He was considered an authority on the migration of southern blacks to northern cities.
Civil rights activist, retired Chicago professor and historian Timuel Black has died at the age of 102.
Black died on October 13, his wife told the Chicago Sun-Times and WLS-TV.
Details of his death were not immediately available.
Zenobia Johnson-Black told the Chicago Sun-Times in October, “He left his mark on this city, on his friends, and on the people who are trying to make this world a better place, because that’s what he did.” had tried.” 13.
Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson was one of many to express grief over Black’s passing, calling him “a tall tree in the civil rights forest”.
Rev. Jackson said, “He was an excellent teacher.” “He followed the students beyond the classroom. Tim taught him about politics and business science. Tim adopted us as his younger brothers and sisters. We all have a deep appreciation for Tim Black. He’s one of the rare vintages Icons are… one of the rare teachers in the city of Chicago.”
Black graduated from Chicago’s DuSable High School in 1935 and would serve in the military during World War II.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Roosevelt University and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. Black taught history at Chicago’s public schools and, according to the Sun-Times, was a professor of sociology and anthropology at Chicago’s City Colleges.
“My mother and father were the children of former slaves, my great-grandfathers, products of the Emancipation Proclamation,” Black told the newspaper when he was 100. “I came at a time when African American men – women were also being lynched. The racial segregation was so terrible that people were running to escape terrorism.”
He was considered an authority on the migration of southern blacks to northern cities.
“They fled the South for better opportunities – education, jobs, housing, the right to vote,” Black once said. “Instead, they were made ghettos by landowners who were determined not to rent or sell to Negroes.”
Former President Barack Obama said in a statement on October 13 that Black “was a testament to the power of place, and the work we do to improve a community can resonate through other neighborhoods and other cities, could eventually change the world.”
According to the Chicago Tribune, in the early 1980s, Black threw himself into campaigning to help register voters and elect the city’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington.
“Timuel Black has been an anchor in some of the most consequential struggles for racial, social and economic justice of our time,” the Chicago Teachers Union said in a release on October 13. “For a generation, he shared his voice, his wisdom, his humanity, and his tireless activism to support movements ranging from the struggle for the right to vote for black and brown people.”
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