Black American gothic. Planting urban roots in iowa

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Description

Independent filmmaker Carla Wilson documents the exodus of black people from the inner-city, tracking folks from Chicago as they migrate west to small-town Iowa City, where they struggle to establish roots. Echoing the early 20th-century Great Migration of blacks from southern states to the Northeast and Midwest, this new migration is also about family-friendly housing, jobs, and the search for a better life. Iowa City is a self-identified peaceful community now facing new challenges: supposedly safe havens from urban life are increasingly attractive to the urban underclass, and as a consequence, these communities are compelled to redefine themselves in terms of race, class, and the urban/rural divide. Moving between narrated experience and social scientific data, local and the national scenes, history and immediacy, the documentary profiles a region in transition, providing public administrators, teachers, and private citizens new narratives for self-understanding and action.