Black Voices

Were You Ever Told to Avoid the South or West Sides? New Book Shares Stories of Disrupting Segregation


Have you been told to stay away from the South or West sides of Chicago?

That was the question posed to local residents, and responses poured in about times they were told “don’t go.”

Artist and photographer Tonika Lewis Johnson and sociologist Maria Krysan compiled those stories in a new book called “Don’t Go: Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt It.” The goal was to better understand what can happen when people explore often ignored parts of the city.

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The book begins by chronicling how the women met and started the project, explaining how their different backgrounds didn’t stop them from learning about their common interests. Johnson said these stories are a way to show the opportunities segregation can put a stop to.

“The other part that I think we really wanted to show with this book, is the personal part of segregation,” Johnson said. “It’s not just that it prevents economic investment, it hurts people’s feelings and it helps people live in fear. And we want it to offer an opportunity for people to understand how to disrupt that and how to not be offensive to people.”

The initial question garnered more responses than the book could fit, but the authors said many stories were powerful and vulnerable.

Krysan added that sometimes the numbers and reports don’t always get the message across the same way as a personal story can.

“The stories touch us in a way that Tonika always talks about,” Krysan said. “Until we make segregation personal we’re never going to break it down. And I think what better way than through stories to help people see really what’s going on. … I just think stories are relatable.”

Read an excerpt from the book below.


“Don’t Go: Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt It” by Tonika Lewis Johnson and Maria Krysan.

FOREWORD

BY MARY SCHMICH

I was scrolling through Facebook one day, musing on what to write about in my next Chicago Tribune column, when I what landed unexpectedly on the perfect topic. There in the stream of pet photos, birthday greetings, and vacation selfies was a short video that showed Tonika Lewis Johnson talking to freshmen at Northwestern University.

“By a show of hands,” she asked the group, “how many of you all are not from Chicago?”

Most of the hands went up.

”By a show of hands, how many of you all have been told to not go to the South Side or that it’s dangerous?”

Again, almost every hand was raised.

“So,” she told the group, “there lies one aspect of how segregation is perpetuated.”

At the time, in 2019, I’d never met Tonika. I’d heard of her Folded Map project, in which she photographed homes at corresponding addresses on Chicago’s North and South Sides. The photos showed how racially segregated the city is, how unfairly the city’s resources are distributed.

Of course, segregation and inequity are hardly new. They’re the enduring cracks in our shared Chicago life. But Tonika has a knack for finding novel approaches to these tenacious problems, and in her Folded Map explorations, she went beyond taking pictures and naming the issues. She met the people whose homes she photographed. She introduced them to each other. She got the North Siders talking to the South Siders. She got them thinking.

That’s Tonika’s brilliance. She gets people talking. Thinking. Looking for solutions. She did it with Folded Map and she’s doing it again with the Don’t Go project.

The day I stumbled on her “Don’t Go” Facebook post, I instantly recalled my arrival in Chicago to write for the Chicago Tribune. It was 1985. I’d spent my life in Georgia, Arizona, California, Florida, and France, and I felt like a foreigner in this vast, northern metropolis. I knew little about the city’s racial history or geography.

But I soon learned - meaning I was told - that there were streets I shouldn’t cross, neighborhoods I shouldn’t enter. Some of those places were on the predominantly White North Side, where I lived, but most were on the South and West Sides, home to most of the city’s Black residents. In fact, it soon became clear that the terms “South Side” and “West Side” were common shorthand for “poverty” and “danger,” never mind that such reductive thinking overlooked the deep, rich life that also existed in those parts of town.

A few months into my new job, I heard about a woman who was running a theater program for residents of her West Side neighborhood of Lawndale. When I proposed a story on her and her program, an older colleague, a longtime Chicagoan, shook his head. It’s dangerous, he said, don’t go there.

I went anyway.

The cab driver I hailed outside Tribune Tower downtown grumbled when I gave him the address, but he took me, warning that I’d have to call for a taxi home since cabs were hard to find in Lawndale. When the interview was over, I called. I waited for the cab for two hours. Getting a ride home, as it turned out, was the only trouble I encountered.

In the following years, I heard many more “don’t go” warnings. Some, frankly, were reasonable. Others, though, were rooted in poorly informed stereotypes, which was what resonated for me the day I saw Tonika’s Facebook post.

So I tracked her down. We talked. And I wrote a column about her “Don’t Go” presentations. Responses poured in.

Some people wrote to say thanks, or to report their positive experiences in neighborhoods unfairly painted with the broad brush of “dangerous.” Others warned about the “naivete” of suggesting people travel across the “don’t go” boundaries. Some said they’d like to visit the South or West Sides but didn’t know where to start. Or they worried they’d been seen as woke tourists, voyeurs, intruders. A few responses were flat-out racist. All of them, together, illuminated how complicated it is to change neighborhoods and minds. This book is an attempt to help make that change.

In these pages, Tonika and her collaborator, sociologist Maria Krysan, interview 25 people* who reflect on their own experiences of being told not to go to the South or West Sides. No two stories are the same. Every single one is moving, and thought-provoking. So are Tonika’s and Maria’s reflections - included with the interviews - on the stories they’ve collected.

I was lucky in my years as a Chicago Tribune writer to have work-related reasons that made it easy for me to disregard the “don’t go” warnings. My reporter’s notebook was my calling card, and it allowed me to meet people I probably otherwise wouldn’t have, to sit and converse in their living rooms and kitchens and churches. Those encounters taught me to see Chicago more fully, and love it more deeply, a process that never ends.

This book will help many people see Chicago more fully. And while solving the “don’t go” problem isn’t as simple as telling people, “Go,” Tonika’s and Maria’s work helps us confront the myths and mindsets that make it harder for Chicago’s very real problems to be solved.

Don’t Go sends a message: Let yourself listen. Let yourself learn. Let yourself think about how you learned what you think you know. And then go somewhere that broadens your view of your city, your fellow citizens and, maybe, yourself.

Reprinted by permission of Polity Press. Excerpted from Don’t Go: Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt It by Tonika Lewis Johnson and Maria Krysan. Copyright 2025 Tonika Lewis Johnson and Maria Krysan. All rights reserved.

 

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