ABSTRACT
Helen Anglin sits in a high-backed, brown vinyl booth in the southwest corner of her restaurant, Soul Queen, on 91st and Stony Island Drive in Chicago. It is 1997, and this year is Helen’s sixty-seventh birthday and the fiftieth anniversary of her business. As she reminisces, she leafs through photographs, tinted brown or faded with age. They are an almanac of the changes she and this neighborhood have been through together since she, along with hundreds of thousands of other African Americans, left the rural South in search of a home where she could “just be herself, without bending down to anybody.”
