Black Migration Chapter Summary

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Pages: 4

Black | Southland locates and traces Blackness in Chicago Southland—a suburban sub-region of 60 suburban villages and towns southwest of Chicago—and examines how Black migration and Black spatial imaginaries produce Black suburban life as a geographic formation. An exploration of the suburbs as a Black spatial form, this chapter journeys through the ways Blackness maps itself into the agro-industrial and post-war suburbs in the Chicago Metropolitan Area during the post-Reconstruction and post-Civil Rights eras. While Black | Metropolis critiques urbanization as an overdetermined scale of Black livingness, Black | Southland centers suburbanization as an overlooked scale of analysis for understanding the development of Black suburban villages …show more content…
You will also discover who we were|are, the struggles we endured and our many achievements, and how we willingly became Black suburbanites and produced Black suburban villages, towns, and neighborhoods. This chapter also draws attention to what Black suburban living looks, feels, and sounds like, what it means to be a Black suburbanite, and how a collective of Black aviators built the first Black airport in an all-Black suburban village in 1931. Black | Southland is grounded in and prioritizes the histories and lived experiences of Black Southlanders and the ways Black people (re)shape Blackness as a geographic formation through a Black sense of place and how it transforms the suburban form. By complicating Black suburban narratives across the post-Reconstruction and post-Civil Rights eras, I unravel the complexities of Black identity through the geographic scales that produce them and demonstrate how a suburban sub-region like Chicago Southland became Black