The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago

Like Their Black Neighbors, Mexican Americans Fought for Decades to Access Restricted Housing and Urban Space

In June of 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference headed north to Chicago to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement in a series of marches through all-white neighborhoods intended to take aim at the city’s deeply-entrenched residential segregation.

They marched through Gage Park and the surrounding neighborhoods of Chicago’s Southwest Side, where rows of bungalow homes provided a perfect visual. The modest houses were within buying reach for many Black families, but decades-old restrictions and discriminatory practices by real estate agents barred African Americans from purchasing …

by Mike Amezcua | April 10, 2023

The ‘Ferociously Contested’ Story of How Blackness Became a Legal Identity

In Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, Colonial Laws Defining ‘Freedom’ Still Affected the Status of Citizens Centuries Later

by Ariela J. Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente | April 23, 2020

How did Africans become “blacks” in the Americas?

Those who were forced into the ships of the infamous slave trade probably thought of themselves using ethnic and territorial terms that …

To Black Athletes, Donald Trump Is Playing the Dozens

This Time, the Age-Old Game of Exchanging Insults Will Have No Winner

By Kenneth L. Shropshire | October 3, 2017

President Donald Trump did not say, “Yo’ mama!” in front of a partisan Huntsville, Alabama audience. But he might as well have because that is what athletes heard directed at …

How African Americans Emerged from Slavery with a Hunger for Education

From Plantations to Churches to the Classroom, Ex-Slaves Tirelessly Pursued Public Schooling

By Abraham Ruelas | July 28, 2017

The focus of my research and writing is women’s involvement in higher education, especially women from the Pentecostal and Holiness faith traditions. While conducting research on African American female seminaries, …

Why Has America Named So Many Places After a French Nobleman?

The Marquis de Lafayette's Name Graces More City Parks and Streets Than Perhaps Any Other Foreigner

By Laura Auricchio | June 22, 2017

If you live in the United States, you’ve probably come across a county, city, street, park, school, shop, or restaurant named for Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), …

Mitchell Duneier Explains the Invention of the Ghetto, as Place and as Idea

The Zócalo Book Prize Winner Discusses the Evolution of Ethnic Enclaves, from Renaissance Europe to the Modern U.S.

By Sarah Rothbard | May 15, 2017

When sociologist Mitchell Duneier was growing up in the 1960s, he said, “references to the word ghetto were references in my house and in my segregated Jewish community on Long …

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