West Side
VOICES Helen KinsKey and Peter t. Alter
ounded in 2005, the Chicago History Museum’s Studs Terkel Center for Oral History collaborates with community partners to promote oral history as a tool of social justice. Through documenting everyday people’s voices, the center carries forward the legacy of well-known actor, disc jockey, oral historian, journalist, and writer Studs Terkel. The center’s most recent oral history projects have a youth engagement component, training middle and high school students as oral historians. During the past three years, the center has worked with youth to address the gaps in our historical understanding of the city’s West Side. Young people have conducted interviews for Forty Blocks: The East Garfield Park Oral History Project and the North Lawndale Sesquicentennial celebration. They will also serve as oral historians for the Chicago Muslim Project.
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East Garfield Park and North Lawndale are two of Chicago’s most historically significant West Side communities. Since World War II, both have undergone enormous changes. During much of the postwar period, many West Side communities, including these areas, experienced major racial transformation, from white to African American, and deep disinvestment as companies and businesses moved out of the area, taking jobs and services with them. Historians and others have studied the pre-1950s and civil rights history of North Lawndale and East Garfield Park. After the late 1960s, however, these communities are woefully underdocumented. In 2016, Studs Terkel Center staff worked with the Film Crew, a youth documentary filmmaking group that is part of Breakthrough Urban Ministries in East Garfield Park. Each year, Breakthrough— a community organization with broad connections in the neighborhood—recruits, hires, and trains young people from the area to work with documentary filmmakers to create short films. 32 | Chicago History | Summer 2018
The Forty Blocks interview day team (above) included Breakthrough’s Film Crew and volunteers as well as Chicago History Museum staff and interns, 2016. Photograph by Erin Drewitz.
The Film Crew, consisting of nine middle and high school students, collaborated with the center to conduct twenty-two interviews. These oral histories became Forty Blocks, a documentary film about East Garfield Park’s history. Currently, the center plays a supporting role in the North Lawndale Sesquicentennial, developed by Paul Norrington, presi-
dent and founder of the K-Town Historic District Association. The project supports the upcoming celebration of the 150th anniversary of Chicago annexing this West Side community. Consisting entirely of local stakeholders, in the words of the organization, “the North Lawndale Sesquicentennial Committee (NLSC) is dedicated to fostering community pride by maximizing community participation