The Rise and Fall of Chicago

 By Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes

When Coleman Hughes was growing up twenty years ago or so, he thought of the “South Side of Chicago” as shorthand for all the problems of troubled urban black communities. He had reason to think that. For, in the media and in reality, it had become a paragon of decline. Things were different when I was coming along there in the 1950s and ‘60s. There were rough patches, to be sure. But there were also plenty of safe, beautiful, black neighborhoods like the one I grew up in, Park Manor. So Coleman wanted to know: what happened? How did the South Side of Chicago and other places like it deteriorate into what they’ve become? In this clip from his show, Conversations with Coleman, we try to answer the question.

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