My Teen Talk Radio students tell me that many students at our school (Uplift Community High) are planning on walking out of school on Thursday April 8th at 9:30am to protest proposed CPS (Chicago Public Schools) budget cuts. Another school involved is Social Justice High School at Little Village/Lawndale High School’s campus (a school I’ve also worked with).
There is a projected deficit of nearly $1 Billion for the FY 2011, and the proposed budget cuts according to an official CPS slideshare presentation (presented March, 15th 2010) includes:
increasing class size (H.S. and elementary) to 37 students (a savings valued at $160 Million)
cut supplemental resources in half for gifted, magnet, and montessori schools by $22 Million
reduce early childhood and bilingual education programs by $61 Million
reduce district funding for full day kindergarten programs by $16 Million
eliminate all district funded non-varsity sports (a savings valued at $7 Million)
reduce enrichment and after school programs by $17 Million
Taking into account the deficit, budget cuts certainly must be made; but students wonder how enrichment that supports at-risk students and gives students a chance at post-secondary success (via sports and other after school programs) can be considered for the chopping block. They are (in their mind) just as, or even more essential than what goes on between the bells.
The budget will not officially be approved by the board until August.
This, of course, opened the door for a classroom discussion about whether such protests still work, and what the pros and cons of such displays are. Many of my students will cover the walkout and subsequent rally as student journalists. Below is some of our board work. Great to know that students aren’t as apathetic as the media leads us to believe. Jive on!
Chicago’s own Ebony Magazine has digitized its archives. Celebrate.
Ebony was the premier photojournalism and news magazine of the Black Diaspora for decades. During its peak, Ebony featured groundbreaking work by photographers such as Gordon Parks (work seen below), as well as thought provoking articles that exposed sometimes obscure corners of the “black experience” (Mixed race children of WWII G.I.s in Japan, black scuba divers, black opera singers, et al.). A beautiful thing.
A contender has yet to step up to the plate and pick up that mantle.
click here to access the archive that goes back more than fifty years. Jive on!
Eunice Johnson (1916-2010), widow of Ebony/Jet Publisher John H. Johnson, was more than Black Media’s First Lady. As Creator and Director of theEbony Fashion Fair (an all black roadshow of haute couture), she paved the way for generations of black models from Beverly Johnson and Naomi Sims to Naomi Campbell. In fact, Richard Roundtree (“Shaft”) was a Fashion Fair model before he was kicking tail on the big screen.
In the show, which was started in 1961, she included some of the most fashion forward designers, including Yves Saint Laurent (pictured with Mrs. Johnson, above). In a time when Chicago was in many ways the hub of culture and information that bound the Black Community together(i.e., the nationally recognized Chicago Defender, Ebony, Jet, and a world renowned music and arts scene), Mrs. Johnson took her Fashion Crusade to the streets in towns both near and remote. Accordingly, sewing machines buzzed each season, inspired by the roadshow of dreams. Her shows, as well as so many of those classic Ebony Magazine fashion layouts, presented our people as we were (and still are) striving to be: free and uplifted. Strutting. Gliding.
As if that weren’t enough, Ebony Fashion Fair, which grew into the world’s largest traveling fashion show, annually encompasses a nearly 180-city tour of the United States, Canada and the Caribbean. It has raised more than $55 million for various charities.
And it keeps us dreaming. To me, that is her legacy. She brought the dream to our door.
Now is the time of year that our minds drift towards fantastical costumes and sugary delights. Above, perhaps the sweetest costume I’ve ever seen. The Tootsie Roll Baby Bunting costume is made out of a soft brown felt and is available at Target.com. A bit about Tootsie Rolls (a Chicago based classic):
Tootsie Rolls were first manufactured in 1896.
The traditional chocolate Tootsie Roll lists among its ingedients orange extract.
Tootsie Roll Industries moved operations to Chicago in the early 1960s (before that, it was based in Hoboken, NJ).
Tootsie Roll has had the same jingle since 1976. Enjoy, below…and Jive on.
I am bothered by tapes that disappear, the same tapes that record our collective story. The sort that get erroneously misplaced, taped over, or buried (true stories, all). It’s happened often in Chicago to bits of media that palpably documented Chicago Cultural History. It seems to have happened too many times for my taste. Here’s a few times that hit especially close to home.
Our People
“Our People” (1968-1972) was Jim Tilmon’s groundbreaking public affairs television series that aired on WTTW. For, by, and about Black Chicagoans, the show was deemed completely lost for the ages until someone at WTTW unearthed one lonely “lost episode”.
According to WTTW.com, the episode:
“features guests Harold Washington, then a young State Representative who would later become Mayor of Chicago, author James Baldwin at his outspoken best, State Senator Richard Newhouse, and music by the great jazz vocalist Johnny Hartman.”
Our People premiered the week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a time frame remembered in Chicago as the days when the West Side went up in riotous flames (and one Darkjive informant told me of more than a few young men “enlisting” the aid of rifles from the Sears on Kostner for protection). It should also be noted that The Loop shut down, paralyzed with fear of such riotous activity spreading downtown (it didn’t).
Each week, Our People dealt with issues the Black Community grappled with… and offered a few solutions, as well. What a remarkable loss.
Below, a clipping from The Hyde Park Herald, Volume 87, 12 February 1969, Page 13.
Dick Gregory, 1451 E. 551h, talks with program producer John Tweedle and host Jim Tilmon on WTTW-Channel 11, Our People, a weekly program focusing on the interests and talents of the black community.
The Infamous Paul Serrano PS Studio Tapes
So, Paul Serrano(left) was a hard bop trumpeter here in Chicago that ultimately became a world-renowned Engineer with his own Studio (PS Recording Studios). He recorded some of the greatest Soul, Gospel, Blues, and Jazz music ever laid down on wax, right here in Chicago. Built in 1966, the independent studio was on-par with Chess Records’ Ter-Mar Studios and even RCA’s massive Midwest Recording Studios.
Artists including Jerry Butler, the Emotions, Natalie Cole, Ramsey Lewis, Peabo Bryson, the Independents, Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, Mary Wells, Chicago Gangsters, Oscar Brown, Jr., Deniece Williams, Von Freeman, Ghanaian Highlife Bandleader Dan Boadi, and Captain Sky recorded there.
The Studio (at one time located on East 23rd Street) shut down in the early nineties, but according to the folk at Numero Group, a bounty of master tapes (some never released) were BURIED at the sight of McCormick Place. The world may never know.
Below, a slice of funk recorded in the Near South Side at PS Studios.
“Soul Train Local”
So, most of us Chicagoans know that Soul Train got its start here in Chicago (at Weigel Broadcasting’s WCIU-TV), where sponsors included Joe Louis Milk and Sears. The train moved on to L.A. (Grrrrrrrrrr) in 1971, but time has nearly erased that the local version was aired in Chicago until 1979. Unfortunately, those episodes starring the homegrown talent of Tyrone Davis, The Dells, Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler, Gene Chandler, the Chi-Lites, and the Emotions were lost to time, many of them taped over by WCIU…repeatedly. For more on this story, check out Jake Austen’s excellent Chicago Reader article here.
B.B. King on Soul Train Local
I would much rather have any one of these in my personal collection than some of the inane box sets (“Webster”?? Really??) that are being offered up for posterity. Sigh.
I have dedicated a number of posts here at Darkjive to the PUSH Expo, a 1970s exercise in Black Economic Empowerment (or Black Power as it was then known). The PUSH Expo phenomenon was borne from the seed of Operation Breadbasket (a department of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference), but the roots took twisted turns.
The term “Civil Rights Movement” often brings to mind images of the deep south, but Chicago was a key battleground in those days. Not just because of the influx of new Black citizens that the Great Migration delivered, but because of the ongoing struggles for housing equality and empowerment exacerbated by said influx.
Jesse Jackson, whose ties to Dr. King traced back to the Campaign at Selma in 1965, was selected by King to head Operation Breadbasket’s Chicago Branch. True to its name, the organization distributed nourishment to the communtity, but it also played a more proactive role to fighting for social justice.
Tactics such as boycotts were implemented, but according to Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), a seamier aspect including cronyism and strong-arming businesses to donate money to Operation Breadbasket were folded into the tactics, as well.
Eventually, leadership rifts came to a head, and in December 1971, Jackson fell out with Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor as head of the national SCLC. Jackson and his allies broke off and formed Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity).
Various sources tell me that this was a pivotal moment in Chicago History because a giant, organized black party (the largest in Chicago at the time) broke off into factions and never regained the traction it had built before that point. Then crack hit the community like the atomic bomb (and the fallout is still being felt). I argue that the hindsighted strength of the PUSH Expo-era was built on momentum created in the years that had preceded it, in conjunction with the genius of marketing with a major motion picture (!) and tons of press. Documentation equals existence itself, and media has the power to romanticize just about anything.
In the end, please leave me the romance. Let me believe that we were SO close to breaking free. It gives me a fairy tale to build tomorrow upon.
Lady Terror says she’s a menace on a mission. Terrorizing for a cause. Be it staging a soapbox rant in front of Rothschild’sLiquors (clamouring for more grocery stores) or engaging in impromptu yoga at a Harold’s Chicken Shack (calling for inner city yoga centers for the sake of public health), her performance art and poetry is meant to highlight issues in her community, and to start dialogues about them. She calls them “guerrilla art spectacles”. And, she believes poverty is a form of terrorism. She wants to “slay terror by dropping knowledge bombs to all”.
“I’m writing to give voice to the communities they have forgotten. I am mad. I want to know why you are so calm. We got work to do.”
The intersection of race and class.In Chicago. In the late 1960s. That’s the backdrop of a memoir (rather cheekily) titled “Hey, White Girl!” written by Susan Gregory (Norton, 1970).
In the book, teenage Susan transfers from well-heeled, suburban New Trier High School to attend infamous-even-then Marshall High School on Chicago’s West Side for her senior year.
What’s notable about this book is that save certain specificities (slang, style of dress, et al), the story would probably play out identically today: that’s how little race and class lines have shifted since then in the Windy City.
There are many notable moments in the book: some poignant, some funny, some perfect slices of Sixties Chicago.
“What jam can I mash on you?” the disc jockey asked… The words, the phrases were endless. But I learned them, and slowly they became my own…
…A “humbug” was a fight. A “box” was a record player. “The hawk” referred to the wind… Marshall and WVON helped me build my vocabulary. — fromHey, White Girl
Find a copy, if you dare. Definitely worth the search. It’s wild.
thanks to Mr. Catano for the headsup on this video….
At the bottom of this post, Tony Verity breaks down ska dancing (quite anthropologically, I might add). Byron Lee and the Dragonaires play backup. Plays out a bit like the movie Hairspray, only with a Jamaican twist (the original, of course…John Waters kept it gritty, yet sufficiently camp). What’s Ricki Lake up to these days?
Funny thing, for an era that spawned so many dances (the mashed potato, the madison, the slop, the philly dog, the shing-a-ling, the pony, the jerk, et al), few have such detailed documentation. Anybody out there remember “The Gouster”(a Chicago flash-in-the-pan dance committed to wax by local group the 5 Duotones)?
Near Philadelphia, kids of color were allegedly turned away from a private club's swimming pool (even though they'd ponied up the nearly $2000 entry fee). Upon arrival, the kids' presence allegedly made the regular pool crowd uncomfortable. Now the blogosphere is abuzz.
"Racism!"
"It's 2009!!!"
What does that even mean? All I know is that racists are better at acting like they're not racist. In public.
In defense of the Huntingdon Valley Swim Club they have posted on their website that:
"[They] had originally agreed to invite the camps to use our facility, knowing full well that the children from the camps were from multi-ethnic backgrounds. Unfortunately, [they] quickly learned that we underestimated the capacity of [their] facilities andrealized that [they] could not accommodate the number of children from these camps.”
My reading is that the club underestimated how their members would react. Underlying feelings surfaced, perhaps. One camper was quoted by NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate as saying:
”I heard this lady, she was like, ‘Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?’ She’s like, ‘I’m scared they might do something to my child.’” Ouch.
Ironically, 90 years ago this month, Chicago saw one of the bloodiest race riots in American History during the Red Summer of 1919. The irony? That riot started when a black boy allegedly floated into “white water” at what was then 26th Street Beach. Neighborhoods became battlefields. Veterans, black and white, (newly home from World War One) made Trenches out of Boulevards.
At the end of thirteen days of skirmishes, 38 Chicagoans were dead (23 blacks and 15 whites), 537 injured, and 1,000 black families were homeless.
click here to access the archive that goes back more than fifty years. Jive on!
Now is the time of year that our minds drift towards fantastical costumes and sugary delights. Above, perhaps the sweetest costume I’ve ever seen. The Tootsie Roll Baby Bunting costume is made out of a soft brown felt and is available at 
Chicago Public Schools Walk Out to Stop Budget Cuts
My Teen Talk Radio students tell me that many students at our school (Uplift Community High) are planning on walking out of school on Thursday April 8th at 9:30am to protest proposed CPS (Chicago Public Schools) budget cuts. Another school involved is Social Justice High School at Little Village/Lawndale High School’s campus (a school I’ve also worked with).
There is a projected deficit of nearly $1 Billion for the FY 2011, and the proposed budget cuts according to an official CPS slideshare presentation (presented March, 15th 2010) includes:
increasing class size (H.S. and elementary) to 37 students (a savings valued at $160 Million)
cut supplemental resources in half for gifted, magnet, and montessori schools by $22 Million
reduce early childhood and bilingual education programs by $61 Million
reduce district funding for full day kindergarten programs by $16 Million
eliminate all district funded non-varsity sports (a savings valued at $7 Million)
reduce enrichment and after school programs by $17 Million
Taking into account the deficit, budget cuts certainly must be made; but students wonder how enrichment that supports at-risk students and gives students a chance at post-secondary success (via sports and other after school programs) can be considered for the chopping block. They are (in their mind) just as, or even more essential than what goes on between the bells.
The budget will not officially be approved by the board until August.
This, of course, opened the door for a classroom discussion about whether such protests still work, and what the pros and cons of such displays are. Many of my students will cover the walkout and subsequent rally as student journalists. Below is some of our board work. Great to know that students aren’t as apathetic as the media leads us to believe. Jive on!
(below, notes on a “reporter’s job”)
(above, pros and cons of protests)
1 comment | tags: April 8th 2010, CPS, CPS Budget Cuts, CPS Protest, CPS rally, CPS Student Walkout, CPS Walkout, Student Protest, youth walkout | posted in Chicago Cultural History, Commentary, Education, Events