Ida B. Wells, in 1892, was fired from a teaching post with the Shelby County Schools. Her chief offense, in addition to a certain “prickliness”: encouraging black subscribers to the Memphis Free Speech to boycott white businesses and streetcars, and moreover to leave Memphis altogether for points west. Wells had moved to Memphis herself from Holly Springs, Mississippi — from the village to the city — hoping to find greater opportunity in the latter.
Instead, “Memphis laid bare the realities of racism for poor and middle-class Black people alike,” Zandria F. Robinson and Marcus Anthony Hunter write in Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (University of California Press, 2018).
“The current maps” of the United States, Robinson and Hunter write, “are wrong.” Where the current maps fail, in the authors’ view, is in accounting for racial and ethnic inequities that organize the experiences of people of color, from Emancipation through the present. Census data offer clues into the migrations of black Americans. Tracing individual lives provides alternative rivers and ranges that have shaped lived experience — lived experiences often set in chocolate cities, the left-behind urban spaces occupied by black Americans following movement by white Americans in the postwar years to “vanilla suburbs.”
When Wells left Holly Springs, it was for opportunity. When she left Memphis, it was for fear of violence (a white mob came for her after she had decamped for New York City). Next came Europe, before she eventually landed in Chicago. Wells’ “travels help us understand chocolate maps as a geography of Black people’s freedom strivings,” Robinson and Hunter posit, “illuminating the pathways they took in search of safety and a place to be Black and free.”
Photo by Cole Shots
Zandria Robinson
Chocolate Cities centers on two premises: first, that black social life in America “is best understood as occurring wholly in ‘The South’ — one large territory, governed by a historically rooted and politically inscribed set of practices of racial domination” — and second, that black migrants brought “The South” with them to urban centers across the country. Robinson and Hunter provide several versions of what America’s consummate and complete Southernness might look like, mapped: The first reconfigured map in Chocolate Cities shows the Lower 48 rendered into six regions: instead of New England, the Midwest, the Northwest, and so on, we have Up South, Down South, Deep South, Mid South, Out South, and West South.
In this rendering, everything below the Canadian border is one form of South or another — and this because of black Americans’ movements throughout the states following Emancipation. From plantations and rural Southern towns, to the closest Southern cities, to bigger Southern cities, and eventually to large urban areas in the Midwest and along the coasts, black Americans brought their own culture and history as they moved about the country.
If Chocolate Cities were itself made of chocolate, it would come in a variety of forms: the central theses of the book like unsweetened cacao nibs, true and deep-flavored, long-lasting, challenging, surprising. Census data as chocolate bar, scored into bite-size forms. Musical references like the aroma of chocolate, wafting through the room. And the personal stories Robinson and Hunter delve into are multi-layered, well-baked undertakings.
The authors’ own family narratives ribbon their way through the book. A native Memphian, Robinson is a professor of sociology at Rhodes College, and Hunter is an associate professor of sociology at UCLA. They met when the two were doctoral candidates at Northwestern University outside Chicago.
Photo courtesy Marcus Anthony Hunter
Marcus Anthony Hunter
Their discoveries of “a fictive kinship of the highest order” brought their imaginations into a “dynamic collision … truly a straight-outta-South Memphis meets straight-outta-South Philly synergy.” The more they debated regions and music, and through music philosophy and sociology, the more Robinson and Hunter came to see that “Philly was the Memphis of the North and Memphis the Philly of the South. Or maybe,” they go on, “it was all just the South — up, down, left, or right.”
The book itself migrates across a map from “the village” to “the soul” to “the power” — from community, in other words, to culture, and finally to collective power. The authors demonstrate how black life in America has been defined by constant movement, and simultaneously how the movement of black people across America has defined the country through “a patchwork of interconnected chocolate cities.” We trace the chocolate paths of, among many others: Ida B. Wells. “The two Ms. Johnsons,” both LGBT women, one in Chicago and the other in North Memphis. Aretha Franklin. Tupac Shakur and his mother, Afeni. Big Freedia, New Orleans bounce star and joyfully challenging force.
Before the Black Lives Matter movement gathered momentum, Freedia and her crew danced their way into a moment of black queer disruption, twerking traffic to a standstill. We spend time, in these pages, with Mos Def, and with W. E. B. Du Bois, who was indicted for failing to register as an agent of a foreign state, during the McCarthy era, and emigrated to Ghana for the last years of his life.
Restricting black movement — whether by means of slave ships or “whites-only” signs — has been “essential to White supremacy,” but the authors point out, “Black people, chocolate city traveling folk, have nonetheless pushed and moved and resisted.”
As the U.S. population becomes majority-minority, the valence of these cultural exchanges has shifted — somewhat. The movements of persons and groups are less restricted than once they were. But the need for a publication like the “Green Book” — a black travel resource guide, providing black motorists with a list of where on the road to stop safely, restaurants and hotels to avoid prudently — is not so very far past. Stories of progress are not single-track: in San Jose, California, for instance, Robinson and Hunter demonstrate, though “money and education can do many things, protecting and insulating Black people from the harms and injuries of racism and glass ceilings is not one of them.”
The authors set cultural transit and transition against a backdrop of migratory patterns (including patterns of forced migration), showing how macro-level shifts and individual lives reflect — and refract — each other. Reframing two-dimensional cartographies better to fit the realities of the breathing lives within them may not be altogether novel — but Robinson and Hunter swirl in figures recognizable and anonymous, compelling data, and a strong case for hope in what’s to come, in the form of collective power. The full prism of Chocolate Cities — a prism shone through chocolate — casts a singular light.
