The North End I saw in the 1990s was a peaceful, sleepy enclave of black and white neighbors. Fleisher writes, for instance, that “the North End had two faces, one soft and welcoming, the other hardened, portending the area as a dangerous place. In many ways, Living Black is a book about dichotomies. But he also found this community among mothers and grandmothers and cousins who stuck together, generations bound by blood and history. Among young gang members who sold weed? Yes. Among unwed teenage mothers whose baby daddies were nowhere to be found? Yes. He found a community where people didn’t chastise, scold, belittle, or judge their peers.ĭid he find this community among convicts and felons? Yes. What he found were children playing in parks, mothers gossiping with friends, and families holding birthday parties for their children. What Fleisher found was a community of friends and family with deep connections and a rich social life. Street corners didn’t harbor drug sellers, and local gang youth didn’t hold court there or in parks.” No bag ladies pushed swiped grocery carts packed with heaps of plastic bags. Rather, he writes, “the North End was a quiet, low-income residential neighborhood … No homeless folks panhandled by day and slept by night on sidewalks or under bushes. That was not, however, the neighborhood that Fleisher found.
The kind of neighborhood most of us would assume to be dangerous. It’s the kind of neighborhood that many people would avoid at all costs, the kind of neighborhood that, if they had to drive through for whatever reason, they would lock the doors, roll up the windows, and floor it through stop signs and red lights. Living Black takes readers inside a neighborhood most of us likely would never willingly venture into, a neighborhood marked by gangs and violence and poverty and unemployment and drugs.
Published by the University of Wisconsin Press within days of the release in Chicago of the Laquan McDonald video, the timing for this book and its topic couldn’t be more relevant. During those six years, he came to know many of the area’s residents, several of whom feature prominently in his reportage of the area and its people, Living Black. Fleisher was tasked with interviewing hundreds of adolescent gang members in the North End.įleisher spent six years hanging out in the North End, usually the lone white person in the neighborhood. An ethnographer by trade, his assignment was to be a local evaluator for a project designed to study gangs and violence as well as intervention and prevention. Mark Fleisher, a balding, middle-aged, white Jewish man, spent six years conducting research in “Little Chicago,” an African-American neighborhood on the north end of Champaign, Illinois, not far from the campus of the University of Illinois. Social Life in an African American Neighborhood
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