Wendy M. Thompson – författare

How black migrants made the Bay Area a stage for belonging, resistance, memory, and survivalDuring 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.

How black migrants made the Bay Area a stage for belonging, resistance, memory, and survivalDuring 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.

For numerous migrants who ventured westward in the twentieth century in search of greater opportunities, the glitter of California often proved to be mere fool’s gold-promising easy riches but frequently resulting in dispossession and displacement. Poet Wendy M. Thompson is descended from two of these migrant waves-post-1965 Chinese immigrants and Black southerners of the Second Great Migration-whose presence has permanently transformed the region.In this arresting debut poetry collection, Thompson traces the past and present of California’s Bay Area, exploring themes of family, migration, girlhood, and identity against a backdrop of urban redevelopment, advanced gentrification, and the erasure of Black communities. Traveling down both familiar highways and obscure side streets, her poems map a region where race, class, and language are just some of the fault lines that divide communities and produce periodic tremors of violence and resistance.Confronting assimilationist myths of the American Dream, Black California Gold depicts a setting that is less a melting pot than a smelting pot, subjecting different ethnic groups to searing trials and extreme pressures that threaten to break them down entirely. Yet, it also celebrates the Black residents of the Bay Area who have struggled to sustain home and hope amid increasingly desperate conditions.