Book DescriptionA powerful collection of never-before-published WPA images of black Chicago's defining moment. In the 1940s, the federal government sent a group of gifted photographers across the United States to record and publicize conditions in cities, towns, and rural areas that were the destination of an unprecedented migration. Two of these photographers, Russell Lee and Edwin Rosskam, spent time on Chicago's South Side, eventually producing over a thousand documentary images of Bronzeville's life. This unprecedented coverage of a black urban community?the only significant collection of photographs of black Chicago during this pivotal era?has largely gone unpublished. Now, in over 100 handsome full-page black-and-white photographsof bustling city streets and sidewalks, prosperous middle-class businesses, thriving cabarets, as well as dirt-poor migrants from the deep South, this stunning tribute captures the vitality of a city whose burgeoning black population...