Calling inner-city scholars
It seems like almost overnight, the housing development along 39th Street, between King and Cottage Grove, was leveled and its residents dispersed.
Nonetheless, the Jacob Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, at 700 E. Oakwood Blvd., remains a beacon for urban pioneers.
On Wednesday afternoon and again on Thursday morning, the center will hold an open house, hoping to attract the next generation of scholars who will recognize the center as the best institution to prepare them to serve urban communities.
“This is probably the only institution of its kind that came out of the 1960s and is still standing,” noted Conrad Worill, PH.D., director of the center since 2003.
The building was co-designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905. It survived the 1919 riots that began a couple of miles north at 31st Street, where a black teen died after being struck with a rock at the segregated beach.
“By 1965, the building was in bad shape,” Worrill noted.
He credits efforts by Dr. Don Smith, the only black professor at Northeastern Illinois University at the time, with transforming the former settlement house and creating a graduate program to retrain inner-city teachers.
Today, the center is just as wellknown for being the place where African Americans can learn about African history, the slave trade, the reparations movement and rituals such as Kwanzaa.
Many of the school’s original scholars have passed on or retired. On May 31, Robert Starks, one of the center’s highprofile professors, will retire.
The open house is designed to cultivate a new crop of African-american scholars and to introduce new faculty.
For instance, Zada Johnson, PH.D., an anthropologist educated at the University of Chicago, was a part-time instructor at the center before signing on full time in 2011.
“I live on 36th and Calumet in the house that my grandparents bought when they first came to Chicago,” Johnson told me. “The center is in a key location geographically and also ideologically. My experience teaching here is even in a classroom with students from the surrounding area, they have very little information and knowledge of the rich culture and history of the Bronzeville area.”
Johnson recently helped put together a Bronzeville neighborhood research project in which students were engaged with Bronzeville organizations. Several served as guides, taking tourists between the South Side campus and the North Side NEIU campus.
“What the [center] could do is teach us about the transformation of the inner city,” she said.
Renee Simms, an alum of the center, is principal of Hillcrest High School in Country Club Hills. She points to the current education crisis as evidence that the center is still relevant.
“We really need a place where we can look at issues of learning and servicing our community, in a place where students can feel comfortable and where they are receiving some encouragement and skill-building,” she said.
Simms also noted that the center has always been willing to serve disadvantaged college students.
For instance, when she graduated from high school, she wanted to go to Southern Illinois University but could not afford to go away.
“I thought I would just stay at the [center] for a year and transfer to the party school, but that didn’t happen. I joined the Concerned Students Organization and got involved in community projects and I just loved it,” she said.
Simms intends to bring a group of Hillcrest students to the open house.
“Last year, a student was about two credits away from graduating and I didn’t want to see him not do anything. So I called Conrad, and got [the student] involved in a GED program. The next semester, he started college,” she said.
“I am glad they are having an open house. There are people who don’t have the money to go away. But they can still have the benefit [of college] and get involved with the community at the same time,” she said.
The open house is from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday. For more information, call (773) 268-7500.