Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), commonly referred to as Illinois Tech, is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has programs in architecture, business, communications, design, engineering, industrial technology, information technology, law, psychology, and science. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
Douglas, on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, is one of Chicago's 77 community areas. The neighborhood is named for Stephen A. Douglas, Illinois politician and Abraham Lincoln's political foe, whose estate included a tract of land given to the federal government. This tract later was developed for use as the Civil War Union training and prison camp, Camp Douglas, located in what is now the eastern portion of the Douglas neighborhood. Douglas gave that part of his estate at Cottage Grove and 35th to the Old University of Chicago. The Chicago 2016 Olympic bid planned for the Olympic Village to be constructed on a 37-acre (15 ha) truck parking lot, south of McCormick Place, that is mostly in the Douglas community area and partly in the Near South Side.
The history of African Americans in Chicago or Black Chicagoans dates back to Jean Baptiste Point du Sable’s trading activities in the 1780s. Du Sable, the city's founder, was Haitian of African and French descent. Fugitive slaves and freedmen established the city's first black community in the 1840s. By the late 19th century, the first black person had been elected to office.
Jean Baptiste Point DuSable High School is a public high school campus located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. DuSable is owned by the Chicago Public Schools district. The school was named after Chicago's first permanent non-native settler, Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable. Constructed between 1931 and 1934, DuSable opened in February 1935.
Jesse Binga was a prominent American businessman who founded the first privately owned African-American bank in Chicago. Binga recalled coming to Chicago in the 1890s with $10 in his pocket. By the 1920s he was a bank president and major real estate owner. Unwilling to conform to de facto, private real-estate segregation, white real estate interests sometimes opposed him violently. After his bank failed in the Great Depression, Binga was eventually charged with embezzlement, a controversial prosecution in the African American community. Protests and public petitions helped lead to his early release. He was granted a full pardon in 1941.
The Black Metropolis–Bronzeville District is a historic African American district in the Bronzeville neighborhood of the Douglas community area on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois.
The Chicago Bee Building is a historic building on Chicago's South Side. It originally housed the Chicago Bee, a newspaper serving the African Americans of Chicago. The building now houses the Chicago Bee Branch of the Chicago Public Library. The building was named a Chicago Landmark on September 9, 1998. It is located in the Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District in the Douglas community area of Chicago, Illinois.
Hygienic Manufacturing Company, also known as Overton Hygienic Company, was a cosmetics company established by Anthony Overton. It was one of the nation's largest producers of African-American cosmetics. Anthony Overton also ran other businesses from the building, including the Victory Life Insurance Company and Douglass National Bank, the first nationally chartered, African-American-owned bank. The Overton Hygienic Building is a Chicago Landmark and part of the Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District in the Douglas community area of Chicago, Illinois. It is located at 3619-3627 South State Street.
The South Side Community Art Center is a community art center in Chicago that opened in 1940 with support from the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in Illinois. Opened in Bronzeville in an 1893 mansion, it became the first black art museum in the United States and has been an important center for the development Chicago's African American artists. Of more than 100 community art centers established by the WPA, this is the only one that remains open.
Vivian Gordon Harsh was an American librarian. Harsh is noted as the Chicago Public Library (CPL) system's first African American librarian, being assigned to the position on February 26, 1924. Harsh served as a librarian for 34 years until retiring in 1958. During her career, she began an extensive archive on African American history and culture, which is now known as, the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, at the CPL.
Frank Marshall Davis was an American journalist, poet, political and labor movement activist, and businessman.
Anthony Overton Jr., was an American banker and manufacturer. He was the first African American to lead a major business conglomerate.
Walter Thomas Bailey was an American architect from Kewanee, Illinois. He was the first African American graduate with a bachelor of science degree in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the first licensed African-American architect in the state of Illinois. He worked at the Tuskegee Institute, and practiced in both Memphis and Chicago. Walter T. Bailey became the second African American that graduated from the University of Illinois.
The South Side Writers Group was a circle of African-American writers and poets formed in the 1930s in South Side, Chicago. The informal group included Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, Fenton Johnson, Theodore Ward, Garfield Gordon, Frank Marshall Davis, Julius Weil, Dorothy Sutton, Marian Minus, Russell Marshall, Robert Davis, Marion Perkins, Arthur Bland, Fern Gayden, and Alberta Sims. Consisting of some twenty members, the group championed the New Realism movement and social realism. They met at the Abraham Lincoln Centre on South Cottage Grove Avenue near the Bronzeville District.
The Chicago Black Renaissance was a creative movement that blossomed out of the Chicago Black Belt on the city's South Side and spanned the 1930s and 1940s before a transformation in art and culture took place in the mid-1950s through the turn of the century. The movement included such famous African-American writers as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, and Lorraine Hansberry, as well as musicians Thomas A. Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Mahalia Jackson and artists William Edouard Scott, Elizabeth Catlett, Katherine Dunham, Charles Wilbert White, Margaret Burroughs, Charles C. Dawson, Archibald John Motley, Jr., Walter Sanford, and Eldzier Cortor. During the Great Migration, which brought tens of thousands of African-Americans to Chicago's South Side, African-American writers, artists, and community leaders began promoting racial pride and a new black consciousness, similar to that of the Harlem Renaissance. Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Black Renaissance did not receive the same amount of publicity on a national scale. Among the reasons for this are that the Chicago group participants presented no singularly prominent "face", wealthy patrons were less involved, and New York City—home of Harlem—was the higher profile national publishing center.
Christopher Robert Reed is an American historian known for his expertise on the African American experience in twentieth century Chicago, Illinois. Reed was assistant professor of Black Studies at the University of Illinois from 1982 to 1987, and professor of history at Roosevelt University from 1987 to 2006 as an associate and then full professor. He has published a number of books in his fields.
Ada Sophia Dennison McKinley was an American educator, settlement house worker, and activist in Chicago, Illinois. She founded the South Side Settlement House, later renamed in her honor as Ada S. McKinley Community Services. The organization continues to serve thousands in the Chicago metropolitan area, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Because of her pioneering community service work, she is hailed as a "heroine of Chicago's South Side."
The Phillis Wheatley Clubs are women's clubs created by African Americans starting in the late 1800s. The first club was founded in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1895. Some clubs are still active. The purpose of Phillis Wheatley Clubs varied from area to area, although most were involved in community and personal improvement. Some clubs helped in desegregation and voting rights efforts. The clubs were named after the poet Phillis Wheatley.
Olive Myrl Diggs was the managing editor of Anthony Overton's Chicago Bee from 1929 until it closed in 1947, a public official advocating for Chicago's African American community, and a city planner.
Tony Langston was best known as "a tastemaker," an unusually insightful and persuasive African American arts critic who could tip "his readers off to a new wave of emerging Black talent" while also effectively arguing against racist tropes. As entertainment editor for the Chicago Defender, the city's largest Black newspaper, Langston wrote on theater, film and music, reviewing everything from the rare talent of Bessie Smith to the outrageous racism of Birth of a Nation for as many as a million weekly readers.
