A People's History of Chicago

Kevin Coval

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781608466719
• eBook ISBN: 9781608467662
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Known variously as "'the Windy City, "' "'the City of Big Shoulders, "' or "'Chi-Raq, "' Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world.

Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval's A People's History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the city's seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape.

Kevin Coval is the poet/author/editor of seven books including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and the play, This Iis Modern Art, co-written with Idris Goodwin. Founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Coval teaches hip-hop aesthetics at the University of Illinois–-Chicago. The Chicago Tribune has named him "the voice of the new Chicago" and the Boston Globe calls him "the city's unofficial poet laureate."

Praise for A People’s History of Chicago

“I just read your new manuscript and got the same feeling I had some weeks ago when I was back in Chicago in a cab very early in the morning on my way to catch a train, the city shrouded in a misty rain, and as we passed what has always been one of my favorite historic intersections by the river at michigan and wacker (where once long long ago the freshly created soul of jazz poured out of the London House) there was this fucking sign, TRUMP, like an obscenity scrawled across chicago history, illuminated like a raw scar. There’s that sense to your book, the scars of how the city was made are part of the architecture, of the landscape.”

—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship

“The stories and personalities memorialized in these poems are real to me. Poet Kevin Coval breathes them back alive with word-pictures both concrete and passionate, compressing centuries into verse. These are poems to be savored. I’d be hard-pressed to pick just one favorite from this remarkable collection.”

—Timuel D. Black, Chicago historian/activist/teacher, author of Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black Migration

“Kevin Coval has given us a gift, a collection of heartfelt, piercing poems, stories really, about America’s city. Taken together, these song-like postcards are a kind of celebration, as well as some takedowns, of those who sweat and struggle and endure to make this city a better place. The book soars.”

—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here and Never a City So Real

“From our first resident, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, to the immigrants, migrants, and souls who make this city great, a vibrant, dynamic collection of vignettes that expose the naked truth...

Table of contents

• A People's History of Chicago
• Foreword by Chance the Rapper
• Shikaakwa
• lasalle Wrote It Down Wrong
• The Father Is a Black Man
• The Treaty of Chicago
• Hog Butcher for the World
• Albert Parsons Can Hang
• How to Be Down
• The L Gets Open
• The white City
• Eugene Debs Reads Marx in Prison
• Reversing the Flow of the Chicago River
• The Great Migration
• The Eastland Disaster
• The Murder of Eugene Williams
• Society for Human Rights (America’s First Gay Rights Organization)
• Thomas Dorsey, Gospel’s Daddy
• Gwendolyn Brooks Stands in the Mecca
• Hansberry vs. Lee
• Muddy Waters Goes Electric
• Nelson Algren Meets Simone de Beauvoir at the Palmer House
• Pickle with a Peppermint Stick
• Sun Ra Becomes a Synthesizer
• hugh hefner, a Play Boy
• Mamie Till Bears the Movement
• king daley Unfurls His burnham Plan
• The Division Street Riots
• Martin Luther King Prays in Marquette Park
• Studs Terkel Drops a Mixtape
• Carl Sandburg Village (Where My Parents Met)
• Wall of Respect
• AfriCOBRA
• The Assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton
• Don L. Lee Becomes Haki Madhubuti
• The Chicago 21 Plan
• Leaving Aldine
• Ode to Steppin
• Disco Demolition
• mayor byrne Moves Into & Out of Cabrini Green
• Ron Hardy Plays the Record Backwards
• The Assassination of Rudy Lozano
• Marc Smith Invents the Poetry Slam
• Collateral Damage
• The Day Harold Died
• Patronage
• Fresh to Death
• Molemen Beat Tapes
• Graffiti Blasters: An Erasure (A Buff)
• The Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act
• The Etymology of Chicago Joe
• Common’s Resurrection
• The Supreme Court Makes Color Illegal
• Erasing the Green
• Ida B. Wells Testifies in the Ghost Town
• How to Teach Poetry in Chicago Public Schools
• Lenard Clark Pedals for Air
• Baby Come On: An Ode to Footwork
• A Moratorium on the Death Penalty
• Praise the House Party
• Día de las Madres
• Kanye Says What’s on Everybody’s Mind
• I Wasn’t in Grant Park when obama Was Elected
• Republic Windows Workers Sit In
• The Night the Modern Wing Was Bombed
• When King Louie First Heard the Word Chiraq
• An Elegy for Dr. Margaret Burroughs
• A Dedication to the Inaugural Poet
• Memoir of the Red X
• Chief Keef’s Epiphany at Lollapalooza
• Teachers’ Strike in the Chicago Tradition
• During Ramadan the Gates of Heaven Are Open
• Ms. Devine Explains the Meaning of Modern Art: A Found Poem
• Two Cities Celebrate Independence Day
• We Charge Genocide
• Atoning for the Neoliberal in All or rahm emanuel as the Chicken on Kapparot
• 400 Days
• The Night the Cubs Win the World Series
• Chicago Has My Heart
• Notes
• Illustration Credits
• Acknowledgments