As a high school senior in Chicago, I got to tell you, when it comes to Black history, the only people who I really learned about in school were Emmett Till, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Oh, and Harriet Tubman.
But if I was teaching history, I’d tell you about Dr. Margaret T.G. Burroughs, or as I like to call her, Dr. B.
She was a powerhouse. She helped start the South Side Community Art Center when she was only 23 years old. In 1959, she started the DuSable Black History Museum in her own home. She even has art in the Art Institute of Chicago.
But I didn’t learn this in school. To find out about Dr. B, I had to go to a special summer program at Illinois Humanities that became an all-year program at the Invisible Institute. The other young folks in the program and I went through her archives at South Side Community Art Center and read Our Girl Tuesday, a zine about her legacy. We started calling ourselves the Burroughs Scholars.