Jeffrey Express

As a grad student, I didn’t have a car, so I learned to navigate Chicago on public transportation. I spent many hours on the #6 bus, the Jeffrey Express, which connected three very different zones of the city: the working-class black neighbourhood of the South Side, Hyde Park and the University of Chicago, and the downtown, with its shiny skyscrapers. Chicago is still a segregated city, and riding the Jeffrey Express tended to place these divisions in stark relief. The correlation between urban geography and race, class, and education was unmistakable, and it was always clear to me that this bus was one of the few public spaces where these separated spheres would mix. One day in 2003 I was taking the Jeffrey downtown, no doubt to watch movies at the Art Institute, when some middle-aged ladies climbed aboard and started talking to people about a candidate for the Senate. They handed out modest brochures, and they sat and chatted with cleaning ladies and grad students alike about a man they believed in, and who promised to bring real change. I remarked that it was a clever move to campaign on the Jeffrey, a bus line that sliced through demographic divisions. Still, I had my doubts that their candidate would have much of a chance, what with the strange and politically unlikely name of “Barack Obama.”