Chicago's Ties To American South Much More Recent Than Great Migration

An article in Chicago Magazine suggests that the Windy City's ties to the South generally, and to Mississippi, in particular, are much more recent and pervasive than generally understood.

In 1986, Nicholas Lemann wrote a lengthy, two-part series for The Atlanticon crime and poverty in Chicago. One of the things he encountered was just how Southern Chicago is: 

Although the migration ended in the early seventies – again, because jobs had become scarce in Chicago – there is still considerable movement back and forth, and the South is very much in the minds of black Chicagoans. Most of the very successful local blacks who are held up as role models are southern-born: Jesse Jackson (South Carolina), John H. Johnson, the owner of Ebony (Arkansas), Oprah Winfrey, the TV host who appeared in The Color Purple (Mississippi), Walter Payton, of the Chicago Bears (Mississippi), the Reverend Johnnie Colemon, the pastor of the biggest church in Chicago (Mississippi).

[snip]

Black Mississippians go to Chicago too. Recently, at a student assembly of a black Catholic grade school in Canton [Mississippi], I asked the children how many had been to Chicago, and nearly every hand went up. Often they went for long visits with relatives in the summers. (How many want to live in Chicago when they grow up? I asked. No hands. Why not? An immediate chorus: “Too dangerous.") At one of Chicago’s worst high schools – Orr, on the West Side – I asked a class how many were born in Chicago. Almost everyone was. But almost everyone’s mother had been born in Mississippi. Many of the mothers of a class of eighth graders at Beethoven School, an elementary school whose students all live in the Robert Taylor Homes, were from Mississippi.

Part of Lemann’s thesis, not that he ignores the effects of segregation and concentrated poverty, is that the divide between city and backcountry was also brought north: “Every aspect of the underclass culture in the ghettos is directly traceable to roots in the South – and not the South of slavery but the South of a generation ago. In fact, there seems to be a strong correlation between underclass status in the North and a family background in the nascent underclass of the sharecropper South.” Lemann also found the opposite—a correlation between middle-class status in the nascent middle-class of urban Canton and mobility in the North.

It isn't the first time I've seen parts of the United States described as virtual colonies of a place of origin of its migrants, but it is the first time I've seen this particular connection made to Chicago.

Chicago Ignores The Right To Counsel

Colorado used to make misdemeanor defendants plea bargain before having counsel appointed, which federal courts subsequently held was unconstitutional.  So, Colorado district attorneys have had to reform their practices.

Chicago is worse.  Only 1% of people incarcerated in its jails have seen a lawyer, in a clear violation of the constitutional right of indigent criminal defendants to be represented by counsel at public expense.  Of course, this isn't the only thing rotten in Chicago, which is also violating numerous other constitutional rights of its citizens in its criminal justice process.

OFF TOPIC BUT RELATED:

The criminal justice system is notorious for defending police officers who behave badly no matter how obvious it is that they have screwed up.

A recent case out of San Diego (in which the police lost an appeal to the 9th Circuit) in which police mounted a massive armed raid on a 7 year old girl's birthday party despite quickly learning that the tip that they received had no connection to reality is typical.  Police authority evaporates almost instantly in the absence of probable cause or a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, but police aren't at all good at backing down when they learn that a situation is far different from what their tip led them to believe.  Yet, the government has strenuously defended the bad police conduct at trial and on appeal, to no avail, rather than conceding that obvious misconduct was wrong.