Goin' To Chicago

Atlanta filmmaker George King's Goin' to Chicago is a bittersweet ode to Southern blacks who migrated after WWII to the North, many to Chicago (known variously as "the Promised Land" and "Heaven" to those who weren't there yet). Combining interview clips with Chicagoans who have formed a club and take bus trips back to their Mississippi Delta homeland and simulated newsreels which chronicle the struggle for racial integration in Chicago, the film contrasts the miseries of Southern sharecropper life at the turn of the century with the miseries of Northern industrial life during the segregated 1950s. Though life was a battle--for non-restrictive housing, equal pay, and patronage of local business--the interviewees recall many good moments too. Noted blues singer Koko Taylor and her husband left the South with no money and a box of Ritz crackers--shortly after arriving in Chicago, Taylor was making $5 a day as a housekeeper (to Taylor, at the time, an amazing financial bounty). The most powerful segment traces the rise of "Bronzeville"--Chicago's black neighborhood--and the failed efforts of incoming blacks to purchase housing outside of this circumscribed area, efforts that eventually led to the "vertical" expansion of housing projects. One young boy from the projects says--with haunting seriousness--that he just wants to "get out of here and live my life." a sadly tame aspiration to be sure, but for many inner-city Chicagoans the dream is still being deferred. The powerful central story is diluted a bit by the "home video" footage of the Greenville, MS club which travels from Chicago back to the homeland for frequent reunions; these rambling segments, while warm and funny, seem more like filler than anything else. This quibble aside, Goin' to Chicago is a good film, and very affordably priced. Recommended. (R. Pitman)