“Freedom of mobility, accessibility of housing for one night or many, and a safe and secure environment for the many ways young Black women needed to spend their days—that was the point.”

One late August night in 1943, Robbie Shields traveled up from Woodlawn in the South Side to Chicago’s northern suburb of Evanston for a special weeklong summer program at Northwestern University. A twenty-six-year-old youth choir director, Shields was there to represent her church, Woodlawn ame, at the eleventh annual Church and Choral Music Institute, where she would join other vocalists in the program’s courses and in the chorus. Well, only the courses. Prior to her arrival, the director of the summer program had advised Shields to stay out of the choir, since there were so many southerners at Northwestern, thus insinuating that Jim Crow conventions would apply.