Timuel Dixon Black Jr. loved history, especially African American history and Chicago history.
He studied it, taught it, wrote about it and, in many ways, helped to make history happen.
He was in the inner circle of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s civil rights crusade. He was a close friend and adviser to fellow DuSable High School classmate Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor. He was present when Carter G. Woodson first introduced “Negro History Week,” which later expanded to African American History Month.
He mentored numerous students and activists, including a young community organizer named Barack Obama, who sought his counsel on how to build a political base in Chicago’s Black community.
The retired sociology and anthropology professor at City Colleges of Chicago died Wednesday at age 102, marking an end to what might well be called the Timuel Black Century, an era of seismic racial, political and social changes to which he not only showed up but helped to bring about.
“Legend has it,” he told the Tribune’s Rick Kogan in a WBEZ interview commemorating Harold Washington for Roosevelt University, “that when I was 8 months old in Birmingham, Alabama, I looked around and saw and felt what was going on in those days and I said to my mother, I’m leavin’ here. So, I brought my family here when I was 8 months old.”
Yes, Black , an educator, civil rights activist, historian and author and organizer, also will be remembered for his humor. Yet, the word “legend” does appropriately describe his reputation and influence as an adviser and foot soldier in Chicago’s civil rights history.
For generations of journalists, scholars, activists and aspiring political figures, Black was one-stop shopping for knowledge and the wisdom of a canny insider.
Called the city’s “unofficial chief historian” by many, he chronicled the evolution of Black life and culture in his writings, lectures and appearances, recalling with vivid detail the ground-level world and events that gave shape to the city’s multiracial and multiethnic identity.
That included such epic events as World War II, into which he was drafted into the Army at age 23, served in a segregated unit at Normandy and the Battle of Bulge and earned four battle stars and the French Croix de Guerre.
He also paid what he recalled as a life-changing visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp, an infuriating reminder for him of the “organized, systemic way” African Americans were oppressed before emancipation.
After the war, he immersed himself in academia, particularly history and sociology. He received a bachelor’s degree from Roosevelt University and a masters from the University of Chicago.
But the classroom wasn’t enough. He saw King on TV leading the Montgomery bus boycott and flew down to meet him. A year later he joined members of Hyde Park’s First Unitarian Church to encourage King to deliver a sermon, an address that had to be moved to the larger Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on the University of Chicago campus to accommodate the large turnout.
In 1963, Black was enlisted by A. Phillip Randolph to coordinate “freedom trains” of Chicago residents to join the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, best remembered as the scene for King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
Later in the year, Black took the political plunge in a group of Black candidates who ran for City Council in a campaign against the city’s political establishment. He didn’t win, but he left a legacy in his pithy oratory.
When you hear younger progressive candidates rail against “plantation politics,” they’re quoting a term widely credited to Black.
He continued his academic career, including work as a dean with the City Colleges of Chicago and, later, vice president for academic affairs at Olive Harvey College.
But in the early 1980s, Black helped register 250,000 new voters as part of an effort to persuade Washington to run for mayor. Washington didn’t think the effort would succeed, Black later recalled, but, when it did, Washington said, “I guess I’m running for mayor.”
Black’s profile rose further in, among others, the presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr., and the election of Carol Moseley Braun as the first Black woman in the U.S. Senate.
Black retired from City Colleges in 1989, but his work continued with books and lectures throughout the city, sometimes with author, close friend and fellow Chicagoan Studs Terkel, whom he credited with talking him into a book of oral history interviews in the style for which Terkel is famously known.
Just as some people speculated that Obama was “not black enough,” said Black at Terkel’s funeral, “There probably were some who said Terkel was not white enough.”
But, after the laughter subsided, Black continued that, what mattered was not black or white but the “humanitarian behavior” that his friend embraced and exhibited.
The same can be said of Black. He could have been embittered by the hardships inflicted on him and other Black Chicagoans, but he turned his energies instead to opening opportunities for the full participation of all races, ethnicities and genders.
In his last days, his friends and family have said, he expressed disappointment that Americans have not made more racial progress. But through his example and tireless appeals to intellect over resentments, Timuel Black’s century blazed a trail for new generations to use the lessons of history to prepare the way for more progress to come.
We salute him. And we mourn this city’s loss.
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