Join our virtual event on September 17
Join CatchLight and ProPublica for a virtual panel discussion revisiting systemic disinvestment through archival visuals in Garfield Park , the historically Black neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago.
The panel, moderated by Tony Briscoe of ProPublica, will include Garfield Park resident Annette Britton, CatchLight Local Chicago Fellow Samantha Cabrera Friend, and Stacie Williams, Division Chief, Archives and Special Collections, at the Chicago Public Library and a member of The Blackivists, a collective of professional Black archivists. The virtual panel discussion will be held at 6 p.m. CT on Friday, September 17.
The discussion will center around Meeting History: A Garfield Park Citizen Archive, an exhibition by CatchLight Local Chicago Fellow Samantha Cabrera Friend, in partnership with ProPublica and the Institute for Nonprofit News. The exhibition, “Meeting History: A Garfield Park Citizen Archive” is a community-based visual storytelling and archival project helping residents put in focus a previously undocumented history of Garfield Park—one that centers historical Black joy, ownership, legacy, and preservation through the sourcing of citizen archives.
Why Garfield Park? An extensive 2019 ProPublica story on systemic disinvestment by the City of Chicago dispelled the myths surrounding the struggles of Garfield Park and showed it was ongoing government neglect and not the result of riots sparked by the 1968 assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the article:
“Like many commercial corridors in Black neighborhoods around the country, Madison Street has suffered the devastating consequences of generations of government and private sector neglect. For decades, many Chicagoans have attributed the community’s struggles to the riots of April 1968, when cities across the nation erupted in property destruction and violence after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In Chicago, the uprising started on Madison Street and spread, leaving nine people dead and 300 injured — reducing stretches of East Garfield Park to rubble. In this narrative, the riots set the West Side on a path of decline. A ProPublica investigation tells a different story.”
A visual essay including community-sourced archives and portraits will be published by ProPublica in September as a visual response to the previous ProPublica article written by Briscoe, Haru Coryne and Mick Dumke.
An exhibition of the project will be on view at the Chicago Public Library’s Legler Regional Library, located in the West Garfield Park neighborhood, from September 2 through November 15.