Chicago

Simple Simon excerpt, The Chicago Defender

Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. Hailing from Missouri, who graduated from Lincoln University, a Pennsylvania HBCU. He is known for being a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, and an innovator of ‘Jazz Poetry’ Chicago Connection: From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement gained traction, he wrote an in-depth weekly column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender.

“We Real Cool” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century American poets. She had the distinction of being the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize, the first Black woman to hold the role of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now referred to as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, and as the first Black Illinois poet laureate, a position she held for 32 years.

Historic image of Ida B. Wells Drive, Chicago, IL

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a prominent educator, journalist, activist, and researcher, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In her lifetime, she battled sexism, racism, and violence. In 1895, Wells-Barnett married famed African American lawyer Ferdinand Barnett. Together, the couple had four children. Throughout her career Wells-Barnett, balanced motherhood with her activism. Although she was in Niagara Falls for the founding of the NAACP, her name is not mentioned as an official founder. Chicago Connection: Her expose about an 1892 lynching enraged locals, who burned her press and drove her from Memphis. After a few months, the threats became so bad she was forced to move to Chicago.

Original patient drawing, ice cream mold and disher

Alfred L. Cralle received US Patent 576,395 in 1897 for an “ice cream mold and disher,” or mechanical ice-cream scoop, which is the basic design still used widely today. Cralle did not become famous for the invention of his ice cream scoop. It spread widely so quickly that people soon forgot or never knew Cralle as the inventor. Thus, he never profited from his invention.

George Speak a.k.a. George Crum, was a Chef in upstate New York, who owned a popular restaurant called Crum's, that used ingredients primarily grown and sourced from his farm. His sister Kate Wicks, who worked as a cook at his establishment, is known for inventing Saratoga Chips, which helped popularize potato chips in the US. According to the story, she had "chipped off a piece of the potato which, by the merest accident, fell into the pan of fat. She fished it out with a fork and set it down upon a plate beside her on the table." Her brother tasted it, declared it good, and said, "We’ll have plenty of these." In a 1932 interview with the Saratogian newspaper, her grandson, John Gilbert Freeman, asserted Wicks's role as the true inventor of the potato chip.

Street Scene Chicago, 1936. Oil on canvas, 36 x 42 inches (91.4 x 106.7 cm).

Archibald Motley was an American visual artist. Motley is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, a time in which African-American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America—its local expression is referred to as the Chicago Black Renaissance He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1918.

Composition Study III, etching and aquatint, 1974.

Eldzier Cortor was an artist and printmaker from Chicago. His work typically features elongated nude figures in intimate settings, influenced by both traditional African art and European surrealism. Cortor saw Black women as the carriers of Black culture. A 1936 graduate of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, his style is often described as experimenting with black physiognomy while infusing it with surrealism.

Overburdened with Significance (detail), 2011. Porcelain, terracotta, and graphite, 22 × 8 × 14 inches (55.9 × 20.3 × 25.6 cm). Bridgitt and Bruce Evans. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who currently resides in New York City. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time magazine in 2023.

Philip P. Thomas, © 2016.

Founded in 1955, the Washington Park Camera Club is the oldest, predominately African American camera club in the Chicago area and a member of the Chicago-Area Camera Club Association

45-Degree Residence, Detroit, MI

Roger Margerum was an African American architect who worked primarily in Michigan. His designs were like architectural Rubik's cubes — midcentury modern structures twisted into geometric shapes that are visual delights. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Margerum earned his architectural degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Nine years after Margerum opened his architectural firm in 1974, the designer had construction projects totaling around $35 million.