CHICAGO -- The history of Black History Month began 100 years ago, in the old YMCA building on South Wabash, a wide-shouldered block of pale red brick erected in 1913. It was once the nexus of Bronzeville, the premier gathering spot. At least 80 Chicago organizations met there regularly. When the Harlem Globetrotters (which formed in Bronzeville) were still a novelty, they trained regularly in its gym, for years. If you moved to Chicago during the Great Migration and didn’t have a place to stay, you stayed here, maybe. If you were lucky. During the peak of the Great Migration, the YMCA turned away 20 travelers a day.

The people who work there now, the small staff of the Renaissance Collaborative — which bought the building in 1992, rescuing it from demolition — don’t assume you know any of that. They figure Chicagoans do not know Black History Month took shape here.

When program manager Tara Balcerzak began fundraising for the building’s latest renovation, she told the group’s founder, Patricia Abrams, that she would lean into its role in the creation of Black History Month. Abrams said everyone already knew that; she’d told that story herself for years, while she raising $11 million for the first restoration of the Y.

They’ve since learned people forget, said Fara Taylor, director of finance.

She smiled sadly. “You need to remind them, remind them once more — then again.”

Except, here’s the irony about having to remind them: Considering the political climate, is it possible to draw too much attention to the old YMCA and its history? Balcerzak wonders that. Of course, they do need the attention, she said; she just worries what it could mean in 2026. Even this newspaper story worries her.

“Yes,” she said, “I feel an urgency to see the restoration through, as soon as possible.” See, a few years ago, to renovate this birthplace of Black History Month, they landed a $436,375 grant from the Historic Preservation Fund, which is administered by the National Park Service. That was before federal agencies started removing Black history from websites, erasing names of Black soldiers from battleships and deciding not to recognize Black History Month.

On a recent Monday afternoon, Balcerzak and Taylor stood outside the building’s indoor swimming pool, which is drained and gray and been waiting a decade for its renovation.

Balcerzak chose her words carefully: “There haven’t been any threats.”

Taylor nodded: “We’ve been lucky — (the grant) doesn’t have certain words attached …”

“Not true,” Balcerzak said, “it’s technically an ‘African American Civil Rights Grant’ …”

“Well,” Taylor considered, “at least ‘YMCA’ comes at the end of alphabetizing.”

Black Ellis Island

“The Black Ellis Island.” That’s how John Adams, founder of the Bronzeville Trail Task Force, which is developing two miles of abandoned rail line from the historic neighborhood to the lakefront, describes the old YMCA. “It’s not a relic,” he said, “it was literally key to generations of Black Chicagoans.” Indeed, it was conceived as a step in self-determination. In 1911, Julius Rosenwald, owner of Sears, Roebuck & Co., on the urging of his friend Booker T. Washington, pledged to build YMCAs in Black neighborhoods across the country; he offered $25,000 for each one, if a community raised another $75,000. He eventually built more than two dozen, but Bronzeville was first to raise funds — in fact, within 10 days of the offer, they had the money, a mix of donations from Black Chicagoans and corporate philanthropy. The first donor: James H. Tilghman, a Black retiree, who gave his life savings, about $1,000.

It opened in 1913 and quickly became a community hub.

Timing was perfect. The Great Migration began in 1915 and soon the building teemed with fledgling organizations (the Chicago Urban League was one of many groups launched here); families stayed on its residential floors until they could find homes; the city founded health drives here and YMCA staff helped people find work. They also hosted dances, creating future families. Civil rights leaders met here; famous faces (Jesse Owens, Richard Wright) visited. At a time when few Chicago parks or beaches were inviting to Black Americans, it was a place to learn to swim and play ping pong and basketball and checkers. In 1919, when racial violence broke out across the city after a Black teenager was stoned and drowned at a lakefront beach, the paychecks of Black stockyard workers were forwarded to the Wabash Y, so they could avoid more attacks.

By the mid-’30s, its ballroom contained a mural celebrating all the building promised: a young man kneels in relief before the YMCA crest and Chicago skyline, surrounded by portraits of Black athletes and doctors and scientists and soldiers and pilots and artists.

A need to tell the history

The summer of 1915 was relatively calm in Bronzeville — “not a long, hot summer,” wrote James E. Stamps, who met a young historian named Carter G. Woodson at the Wabash YMCA. Woodson was in town for Fifty Years of Negro Progress, a celebratory exposition at the Chicago Coliseum to mark the anniversary of emancipation. Woodson had a booth, selling posters of Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. He invited Stamps and three others to the Y, where he was staying, to discuss “the need for an organization to give to the world, and particularly to the Negro people, a true story of the Negro.”

Black historians were mostly shut out of meetings of American historians, many of whom insisted Black Americans had no history. So Woodson and friends established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.) A year later, they created the influential Journal of Negro History. In 1926, as the group was floundering, Woodson returned to the Wabash YMCA and announced that the second week of February was now Negro History Week. Fifty years later, it became a month.

Woodson was a restless, ambitious sort, a West Virginia miner and son of former slaves who didn’t enter high school full-time until he was 20. But within 15 years, he had a bachelor’s and master’s degree in history from the University of Chicago; by his late 30s, he was the second Black American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard (the first being W.E.B. Du Bois). His 1933 book, “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” became a landmark study of how American schools wash over Black Americans, especially their history. He was also known as a “cantankerous person, stern to mentees,” said Jarvis Givens, a Woodson biographer and professor of education and African American studies at Harvard; his latest book is “I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month.” “But those same people who thought he was controlling also had a very deep respect for him — they saw him as a person who could be controlling because he was on this mission.”

In many ways, Givens said, by establishing the foundations of Black History Month, “he was demonstrating that what we now call Black studies is an essential part of American history. But really, he was formalizing a tradition that had started going long before him.”

Woodson built on earlier historians who sought a canon of Black figures and events. In 1897, Mary Church Terrell, a teacher in Washington, D.C., convinced her segregated school district to recognize Frederick Douglass Day as an annual commemoration on Feb. 14, Douglass’s recognized birthday. In 1858, William Cooper Nell, a Boston abolitionist, established Crispus Attucks Day, to remind New Englanders that Black people fought and died in the American Revolution. Woodson himself urged Omega Psi Phi, his fraternity, to create a Negro History and Literature Week in 1921, which then became Negro Achievement Week. His Negro History Week, though, first gained traction in schools. By 1932, a number of white schools were also participating.

About 20 years after Woodson’s death in 1950, as Black Studies departments were forming in universities, Black History Months were sprouting on campuses. In Chicago, though, Black History Month was initially Black Liberation Month, the creation of an activist group named The Catalysts. “I was a member and we’d have an event called ‘Black Folk Us’ that would clash with other events in February,” said Carol Adams, the former president of the DuSable Black History Museum in Hyde Park. “There were so many events, you could no longer fit them into one week. So someone suggested a month, and it caught on fast — it became important for school systems to recognize if they were teaching American history without Black people, it was a fiction.”

In 1976, Black History Month was certified by President Gerald Ford, who had been pushed by Black leaders, including ASALH, the group founded at the Wabash YMCA.

A building worth saving

The building, however, was already in steep decline. Said Bernard Turner, executive director of the Bronzeville-Black Metropolis National Heritage Area: “By then a lot of homes and buildings in the neighborhood had become dilapidated from overcrowding and overuse. There was crime, of course, but really there was a lot of overcrowding.” YMCA members were lured away to newer facilities. The YMCA itself left in the late ‘70s. The building closed in 1982, then sat for a decade, a dark husk on a Wabash corner.

The old Wabash YMCA seems to lay low on its block these days. It’s almost modest, nothing flashy and, at a glance, not particularly historic looking. It’s two stories of recreational space, beneath three floors of residential apartments; an addition was built in 1945 for more apartments. When the building was acquired by a group of Chicago churches in 1992 — on the concern it was headed for demolition — its 101 apartments were converted into housing for the chronically homeless, which is how it remains. In the time since it reopened in 2000, the addition has had a $23 million restoration, but the YMCA has returned to the building and departed again (in 2015).

Balcerzak and Taylor walked through the recreational floors, pointing out how much work has been done, and how much is left. Last year, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation donated $105,000 to its revival. But National Park Service money is quickly dwindling.

We walk into the gym, where workers are tearing up its wooden basketball court (not the original floor) with crowbars, stacking blonde slats in a corner. We pass its drained pool. We enter its grand ballroom, where a 30-foot-long mural, W.E. Scott’s “Mind, Body, Spirit,” has already passed through rounds of conservation. Its floor smells like sealant.

You can feel a building returning, slowly.

The Renaissance Collaborative would like it to be a YMCA once again, tucked into a modest history museum. Turner, who worked with them on grants and the building’s story, imagines a set of small classrooms “for children to learn about black history and the Great Migration and touch that actual history, as opposed to only hearing about it.” Balcerzak said when the restoration is completed, eventually, after one more round of fundraising: “We’d like it be what it once was to this community, which is a lot of things.”

The sentiment sounds almost like activism at a moment when Black History Month is being deemphasized, politicians claim diversity itself is a primary source of our woes and museums are being told to rework exhibitions that tell less than flattering history.

On the other hand, what was once created in these rooms is no longer taken for granted. “Black History Month had started to feel somewhat commercial,” Carol Adams said. “People are now realizing as hard as you fought to get something, you have to fight just as hard to keep it.” John Adams, who is also national treasurer for ASALH, said: “We look to the long game with Black history. We survived slavery, Jim Crow — we’ll survive Trump.” He said the old YMCA was “too personal to Chicago” to let it slip.

On a cold February day, Oji Eggleston, executive director of the Renaissance Collaborative, stopped on the stairs of the building. He swam here as a child. His parents and grandparents had decades of history here. He said he does indeed feel “a huge sense” of weight these days, a pressing need to ensure the home of Black History Month remains. “I have to admit, considering what’s happening in the country, it all hits differently. I mean, the reason that we even have a Black History Month at all is because, 100 years ago, this building, right here, made the room for one.”

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