african american

Many know Christopher Gardner from the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness," where actor Will Smith portrayed Gardner's journey from sleeping in train stations to becoming a self-made millionaire.

But now, thanks to African Ancestry Inc., everyone can "really" know where Gardner's from.

He took part in an N'DIGO magazine project that traced the maternal roots of six black lawmakers, politicians and celebrities.

At a Wednesday luncheon to reveal the DNA sampling results, Gardner learned that with 95 percent accuracy, his bloodline started in Sierra Leone and he had relatives upon the infamous Amistad slave ship.

"Hmm," Gardner said widening his eyes after Rick Kittles, co-founder and scientific director of African Ancestry Inc, handed him the proof.

After the presentation, Gardner said it was amazing "to have with this set of accuracy, an understanding of 'Where was I before I was here?'"

N'DIGO publisher Hermene Hartman said the ceremony was just a "highlight" to Black History Month. Even though "it has been impossible" for blacks to trace their roots in the past because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, she said things have changed.

The testing has been around since 1995, but has gained popularity with celebrities years back. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) 2 has also launched a DNA testing documentary "African American Lives" this month. And Hartman said the experience doesn't have to stop there.

"Sometimes people see stuff on TV...Oprah Winfrey did it and Chris Tucker did it and you think, well wow, that's way beyond me," she added. But with a $350 fee for either a maternal or paternal trace, she said "everybody can do it."

From the first steps of taking cotton swabs of saliva to actually processing the results takes about four to six weeks. African Ancestry's database of over 25,000 African genetic sequences can trace someone to a specific country in Africa or an African ethnic group.

Wayne Watson, Chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, said the test verifies stories passed down throughout his generation.

And with DNA evidence to add to "genealogy, oral history and archival analysis," Watson said he gets "a more complete picture" of who he is.

Scientific Director Rick Kittles said his work is humbling.

"I get very excited to have the opportunity to provide this level of information to the African-American population," he said.

Gardner left the luncheon with a smile on his face. He said he needed time to "take in" his newfound information.

"This is so overwhelming," Gardner said. "It's something that I want to encourage more people to do, especially African-Americans."

N'DIGO will have a description of the project in Thursday's edition. Anyone interested in the testing can log onto www.AfricanAncestry.com.

Denise Nicholes and Julie Welborn stand in their bakery, a Perfect Peace Cafe and Bakery.
Kerry Leonard/Medill

MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Denise Nicholes crouched down to peer into the back of the pristine pastry case at the plate of sliced brown sugar pound cake that her regular customer Rev. Clarence Lumumba James pointed to.

“That should have a label,” she explained to James as she checked to see if it had been misplaced.

“Some things speak for themselves,” James said, smiling and requesting a piece to go.

Nicholes and her business partner Julie Welborn are hoping that their new shop, A Perfect Peace Café and Bakery at 1255 W. 79th St. in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, will do just that and more.

Jonathan Swain, who visits A Perfect Peace every day to check on its progress, is delighted with what he has seen.

“For a start-up business and where they are, they’re doing very well,” he said, adding, “I think it’s important that when kids come in there they see two African American women owning a business.”

“They see the excellence of their space, the excellence of their food, and it sets a tremendous standard,” Swain reflected.

“Here are two African American women," said the Rev. Michael Pfleger of nearby St. Sabina Church, "who’ve always had this dream to open up their business. So we put them together – and we invested.”

Pfleger is the founder of The Beloved Community, a business incubator program born out of St. Sabina to foster economic development in Auburn Gresham.

“People come in and say, ‘Wow, this is like being downtown or on the North Side. Are you sure you belong here?’” Welborn recounted. “We weren’t anticipating any of that.”

What they were anticipating was a bake shop-meets-mission where customers could come together and experience God, truth, and most notably, peace.

“This is a ministry to me,” Welborn said. “Because a ministry is serving people.”

The brightly lit shop, located on a stretch of 79th Street once bereft of sustainable businesses, is painted in lavender and magenta hues, with the half-dozen café tables adding green accents. A vase of flowers sits at each table and art created by local school children decorates the walls. Several hanging blackboards neatly display the desserts, gourmet sandwiches, salads and soups offered daily. Two culinary school graduates hired by Welborn and Nicholes assemble sandwiches and bake in the immaculate kitchen behind the counter.

Welborn alternately checks her laptop computer and tends to customers, while Nicholes works a panini press that fills the 1400-square-foot shop with the smell of marinated, roasted vegetables. They tag in and out of their duties, helping, laughing and chatting with the continuous stream of hungry folk that enter the shop well after the lunch rush.

“This is not just a bakery,” said James. “This is an upscale, gourmet bakery.”

Opened last July, A Perfect Peace is part of a larger effort to revitalize a commercial district long dominated by businesses undervaluing the growth potential of the area. According to the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corp., the neighborhood is roughly 90 percent African American with a glut of businesses such as liquor stores and barber shops that did little to encourage outside visitors to come in and much to encourage residents to take their dollars elsewhere.

“We realized that there was about $46 million leaving the community annually,” said Ernest Sanders, new communities program organizer and director for community outreach for the organization. “We discovered what industries and what sectors were present in the community and what was really lacking.”

What was lacking was African American-owned and operated businesses, especially the sort like A Perfect Peace.

“We realized we needed more catering and food industry,” he continued. A detailed 2007 potential market scan of the neighborhood conducted by the Development Corp. revealed that the demand for such establishments pushed towards a potential $60 million in business revenue. The available pool of generated revenue was closer to $47 million.

It's businesses like the bakery, in addition to anchor stores and other general retail shops, that Sanders believes will help Auburn Gresham reach its goal of being a destination shopping spot.

“They share the same spiritual intimacy to revitalize this community,” Sanders said of Welborn, Nicholes and the development efforts. “And it is definitely the reason they are in business.”

Julie Welborn's and Denise Nicholes’ partnership had a lot to do with chance, and as they contend, more to do with strong faith. Welborn, 42 and unmarried, had earned two master's degrees and was living in her Hyde Park condominium, working as a youth pastor at St. Sabina Church across the street from where her shop now stands. Nicholes, the newly single mother of 12-year-old twin girls, had worked in catering and for a Marriott Hotel after getting her degree from the Culinary and Hospitality Institute of Chicago.

“I’m a people person,” Welborn said. “Denise’s passion is food. She speaks through her food.”

They shared a vision to open a peaceful place, where food and community could come together, and they were both parishioners at St. Sabina. This is where their similarities ended, for Welborn and Nicholes knew each other only in passing. Their pastor, Pfleger, said the church community stepped in to play matchmaker when everyone saw them as the perfect pieces to complete this ambitious puzzle.

Welborn and Nicholes hit it off, hashed out a plan, quit their day jobs and, for over a year, catered by day and dreamt big by night.

“We really, soup to nuts, helped them with every single step,” said Jonathan Swain, executive director of The Beloved Community. “The business plan, the marketing plan, the legal plan… and then just supporting them through this process.”

Such support came in the form of investors cultivated from St. Sabina and the steady, built-in clientele an adjacent, populous and involved church can provide. But for two women new to business ownership, they were not without their growing pains.

“Oh, the first month I cried every day,” Welborn laughed.

“I’m tired!” Nicholes recalled thinking, “When are we going to get some help?”

But with frustration came clarity.

“No, this is what I want. This is it,” Nicholes continued, “and it’s worth it. It’s all going to pay off.”

The business, a mere seven months old, is beginning to see that payoff slowly come around.

“We’re doing okay. I think we’re starting to break even a little bit,” Welborn said. “We’re still getting into the numbers game and covering our costs and checking our pricing.” She said the average day’s sales tally roughly $650 to $700, with more revenue generated around holidays or from big catering jobs. Welborn is quick to caution that there is a broad range to daily sales, and that they'll get a better grasp on what they can expect after a full year of business.

“At the end of the day, you’ve gotta make numbers. But also at the end of the day, were you kind to someone?” Welborn mused.

Sandwich prices range from $4.99 to $6.25, salads run slightly less and slices of cake are priced from $1.69 to $2.99. The most expensive item on the menu is a full-sheet cake with filling, $80.99. Conversely, a peanut butter cookie with peanut butter chips will set the customer back a mere 59 cents.

A Perfect Peace is setting standards not only for the vitality and local ownership of Auburn Gresham’s business community, but for its overall physical health as well.

“You’re walking down 79th Street and it’s fast-food this, fast-food that,” Nicholes said. “People in the community, we need to learn to eat better, healthier. We’re just trying to give them a healthier alternative.”

Organizations such as The Beloved Community and the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corp. are committed to seeing this vision of a revitalized neighborhood through, but decidedly not at the expense of the residents who call the area home.

“You look around and you see neighborhoods changing – but you see new people moving in,” Pfleger said. “Fine, if people move in. But we want everyone here to stay put.”

“This is one of the few communities in Chicago where development is taking place but there is no gentrification,” he continued.

Swain and Sanders believe long time residents are staying put, investing in their community and that a new generation is considering doing the same.

“I think it’s a very positive message and an influence on the neighborhood as a whole,” said Robert Bryant, 23, an employee at A Perfect Peace. “It’s just a nice place – it’s refreshing.”

A neighborhood long deserving of being refreshed and revitalized, said Swain, can look fondly to a business that is helping it on its way towards a renaissance.

“People say, ‘Why?’ and I say, ‘Because you deserve it!’ We deserve something nice on 79th Street.” Welborn said. “People want to see things – good things – happen here.”

South Side historian Dr. Timuel Black presented his newest volume of oral history at the Woodson Regional Library auditorium on Feb. 11, documenting The Great Migration and the construction of Chicago's Black Belt.

He also weighed in on Barack Obama's presidential campaign. (Click play for audio)

Black, an 89-year-old retired professor emeritus of the City Colleges of Chicago and an internationally renowned historian of Black Chicago, said he spent five years interviewing members of the second wave of the historic movement of African-Americans from the agricultural South to the urban North. Their stories, chronicled in "Bridges of Memory Vol. II," inform the reemergence of Bronzeville as a center of Black life, even as they connect the neighborhood to its storied past as The Black Metropolis.

"We are - regardless, white or black - we are the results of those of our ancestors having a dream in their hearts; a spirituality that told them somehow, one day, it was going to get better," Black told the audience as he traced African-American roots to slaves whose dreams meant "they cannot lose the significance of living."

The continuity of the African-American experience continued on Chicago's South Side, he said, noting "the struggle became something we looked forward to because it made us feel good overcoming day-to-day [life]; those things have carried us forward to the present."

That legacy was invoked by many in the audience troubled or excited by the presidential campaign of the Senator Obama.

"Obama is the test of how deep racism is in this country," Black began before a pause that left his audience in silent expectation. "Barack is the recipient of the struggle of other generations," he said, adding "that does not mean that you concentrate and forget others," or resent the gains Obama enjoys. "That means that you feel proud of your ancestors, your successes," he said. "(Obama), based on the opportunities that were opened to him by others, is in the position to prove to the world whether the United States of America is a true democracy, or is a continuing hypocrisy."
Dr. Black talks with students after his presentation at Woodson Library

Timuel D. Black Jr. was born in Birmingham, Ala. in 1917. He says the story of his birth and move to Chicago is a fairy tale. (Click to hear Dr, Black describe his birth and migration.) His family moved north in 1918, members of the first wave of The Great Migration, to seek a safe place to raise a family. Restrictive racial covenants ensured the Black family settled in the Black Belt, as the South Side neighborhood between Cottage Grove and the railroad tracks (now the Dan Ryan Expressway) was known at least a decade before the Chicago Defender coined the term Bronzeville. Black said the penalties for straying too far east or west were severe, but that the Black neighborhood kept stretching south, from 22nd Street eventually to 67th Street.

"I remember my daddy come home one day and said 'Maddie, you know those Negroes have moved across Garfield?'" Black recalled of the expansion. "And my momma said 'cmon then, let's go!'"

As the race covenants governing housing expired in the late 1940s, new arrivals were able to settle in different parts of the city, and Bronzeville's density, once 81,000 per square mile and approximately four-times the Chicago average according to Black, declined. So too did the parallel institutions Black businesspeople built to serve their once burgeoning community.

Some of Black's earliest activism supported these Black businesses. "We organized around that theme: don't spend your money where you can't work," he said. "So, the dollar turned around in the Black community in those days five times." Black compared this vibrancy with the devastated business districts of Bronzeville now. "Today it doesn't turn around once, it's spent before it gets here," he said.

Conjuring neighborhood images of the Savoy Five ("the original Harlem Globetrotters"), the Palms Tavern ("actually a front for a numbers racket"), and Joe Louis walking the streets of Bronzeville after winning his heavyweight title, Black shared his time, memories, and hope for the future with a generosity that has become legendary among students, critics, activists, and academics.

"His oral histories capture and preserve life stories in the words of those who lived them, preserving a rich legacy that might otherwise have been lost," Valerie Gerrard Browne writes in a foreword to Black's recent volume.

But Evelyn Johnson, a former student, came to the library to see Black and said simply that his 1973 City Colleges class "was one of the most joyful experiences" of her life. "He always made you feel like you were entitled to learn," she said. "I still live by the lessons he taught me."

A former Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organizer, Black's next public appearance will be on a Civil Rights and Black Power panel, Sunday Feb. 25, 2007 at the Woodson Regional Library, 9525 S. Halsted St.