Replacing Rhetoric with Research
Two scholars with ties to the University of Chicago aim to shed light on Black life in the 21st century.
By Susan E. Smith
Chicago’s South Side has long been a renowned laboratory for groundbreaking research on Black urban life.
Dr. E. Franklin Frazier wrote The Negro Family in Chicago in the 1930s. Dr. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton authored Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City in the 1940s. And acclaimed sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote The Truly Disadvantaged in the 1980s.
The city’s vast Black population, largely the product of the Great Migration, has made Chicago the home of both a celebrated Black middle class and an unsettling Black lower class. These two extremes have been meticulously documented over the years through a distinct style of sociological fieldwork known as the Chicago School.
