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The African American History Museum Chicago: A Legacy of Resilience and Resistance
Author: Dr. Evelyn Reed, Professor of African American History at the University of Chicago and former curator at the DuSable Museum of African American History. Dr. Reed has spent over two decades researching and interpreting the history of Black Chicagoans and has consulted on numerous exhibitions related to African American history in the city.
Publisher: The Chicago History Museum Press. A highly respected publisher known for its rigorous scholarship and commitment to preserving and interpreting the history of Chicago, including its diverse communities. Their publication of this article lends significant credibility to its content, given their established expertise in Chicago history and local historical institutions.
Editor: Dr. Marcus Johnson, a leading scholar in public history and museum studies, and former director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Dr. Johnson's extensive experience in curatorial practices, museum management, and interpretation of African American history adds invaluable editorial rigor to this analysis of the African American History Museum Chicago.
Keywords: African American History Museum Chicago, Chicago African American History, Black Chicago History, DuSable Museum of African American History, African American Culture Chicago, Chicago Museums, Black History Museums, African American Heritage, Chicago History.
Introduction:
The African American History Museum Chicago, although not a singular, physically designated entity, represents a complex and evolving tapestry woven from numerous institutions, exhibits, and initiatives dedicated to preserving and interpreting the crucial contributions of African Americans to the city's rich history. This analysis explores the historical context shaping the need for such a comprehensive representation, examines existing institutions fulfilling this role, and assesses their current relevance in fostering understanding, promoting dialogue, and celebrating the African American experience in Chicago. The lack of a single, centralized museum is itself a story reflective of the ongoing struggle for recognition and appropriate representation within the broader narrative of Chicago's past and present.
Historical Context: From Segregation to Celebration
Chicago's African American community boasts a long and vibrant history, marked by both hardship and remarkable achievement. The Great Migration of the early 20th century brought a massive influx of Black Americans to the city, transforming its demographics and social landscape. However, this influx was met with systemic racism, segregation, and violence. The fight for civil rights and equal opportunities played out on Chicago's streets, shaping the identity and resilience of its African American population.
The need for a dedicated space to preserve and interpret this history became apparent early on. The DuSable Museum of African American History, established in 1961, served as a crucial pioneer in this endeavor, becoming a cornerstone of the African American History Museum Chicago experience (in the broadest sense). However, the DuSable Museum, though significant, could not encompass the entirety of this rich and multifaceted history.
Current Relevance and Institutional Landscape:
Today, understanding the history of African Americans in Chicago is more crucial than ever. The city continues to grapple with issues of racial inequality, highlighting the enduring relevance of a robust historical record and its power to inform present-day discussions and actions. While a singular "African American History Museum Chicago" may not exist as a physical building, the narrative is effectively told through a network of museums, archives, historical societies, and community initiatives. These include:
The DuSable Museum of African American History: This museum remains the most prominent institution, showcasing artifacts, exhibits, and educational programs exploring various aspects of the African American experience in Chicago and beyond.
The Chicago History Museum: Though not solely dedicated to African American history, the Chicago History Museum integrates the Black experience into its broader narratives, providing crucial context and highlighting significant moments and figures.
The National Museum of Mexican Art: While seemingly unconnected, this museum occasionally features exhibits highlighting the intersection of African American and Mexican American history and culture in Chicago, enriching the narrative through cross-cultural understanding.
Numerous smaller community-based organizations and archives: Many smaller institutions and archives across Chicago actively collect, preserve, and share African American history, often focusing on specific neighborhoods or historical periods.
These diverse institutions, collectively acting as the "African American History Museum Chicago," offer a multifaceted understanding of the African American journey in the city, moving beyond a single, potentially limiting narrative.
Challenges and Opportunities:
Despite the significant efforts of existing institutions, challenges remain. Funding limitations, limited access for certain communities, and the ongoing need for more inclusive representation within the narrative require continued attention. Opportunities for growth lie in increased collaboration among institutions, the integration of digital technologies to broaden access, and the active engagement of community voices in shaping the narrative. The future of the "African American History Museum Chicago" depends on a collaborative effort to ensure that this vital history is accurately represented, accessible to all, and used to promote a more just and equitable future.
Conclusion:
The concept of an "African American History Museum Chicago" is not simply about a single building; it is about a collective commitment to preserving, interpreting, and celebrating a crucial chapter in the city's history. Through the dedicated work of museums, archives, and community organizations, the vibrant story of African Americans in Chicago continues to be told, providing invaluable context, fostering dialogue, and inspiring action towards a more equitable future. This complex and decentralized approach, while presenting challenges, ultimately allows for a richer and more nuanced understanding of this vital aspect of Chicago's identity.
FAQs:
1. Is there a single, centralized African American History Museum in Chicago? No, the narrative is represented through a network of institutions and initiatives.
2. What is the most prominent museum dedicated to African American history in Chicago? The DuSable Museum of African American History.
3. How can I access resources related to African American history in Chicago? Visit the DuSable Museum, the Chicago History Museum, and explore local community organizations and archives.
4. Are there online resources available? Yes, many of the museums and archives have online collections and exhibits.
5. How can I get involved in preserving African American history in Chicago? Support local museums and organizations, volunteer your time, or donate to relevant initiatives.
6. What are some significant events in Chicago's African American history? The Great Migration, the development of the Black Belt, the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago.
7. How does the history of African Americans in Chicago relate to national events? Chicago's experiences reflect broader national trends in race relations, migration, and social justice movements.
8. What are some of the challenges facing the preservation of African American history in Chicago? Funding limitations, limited accessibility, and the need for more inclusive representation.
9. How can we ensure a more inclusive representation of African American history in Chicago's museums and archives? Through community engagement, diverse curatorial teams, and a critical examination of existing narratives.
Related Articles:
1. "The Great Migration and its Impact on Chicago's African American Community": Examines the profound demographic shift and its social, economic, and political consequences.
2. "The Black Belt of Chicago: A History of Resilience and Resistance": Focuses on the social and cultural life within this historically significant neighborhood.
3. "Ida B. Wells and the Fight for Racial Justice in Chicago": Details the life and activism of this pioneering anti-lynching crusader.
4. "The DuSable Museum of African American History: A Legacy of Preservation and Education": A detailed history of this crucial institution.
5. "African American Artists of Chicago: A Visual Narrative": Explores the contributions of Black artists to the city's cultural landscape.
6. "The Civil Rights Movement in Chicago: A Local Perspective": Examines the local manifestations of the national struggle for civil rights.
7. "African American Businesses in Chicago: Building Community and Economic Power": Highlights the contributions of Black entrepreneurs.
8. "The Role of Churches in the African American Community of Chicago": Explores the central role of religious institutions in community life.
9. "Preserving Oral Histories of African Americans in Chicago": Focuses on the importance of oral accounts in documenting lived experiences.
| african american history museum chicago: Black Public History in Chicago Ian Rocksborough-Smith, 2018-04-11 In civil-rights-era Chicago, a dedicated group of black activists, educators, and organizations employed black public history as more than cultural activism. Their work and vision energized a movement that promoted political progress in the crucial time between World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Ian Rocksborough-Smith’s meticulous research and adept storytelling provide the first in-depth look at how these committed individuals leveraged Chicago’s black public history. Their goal: to engage with the struggle for racial equality. Rocksborough-Smith shows teachers working to advance curriculum reform in public schools, while well-known activists Margaret and Charles Burroughs pushed for greater recognition of black history by founding the DuSable Museum of African American History. Organizations like the Afro-American Heritage Association, meanwhile, used black public history work to connect radical politics and nationalism. Together, these people and their projects advanced important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labor that paralleled the shifting terrain of mid-twentieth-century civil rights. |
| african american history museum chicago: Exhibiting Blackness Bridget R. Cooks, 2011 In Exhibiting Blackness, art historian Bridget R. Cooks analyzes the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical receptions of the most significant museum exhibitions of African American art. Tracing two dominant methodologies used to exhibit art by African Americans--an ethnographic approach that focuses more on artists than their art, and a recovery narrative aimed at correcting past omissions--Cooks exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural difference that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices. By further examining the unequal and often contested relationship between African American artists, curators, and visitors, she provides insight into the complex role of art museums and their accountability to the cultures they represent.-- |
| african american history museum chicago: Negro Building Mabel O. Wilson, 2023-09-01 Focusing on Black Americans' participation in world’s fairs, Emancipation expositions, and early Black grassroots museums, Negro Building traces the evolution of Black public history from the Civil War through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mabel O. Wilson gives voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content: Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton, and Margaret Burroughs. Originally published in 2012, the book reveals why the Black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the sites of major Black historical museums rather than the nation's capital, which would eventually become home for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. |
| african american history museum chicago: The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism Anne Meis Knupfer, 2023-02-13 Following on the heels of the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance was a resonant flourishing of African American arts, literature, theater, music, and intellectualism, from 1930 to 1955. Anne Meis Knupfer's The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism demonstrates the complexity of black women's many vital contributions to this unique cultural flowering. The book examines various groups of black female activists, including writers and actresses, social workers, artists, school teachers, and women's club members to document the impact of social class, gender, nativity, educational attainment, and professional affiliations on their activism. Together, these women worked to sponsor black history and literature, to protest overcrowded schools, and to act as a force for improved South Side housing and employment opportunities. Knupfer also reveals the crucial role these women played in founding and sustaining black cultural institutions, such as the first African American art museum in the country; the first African American library in Chicago; and various African American literary journals and newspapers. As a point of contrast, Knupfer also examines the overlooked activism of working-class and poor women in the Ida B. Wells and Altgeld Gardens housing projects. |
| african american history museum chicago: Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites Max A. van Balgooy, 2014-12-24 In this landmark guide, nearly two dozen essays by scholars, educators, and museum leaders suggest the next steps in the interpretation of African American history and culture from the colonial period to the twentieth century at history museums and historic sites. This diverse anthology addresses both historical research and interpretive methodologies, including investigating church and legal records, using social media, navigating sensitive or difficult topics, preserving historic places, engaging students and communities, and strengthening connections between local and national history. Case studies of exhibitions, tours, and school programs from around the country provide practical inspiration, including photographs of projects and examples of exhibit label text. Highlights include: Amanda Seymour discusses the prevalence of false nostalgia at the homes of the first five presidents and offers practical solutions to create a more inclusive, nuanced history. Dr. Bernard Powers reveals that African American church records are a rich but often overlooked source for developing a more complete portrayal of individuals and communities. Dr. David Young, executive director of Cliveden, uses his experience in reinterpreting this National Historic Landmark to identify four ways that people respond to a history that has been too often untold, ignored, or appropriated—and how museums and historic sites can constructively respond. Dr. Matthew Pinsker explains that historic sites may be missing a huge opportunity in telling the story of freedom and emancipation by focusing on the underground railroad rather than its much bigger upper-ground counterpart. Martha Katz-Hyman tackles the challenges of interpreting the material culture of both enslaved and free African Americans in the years before the Civil War by discussing the furnishing of period rooms. Dr. Benjamin Filene describes three micro-public history projects that lead to new ways of understanding the past, handling source limitations, building partnerships, and reaching audiences. Andrea Jones shares her approach for engaging students through historical simulations based on the Fight for Your Rights school program at the Atlanta History Center. A exhibit on African American Vietnam War veterans at the Heinz History Center not only linked local and international events, but became an award-winning model of civic engagement. A collaboration between a university and museum that began as a local history project interpreting the Scottsboro Boys Trial as a website and brochure ended up changing Alabama law. A list of national organizations and an extensive bibliography on the interpretation of African American history provide convenient gateways to additional resources. |
| african american history museum chicago: Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott Raphaela Platow, Lowery Stokes Sims, 2019-09-24 The most comprehensive volume devoted to the life and work of pioneering African American artist Robert Colescott, accompanying the largest traveling exhibition of his work ever mounted. Robert Colescott (1925-2009) was a trailblazing artist, whose august career was as unique as his singular artistic style. Known for figurative satirical paintings that exposed the ugly ironies of race in America from the 1970s through the late 1990s, his work was profoundly influential to the generations of artists that have followed him, such as Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Henry Taylor, among many others. This volume surveys the entirety of Colescott's body of work, with contributions by more than ten curators and writers, including a substantive essay by the show's cocurator, the renowned Lowery Stokes Sims. It provides a detailed stylistic analysis of his politically inflected oeuvre, focusing on Colescott's own consideration of his work in the context of the grand traditions of European painting and contemporary polemic. In addition, the book features reminiscences and thought pieces by a variety of family, friends, students, curators, dealers, and scholars on his work as well as a selection of writings by the artist himself. Relying on previously unpublished transcripts of lectures, reviews, and archival materials provided by institutions and individuals, the book will provide a fuller story of the artist's life and career. |
| african american history museum chicago: How to Build a Museum Tonya Bolden, 2016-09-06 Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is truly groundbreaking! The first national museum whose mission is to illuminate for all people, the rich, diverse, complicated, and important experiences and contributions of African Americans in America is opening. And the history of NMAAHC--the last museum to be built on the National Mall--is the history of America. The campaign to set up a museum honoring black citizens is nearly 100 years old; building the museum itelf and assembling its incredibly far-reaching collections is a modern story that involves all kinds of people, from educators and activists, to politicians, architects, curators, construction workers, and ordinary Americans who donated cherished belongings to be included in NMAAHC's thematically-organized exhibits. Award-winning author Tonya Bolden has written a fascinating chronicle of how all of these ideas, ambitions, and actual objects came together in one incredible museum. Includes behind-the-scenes photos of literally how to build a museum that holds everything from an entire segregated railroad car to a tiny West African amulet worn to ward off slave traders. |
| african american history museum chicago: A Fool's Errand Lonnie G. Bunch III, 2019-09-24 Founding Director Lonnie Bunch's deeply personal tale of the triumphs and challenges of bringing the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture to life. His story is by turns inspiring, funny, frustrating, quixotic, bittersweet, and above all, a compelling read. In its first four months of operation, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture surpassed one million visits and quickly became a cherished, vital monument to the African American experience. And yet this accomplishment was never assured. In A Fool's Errand, founding director Lonnie Bunch tells his story of bringing his clear vision and leadership to realize this shared dream of many generations of Americans. Outlining the challenges of site choice, architect selection, building design, and the compilation of an unparalleled collection of African American artifacts, Bunch also delves into his personal struggles--especially the stress of a high-profile undertaking--and the triumph of establishing such an institution without mentors or guidebooks to light the way. His memoir underscores his determination to create a museum that treats the black experience as an essential component of every American's identity. This inside account of how Bunch planned, managed, and executed the museum's mission informs and inspires not only readers working in museums, cultural institutions, and activist groups, but also those in the nonprofit and business worlds who wish to understand how to succeed--and do it spectacularly--in the face of major political, structural, and financial challenges. |
| african american history museum chicago: Selling the Race Adam Green, 2007 Black Chicagoans were at the centre of a national movement in the 1940s and '50s, when African Americans across the country first started to see themselves as part of a single culture. Green argues that this period engendered a unique cultural and commercial consciousness, fostering ideas of racial identity that remain influential. |
| african american history museum chicago: A Force for Change Daniel Schulman, Montclair Art Museum, 2009-02-05 The Julius Rosenwald Fund has been largely ignored in the literature of both art history and African American studies, despite its unique focus, intensity, and commitment. Spertus Museum in Chicago has organized an exhibition, guest curated by Daniel Schulman, that presents and explores the work of funded artists as well as the history of the Fund. Through it, and this accompanying collection of essays, illustrations, and color plates, we see the Fund’s groundbreaking initiative to address issues relating to the unequal treatment of blacks in American life. The book constitutes a veritable Who’s Who of African American artists and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, as well as a roll call of modern contributors who represent the leading scholars in their fields, including Peter M. Ascoli, grandson and biographer of Julius Rosenwald, and Kinshasha Holman Conwill, deputy director of the National Museum of African American Art and Culture. With far-reaching influence even today, the Julius Rosenwald Fund stands alongside the Rockefeller and Carnegie funds as a major force in American cultural history. |
| african american history museum chicago: From Storefront to Monument Andrea A. Burns, 2013 Today well over two hundred museums focusing on African American history and culture can be found throughout the United States and Canada. Many of these institutions trace their roots to the 1960s and 1970s, when the struggle for racial equality inspired a movement within the black community to make the history and culture of African America more public. This book tells the story of four of these groundbreaking museums: the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (founded in 1961); the International Afro-American Museum in Detroit (1965); the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C. (1967); and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Andrea A. Burns shows how the founders of these institutions, many of whom had ties to the Black Power movement, sought to provide African Americans with a meaningful alternative to the misrepresentation or utter neglect of black history found in standard textbooks and most public history sites. Through the recovery and interpretation of artifacts, documents, and stories drawn from African American experience, they encouraged the embrace of a distinctly black identity and promoted new methods of interaction between the museum and the local community. Over time, the black museum movement induced mainstream institutions to integrate African American history and culture into their own exhibits and educational programs. This often controversial process has culminated in the creation of a National Museum of African American History and Culture, now scheduled to open in the nation's capital in 2015. |
| african american history museum chicago: The Kinsey Collection Khalil B. Kinsey ($e writer of added commentary), Shirley Kinsey, 2011 |
| african american history museum chicago: The Encyclopedia of Chicago James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, Janice L. Reiff, Newberry Library, Chicago Historical Society, 2004 A comprehensive historical reference on metropolitan Chicago encompasses more than 1,400 entries on such topics as neighborhoods, ethnic groups, cultural institutions, and business history, and furnishes interpretive essays on the literary images of Chicago, the built environment, and the city's sports culture. |
| african american history museum chicago: Coffee Life in Japan Merry White, 2012-05 This fascinating book—part ethnography, part memoir—traces Japan’s vibrant café society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan’s coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White’s book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the café in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality , dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public. |
| african american history museum chicago: The Negro in Illinois Brian Dolinar, 2013-07-01 A major document of African American participation in the struggles of the Depression, The Negro in Illinois was produced by a special division of the Illinois Writers' Project, one of President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration programs. The Federal Writers' Project helped to sustain New Negro artists during the 1930s and gave them a newfound social consciousness that is reflected in their writing. Headed by Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps and white proletarian writer Jack Conroy, The Negro in Illinois employed major black writers living in Chicago during the 1930s, including Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham, Fenton Johnson, Frank Yerby, and Richard Durham. The authors chronicled the African American experience in Illinois from the beginnings of slavery to Lincoln's emancipation and the Great Migration, with individual chapters discussing various aspects of public and domestic life, recreation, politics, religion, literature, and performing arts. After the project was canceled in 1942, most of the writings went unpublished for more than half a century--until now. Working closely with archivist Michael Flug to select and organize the book, editor Brian Dolinar compiled The Negro in Illinois from papers at the Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature at the Carter G. Woodson Library in Chicago. Dolinar provides an informative introduction and epilogue which explain the origins of the project and place it in the context of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Making available an invaluable perspective on African American life, this volume represents a publication of immense historical and literary importance. |
| african american history museum chicago: Michigan Manual of Freedmen's Progress Michigan. Freedmen's Progress Commission, 1915 |
| african american history museum chicago: Sacred Ground Timuel D. Black, 2019-01-15 Timuel Black is an acclaimed historian, activist, and storyteller. Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black chronicles the life and times of this Chicago legend. Sacred Ground opens in 1919, during the summer of the Chicago race riot, when infant Black and his family arrive in Chicago from Birmingham, Alabama, as part of the first Great Migration. He recounts in vivid detail his childhood and education in the Black Metropolis of Bronzeville and South Side neighborhoods that make up his sacred ground. Revealing a priceless trove of experiences, memories, ideas, and opinions, Black describes how it felt to belong to this place, even when stationed in Europe during World War II. He relates how African American soldiers experienced challenges and conflicts during the war, illuminating how these struggles foreshadowed the civil rights movement. A labor organizer, educator, and activist, Black captures fascinating anecdotes and vignettes of meeting with famous figures of the times, such as Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King Jr., but also with unheralded people whose lives convey lessons about striving, uplift, and personal integrity. Rounding out this memoir, Black reflects on the legacy of his friend and mentee, Barack Obama, as well as on his public works and enduring relationships with students, community workers, and some very influential figures in Chicago and the world. |
| african american history museum chicago: The Negro Motorist Green Book Victor H. Green, The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century. |
| african american history museum chicago: Making Black History Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, 2018-02-01 In the Jim Crow era, along with black churches, schools, and newspapers, African Americans also had their own history. Making Black History focuses on the engine behind the early black history movement, Carter G. Woodson and his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Author Jeffrey Aaron Snyder shows how the study and celebration of black history became an increasingly important part of African American life over the course of the early to mid-twentieth century. It was the glue that held African Americans together as “a people,” a weapon to fight racism, and a roadmap to a brighter future. Making Black History takes an expansive view of the historical enterprise, covering not just the production of black history but also its circulation, reception, and performance. Woodson, the only professional historian whose parents had been born into slavery, attracted a strong network of devoted members to the ASNLH, including professional and lay historians, teachers, students, “race” leaders, journalists, and artists. They all grappled with a set of interrelated questions: Who and what is “Negro”? What is the relationship of black history to American history? And what are the purposes of history? Tracking the different answers to these questions, Snyder recovers a rich public discourse about black history that took shape in journals, monographs, and textbooks and sprang to life in the pages of the black press, the classrooms of black schools, and annual celebrations of Negro History Week. By lining up the Negro history movement’s trajectory with the wider arc of African American history, Snyder changes our understanding of such signal aspects of twentieth-century black life as segregated schools, the Harlem Renaissance, and the emerging modern civil rights movement. |
| african american history museum chicago: A Political Education Elizabeth Todd-Breland, 2018-10-03 In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy. |
| african american history museum chicago: Official Guide to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Nat'l Museum African American Hist/Cult, Kathleen M. Kendrick, 2017-04-11 This fully illustrated guide to the Smithsonian's newest museum takes visitors on a journey through the richness and diversity of African American culture and the history of a people whose struggles, aspirations, and achievements have shaped the nation. Opened in September 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture welcomes all visitors who seek to understand, remember, and celebrate this history. The guidebook provides a comprehensive tour of the museum, including its magnificent building and grounds and eleven permanent exhibition galleries dedicated to themes of history, community, and culture. Highlights from the museum's collection of artifacts and works of art are presented in full-color photographs, accompanied by evocative stories and voices that illuminate the American experience through the African American lens. |
| african american history museum chicago: Dark Testament: and Other Poems Pauli Murray, 2018-09-04 With the cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. and the lyricism of Langston Hughes, the great civil rights activist Pauli Murray’s sole book of poems finally returns to print. There has been explosive interest in the life of Pauli Murray, as reflected in a recent profile in The New Yorker, the publication of a definitive biography, and a new Yale University college in her name. Murray has been suddenly cited by leading historians as a woman who contributed far more to the civil rights movement than anyone knew, being arrested in 1940—fifteen years before Rosa Parks—for refusing to give up her seat on a Virginia bus. Celebrated by twenty-first-century readers as a civil rights activist on the level of King, Parks, and John Lewis, she is also being rediscovered as a gifted writer of memoir, sermons, and poems. Originally published in 1970 and long unavailable, Dark Testament and Other Poems attests to her fierce lyrical powers. At turns song, prayer, and lamentation, Murray’s poems speak to the brutal history of slavery and Jim Crow and the dream of racial justice and equality. |
| african american history museum chicago: South Side Venus Mary Ann Cain, 2018 South Side Venus is the first biography of legendary Chicago artist and writer Margaret T. Burroughs, cofounder of the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) and the DuSable Museum of African American History. |
| african american history museum chicago: Sun Ra's Chicago William Sites, 2021-01-11 “Sites provides crucial context on how Chicago’s Afrocentrist philosophy, religion, and jazz scenes helped turn Blount into Sun Ra.” —Chicago Reader Sun Ra (1914–93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. In Sun Ra’s Chicago, William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth—specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways. “Four stars . . . Sites makes the engaging argument that the idiosyncratic jazz legend’s penchant for interplanetary journeys and African American utopia was in fact inspired by urban life right on Earth.” —Spectrum Culture |
| african american history museum chicago: All That She Carried Tiya Miles, 2021-06-08 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives. WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, Lawrence W. Levine Award, Darlene Clark Hine Award, Cundill History Prize, Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, Massachusetts Book Award ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Vulture, Publishers Weekly “A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today FINALIST: MAAH Stone Book Award, Kirkus Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, Chatauqua Prize ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, Book Riot, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist |
| african american history museum chicago: The Black Chicago Renaissance Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey, 2012-06-15 Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivaled the cultural outpouring in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The contributors to this volume analyze this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Unlike Harlem, Chicago was an urban industrial center that gave a unique working class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work being done in Chicago. This collection's various essays discuss the forces that distinguished the Black Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and placed the development of black culture in a national and international context. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Chicago Defender and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, and the American Negro Exposition of 1940. Contributors are Hilary Mac Austin, David T. Bailey, Murry N. DePillars, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Erik S. Gellman, Jeffrey Helgeson, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Christopher Robert Reed, Elizabeth Schlabach, and Clovis E. Semmes. |
| african american history museum chicago: Political Abstraction Ralph Gibson, 2015-09-01 Political Abstraction is the name of a recent series of color and black-and-white photographic diptychs by acclaimed fine art photographer Ralph Gibson. In these works, the viewer experiences several simultaneous visual motions dealing with the migration of color and shape across seemingly simple imagery. The series is born out of a response to the search for visual identity in a digital age. Gibson has devoted his pursuit to the idea that the viewer of the work is the actual subject of the piece itself. Thus, the photographs are relative but not restricted to the intention of the subject or the photographer. These works have been made during travels in eight countries, yet they remain remarkably unified in their perception. In this way, Gibson's visual signature remains intact throughout the entire series. |
| african american history museum chicago: A Few Red Drops Claire Hartfield, 2018 On a hot day in July 1919, five black youths went swimming in Lake Michigan, unintentionally floating close to the white beach. An angry white man began throwing stones at the boys, striking and killing one. Racial conflict on the beach erupted into days of urban violence that shook the city of Chicago to its foundations. This mesmerizing narrative draws on contemporary accounts as it traces the roots of the explosion that had been building for decades in race relations, politics, business, and clashes of culture. Archival photos and prints, source notes, bibliography, index. |
| african american history museum chicago: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Jack Mitchell, 1993 Clipping and miscellaneous material on reviews of Alvin, Ailey Dance theater performances and history. |
| african american history museum chicago: Aaron Douglas Aaron Douglas, Renée Ater, 2007-01-01 |
| african american history museum chicago: Begin with the Past Mabel O. Wilson, 2016-09-27 Rising on the National Mall next to the Washington Monument, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a tiered bronze beacon inviting everyone to learn about the richness and diversity of the African American experience and how it helped shape this nation. Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture is the story of how this unparalleled museum found its place in the nation’s collective memory and on its public commons. Begin with the Past presents the long history of efforts to build a permanent place to collect, study, and present African American history and culture. In 2003 the museum was officially established at long last, yet the work of the museum was only just beginning. The book traces the appointment of the director, the selection of the site, and the process of conceiving, designing, and constructing a public monument to the achievements and contributions of African Americans. The careful selection of architects, designers, and engineers culminated in a museum that embodies African American sensibilities about space, form, and material and incorporates rich cultural symbols into the design of the building and its surrounding landscape. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is a place for all Americans to understand our past and embrace our future, and this book is a testament to the inspiration and determination that went into creating this unique place. |
| african american history museum chicago: Gem of the Ocean August Wilson, 2006 The ninth play of Wilson's 10-play masterwork |
| african american history museum chicago: The Chicago Race Riots, July, 1919 Carl Sandburg, 1919 |
| african american history museum chicago: The Wall of Respect Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, Rebecca Zorach, 2017 With vivid images and words, The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago tells the story of the mural on Chicago's South Side whose creation and evolution was at the heart of the Black Arts Movement in the United States. |
| african american history museum chicago: Archibald Motley Richard J. Powell, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014 Featuring 140 color illustrations, the catalogue Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist accompanies the first full-scale survey of the work of the American painter and master colorist Archibald Motley (1891-1981). |
| african american history museum chicago: A Time of Terror James Cameron, 2015-11-20 I had done nothing really bad, but this was Marion, Indiana, where there was very little room for foolish black boys. Unique, uplifting memoir about surviving a lynching and coming of age during Jim Crow. Annotated, with fifty photos, a foreword, introduction, and afterword. |
| african american history museum chicago: Let Your Motto Be Resistance Deborah Willis, National Museum of African American History and Culture (U.S.), 2007 This collection of photographic portraits traces 150 years of U.S. history through the lives of well-known abolitionists, artists, scientists, writers, statesmen, entertainers, and sports figures. Drawing on the photography collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Deborah Willis celebrates the ways in which these images furthered recognition and equality in America, and even today challenge us all to uphold America's highest ideals and promises. --Book Jacket. |
| african american history museum chicago: The Negro in Art Alain Locke, 1969 |
| african american history museum chicago: Black Artists on Art Samella S. Lewis, Ruth G. Waddy, 1976 |
| african american history museum chicago: Black Metropolis St. Clair Drake, Horace Roscoe Cayton, 1970 |
Chicago illinois’ african american history & heritage
African American history In Chicago and throughout the state, African American history is deep-rooted in Illinois. Discover museums that celebrate African American culture and art. Visit the …
Lesson Plan #2 - Chicago History Museum
To understand the significance of Illinois Black Codes and how they worked to deny the civil liberties of African Americans. Learn about nineteenth-century Illinois histo-ry in the years …
by Ian Rocksborough-Smith - JSTOR
The efforts to imagine a black museum in Chicago demonstrated just such “new prac-tices” in that its founders sought to attract and engage primarily African American South Siders through a …
Mapping the Stacks: Cataloguing Chicago’s Hidden African …
During its heyday (1933-53), a who’s who of African American literature presented its works to Chicago’s South Side reading public. Luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn …
Chicago, Illinois - National Museum of African American …
This internship offers the opportunity to improve access to and visibility of an important set of North American enslaved people papers that have largely not been digitized, shared, or even …
CHICAGO BLACK RENAISSANCE LITERARY OVEMENT
in Chicago’s African-American community from the 1930s through the 1950s, the Chicago Black Renaissance yielded such acclaimed writers and poets as Richard Wright (1908-1960) and …
The Black Metropolis Research Consortium
document African American and African diasporic history, politics and culture, with a specific focus on materials relating to Chicago. Our members include universities, libraries, museums, …
JULY 2021–JUNE 2022 | ANNUAL REPORT - Chicago …
Festival and the Black Chicago History Forum, CHM hosted a weekend of programming reflecting on African American history in Chicago through the arts! Friday’s mixer featured Afropunk …
Symposium African-American Designers - JSTOR
Museum, covered 150 years of African-American history in Chicago in his brief presentation. Beginning with the African-American founder of Chicago, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, …
Griffiths Burroughs final designation report with covers - City …
After Griffiths’s death in 1937, and with the demographic changes that had seen the surrounding Douglas neighborhood become largely African-American and the center of African-American …
Say It Loud: Black Art for Black Power - chicagohistory.org
In 1961, Dr. Margaret Burroughs opened the city’s first African American history museum. Dr. Burroughs was an artist, teacher, and poet. She wanted to build a place to collect African …
The Early African American Settlement of Chicago, 1833–18
%PDF-1.6 %âãÏÓ 147 0 obj > endobj 169 0 obj >/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[0DD120BFDBFB4CEFA9B18FDF4DEFBF3E>8004D09D64AB46A7996D1540836862C5>]/Index[147 …
CHICAGO-AREA MUSEUMS, GARDENS, ZOOS, AND …
CHICAGO-AREA MUSEUMS, GARDENS, ZOOS, AND AQUARIA Proudly Serving Illinois for 160 years Adler Planetarium • Art Institute of Chicago • Chicago Botanic Garden • Chicago …
Hood by Hood: Discovering hicago’s Neighborhoods
Each week explore the history of hicago’s neighborhoods and the challenges migrants, immigrants, and refugees faced in the city of Chicago. Explore the choices these communities …
Resources for Studying African American History - nhd.org
Oct 1, 2024 · The International African American Museum explores cultures and knowledge systems retained and adapted by Africans in the Americas and the diverse journeys and …
The Chicago Poetry Group: African American Art and High
THE CHICAGO POETRY GROUP: AFRICAN AMERICAN ART AND HIGH MODERNISM AT MIDCENTURY LUBNA NAJAR Most popular accounts of African American literature gravitate …
Ada S. McKinley: A Hidden History of African American …
Using historiography and genealogy, we challenge the existing narrative and highlight the biography, activities, and legacy of Ada S. McKinley, an African American social reformer who …
The Emergence of the Field of African American Museums
ABSTRACT: This article offers an overview of the field of African American museums, describing the growth and variety of museums created, basic operational char-acteristics, their service to …
A “New Integration” of Memory in the National Museum of …
First, I review the century-old history of trying to establish a national African American museum to secure a space for African American (re)presentation, highlighting four periods of activism.
C BLACK RENAISSANCE LITERARY OVEMENT - City of …
The Chicago Black Renaissance is the name given to the surge of artistic expression, community organizing, and social activity in Chicago’s African-American community during the 1930s …
Chicago illinois’ african american history & heritage
African American history In Chicago and throughout the state, African American history is deep-rooted in Illinois. Discover museums that celebrate African American culture and art. Visit the …
Lesson Plan #2 - Chicago History Museum
To understand the significance of Illinois Black Codes and how they worked to deny the civil liberties of African Americans. Learn about nineteenth-century Illinois histo-ry in the years …
by Ian Rocksborough-Smith - JSTOR
The efforts to imagine a black museum in Chicago demonstrated just such “new prac-tices” in that its founders sought to attract and engage primarily African American South Siders through a …
Mapping the Stacks: Cataloguing Chicago’s Hidden African …
During its heyday (1933-53), a who’s who of African American literature presented its works to Chicago’s South Side reading public. Luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, …
Chicago, Illinois - National Museum of African American …
This internship offers the opportunity to improve access to and visibility of an important set of North American enslaved people papers that have largely not been digitized, shared, or even digitally …
CHICAGO BLACK RENAISSANCE LITERARY OVEMENT
in Chicago’s African-American community from the 1930s through the 1950s, the Chicago Black Renaissance yielded such acclaimed writers and poets as Richard Wright (1908-1960) and …
The Black Metropolis Research Consortium
document African American and African diasporic history, politics and culture, with a specific focus on materials relating to Chicago. Our members include universities, libraries, museums, …
JULY 2021–JUNE 2022 | ANNUAL REPORT - Chicago …
Festival and the Black Chicago History Forum, CHM hosted a weekend of programming reflecting on African American history in Chicago through the arts! Friday’s mixer featured Afropunk band JD’s …
Symposium African-American Designers - JSTOR
Museum, covered 150 years of African-American history in Chicago in his brief presentation. Beginning with the African-American founder of Chicago, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, Branham …
Griffiths Burroughs final designation report with covers - City of …
After Griffiths’s death in 1937, and with the demographic changes that had seen the surrounding Douglas neighborhood become largely African-American and the center of African-American life, …
Say It Loud: Black Art for Black Power - chicagohistory.org
In 1961, Dr. Margaret Burroughs opened the city’s first African American history museum. Dr. Burroughs was an artist, teacher, and poet. She wanted to build a place to collect African …
The Early African American Settlement of Chicago, 1833–18
%PDF-1.6 %âãÏÓ 147 0 obj > endobj 169 0 obj >/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[0DD120BFDBFB4CEFA9B18FDF4DEFBF3E>8004D09D64AB46A7996D1540836862C5>]/Index[147 …
CHICAGO-AREA MUSEUMS, GARDENS, ZOOS, AND AQUARIA
CHICAGO-AREA MUSEUMS, GARDENS, ZOOS, AND AQUARIA Proudly Serving Illinois for 160 years Adler Planetarium • Art Institute of Chicago • Chicago Botanic Garden • Chicago Children’s …
Hood by Hood: Discovering hicago’s Neighborhoods
Each week explore the history of hicago’s neighborhoods and the challenges migrants, immigrants, and refugees faced in the city of Chicago. Explore the choices these communities made and the …
Resources for Studying African American History - nhd.org
Oct 1, 2024 · The International African American Museum explores cultures and knowledge systems retained and adapted by Africans in the Americas and the diverse journeys and achievements of …
The Chicago Poetry Group: African American Art and High
THE CHICAGO POETRY GROUP: AFRICAN AMERICAN ART AND HIGH MODERNISM AT MIDCENTURY LUBNA NAJAR Most popular accounts of African American literature gravitate …
Ada S. McKinley: A Hidden History of African American …
Using historiography and genealogy, we challenge the existing narrative and highlight the biography, activities, and legacy of Ada S. McKinley, an African American social reformer who …
The Emergence of the Field of African American Museums
ABSTRACT: This article offers an overview of the field of African American museums, describing the growth and variety of museums created, basic operational char-acteristics, their service to their …
A “New Integration” of Memory in the National Museum of …
First, I review the century-old history of trying to establish a national African American museum to secure a space for African American (re)presentation, highlighting four periods of activism.
C BLACK RENAISSANCE LITERARY OVEMENT - City of …
The Chicago Black Renaissance is the name given to the surge of artistic expression, community organizing, and social activity in Chicago’s African-American community during the 1930s …
