Chicago

Chicago first appears as a city of possibility for Austin: fast-moving, architecturally striking, and diverse enough to make her feel that important things were happening there. As she entered college, the city seemed like a place to practice adulthood. That promise acquired greater depth through the classrooms and organizing work she encountered there, even as her account makes clear that diversity alone did not undo the dominance of white norms.

College and Belonging

Austin’s first surprise on campus was Professor McMath, her first Black teacher and a marketing professor who commanded the classroom. Professor McMath drew on her professional experience in teaching, but her presence mattered beyond representation: in her class, Austin did not have to construct a sense of belonging by herself or continually translate a curriculum shaped around white middle-class assumptions.

A lesson on business planning offered a small but telling reversal. Professor McMath used opening a beauty shop as an example and referred to getting a relaxer. Austin immediately recognized the reference; the white students did not. Professor McMath explained the hair treatment and its effect on Black women’s curly hair, then winked at Austin. The moment made shared cultural knowledge visible in a classroom where Austin had often been expected to adapt to someone else’s frame of reference. It helped stir her discontent with feeling that she attended a college made for someone else.

The Sankofa Trip

That spring, Austin’s roommate invited her to join the Sankofa Trip, a three-day journey exploring Black history with another student. About twenty pairs, mostly one Black student and one white student, traveled overnight from Chicago to Louisiana. Their first stop was a plantation, where the guides presented enslaved people as happy and described their working conditions in misleadingly favorable terms. At the end of the tour, the visitors were invited to pick cotton themselves. The juxtaposition of Black students picking cotton at a plantation made the distance between historical images and lived experience collapse for Austin.

After further stops, discussions, tears, and prayers, the group returned to Chicago. Before leaving the bus, every participant was asked to name a way to become a change agent. Austin did not remember her exact response, but she understood her commitment as genuine. The trip connected the places she had walked with the history she had studied and strengthened her resolve to take part in the struggle for change.

Activism and Work on the West Side

Back at college, Austin began acting on that commitment. She helped challenge the administration to hire and retain Black faculty and staff, attended race-related movie discussions and conferences, and organized small gatherings where diversity could be practiced through prayer groups and worship services. Unlike in high school, where she had noticed racism but kept her thoughts to herself, in college she began speaking up. Chicago thus became not only a setting for her education but a place where she tested what racial-justice work could look like in practice.

Later, Austin worked for a year at a short-term missions site in a Black neighborhood on the Chicago West Side. The program brought students to learn about the work already taking place in Black communities. It hosted about fifty people each week during the summer and smaller groups during the rest of the year. Participants arrived in vans, then traveled around the city, riding the El as they learned about the neighborhood. The program’s purpose stood against the assumption that Black neighborhoods were defined by problems to be solved: it asked visitors to recognize the work and life already present there.

Significance

Across these episodes, Chicago marks a progression from anticipated independence to cultural recognition and public action. The city’s diversity initially suggested possibility, but Austin’s account locates belonging more specifically in a classroom where Black experience was not treated as an interruption, and in collective efforts to change who was represented in college leadership. The Sankofa Trip extended that learning beyond campus, while work on the Chicago West Side placed visitors in a Black neighborhood to encounter its existing community and work. Chicago’s significance lies in this movement between promise and practice: it gives Austin room to imagine adulthood, but also becomes a site where she learns that inclusion requires more than diverse appearances and must be pursued through sustained action.