Guidebook maps the legacy of black women on Chicago’s South Side
With its boarded-up windows and rusting wrought-iron fence, the abandoned three-story mansion in the 4700 block of South King Drive doesn’t look historically significant.
But in the 1930s, the elegant greystone was where Melissia Ann Elam, a woman born into slavery and later emancipated, provided housing and social services to other black women and girls who came to Chicago during the first wave of the Great Migration.