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    Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston
    Unavailable
    Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston
    Unavailable
    Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston
    Ebook491 pages7 hours

    Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston

    By Mary Barr

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Mary Barr thinks a lot about the old photograph hanging on her refrigerator door.  In it, she and a dozen or so of her friends from the Chicago suburb of Evanston sit on a porch. It's 1974, the summer after they graduated from Nichols Middle School, and what strikes her immediately—aside from the Soul Train–era clothes—is the diversity of the group: boys and girls, black and white, in the variety of poses you'd expect from a bunch of friends on the verge of high school. But the photo also speaks to the history of Evanston, to integration, and to the ways that those in the picture experienced and remembered growing up in a place that many at that time considered to be a racial utopia.

    In Friends Disappear Barr goes back to her old neighborhood and pieces together a history of Evanston with a particular emphasis on its neighborhoods, its schools, and its work life. She finds that there is a detrimental myth of integration surrounding Evanston despite bountiful evidence of actual segregation, both in the archives and from the life stories of her subjects. Curiously, the city’s own desegregation plan is partly to blame. The initiative called for the redistribution of students from an all-black elementary school to institutions situated in white neighborhoods.  That, however, required busing, and between the tensions it generated and obvious markers of class difference, the racial divide, far from being closed, was widened.  Friends Disappear highlights how racial divides limited the life chances of blacks while providing opportunities for whites, and offers an insider’s perspective on the social practices that doled out benefits and penalties based on race—despite attempts to integrate.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateOct 30, 2014
    ISBN9780226156637
    Unavailable
    Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston
    Author

    Mary Barr

    Mary Barr sees storytelling as an art. Each completed story is a piece of life born from words onto the page. A true storyteller and then a writer, she sees the storyline in its entirety before she begins to write. She shares all the twists and turns which continue to whet the reader’s appetite through to the unexpected ending. It’s not about spelling, vocabulary or grammar, although important, these things alone will never make a good story. Instead, Mary Barr’s readers experience the drama, suspense and intrigue of a captivating plot, with characters who often appear larger than life. Maybe we can relate to the good in each of them or the bad. Do we share their character flaws? Have we experienced similar triumphs or do we merely aspire to get a glimpse into their lives? Only in our dreams can we share their dangerous and exciting worlds. Whatever the answers, true fiction is an art and it creates a vivid image that stays with us long after the book is read. Mary Barr’s stories are created solely from her imagination and promise to keep you turning the page, all the way to the rapt conclusion. Mary Barr and her rich imagination currently reside in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

    Read more from Mary Barr

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