Book is an ‘excellent primer’ for understanding Chicago’s woes

I first came to Chicago in 1969. It was the year after the riots that erupted following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the year after the brawls between police and demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention. It was the year of the Chicago Seven trial and the infamous Chicago police raid on Black Panther Party headquarters that took the lives of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

I rented a one-room apartment near the corner of 47th Street and Drexel Boulevard on the South Side, and walked every day to and from the Hyde Park campus of the University of Chicago, where I was attending graduate school.

Chicago — and the South Side — seemed to me a land of dreams and legends. I found myself in the midst of people and locations I had known previously only through reading or television.

I would occasionally take the L downtown, departing from and returning to the station at 47th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (locals still referred to it most often as South Park Boulevard). On the northeast corner of that intersection was the Walgreens that the singer Lou Rawls had mentioned in a monologue on one of his albums.

I made it a point to find and take a look at the building that housed Johnson Publications, which had sent Ebony and Jet magazines to my family’s home ever since I could remember. I tracked down the headquarters of Operation Breadbasket, which had become the base of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was becoming an influential figure in his own right after having been an acolyte of King.

Natalie Y. Moore grew up on the South Side, a generation after I lived there. She experienced a very different South Side and a very different Chicago than the one I had encountered as, essentially, a tourist.

In a city that was a principal terminus for members of the great black migration of the 20th century, she grew up among family members who had made that trek from south to north, from apartheid to freedom. In a city of neighborhoods, she was a child of Chatham, a neighborhood that exemplifies black striving and success. In a city riven by racial division, she and her family lived through and were participants in efforts to overcome some of those divisions through school busing and open housing programs.

Moore, a reporter for Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ, brings that rich background and a journalist’s perspective to this book, which is part sociological study of race in modern Chicago and part memoir. The book has some substantial flaws — it is better researched than it is written, and it fails to take adequate account of the enormous negative role played by the deindustrialization that began to occur in Chicago about the time the great migration ended. Nevertheless, it is an extremely important work, an excellent primer for anyone trying to understand the political, social, criminal and other trends afflicting Chicago — and especially black Chicago — at this historical juncture.

“In 2007,” Moore writes, “I took a job at WBEZ-Chicago Public Media as the South Side reporter set up in a one-woman storefront.” Very shortly, she said, she began to recognize a common denominator to all of the stories she reported about urban problems. “It was easy to connect the dots from housing to education to crime to food access: segregation is the culprit.”

Racial segregation, that is. Moore acknowledges that economic class plays a large role in the isolation of the South Side and many of its black residents from the good life enjoyed by residents of other parts of the city. But race, she contends, plays the largest role.

This reality is perhaps most obvious in the area of housing. The housing market works differently — and more detrimentally — for blacks than for whites and others.

“Immigrants and white ethnics move out of their low-income neighborhoods with the assumption that another ethic group will move in,” Moore writes. “The problem is that no other group wants to move into poor black neighborhoods. Except other blacks.”

When the only market for your house is among the poorest segment of society, that house is going to be worth far less than it otherwise would be. And if the principal means of wealth accumulation in the society is real-estate appreciation, you are going to be a lot poorer than people who don’t labor under the disadvantage of racial bias.

Citing her own experiences, as well as the opinions and studies of academic experts, Moore tracks the influence of race — and intractable racial bias — in housing, education, crime, and even food choices and availability on the South Side.

“Until we address segregation, racial inequities will prevail,” Moore says.

Moore’s book is strongest in the earlier chapters, where she brings a great deal of research and expert opinion to bear in explaining the pernicious effects of racism in housing and education on the South Side. The book becomes weaker in the later chapters, where she seems to rely more on mere argumentation than on evidence.

She could have benefitted from more rigorous editing. In most cases, the flaws in her writing make for inelegance. But in some cases, they serve to confuse the reader and obscure her meaning.

Flaws notwithstanding, Moore has written a valuable book. I wish I had had something like it when I first came to Chicago.