Bart Schultz

The best example of the work of the Civic Knowledge Project  is our work with the great South Side historian, educator, and civil rights activist, the late Timuel D. Black, who now, at long last, has an endowed scholarship named in his honor at the University of Chicago, one of his alma maters. Prof. Black, who worked closely with Dr. King, was a revered teacher whose many devoted students (from such fabled schools as DuSable HS, Hyde Park Academy HS, and Harold Washington City College) would celebrate him for putting students at the center of his teaching and committing to their total educational experience, encouraging them to become active learners by engaging in dialogue with community activists and organizers from the civil rights movement.

His long and amazing life stretched from 1918 to 2021, and he shaped our program in so many ways and to such good effect that we adapted the CKP's Winning Words curriculum to teach philosophy, civics, and history through the example of his life and work, and the stories of other brilliant Chicago changemakers, from Ida B. Wells to Margaret Burroughs to Leon Despres to Hazel Johnson, and of course the stories of the civic-minded community members without whom change does not happen. Timuel D. Black and his “Sacred Ground” taught the CKP and Winning Words how the academic disciplines at the University of Chicago can and should be made more diverse, inclusive, and equitable, better grounded in their historical communities and more attuned to the deep insights and life lessons of our friends and neighbors on the South Side and in other Chicago neighborhoods. And through these local relations, we can see the global situation in a clearer way—the worldview of Timuel D. Black, though rooted in his “Sacred Ground” of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, was as expansive as the worldview of his mentor, Dr. King, who held that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”