This project emerged fairly organically. I have long been a student of African American literature and culture generally. And people asked me, what do you continue to come back to? What's the literature that makes you want to return to it over and over again? And it was always the literature of the mid-20th century, the literature of the Great Migration. So you have people moving to New York, or to Chicago, and later to the West. And I knew so much, or read so much, about the movement to Harlem. I didn't know that much about the movement to Chicago, so I started reading more about that. And as I read, I kept coming across mentions of the kitchenette, and I had no idea what it was. I didn't have a good visual for it besides the literary depictions, which I understood were fiction (although these writers were living there, so I knew they were talking about a real place). I could not really understand what a kitchenette was.

You have the Chicago School of Sociology that's treating Chicago as a laboratory of social interaction, because of how many different demographics are in Chicago. So the Black population in Chicago is being studied, and the types of housing they live in is part of that narrative, but it's not necessarily studied in particular by them. There's a book by Edith Abbott called The Tenements of Chicago, written in the earlier part of the twentieth century — and she looks at some of the Black population, but she's looking at the ills of housing more broadly in Chicago at the time. But in the 40s and 50s is when you see this entrenchment of the Chicago kitchenette being consonant with slums, blight, Chicago's housing problems nationally, and people are talking about the kitchenette specifically.

So I went looking, and the only place I could find any mention of it was in public housing scholarship. It was the slums of Chicago. The 'kitchenette evil'. It was what got used discursively to bring people on board with building more public housing. But in that scholarship it was only ever a passing mention. Kitchenettes were so bad they were the slums, people were miserable in them, and public housing was the great solution, until it wasn't, in Chicago. That was all I could find.

There is this small summer fellowship in Chicago to go to the archives. There's a consortium of archives called the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and they had done the work of going through the collections of so many historical institutions and making finding aids for all those that had holdings on Black Chicago history. It was a month-long thing and I was looking to find something on the kitchenette. That changed the landscape of my research forever. Because there, I could not find the kitchenette per se, but I found things that sounded like the kitchenette in the archive. I often tell people my project has been a scavenger hunt. I went to the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois Chicago and found a lot there. I'm in the archive, and the archivist tells me I'm in the wrong one. She says, you need to go to the Library of Health Sciences. And I said, why would that be? I'm looking for housing. And she says, because there were sanitation issues, there were health issues, because the housing was so bad. I would never have known to do that. Why would I know? And when I got over there, it opened up everything for me.

Sticking with your interests works. To me, serendipity was in the archive, especially after following the threads of historically how people were referring to the kitchenette. Certain things like the word partition, conversion, etc. These were the indicators. And that led me to further define it for myself, and then find more resources in and beyond the archive.

Why this history matters now

A big takeaway from the book is how something can manifest on so many different registers in ways that sometimes we're not aware of. This housing form is possible in part because of discourse. Hypersegregation in Chicago happens because of discourses about Black people and migrants generally. They're cast as cancerous, all these words of tainting and disease associated with these populations and because of that, there's a vitriolic response to people living in other places. And because people can't live in other places, you have hyper-conversion to kitchenettes. And then, because there are so many people who have to live there and landlord neglect of buildings, their quality of life is terrible.

Another thing is what we see as symbols in art often are tied to things happening materially in the world, whether or not we're aware of that context. Now, there's space for abstraction and all of that. But people see a play like A Raisin in the Sun and they don't know that it's about life in a kitchenette. It was such a common experience and understanding of what Black life in Chicago was at the time that it didn't need to be explicitly explained or called out in the play. So that's not necessarily a changing of minds, but a reminder of how artists have their finger on the pulse of what's happening in society at particular moments and to take that work seriously.

And in the moment we're in, there's a need to understand how we might look back to history to figure out what we did wrong, so we know what to do when we get to these moments again. History is often cyclical. It doesn't necessarily go back, but someone says it rhymes. And so this idea that we're in a moment that looks very Cold War-ish. What were people doing at that moment? How were people censored? How much migration was happening? How did people respond to that? And what did people do wrong as it relates to their fellow citizens? Sometimes policy takes a long time to change, and housing policy was not keeping up with what was needed at the time. So maybe we can't get it right in policy on a timeline that makes sense but what can we be aware of, in terms of people's housing needs? Maybe we have not been here before, but people have been here before, and we can be students of history to do better moving forward.

Ongoing thread. More from Amani C. Morrison to follow.