Beloved Bronzeville firebrand Harold Lucas has died. Organizer, activist, historian and preservationist will be missed. ‘Harold was one who did the work.’
Community organizer.
Activist.
Preservationist.
Historian.
Advocate.
Teacher.
Tour guide.
Entrepreneur.
Cyclist.
Fisherman.
Friend.
Father.
Kingmaker.
The Brilliant Bishop of Bronzeville.
A self-described “brick thrower,” Harold Lucas, Jr. had many monikers during his 79 years, and each one connected him to his native Bronzeville and its cultural heft. For years, Lucas helmed the Black Metropolis Convention & Tourism Council, an advocacy group working to revitalize the neighborhood.
Lucas was born Nov. 1, 1942, to Katherine Hodges and Harold Lucas Sr. Lucas Jr. died Aug. 9, according to family and friends. Lucas’ daughter, Sherri Lucas-Hall said her father suffered a stroke in 2020 and had endured illness over the past two years.
“He’s a historian to everybody else — to me, he was just daddy,” said the mother of three. “I’ve known of his work my whole life. My earliest memories, I spent a lot of time in the South Shore Country Club with my dad because we used to go there and have picnics with the family. We had picnics most weekends, so when he started fighting to preserve the South Shore Country Club (through the Coalition to Save the South Side Country Club) that didn’t surprise me because that was the place we’d hung out, why would we want them to tear it down?”
Lucas-Hall, a tutorial business owner, says she got her fight from her father. Currently training educators on how to better teach reading to pupils, Lucas-Hall said she found what she believes in and has been fighting for it for the past three years. A Hyde Park Career Academy alumnus like her father, she remembers how his yearslong fight was always for and about the Black community. His work was “for Bronzeville to stay what it was to all of those people that migrated from the South because this is where they congregated ... in the Bronzeville area and he wanted to preserve that as a community for Black people,” she said.
Friends of Lucas say the DNA of Bronzeville (aka the Black Belt) was Lucas’ life’s work and legacy. Knowing the area’s history: It being home to millions of Blacks fleeing racial violence in the South and a place where they faced discrimination in terms of housing, jobs and education, Lucas set out to share that knowledge and history with everyone from youth who weren’t aware of it to adults who seemed to have forgotten about it.
“He really propelled Bronzeville as a state of mind in terms of what this mix of Black people from the South created in Chicago,” said Anton Seals Jr., executive director of Grow Greater Englewood, a food and land sovereignty nonprofit. Seals got to know Lucas through his father as a child and reconnected with him as an adult. “He kind of coined that around us, holding on to our history in order to create a better future and that our history makes us.”
“As a city, we don’t tell our narrative as one of the premier Black capitals in America,” Seals added. “With segregation, there is the highlight where you are among your own people. When you think about all the people who came out of that — Dinah Washington was the queen, Nat King Cole was the king, all the literature, theater. But it’s never told that way. These stories are not canonized in ways like other places that you go are.”
Lucas worked on making Bronzeville an international sustainable Black heritage tourism destination, a community of the future with a rich past. That meant retaining the buildings that held that history. Per his friends, Lucas helped save from demolition the Chicago Bee Building (3647 S. State St.) which housed a Black newspaper founded in 1926 and now houses a branch of the Chicago Public Library; the former headquarters of the all-Black “Fighting 8th” regiment, the armory at 3533 S. Giles Ave., the Overton Hygienic building, 3619-3627 S. State St., which housed one of the first firms to specialize in cosmetics for Blacks and eventually housed the Douglass National Bank (the first black bank to be granted a national charter): and the former headquarters of the Supreme Life Insurance Co., (founded in 1919 at 3501 S. King Drive), the first Black-owned and-operated insurance company in the northern United States — where Lucas conducted business for years. Saving this history was a task tackled with others committed to Bronzeville’s rejuvenation — those such as Paula Robinson, president of Bronzeville Community Development Partnership and Bernard Turner, executive director of the Black Metropolis National Heritage Area commission.
“I was community relations, he was community organizing, and we both began to go down this path of community economic development. We learned more about what that is ... a regeneration for these communities,” Robinson said.
She said Lucas was of the Saul Alinsky style of organizing, and saw community organizing as a profession and not just a passion. Robinson worked with Lucas on a number of commissions, including the Mid-South Planning Development commission and the Black Metropolis National Heritage Area commission (steering committee).
Turner, author of “A New View of Bronzeville,” used to conduct tours of Bronzeville with Lucas. Turner said he would offer the glass half full perspective, while Lucas would share the injustices within the area. He emphasized if something needed to be done and “didn’t spare the words.”
“We want to pick up from where he left off with certain types of advocacy for preserving what’s still there,” Turner said. Ald. Pat Dowell said it was because of Lucas’ leadership and commitment to save our history that those buildings were saved. Dowell said she looks forward to doing a proclamation in Lucas’ honor and putting a plaque with his name on it in the Bee Building.
“He was about saving the buildings, protecting the integrity of the community ... he was uncompromising in those areas,” said friend and activist Eddie Read. “He kept looking at trying to rebuild every aspect of Black life. The thing I know about Harold Lucas is that his principles and integrity were about preserving the culture, the quality and sincerity of Black Chicago and teaching it to the next generation. Even with his tourism piece, I never saw him as anti-anyone, the phrase that Harold Washington used that exemplifies Harold Lucas was ‘in his pro-ism, it didn’t mean that he was anti-anything else.’ He was very pro quality of life and the essence of what Black Chicago used to be and what he thought it should continue to be for all of the right reasons.”
Will Crosby said he met Lucas in 1976 when doing some work for congressman Ralph Metcalfe. The pair would go on to work on other political campaigns and organize free jazz concerts on the South Side through the years. Lucas lending his expertise with media, graphics and photos. Skills he taught to youth when he had the time. Lucas created “Youth Vision and Integrity” a program that mentored youth to a college path. Crosby said during their friendship, he never knew of Lucas leaving Bronzeville for more than a couple of days.
“He was just deep into Chicago,” he said. “He really was trying to work on Bronzeville, or what he called his native son.” Even while in and out of medical institutions the past several months, Crosby said “Harold’s mind never stopped thinking about what he was trying to do.”
“It’s always been a few people who do the work and a lot of people get the reward and Harold was one who did the work,” Crosby added.
That’s not to say Lucas’ work ethic got in the way of his enjoyment of what Chicago had to offer. Lucas could often be found riding his bike along the lakefront, enjoying the nearby green areas (forest preserve/parks), and fishing in Kankakee or Marquette Park. Harold Hall, aka Brother Hall, was looking at rods his friend strung for him when he had a hand injury. Hall said Lucas loved to engage Black youth in the city’s natural landscape too.
Several friends remember how the book “Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City,” by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr., was Lucas’ bible; and a portion of the Richard Wright introduction a mantra he often cited in public discourse. (Lucas even received a typed letter from Drake in 1986, a letter found in the Harold Lucas Papers at the Newberry Library). Hall remembers a friend who would help him feed the homeless; someone who would ask a friend to pull over the car to talk to youth to tell them about the hallowed ground they stood on, given the ancestors and notable Black figures who called Bronzeville home.
“If you’re going to speak about Harold, speak about how he reached out to those less fortunate than himself, speak about how he would take his last $15 and share with brothers who couldn’t help themselves and needed to get a meal for their family — that’s the Harold I know,” Hall said. “When it came to being able to communicate with all, he was well versed, he could articulate the language very well. But he was a frustrated giant because he understood that it didn’t take 10 bubble gums and a Coca-Cola to get his community through, it took a little bit of love and a little bit of understanding ... he’s someone who understood the establishment before the establishment brought it up on the people. He understood urban renewal, gentrification ... and he used to convene meetings just to make sure that we weren’t left out in the cold.”
Marquinn McDonald, co-founder of Bronzeville’s community patrol group Watch Guard, likened Lucas to the late Timuel Black, and was not the only person to do so. Lucas was a bridge to the past and a griot of the Black community that held a university of knowledge.
“The thing that was magical about Harold Lucas is if you were out of order, he didn’t give a damn who you were, he challenged you. He pushed back and he pushed back hard and he didn’t compromise on his pushing back,” said McDonald. “I had the pleasure of being in a few meetings with him to see him break it down. He did not care who was there, he was going to tell you the truth, he didn’t bite his tongue.”
Hall said he was before his time, a MacGyver of the community. Lucas was a proponent for area internet before the pandemic, hoping to spur communication and economic development in Bronzeville. He also asked the growing number of young professionals moving to the area in recent years to engage in activism and make the area better. Seals said he was one of the best public advocates Chicago has seen, one who used the system in order to extract and leverage resources for the community. Seals is hoping the work Lucas did with Robinson will continue and canonize Bronzeville as a national historic site. And from there, the linkages to our footprint in this city and our culture is reflected and that we aren’t erased.
“He was one of a kind — keeping people honest, not getting enthralled with politics, understanding that politicians play a role and as public advocates, we play a role,” Seals said. “It’s not about you not being friendly, it’s understanding that you’re there on the business of those who sent you so when you have to call people to account, you do that. It’s about pulling up your sleeves and understanding that policy proceeds program.”
Lucas-Hall said she would like to see what her father built continue, as well as the fight he took on for the community. She would like to see Bronzeville as a space where Black people have room and places they can afford to live.
At a memorial for Lucas (aka “Buzzie”) dozens of those who knew him celebrated his life. Phrases like: “We cannot let him stop talking in our head,” and “happiness was not his goal,” and “unsung hero” were spoken. Yvette Moyo, publisher of “The South Side Drive,” said “Harold was Chicago to the bone.”
She told the group to channel their own Harold to honor him.
“Harold is a representation of old Chicago, and even us as younger Chicagoans or new Chicagoans gives Chicago the value that it deserves, or even understand it,” said Toussaint Werner, graphic artist and co-host of “I Said what I Said” podcast. Cook County is the largest concentration of American descendants of slaves left in America. So what that represents is that we really lead the cause for what Black culture is in America. This is a mecca for Black people. And I think as this begins to crumble, our existence on American soil will look very different and like Uncle Harold, I’m very afraid of what that is. I think his legacy would be that of an alarm, trying to wake the populace up to the possibilities of either greatness or failure. Because we harness both. If this falls apart, what happens to Black existence in America?”
Lucas is survived by a daughter Lucas-Hall; a son Eli Lucas; three sisters Lydia Lucas, Helen Lucas and Harriet Herron; and three grandchildren.
A number of memorials/tributes are being considered for Lucas, including a bike ride over Labor Day weekend.
