Kindred Spirit

Sometimes the wall of history seemed an inch high, and sometimes it seemed tall as the clouds.

* * *

Here he comes. His plane is swooping into Chicago. The candidate is going home for the night.

Years back, black folks used to arrive in Chicago by train. From Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and Louisiana. From turpentine camps and sharecropping farms. The scholars called it the Great Migration. A great many called it a dream.

It was a factory job dream back then.

Now it's a White House dream.

* * *

Chicago was special, and it had its big arms open. It wasn't exactly by design, but World War II came and suddenly there were jobs in the urban centers of the North. Pullman porters were known to slip fliers about Chicago jobs to the downtrodden when they were traveling through the South. Huge apartment complexes rose up in the city to house the newcomers. Progressive thinkers, many of them anchored at the University of Chicago, gave the city a unique social vibe.

William Dawson was a rare black member of Congress who was elected in 1942 from Chicago. John Johnson started his media empire there, giving Ebony and Jet magazines to the public. And no other newspaper in the country rivaled the Chicago Defender for its day-to-day chronicling of the black experience in America. The Defender wrote about lynchings, music, art, black death rates, black strivers.

Jesse Owens arrived there in 1949, got himself a job in public relations, did some jazz DJing for pocket money. Joe Louis strutted down Michigan Avenue in a long tweed coat. Billy Eckstine bought drinks over at the Drake Hotel. As a child, Nat King Cole -- they called him "Chicago's Young Maestro" -- would walk around in a porkpie hat, carrying a Thanksgiving turkey, the prize for winning the musical competitions over at the Regal Theatre.

Chicago: Langston Hughes hanging out at the Defender offices, yakking about his latest column for that newspaper; Sugar Ray Robinson defeating Jake LaMotta on Valentine's Day 1951 at Chicago Stadium.

"My town," Sugar Ray once said of Chicago.