[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15384-15385]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         TRIBUTE TO TIMUEL D. 
                               BLACK, JR.

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, sometimes, when I am asked to describe my

[[Page 15385]]

politics, I say, ``I believe in the Gospel of Saints Paul''--Paul the 
Apostle, Paul Douglas, Paul Simon, and Paul Wellstone.
  Paul the Apostle was, of course, one of the most important figures in 
the history of the early Christian Church. Paul Douglas, Paul Simon, 
and Paul Wellstone were Members of this Senate and champions of human 
rights and human dignity.
  This Friday, another champion of human rights and human dignity--Dr. 
Timuel Black--will honored by Citizen Action Illinois with its ninth 
annual Pauls Award, named for Paul Simon and Paul Wellstone.
  I am lucky enough to have been friends with both Pauls--Simon and 
Wellstone. I am sure that they would have approved heartily of the 
decision to honor Dr. Black with an award bearing their names.
  Dr. Timuel Black is a decorated World War II veteran, an educator, 
author, labor leader, civil rights activist, and historian--and a 
bender of the moral arc of the universe. He is a visionary and--for me 
and so many others--a personal hero.
  Timuel Black was born in 1918, in Birmingham, AL--the son of a 
sharecropper and the grandson of slaves.
  He was 8 months old when his family moved to Chicago--the first wave 
of the great migration of African Americans from the Deep South to the 
North. They settled in a part of town called the Black Belt, now known 
as Bronzeville.
  He attended DuSable High School, a legendary all-Black public high 
school, where his classmates included Nat King Cole and John Johnson, 
who would go on to found Jet and Ebony magazines.
  On his 23rd birthday, Japan bombed U.S. Navy ships at Pearl Harbor.
  He served 2 years in a segregated U.S. Army. He participated in the 
Battle of the Bulge, the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of 
Paris, and he earned four battle stars.
  He thought he had seen the worst of World War II--then he witnessed 
what had happened at Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp.
  The horrors that he witnessed at that death camp changed his life.
  For a time, he was filled with despair. Then he resolved to spend the 
rest of his life doing whatever he could to advance the causes of human 
rights and human dignity.
  He returned to Chicago and earned an undergraduate degree from 
Roosevelt University and a master's degree from the University of 
Chicago.
  He helped establish the Congress of Racial Equality. He also helped 
found a labor union that helped me work my way through college: the 
United Packinghouse Workers of America.
  He began his professional career as a social worker, but he quickly 
discovered that his real love was ``teaching young men and women about 
the world they live in and how to be responsible citizens of that 
world.''
  He spent more than 40 years as a teacher, including 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.
  Timuel Black was watching television in December 1955 when he saw 
``this good-looking man in Montgomery, Alabama.'' He was so moved that 
he boarded a plane to meet him.
  A year later, Tim Black convinced that young man to come to Chicago--
the first time Dr. Martin Luther King would speak in the city.
  In 1963, Dr. Black helped organize the Freedom Trains that carried 
thousands of Chicagoans to hear Dr. King and others speak at the foot 
of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. He was there when Dr. King 
delivered his immortal ``I Have a Dream'' speech.
  He was with Dr. King in 1966 when an angry mob jeered him in 
Chicago's Marquette Park neighborhood.
  In 1983, Tim Black provided influential support to help elect another 
of his DuSable High School classmates, Harold Washington, the first 
African-American mayor of Chicago.
  Some years later, 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.
  Over the years, Professor Black and that young organizer became good 
friends.
  On January 20, 2009, it was my privilege to invite Professor Black 
and his incredible wife, Zenobia Johnson-Black, to be my guests as that 
community organizer swore an oath to become President of the United 
States of America--Barack Obama.
  My friend, Paul Wellstone, had a beautiful definition of politics. He 
used to say: In the last analysis, politics is not predictions and 
politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what 
we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope 
for and what we dare to imagine.
  Dr. Timuel Black has witnessed injustice and inhumanity, but he has 
never stopped working to believe in a better world, and he has never 
stopped working to make that world a reality. He is a true inspiration, 
a Chicago treasure, and an American hero.

                          ____________________