But he was lamenting the disappearance of all the black-run institutions that gave the city's segregated black neighborhoods an atmosphere of security and autonomy in the face of widespread poverty and discrimination from the commercial and political elite that governed the city at large. 'You know,' he said, 'sometimes I think we made a mistake leaving the ghetto.' We were discussing the challenges and opportunities that black people had dealt with in the years since segregation, when all of a sudden Black sighed and said something that startled me. Twenty years ago this spring, I had a long, candid conversation with Timuel Black, one of the lions of the civil rights movement in Chicago, a man whose activist career dates all the way back to his youth in the 1940s.
