University of Washington Press Chasing the Sun: Staging Black Life and Belonging in California's Bay Area

During the Second World War, thousands of black Southerners migrated west, transforming the California Bay Area into one of the most dynamic centers of black life in the United States. In this strikingly original and poetic work, Wendy M. Thompson traces the history of these migrants and their descendants, revealing how black communities performed identity, created belonging, and resisted erasure in a region shaped by capital accumulation and racial displacement. Skillfully weaving together artifacts from the past—personal photographs, memory, notes on material objects, and secondary sources—Thompson illuminates how black migrants used various media and methods of performance to repurpose spaces into sets, objects into props, and wardrobe into costume. Living rooms, train platforms, and city streets became sites of performance where families asserted respectability, cultivated community, and challenged racial exclusion. Chasing the Sun unveils how old narratives—of the South, blackness, self-image, public and private space, and rootedness and ownership—were transformed into affirmations of black life and the desire to remain. Blending history, theory, and poetic reflection, Thompson offers a powerful account of black mobility, creativity, and survival. Chasing the Sun shows how performances of black placemaking unmasked the possibilities and limitations of freedom during and after the Great Migration, in a region and a state that continue to define themselves as exceptional, multicultural, and progressive.