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East Garfield Park To Be Focus of Oral History Project

By Ted Cox | February 8, 2016 6:41am | Updated on February 9, 2016 9:58am
 Although he lived for a time in North Lawndale, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. also spent significant time in East Garfield Park.
Although he lived for a time in North Lawndale, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. also spent significant time in East Garfield Park.
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University of Illinois at Chicago Library via Flickr

EAST GARFIELD PARK — West Siders will get a chance to flesh out their own place in the city's history thanks to a project by the Chicago History Museum and East Garfield Park's Breakthrough Ministries.

The oral-history project is meant to correct an imbalance in historical archives between African-American communities on the West Side and the South Side, museum officials said.

"We have great history, great treasures," said Ald. Jason Ervin (28th), who cheered the project. "A lot of people on the South Side originally lived on the West Side.

"The West Side has great history and great people," he added, "and while we've had some challenges we are communities that are definitely on the incline."

"We will be learning every step of the way, learning something new about East Garfield Park," says the Chicago History Museum's Peter Alter.
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DNAinfo/Ted Cox

"Forty Blocks: The East Garfield Park Oral History Project" is intended to balance the local history books, while at the same time providing training in the field to middle- and high-school students on the West Side through Breakthrough Ministries' Film Crew group.

Those students — 10 selected just last weekend from applications and interviews — will be schooled in documentary techniques, in addition to their usual mentoring through the Film Crew group by professional filmmakers, sound crews and photographers.

Things figure to really get rolling in March, said Peter Alter, director or the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History at the museum, when they'll have weekly sessions on the area's history, interviewing and film, as well as a tour of the museum and, of course, the interviews themselves. They're planning not just a collection of the interviews, but a 20-minute film documentary, to be completed this summer.

"It's a great opportunity for some of our students, for sure," said Amy Nelson, associate director of the Youth Network Art & Science Academy at Breakthrough. Until then, they have a 30-day Kickstarter campaign going with the goal to raise $3,000, raising $900 as of Sunday.

According to Alter, the University of Chicago's Black Metropolis Resource Consortium has found "strong" collections of historical information on the South Side, "but not for the West Side."

Local historians are "excited," he said, in that "they know there's a lack of documentation of African-American communities on the West Side."

Community group Breakthrough Ministries was preparing to embark on its oral history project in East Garfield Park at the same time that Alter had the idea to do the same.

"I've been looking for a community-based oral-history project," Alter said. A 16-year employee of the museum, promoted to head the Terkel Center last year, he'd had a role in a 2008 oral-history production on the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as well as another on the Cold War, and "I re-caught the oral-history bug."

With students conducting and recording what's expected to be 20 to 30 half-hour interviews, Alter said one of the pleasures of the project is they don't really know what they'll turn up, as the story of East Garfield Park is largely untold in conventional archives.

"We will be learning every step of the way, learning something new about East Garfield Park," he said.

Alter knows, however, that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s stay on the West Side as he pushed for fair housing through the Chicago Freedom Movement in the '60s figures to be a significant part of it.

RELATED: 50 Years Ago, MLK Lived In, Led Fair Housing Fight From Chicago's West Side

"Martin Luther King, of course, lived in North Lawndale," Alter said, "but he was very active and spoke at a lot of churches and other public venues in East Garfield Park, so we'll be documenting a little bit of that history."

"East Garfield Park's history has not been recorded over the last 40 years," Nelson said. "I think it'll be an opportunity for people to talk about gentrification," along with changes that have taken place on major neighborhood thoroughfares like Madison Street and Kedzie Avenue.

Those changes are ongoing, Nelson said. "People are saying East Garfield Park is going to be the next Wicker Park," she added, with a current influx of artists into area lofts. "It's dramatically changing. A number of residents who've been here a long time have actually seen their rent prices raised, so some people have had to relocate farther west."

Those changes figure to get placed under the microscope, along with the rise and fall of the crime rate over the years, Nelson said, "as well as some of Breakthrough's history," since the agency moved to the West Side about two decades ago. It now runs a homeless shelter, a food pantry, housing and legal aid and youth and family programs in the area.

Alter believes it could be the jumping-off point for other neighborhood oral histories, as the museum takes the same basic idea to other areas with what he called a "same song, second verse" approach.

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