This wonderful personal memoir, published shortly after the author’s one hundredth birthday (December 7, 2018), tells of growing up in Chicago as part of “The Great Migration” of blacks to the North. Timuel Black’s parents arrived in Chicago in 1919 when he was about eight months old and settled in the African American community known as Bronzeville.
Black, who produced two volumes of oral histories of Bronzeville residents and is currently working on a third volume, sees this kind of storytelling as a key to our understanding of an important cultural history. He writes, “It seemed to me that both our physical history, the spaces and places of my Sacred Ground, and our spiritual history, our stories and memories, were being systematically destroyed.” He decided to tell his own story at the urging of friends, including fellow Chicagoan Studs Terkel.
Sacred Ground came about through a series of interviews conducted with Black over several years by public schools activist Susan Klonsky. Black had served in the 1990s as a community adviser for The Small Schools Workshop, co-founded by Klonsky and her husband, Michael. The interviews were edited by Bart Schultz, director of the Civic Knowledge Project at the University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement, which, among other things, conducts tours of Chicago’s historic South Side led by Timuel Black.
Black refers to his South Side neighborhood as “Sacred Ground . . . a real, hallowed space, from which major figures in the freedom movement emerged, and where historic commitments were forged.”
For Black, oral history is important because it tells first-hand stories about everyday people’s lives. “To those who consider oral history ‘soft’ history, or somehow less valid,” he writes, “I would say, it’s the people who are left out of history whose stories we are collecting and saving.
“I’m telling stories that I hope capture a feeling, a spirit of what this place and its people have meant,” he continues, “not just to me, but to our city and our country.” Black’s own story, his full century of participation in that place and with the people there, makes this book a powerful capturing of that spirit. “I believe my life is fairly representative of the lives of many of the children of migrants from the Deep South,” Black states in the introduction. “My story’s typical-ness is precisely where its value lies.”
In the book’s title, and throughout its pages, Black refers to his South Side neighborhood as “Sacred Ground.” It is, he explains, “a real, hallowed space, from which major figures in the freedom movement emerged, and where historic commitments were forged.” Throughout the book, he shares the stories of those major figures, intertwined with his own life story and his personal development as a skilled and committed activist.
Like many members of his generation, Black served in the army during World War II. The experience of racism and segregation in the military, as well as what he witnessed of the liberation of the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp, was transformative.
“This got me to reflecting, and I thought, this can happen anywhere to anyone,” he says. “I determined that when I returned home I was going to spend the rest of my life working for peace and justice.” In his case, he continues, “political activism and organizing was the key to recovering from the whole deeply difficult experience of war. You never forget war, and you never get fully away from it.”
Black worked with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in the South in the early 1960s, and helped bring him to Chicago in 1966. In October 1963, he helped organize a boycott of the Chicago public schools by more than 200,000 people to protest the use of “mobile classrooms” (really trailers) at overcrowded black schools.
In the early 1980s, Black worked to elect Harold Washington, another Bronzeville resident, as Chicago’s first African American mayor, presaging his later work for the adopted son of Chicago, Barack Obama. “[W]hile it thrived, the Washington campaign and its victory created the same kind of excitement at the local level that Barack Obama’s would generate on the national level two decades later,” Black says. “It taught so many younger people about the power of an awakened, organized community.”
Black sees Obama’s presidency as a watershed moment: “He was not all perfect, but he was historic.” As one of the lead organizers for getting people from Chicago to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Black remembers that event as “one of the greatest experiences of my life”—a feeling that still resonates today. He calls Obama “the beneficiary of the hopes and dreams of all kinds of Americans carried forward by those of my generation, struggling to achieve the impossible, but so often doubting that they can do it. His successor, I am sad to say, is contributing to the doubt, not to the dream.”
Black spent many of his working years as a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, beginning in 1954, and later at City College, from which he retired in 1989. The philosophy he tried to convey to students was simple: “You are somebody, trouble don’t last forever.” In a letter sent to honor his ninetieth birthday, then-President Obama wrote, “We are all his students in a classroom that never closes.”
Having grown up on Chicago’s South Side, within two miles of most of the various apartments in which Tim Black lived, I know the neighborhood, and many of the characters in this book from my own youth. I found the book to be both informative and inspirational, which was precisely Black’s goal. As he puts it, “There is still a lot to overcome. But we have overcome a lot, and we need to remember that. We can still do the impossible, maybe even the miraculous.”
The kind of hope this book offers is rooted in perseverance and committed activism. Having seen so much over the past century, Black concludes, “even at my age, and in these times, times that seem so bad, I can keep on keepin’ on, and you can too.”