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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.