Sacred Ground
Historian Timuel Black takes us on an oral history of Chicago's Bronzeville since the great migration by Suzanne Hanney
Bronzeville is “Sacred Ground” to historian and social anthropologist Timuel Black, not so much for its brick and mortar, but for its oral histories, its networking and its music: “jazz with an African beat and a European melody line that affirms we are all sharing this Earth together and that there is no monopoly on joy.” Black, age 101, came up from Birmingham, Alabama as a baby with his parents shortly after the Race Riots of 1919 intensified the neighborhood’s segregation, so that residents were forced to develop their own businesses and to rely on each other. When he was growing up in the 1920s and ’30s, “Bronzeville was a place of much poverty and some wealth, a center for music and sports, and a terrain where demonstrations could break out at any time,” according to his archive at the Carter G. Woodson regional library. “Even when the Depression was at its worst, the sense of poverty never seemed that overwhelming,” Black wrote in “Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black,” as told to Susan Klonsky, edited by Bart Schultz and published last year by Northwestern University Press. “We always lived
in and around fairly prosperous neighbors, among doctors, lawyers, railway porters and postal workers.” The Great Migration of African Americans from the South during World War I meant that the area between 22nd and 55th Streets doubled in population between 1910 and 1920, with small families crammed into kitchenette apartments. Mom-and-pop stores provided first jobs for teenage delivery boys. “Pearl’s Kitchens” -- independent restaurants -created places for conversation between people as seemingly far apart as gamblers and preachers. Always, there was music. In the 1910s and '20s, “The Stroll,” or State Street between 26th and 39th Streets, was so thick with nightclubs that it was said a musician could just hold a cornet in the air and it would play itself. Before air conditioning, there was not only music in the air, but coming out of neighbors’ windows, Black said. In 1927, the opening of the Savoy Ballroom at 47th and South Parkway (later known as Dr. Martin Luther King Drive) moved the entertainment area farther south.
Bronzeville section of Chicago, 1941. Photo: Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
77
