Please join the Chicago Public Library’s Edgewater branch (6000 N. Broadway) for a panel discussion about how the Great Migration changed politics in Chicago and across the United States. This event will take place on Saturday, October 26 at 2:00 PM in our second floor community room. Panelists will include historian James Grossman, author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration; historian Cedric Johnson, author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics; and Laura Washington, an ABC-7 political analyst and former member of the Harold Washington administration.

This conversation will cover an enormous amount of ground: how early black leaders in northern cities like Chicago challenged and also compromised with intransigent urban political machines; how, in the wake of a massive exodus of blacks to the North, the Civil Rights Movement worked tirelessly to achieve racial equality for those who remained in the segregated South; how, by the 1960s, miserable socio-economic conditions facing blacks in northern ghettos gave rise to scores of urban rebellions as well as to a new political sensibility, Black Power; and how many African-Americans have achieved election to positions of political power since the 1960s, with varying results for their constituents. This conversation will plumb the depths of 20th century U.S. history to ask how the Great Migration shaped power structures in the city and country we inherit today.

Event Location:
Edgewater Branch, Chicago Public Library
6000 N. Broadway, Chicago, IL 60660
312-742-1945