Chicago's racial divide

Chicago today is still very much a city divided by race. While blacks and whites in the Chicago metropolitan area work together, play sports together and engage in various other civic activities together, the evidence suggests that they continue to live in neighborhoods -- and to send their children to schools-- that are very strictly segregated along racial lines. And though conditions in the city's majority African American neighborhoods have improved since Martin Luther King arrived in town to protest against the plight of those confined to the ghetto, the improvement has not been very dramatic. This raises a big question: What do you think accounts for the persistence of racial divide in 21st century Chicago? And, perhaps more importantly, what, if anything, could be done to dismantle residential segregation in the city AND its suburbs?

Immigrant Chicago

Chicago-- like New York-- has long been known as an immigrant city. Last week, we visited one of Chicago's most famous immigrant neighborhoods, Pilsen, formerly a Czech stronghold and now the capital of Mexican Chicago. Based on both on what you've read for this course amd on your own experiences of the city so far this term, in what ways would you say immigration and immigrants are still important to the city culturally and economically? How are the obstacles and challenges faced by recent immigrants to Chicago today different than they were back in the 19th century or in the 1930s when Zorbaugh was writing The Gold Coast and the Slum? What has changed and what has remained constant in the immigrant experience over the years? And how is the immigrant experience different for, say, Mexicans than it was and is for white Europeans (like Poles and the Irish)?