Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago by Brian McCammack (review)

The typical Great Migration narrative is one of southern black people moving from plantations to small towns and then becoming urban when they moved north to Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit or any of the booming northern cities. When WWI cut off immigration from Europe, northern industries, finally, were willing to hire black laborers fleeing rural poverty and racial terror. Chicago was the so-called "land of hope" promoted by the nation's leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. It was where black southerners sought education for their children, decent-paying factory jobs, and sanitary housing, and where they learned about northern racism and became an urban people. Brian McCammack's important new book offers an incisive twist on this history, exploring the ways the migrant generation and their children in Chicago used nature to temper the bruising impact of over-crowded, segregated urban neighborhoods and, in the process, created a "hybrid" experience that tied the rural south to urban parks, YMCA camps, and elite lakeside vacation spots. For the Great Migration generations, McCammack argues, seeing green-spaces as sites of leisure not labor was an essential part of becoming "modern."

An innovative blend of environmental, urban and African American history, Landscapes of Hope demonstrates that urban greenspace, as much as housing and jobs, was a racial battleground in the increasingly-segregated northern cities. As African American migrants sought natural landscapes to escape the industrial city, they sparked new contests over access to urban public space. The best-known of Chicago's battles began in July 1919 at the 39^th Street beach where white men attacking black teens sparked a five-day riot that spread across the South Side, leaving 23 black and 15 white people dead. The riot, McCammack notes, could have started in Washington Park, the South Side park designed by the famed team, Calvert Vaux and Frederic Law Olmsted. Until the late nineteen teens, it was largely used by white Chicagoans. As migrants streamed into the city and the color line pushed westward, black Chicagoans sought to enjoy the park's healthy walks, landscaped lagoons, and ballfields. By the early twenties, wealthier black families moved into houses along the boulevards surrounding the park, prompting white attacks. The homes of banker Jesse Binga and of Oscar de Priest, the city's first black alderman, were firebombed several times. In the park, white mobs assaulted African Americans. But the park also was an "intraracial social battleground(s) where black Chicagoans clashed over the contours of the new, hybrid leisure culture. . ." (20). Like the white Progressive-era reformers who promoted urban parks to "Americanize" European immigrant laborers, the city's black elite believed that nature would bring health and morality to the new arrivals from the south. The black cultural elite's efforts to control behavior in the park expanded class conflict among the city's growing black population. Migrants "challenged black reformer's ideas about respectability and cultural uplift. . ." even as the reformers sought to promote their vision of morality and health among the black laboring classes (21). By the 1930s, the park was squarely within the segregated South Side and its new uses alarmed the black cultural elite. Communist Party organizers and radical speakers transformed the park into a site of protest, rallying the black working classes to a new cause. Washington Park had become a communal institution, representing all the social and political forces that both divided and unified black Chicagoans.

Black Chicagoans in the twenties sought to escape the urban environment and the city's toxic racism, reinforcing the growing gap between the cultural elite and the laboring classes. Well-to-do black families bought lots and houses in Idlewild, one of the many black resort towns in the north. It was, McCammack writes, a symbol of "just how modern the Great Migration had made urban-dwelling African Americans" (62). During summer holidays at Idlewild, elite black Chicagoans like Binga and De Priest...