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  • Bridges of Memory: Chicago's Second Generation of Black Migration. Volume 2
  • Lisa Krissoff Boehm
Bridges of Memory: Chicago's Second Generation of Black Migration. Volume 2. By Timuel D. Black, Jr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 392 pp. Hardbound, $22.25; Softbound, $15.61.

In Bridges of Memory, skilled oral historian Timuel D. Black offers readers the second installment in his unprecedented series of oral histories with leading black Chicagoans. This volume contains thirty-one interviews, each preceded by a brief introduction. The introductions provide some biographical details about each respondent and something about their prior relationship with Black. Black retains the exchanges between oral historian and subject and thus reveals his own valuable thoughts and experiences alongside that of the interviewees. Readers may have benefited from the addition of lengthier biographical sketches on each respondent; some readers may not be entirely familiar with the role each personage played in Chicago's history, and some background history on the music and political scene in Chicago would have assisted the general reader.

At present, American archives do not have sufficient numbers of oral histories conducted with African Americans. Black's lively histories offer a much-needed corrective. Black's subjects, ranging from rhythm and blues great Jerry "Iceman" Butler to Jewel Stradford Lafontant, the first black female Assistant U.S. Attorney in the nation, add a greater perspective to our understanding of the American past. The interviews contain especially rich memories of the world of Chicago jazz; the [End Page 87] respondents recall the Club DeLisa and interactions with such icons as Louis Jordan, Curtis Mayfield, Lester Young, Count Basie, and Billie Holiday. The interviews' recurring focus on Chicago's musical history stems in part from Black's own deep interest in the subject. But Chicago figures strongly in the musical history of the U.S., especially in the jazz and blues scenes blossoming in Bronzeville, Chicago's segregated black section, and the city's west side. Tenor saxophonist Bill Adkins remembers that "there were just three things that people seemed to know about Chicago. Number one: the Italian gangster thing—Al Capone and all of that. Number two: the Club DeLisa, and number three: Chili Mac's!" (85).

The respondents share their migration stories and those of their parents, many of whom came to Chicago from Mississippi and Arkansas looking for more stable employment. Despite the historical record revealed in the interviews, in one section Black and narrator Fred Rice, Superintendent of Chicago Police, reflect on supposed differences between the migrants who came in the second wave of the Great Migration (roughly 1940-70) and those who came to Chicago in the earlier wave (roughly 1914-30). Rice states, "they (second wave migrants) came here not because jobs were waiting for them but because there were no more jobs for them in the South. Mechanization had put them out of work in the rural areas, and they became surplus in the South" (141). The latter half of Rice's comments—regarding mechanization and the dwindling need for field hands in the South—is very important. But the migrants needed both "pushes" like mechanization and "pulls" like relatively high-paying industrial jobs to make the long journey to northern cities like Chicago. Indeed, during the period of the Second Great Migration, migrants actually had a higher rate of employment than those African Americans who were born within the city. According to the work of sociologist Stewart Tolnay, the southern migrant families were far more stable than others perceived and in fact were slightly more stable than African American families who had spent multiple generations in the city. Due to the great outpouring of anti-Southern migrant invective during the 1960s and 1970s, most well known in the words of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, it is important to note that the migrants came to locate jobs and by and large found them. In fact, many migrants located their first job in just a few days after arriving in the city or even before relocating. As the decades progressed however, the Midwest deindustrialized, and many of the occupations that had once offered an entry point into the middle class...

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