Replacing Rhetoric with Research
Two scholars with ties to the University of Chicago aim to shed light on Black life in the 21st century.
By Susan E. Smith
Chicago’s South Side has long been a renowned laboratory for groundbreaking research on Black urban life.
Dr. E. Franklin Frazier wrote The Negro Family in Chicago in the 1930s. Dr. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton authored Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City in the 1940s. And acclaimed sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote The Truly Disadvantaged in the 1980s.
The city’s vast Black population, largely the product of the Great Migration, has made Chicago the home of both a celebrated Black middle class and an unsettling Black lower class. These two extremes have been meticulously documented over the years through a distinct style of sociological fieldwork known as the Chicago School.
Now, more than 60 years after the publication of Black Metropolis, Dr. Mary Pattillo, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, and Dr. Cathy J. Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, are doing research that reflects the new dynamics of Black urban life in the 21st century, as internal conflicts take on a more important role in Black studies.
Pattillo’s book, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, published earlier this year, studies the gentrification of poor Black neighborhoods. And in February, Cohen released the “Black Youth Project,” widely considered to be the first comprehensive national examination of the attitudes and beliefs of today’s young Black population.
Both women were mentored by scholars who made a mark in their respective fields: Pattillo worked closely with Wilson in the 1990s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago; and Dr. Michael Dawson,
a leading expert on Black political behavior, was on Cohen’s dissertation committee in the 1980s at the University of Michigan.
