Moving Up, Moving Out: The Rise of the Black Middle Class in Chicago.

Cooley challenges those who view Chatham's Black residents as traitors to fellow Black Chicagoans and documents the active role Chatham's African American community played in the local fight against school segregation in light of White flight. The African American community's political economy of free-market capitalism and racist limits raised community tensions over the responsibility of its strivers to everyone else and created a "cynical black version of the American Dream" (6). In analyzing the paradox of the Black American Dream, Cooley's study focuses on the places where African Americans in Chicago established a middle class. [Extracted from the article]