Some REAL Summer Reading
Suggestions for your reading pleasure and enlightenment over the summer – fill in some of
those blank spots we all have in understanding American history.
Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools
By John Diamond and Amanda Lewis
On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained and many of its students are high-achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers?
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
By Isobel Wilkerson
“Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. …It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country towards the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.”
This is a GREAT book. It reads like a novel, sweeps you along, and opens up unknown lives.
Family Properties
By Beryl Satter
The “promised land” for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, due to a very intentional, institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. Satter, the daughter of a man who was at the same time a landlord holding some slum properties and a lawyer representing black clients who were victimized by the contract buying system, is able to describe the mechanisms, pressures and terror employed to keep blacks and whites from living comparable lives. When you read in the June 6, 2019 Tribune that there is a 30 year variance in life expectancy for people living in Chicago’s Streeterville and those 9 miles away in Englewood, this book provides part of the explanation.