First-hand knowledge: Associate Professor of Sociology Nicole Brown was inspired to write her new book by her own experience growing up in Chicago. At a time when “histories are being challenged and targeted,” she argues, it’s essential to “know and remember” the accomplishments of Black women. / Photo by Francis Tatem
Sociologist At Work: Nicole Brown Celebrates Female Activists in Her New Book, ‘We Are Each Other’s Business’
As we enter Women’s History Month, Brown sees lessons to be learned from the women behind the Chicago Welfare Rights Movement, particularly in terms of collective action. “We need to recognize the power we have,” she says.
“At Work” is a series that highlights Saint Mary’s faculty and staff at work in the world. Artists, writers, scholars, scientists—we sit down and dive deep into their latest projects.
History, like photography, is a matter of magnification. In examining the 1963 March on Washington, for instance, it can be all too easy to zoom in on Martin Luther King Jr., holding forth on his dream—and neglect to consider the 250,000 individuals gathered, or the countless organizations, many led by Black women, who helped assemble everyone in the first place.
Nicole Brown, an associate professor of Sociology at Saint Mary’s, is a proponent of widening the aperture. “Charismatic leader narratives can overshadow the women of the movement, who usually worked collectively,” she tells me one morning in late January. But, Brown argues, that doesn’t make the women’s contributions any less significant—or timely.
She knows firsthand the importance of alternative narratives. A born-and-raised Chicagoan and first-generation college student, Brown graduated with a degree in Business Administration from Illinois Wesleyan University, never envisioning a career as a professor. Not until years later, after transitioning from the corporate world to a student affairs role at her alma mater, did she encounter “Black women in academia teaching, researching, and doing their thing,” she says.
Inspired, she went on to earn a master’s in Education from Illinois State University and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois. Brown joined Saint Mary’s faculty in 2020. The following year, she founded the College’s Radical Imagination Lab: an interdisciplinary research incubator that strives to foster “a radical reimagining of economic, political, and social systems,” as in the scholarly journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
In August 2024, Brown published her first book, We Are Each Other’s Business: Black Women’s Intersectional Political Consumerism During the Chicago Welfare Rights Movement (Columbia University Press.) As she explains, the book demonstrates the power of refocusing the lens of history—and the real consequences if we do not.
I love that your first chapter starts with a quote from Octavia Butler—a writer whose work is so rooted in place. I get the sense your work is, too. Can you talk a bit about Chicago?
From age 3 to 13, I lived with my grandmother on the South Side of Chicago. During that time, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, there were all these narratives—about people like me, where we lived, and what we didn’t have. It was jarring, because that was such a stark contrast to my lived experience. Within a two-block radius, I could walk from my grandmother’s house to my elementary school and the church where my afterschool program was. There was the beauty shop where I would get my hair done with my grandma, and Miss Underwood would sit me up on a stack of phone books because I was so tiny!
So I have all these memories of these places, these institutions. They offer counternarratives to perceptions about the South Side and Chicago in general.
So much of We Are Each Other's Business hinges on what you call “intersectional political consumerism.” Can you unpack that concept a bit?
First off, political consumerism is when folks engage in the consumer arena to try to influence the marketplace. Some common examples are things like boycotts, or “buycotts,” where you intentionally buy one thing over the other.
Intersectional political consumerism, then, has to do with actions taken in the consumer space that are motivated by intersecting social locations—things like race, class, and gender. For intersectional political consumerism to occur, there has to be some desire to influence the political condition of your social position through the marketplace. Think of the bus boycotts of the Civil Rights Movement. These were people engaging with the market, withholding their business in an effort to shift their sociopolitical position.
Your book centers on the Black women who led the Chicago welfare rights organizations in the 1960s and the 1970s. For those who may not know that story, what were the aims of that movement?
When we talk about the welfare movement, folks may be more familiar with the National Welfare Rights Organization. Established in 1966, the NWRO was an activist group created to protest cutbacks against federal assistance to poor families. From 1966 to 1975, the NWRO fought for better treatment, increased representation, and guaranteed income—what we now call universal basic income. It was made up of hundreds of smaller organizations led primarily by Black women, many of them single mothers on welfare.
Many of Chicago’s welfare rights groups actually predated the NWRO, and they all had particular, hyperlocal agendas they were focused on. But in terms of major campaigns that the Chicago Welfare Rights Organization—the Chicago chapter of the NWRO—and affiliated groups got on board with, certainly there was guaranteed annual income. There was also the Sears campaign, which is a major focus of the book.
In 1969, the NWRO launched a nationwide boycott of Sears, the department store chain, because the company would not extend credit to welfare recipients. The goal of the campaign was that if you were a paying member of the NWRO, Sears would extend credit to you, and you’d be able to purchase high-quality clothes or appliances.
“There’s a lot to be learned about the importance of community, and the ways in which we can show up for one another on the local level. That’s as important as it has ever been. It’s crucial that we do not shrink from this moment.”
Were they able to accomplish what they hoped?
A lot of the goals of welfare organizations in Chicago and elsewhere were never fully realized. Historians have different perspectives on why. I don’t subscribe to the framing that the movement wasn’t successful. I focus on the forward thinking and resistance that took place, during a time that was particularly hostile and anti-Black. There was success in just being able to withstand that.
They were innovators, in the sense that they were engaging with a technology—consumer credit—that was still very new. And they were still able to mobilize, demanding they be included and centered in conversations around politicized consumer spaces, and do so unapologetically. That’s impactful, and that’s meaningful.
We’ve just finished up Black History Month, and we’re entering Women’s History Month. Considering that—and also recognizing our fraught historical moment—what do you think we could learn from the women and organizations in We Are Each Other's Business?
There’s a lot to be learned about the importance of community, and the ways in which we can show up for one another on the local level. That’s as important as it has ever been. It’s crucial that we do not shrink from this moment. We need to recognize the power we have.
It's particularly important during this moment, too, when histories are being challenged and targeted, to know and remember these stories. I think about when I was a kid in Chicago, living with my grandmother and uncle on the top floor of a three-story brownstone. Walking through my neighborhood, you’d see all these vacant lots. I didn’t understand why. Only later, when I learned Chicago history, did I understand. Before the Great Migration, the neighborhood I lived in was primarily occupied by European immigrants. But as Black people moved into the city, and white people increasingly fled, building owners decided to commit arson. They burned down their own properties to recoup the insurance money, because they didn’t want to deal with the shift in demographics.
As a kid, I didn’t know that. And without that knowledge, it would have been very easy to buy into the narrative that my community didn’t care about itself. That’s the danger: If we don’t share these histories, we risk buying into the wrong narratives.
What is something you try to impress on Saint Mary’s students about being good scholars, good people, or both?
I direct the Radical Imagination Lab at Saint Mary’s, and one of our core tenets is genuine curiosity. In this day and age, with our silos and vacuums, it’s rare to meet others with genuine curiosity. But there is power in asking, “What do you mean by that?” It gives people the space to think and weigh their perspectives. It opens up an opportunity for understanding and unreasonable kindness.
That’s another tenet of the lab—unreasonable kindness—that I borrow from the wonderful writer Kiese Laymon. In , he questioned what society thinks is a “reasonable” way to treat Black people. Laymon’s point was that he wanted to be loved unreasonably—beyond what society says is reasonable for us to have or to want.
I tell my students, “When you think you can’t be any more kind than you are, dig a little bit deeper to the unreasonable.” That’s what I hope to impress on them. If I leave my students with more genuine curiosity and more unreasonable kindness, then I say I’ve spent my time well.
(This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.)
