I look forward with great enthusiasm to the delivery of the paper to my home in Houston and reading your coverage of local Chicago stories, historical accounts of Black history in America and the paper’s coverage of national stories.

Many people across America, just like my father-in-law and me, have some limited knowledge of Chicago, and we often discuss experiences when he was a young man and when I grew up visiting friends in Chicago, like Allen Smith and his brothers.

The common theme for all of us when thinking about growing up in the Midwest evolves around the history we all share, in that we actually represent the six million African Americans whose families left the southern states during the period from 1916 to 1970, known as The Great Northward Migration, Black Migration and landed in Chicago, and in my family’s case St. Louis, Missouri and Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Each publication is like a time machine that, for a brief period, allows my mind to recall being in Chicago, and relating to the issues that refer to the South Side versus the North and West sides; politics from the “Daley Machine” to Harold Washington and President Obama; the Chicago Wards; geographical differences between Schaumburg, Chinatown, the lakefront, and legends like Ernie Banks, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and so much more.

As an example, the competition to have a President’s library among universities and cities requires a [bold] major fund raising, and most communities in America fawn over having a President’s library, except as noted in the Chatterbox, “some folks in Chicago’s Black community.”

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