Three Girls From Bronzville by Dawn Turner

This memoir is set in an historically Black neighborhood, a bit of land on Chicago’s South Side known as Bronzeville, and three Brown girls – the author, her sister, Kim Turner, and best friend Debra Trice – who were shaped by this milieu while growing up in the 1970s. Their families moved northward in the Great Migration, escaping the lynchings and unpredictable violence of the Jim Crow South. Dawn, Debra and Kim all had a leg up in life, as so-called children of the dream: the first generation to realize the hard-won freedoms of the civil rights movement. But only Turner was able to grab hold of the advantages, entering the University of Illinois at Urbana on the early tide of affirmative action, one of just a thousand African American students in a sea of 34,500. They were raised in the same environment, a land of milk and honey soured by neglect both benign and intentional — redlining, contract buying and other policies that extracted Black wealth, opportunity and hope. They ended up with entirely different fates, and the author takes the reader through each of them while trying to make sense of it all.