Chicago has always held a special allure for me.

When I was growing up in Natchez, Mississippi, Chicago was the place people escaped to as soon as they got out of high school. It was held out as a land of opportunity, where African Americans could be free to pursue their dreams with few of the impediments that had held them back in the South.

My Uncle Vernon, my father’s youngest brother, whom I was named after, joined the great migration to Chicago after serving in World War II and had a career at the post office while also working at one of the city’s biggest department stores.

The first time Uncle Vernon returned home to Natchez from Chicago that I can recall, it was really a big deal. He drove up to our house in a big sedan with fins, and got out wearing a blue pinstripe suit and a white straw boater.

People seemed to always return home in fancy city duds, driving big cars like Uncle Vernon. It was why people called Chicago the “Promised Land.”

So many people from my hometown had moved to Chicago by 1940, that when a nightclub fire in Natchez that year took the lives of over 200 people, the commemorative marker for the Rhythm Club tragedy later placed on the Mississippi River bluff was funded by the Natchez Club of Chicago.

If Chicago was not Mississippi, or Birmingham, as historian Timuel Black observed at today’s Voices of Civil Rights gathering at the South Shore Cultural Center, it was not exactly the Promised Land either.

Most blacks were concentrated in a few neighborhoods, and in mostly low-paying jobs. Segregation was the order of the day. Looking north for a battleground that would give the Civil Rights Movement a national focus, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. set his sights on Chicago in 1966.

King targeted slum housing, but Mayor Richard J. Daley refused to meet with him, declaring that there were no slums in Chicago.

Lifelong Chicago resident Dorothy Mae Thompson, 70, chuckled as she recalled Daley’s audacious claim.

For years, black people who could afford better housing couldn’t buy it because of the restrictions.

“Nobody black was south of 69th Street,” recalled Pearl Cartman, whose late husband, Adlert M. Cartman, was an early Chicago NAACP official who fought against discrimination in jobs and housing. “After we got a few people across 69th Street, if a black person moved in any block, at that point all the For Sale signs went up.”

When the Cartmans’ daughter, Barbara Fredrick, got married in 1956, the South Side hotel chosen for a wedding night suite refused to honor the newlyweds’ reservations after learning they were not white.

“They said, ‘I’m sorry, you don’t have reservations and we don’t have any rooms,’” Fredrick recalled. “They never said ‘you can’t come here,’ and that’s the kind of segregation we had in Chicago. We didn’t have signs up that said ‘White Only,’ but you always knew you were not accepted.”

The city was primed for protest activity when King moved into a West Side apartment with his family in 1966 to dramatize the housing crisis.

Art historian and collector Daniel Parker, 63, remembers joining a South Side march led by King from Saint Mark Methodist Church in a pouring rain. “I remember people throwing rocks and eggs at us and cursing, but we kept marching,” he recalled.

When the angry crowd finally scattered under an increasing downpour, Parker spotted a white woman with a baby in a carriage standing on a corner that restored his faith in people.

“She was shaking her head up and down, saying, ‘Bless you, you’re doing the right thing,’” Parker said. Suddenly his apprehension turned to concern for the safety of a lone woman brave enough to bear witness against a mob’s action.

“In spite of all the racism, you always get that glimmer of hope from people who are sensitive to the human condition and who are willing to make their own sacrifices,” Parker said.

Before she took her mother home, Barbara Fredrick wanted me to know too, that despite the hardships, Chicago was still her favorite place in the world. “For all that I have said about my darling Chicago, I’ve been around most of the world and I lived thirteen years in Los Angeles, and I wouldn’t give up Chicago for anything,” she said. “I love her, love her, love her. This is home.”

With two aunts, a dozen cousins, and more friends from Natchez living here than I can count, Chicago continues to feel like a warm second home to me too, even if it still isn’t the Promised Land.