I realized that inequity would continue in Chicago unless segregation was addressed. It was important to step back and create a coherent argument around my observations.

What inspired or motivated you to write The South Side? What was missing from the current canon of books-and conversations-about the region that you wanted to address?Īs a reporter for WBEZ, I have covered issues around segregation and inequity for years. Moore, WBEZ Chicago‘s South Side Bureau reporter, about writing and researching The South Side, what the mayor and everyday Chicagoans can do to combat segregation and racism, and where to see some of that South Side “magic.” Natalie Y.

The Chicago Review of Books spoke with Natalie Y. Whether you live on the South Side or have never ventured south of the Loop, The South Side will change the way you see Chicago, a true “tale of two cities,” thanks to Moore’s blistering insights.

As if middle-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods like Hyde Park, Kenwood, and Moore’s own Chatham don’t exist, as if thousands of lawyers, doctors, judges, nurses, journalists, and college students don’t live south of I-55 in some of the most vibrant, “magical” communities in the city. In a fascinating blend of reportage and memoir, Moore shows how the socio-economic realities on the South Side-where the unemployed often stay unemployed, the working class often stays working-class, and the middle and upper-middle class face challenges unknown to the North Side-are the direct results of racist housing and banking policies, retail redlining, food deserts, public school failures, and misrepresentations in the media.īut also, Moore describes how, by and large, the South Side isn’t the “war zone” oft-depicted on Fox News or CNN, where all 42 neighborhoods are reduced to the worst blocks of Englewood on a hot summer night. Moore’s new book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation-an absolutely essential read for all Chicagoans, new and old-is full of revelations about how Chicago became (and remains) one of the most segregated cities in the world. But when they arrived, white employers turned them away, and racist housing policies-also known as redlining-kept them confined to the city’s South Side. More than 500,000 African Americans moved to Chicago between 19 during the Great Migration, leaving the oppressive Jim Crow South behind for the promise of new jobs and good homes, as advertised in the pages of the Chicago Defender.

The southside natalie moore