StreetWise Vendor Kianna Visits the Wabash YMCA

by Kianna Drummond

It was so amazing for me to visit the former YMCA on 38th Street and Wabash Avenue, where a lot of African American history happened in the early 1900s. When it first opened in 1913, lots of Blacks from around the U.S. were able to sleep, eat, swim and reach out to one another.

It was so mind-blowing for me to see where a group of African Americans could get together – high end and low-end people – and work together. It was like a meetup place for us. Now, there are 101 affordable units there through The Renaissance Collaborative.

There was no other place in those days that would take Blacks, so Carter Woodson stayed there when he visited Chicago in 1915 for an emancipation conference. He had gone to Harvard with A.L. Jackson, the Y’s executive director. For background, Woodson was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora. Together, they and two others founded the organization that started Negro History Week, later Black History Month.

Some people stayed for longer periods at the Wabash Y; some just visited: 140,000 used the facility in 1919. Now, that’s a lot of African Americans in one building, and everybody cooperated to have a space to stay. I say we need a place like this today, because there are so many of us going through the same or similar things right here

in Chicago and we have no place to go to talk about it or people to talk about it with. We hold it inside and think we’re alone, when here it is that many people: rich, poor, famous, unknown, were able to come together from all over the world and get along.

It's sad to say, but speaking for myself, we were together then. Not like when everybody was out there looting; every Black person was for each other then. It makes no kind of sense. If we can do it for justice, we can do it for our youth coming up. We need more centers like this Y of the 1900s. More outreach places for our kids, job training programs, Big Brother and Big Sister programs, where kids who have no siblings or no one to talk to can go, because a lot of violence can be avoided by just having someone to reach out and talk to. The world is so different today, and yet so much the same. So many African Americans fought the fight to change the future for us, and how do we repay them? By going against each other.

A lot more of us need to take the tour at 38th and Wabash. There is a $20 donation requested, but you can give what best suits you. It will be better to experience it hands-on and see what you get out of it. Not just word of mouth. Go visit, yourself. It’ll give you something to think about, I promise. And it will help you understand where we came from and where we are today.

Badminton players at the Wabash YMCA

Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago

Kianna Drummond