Guidebook maps the legacy of black women on Chicago's South Side

With its boarded-up windows and rusting wrought-iron fence, the abandoned three-story mansion in the 4700 block of South King Drive doesn't look historically significant.

But in the 1930s, the elegant greystone was where Melissia Ann Elam, a woman born into slavery and later emancipated, provided housing and social services to other black women and girls who came to Chicago during the first wave of the Great Migration.

For years, this site and others where black women labored to serve their South Side communities have gone unnoticed, blending into the urban landscape.

But two women plan to release a guidebook that maps where more than 40 black women landed during the 1800s