Uptown Mountain People Transfer to a Problem City

I'm not sure exactly what message the photographer from the Sun-Times was trying to make with this image, but somehow a rusty car and a dead cat symbolize the troubles faced by Southerners moving to Uptown in 1964. Original image available on eBay: http://bit.ly/12zEtA5

Dorothy Wada and Young Appalachian Artists, 1970

Photo of Dorothy Wada and some sidewalk artists from 1970 that ran in the Sun-Times. Excerpt from the original article:

Four days a week these children mill around the neighborhood — skipping over cracked sidewalks littered with broken glass. They "play car" in rusty autos junked in empty lots. Or they "just set around ... but you kin fall down and get hurt doin' that ... so it's funner at scouts..." On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, the children participate in a unique program that Miss Wada invented three summers ago. It's now accepted as a new form of scouting and is being used in several other areas of Chicago. "We had few troops in Uptown in 1967," Miss Wada said. "Traditional programs didn't appeal to the Southern white lifestyle and we couldn't get either Scouts or leaders to join."

The article goes on to describe how Miss Wada brought bags full of craft materials and games to the streets, and coaxed the children out "pied piper style" to come play. Eventually, she gathered more than 1000 children at six sites in Uptown and two at other locations in the city. It was harder to get leaders. Because of the violence in Uptown, many were afraid to walk the streets. "There's been a rash of shootings in the neighborhood lately," Miss Wada said, "but we just keep believing that nobody's going to hurt us as long as we're helping the children."

Original photo available on eBay (search Girl Scouts)

Hillbillies in Chicago, 1958

An excerpt from Hillbillies in Chicago:

Chicago's toughest integration problems happen to involve whites, hillbillies, and not Negroes.

Albert N. Votaw executive director of the Uptown Chicago Commission, writes in Harper's Magazine (February, 1958) on "The Hillbillies Invade Chicago." He says:

A pathetic though bumptious minority of 70,000 newcomers among Chicago's motley population of four million is disturbing the city's peace these days and incidentally proving to everybody who will listen that integration problems often have nothing to do with race, language, or creed. These are Chicago's share of the hundreds of thousands of Southern Hillbillies who have been imported during and since World War II to offset labor shortages in the industrial centers of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.

'In my opinion they are worse than the colored,' said a police captain. 'They are vicious and knife-happy. They are involved in 75 percent of our arrests in this district.'

'I can't say this publically, but you'll never improve the neighborhood until you get rid of them,' commented a municipal court judge.

Read complete article here.

Uptown Chicago Kind of Blues — Appalachian Immigrants to Uptown

While browsing Amazon tonight, I came across Voices from the Mountains, about the Appalachian experience. It mentions the Southern immigrants to Uptown, and provides a few photos and this song.

I watch the children playing in the puddles left by rain

Underneath the el-tracks, in the noise of a train;

But the children of the wealthy lack nothing for their games

As I stare at this unfairness

Fingers of fire

Keep a-reaching for my brain...

Here's the complete book description:

A rich mosaic of photographs, words, and songs, Voices from the Mountains tells the turbulent story of the Appalachian South in the twentieth century. Focusing on the abuses of the coal industry and the grassroots struggle against mine owners that began in the 1960s, Guy and Candie Carawan have gathered quotations from a variety of sources; words and music to more than fifty ballads and songs, laments and satires, hymns and protests; and more than one hundred and fifty photographs of longtime Appalachian residents, their homes, their countryside, the mines they work in, and the labor battles they have fought.

The "voices" that speak out in these pages range from the mountain people themselves to such well-known artists as Jean Ritchie, Hazel Dickens, Harriet Simpson Arnow, and Wendell Berry. Together they tell of the damage wrought by strip mining and the empty promises of land reclamation; the search for work and a new life in the North; the welfare rights, labor, antipoverty, and black lung movements; early days in the mines; disasters and negligence in the coal industry; and protest and change in the coal fields.

Dignity and despair, poverty and perseverance, tradition and change—Voices from the Mountains eloquently conveys the complex panorama of modern Appalachian life.

Appalachian Migrants in Uptown Chicago

From Diversity to Unity is a community study of settlement and adaptation of Southern and Appalachian migrants to the neighborhood of Uptown Chicago. Oral histories, community newspapers, and secondary sources reveal the human experince of urban migration.

To order your copy, go here.