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Palm Tavern

... The migration, from World War I to the 1960s, redistributed 6 million black Southerners who fled to nearly every major American city in the North and West. They were fleeing the racial caste system that consigned them to the lowest rung and the racial violence that came with it.

The waves of people crested at wartime when factory jobs were plentiful and paid what seemed like unbelievable money to people accustomed to picking 100 pounds of cotton for a dollar. To big manufacturers, it was cheap, hungry labor. ''Chicago was built on the backs of black migrant workers,'' said Harold Lucas, president of the Black Metropolis Convention and Tourism Council. ''They worked the stockyards and the factories and the steel mills. Their hard work helped the country make it to the technology age.''

The first migrants settled in what would become the northern tip of their new neighborhood, about 2 miles south of the Loop, in a tight sliver of land extending several blocks on either side of what is now King Drive. With the east and west boundaries fixed by segregation, the neighborhood spread south as the population swelled, past 31st Street, past 35th Street, past 43rd Street. By the mid-1940s, according to ''Black Metropolis,'' the landmark 1945 study of black Chicago by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, it was said, ''If you're trying to find a certain Negro in Chicago, stand on the corner of 47th and South Park long enough and you're bound to see him.''

''It was so beautiful,'' said Gerri Olier, who migrated from Jackson, Miss., in the 1940s and owns Gerri's Palm Tavern, 446 E. 47th St. Once a tony supper club frequented by the Duke Ellington crowd, it's now a lonely time capsule used by the occasional Hollywood film crew and the neighborhood regulars, who must wait to be buzzed in before they can get the whisky sours and herbal tea and wisdom she serves up. ''Everybody was sharp,'' she said. ''You didn't meet a stranger.''

The neighborhood came to be known as Bronzeville after the Chicago Bee, a black newspaper of the time, held a contest in 1930 to elect a ''mayor of Bronzeville.'' It took on greater significance than most publicity stunts, coming when blacks could not dream of becoming mayor of the whole city. Because the migration unfolded with little mainstream documentation and was taken for granted even by many participants, the idea of preserving its history has only recently caught on in Chicago. After housing restrictions were eased, the neighborhood went into steep decline, losing population and many landmarks from its heyday.

Crime, drugs, unemployment-when it's at your doorstep, open the doors to artists.

Tavern owner Gerri Oliver did that in July, inviting poets and artists to her legendary Bronzeville night spot for readings, which were the brainchild of Chicago poet Frances Callaway Parks, 56. They featured name poets such as Angela Jackson and members of Women of the Word, a writer's group.

''I had seen Gerri on television, trying to designate her tavern as a historical landmark, and I wanted to go see it,'' says Ms. Parks, a professor of business at Chicago State University whose Victory Services Inc. in Chicago plans events such as readings and workshops around the written word.

''So we went down that Saturday night: But it was empty! The neighborhood had had white flight, black flight, and here was a businesswoman, an important woman who was still there. It appealed to me that she was trying to do something to keep the community alive. So while we were sitting there I said 'I have this group; we'd like to read.''' Thus was born the monthly poetry readings at Gerri's Palm Tavern on 47th Street.

''I'm trying to bring culture back to this community,'' says Ms. Oliver, 77. ''I'm trying to distinguish myself as being over and above the cocaine'' sold on nearby streets.

... A few blocks up the street, Gerri Oliver, owner of Gerri's Palm Tavern, one of the oldest black-owned taverns in the city, said crime and poverty have decimated her business, which at one time employed 12 people, but now employs one.

"My business is at the lowest point it's been in the (38) years I have been here. I have had guns put in my face," she said of her brushes with crime. "It's drugs. If you get rid of the drugs, the crime problems will disappear."

The grand finale for this season's Midnite Ramble series was indeed grand as Chicago's Kuumba Theatre Company had a crowd of 500 rocking and rolling with "Precious Memories: Strolling 47th Street," last night at the Kentucky Center for the Arts' Bomhard Theatre.

Set at Gerri's Palm Tavern, a noted supper club of the era, thetwo-hour show re-created the nightclub scene of the '30s and '40s on Chicago's famed 47th Street, where some of the best jazz in the country was played.

... Kuumba's Emmy Award-winning television version of "PreciousMemories" featured interviews with many people associated with 47th Street. Last night's show had no interviews and very little transitional dialogue -- just great jazz, blues and gospel music.

... At 9 p.m. Saturday, there will be a Poetry/Blues Jam at Gerri's Palm Tavern, 446 E. 47th St. The program will feature music by Billy Branch and the Sons of Blues and poetry readings by Plumpp, Sandra Royster, Toni McConnell, Ginger Mance, Judy Massey, Detmer Timberlake, Walter Bradford and Barbara Cochran, among others. Admission is $5.