The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

The Devil You Know opens with Charles M. Blow traveling through Hyde Park, a Southside Chicago neighborhood “aiming earnestly to reset and recover […] a bygone prosperity that had given way to hope and aspiration, memory and longing, an angst in the air” (13). He is on his way to meet Timuel—the griot—and Zenobia Black, two stately Black intellectuals. He seeks Timuel’s counsel on the Great Migration’s legacy.

The Great Migration, which occurred approximately from 1916 to 1970, was a mass migration period in which 6 million Black Americans moved to northern destination cities to seek economic prosperity and flee southern state-sanctioned terror (14, 23). Timuel, a migrant himself, explains his parents’ decision to move to Chicago in 1919 as an attempt to “escape the viciousness of the South” (16). Timuel’s family, like many others, was convinced by relatives, friends, and Black intellectuals of the socioeconomic opportunities in the North. They were also assured that the North’s white society would easily assimilate them.

However, no respite from the prejudices and violence suffered in the South materialized in North. Chicago was soon engulfed by the