The Walls of Jericho.

[San Francisco, California, USA] : Kanopy Streaming, 2015.

1 online resource (1 video file, approximately 51 min.)

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Today more than a third of the population of Chicago is black. It's a direct result of the Great Migration between the 1930s and 70s when more than five million black Americans left the Deep South for "the promised land". The black tenement blocks of the South and West sides of Chicago are now battle grounds for America's most powerful gangs. They are among the most dangerous places in America. Seven years after Mayor Daley's 21-year reign ended, Chicago elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington. It was hoped that this supreme example of electoral mobilization would spread black empowerment "like prairie fire". By now, a new generation of black Chicagoans was in the changing city, and this episode tells their stories of widely differing experiences. Gang life was intensifying in the projects, stable manufacturing jobs were on the decline, and the black underclass was growing. Black citizens tell of their hopes, their fears and their attempts to bring about political change. Today, Chicago has become the most racially segregated city in America. There are lines across the city that divide black and white just as they did in Mississippi when the great migration began. Its apartment blocks are among the most dangerous places in America, a battleground for the country's most powerful gangs. Vernon Jarrett, who joined the migration North and became a journalist, warns: "What you see in the black community is a microcosm of the whole community ... the demise of hope." Today, Jarrett keeps a handful of cotton on the wall of his office. "I never want to get above where I came from," he says. But somehow there is hope. Joanna Johnson, whose parents journeyed North from Mississippi, has become Chicago's first black female police officer. "I've done some real good things. I've helped a lot of people. I've put a lot of people in jail, but they deserved it," she says. It is Joanna who has to pick up the pieces when another son or grandson of an original migrant dies in a gangland shooting. "Scratch black Chicago and there is Mississippi," says Morgan Freeman. And some of the people who came north are now going back. Uless Carter returned to the town of his birth - where he picked cotton as a sharecropper - and found a black mayor and a black sheriff in office. But the town still has a right and wrong side of the tracks. But as the blues song has it, there's still hope. "Someday we'll all be free."

ASP-AVON. OCLC KB.

Images / Online / Video & Film

English

April 01, 2024

1132910 Kanopy