Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago
(By Brian McCammack)
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| Author | Brian McCammack |
Between 1915 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved away from the South to begin new lives in the urban North. In Chicago alone, the Black population quintupled to more than 275,000 in a quarter century. Most historians map the integration of southern and northern Black culture through labor, religion, politics, and popular culture. Brian McCammack follows a different path, recapturing Black Chicagoans as they forged material and imaginative connections to nature. In the relatively prosperous migration years but also in the depths of the Great Depression, Chicago’s Black community—women and men, young and old, working class and upper class—sought out, fought for, built, and enjoyed natural and landscaped environments. No matter how crowded or degraded, green spaces provided a refuge for Black Chicagoans and an opportunity to realize the promise of nature and of the Great Migration itself.
Situated at the intersection of race and place in American history, Landscapes of Hope traces the contours of a Black environmental consciousness that runs throughout the African American experience.”
