A further thought about Natalie Moore's book

 

Written in my journal shortly after starting The South Side:

 

In the process of reading the chapter headed “separate but equal” in Natalie Moore’s The South Side, I felt the need to place her biographically in a context that made sense to me. As it turns out, she will be 44 sometime this summer, which makes her about three and a half years younger than my son Nate and a little more than two years older than my daughter Julie. This mattered, at least in part, because in reading her personal stories of growing up on the south side, I needed to understand the period of her growing up in some sort of relationship to my childhood and youth in the South Shore neighborhood some 30 years earlier.

 

Having reached that point in the book, less than halfway through, I felt a growing anger at the city’s municipal government, and at the Chicago Public School (CPS) system, for policies and decisions that drove, exacerbated, and accelerated the inequity, inequality and injustice that have so thoroughly plagued the lives of Chicagoans these past 100 years and more. Those feelings developed in reaction to Moore’s thorough historical indictment of the white supremacist political regimes of former mayor Richard J. Daley and former CPS superintendent Benjamin Willis (and the fundamentally similar political leaderships that followed).

 

Nevertheless, that anger was also accompanied by a feeling somewhat like awe at Moore’s ability to conjure far more benign descriptions of the Chatham neighborhood of her growing up and of her high school years at Morgan Park on the far south side, and her clear descriptions of the positive effects her experiences had on her life and career since. Into the bargain, I also felt a kind of shock that I could be so fundamentally unaware of the actual existence of neighborhoods in Chicago like Chatham, and schools like Morgan Park, that nurtured their own in such positive ways, not by accident, but by the deliberate design and action of African American communities that existed and persisted, and thrived despite the neglect and exploitation of a system designed to destroy whatever they built.