Preserving the legacy of Chicago’s Black social culture

In my high school senior memory book, several pluggers from early 1990s teen parties crowd a plastic sleeve. They are documents of warehouse parties from a time when the West Loop wasn’t the West Loop, and when the South Loop didn’t exist as a moniker.

I save everything, which is great because the Chicago Black Social Culture Map is collecting local artifacts like the ones I have stored in my parents’ basement.

The map is an artistic and archival project that’s compiling the city’s Black social and cultural lineage, past and present. The project grew out of Honey Pot Performance, which presented a 2014 piece called “Juke Cry Hand Clap” that led to research on Black social culture, beginning with the Great Migration. Ultimately, a 2018 digital archive was launched.

So far, data has been collected on 350 venues. Photographs, flyers, panel discussions and oral history have bloomed from the project.

“They’re informational, educational and art objects,” said Meida Teresa McNeal, artistic and managing director of Honey Pot Performance. She said dance culture is a folk culture tradition — even if most people don’t see it in that regard.

Although the map archive explores blues, gospel, disco and funk, the Chicago-born house music genre takes center stage with flyers that feature pioneering house DJs Jesse Saunders and Wayne Williams. McNeal characterizes the project as cultural work tied to community that is building an archive accessible to the public. The map has thus far highlighted the West Side’s influence, with a panel on the now-shuttered George’s Music Room, and how independent label Dane Mania Records helped popularize juking and footwork.

“People who have knowledge don’t think about it as history,” McNeal said. “We have to get people to understand the relevance, and to preserve to build awareness.”

Understanding how the past repeats itself is a map theme. McNeal and the team — which includes the Modern Dance Music Research and Archiving Foundation and the Blackivists — learned about how Black social clubs with memberships were important back in the 1950s and 1960s. That pattern reemerged in house music’s infancy to create safe spaces for Black and Brown queer folk.

“The most precious thing to me is these stories are layered and complex — making connections over decades,” said McNeal.

One era she and I are both familiar with is the boho vibe of Wicker Park in the 1990s. Lit X — where Flash Taco on North Damen Avenue is located today — was then a basement joint that hosted spoken word artists such as Mario Smith and avery r. young. Meanwhile, cultural tastemaker Eric Williams opened the eclectic Silver Room down the street.

And speaking of Wicker Park, through the end of this month, the map is presenting an exhibit at Heaven Gallery on North Milwaukee Avenue called “Love Dancing: Documenting Chicago’s Nightlife.” The name is a line from “Is It All Over My Face?,” a call-and-response house track. When it plays in Chicago, the crowd responds “hell yeah.” The next lyric in the Loose Joints (Larry Levan remix) is “I’m in love dancing.”

The show’s curator is Jenea Onikoyi, with photography from Seed Lynn, Kymon Kyndred and Shay Turner. The color photographs are as recent as 2022. As I toured the exhibit, I saw something familiar — a young person with dreads and round glasses who looked like he could’ve been plucked from the better days of 1990s neo-soul. Then in another photo, I saw a slim brown figure with intricate braids — my stepchild, better known as DJ SydFalls. The photo was taken of them at a rave they curated last May at a warehouse on the Northwest Side that celebrated Black Chicago music. They graciously let my husband and I attend.

The photo surprised me. I had no idea Syd would be in the exhibit. I smiled, knowing the Chicago Black music scene comes full circle — from my artifacts tucked away in a memory book to Syd’s experience, documented on the white walls of a gallery.

Natalie Moore is a reporter for WBEZ. She writes a monthly column for the Sun-Times.

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