“Memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.”1

—Toni Morrison^[1]2

I revisit these words from Toni Morrison’s 1987 speech “The Site of Memory” often, especially when reflecting on the influence of archives, records, truth, and memory on my understanding of the world and my roles in it. In the speech, Morrison spoke to the logic and historical circumstances that shape her approach to fiction as well as fiction’s proximity to autobiography. She notes that her work constantly embraces and departs from autobiographical strategies, especially when she is telling Black American stories, which are often fragmentary and distorted, requiring imagination to fill in gaps left by incomplete and interrupted archives. Until I read those words, I had never had access to such an incisive description of how I understand, maneuver through, and make sense of archives and the circumstances of their creation.3

Morrison’s words echoed in my mind as I spent time reflecting on the photographs made during the peak decades of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, which have rarely been exhibited or published. Morrison’s words and images from the Black Arts Movement together remind me that history is an everlasting practice of reassembly and recomposition—processes that have also defined my family’s story and its wider contexts. The idea of historical reassembly also became an anchor to my curatorial practice and archive advocacy. These personal and professional undertakings were defined through several unexpected encounters in 2017. 4

I had already been living on Chicago’s South Side for nearly a decade before I saw a photo of my father as a child in the early 1960s, taken in front of a three-flat near the corner of Langley Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street in the Bronzeville neighborhood. There he stood, alongside my grandmother and family members whose young faces I did not recognize, with other elementary- and middle-school-aged cousins and kin, dressed as if they were on their way to church.5

For years, this image of my father has left me mesmerized. Not only was this elusive memory captured just blocks away from the home I lived in at the time, but photos of my parents in their younger years were few and far between. Prior to seeing this photograph, I had spent my lifetime subtly prying at my parents for the stories of their lives, transforming them both into temporary, walking memoirs. At the points where their memories stopped, my imagination began, as I completed their portraits using images and materials that I had mentally, physically, or digitally collected over time. My vision of my parents’ earliest days included collages of photos from the pages of the Johnson Publishing Company’s magazines (see fig. 1), scenes from mid- and late twentieth-century television shows with Black storylines, and other capsules of Black visual culture.^[2] In my adult years, as I developed my curatorial practice, I began to add images gathered during my research into Black American life, particularly in Chicago. I found photos and footage of everyday life in Bronzeville—a neighborhood I’ve called home for over fifteen years and an epicenter of Black culture—at the South Side Community Art Center, the Chicago Public Library, the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Bronzeville Visitors Center, and in the personal collections of my neighbors. I started using these images to reconstruct the unremarkable yet treasured events in my parents’ biographies, even though the majority of them actually took place downstate in Peoria, Illinois. But I never expected that those lovely and embellished fragments of memory and imagination would be made more real and truthful through the discovery of a hazy and frayed photograph of my father as a child.
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I realize now that curation may have been my inevitable path, for what does the curator do if not piece together images and objects into a story? And what is the Black American story but a relentlessly incomplete puzzle that is too often waiting for someone to piece it together through a combination of remembrances, imagination, and archival material?7

In the introduction to her book Looking for Lorraine, about the life of writer Lorraine Hansberry, Imani Perry notes the ways that Black artists, particularly in cities like Chicago, must grapple with sociological and material conditions that inevitably impact not only the form of their work but also the content. She writes, “The exploration of big human questions about love and meaning always had material conditions as a backdrop.”^[3] In my work, considerations of social and material conditions are also critical lenses through which to understand the histories and limitations of Black people documenting Black life. These concerns are also present in my reliance on other people’s images as part of my ongoing efforts to reconstruct visual representations of my parents’ memories. The lack of photographic mementos of my family is not the result of their lack of interest in capturing their lives; it is rather an issue of economic position, limited access to photographic tools, and a deficit of the kind of stability that allows for prioritizing and preserving family archives. My relatives have recounted the loss of more than five family homes. The times when a camera was present were memorable occasions because they were rare. The more I learned about this backdrop, the more I could understand why the fissures in our history exist and the more effective my efforts to mend them.8

In the summer of 2017, just a few months after I found that photo of my father, my personal history and creative research collided once again during a summer of visits to the archives of the South Side Community Art Center and the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection at the Chicago Public Library. I was doing racial equity work in philanthropy as the Arts Program Officer at the Field Foundation of Illinois while also developing independent projects for Revisited/Reflected, an ongoing curatorial series that re-creates, based on archival ephemera, historic cultural, political, and social gatherings, often with the original presenters and participants. I created this series to remind myself and others that the breadcrumbs Black people and communities need to reconstruct our past—as well as to accurately forecast the future of our present cultural, economic, political, and social struggles—often live in archives. Working closely with Chicago’s community-rooted artists, arts collectives, media outlets, organizations, and organizers through the Field Foundation, I shaped a project that reconstructs and revisits the history of and intentions behind past events to find continuities and explore how artistic practices and political thought have evolved or endured.9

That was the summer I came across the incredible work of The Catalyst, a radical and stealth collective of artists, cultural workers, educators, psychologists, and sociologists who were behind many of Chicago’s most effective liberation, political, and social movements—that is, those that led to institutional and political change to the direct benefit of Black communities. Founded in 1968 and active for nearly twenty years, The Catalyst first rocked the leaders of Chicago’s white-led service organizations and institutions after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the subsequent uprisings on the West Side. That year marked the beginning of two decades of organizing that had a lasting impact locally and globally. Although it is not known to many outside the collective’s former members and now exists mostly as limited documentation in private archives, The Catalyst’s work is evidenced in explicit shifts toward racial and gender equity in the missions and visions of organizations such as the Young Women’s Christian Association and United Way and even in the election of Harold Washington as mayor. Among the over one hundred and twenty recorded members are familiar names in Chicago’s Black cultural and political heritage, including educator Dr. Carol Adams (a founding member), Creative Arts Foundation founder Abena Joan Brown, historian and author Lerone Bennett, Jr., photographer K. Kofi Moyo, journalist Warner Saunders, and scholar Conrad Worrill.10

After finding one of The Catalyst’s symposium posters and their unapologetically powerful fifteen-point Code of Ethics in the archives of Dr. Adams, I was enthralled—fueled by the same energy that led me to reconstruct and revive my parents’ history and memories. I went on to work with several of the original members to collaboratively reproduce Black FolkUs, the annual symposium and festival the group produced between 1968 and 1981. Thirty-seven years after the last Black FolkUs took place, nearly one hundred artists and organizers representing over fifty Black-led, Chicago-based institutions gathered, ready to harness that original collective energy and discuss how to build, connect, and grow together (see figs. 2–3). Revisiting Black FolkUs made clear the cyclical nature of the symposium’s original topics like funding community education and Black-led schools, creating effective institutions, Pan-Africanism, and the effects of government retrenchment on Black communities.11

Figs. 2–3

That summer I also learned about the work of Alice Browning, founder of the International Black Writers Conference (see fig. 4), which served as an important point of connection for writers in Chicago and globally from 1970 until her passing in 1984. Browning, a Bronzeville-based writer, grassroots publisher, editor, and advocate for Black writers, was one of the first publishers of short stories by celebrated poets like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks in the 1940s, through Negro Story Magazine, which she founded with Fern Gayden. For the Revisited/Reflected series, I reproduced the International Black Writers Conference using archival flyers, programs, posters, and other original documents from the event’s run. Over two dozen writers came together to talk about their work and commune with other Black artists as a tribute to Browning’s life and legacy.
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None of the original events to which Revisted/Reflected paid tribute were extensively photographed—or, if they were, that documentation is not present or accessible in local or national archives that I have searched over the years. This lack of documentation likely contributes to the fact that these significant moments are missing from citations, curricula, documentaries, and history books. Considering Browning’s unbelievably expansive collection of chapbooks by Black poets as well as clippings, comics, ephemera, and manuscripts that define vital periods of Chicago’s twentieth-century Black literary scene, why isn’t her name as well known as those of the writers she championed? Given Chicago’s distinctly vast history of community organizing and era-defining political action, why isn’t The Catalyst’s work mentioned alongside The Wall of Respect, the Organization of Black American Culture, AfriCOBRA, or the South Side Community Art Center? Why did it take nearly ten years for me to know that I had been walking the same streets my grandmother and father had walked decades before I was born? Why are images that tell stories like those of The Catalyst or Browning rarely accessible or presented to wider audiences?
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The reasons are complicated and numerous, but the one that stays at the top of my mind goes back to the material conditions that Perry noted—how they shape the scholarship and preservation practices that cause or, in some cases, correct the omissions in history, especially photographic documentation. We know that gaps in history and memory exist, but we also have access to materials that help us visualize the essence and many possible forms of information that might fill those gaps. We can take a lesson from Morrison, too, whose writing falls somewhere between fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. The methodology I use to reconstruct my family’s story is certainly a Morrison recipe, which mixes a dose of imagination with historical facts and patterns in order to give shape to the missing puzzle pieces. Through the lenses of Darryl Cowherd, Roy Lewis, and Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke, I can see the same sights that members of The Catalyst saw in the spaces where their revolutionary thoughts and actions were seeded and born. In images by Valeria “Mikki” Ferrill, Ted Gray, and Robert Earl Wilson, I encounter the lyrical and breathtaking moments about which poems and short stories are written, by authors like the ones Alice Browning nurtured and uplifted. Through the work of Bob Crawford, James E. Hinton, Don Sparks, James Stricklin, and Onikwa Bill Wallace, I unlock Hazel family memories of laughter, gospel melodies, and long weekends in Chicago. These photographs affirm my understanding of history as a reconstruction. They offer additions to the repository of images I use to visualize the undocumented moments in my family’s life. I am reminded that while all these images depict real people, places, and events, they can also help us to imagine the missing threads of Black stories.
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