south side.

I hear those two words and I see Home. my people, not relics of past glory taken by Father Time, Mother Earth, and the plague of man but modern architects of a way of life you have pay to experience. I think of block parties off King Drive, ribs tips off 103rd, knowing you got both PACE and CTA and if you miss both you walking yo happy ass to the 95th red line station, friends picking the day the Taste of Chicago people thought kinfolk wasn’t wylin out on, the look on faces when they found out we got a beach in the hood; & my mind goes everywhere at once and nowhere at the same time. I think it’s been hard reckoning what people continue to believe about our city, my Home, and what goes into it, without spending a day in our shoes or our skin, let alone our town. The South Side of Chicago, along with many neighborhoods terrorized by bank lenders and FHA policies, state sanctioned police violence and food deserts, predatory low income housing and underfunded schools, are living monuments of our splendor and ingenuity, even as you call as chi-raq and pontificate over death you only see as numbers in a game of narratives. We are the enclaves of culture, the bastions of beauty to the shadow of doubt you cast upon us with every right off and every foray into respectability politics concerning families not of your own.

I want you to come home with me to the place I dream about within a land set further and further away from anything resembling Home, every morning as I wake. remember with me. dream with me. until dream land and reality become one in the same.

this is Summer on the South Side.

The photo turned art piece is from the harsh research collection and David Kellum papers of a crowd in Washington Park following the Bud Billiken Parade in 1930’s Chicago. The Bud Billiken Parade is the nation’s largest black parade in the United States and was started by the founder of the Chicago Defender, Robert S. Abbott and David Kellum of the Bud Billiken Club.

STREAM HERE or CLICK THRU the artwork.

produced by the one and only Calvin Valentine. mastered by prof.H of @onthe1sounds