The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC)

☀️Summer learning is underway and our scholarship awardees are immersed in Dr. Nicole A. Cooke’s History of Black Librarianship course. 📖

From uncovering the stories of trailblazers like Edward Christopher Williams and Augusta Baker to examining how segregation shaped the profession, this course challenges students to engage with a holistic history of librarianship and to carry that knowledge forward in their work.

Congratulations to our awardees! We’re proud to support this incredible cohort as they learn, reflect, and help shape a more equitable future for the field. ✨

🎆Join BMRC member Honey Pot Performance/Chicago Black Social Culture Map this Friday May 29th for the opening of The Doctors.

Tracing the influence and innovation of a 1970s dance crew from Chicago’s Roseland community, we find 8 teenage boys from Mendel Catholic High School who transformed school parties into something bigger. What they built didn’t just move a room, it shifted Chicago’s teen scene and left a lasting imprint on the city’s party culture.

Developed through the Chicago Black Social Culture Map’s Community Curators Program, this exhibition was curated by ebere agwuncha, drawing from the personal archives of The Doctors, in collaboration with curatorial writer DaJona Butler. The evening will include a panel featuring voices straight from the scene.

May 29th, 6PM
First Church of the Brethren
Registration 🔗 https://givebutter.com/HPPSpring2026

Photographer John White's images in the DOCUMERICA series is called "a love letter to Black Chicago." He sure was able to capture the feel of summertime in Chicago.
Which photo hits home for you?

Images sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / U.S. National Archives https://pdimagearchive.org/

✨BMRC member announcement from Columbia College Chicago✨

The School of Visual Art is pleased to present the 19th annual Art History and Visual Culture Symposium with a special welcome to parents, friends, faculty, and alumni who are attending. As part of Manifest, the college’s end-of-year student showcase, our event celebrates the culmination of senior students’ original art history research projects including new insights on Elizabeth Catlett, Roy DeCarva, Emory Douglas, Saki Mfundikwa, and Zanele Mulholi.

📆Saturday, May 16th from 1:00-6:00 pm
📍623 W. Wabash, Hokin Hall
🔗Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/manifest-2026-kaleidoscope-tickets-1982892339365?aff=oddtdtcreator

Image credit: Augusta Savage, Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp), 1939, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

🔊Have you seen the headline speakers for the BMRC Symposium on Black Chicago?

Davarian Baldwin will offer the keynote speech, “Second City No More: How Black Chicago Moved to the Center of History,”
Amani Morrison will launch her new book, "A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs: Housing Chicago's Great Migration," and
Skyla Hearn will close out the the Symposium with remarks entitled "In Them We Exist: The Power of Black (Chicago) Archives in Perilous Times"

AND in between we have a rich line-up of panels discussing art, politics, music and the Black Press!🔥🔥🔥

🛎️As a special BONUS - the next 20 people to register and pay will receive COMPLIMENTARY head shots from the professional photographer on site! 📸

REGISTER HERE: https://bmrc.lib.uchicago.edu/events/bmrc-20th-anniversary-symposium-on-black-chicago-june-17-18-2026/

✨ You don't want to miss this: Dr. Carla Hayden, former Librarian of Congress and recently appointed senior fellow at the Mellon Foundation, presents the 2026 Mitchell Cobey Lecture on Cinema. Dr. Hayden will discuss the importance of film history and preservation with Dr. Jacqueline Stewart, Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Advance registration is encouraged, and is limited to two tickets per person. The lecture will be preceded by a reception from 5:00pm-6:30pm in the second floor Great Hall at the Logan Center.

Presented by the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, the Film Studies Center, and the Division of the Arts and Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Registration🔗https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/the-mitchell-cobey-lecture-on-cinema-dr-carla-hayden-tickets-1987702851737?aff=oddtdtcreator

⚡Only a few tickets left to hear Dorothy Berry speak TODAY at 5PM at the Smart Museum about her new book on Black archives!

Get yours NOW https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dorothy-berry-sumayya-ahmed-on-archives-tickets-1986004189994?aff=oddtdtcreator

We will have a few copies of her book , "The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities" on sale AND this for the first time we will be selling BMRC's "Archiving is Resistance" t-shirt . NO CASH ACCEPTED

💥See you there!

💥The BMRC was honored to have Angela Rodgers-KouKoui, the head archivist at the National Museum of African American History and Culture () drop by our Exhibition, "The Ways We Remember," with her team yesterday while they were in Chicago.

Great conversation about space, place, archives, and the lasting effects of "urban renewal."

🌀Join Dr. Christopher Reed on May 16th from 2-4PM at the BMRC Gallery (320 E. 43rd) where he will hold a meeting of The Black Chicago History Forum. The topic that day will be "50 Years of Influencing Among Chicago’s Black Elite, 1888-1940: Methodology and Interpretation.”

⚡We took it as a good sign when Dr. Christopher Reed, showed up on the porch at the BMRC Exhibition, "The Ways We Remember." Reed is the former director of the
St. Clair Drake Center for African and African American Studies at Roosevelt University and a long time supporter of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.

(And yes, he brought that book with him! It's a book for which the BMRC supported research, "Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893-1930" (University of Illinois Press, 2020).https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p084928

And stay tuned for more events in our gallery space this summer!💫