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 integration, 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 Friends Disappear 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. She finds that there is a
detrimental myth of integration surrounding Evanston despite bountiful
evidence of actual segregation, both in the archives and from the life
stories of her subjects. Curiously, the city's own desegregation plan is
partly to blame. The initiative called for the redistribution of
students from an all-black elementary school to institutions situated in
white neighborhoods. That, however, required busing, and between the
tensions it generated and obvious markers of class difference, the
racial divide, far from being closed, was widened. Friends Disappear
highlights how racial divides limited the life chances of blacks while
providing opportunities for whites, and offers an insider's perspective
on the social practices that doled out benefits and penalties based on
race--despite attempts to integrate.
