Margaret Burroughs a famed artist worked to found the DuSable Museum while enlightened scholars showered and work-shopped the ready for change masses with New African insights at the famed “Black Communiversity” and Afro Arts Theater.
On the business levels there was Brother Fuller, whose Fuller Brush Company, transformed door-to-door sales into a community art form that became highly emulated. There too was the ubiquitous John H. Johnson, a constant reminder, long before the Hollywood breakthroughs, that we could be great, black and wealthy. We watched with awe as Reverend Johnny Coleman, a black woman, took a small church on Chicago’s south-side and turned it a magnificent edifice for God’s worshipers. Elijah Muhammed showed that knowledge of self and do for self ethics were essential to restoration of black pride even as the legendary “Dope Busters" refused to allow drugs into black communities. Rev Jesse Jackson did his Operation Push and later the Rainbow Coalition in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination. From whence came the famous saying; “I Am Somebody”… “I may be poor”, but “I am Somebody”!
In the field of literature there was the impeccable historian, Leronne Bennett, the stalwart Defender Newspaper, the gifted Chicago’s poet-laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks and the proud, in-the-image-of Brother Malcolm, Muhammed Speaks salesmen. Journalism instructor the late, Baba Lou Palmer at Wilson Junior College taught night classes after work and the indefatigable Curtis Ellis’s spawned his Ellis Black Book stores throughout the needy areas in the hood. These and a host of strong black mentors were all fiercely dedicated to raising the consciousness of talented, yet still deep sleeping kidnapped Africans.
Thus when the young Barack Obama arrived in Chicago the mustard seeds necessary for his matriculation into stellar greatness were already historically planted. The alchemical “winds of change” had been there, waiting, to usher him into a place that was prophetically ordained twenty-five hundred years before and 7,000 miles away.
Significantly not long after his death, Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago had a magnificent library dedicated in his honor. Most recently his vision of transforming the “south side” into a black cultural Mecca, is being realized.
This then is a portion of the rich Chicago legacy that Barack Obama, as Senator of Illinois, has laid claimed to.
When he chose to dedicate his life to helping underprivileged black and Hispanic citizens rather than selecting for himself the highest paying law firm partnership in the country (which he qualified for) he inherited the keys to something far greater.
