We will be discussing Friends Disappear by Mary Barr. Please register for zoom link for discussion.
Mary Barr thinks a lot about the old photograph hanging on her refrigerator door. In it, she and a dozen or so of her friends from the Chicago suburb of Evanston sit on a porch. It's 1974, the summer after they graduated from Nichols Middle School, and what strikes her immediately - aside from the Soul Train-era clothes - is the diversity of the group: boys and girls, black and white, in the variety of poses you'd expect from a bunch of friends on the verge of high school. But the photo also speaks to the history of Evanston, to the detrimental myth of integration surrounding Evanston despite bountiful evidence of actual segregation, and to the ways that those in the picture experienced and remembered growing up in a place that many at that time considered to be a racial utopia. In this book, Barr goes back to her old neighborhood and pieces together a history of Evanston with a particular emphasis on its neighborhoods, its schools, and its work life.
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