In Chicago, after the segregation years, segregation continues

Every morning, Richard Hunt goes to his workshop, located in a former electrical plant on the North Side of Chicago. A makeshift heater stuggles to warm the space. At 86 and with a white beard, the African-American artist works on his latest creation, a sculpture that will be placed in the garden of Barack Obama’s presidential library. The former president is considered a child of the city even if he was not born in it. Standing beside a model of the work – a bird flying out of a book – the artist explained his project, as his slender hands traced its shape. “Reading books allows us to understand, to soar from a place where we might have stayed if we hadn’t read the book, and to explore new possibilities,” he said. Surrounded by a thousand sculptures and as many pieces of metal, Mr. Hunt embodies a myth, that the American dream is also meant for Black Chicagoans.

His parents came from rural Georgia and Illinois, and he lived with them in Chicago’s segregated South Side after World War 2. One of his teachers, like his parents, noticed his interest in the arts. Then he took Saturday classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the city’s superb art museum. Upon graduating from high school in 1953, Mr. Hunt applied for a graduate fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago and was eventually sent to Florence, Italy, to study. Back in Chicago, he opened a studio, taught and sculpted. “I realized then that I was making more money by selling my work,” Mr. Hunt said. In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him an exhibition. “MoMA had been criticized for not showing enough African-American art,” he recalled. This event offered him official recognition.

Chicago would like to be the city of emancipation and glory for African Americans. It was here, in fact, that trumpeter Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) triumphed. He left New Orleans when Storyville, the hotbed of jazz, closed down after the US entered the war in 1917. Chicago is also the city of basketball player Michael Jordan, who, although he was born in Brooklyn, made the Bulls a legend from 1984 to 1998. It is also the city where Barack Obama was a community organizer and met his future wife, Michelle, who attended the same church as Mr. Hunt’s parents.

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Reverse migration

But Chicago is not limited to this beautiful story. It is also the often traumatic history of the South Side, where African-Americans are concentrated. It’s a community whose family units are often fractured, that suffers from segregation, miserable schools, industry-polluted soil and gang warfare that causes nearly 900 deaths per year. Blacks are leaving this city en masse, according to Matt Rosenberg, the author of a vitriolic essay on his city (What Next, Chicago? Notes of a Pissed-Off Native Son). He said, “The Black population has shrunk by a third since 1980, as has the White population. If the overall population is stable, it’s because Latinos have replaced them. We’re witnessing a great reverse migration of Blacks.”

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