Full Description
When you think of a map of the United States, what do you see? Now think of the Seattle that begot Jimi Hendrix. The Dallas that shaped Erykah Badu. The Holly Springs, Mississippi that compelled Ida B. Wells to activism against lynching. The Birmingham where Martin Luther King, Jr. penned his most famous missive. Now how do you see the United States? Chocolate Cities offers a new cartography of the U.S.-a "Black Map" that more accurately reflects the lived experiences and the future of Black life in America. Drawing on cultural sources such as film, music, fiction, and plays alongside traditional resources like census data, oral histories, ethnographies, and health and wealth data, the book offers a new perspective for analyzing, mapping, and understanding the ebbs and flows of the Black American experience-all in the cities, towns, neighborhoods, and communities that they create and defend. Black maps are consequentially different from our current geographical understanding of race and place in America. And as the U.S. moves toward a majority minority society, Chocolate Cities provides a broad and necessary assessment of how racial and ethnic minorities make and change America's social, economic, and political landscape.
Contents
Preface
1. Everywhere below Canada
PART I THE MAP
2. Dust Tracks on the Chocolate Map
3. Multiplying the South
4. Super Lou's Chitlin' Circuit
PART II THE VILLAGE
5. The Blacker the Village, the Sweeter the Juice
6. The Two Ms. Johnsons
7. Making Negrotown
PART III THE SOUL
8. When and Where the Spirit Moves You
9. How Brenda's Baby Got California Love
10. Bounce to the Chocolate City Future
PART IV THE POWER
11. The House That Jane Built
12. Mary, Dionne, and Alma
13. Leaving on a Jet Plane
14. Seeing like a Chocolate City
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
