Collective Care in the Black Metropolis

From Kitchenette Living to the Public Housing Fight, with cultural historian Amani Morrison Join the National Public Housing Museum for a conversation with cultural historian Amani Morrison on her new book, A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs: Housing Chicago’s Great Migration. Kitchenette apartments in Chicago’s mid-twentieth-century Black Metropolis were a primary dwelling place for Black migrants to the city during the Great Migration and often preceded their lives in public housing. Once heralded for their efficiency, Chicago’s kitchenettes became synonymous with subdivided, dilapidated housing and became notorious symbols of housing injustice on the South and West Sides. In this conversation, cultural historian Amani Morrison and public housing scholar Crystal Rudds will discuss Chicago’s kitchenette conditions, the collective and improvised care work that emerged from them, and how they laid the groundwork for organizing and collective action in the public housing to which kitchenette residents moved. The conversation will highlight author and activist Frank London Brown’s representation of his family’s experience integrating the Trumbull Park Homes in his semi-autobiographical 1959 novel Trumbull Park, which is discussed in Morrison’s book, A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs: Housing Chicago’s Great Migration (New York University Press, 2026). A book signing with Amani C. Morrison will follow the conversation. Presented in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Studies Association.