Goin’ To Chicago is nearly 57 minutes long. But because it breaks into roughly three parts, consider screening it over two or three class periods.
Ask students as they view the film to take note of some of the many characters who appear, the situations they faced, and the decisions they had to make since they will write about them after the screening. (See activity III A.)

ACT I

Picture Start = 00:00
Last Scene = 15:00: Koko Taylor:
"We got to Chicago. I said, "Good God, Almighty, this must be heaven, or that place they talk about Paris, one or the other."
Section explores the life of sharecropping in the segregated South and the migration North after World War II.

ACT II

First Scene = 19:30 Facsimile newsreel: Chicago, hog butcher to the world...
Last Scene = 45:00: Clory Bryant:
"No housing project should be..for people to live until they die." Section describes how African-Americans built a life for themselves in Chicago in the late ’40s and ’50s, the fair housing movement, and the origins of segregated public housing projects.