Black youngsters cool off with fire hydrant water on Chicago’s South Side in the Woodlawn community… June 1973
“…The kids don’t go to the city beaches and use the fire hydrants to cool off instead. It’s a tradition in the community, comprised of very low income people. The area has high crime and fire records. From 1960 to 1970 the percentage of Chicago blacks with income of $7,000 or more jumped from 26% to 58%.”* caption by John H. White.
* according to Paul Louis Street’s Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis, the median income for Blacks in Chicago in 2000 was “more than $6,000 less than the Economic Policy Institute’s “basic family budget”…for even a small family of one parent and two children ($35,307). On the flip of this, the median white income in the city was $11,000 more than the that basic family budget.
from the National Archives website:
From June through October 1973 and briefly during the spring of 1974, John H. White, a 28-year-old photographer with the Chicago Daily News, worked for the federal government photographing Chicago, especially the city’s African American community. As White reflected recently, he saw his assignment as “an opportunity to capture a slice of life, to capture history.”
Today, John White is a staff photographer with the Chicago Sun-Times. He has won hundreds of awards, and his work has been exhibited and published widely. In 1982 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.
I am a big fan of John H. White’s photography. He has that magic ability to tell a whole story with one frame. click here for his website
taken from the National Archives and Records Administration Website
Portraits of Black Chicago: The Beat Goes On
Chicago’s PUSH Black Expo was a powerful tour de force for Black Businesses nationwide at the time this photo was shot. Time magazine stated in a 1971 article: “When the five-day trade fair opened in Chicago last week, there were representatives of nearly 400 black firms on hand to prove the premise. But before the week was out, Black Expo proved to be more than a display of the products of America’s fledgling black capitalism. It turned out to be an unofficial convention of entrepreneurs and politicians in search of power at the polls as well as in the marketplace.“ Wow. There was even a major motion picture shot to document one year’s occurrence, entitled “Save the Children” (after that year’s theme). So what happened?
Almost exactly twenty years after the above photo was shot, the following was published in the Chicago Reporter:
Black Expo: Taking Care of Business?
By: Ray Quintanilla (originally published in the Chicago Reporter in September 1993)
When about 250,000 people, most of them African Americans, turned out for this year’s Chicago Black Expo, many were offered fried chicken and menthol cigarettes…
(click the link below for original footage of Marvin Gaye at the PUSH Expo)
marvin gaye live at the expo after the jump
4 Comments | tags: Black Business, Black Expo, Chicago Cultural History, Chicago History, Chicago Reporter, economic empowerment, John H. White, marvin gaye, photography, Portraits of Black Chicago, PUSH Expo | posted in Arts & Culture, Chicago Cultural History, Commentary, Jive Culture, Music, Musical Performance, Photography, Staged Affairs, the Goodness