French side of Canal Street: Arthe A. Anthony, “The Negro Creole Community in New Orleans, 1880–1920: An Oral History” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 1978); Keith Weldon Medley, “The Sad Story of How ‘Separate but Equal’ Was Born,” Smithsonian 24, no. 11 (1994): 106–7; Soard’s City Directory, New Orleans, 1900, Williams Research Center, New Orleans; Keith Weldon Medley, “The Life and Times of Homer Plessy and John Ferguson,” Times-Picayune, May 18, 1996.
New Orleans schools: Medley, We as Freemen, 31–32.
Highway 10: Laine Kaplan-Levenson, “ ‘The Monster’: Claiborne Avenue before and after the Interstate,” WWNO, New Orleans Public Radio, May 5, 2016, www.wwno.org/post/monster-claiborne-avenue-and-after-interstate.
1899–1904: Booker T. Washington
“Negro problem”: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996), 1:1xxvii–xci; and George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debates of Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). For an example of a racist assessment, see N. S. Shaler, “The Negro Problem,” Atlantic, November 1884, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1884/11/the-negro-problem/531366/.
“age of Booker T.”: August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963). See also Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
“at the top instead”: Booker T. Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address, 1895,” in Afro-American Primary Sources, ed. Thomas R. Frazier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 216–20.
“ ‘Cast down your bucket’ ”: Ibid.
“agriculture, mechanics”: Ibid., 218.
“The wisest among”: Ibid., 219.
541 African Americans: “Lynchings: By Year and Race,” Archives at Tuskegee Institute, University of Missouri, Kansas City, law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html.
the story is even more: Ishmael Reed, “Introduction: Booker vs. Negro Saxons,” in Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; New York Signet Classics, 2010), xxii.
“would be about”: Washington, Up from Slavery, 5.
valuable lessons: Ibid., 33, 37–39.
chastised Black people: Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 283–84; Washington, Up from Slavery, 84–85, 120–23.
“Within the last fortnight”: Booker T. Washington, in Birmingham Age-Herald, February 29, 1904.
a distinction: Fitzhugh Brundage, “Reconsidering Booker T. Washington and Up from Slavery,” in Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up from Slavery 100 Years Later, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 1.
1904–1909: Jack Johnson
“But one thing remains”: Jack London, New York Herald, December 27, 1908.
1909-1914: THE BLACK PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL
This chapter draws on Guy-Sheftall’s work in her “Foreword” to Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, Donna-Dale L. Marcano, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
1914–1919: The Great Migration
“They left as though”: Emmett Jay Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), 44.
“their fate was”: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper & Bros., 1936).
“I went to the station”: Quoted in Scott, Negro Migration, 41.
“folk movement of”: Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 263.
1919–1924: Red Summer
1919 Race Riot: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 595–651.
increased by 148 percent: National Register Nomination for Chicago’s Black Metropolis, National Park Service, 1986.
Black Belt: “Black Belt,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society, 2005, encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/140.html.
Black veterans were not: Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, African Americans: A Concise History (New York: Pearson, 2012), 383–87.
diverse population: “Chicago, IL,” DataUSA, datausa.io/profile/geo/chicago-il/.
buried in snow: Whet Moser, “Snowpocalypse Then: How the Blizzard of 1979 Cost the Election for Michael Bilandic,” Chicago Magazine, February 2, 2011.
“Vrdolyak 29”: “Council Wars,” Encyclopedia of Chicago.
closed more than fifty schools: Valerie Strauss, “Chicago Promised That Closing Nearly 50 Schools Would Help Kids in 2013: A New Report Says It Didn’t,” Washington Post, May 24, 2018; Miles Kampf-Lassin, “Rahm Emanuel Will Be Remembered as Chicago’s ‘Murder Mayor,’ ” Nation, September 5, 2018.
highly segregated neighborhoods: Noreen Nasir, “Segregation Among Issues Chicago Faces 100 Years After Riots,” Associated Press, July 24, 2019; Curtis Black, “In Final Act, Emanuel Cements Legacy of Tolerating Corruption, Promoting Segregation,” Chicago Reporter, March 7, 2019.
discrepancy in life expectancy: Lisa Schencker, “Chicago’s Lifespan Gap: Streeterville Residents Live to 90. Englewood Residents Die at 60. Study Finds It’s the Largest Divide in the U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 2019.
disparities are evident: Alana Semuels, “Chicago’s Awful Divide,” Atlantic, March 28, 2018; “New Report Details Chicago’s Racial, Ethnic Disparities,” UIC Today, May 15, 2017.
1924–1929: The Harlem Renaissance
“the first act”: David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 153.