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Performers in procession on a street in the Old Town neighborhood, Chicago, c. 1963. CHM, ICHi-132982; Raeburn Flerlage, photographer

The wafting aroma of chicken teriyaki, the rhythmic pulsing of taiko drumming, and the occasional murmur of Japanese on a languid summer day. For sixty-five years, the Ginza Holiday Festival has brought a bit of Japan to Chicago. The tradition.

A performer plays a koto (Japanese zither) at the Ginza Holiday Festival, Chicago, c. 1961. CHM, ICHi-117777; Raeburn Flerlage, photographer

In 1955, the Midwest Buddhist Temple in the Old Town neighborhood sought to create a fundraising event that would introduce Japanese food, culture, and entertainment to the public. With that in mind, the Ginza Holiday Festival was created. The festival’s name comes from the famous district in Tokyo, which for centuries was a destination for shopping and entertainment and still attracts millions of visitors. 

Early Ginza Holiday Festivals were brightly lit with Japanese lanterns lining the street outside the temple and featured an authentically decorated stage and traditional red torii gates at the festival’s entrances. It was at the inaugural festival that its now-famous chicken teriyaki was introduced, a family recipe of an early temple member. Entertainment consisted of classical Japanese dancing, minyo (Japanese folk dancing), musicians such as shamisen and koto artists, and martial arts demonstrations, including judo, karate, and kendo. 

In the 1970s, the Ginza Holiday Festival further enhanced its offerings by adding performances of taiko (Japanese drumming) and beginning a relationship with the Waza, an organization of more than 100 Japanese artisans who each master a craft that has been handed down through their families for 300 years since Japan’s Edo period.

A vendor selling hand-painted fans at the Ginza Holiday Festival, Chicago, c. 1963. CHM, ICHi-133016; Raeburn Flerlage, photographer

Each year, various Waza craftsmen travel internationally to share their artistry, and in August a small group of artisans visit the Ginza Holiday Festival, bringing unique art such as hand-thrown pottery, delicately detailed Japanese dolls, and silkscreened cloth towels. In addition to food, entertainment, and arts and crafts vendors, the Midwest Buddhist Temple’s resident minister opens the hondo (temple hall or chapel) and invites visitors to tour the temple and learn about Jodo Shinshu Buddhism. 

A performer with a child during the Ginza Holiday Festival, Chicago, 1960. CHM, ICHi-132972; Raeburn Flerlage, photographer

For many Chicagoans, the Ginza Holiday Festival provides an opportunity to experience a different culture, connect with new acquaintances, and reconnect with old friends. See more images.

CHM Images

Peruse thousands of digitized prints and photographs at CHM Images, our online portal. Featured galleries include images from our newly acquired Chicago Sun-Times Photography Collection, Raeburn Flerlage’s work documenting the Chicago blues and folk music scene during the 1950s–1970s, and Declan Haun’s photography capturing the American Civil Rights Era. We encourage the use of our images for a variety of personal, nonprofit, and commercial purposes and all proceeds support the Chicago History Museum and our mission to share Chicago’s stories. See more images. 

In this post, we commemorate the birthday of Dr. Nathan Wright Jr. A prolific writer of eighteen books, Wright was an internationally renowned scholar whose research focused on the rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s. As an activist, he was seen as a moderating and conciliatory voice that advocated for Black Power as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Wright suggested more aggressive tactics in the struggle for equality, alienating many leaders in the mainstream Civil Rights Movement.

Wright served as the chairman of the first National Conference on Black Power in 1967, which was attended by more than 1,000 delegates representing 286 organizations. The New York Times noted that the event represented a major shift in Black intellectual life and quoted Wright as saying that his notion of Black Power depended “on the capacity of black people to be and to become themselves, not only for their own good, but for the enrichment of the lives of all.”

In 1969, he was the founding chair of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the State University of New York at Albany. As an ordained Episcopal minister, Wright served as the executive director of the Department of Social Work in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey, and later in his life, he preached his lifelong message of self-reliance along the Eastern Seaboard. In 2005, Wright died at the age of eighty-one from kidney disease.

In the aftermath of the urban insurrections in Detroit and Newark in 1967, Studs Terkel interviewed Nathan Wright about his book Black Power and Urban Unrest. Acknowledging that the term “Black Power” had become widely associated with violence, Terkel was especially intrigued by Wright’s subtitle: Creative Possibilities. The conversation that ensued identified power as an expression of the creative potentiality of life itself, and in this respect the interview underscores how much the Black Power movement could be understood to represent a veritable creative renewal of culture and political life in the United States. Listen to the interview.

A Black man holds up a sign that reads “Black Power” at the Cicero March in Cicero, Illinois, 1966. CHM, ICHi-036894; Declan Haun, photographer

Studs Terkel Radio Archive

In his forty-five years on WFMT radio, Studs Terkel talked to the twentieth century’s most interesting people. Browse our growing archive of more than 1,200 programs. Explore the archive.

Muslims observe Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, at McCormick Place, 2301 S. King Dr., Chicago, January 4, 1974. ST-10104873-0006, Chicago Sun-Times collection, CHM.

Eid al-Adha, or the Festival of the Sacrifice, is the second Eid holiday celebrated annually by Muslims worldwide, with the date falling in the twelfth and final month of the Islamic lunar calendar, Dhul Hijjah. The holiday commemorates the Prophet Ibrahim’s (Abraham) willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail (Ishmael) and to mark the occasion of the final day of the annual Hajj (pilgrimage) of Muslims to Islam’s holiest sites in modern-day Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia.

Arab Muslims often make ma’amoul (nut- or date-filled cookies) for religious holidays such as Eid al-Adha. In Chicago, refugee women from the Syrian Community Network (SCN) started The Sweet Syrian to create and sell ma’amoul and many other sweet and savory pastries. Dr. Bana Ahdab, a SCN board member, remarked, “People are liking it [Sweet Syrian’s baked goods], and so we start selling and little bit by little we got bigger.”

Women from The Sweet Syrian make ma’amoul, 2019. Photograph courtesy of The Sweet Syrian.

In her interview for the Chicago Muslim Oral History Project, Dr. Ahdab talks about her life in Syria, journey to Chicago, and work with The Sweet Syrian. Listen now.

The Chicago Muslim Oral History Project at our Studs Terkel Center for Oral History, is an ongoing oral history interview process in which staff, interns, and volunteers have collected nearly 150 oral histories since 2016. Interviewees have shared their stories of faith, identity, and personal journeys.

CHM assistant curator Brittany Hutchinson recounts how Provident Hospital, the first African American–owned and operated hospital in the US, created opportunities for Black nurses in Chicago. This blog post is part of a series in which we share the stories of local women who made history in anticipation of CHM’s upcoming online exhibition Democracy Limited: Chicago Women and the Vote.

African American women have served as nurses and caretakers since the United States’ period of enslavement, work that can be viewed as another form of labor that befell African American women. The relationship between Black women and nursing work continued throughout history, without the nurses receiving professional recognition or adequate compensation, and their work was an integral and unsung part of many notable historical events—particularly in the early twentieth century.

In the late nineteenth century, Black women who wished to receive formal training were often denied the opportunity to do so solely because of their race. Hospitals in the South directly and explicitly banned Black women from entering their training programs, while very few northern hospitals granted admission—and did so only in rare cases.

In 1889, after Reverend Louis Reynolds’s sister Emma expressed her frustration with Chicago-area hospitals refusing to admit her to their nursing programs due to her race, he enlisted the help of his friend Dr. Daniel Hale Williams to use his connections to find a suitable program for her. Dr. Williams first met with other Black doctors to convince an existing program to admit Emma. Despite being on staff at many of the area hospitals, Black doctors had very little influence within these organizations. It was then determined that establishing a new nursing program for African Americans was the best course of action, as it would create educational opportunities for Black women and also attempt to shield them from hostile, white supremacist learning environments. Dr. Williams founded Provident Hospital in 1891 and a few years later, Emma Reynolds and three other women became the nursing program’s first graduating class.

An undated photograph of nurses in front of Provident Hospital at its second location at 36th and Dearborn Streets, Chicago. CHM, ICHi-040212

As the field of nursing became professionalized, organizations such as the American Nursing Association offered professional opportunities and other advancements to their members. As a requirement of acceptance into the ANA, nurses had to first join a state-level organization. This proved to be impossible in many cases for Black nurses, as most state-level organizations did not accept African Americans for membership. In a similar fashion to the Black women’s club movement brought about during the fight for suffrage, Black nurses like Carrie E. Bullock, a suffragist in her own right, helped create and lead state and national professional organizations dedicated to serving the needs of Black nurses, who were caught in the crosshairs of white supremacy and patriarchy.

Nurses from Provident Hospital’s class of 1904, from the 14th Annual Report of Provident Hospital and Training School, 1905. CHM, ICHi-030235

The suffrage movement carried on as the US entered World War I, and Black nurses who were involved in fighting for the Nineteenth Amendment were eager to join the war effort. However, they were again denied the ability to serve due to their race as the American Red Cross, Army Nurse Corps, and Navy Nurse Corps banned the service of Black women.

In the spring and fall of 1918, an outbreak of a deadly strain of influenza caused a drastic shortage of nurses, which forced the military and Red Cross to change their policies on accepting Black nurses. In December 1918, eighteen nurses were admitted to Army bases at Camp Grant and Camp Sherman in Rockford, Illinois, and Chillicothe, Ohio, respectively. Prior to this integration, Black nurses worked alongside doctors and community leaders to educate Black Chicagoans on how to best prevent becoming infected with influenza. The efforts were not limited to medical advice, as Black medical professionals lobbied city officials to increase sanitation efforts and improve infrastructure in Black neighborhoods, which often did not receive adequate access to city services.

The summer of 1919, often referred to as the Red Summer, brought about a wave of violence against Black people in numerous cities across the US. The violence in Chicago spread across the city’s “Black Belt,” leaving nearly forty people dead, several hundred injured, and more than one thousand without shelter. The most heavily affected were African Americans. The violence was more than a period of civil unrest—the effects it had on the community were identical to that of a public health crisis, as the Chicago Tribune noted, “injured patients all but overwhelmed 10 physicians, three interns and 15 nurses at the South Side’s Provident Hospital.”

The years 1918–19 proved to be a pivotal point in US history, as the suffrage movement, World War I, the influenza pandemic, and the Red Summer of 1919 shook the country to its core. While the effects of these events were felt across the country and in some cases the world, the direct experiences of Black nurses in Chicago are uniquely situated in the absolute center of this intersection in American history.

Further Reading

• The Provident Foundation
• The Eighteen of 1918–1919: Black Nurses and the Great Flu Pandemic in the United States
• The Ethel Johns Report: Black Women in the Nursing Profession, 1925

One hundred and one years ago today, the Chicago Race Riot began with the murder of Eugene Williams and the failure of law enforcement to hold those responsible for his death accountable. On Sunday, July 27, 1919, thousands of Chicagoans sought relief from the brutal heat on the shores of Lake Michigan. Among them was Williams, a seventeen-year-old African American who was on a raft with some friends. They inadvertently drifted across an invisible line that divided the waters by race a few yards out from a “white” beach at 29th Street. Beachgoers witnessed George Stauber, a twenty-four-year-old white man, hurl stones at the boys until Williams fell off the raft and drowned. The first police officer at the scene, Daniel Callahan, refused to take Stauber into custody.

A large crowd of people assembled at the 29th Street beach after Eugene Williams’s death, Chicago, July 27, 1919. CHM, ICHi-030315

As word spread of Williams’s death, a large crowd gathered at the beach and the scene became tense. Soon, the racial powder keg that was Chicago exploded into a race riot that began on July 27 and ended on August 3, 1919. The eight-day riot was one of many racial conflicts throughout the United States that were a part of what became the Red Summer of 1919, when violence was used by whites to reassert racial dominance over African Americans.

Learn more about the event through Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots, a year-long project coordinated by the Newberry Library in partnership with the Chicago History Museum and twelve other Chicago institutions. Explore Chicago 1919.

Victim being stoned and bludgeoned under corner of house during the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. CHM, ICHi-065493; Jun Fujita, photographer

Armed National Guard and African American men stand on a sidewalk during the race riot in Chicago, 1919. CHM, ICHi-065478; Jun Fujita, photographer

On PBS’s The Future of America’s Past, award-winning historian Ed Ayers travels to places that define misunderstood parts of America’s past. In his “Red Chicago” episode, Ayers visits Chicago during the centennial of the “Red Summer,” when long-simmering tensions between white and Black residents in the city erupted in violence. Join him as he talks with a poet, a performance artist, as well as the Chicago History Museum’s public and community engagement manager, Erica Griffin. Watch the episode.

The Chicago Stories Initiative

Our fellow Chicago community organization, the Lookingglass Theatre, will feature COVID-considerate events/expressions that plumb the depth of Chicago’s history and people, while inventing new Chicago traditions to carry us forward together. The first production of this series is Sunset 1919, which commemorates the start of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot by creating art to honor the fallen. This spoken-word piece is meant to peacefully honor the lives of Black humans impacted by the deadly racial attacks that swept the nation that summer, the roots of which stretch back across centuries, and the fruits of which we continue to pluck—a moment in an unbroken line. See the film.

On July 25, 1941, Mamie and Louis Till celebrated the birth of their only son Emmett at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. Like many African Americans of the era, Emmett’s parents were part of the millions of Blacks who migrated north during what is now known as the Great Migration—Mamie from Mississippi and Louis from Missouri. The young couple met in Chicago and were married by the age of eighteen.

When Emmett was a teenager, like many migratory families of the time, he was sent to spend a summer visiting relatives still living in the South. A few days after arriving in Money, Mississippi, tragedy would strike when a then fourteen-year-old Emmett was accused of making overt gestures at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, in her family’s store.

Around 2:00 a.m. on August 28, 1955, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother John Milam kidnapped Emmett from his uncle’s house where he was staying. In the early morning, Emmett was brutally tortured, shot, and killed. His mutilated body was tied with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Emmett’s badly decomposed body was found. The grotesquely disfigured corpse hardly resembled a human form.

Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till, c. 1950. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-48234. Mamie Bradley, the mother of Emmett Till, takes a last look at his open casket, Chicago, September 6, 1955. Photograph by Ralph Walters, Chicago Sun-Times Collection, CHM, ST-17500641. © Sun-Times Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

When his body was returned to Chicago, his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral to “let the world see what I’ve seen.” Photographs published in the Chicago Defender and JET magazine, along with an account of the last days of Emmett’s life, were the first public recordings of the lynching. These images sparked outrage throughout the United States. Many historians attribute the reaction to these images as one of the catalysts that began the modern Civil Rights Movement.

In September 1955, an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam, who confessed to the murder in 1956 after they were safe under double jeopardy laws. In 2017, it emerged that in a 2008 interview, Carolyn Bryant admitted to lying about what she had accused Emmett of doing to her. Unfortunately, Till would neither be the first nor the last person of color to lose their life or freedom on the basis of a lie conceived in racism.

In 2004, the Chicago History Museum acquired Franklin McMahon’s courtroom drawings of Bryant and Milam’s trial. With more than forty works ranging from simple pencil sketches to intricate ink-and-wash drawings, McMahon’s documentation is an invaluable record of what became one of the seminal moments of the modern Civil Rights Movement. See the drawings in the Fall 2005 issue of Chicago History magazine.

What is redlining? A form of discrimination. Simply put, it’s the practice of arbitrarily denying or limiting financial services to specific neighborhoods, generally because its residents are people of color or are poor. Like other forms of discrimination, it has inflicted long-lasting damage.

While discriminatory practices had long existed in the banking and insurance industries, the term came into use in the 1930s when the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) instituted a redlining policy by developing color-coded maps of American cities that used racial criteria to categorize lending and insurance risks. New, affluent, racially homogeneous housing areas received green lines, while Black and poor white neighborhoods were often indicated by red lines denoting their “undesirability.”

In Chicago, the effects of redlining became obvious after World War II. Without bank loans and insurance, redlined areas lacked the capital essential for investment and redevelopment. As a result, suburban areas received preference for residential investment at the expense of poor and minority neighborhoods in the city. The relative lack of investment in new housing, rehabilitation, and home improvement contributed significantly to the decline of older urban neighborhoods and compounded Chicago’s decline in relation to its suburbs.

Redlining’s negative effects remained largely unrecognized by policymakers until the mid-1960s when the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed and then with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975. Unsatisfied by the practical results of these laws, community activists in Chicago spearheaded further reform, leading the nation in identifying and addressing the redlining issue.

The cover of “Redlining: Discrimination in Residential Mortgage Loans,” a report by the Illinois Legislative Investigating Commission, 1975. CHM, ICHi-037471

In the early 1970s, the Citizens Action Program, a crossracial group of community leaders from the South Side, developed a strategy of “greenlining” by asking residents to deposit savings only in banks that pledged to reinvest funds in urban communities. Chicago organizers were also instrumental in lobbying Congress to pass the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977, which required banks to lend in areas from which they accepted deposits. The law had limited effect until the National Training and Information Center in Chicago, led by Gale Cincotta, put public pressure on Chicago banks to lend to distressed neighborhoods. Cincotta’s group successfully negotiated $173 million in CRA agreements from three major downtown banks in 1984, settlements that served as models for other cities.

Additional Resources

• Learn more in the Encyclopedia of Chicago.
• A community activist from Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, Gale Cincotta was an expert on discrimination in mortgage loans and its effects in Chicago and other cities. Learn more about her work on issues of housing and employment in her interviews with Studs Terkel.

Rudy Lozano (foreground) at a Center for Autonomous Social Action meeting in 1975. ST-40001425-0011, Chicago Sun-Times collection, CHM

On July 17, 1951, Mexican American political activist Rudy Lozano was born in Harlingen, Texas. Lozano and his family moved to Chicago in the early 1950s, and he spent his formative years in the Pilsen neighborhood on the near Southwest Side. Lozano’s activism began as a student at Carter Henry Harrison Technical High School (now Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy), where he organized a walkout to protest poor school facilities and the lack of Latino representation in the curriculum.

After attending the University of Illinois Chicago, Lozano became a part of the group Centro de Acción Social Autónoma, Hermanedad General de Trabajadores (Center for Autonomous Social Action, General Brotherhood of Workers, or CASA). CASA worked to unionize noncitizen workers and provided them with welfare services and education to better know their rights as employees. Lozano also became the Midwest director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. His political work began in the Southwest Side’s 22nd Ward, where he registered Latine voters and tried to build unity between Latino and Black communities as he campaigned for Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African American mayor.

Lozano’s life was cut short on June 8, 1983, when he was murdered in his home. His memory lives on through the work of his sister, Emma, who created Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), an immigrant rights group, and in the Latino community in Chicago. The Rudy Lozano branch of the Chicago Public Library is located today in the Pilsen neighborhood.

Read more about Rudy Lozano at Digital Chicago History.

Made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Digital Chicago History is a CHM website that showcases Lake Forest College’s Digital Chicago: Unearthing History and Culture project, a collection of multidisciplinary student and faculty research on Chicago’s history that explores diverse topics, such as music of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the history of Haitian churches in Chicago, as well as student intern research conducted at CHM on the history of race in Chicago as part of the Humanities 2020 initiative. See all of these projects. 

For National Mac and Cheese Day, we’re highlighting a local company whose name is synonymous with cheese—Kraft. Founded in 1903 by James L. Kraft, it started as a cheese-delivery business in Chicago, and within a few years, Kraft was producing cheese as well. By 1976, Kraft Inc. had about $5 billion in annual sales with nearly 50,000 employees around the world, including about 3,000 in the Chicago area. Starting in 2011, the company, then known as Kraft Foods, split into two publicly traded companies. The first, a snack food company called Mondelēz International, became the legal successor of the old Kraft Foods and recently moved from suburban Deerfield, Illinois, to Chicago. The second was the Chicago-based Kraft Foods Group grocery company, which later merged with Heinz to become the Kraft Heinz Company. In 2019, Mondelēz International had net revenues of approximately $26 billion, while Kraft Heinz earned about $25 billion in net sales. 

One of its most popular products, Kraft macaroni and cheese was introduced in 1937. At just nineteen cents a box and easily prepared, the prepackaged product was a hit during the Great Depression and into World War II as rationing took place and working women had limited time at home. This advertisement from 1961 promotes Kraft’s new “company-best” Deluxe Dinner, which comes with prepared cheese sauce instead of the standard powder form. 

Learn more about the history of food processing in Chicago in the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Read more.

Advertisement for Kraft Deluxe Macaroni & Cheese, 1961. Published in McCall’s. CHM, ICHi-040410

The Museum’s North & Clark Café is ready to welcome you again! A local gathering spot for both CHM visitors and neighborhood patrons alike, you can now enjoy our fresh-made menu offerings indoors, on the patio, or to go. We’re serving up Chicago-style hot dogs, all-day breakfast + coffee, and some of the best burgers in town! See the menus.

Let’s revisit an old Chicago favorite—Fritzel’s. Before air travel was common, Chicago was a popular stopping point for celebrities traveling by train between New York and Los Angeles, and there were certain restaurants where a star sighting was more or less guaranteed.

Located at State and Lake Streets in the Loop, Fritzel’s was founded in 1947 by Mike Fritzel and his business partner Joe Jacobson, who took over when Fritzel retired in 1953. The restaurant was known for not only the exceptional quality of its food, but also the nearly 100 items on its menu. In a 1967 interview with Chicago Tribune restaurant critic Kay Loring, Jacobson admitted, “It doesn’t make sense to have so many things on a menu. It’d be easier on the help, and we’d make more money if we cut it down. But it won’t be cut as long as I’m around.”

Fritzel’s at 201 North State Street, Chicago, April 12, 1959. CHM, ICHi-059848; Betty Hulett, photographer

At the height of its popularity in the 1950s and ’60s, the restaurant welcomed the biggest names in showbiz, sports, and Chicago politics. Among its regulars were comedian Phyllis Diller, singer Tony Bennett, and mayor Richard J. Daley. Members of Chicago’s baseball, hockey, and football teams frequented the establishment, as did many of the New York Yankees when the team was in town, including Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra. 

However, a combination of factors led to Fritzel’s steady decline: in 1967 the massive fire at McCormick Place drastically reduced trade shows in Chicago for a period of time; the movie theaters in the Loop ceased showing family-friendly films, resulting in less foot traffic; and the increasing popularity of air travel meant fewer people traveling by train. By June 1972, the restaurant closed after being unable to break even for four weeks.

Trace Chicago’s evolution from meatpacking capital to foodie paradise through the Museum’s collection of historical menus and restaurant photographs. See more menus.