In 1916, a lynch mob murdered wealthy Black landowner Anthony Crawford in Abbeville, South Carolina. This killing spurred an outflux of Black families from the region, many of them relocating to a small but growing city in the North Shore of Chicago – Evanston.
Today, many members of Evanston’s close-knit Black community can trace their roots to the exodus from Abbeville or to other waves of the Great Migration, in which many Black Americans moved from the South to the Midwest in search of equality and opportunity. But these roots aren’t always visible, even to the people who share them.
“We recognize that there are people who might have known each other and come up together, who have no idea of their own connections because of the disconnect and disenfranchisement,” said Laurice Bell, executive director of the Shorefront Legacy Center.
Over time, a tight-knit and vibrant Black community took root and grew in Evanston. Black Evanstonians began to create new history in the city, which is now being traced and recorded by the Shorefront Legacy Center, in collaboration with the Northwestern Center for Civic Engagement.
Mapping Black Evanston, an oral history and digital mapping project, records residents’ memories of the Evanston sites that shaped their lives, researches those places and puts them on a map, building a growing history of community and revealing unexpected links between neighbors.
“It’s detective work, it’s archive work, it’s history work, it’s journalism work, all sitting on top of each other,” Bell said.
Colette Allen, the great-granddaughter of Crawford, inspired the project. For the “Activating Local Black History” symposium hosted by Shorefront in 2025, she drew on Shorefront’s archives to create a presentation on places in Evanston that were important to her life.
“It transfixed the room to hear this personal account of the city that we shared,” said Ruth Curry, program administrator at the Northwestern Center for Civic Engagement. “And it had a semi-mournful tone because Colette was telling us about places that had disappeared. Some of them survive and are still vibrant, but some of them have been displaced by all of the forces that displace Black people and Black institutions.”
This year, with a second-round grant from Northwestern’s Advancing Neighborhood & Community Health, Opportunity & Resilience program, Shorefront expanded Allen’s work into a community-wide effort.
The team trains community members to interview their neighbors, who are asked to show the interviewer the sites that matter to them. Researchers then dig into each site: they collect photos, write an encyclopedia-style entry and add the site to the map with help from Northwestern.
Many interviewees point to places that no longer exist. Several were specific to the Black community during decades of segregation. From 1914 to its closure in 1980, the Community Hospital in the historically-Black Fifth Ward treated Black patients when other hospitals would not. The Foster School served as a focal point for the neighborhood before it closed during school integration in 1979. The Emerson Street YMCA, which was known as the “Black Y” before it closed in 1969, acted as a gathering spot and a home for Black male Northwestern students before they were allowed to live in the university dormitories.
Other sites still stand, such as churches, libraries and Evanston Township High School. Jojo Galven Mora, a Northwestern history graduate student working on the project, said that interviewees have shared memories of the high school spanning over 50 years – enough to “build out this repository of historical memory around African American life and experiences.”
Curry explained that the project carries a sense of urgency. Eleanor “Brownie” Frazier, Allen’s cousin who she spoke to as the project’s first interview, recently passed away, highlighting the exigency of the project. And the places too are being lost to the passage of time.
“There’s just an incredible history that now spans generations,” Galven Mora said. “And the reality is, this history is being lost at an alarming rate.”
Galven Mora pointed to the rising cost of living in Evanston, gentrification and the deaths of older residents. Another factor, Galven Mora said, is decades of disinvestment in the Fifth Ward, where Evanston’s Black population has historically been concentrated.
“It’s really important for people to be able to see themselves represented on a map, to be represented in galleries and exhibits and history,” said Galven Mora. “I’m hoping that this project is the first of many steps in correcting that longstanding history of inadequate representation.”
Leelai Demoz, an Academy Award-nominated producer of documentaries and other films, works with Mapping Black Evanston to conduct and film interviews. He grew up in Evanston but moved away for about 25 years. When he returned, he became involved with the Shorefront Legacy Center.
“I know that when someone watches one of these interviews, they’re going to get an insight into the place where they’re from, which I think will give them an understanding of themselves,” Demoz said.
The lesson, Galven Mora said, is that “history is everywhere you look.”
“Sometimes all you need to do is ask,” he added. “Just because the history isn’t easy to find in textbooks and maybe even in museum galleries, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
