Session Summary: Politics
On March 12, Arts + Public Life’s Cultural Stewardship team launched the Washington Park In Our Time discussion series, bringing together a cohort of eight artists, scholars, entrepreneurs, and community members. This first gathering explored the political life of the area in the 1980s and 1990s. Dr. Adrienne Brown opened the discussion with gratitude for the group’s presence and emphasized Arts + Public Life’s commitment to recognizing memory holders from this era as vital to understanding cultural expression today. Joining us in conversation, the group welcomed two guests for the evening: political historian Dr. Charles Branham and prolific journalist Salim Muwakkil. We began our conversation by reflecting on the temporal and geographic boundaries of Washington Park, exceeding the limits of the park itself to trace the connections to specific heritages, ecologies, and symbolisms. Grounded in the constancy of ‘summetime Chi,’ cohort members brought us back to the cover of Rose Blouin’s To Washington Park, With Love – an image of makeshift picnics, generations of family, and people coming together all the way to the tree line. The routine of deviled eggs “every Sunday,” passing out water bottles “every year like clockwork,” at the park became a consistent space to share in culture and community. In that shared geography, Washington Park also became a space to get beyond the typical, to find an environment for adventure and curiosity whether by skipping school or starting one.
Through the figure of the monk parakeet, Salim reminded us of all those paths that cross through Washington Park, political and otherwise. There seemed to exist a kind of serendipity in which the park felt as though it had almost been named for Harold a century too soon, in which the nature of the park itself felt inherited from Southern landscapes. The civil rights movement, grassroots organizing, Harold Washington’s mayoral election, and larger-than-life political showmanship, all fit together in the neighborhood and community of the park. Washington Park became a space for distance from the machine politics that defined Chicago, even as it was considered a ‘fluke’ by dominant figures in the media and politics. The coalitions for Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign emerged out of a genuine interest, a new “realm of possibility,” in reshaping Black politics in Chicago. These coalitions were embedded in a long history of local entrepreneurship, based in the arts, that stood apart from national politics to forge new kinds of alliances: artists for Harold, lawyers for Harold, Young Democrats for Harold. Even amidst the political maintenance of racial segregation, boundaries were being redrawn at every level, wards remapped, and new social and geographical networks were formed through Washington Park.
This political energy came springing out from the infrastructures of the neighborhood: the jitnies, buses, cars, phone lines, radio waves, and beyond. Whether kids were hanging out of the window – “Vote for Harold!” – or riding down King Drive in the jump seat to “Come Alive October Five,” the collectivities forged through infrastructure became part of a visual and auditory culture of Black political subjectivity. It is these infrastructures that feel missing in the contemporary moment, in which festivals can no longer maintain the same crowds and the park goes quiet and dark in what would have been busy summer nights – an absence of Black sounds and festival drums. As we located a collective desire to understand disinvestment in Washington Park, the cohort came together to think about what we all still wanted to explore in future sessions: the impact of national politics on the neighborhood, ways to redefine community spaces for organizing and leisure, and everyday life beyond the park.