Description:
Jeffrey Helgeson shows how twentieth-century black Chicagoans created and sustained race-conscious institutions and politics. Some of the city s prominent political and cultural figures play roles in this story, but Helgeson focuses mostly on people who worked and lived outside the spotlight. Helgeson uncovers the domestic workers and housewives who organized their neighbors; the skilled building tradesmen who used connections to federal officials to create opportunities in a deeply discriminatory sector; the social workers, personnel managers, and journalists who carved out positions in the white-collar workforce while trying to use their position to open jobs to black workers. The results of these efforts remain open to debate community institutions crumbled even as Harold Washington rose to become mayor but, Helgeson shows, black Chicagoans engaged with the institutions of urban life in ways and to a degree not previously understood.
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Brief description: Jeffrey Helgeson is assistant professor at Texas State University. He is also a director at Labor Trail, a collaborative project of the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies.
Review Quotes: "Crucibles of Black Empowerment successfully explores the motivations and sources of how community-based protest politics counterbalanced the apathy and connivance of establishment politics and politicians over one half-century in efforts aimed at improving black life in Chicago. The activists who made this reality are both known and unknown, and include Rev. Addie Wyatt, Ida B. Wells, and Lovelyn Evans in labor, social service, and employment, along with Tim Black, Sidney Williams, Ed 'the Iron Master' Wright, and Ed Doty in civil rights, politics, and labor."--Christopher Robert Reed "Roosevelt University"