Lowell Thompson: African Americans in Chicago

Date: Tue. February 28, 2012

Time: 6:00 pm

Location:
Harold Washington Library Center
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium
400 S. State Street
60605

Program: African American Heritage Month

About this event:

Lowell Thompson discusses and signs his new book African Americans in Chicago.

The story of black Chicago is so rich that few know it all. It began long before the city itself. “The first white man here was a black man,” Potowatami natives reportedly said about Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the brown-skinned man recognized as Chicago’s first non-Indian settler. It’s all here: from the site of DuSable’s cabin—now smack-dab in the middle of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile—to images of famous and infamous residents like boxers Jack Johnson, Muhammed Ali, and Joe Louis. Here are leaders and cultural touchstones like Jesse Binga’s bank, Robert S. Abbott’s Chicago Defender, legendary filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Ida B. Wells, the Eighth Regiment, Jesse Jackson, Oprah, and much more . . . including a guy named Obama. Here is the black Chicago family album, of folks who made and never made the headlines, and pictures and stories of kinship and fellowship of African Americans leaving the violent, racist South and “goin’ to Chicago” to find their piece of the American Dream. Chicago has been called the “Second City,” but black Chicago is second to none.

Born on Chicago’s South Side, Lowell Thompson is an artist/writer and “creative catalyst.” In 1968, three months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he was one of the first African Americans hired in the creative department of any leading American advertising agency.

Seating is available on a first come, first served basis.  Registration is not required.

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