Goin' to Chicago chronicles one of the most momentous yet least heralded sagas
of American history - the great migration of African-Americans from the rural South to
the cities of the North and West. After World War II, four million black people created
a dynamic urban culture outside the South, changing America forever.
The sixty-minute documentary film traces this history through the personal stories of
a group of older Chicagoans born mostly in the Mississippi Delta. They share their
bitter recollections of sharecropping - owing half of each crop to the landowner, the
BACK-breaking labor in the fields from sun up to sun down. A steelworker, newspaper COLUMNIST, blues musician and others movingly recall their journeys up Hwy. 61 to Chicago in search of comparatively well-paying factory jobs. On the South Side they built a vibrant city-within-a-city of thriving black businesses and civic institutions, proudly referred to as "Bronzeville."
They recall that after World War II increasingly self-assertive and prosperous blacks
led a bitterly resisted struggle to open up fair housing opportunities outside the
ghetto.
But just as the American Dream was coming into reach for some, the steel
mills and stockyards closed, leaving newer immigrants trapped in decaying public
housing projects and inner-city despair.
Goin' to Chicago is a moving
tribute to a generation of African-
Americans who struggled and
triumphed over odds as great or
greater than other immigrant groups.
Contact the Filmmakers
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e-mail us at www.georgeking-assoc.com