PREFACE

I started this project thirteen years, three institutions, dozens of hospitalizations, and seven surgeries ago. Back then, I was a very young and very sheltered middle-class Black girl from the West Side of Detroit. But while I had never been inside a public housing development prior to the beginning of this work, I knew that no matter who they were, every Black adult needed and deserved to be greeted how they wanted to be greeted, as mister, miss, doc, Baba, auntie, or a chosen name. In the early days of my research, I knew nothing about the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) or the developments they built and managed. It was only through transparency about my lack of experience, a lot of humility, and a community of Black women who took a young researcher under their wing that this project was able to come to completion.

When I first spoke with Bernadette Williams, the president of the Local Advisory Council (LAC) of the Altgeld Gardens and Phillip Murray Homes development on the far south side of Chicago, she was reluctant to communicate with me. Her first question was, “What makes you any different? Why should I talk to you?” I told her that my intention was to study the lives of Black women in public housing to make a substantive difference in their lives (as cliché as that likely seems now in 2024, I was young!). Unenthusiastically, Ms. Bernadette scheduled a meeting with me for a couple of days later. When I arrived at her office, the genuine surprise on her face was palpable. Since I’d introduced myself over the phone as a doctoral candidate from the University of Chicago, she’d automatically assumed that I was white and much older. Almost immediately, she said that she “didn’t expect [me] to look like” I did. In fact, she was convinced that I looked just like one of her younger cousins and corroborated this with the other women in the office. At the time, I was a very young looking twenty-six-year-old with soft fuzzy black hair and big round glasses. I was still skinny enough to squeeze through the iron gate on my mother’s back door in Detroit, Michigan.

The conversation that followed with Ms. Bernadette was familial in tone. She told me repeatedly that she was proud of me for getting a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (this was a theme repeated throughout my time at Altgeld). Open about her challenges and victories, Ms. Bernadette was also generous in sharing the dates and times of Altgeld LAC meetings, CHA Board meetings, and Tenant Services meetings. This initial meeting with her was critical because it served as my opening to a community with deep-rooted suspicions of researchers. Because of her negative interactions with academics in the past, Ms. Bernadette was clear that she expected me to keep in regular contact with her, as well as to show her my final dissertation. I agreed to these terms readily, but over the course of my time at Altgeld, it proved challenging to keep in touch with Ms. Bernadette, largely because she was difficult to find. I would call the office, as well as visit the office repeatedly and miss her. The challenge for Ms. Bernadette as the LAC president was that the position was a full-time job that paid her a mere $200 a month. In the end, it was Ms. Bernadette’s initial enthusiasm about my project and her willingness to introduce me at meetings, as well as to individual residents, that allowed my project to take root.

Toward the end of April 2011, I was able to schedule an initial meeting with Cheryl Johnson. My meeting with Ms. Cheryl was similar to my meeting with Ms. Bernadette, familial in tone. Ms. Cheryl was similarly open about the challenges she faced as an activist in the Altgeld Gardens development. Ms. Cheryl is the daughter of Hazel Johnson, the founder of People for Community Recovery (PCR). A well-known Chicago environmental activist, Ms. Hazel was responsible for introducing a young Barack Obama to a number of other residents within the development and was infamous for hosting him at her kitchen table. After Ms. Hazel’s death, Ms. Cheryl followed in her mother’s footsteps, staying within public housing in large part to continue her mother’s work. When I met Ms. Cheryl, she was organizing activist actions within the development, providing training workshops, hosting “toxic doughnut” environmental racism tours of Altgeld Gardens, and facilitating activities for local youth. My meeting with Ms. Cheryl turned out to be another critical moment in the development of this research. She provided information about my project to a number of women who live in Altgeld and also informed me of meetings and protests hosted by PCR.

A consistent theme throughout my interviews within Altgeld Gardens was the surprise and relief many respondents seemed to experience when I showed up at their door. Because of our screening conversations over the phone, almost all of them expected me to be a much older white woman. In 2011 and 2012 I appeared to be much younger than I actually was, so many respondents assumed that I was an undergraduate in college when they initially met me. Many also expressed relief over our shared racial identity. Throughout the study, I heard many times that I looked just like a respondent’s sister, cousin, or daughter. One other theme that appeared in many of my interviews was a sense of pride from respondents when they discovered I was working on my Ph.D. Woman after woman congratulated me for being in school and encouraged me to finish the degree and “do something with my life.” Perhaps this was an expression of Michael Dawson’s concept of linked fate (Behind the Mule, 1994). Many women seemed to closely identify with my perceived achievement and had an urgent desire to express a personal sense of pride. It meant a lot to me.

The intersection of my race, age, and gender provided a certain level of access, trust, and comfort throughout my interviews. But while a shared racial and gender identity created a certain level of vulnerability in many instances, it also created an assumption of a shared lived experience on the part of some respondents. There was so much I did not know and could not hope to understand about their lived experience as Black women living below the poverty line. Many respondents told me poverty was the identity that had the most power over their lives. Race and gender were a very distant second and third factor for a number of the women I interviewed. However, my lack of shared experience provided rich opportunities for me to listen in silence as I recorded the narratives they told me about their political lives, aspirations, and dreams. Ultimately, the data I collected is rigorous, rich, and theoretically meaningful. It centers a political community rich with its own political legacy and history.

In Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, James C. Scott (2014) argued that “the largest class in world history” is “the peasant class.” In simpler terms, the majority of the people who ever have and likely will ever walk this earth are the working class, the working poor, and those living below the poverty line. A famous proverb says that “history is written by the victors,” and while that may be true, it rings hollow on the realization that the vast majority of the people—soldiers, cooks, domestic workers, factory workers—who move civilization forward are never recorded in the history books, even when they happen to be on the winning side.

In humanity’s long history, there are very few records about the people who only had power over themselves and their local communities. We know precious little about those who came before us. Even as researchers, most of us study the wealthy, the elite, the exceptional, the special, and the especially gifted of humanity. Of course, this feeling is only exacerbated via the realities of being a person of African descent, anywhere in the global diaspora. Most Black people of African descent who are also descendants of enslaved people have precious little written about them in the Western historical record of the last one thousand years. But we know even less about the Black poor and the Black working class as they have existed throughout history. We know precious little about the internal politics and social community structures of enslaved people throughout the Americas. This must change.

The growth in published work centering the lived social and political experiences of poor Black people throughout the Americas is only the first step. We must build on the work of the scholars who came before us and continue to develop research that values documenting, archiving, and critically engaging with the politics of poor Black people as legitimate and knowledgeable political actors. Through the centering of the sociopolitical communities of the Black poor and the Black working class, not only will the rigor and general applicability of our research increase but so will the quality and relevance of our politics. After all, Black liberation is an all-or-nothing deal. As Fannie Lou Hamer instructed us, “No one is free until everybody is free.” Redefining the Political is not a history book or even a traditional ethnography. Instead, I use these pages to argue that the sociopolitical strategies, knowledge, and community networks of poor Black people are worth studying as critical political thinkers working within a very different political environment.