Trumbull Park

Frank London Brown’s powerful debut novel, originally published in 1959, fictionalizes the real-life ordeals of the first black families to integrate Chicago’s Trumbull Park public housing project in the 1950s. Protagonist Buggy Martin tells the first-person story of moving with his wife, Helen, and two children from a rotting tenement on the South Side to the new development, where the family is besieged by angry whites.

With honesty and humor, the richly textured narrative chronicles how the small group of black tenants at Trumbull Park endure the strain of living with racial violence: the endless danger of bombings and shattered windows, filthy insults, callous attention from police, and forced rides in armed convoys to and from work and the market. Until, that is, the day Buggy and a friend refuse police protection and walk home together through the white mob.