Return to the Black Metropolis
New Histories of Black Chicago
Black Chicago’s ongoing achievement in building power, culture, and community
Cloth – $125
979-8-240-40013-1
Paper – $32
979-8-240-40014-8
eBook – $29.95
979-8-240-40015-5
Publication Date
Paperback: 06/15/2027
About the Book
Published in 1945, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City remains an essential portrait of the diversity, nuance, and complexity of Black people’s lives in Chicago. The foundational book’s immense legacy includes the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC), an initiative dedicated to facilitating access to and use of Chicago’s African American archival materials.Simon Balto and Erik S. Gellman edit a collection of the research and historical scholarship that have emerged from BMRC programs. The editors organize the contributions along thematic lines: policing, incarceration, and survival; protest politics; historical, literary, and artistic representations of African Americans; and photography’s role in commerce, art, and activism. Throughout, the contributors explore the understanding of Black Metropolis as a living concept that both reflects and embodies the dynamism of Black Chicago.
An exciting collection of cutting-edge scholarship, Return to the Black Metropolis captures the spirit of the foundational text while adding to the decades-long promise of, in the words of Timuel Black, bringing historical knowledge forward.
Contributors: Sumayya Ahmed, Richard Benson, Kimberly Black-Parker, Richard A. Courage, Ashley Dennis, Melissa Ford, Michelle Johnson, Mark Koschmann, Nick Kryczka, Amy Mooney, Melanie D. Newport, Ian Rocksborough-Smith, E. James West, Jakobi Williams
* Subvention funds generously provided by the Mellon Foundation to the Black Metropolis Research Consortium
About the Author
Simon Balto is the College of Letters and Science Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. Erik S. Gellman is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay.Reviews
“At a moment when Black Chicago is too often caricatured or pathologized, this volume restores its complexity, reclaiming a dynamic, contested metropolis—alive as archive and argument.”—Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities
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