[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 191 (Tuesday, December 4, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7273-S7274]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO TIMUEL BLACK

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, one of our most preeminent oral historians 
of our time turns 100 on December 7. Timuel Black was born near the end 
of World War I and has been the keeper of the soul of the south side of 
Chicago to this very day. World War I was supposed to be the war to end 
all wars, but we know some of America's greatest wars were yet to come. 
Tim Black was on the frontlines of many of those fights. As a 
historian, as an activist, and a humanist, he fought and continues to 
fight for the dignity of people and a better future.
  Professor Black was born in 1918, in Birmingham, AL, the son of 
sharecroppers and grandson of slaves. At 8 months, his family moved to 
Chicago, joining the first wave of migration of African Americans from 
the Deep South to the North. His family settled in an area of Chicago 
then-called the Black Belt. It is now known as Bronzeville.
  Tim would go on to celebrate and shape the history of Chicago's Black 
Belt. To Tim, this is sacred ground. But first, he went to Burke 
Elementary School and DuSable High School. His classmates included Nat 
King Cole; future publisher and founder of Jet and Ebony Magazine, John 
H. Johnson, the first African American on Forbes' 400 most wealthy; and 
future Mayor Harold Washington. Don Cornelius and musician Sonny Cohn 
also were among the many famous students of DuSable High School.
  It was on his birthday in 1941 that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The 
U.S. Army drafted Tim into a segregated army 2 years later. In the last 
2 years of World War II, Tim experienced the worst of the war. He 
participated in the Normandy invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, and the 
liberation of Paris. He earned four battle stars. But it was what he 
saw while liberating the Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp, that 
altered the way Tim saw the world. The horrors of the human capacity 
for cruelty at Buchenwald filled Tim with despair.
  He returned to Chicago, resolved to fight for human rights and human 
dignity. He earned an undergraduate degree from Roosevelt University 
and a master's degree from the University of Chicago. Tim started his 
professional career as a social worker, but he quickly discovered that 
his real love was, in his words, ``teaching young men and women about 
the world they live in and how to be responsible citizens of that 
world.''
  For 40 years, Tim did just that through his teaching positions at 
DuSable and other Chicago public schools, as well as Roosevelt 
University, Columbia College Chicago, and schools in the City Colleges 
of Chicago system.
  Tim also has spent his life on the frontlines of the struggle for 
human rights and dignity. At age 13, he walked his first picket line to 
protest the refusal of White-owned businesses in Bronzeville to hire 
Black clerks. As an organizer in labor and social justice movements of 
the 1940s and 1950s, he worked with Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Dubois.
  Tim helped establish the Congress of Racial Equality and the United 
Packinghouse Workers of America labor union. I might not be where I am 
today were it not for Tim's work because it was the Packinghouse union 
that helped me work through college.
  In December of 1955, Tim was watching television when he first saw an 
inspiring man in Montgomery, AL. He hopped on a plane to meet him. A 
year later, Tim convinced him to come to Chicago. This was the first 
time Dr. Martin Luther King would speak in the city. Tim then helped 
organize the Freedom Trains that carried thousands of Chicagoans to 
hear Dr. King roar ``I Have a Dream'' in Washington, DC, in 1963. In 
1966, Tim was right there with Dr. King when an angry mob attacked him 
in Chicago's Marquette Park. Whenever there was a good fight against 
Jim Crow housing, segregated public beaches, job discrimination, or the 
shortchanging of Black students in public schools, you would always 
find Tim Black.
  There is one student of Professor Black we all remember. A couple of 
decades ago, a young community organizer who had just returned to 
Chicago with a Harvard law degree asked Professor Black to teach him 
about organizing people so they could create a better life for 
themselves and their children. The young organizer and Professor Black 
became friends over the years. It was my privilege to invite Professor 
Black and his wonderful wife Zenobia Johnson-Black to be my guests as 
that community organizer swore an oath to become the President of the 
United States. I could not have had a better guest to see the history 
that he had helped make possible as Barack Obama became our first Black 
President.
  Tim may have retired from teaching years ago, but we are all still 
students in his never-ending classroom. His three-volume history of 
Chicago's Black Belt, entitled ``Bridges of Memory,'' is the story of 
the great Black migration to Chicago from the Deep South, told by those 
who made that journey and by their descendants. His home in Hyde Park 
is an incomparable museum of stories about every place he has lived in 
Chicago. The theaters he first heard Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and 
Billie Holliday are still alive and well in memories to be shared.
  Happy birthday, Tim Black. Generations have grown up with a better 
appreciation of their homes and the history they inhabit because of 
you.

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