“This little light of mine,” a swell of voices rang out over darkness twinkling with red, white, and blue lights. “I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” The DuSable Museum of African American History Theater was full to the brim with bodies and feeling as visitors sang the spiritual and waved glow sticks in celebration after President Obama’s inauguration speech. Read the rest of this entry »

Enter Woodlawn: Get off the Cottage Grove bus at Marquette Road. Turn east and cross the street. Keep trudging through knee-deep snow for as long as you can stand it; if there are no cars coming, it might be easier to walk in the less-snowy street. Use your judgment. Look around and you’ll see some abandoned lots, a package of beef jerky peeking through the frost, sad-looking brownstones sighing under the weight of winter. But if you look closer, some color starts to peek out of the snowy grayness: some of the brownstones don’t look so sad, and they have bright signs in their front yards advertising amenities like high-grade soy insulation, hardwood floors, and energy-efficient construction (call for details). Read the rest of this entry »

Recession is a terrifying thing: it destroys industries, communities, and families on a global scale. With the stakes so high, it’s natural that all the major players would start searching desperately for a place to lay the blame—preferably, a place as far away from theirs as possible. One possible cause for our current recession that has been bandied about is the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a 1977 law that requires federally-insured banks to make loans to their entire service areas, not just the most affluent parts. Placing the blame here is misguided—in fact, it’s been convincingly argued that the CRA actually counteracted some of the most destructive forces driving the recession—and deflects attention from the larger causes. Read the rest of this entry »

“The University of Chicago” can be a four-letter word. Pundits use it as a symbol of Barack Obama’s alleged aloofness and professorial remove from reality, while South Side activists have often accused the UofC of being primarily concerned with itself—to the detriment of its neighbors. The core of these accusations center around an image of the UofC as an army of navel-gazing students that stay firmly entrenched in the Regenstein Library or their fortress-like dorms, occasionally emerging to head downtown for a Friday night dinner or to Lakeview for shopping.

Chicago Studies, a new interdisciplinary program spearheaded by Dean John Boyer in collaboration with the College and the University Community Service Center (UCSC), wants to change that. Read the rest of this entry »

Shaquocora Henderson has big plans for her future. “I’m going to be the CEO of my own company,” the eighth grader says. “I’m not going to work for anybody.” When asked about future colleges, she says without hesitation, “It’s still a battle between Harvard and Brown University.” Read the rest of this entry »

Marisol Flores has proof: stacks of Polaroid photographs documenting bruises and welts, emergency room bills, police and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) reports, reams of court testimony. All these tell in painful detail the history of her twelve-year marriage that has dramatically colored her life in the United States, retold by the Chicago Reporter. It’s a different story for Monica Bejar: as she told the American Prospect, her papers fell victim to her ex-husband’s drunken rages, in which he ripped up the very immigration forms he offered to file for her. Read the rest of this entry »

Vesta Johnson could be your grandmother—that is, if your grandmother is a musical trailblazer. The eighty-something Missourian, one of the first female fiddlers in the style called “old-time” or “Ozark style,” made a name for herself with her energetic bow work at a time when few women played at all. Although she’s more accustomed to playing in small halls populated with friends and family, she graced the big stage at Mandel Hall last year for the 47th Annual University of Chicago Folk Festival. The organizers wanted to make sure she made it home safe after the performance, so they searched for her high and low backstage. Read the rest of this entry »

He appears to be a high-powered businessman, perhaps in the financial sector—black-suited, armed with a busily ringing Blackberry and headset, accessorized with an immaculately shaven head and stylish rimless glasses. Laughter rolls out of his mouth, booming and golden like a sentry’s horn, whenever he stumbles upon a pithy way to explain a theory from his life’s work to a layman. For example: “People complain about MTV and commercial hip-hop, but to me, that’s not even hip-hop. It’s like hip-hop looking at itself in a funny mirror at the carnival.” Wait, what? Read the rest of this entry »