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Bronzeville Lives: Chicago's Black Metropolis

Mark Burman

Bronzeville Lives: Chicago's Black Metropolis: Episode 2

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Episode 2

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Bronzeville Lives: Chicago's Black Metropolis, Episode 2Search BBC

Bronzeville, a city within a city. Four generations of Chicago's Black Metropolis speak.

Mark Burman explores the uncertain future of the once teeming heart of Chicago's Southside. From April 2011.

Bronzeville is a city within a city. Once the teeming heart of Chicago's Black Metropolis on the city's Southside, epicentre of the Great Migration that brought hundred's of thousands from the South, it has shaped the career of President Obama, launched the city's first black Mayor, birthed brilliant writers and poets and made music to entrance the world.

Once it was a proud and self contained black universe remembered by Timuel Black & Sam Greenlee. Banks, department stores and clubs where the world's greatest performers played. But it was also a slum where two thirds of its housing was condemned. A world of de facto segregation made possible by housing covenants and hostile white communities. 

Bronzeville began to crumble and change in the late 1950's as the world's largest housing developments, the Projects, rose to create a city within a city within a city. They would become a trap for the poorest of the poor and a base for the rising gangs to deal drugs and death. Now those projects are either empty lots or desirable low rise homes & Bronzeville faces an uncertain future with the prospect of gentrification and a scramble to preserve its fast disappearing landmarks.

A long walk along State St, once a 4 mile concrete corridor and home to 40,000 people brings you finally to the Bishop Roberts Temple. In 1955 Mamie Till brought her son Emmet's corpse here for a funeral that would spark the civil rights movement. Just a few blocks away on 44th St was the world of Coach John Hill which grew increasingly murderous by the late 1960's. Young entrepreneur Tanya Durr still smiles about a childhood in the notorious Ida B.Wells projects. some 40 years separate them. Neither can remember how many friends and students they have buried 

Presented & Produced by Mark Burman.

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Portrait of the Chicago city of Bronzville

Portrait of the Chicago city of Bronzville, which has shaped a president and been both promised land and bitter truth for black Americans

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