Timuel Black

Timuel Black was born in Birmingham, Ala., on December 7, 1918, and planted in Chicago when he was less than a year old. He put down roots here, and never left. Timuel Black’s Bronzeville in the 1920s and 1930s was a place of much poverty and some wealth, a center for music and sports, and a terrain where demonstrations could break out at any time. As a teenager, he walked a picket line protesting white-only employment in stores on 47th Street, in Bronzeville’s main shopping district, warning shoppers: “Don’t Spend Your Money Where You Can’t Work.”

He was educated at Burke Elementary School and DuSable High School. At both schools he formed friendships that he maintained throughout his life. After graduating from high school, Tim worked at several ma-and-pa stores. When World War II broke out in September 1939, Timuel Black was working at a grocery store at 59th Street and Michigan Avenue. Later he was an agent for Robert Cole’s Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company; for a short time he left Chicago, working at Greenbaum Tannery in Milwaukee. Like many others, he had a hard time finding work during the Depression.

The United States’ combat entry into World War II began with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Timuel Black’s 23rd birthday. By August 1943, he was inducted into the 308th Quartermaster Railhead Company, a “forward supply unit,” with all black troops and nearly all white officers. Shipped to Europe, he landed on the beach in Normandy when the Germans were sending saboteurs to blow up supplies. “We were awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palms because we helped save the butts of everyone on that beach,” Black said. By November 1944 he was in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. Although his unit suffered many casualties in D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, Black was not wounded. Through the racism and discrimination of army life, Black still went on to receive four bronze battle stars by the end of the war. Discharged in late 1945, he returned to a segregated Chicago.

Timuel Black met and married Norisea Cummings in 1946. They had two children, Ermetra and Timuel Kerrigan Black. Even though their marriage ended in divorce, they worked together to ensure their children’s future.

The war had changed Black and other returning veterans. Many African Americans had fought, and many died, to preserve the American ideology of freedom. Seeing Chicago’s segregation all over again, Black was firmly committed to the ideals of public service, political equality and social activism. He went back to his old job at the Metropolitan Assurance Company, where he was quickly fired for attempting to organize the agents into a union.

He enrolled at Roosevelt University in 1949. After graduating in 1952, he entered the University of Chicago, earning a master’s degree there. By 1954, he was student teaching at DuSable High School, his alma mater. Black officially began his teaching career at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Ind., in 1954. Two years later, he returned to DuSable and taught there until 1959.

The political and social landscape of Chicago changed after the war. During Martin Kennelly’s term as mayor, there was a break between political leaders in the black community and City Hall. Mayor Richard J. Daley succeeded Kennelly. In 1955, the brutal murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old victim of lynching in Mississippi, sent shockwaves of anger throughout the black community nationally. Till’s funeral in Chicago drew huge crowds and provoked mass protests. Three years later came a new organization—the Chicago League of Negro Voters. This independent black electoral organization, in which Timuel Black participated, was the first to challenge City Hall’s control over the “Negro vote.” A year later, the league blossomed into the “March on Conventions Movement,” staffed by Bennett Johnson and Timuel Black. This movement led mass marches to the site of the 1960 Republican convention. By this time, both Black and Johnson were teaching at Farragut High School on Chicago’s West Side. Both men were active in support for the 1960 Southern lunch counter sit-ins. After they invited one of the sit-in leaders to Farragut, Johnson was fired by the Chicago Public Schools.

The new, rapidly growing civil rights movement also targeted “racism within the House of Labor.” Agitation over discrimination in the job market, and lack of action against it by some trade unions, produced a new organization, the Negro American Labor Council (NALC). Timuel Black, a teachers’ union activist, was elected president of the Chicago chapter. He remained its president throughout the civil rights movement. NALC grew quickly, recruiting nearly 1,000 black workers as members. In its early years, the chapter focused on breaking down racial exclusion in skilled trades apprenticeship programs at the Chicago Board of Education’s Washburne Trade School. After studying exclusion at Washburne, Black presented NALC findings to the Chicago Board of Education. The board ignored him, but he was able to persuade Congressman Ada
m Clayton Powell, Jr. to temporarily block federal funds to Washburne. Mayor Richard J. Daley later went to the White House and eventually got the money released, but NALC continued its efforts to integrate Washburne.

Throughout all these protests, Timuel Black was working as a teacher at Hyde Park High School. In 1963, A. Phillip Randolph, the national president of the Negro American Labor Council, tapped Black to be the Chicago coordinator of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He was successful beyond all expectations. Thousands of returning marchers, energized by their numbers and by inspiration from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., vowed to shake up their city. To that end, a host of civil rights organizations, including the NALC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC and the new Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) organized the October 22, 1963 “freedom march” and boycott of the Chicago Public Schools. A quarter of a million students participated. Many marched on school headquarters, chanting “Willis Must Go!” and “No More Segregated Schools.”

During the 1963 municipal elections, a coalition of seven independent black candidates, including Timuel Black, challenged incumbent African American aldermen who were aligned with Mayor Richard J. Daley and with Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis. At a press conference for the campaign, Black said it was time to “end plantation politics” in Chicago. He did not win the aldermanic race, but the phrase became nationally famous.

Timuel Black severed his relationship with the Chicago Public Schools in 1966. For the next three years he served as assistant director of the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Chicago Teacher Corps, coordinating its community activities. Black was appointed dean of Wright College, part of the City Colleges of Chicago, in 1969; he was promoted to vice president for academic affairs at Olive Harvey College in 1972. In the summer of 1973, he received an unexpected two-sentence memo from Dr. Charles Kidd, acting president of Olive Harvey College, announcing “the abolishment” of Black’s position. Kidd was acting on orders from City Colleges of Chicago Chancellor Oscar Shabat. Black responded with a letter to Dr. Oscar Shabat detailing the events leading to his termination and asking for an official reason for his dismissal.

The college and president’s office received a deluge of complaints and negative publicity over Black’s termination. Students, faculty, civil rights organizations and activists mounted a written protest campaign. Lu Palmer and Vernon Jarrett penned newspaper columns and flooded the air waves with the story. This tide of negative publicity forced the City Colleges to rescind his termination. Black was rehired and promoted to the new position of director and chairperson of community affairs for the City Colleges. The wide-ranging duties of this position allowed Timuel Black to interact with all the city colleges and foster relationships between the city colleges, communities and private organizations. Due to budget cuts in 1975, Black’s position was eliminated and he resumed teaching duties at Loop College (now Harold Washington College). He held a professorship there until he formally retired from the City Colleges in 1989.

Timuel and his wife, Zenobia, met while doing campaign work for Congressman Harold Washington in 1982. Timuel was co-chairing the 1st Congressional District Education Task Force, and Zenobia was a member of the Housing Task Force. Zenobia Johnson-Black is a second generation Chicagoan, educated in the Chicago public school system and an alumna of Chicago State University. She later said they dated, married and spent their honeymoon doing voter registration work for Washington’s 1983 mayoral campaign.

In response to conditions set by Congressman Harold Washington to enter the 1983 mayoral race, Timuel Black, Lu Palmer, Zenobia Johnson-Black, Oscar Worrill and Nate Clay organized the “People’s Movement for a Voter’s Registration.” Black told the activists: “We must agitate, organize, educate and register to vote.” This organization and several other grassroots organizations like P.O.W.E.R. (People Organized for Welfare and Employment Rights) from the West Side, the Uptown coalition and Midwest Community Council worked together tirelessly to educate, train and mobilize African American voters. Church basements, community centers and union halls became venues for political education classes. Harold Washington’s campaign was a grassroots effort, and Timuel Black was visible in just about every political committee that catapulted Harold Washington into the fifth floor of City Hall in 1983.

Even though Black officially retired in 1989, he never stopped teaching and working. He taught courses at Roosevelt University, lectured at DePaul University and Columbia College, and worked on the Black Metropolis Oral History Project for more than 10 years. The Black Metropolis Oral History Project had three components: oral history interviews of more than 100 people, his own autobiography and a monograph on “Bronzeville and the Great Migration.”

Throughout Timuel Black’s life, organizational consciousness was paramount. Black began his activist career while he was still a teenager by advocating “Don’t Spend Your Money Where You Can’t Work” and picketing stores that would not hire African Americans. He went on to promote desegregation in the armed forces, open housing, independent African American political activity and union organizing. In 1960 Black was instrumental in the founding of the Negro American Labor Council, Chicago Chapter after the AFL-CIO refused to discipline member unions that discriminated against African Americans. Researchers will find extensive working papers of the NALC in the organization series, along with the evidence of Black’s role in civil rights work in other groups. Important organizations in which Black played a leading role in the 1960s include Americans for Democratic Action, Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, Independent Voters of Illinois, Chicago League of Negro Voters, Teachers for Integrated Schools, Teachers for Quality Education, Congress of Racial Equality, Coordinating Council of Community Organizations and the 1963 March on Washington. He also entered politics as an independent aldermanic candidate opposed to what he saw as support for continued segregation by Chicago’s political establishment.

The 1970s saw Black utilizing his position in the administration of the City Colleges of Chicago to solidify civil rights progress through systemic reform and to strengthen coalitions. Black extended his scholarly and professional affiliations, both locally and nationally, in the National Alliance of Black School Educators, Black Faculty in Higher Education and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

In the 1980s Timuel Black served on the 1st Congressional District Office’s Education Task Force, with local and national political implications. As a member of Harold Washington’s inner circle, he helped manage the 1983 mayoral campaign, particularly the registration of voters (People’s Movement for Voter Registration, United Black Voters of Illinois).

The Monsignor John J. Egan Urban Center at DePaul University was dedicated in February 1995 to act as an information catalyst and provide support for community groups and individuals attempting to find grassroots solutions to communitywide problems. Timuel Black was named its first African American member and gave its inaugural lecture on May 11, 1995, while working on his Black Metropolis Oral History Project. As he began more than 70 years ago, building coalitions and educating people in an effort to make the world a better place, he continues the fight today. The late Vernon Jarrett said: “Timuel Black displays a missing ingredient in today’s professionals—organizational initiative.”