This book examines how various black Chicagoans used public history to engage with civil rights struggles. Numerous efforts to promote and teach this history demonstrated how dissident left-wing political currents from previous decades remained relevant to a vibrant and ideologically diffuse African American public sphere despite widespread Cold War dispersions, white-supremacist reactions, and anti-Communist repressions. The argument in this book proceeds by demonstrating how public-history projects strategically coalesced around a series of connected pedagogical endeavors. These endeavors in ... More

This book examines how various black Chicagoans used public history to engage with civil rights struggles. Numerous efforts to promote and teach this history demonstrated how dissident left-wing political currents from previous decades remained relevant to a vibrant and ideologically diffuse African American public sphere despite widespread Cold War dispersions, white-supremacist reactions, and anti-Communist repressions. The argument in this book proceeds by demonstrating how public-history projects strategically coalesced around a series of connected pedagogical endeavors. These endeavors included the work of schoolteachers on Chicago’s South Side who tried to advance curriculum reforms through World War II and afterwards; the activities of important cultural workers, such as Margaret T. G. Burroughs and Charles Burroughs, who politicized urban space and fought for greater recognition of black history in the public sphere through the advancement of their vision for a museum; and the Afro-American Heritage Association, which expressed a politics of black left nationalism that engaged with radical politics through black public-history labors. Collectively, these projects expressed important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labors that engaged closely with the rapidly shifting terrains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights and international anticolonialisms. Ultimately, this book offers a social history about how black left-wing cultural work in public history and similar forms of knowledge production were at the intersections of political realities and lived experience in U.S. urban life.