Bronzeville

Bronzeville in Chicago grew up around the Pullman porters, Black men who worked brutal four-hundred-hour shifts on the company's sleeping cars for little more than tips, dressed to project luxury to passengers who rarely learned their real names. The guide follows editor A. Philip Randolph's 1925 push to organize those porters into a union, and Milton Webster's fight to run its toughest chapter from these streets, against a company willing to spy and fire to stop it. It traces how those paychecks built the banks, churches and jazz clubs that still line these blocks.