History Lessons: Osage Nation
Join artist Lydia Cheshewalla, poet Elise Paschen, and members of the Osage Nation for an exhibition opening reception and conversation.
Collective Care in the Black Metropolis
From Kitchenette Living to the Public Housing Fight
Background image: Edwin Rosskam, Kitchenette apartment house, Chicago, April 1941, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
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National Public Housing Museum, 919 S. Ada Street, Chicago, IL 60607
- Free
- Register
Join us for a conversation with cultural historian Amani Morrison on her new book, A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs: Housing Chicago’s Great Migration.
Kitchenette apartments in Chicago’s mid-twentieth-century Black Metropolis were a primary dwelling place for Black migrants to the city during the Great Migration and often preceded their lives in public housing. Once heralded for their efficiency, Chicago’s kitchenettes became synonymous with subdivided, dilapidated housing and became notorious symbols of housing injustice on the South and West Sides.
In this conversation, cultural historian Amani Morrison and public housing scholar Crystal Rudds will discuss Chicago’s kitchenette conditions, the collective and improvised care work that emerged from them, and how they laid the groundwork for organizing and collective action in the public housing to which kitchenette residents moved. The conversation will highlight author and activist Frank London Brown’s representation of his family’s experience integrating the Trumbull Park Homes in his semi-autobiographical 1959 novel Trumbull Park, which is discussed in Morrison’s book, A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs: Housing Chicago’s Great Migration (New York University Press, 2026).
Pre-order a copy of the book when you register! A book signing with Amani C. Morrison will follow the conversation.
FREE, but space is limited. Advance registration is requested.
Presented in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Studies Association.
About the presenters
Amani C. Morrison, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture in Georgetown University’s English Department and researches Black engagements with place and property through a cultural and historical lens. She is the author of A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs: Housing Chicago’s Great Migration (NYU Press 2026), the first cultural history of Chicago’s mid-twentieth-century kitchenette apartments, and she is also building a digital map and archival database, the Chicago Kitchenette Archive, as a corollary project. From 2023-2025, Morrison served as the Lead Principal Investigator for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Creative Placemaking, Black Restorative Ecologies, and Black Spatial Futures.” Her second book project builds on those themes to consider historical and contemporary Black Americans’ differential enactments of freedom, rejections and reformulations of capitalism, and redirections of relationships to land and labor through property. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Meridians, Environment and Society: Advances in Research, among other venues, and has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Crystal S. Rudds is assistant professor of English at the University of Utah, previously tenured at Malcolm X College in Chicago. She served as assistant editor for the oral history High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (2013) and is currently writing a book that explores images of public housing across film, literature, photography, and Black men’s oral histories. Her teaching/research interests include African American literature, Black feminist theory, Afrofuturism, and qualitative research. She is a current faculty fellow in the College of Humanities’ Black Feminist Eco-Lab and co-lead of the Vice Provost for Research and Planning’s housing working group. She is also a graduate of the National Public Housing Museum’s Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History!
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