Click on the images below to access a short biography of the honored ancestor as well as the living luminary who is paired with them. These signs, standing about eight feet tall, will be installed at various garden sites around West Woodlawn owned and managed by Blacks in Green. They will serve as wayfinding markers for the millions of tourists that will visit our community over the next several years.

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Katherine Dunham (Choreographer)

West Woodlawn stands as one of the most revealing and powerful urban stories in America—a place where prairie became suburb, suburb became a center of Black aspiration during the Great Migration, and that same community became a frontline in the national struggles over segregation, disinvestment, and self-determination. Academic research from the Chicago History Museum and the University of Chicago shows that Woodlawn was never simply a “neighborhood in decline,” but rather a place shaped by powerful external forces—restrictive covenants, urban renewal policies, and economic restructuring—alongside equally powerful internal forces of organizing, culture, and resilience. Scholars such as Horace Cayton document how policy and economic shifts concentrated hardship, while the rise of The Woodlawn Organization demonstrates that Woodlawn also helped invent modern community organizing and resistance. Today, as Woodlawn stands at the threshold of reinvestment anchored by the Obama Presidential Center, its history offers not only lessons of injustice, but a blueprint for regeneration rooted in land, culture, and community power. For Blacks in Green, this body of research affirms that West Woodlawn is not a case study of loss—it is a national model in the making, where the next chapter can be authored intentionally through the Sustainable Square Mile. To find out more about the Sustainable Square Mile click on the link below.