By Mark Guarino March 13, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. EST
CHICAGO — As a child in the 1950s, Amelia Cooper lived in a multigenerational home in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood that often served as a settlement house for friends of her grandfather, the blues musician Muddy Waters. Many were musicians, arriving from the rural South as Waters had, and they needed a place from which to launch a new life.
Yet many of the significant sites of those years have fallen into disrepair or worse, the memories they held forgotten. But that is changing.
Projects underway across the Midwest are aimed at saving these structures and sharing the Great Migration’s complex story with a country again confronting the deep roots of systemic racism. Amanda Lewis, director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, believes they are “gestures in the right direction” and critical for connecting the present with the past. Read HERE.