Three Giants of Chicago's West Side
The Black women educators and organizers who built the community that helped me grow up.
This past November, I wrote and signed a check for $1000 from the Farm Alliance, the membership organization I help run, to a 17 year old young man from Baltimore to help pay for books when he arrives at college. This award represents the first iteration of the Sofia W. Memorial Scholarship Fund, a modest fund that I started with the help of a few generous donors and some committee members in 2022.
The scholarship fund, named in memory of a teen who died in 2020, is a project I have been waiting and wanting to launch since 2018. It is modeled on the Austin Scholarship Fund, which provides a similar small but meaningful boost to college-bound seniors from Chicago’s West Side, and has been doing so for over 40 years, sponsored by the Third Unitarian Church of Chicago and under the leadership of its founder, Ms. Roberta Wilson.
Ms. Wilson, who is now in her 90s, has helped push over 400 kids into college with this scholarship, which provides a similar type of support to that which middle-class kids might get from extended family members giving them checks for $100 at their graduation parties. But the kids who win this award
don’t have relatives who can afford to write those checks, so the community steps in to provide. It functions similarly to a community care mutual aid fund, with a minimal application process and the only requirements being an acceptance to any college and residency in the city of Chicago.
Third Church was my childhood church, where I went with my family most Sunday mornings until I turned 17 and left for college myself.
I lived in Oak Park, just across the city border to the west, and my parents piled us in the car to drive the 14 or so blocks to the church. It seemed an unlikely home for the sophisticated community organizing and mutual aid that geniuses like Roberta Wilson, Brenetta Howell Barrett, and Bonnie Triplett cultivated and stewarded. The brutalist stone and brick structure, with its drafty warrens of corridors and sunken gathering halls, housed a particular lineage of Black women and other Leftist elders that gave me and other young people a core value system, developed our empathy, and taught us that we will never be alone as long as we have comrades to share in life’s struggles. Today, to honor them and in recognition of Black History & Heritage Month, I want to remember the Black women geniuses, particularly Bonnie Triplett and Roberta Wilson.
The 1980s was a tumultuous decade in Chicago, that saw the decline and fall of the (first) Daley empire, the start of Reagan’s War on Drugs, the hapless mayoralty of Jane Byrne, and the community organizing (due in large part to the work of Brenetta Howell Barrett on the West Side, and others such as Dr. Margaret Burroughs on the South Side, Hazel Johnson the “mother of environmental justice”, Dr. Timuel Black, and more) that gave rise to the election of Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor. All of this community organizing was urgently needed because of the rampant disinvestment in and targeting of Black and Brown communities, the spread of HIV/AIDS, and the rampant industrial pollution & poisoning of communities of color.
Third Unitarian Church was a broadly ignored center of radical organizing on the West Side; I believe it was overlooked because it was difficult to understand as either a church or a political organizing space. It had a long tradition of being a home for humanist/secular spiritual seekers and for Communist Party members and Communist-adjacent intellectuals. It was a national historic landmark and a jarring example of Brutalist architecture in a neighborhood of colorful Victorian and Edwardian “painted ladies”, houses where multiple generations of Black and Brown Chicagoans often dwelled peacefully together even as they were targeted with violent poverty. The brick-walled sanctuary, with its green carpeting and velvet-cushioned pews, boasted a grid of framed mosaic portraits of great organizers by ceramicist Andrene Kauffman, including: Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, and Mahatma Gandhi. The after-services coffee and social hour was held in a great sunken gathering hall tiled in linoleum like a school cafeteria, named the Paul Robeson room -- not because of an abstract affinity for Robeson, but because Paul Robeson actually visited and spoke at the church several times. A small income for the church came from books sold at the Bertolt Brecht Bookstore on the main level. Brenetta Howell Barrett, who is still living on the West Side right now and in her early 90s, built and ran the Harriet Tubman Place shelter in an old house kitty-corner from the church on Mayfield Avenue in the late 1980s. It became a shelter for individuals living with HIV -- nearly all Black women and men, some with children -- and an LGBTQ+ refuge that lasted at least through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. (If anyone knows whether Tubman Place still operates, please reach out and let me know! I haven’t been able to find anything about it online except archival items.) Ms. Howell Barrett also worked closely with other master Chicago organizers including Dr. Timuel Black to ensure that the West Side had representation in the broad coalitional work of resisting racist poverty. She was so prominent a figure in Chicago’s constellation of organizers that her papers have been archived at the Chicago Public Library for all to use.
Bernadette “Bonnie” Triplett was also a member of Third Unitarian Church when I was growing up. A teacher and administrator in the Chicago Public Schools, she had teamed up in 1970 with another church member, fellow educator June Heinrich, to create The Black ABCs, a series of 26 small posters for kindergarten classrooms to help children learn to read. Bonnie was concerned that the existing classroom materials used to teach Black children in Chicago did not offer them positive associations with their own images as Black people. Bonnie came up with the idea for a classroom poster series that could give children a sense of pride in having themselves and their communities represented. One for each letter of the alphabet, the posters consisted of portrait photographs of young Black children from the Ickes Homes in Chicago -- whom June and Bonnie together recruited for the project -- doing normal everyday activities like talking on the phone, eating, or jumping and playing on a blacktop playground, along with a word to describe the activity shown. “Z is for zip” or “B is for beautiful” were typical phrases. June put them into print, and they were distributed to teachers for a few years.1
By the time I met her, when I was around eight or nine years old, Bonnie was happily living in retirement and focusing on her children and grandchildren. June and others organized an intergenerational choir, the West Side Choir for Peace, and Bonnie invited me to be her singing partner. To be clear: I could not carry a tune. But Bonnie made it sound as if I did not have a choice, so she and I rehearsed together along with the rest of the sopranos in the choir each week. We learned songs about peace and justice, and occasionally performed in the church service. Bonnie wore a long wool coat with deep pockets, and unfailingly had a tiny toy or special pencil or piece of candy for me in those pockets. Her hats were massive and colorful, and she and her husband dressed to the nines for church as few others in that congregation did. She managed to be regal, dignified, authoritative, and grandmotherly all wrapped up in one magnificent package. She had gravitas. Given that she was a seasoned educator who had poured years of her life into children’s learning, I wonder how I registered in her eyes. With her I felt I was a member of a cherished category of people, someone infused with possibility and deserving of grace and many, many second chances. Singing with her was frightening for me in the beginning, until I understood that she was not judging my abilities or expecting me to hit all the notes correctly. I am certain that she brought this unconditional loving grace to all children whom she encountered; I myself found it to be powerful and transformational. Bonnie was one of several elders in that church who nourished my soul despite the church’s lack of a Christian theology or worship. Roberta Wilson and Brenetta Howell Barrett, by creating and pouring into that space and their tireless vigilance to protect it as a safe place for all who would come inside from the cold of the city streets, did the same. I am forever in their debt, and forever thankful to and for them. In my memory they will always have their flowers; in my life I will always try my best to build on their legacies.
A PERSONAL NOTE OF HEALING
I've come through a slightly harrowing early part of winter, and wanted to share with you all that I am doing great and back in good health following a CT scan showing a growth of nearly 10cm in my abdomen. I was diagnosed Nov. 23rd, had surgery December 28th, and had a couple of weeks of recovery time — so the lack of newsletters from me is because of that! Thank you dear readers for being so patient. I’m back, baby!
The Black ABCs posters — such a cool project! — have been given, evidently, a revival in today’s Internet age: apparently someone uploaded them and made an instagram post about them a few years ago, and they’ve been memed and re-memed ever since. A neurobiologist and visual artist from the University of Chicago also created a new project about the posters, tracking down some of the people who posed for the original posters and interviewing them. You can read more about that project here and here.