Negro

From back cover: "As early twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism".

Using the South Side of Chicago as a microcosm, Spear analyzes the creation and circumstances that caused the 'Negro' 'ghetto' to form the way that it did. From back cover 'Allan Spear explores here the history of a major Negro community during a crucial thirty-year period when a relatively fluid pattern of race relations gave way to a rigid system of segregation and discrimination'.