“I went to the annual Bud Billiken Parade last month. I’ve been going for a few years now. Before I digress, I want those of you who are unaware to know that (IMHO) this is one of Chicago’s—actually one of our nation’s—most meaningfully soulful events. Every time I arrive at the parade and begin to hear the music and see the dancing, I’m sent into raptures, fighting back tears as my heart heaves with joy and a bit of sorrow. It’s really indescribable.
We’re now just a few years away from the parade’s 100th anniversary. The first one took place in August 1929. The event came about thanks to the efforts of The Chicago Defender, a newspaper started by Robert Abbott in 1905 and soon to become one of the most important in America. Around 1923, Abbott adopted a fictional character by the name of Bud Billiken as a mascot for a section of the paper devoted to the proper behavior and education of the community’s youth. The Billiken character would soon inspire its namesake’s first parade. The parade now attracts tens of thousands of people annually to celebrate the community and to serve as a pep rally for its kids’ upcoming—or looming—return to school.
Whence Billiken? Pursuing his origins leads one down an apocryphal rabbit hole. From what I gather, Abbott saw a Billiken figurine in a South Side Chinese restaurant, a figure reputed to be an Asian guardian and protector of children. It turns out, however, that an art teacher in Missouri by the name of Florence Pretz created and patented the figure in 1908. There’s some evidence that Pretz’s creation was inspired by an 1896 poem called Mr. Moon. Here are a couple of stanzas from the poem, which seem to capture the magic of childhood evoked by Billiken:
O Mr. Moon,
We’re all here!
Honey-bug, Thistledrift,
White-imp, Weird,
Wryface, Billiken,
Quidnunc, Queered;
We’re all here,
And the coast is clear!
Interestingly, the figure did make its way overseas, and to this day you can find Billiken figures in many districts of Osaka. Locals and visitors seek them out so that they can win the good fortune said to come after rubbing the Billikens’ feet.
To get to the parade, I ride my bike down to Bronzeville from West Ridge. It’s a beautiful ride, mostly along the lakefront. It’s a bit of a pilgrimage. This year’s journey had a propitious beginning. It was a lovely day—warm and sunny, and it wasn’t long after I got to the lake that I had the good fortune (even without caressing the soles of Billiken) to pass Chicago’s Cycling Seraph, a woman known to anyone who frequents the lakefront path. She’s forever greeting passers-by with squeals of delight and the friendliest smiles.
About two-thirds of the way to my destination came a short sojourn at the AIC for some AC, a WC, and some water. I lucked out there too, stumbling across a little Kara Walker exhibit (“Free, Black, and Passive Aggressive”) en route to the WC. Walker is a well-known artist who at the age of 13 had a consequential relo from an integrated California suburb to Atlanta, after her father got a job there. I was looking over Walker’s bio, and her account of the move reminded me of descriptions written about a century earlier by W. E. B. Du Bois (who’ll have much to remind me of below), documenting his experiences in the South after a youth spent in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. At her new high school, says Walker, “I was called a ‘nigger,’ told I looked like a monkey, accused (I didn’t know it was an accusation) of being a ‘Yankee.’”
Next came a stop at the memorial for Eugene Williams, an African-American youngster who came with his family from the other direction, from Georgia to Chicago. In July of 1919, Eugene and some friends were on a raft that drifted north and crossed a lacustrian color-line around the 29th Street Beach. There, a white man started hurling rocks at the boys. The teenage Eugene drowned after one of the rocks smashed into his skull. His murder sparked the 1919 Race Riot. I’d been eager to make another stop at the site to see its new fused-glass markers, created by students at Project FIRE, a trauma recovery program for kids who have suffered violence and systemic adversity.
About ten minutes after that, I left the bike path and crossed over the pedestrian bridge to 35th Street, which led me past a big monument marking the tomb of Stephen Douglas (who, thank goodness, was defeated by Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election) and then on to the Victory Monument, which commemorates African-American soldiers who served in World War I. It’s just south of the monument that the parade gets rolling.
It’s nice to be on a bike for this parade, as you can cruise up and down the service roads flanking Martin Luther King Drive, which are teeming with the CPD’s Knights Templar. This gives you a chance to stop and see the different units (dancers, marching bands, gymnasts, color guards, etc.) when they’re performing. The August temps call for intermittent breaks, as a great majority of the performances are incredibly athletic—such as those of the Jesse White Tumblers, who’ve been wowing perspiring parade-goers for decades.
Cruising around on a bike also gives you a chance to people-watch in that multitude of spectators. That can be just as entrancing as the parade itself, since a huge portion of the spectators are themselves participants. I so love seeing the toddlers and grade-school kids set in motion by the bands and DJs as they march by!
As I gradually mosey my way toward the parade’s finish line at Washington Park, about two miles further south, I always start to feel a little uncomfortable. I’m a white guy from a small town near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (where Lincoln spoke a couple years after he defeated Douglas) who feels a bit like an intruder in a gathering at which African-Americans are a ginormous majority. I feel a genuine reverence and appreciation for what I experience at the parade, but that’s not necessarily going to be apparent to anyone else. Were it offered, I probably would not reject the Cloak of Invisibility in order to avoid that unnerving feeling that I’m crashing the party.
I wanted to ask someone from the community what they thought about these feelings of mine. Later in the afternoon, I saw a lady seated on the curb with a younger woman who I’d learn was her daughter. She radiated kindness and—not sure how she pulled this off seated on a curb—but she also possessed some kind of nobility. Her demeanor, her garb, her jewelry and accoutrements, even her Yeezys, seemed to merit an escutcheon over her home’s entrance. I was so grateful for how warmly she accepted my request to speak with her.
She told me her name was Marion and joked about it being John Wayne’s given name as well. She said she was a long-time Chicago resident, born in June of 1956 at Presbyterian–St. Luke’s, the youngest of seven siblings. She said her mother came from Louisiana and her father from Oklahoma. I told her that I’d read about the “Great Migration” in Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis, that magisterial sociological study of the African-American history of Chicago, written in the 1940s. (I also remembered that the Chicago Defender played a major role in promoting the Great Migration, most southern migrants getting their first glimpse of life in Chicago in the pages of that newspaper.) I apologized and confessed that I’m a big fan of sociology and that, in fact, I’d also been rereading Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903) to prep for this post.
Marion knew exactly what I was talking about. She told me that after she’d graduated from Dunbar, she’d studied for four years at Eastern Illinois University, with a focus on sociology. I shared my feelings of discomfort with her, but she shrugged that off, explaining that she was more concerned about what the kids were up to these days. She said that one of the reasons she comes to the parade is “to see how we’re doing; how the kids are doing.” She did not like what she was seeing and had forebodings about where the “tension, confusion, ignorance, and structural damage” she saw might lead. She even spoke of a “festering”!
All that being said, Marion spoke most about her grandchild Bella, who was born in June—sadly, with a very uncertain future. Marion spoke very lovingly of the baby and expressed her relief that Bella’s care team, at her family’s request, had recently removed her from all the hospital’s life-prolonging machinery, which they saw as perhaps lengthening the quantity of Bella’s life without improving its quality. Her face lit up as she spoke about how she could now hold and interact with Bella—savoring her warmth, her tight grip on grandma’s finger, and her beautiful smiles. I started to wonder if I should be thinking harder about these contrasting accounts of her personal and social experiences, as they might be directly related to what I’m trying to say here. But I didn’t get far, as my mind leapt quickly toward darker matters.
I couldn’t help but think of the chapter entitled “Of the Passing of the First-Born” in Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois expresses his profound grief over the loss of his son, but also comes to acknowledge that the brevity of his son’s life spared him the racial subjugation that awaited. Toni Morrison addresses this same chasm in Beloved, in which a mother murders her newborn to protect her from what lies ahead. That Morrison’s novel was published in 1987 suggests that the “Veil” Du Bois spoke of as separating Black and white Americans—not their physical, but their psychological, socioeconomic and structural worlds—has not been drawn entirely aside. But thankfully, it had been parted enough to allow some light to assuage those tragic misgivings.
Still, I felt like a voyeur peeking through that drapery. I got to speak briefly with Marion’s daughter and ask her about this. She fielded my questions just as thoughtfully and kindly as her mom. She told me that she can pass as white and is sometimes mistaken as Hispanic, but that she’s resolute about identifying as a Black woman. She frankly addressed my turd-in-the punch-bowl feelings, confessing that she did, on occasion, have to check her “what are THEY doing here?” thoughts.
So, though ameliorated somewhat, it was still there: that “double-consciousness” Du Bois described as “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” measuring one’s soul against “a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” He described this “twoness”—“two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings”—but he did not want to sunder those selves. He wanted to reconcile them, neither “Africaniz[ing] America” nor “bleach[ing] his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism,” because he believed that “Negro blood has a message for the world.”
She was also more positive than her mom about the music. Her mom did not think much of the music being spun nowadays by the parade’s DJs. She waxed nostalgic about the blues and gospel, which communicated something meaningful. Nowadays, she said, the music “is not giving a good message.” I wish I’d thought to play it for her when we were together, as I’d have really liked to hear Marion’s opinion. I have a great recording of a marching band passing by during the 2025 parade, whose “telling inarticulacy,” I believe, would have conveyed that message Marion sought. When listening to this clip, be sure to use some good headphones and be patient as the band gets closer and closer. Telling Inarticulacy
Her daughter remembered marching and dancing in the parade herself, when she was a little girl. And she also spoke highly of the music we were hearing, a descendant, she explained, of the house music that Chicago had given birth to—a genre that some say got its name from “The Warehouse,” a well-known nightclub, opened in the 70s, that catered primarily to gay African-American men. I read later that the genre had evolved and branched out quite a bit since those days, giving us, among other styles, Acid House, Deep House, Hip House, Ghetto House, Juke, and Footwork, and various cross-pollinations among them and with hip-hop. And the dancing . . . even Marion expressed her respect for the competitive training that allows us to relish the movement you can get a taste of in this clip (sorry for my lack of filming skills). Be sure to also keep an eye on the background and check out the men in orange showing off a highly syncopated style of dance called “Chicago Footwork.” Dancers!
All this brings me back to Du Bois and what he had to say about music. He’s speaking here of spirituals, but I think it can be said for Black music in general, calling it “the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. . . It still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.” But perhaps we must concede that there is some merit to Marion’s dissatisfaction?—the commodification of that gift?
Toni Morrison once spoke of “some enormous strides that African Americans have made in the United States . . . One path is very responsible, very powerful, very consequential, and then there’s another path, which is influential and profitable, but it’s almost as though the history, or that Blackness, or being Black, is a product. I mean you can actually sell it: fashion-wise, you know; music-wise particularly . . . Jazz was designed for other Black people; some layers of music now is for white boys out on Long Island, so it has a different thrust. It loses its political edge. It moves into something . . . purely commerce and shock-value—although the music doesn’t necessarily go that way, but sometimes the language does.”
Du Bois spoke, too, of these conflicting paths. In one of the best-known chapters of The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” he metaphorizes Atlanta, Georgia, through Atalanta, the mythologically unmatched Greek track star whom Hippomenes tricked with the Golden Apples, exploiting her material desires in order to win the race. Du Bois gives a nod to “the levers of work and wealth” (as did the Defender when promoting migration), but he emphasizes our need for a proper finish line—that approached by pursuing spiritual and intellectual goals. (How ironic that our state’s exemplary educators are now awarded Golden Apples!)
Among the many reasons I so love the Bud Billiken parade is that it’s less tainted by such commercial opportunism. It’s nearly impossible to find a parade or festival in other parts of the city that isn’t pasted over with business logos. The last events comparable to the Bud Billiken parade that I can think of were the Red Moon Theater’s Logan Square Halloween Parades, back in the ’90s—processions that included giant papier-mâché animals, fire-eaters and pyrotechnics, jugglers, skeletons, and musicians from Jellyeye Drum Theater, whose instruments were made from sewer pipes and giant oil barrels.
I pondered all that as I began my journey back north. My mind also wandered back over those ideas and concerns that had occupied me that day—communities, education, and raising our kids. I felt not a little forlorn leaving the Bronzeville community, with all its richness and intensity, and crossing over that color-line that you can still see very clearly on city maps. Du Bois returned to me again, speaking of my arrival: “The Black town flocked to the [parade], with a little white at the edges”; and my departure: “He realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle their waters in seeming carelessness,—then they divide and flow wide apart.”
Then there’s the coming school year; of education. Of course it’s an exaggeration, but early in his career, one might argue that Du Bois saw education as the be-all and end-all of African-American progress. In 1903, the return of Bronzeville’s kids to school would have swelled his heart with hope. As time went on, however, his confidence in rationality faded. He came to realize that he was enmeshed in a system “of larger social forces beyond personal control. . . . These forces or ideologies embraced more than our reasoned acts. They included physical, biological and psychological forces; habits, conventions and enactments.” Reading such passages, it’s difficult not to reflect on the impact that “white flight” had on Chicago’s public schools, or on the pipelines to private funding from which public schools in certain Chicago neighborhoods benefit today. I can’t imagine how enraging and heartbreaking this uneven playing field must be to those getting the short end of the stick, especially parents.
I felt increasingly melancholic as I pedaled north toward the Victory Monument. This gorgeous landmark was erected in 1927 to honor the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, an African-American unit that served with distinction in France during World War I. (It was the Chicago Defender that mounted a lengthy campaign to get the monument erected.) It’s a white granite shaft topped with a soldier in bronze. At its base are four panels. One lists the names of 137 members of the “Fighting Eighth” who died in the war. The Soldier Panel features a bare-chested African-American soldier standing with an eagle in front. The Columbia Panel features a classically dressed and helmeted woman. In her left hand she holds a tablet inscribed with the names of battles in which the soldiers fought. The Victory Panel features a classically draped African-American woman representing the moms who, from their redlined neighborhoods, sent their sons overseas to fight to make the world “safe for democracy.” You can see the Victory Panel’s mother as I pass her by in this 2023 video of my journey back to the North Side. The Victory Panel