The Wabash YMCA: The Birthplace of Black History Month

The YMCA at 3763 S. Wabash Ave. was the focal point of Chicago’s Black Metropolis for half a century – and the birthplace of Black History Month.

In 1915, Carter G. Woodson, a University of Chicago graduate and a Harvard Ph.D, exhibited at a conference marking 50 years since the end of slavery that was held at the Chicago Coliseum, 1466 S. Wabash Ave. (now the site of a dog park). Woodson then returned to his accommodations at the newly built Wabash Y, one of the few places an African American could stay in the Jim Crow era. Inspired by the emancipation conference, Woodson and Wabash Y executive director Alexander L. Jackson, who attended Harvard with him, along with two others, co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).

As Woodson told a group of Hampton Institute students, “We are going back to that beautiful history and it is going to inspire us to greater achievements,” according to asalh.org. By 1926, he was back at the Wabash Y to declare Negro History Week. The period he picked would always coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and Frederick Douglass (February 14).

After the first wave of the Great Migration – the World War I exodus of African Americans up from the South to the urban and industrial North – Blacks in the 1920s were starting to form a middle class that was ready for Woodson’s message. With the U.S Bicentennial in 1976, Negro History Week was officially extended to Black History Month.

“It started as a grassroots movement. Teachers got involved, churches got involved,” said Dr. Lionel Kimble Jr., an ASALH member and associate professor of history at Chicago State University, in a YouTube video for The Renaissance Collaborative (TRC), which now owns the Wabash Y building.

The Wabash Y was built right before World War I and the first wave of the Great Migration, so “it was a clearing house,” Kimble said. “People would come here to try to find a job, to try to reconnect with families who came before them, to try to find housing. It was the town square.”

Kimble’s grandparents came to Chicago before World War I and settled around 39th and Dearborn streets. He recalls historic landmarks within a mile-and-a-half of the Y: the Chicago Bee newspaper building, now a Chicago Public Library branch at 3647 S. State St.; the Overton Hygienic building at 3619 -27 S. State St., headquarters for an African American cosmetics company; the South Side Community Arts Center at 3831 S. Michigan Ave., and the original Chicago Defender newspaper building at 3435 S. Indiana Ave.

“But this was the epicenter of Black Chicago,” he said of the Wabash Y.

Part of understanding the early 20th century Black Belt, now known as Bronzeville, Kimble said, is that “the neighborhood developed as a city within a city, with a considerable amount of agency. Black people actively fought to create their own institutions like the Y with the help of Julius Rosenwald to create their social, cultural and community spaces for entrepreneurship and family life in spite of racism. We’ve always made our way since 1619. You make demands for better treatment and you see who listens.”

Chicago had few Black people in 1910, but Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., was moved to provide his first philanthropy outside his own Jewish community after reading Booker T. Washington’s book “Up from Slavery” that year, said his grandson, Peter Ascoli, in a TRC video. Washington had been born enslaved, gained an education, and founded Tuskegee Institute.

JR, as Ascoli calls his grandfather, “started out with the same prejudice as everyone else in his day, but as soon as he began to meet African Americans, he began to change his mind. It was radical thinking for his day, but he believed they were equal, and should be treated as equals.” But instead of having everything done for them, Rosenwald thought that Blacks should contribute to their own causes.

Immediately pre-World War I, there were few Black YMCAs in the United States for young men who were leaving the rural South and who needed not only recreation, but Single Room Occupancy housing until they could put down roots. The general secretary of the Chicago branch of the YMCA, accompanied by a Black minister, visited Rosenwald in the hope he would spark the campaign.

To their astonishment, Rosenwald not only agreed to a $25,000 grant contingent on the Chicago community raising $75,000, he offered the same grant to any other Y in the United States that could match that effort. (Later, he would found 5,500 schools for Blacks in the South, build the Rosenwald Court Apartments, 4648 S. Michigan Ave., and founded the Museum of Science and Industry here.)

StreetWise Vendors Kianna and A. Allen meet outside the Wabash YMCA to take a tour

Suzanne Hanney Photo

YMCA at Wabash and 38th Street, with St. Thomas Episcopal Church across the street to the south

University of Minnesota Libraries, Kautz Family YMCA Archives

Rosenwald formally announced his challenge grant on New Year’s Day, 1911, before a select group of 500 African American Chicago men. He described how Russian Jews were also persecuted and killed in their homeland and that there were certain clubs that would neither admit him as a member nor allow him to visit, because of his religion.

Ascoli wrote with amazement in his book, "Julius Rosenwald: The Man who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South," (Indiana University Press, 2006) that JR was more than politely applauded. James Tilghman jumped up and handed over $1,000 in cash – his entire life savings: the largest contribution ever made by a Black man to a Black YMCA. Tilghman had been born enslaved, had come to Chicago in the 1880s, and had worked a variety of odd jobs before ending up as a janitor for the telephone company. Rosenwald was so impressed that he wrote a letter of praise to the president of Illinois Bell.

Chicago Blacks beat the challenge of raising $50,000 in 10-days, with $66,932. Norman Harris, president of Chicago’s Harris Trust & Savings Bank, and Cyrus McCormick, head of the grain harvesting machinery firm, both matched Rosenwald's $25,000.

When the five-story, solid brick Wabash Y opened in 1913, it had 114 rooms; in 1919, 140,000 people used the facility in some way. In 1944, the Y provided space for 106 non-member community groups, said Tara Balcerzak, a former TRC fundraiser who leads Saturday tours of the building. The residents took their meals in the first floor dining room, which was also used by people from the community, such as those who attended Sunday church next door at St. Thomas Episcopal.

The first floor also featured a pool where many in the community learned to swim. On the second floor was a reading room, a billiard room and a gymnasium used by as many as five public schools that lacked their own facilities, Balcerzak said. During the race riots of 1919, the Y became a Red Cross Relief Center, for emergency food and for paychecks from companies that employed Blacks, such as meat-packing plants. There were also dental fairs and health fairs in its large rooms. In the summer, up to 600 kids went away to camp in Michigan, with the Y helping to pay for those who couldn’t afford it.

The Wabash YMCA pool as it looks today

Suzanne Hanney

The YMCA pool

photo provided by The Renaissance Collaborative

Philanthropist and civic leader Julius Rosenwald (left) and Booker T. Washington (right), educator and political leader at Tuskegee Institute, 22 February 1915

University of Chicago Library, Special Collections photo

The 1913 grand opening of the Wabash YMCA drew thousands of people

photo provided by The Renaissance Collaborative

American men working on a car with a sign reading "Wabash Ave Dep't Y.M.C.A. Auto School," in front of the YMCA building during the winter as part of an educational program offered by the Y

University of Minnesota Libraries, Kautz Family YMCA Archives photo

And as late as the 1950s and 60s, women were feted at cotillions in the second-floor ballroom.

After a little more than 50 years, however, the loosening of restrictive covenants meant that Blacks could move beyond Bronzeville. In 1969, the Wabash Y closed and fell into disre- pair. In 1982, the YMCA sold the building to neighboring St. Thomas Episcopal Church for $1. A decade later, St. Thomas was joined by Apostolic Faith Church, Quinn Chapel AME and St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in forming The Renaissance Corporation to save the Wabash Y from demolition. However, the building sat empty until 2000.

TRC and founding Executive Director Patricia Abrams raised $11 million to renovate the building; in 2000, the Renaissance Apartments and Fitness for Life Center opened: 101 apartments with their own bathrooms and kitchenettes, and wraparound services for formerly homeless adults.

Ascoli helped with restoration of William Edouard Scott’s 30-foot-long by 8-foot high ballroom mural that depicted the “Spirit of the YMCA” as conceived by branch director George R. Arthur. Unveiled in 1936, its central figure is a youth who has just come to the big city; life at the Y affords him his choice of careers.

“It’s sort of history repeating itself,” Ascoli said. “The community built it and is now working to restore it. I am very proud. I was brought up to understand something about philanthropy and I practice it a bit.”

Since then, TRC has also developed Bronzeville Green Organic Landscaping to provide jobs in lawn care; and Senior Village 1: 71 affordable units at 346 E. 53rd St.

Next on TRC’s agenda is Senior Village 2, an intergenerational facility for seniors raising grandchildren; a workforce center down the street that will promote environmental sustainability and use netzero energy – and remodeling the Renaissance Apartments after 20 years, preserving their affordability.

The "Healthiest Baby Campaign"

Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago photo

by Suzanne Hanney

Tours of the former Wabash YMCA will be offered during Black History Month at 10:30 a.m. February 11, 18 and 25; after that, tours will be at 10:30 a.m. on second Saturdays. Pre-registration is not required and there is no charge, but a $20 donation is requested from those who can afford it. More information is available at livinglandmark.org and Eventbrite.