On Land of Hope

There’s so much going on here that it can be difficult to make sense of, but Jim Grossman’s big contribution is the way he examines the lives of black southerners at all stages in the migration process. As a result, this book is just as much about the American South as it is about the city of Chicago. What did black southerners see in Chicago that they did not see in the South? How did their experiences shift when they arrived? To what point did those expectations fail them?

It is undoubtedly true that black migrants to the North felt a sense of liberation that they could not have in the Jim Crow South. Black and white workers labored side-by-side, virtually all institutions were integrated (including schools), and there was not the overt discrimination that characterized the South. Yet, residential segregation was widespread—whites often lived close to their places of employment, while blacks were frequently ghettoized on the South Side. Moreover, integrated schools, while they did exist, were something many aldermen were opposed to—they sought to gerrymander them into oblivion, thereby segregating Chicago’s institutions. Under these conditions, black migrants brought some of their own experiences—equating the Democratic Party with white supremacy and the Republican Party with black liberation. To some extent, this remained true in the North, but urban machine politics were far more complicated than the simplistic dichotomy that existed in the South.

So, while Chicago in many ways did function as a “Land of Hope,” it also had many failings, not the least the equating of the “black race” with the “working class,” effectively reifying conditions for African Americans.