Narrating and Navigating Urban Divisions: Alice Browning, The Champions, and Women's Neighborhood Organizing in South Side Chicago, 1945-1960

A lifelong South Sider and aspiring writer, Alice Browning also mobilized women to protest the post-WWII eradication of Chicago’s African American neighborhoods.  Rarely considered in tandem, her combined fiction and activism illuminate how African American women confronted interconnected material and political problems of “blight” in their neighborhoods. Browning elucidated distinctions of class, education, gender and migration history that produced multiple perspectives on “blight,” not only as a set of neighborhood conditions but also as an objectifying definition of black neighborhoods deployed in the politics of urban renewal.   This paper argues that Browning’s fictional stories and political campaigns against urban renewal recognized challenges that other neighborhood activists addressed more prosaically.  Browning underscored the importance of efforts to overcome both entrenched and emergent divisions between homeowners and renters, long-time neighborhood stalwarts and recently arrived migrants in mobilizations against the multiple dimensions of “blight”.  Often associated in subsequent scholarship with liberal-accommodationist politics distinguished from more radical demands of the 1930s and 1960s, neighborhood organizing in the 1940s and 1950s involved everyday struggles that engaged women in bridging differences as homeowners, renters, migrants, or social workers, as well as the contending stakes in the neighborhood ascribed to one another on the basis of these identities. The paper draws on Browning’s papers and fiction as well as archives of South Side block club organizing to document and analyze these gendered politics within everyday struggles for social justice involving urban space and decent housing sought by participants in different waves of black migration to Chicago.