The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood

A powerful and moving story of the racial transformation of an American neighborhood, told in memoir and oral narrative. It deserves to become a classic....This text needs to be understood and performed at least as regularly as Thornton Wilder's Our Town. -Sandy Primm, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

In the 1960s, Chicago's South Side changed from a predominantly Jewish to a mainly black neighborhood. Having grown up there, Rosen experienced this white flight and decided to conduct a series of interviews with former neighbors and friends, asking them how fear had spread so rapidly and why liberal people appeared to have become bigots. The author is a composer for the theater, and he draws on this career to format the interviews into a type of play, featuring 15 composite characters from both the black and the Jewish communities. Especially interesting are stories of how the first synagogue got started and why it faltered during the racial changes in the neighborhood and had to be relocated. The Jewish residents passionately describe their feelings of betrayal and hurt from the synagogue's loss. Also fascinating are reactions from the black community, past and present, who felt a mixture of confusion, rejection and anger when their white neighbors claimed to be moving because they wanted "better schools." After these admissions, however, the book suffers from repetition, and the 15 characters are not distinguished enough from one another. Each time Rosen identifies a factor for the change, such as whites' suspicion of increased crime from black neighbors, each character comments on the issue without always adding something meaningful to the debate. Although the author's intentions are noble, his method is questionable and, ultimately, unsatisfying.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the 1960s, the blockbusting of predominantly white neighborhoods, turning them virtually all black overnight, was emblematic of the turbulence of U.S. race relations. The transformation, often accompanied by violence, unconscionable profiteering, and neighborhood deterioration, fed racist stereotypes about what happens when blacks move into a neighborhood. Rosen offers insights into the role that those who fled played in the failure to integrate neighborhoods. Interviewing black and white men and women who experienced the racial change of Rosen's own mostly Jewish, middle-class Chicago neighborhood, he offers a personal perspective on the change when the first black families moved there in the midst of the racial unrest and riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Rosen provides vivid memories of the way the community was, and he muses about what could have been had the white families stayed. Rosen's own family was among the last to leave. He has since revisited the community and found a stable, though now completely black neighborhood. Vanessa Bush

Rosen examines the phenomenon of white flight in a small neighborhood on the south side of Chicago in the late 1960s. Currently a writer for the musical theater, he was in high school when these wrenching changes took place. In an attempt to understand what happened, he interviewed his former neighbors 30 years later. The result is a composite of narratives detailing the fear, sense of betrayal, and confusion that took place when middle-class blacks moved into a white, middle-class, largely Jewish neighborhood. The oral-history format lends a sense of action and movement to the material and conveys the emotional aspects of this situation. However, presenting personal accounts in a drama format limits the book's usefulness as a research tool. This would complement other, more substantive sources such as Michael Lerner's Jews & Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America (Dutton, 1996). For larger public libraries.?Deborah Bigelow, Leonia P.L., Little Falls, NJ
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.