Childhood, Oral History, and Memory on Chicago's South Side:
Review of Bridges of Memory: Chicago's First Wave of Black Migration by Timuel Black

Moira Hinderer

For scholars who hope to tell the history of young people "from the bottom up" or "through children’s eyes," oral history is an invaluable and sometimes frustrating resource. The interviews transcribed in Bridges of Memory: Chicago's First Wave of Black Migration by Timuel Black (Northwestern University Press, 2003) illustrate both the rich details and the contradictions that historians find in oral histories. The collection includes interviews by Black with men and women who, like himself, grew up on Chicago’s South Side in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. With their detailed descriptions of urban, northern African American life between and after the World Wars, the interviews are particularly useful for scholars exploring issues of childhood and memory. Black 's interviewing techniques and his familiarity with local history allow him to draw out incredibly specific memories from his informants, who provide thick description about life on Chicago's South Side. The interviews, however, also remind the reader of the heavily mediated nature of memories captured in oral histories.

Black encourages his informants to narrate their lives from childhood to the present day, a process that offers insight into the means by which a generation comes to a shared understanding about its life experiences. In reading the interviews, an intriguing trend emerges, namely the tendency of informants to describe childhood events as happy, funny, or exciting even when those events involved typically unhappy experiences of violence, poverty, and racism. Black's interview with union leader and activist Dorsey Day, for example, illustrates this type of memory. Day recounts several experiences of racial violence in childhood that, for the reader, might seem quite frightening. Day remembers that,

Day, however, does not remember this as an event of pain or trauma. Instead he describes incidents in neutral terms, as simply a natural battle of childhood. In another incident, Daly recalls, delivering newspapers across the de facto racial border between Chicago neighborhoods:

Here, Day recounts one of the dominant childhood narratives of the children of the Great Migration, a story of triumph over adversity, one in which the hard times are brushed off with a laugh, while the good times receive most of the attention.

There are many reasons for Day and Black's other informants to remember events the way they do. For some, time removes the hard edges of the past, and for the children of the migrant generations in particular, the excitement, entertainment and sense of possibility they experienced may have outweighed memories of the problems of poverty, racial discrimination and violence they faced. Additionally, child-rearing practice may shape memory. Specifically, this generation of children, seldom encouraged to talk about painful events may find those events less remembered, or at least less discussed. The contrast between Day's memories of childhood and his memories of adulthood also suggest the way that a generation's understanding of itself can provide a framework with which to organize and contextualize memories. For example, instead of focusing on childhood Black's informants generally place their encounter or awareness of racism within the context of World War Two and the Double V Campaign. Day contrasts good times as a child with his experience as a soldier in basic training in Missouri in 1942. Once while he was riding the bus back to base in uniform, Day was threatened by a white man in a dramatic and frightening confrontation. In his interview, Day says of the bus incident,

The people of the migrant generation learned certain truths in childhood; that life was difficult but that they were survivors. As adults they saw that racism was not kid's stuff and this truth may have shaped where they placed memories of their encounters with racism. Taken together, the Black's interviews point to the rich resources oral history provides for historians of childhood. They also suggest the ambiguity of trying to separate childhood memories from the broader memories of an individual or generation as lessons of childhood teach us what to remember and adulthood reshapes the content and meaning of those memories.