Grantee Partner Spotlight: Shorefront Legacy Center
("Colorful Legacies" launch party, February 25, 2024)
Features
By Mark Hallett, Director of Grants Programs
Read Time 8 minutes
August 19, 2024
The Shorefront Legacy Center is an archival institution dedicated to illuminating the rich tapestry of Black history on Chicago’s suburban North Shore. Founded on three core principles — Collect, Preserve, and Educate — it aims to create a dynamic space for reflection and growth.
Shorefront’s mission is to collect, preserve, and share the stories of Black individuals who have lived, sometimes invisibly, throughout Chicago’s suburban north shore. Shorefront received an Illinois Humanities Activate History Microgrant for a project that speaks to its mission and core principles called Colorful Legacies: Celebrating Evanston’s Local Black Historical Figures.
Colorful Legacies draws on Shorefront's extensive archives to create a coloring book that serves as a creative and educational outlet, provides playful enjoyment for children as they color in the book, and education for people of all ages as they learn the names of prominent Black Evanstonians.
In the following Q&A, read more about this project, Shorefront, its programming, and how it builds community.
A Q&A with Laurice Bell
Executive Director of the Shorefront Legacy Center
Shorefront’s website lays out the history of your organization, which I didn’t realize dates back to 1995. The core mission focuses on three values: to collect, preserve, and educate. I wonder if you can share a little bit about the history that Shorefront focuses on as an organization.
I’d like to start with a quote, from Carter G. Woodson, who said, “If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition. It becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”
This is very true of the history of Black people on the North Shore. For generations, we did not bother with these stories and now, we are struggling to regain that ground on a daily basis. In fact, I often feel that timing-wise we are in a five-alarm fire. Yet, we have to find a way to move through it very gingerly and respectfully to gather the stories of Black people who have been marginalized for many years.
Shorefront started in 1995 when Dino [Morris Robinson, Shorefront’s founder] went to a local history center and asked for any information on Black achievements on the North Shore. He was handed two thin file folders marked ‘colored.’ This became his call to action. He started building relationships, and creating trust within the community to allow him to gather the thousands of stories that are now at Shorefront.
You know, as we focus on documenting and preserving the history of Black residents, it’s not just one group. Black is a diaspora. It’s Jamaican, Haitian, Afro-Caribbean, and much more. What we found when we spoke with people is that without the Black community, nothing would have been built.
Archive photo of Gibbs Gas Station in Evanston, Illinois.
Ben Gaines with students from the Intergenerational Reparations Interview Project.
Shorefront as an organization has had a number of pivotal victories or moments of late that are very exciting. Can you share a little of that with us? What kind of a moment is this for you all as an organization?
It’s a transformative moment. My organization is now 26 years old. I started less than two years ago, as the first full-time executive director. In that time, we’ve held our first fundraising gala. We augmented our internship program from one college student to five. We began the Intergenerational Interview Project, a nine-week workshop to teach high school students how to talk with the elders who received reparations from the city of Evanston. We developed a seven-week summer program with Family Focus to teach elementary school students about the Black legacy on the North Shore. We are hiring our first archivist. We developed a partnership with Northwestern University’s Neighborhood and Community Relations Department. We’ve expanded our government support to include the Cook County Board. We garnered seven new grants, including the one from Illinois Humanities to produce a coloring book on Black history.
This is a moment of reflection and proactive engagement. We are finding new ways to share our archives by connecting with broader audiences. But I also want to emphasize the importance of not segregating the historical narrative into Black history. We believe it must be recognized as simply a part of all our history, comprehensive and inclusive.
Our approach acknowledges the contributions of Black people but integrates their stories into the collective memory of our nation and it ensures our history is fundamental, not peripheral.
Last fall Illinois Humanities gave Shorefront an Activate History Microgrant for the Colorful Legacies project. Can you describe it?
I love coloring books because I think they are a doorway to the past. When I think about Colorful Legacies, I think of all the amazing stories we have in our archives. Whenever we open one of those boxes, we are surrounding ourselves with the spirits of our ancestors.
Colorful Legacies informs and educates a new generation about those that came before them and makes the many good things they did in the past, relevant to today.
The coloring book pages were designed by an extraordinary artist, Andrew Walker III, and then we had a remarkable intern from our partnership with the Black Metropolis Research Consortium and Northwestern’s Center for Civic Engagement, Alex Keith, who did some of the writing with me and Susy Schultz.
Colorful Legacies features 20 biographies of Black Evanstonians— some of whom are still here and some who are not. Just recently we lost one of our big names, William Logan, Jr., who was the first Black chief of police here in Evanston. But like so many others, he was also a quiet giant who did not flaunt all he did to improve the community. He touched lives, much like Doria Dee Johnson, a historian, and John Otis Whitmore, the supervising custodian at the elementary school district.
Every one of the people in the coloring book are important in their own way and connect us to the past and present.
So many history centers and societies are struggling with ways to engage young people in appreciating history. We know that this has been a theme in the work you do. How do you approach young people, and what have you learned works?
I’ve learned that education does not just go in one direction. So we’re building timelines and oral histories.
For example, we have two people working on interviewing individuals or descendants of those who worked in homes as domestics on the North Shore. We have someone else working on land clearance, and how that affected the Black community. And we have someone working on sports leagues and segregation.
We try to meet different groups where they are at, such as our kids program. There, we create different tools such as crossword puzzles, or a scavenger hunt, to talk about history.
We engage them on a level that they can embrace.
And when something works, we are always willing to pivot toward success. In our pilot Intergenerational Interview Project, we thought the teens were going to meet the elders on the first day and then, we would teach only the teens about journalism, history, and intellectual curiosity.
The elders were so interested in what the kids were learning that they came back every week. So, what we managed to build was two generations learning and growing together and the end result was a richer and deeper interview on both sides.
Youth participating at the Colorful Legacies Art Pop-up launch party.
Suggested media by Laurice Bell
Books
- U.S. Civil Rights Trail by Deborah D. Douglas
- The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah Jones
- Freedom Was in Sight by Kate Masur
- Black Country Music: Listening For Revolutions by Francesca T. Royster
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Audio
- The podcast Evanston Rules
- WBEZ’s Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons: “Shorefront’s Intergenerational Reparations Interview Project”
- Any and all music by Marvin Gaye
About Shorefront Legacy Center
The Shorefront Legacy Center is a community-based history center that collects, preserves, and shares the history of Black individuals who have lived, sometimes invisibly, throughout Chicago’s suburban North Shore. Founded on the three core principles — Collect, Preserve, and Educate — Shorefront aims to create a dynamic space for reflection and growth.
Shorefront’s archives, which have been donated by multi-generational community members, include more than 1,500 photographic images, 140 hours of film, documents, obituaries, audio/video histories, periodicals, and a library of over 500 books and reference materials. These items span WW1 and WW2, the Civil Rights Movement, groundbreaking inventions, film, music, art, and literature. Shorefront’s archives have played a crucial role in Evanston’s development of the nation's first municipal effort to make reparations to African Americans, an effort that has been studied and copied both nationally and abroad.
Follow @ShorefrontLegacy: Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Upcoming Events & Projects
- Evanston Folk Festival: Community Pop-Up Concert
Friday | August 30, 2024 | 6:30 p.m. | Free
Ridgeville Park, Evanston, Illinois
Jimmy Burns performs the songs and stories of Curtis Mayfield.
- The Intergenerational Interview Project is a nine-week workshop to teach high school students how to talk with the elders who received reparations from the city of Evanston. A video and magazine about this project will be released in the fall.
About the Grantee Partner Spotlight Series
Illinois Humanities highlights the work of our Grants partners through our monthly Grantee Partner Spotlight. It shines a light on our grantee partners' work and allows readers to get to know them better through a Q&A with members of the organization. Read more by browsing the "Grantee Partner Spotlight" series here.
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