Hello! Welcome to COTL, a discussion place for BIPOC. Posted the first 3 Wednesdays of the month
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Greetings, CotL community! HP in the building this week to ask about, and talk about, summer traditions.
This past weekend, the Bud Billiken parade happened here in Chicago. I’ve written about it before:
“The Bud Billiken Day Parade and Picnic is held on the south side of Chicago every year. It is nearly 100 years old now (the first parade was in 1929), and it is widely heralded as the largest African American parade in the US. Bud Billiken was a fictional comic strip character that appeared in the African American newspaper The (Chicago) Defender. Given that the character was done in tribute to the many Black newsboys who sold The Defender, and that the parade has always been centered around celebrating African American children in Chicago, it wasn’t a stretch to name the parade after the character. From its inception, the Bud Billiken parade attracted many of Chicago’s most prominent Black folks, from Duke Ellington to Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, and Paul Robeson. Chance the Rapper was the Grand Marshal for the parade a few years ago, as was Chaka Khan! Obama, of course has also made appearances, twice as Grand Marshal and once as a senator.
For those of us who live on the South Side, the parade also marks the unofficial end of the summer, and the beginning of the ‘back to school’ period in mid-August, just before the start of a new academic year in the Chicago Public Schools. The parade route is about two miles and goes down Martin Luther King Blvd, one of the major thoroughfares in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on the near South Side. The parade finishes in Washington Park, a large park that borders the University of Chicago as well as Grand Boulevard and Wash Park (local neighborhoods); in the park kids can get lots of great swag that includes free school supplies and other helpful things people need to start the school year in style. One year we got everything from a small backpack filled with school supplies to a small toothbrush/dental floss/toothpaste set (courtesy of a local dentist’s office!). Nowadays the parade has lots of corporate sponsors and floats as well as plenty of local news coverage. Local alderman and politicians also know to make themselves prominent at the parade, which can have crowds of over 50k people! And folks know their alderman well, generally-they often stop along the route shaking hands while their volunteers hand out stickers and flyers.
The parade itself is extraordinary, and features a dance style that is native to Chicago-footwork! “Our local news blog, Block Club Chicago, has some amazing photographs from this year:
I love that most of the dance teams have a particular ‘theme’ for their costumes! These young ladies are Maggie and Bart for a Simpsons-themed dance crew. This year there were also The Flintstones, Ghostbusters, Sailor Moon, Wednesday (those girls were AMAZING), and even a crew dressed like Pinocchio! The creativity is really wonderful- it is a true Black Parade!
The other summer tradition I love are the line dances we do at cookouts. Folks do these dances year round, of course, but for me, summers are prime line dancing time because it’s usually when I’m out visiting family. One of my aunts in particular is fantastic at these dances, and often teaches us the newest dances, or the ones we haven’t heard of/don’t know. Soul Line Dances are an important tradition for Black people that stretches back centuries, as this article describes:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/history-black-people-line-dancing-144100741.html
“For African Americans, line dancing stems from the people of the motherland of Africa and Caribbean countries according to The Washington Post. In Western civilization, the origin of traditional assembled dancing dates back to 1776 when slavery was prominent in America with enslaved people using it as a way to connect spiritually and to discover parts of the Underground Railroad according to Thomas F. DeFrantz, a Duke University African and African American dance studies Dance, Theater Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies professor.
“They tell us about black lives, black faith, black transcendence and black resistance,” DeFrantz said.
“We’re looking for places to congregate, to gather, to celebrate together, to feel safe, to feel empowered, to feel like we can express ourselves,” he added.
This year I’m (trying to, lol) learn the Boots on the Ground dance. It blared from the speakers of Brandon Johnson (the Mayor of Chicago)’s float this year at the Bud Billiken parade. Ladies all along the route were snapping their fans in perfect sync!
Ok, that’s my (kinda long) bit for today, I’m turning it over to you! What summer traditions do you/your friends/family/etc have? Did you get to do them this year? They don’t necessarily have to be culturally specific-I’m just wondering what our community gets up to this time of year.🙂
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