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Artists Explore MLK Legacy
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Lizania Cruz, “Freedom Budget” (2021). Photo: Simbarashe Cha for The New York Times
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Let Freedom Ring, an outdoor digital exhibition hosted by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, invited nine artists to explore the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A New York Times article, “Celebrating King the Activist (Not Just the Dreamer) in Art,” notes: “King was an activist, an intellectual, an organizer, a social justice warrior. The work on display on the BAM billboard thankfully reaches beyond the rhetorical construction of an equitable society as a dream to show what freedom looks like when it undergirds the lives of Black and Latino people.”
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Racial Justice, President Biden and Housing Policy
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Photo: AP/Evan Vucci
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President Joe Biden signed an executive order on January 27 to begin reversing the Trump administration’s housing policy of undermining The Fair Housing Act. The memo to HUD states in part: “The Federal Government must recognize and acknowledge its role in systematically declining to invest in communities of color and preventing residents of those communities from accessing the same services and resources as their white counterparts. The effects of these policy decisions continue to be felt today, as racial inequality still permeates land-use patterns in most U.S. cities and virtually all aspects of housing markets.” Biden’s housing policy will go further than just undoing the damage of the previous administration. CityLab reports that the president has “pledged federal action to pursue environmental justice, lift restrictions on housing production and ease the racial gap in homeownership and homelessness alike.” The Biden Administration also extended the foreclosure and eviction moratorium for single family mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or guaranteed by the Office of Native American Programs through March 31, 2021.
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Amazon Offers Housing Fund
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Amazon pledges to invest more than $2 billion over the next five years toward affordable housing in Seattle, Nashville and Arlington, Virginia. The Housing Equity Fund will invest in moderate- to low-income housing in areas where the e-commerce giant foresees having at least 5,000 employees. The plan will offer grants and below-market loans to housing partners, public agencies, and organizations working to find solutions to the affordable housing crisis.
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Photo: Honolulu Civil Beat
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In 1920, Congress passed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act which set aside 200,000 acres of land across the islands for homesteading by Native Hawaiians. Sponsored by Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana'ole, Hawaii's delegate to Congress, the land represented just a fraction of crown lands taken from the Kingdom of Hawai'i when it was annexed by the United States in 1898. The act excluded prime agricultural lands that were already occupied largely by sugar plantations. On this centennial of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, housing advocates are calling for an examination of the original plan and a solution to the housing crisis facing Native Hawaiians. The article, written by lawyer Williamson Chang, states: “The affordable housing crisis is an existential threat to the Hawaiian culture as well as the spirit of aloha that makes our islands unique.”
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Public Housing and Evictions
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The housing authority in the small city of Crisfield, Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay, is one of the leading eviction filers, according to a report published by the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and Capital News Service. According to the report: “It takes so many tenants to court that officials hired a contractor to automate the process.” The Howard Center investigated five local agencies which are part of a national network of 3,300 housing authorities. The report concludes: “Public housing, which is supposed to be a solution to homelessness, may now be the cause of the problem. More financial resources are desperately needed for housing authorities to stay afloat. High rent collection rates can be a way for housing authorities to perform better and, in turn, earn high marks, less oversight and potentially more funding from their superintendent, HUD.”
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Abolishing the Faircloth Amendment
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Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
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An opinion piece by Ross Barkan, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Knows How to Fix Housing,” outlines how the congresswoman was able to engineer the repeal by attaching it as an amendment to a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan that passed the House in July. He writes: “While the government will need to employ short-term measures to avoid a wave of displaced households, one major step toward resolving the underlying problems in the housing market would be repealing an obscure 22-year-old addition to the Housing Act of 1937, the Faircloth Amendment. Passed in an era when the reputation of housing projects was at a low, the amendment prohibits any net increase in public-housing units.”
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Meet Tonika Johnson: NPHM’s 2021 Artist-as-Instigator
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Chicago-based photographer Tonika Lewis Johnson is a long-time community activist who began documenting Englewood, her South Side neighborhood, as a way of counteracting the numerous media reports and visuals that ignored the positive and focused on the problems. She made beautiful images of the people and beloved spaces of her neighborhood that were exhibited in her hometown at Rootwork Gallery, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Harold Washington Library Center, and Loyola University's Museum of Art.
In 2010, she helped co-found the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E), with the mission of building relationships and mobilizing people and resources to create positive change. She also co-founded the Englewood Arts Collective in 2017. In her work, Tonika explores segregation and documents the richness of the black community. This approach was the foundation for her critically acclaimed Folded Map project, that visually investigates disparities among Chicago residents and brings them together for conversation. On her website, there are images, videos, and a downloadable action kit for those who wish to expand their knowledge of their surroundings and explore how systemic racism has impacted all facets of our lives.
The Museum is thrilled that Tonika will be the Artist-as-Instigator for the year.
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Rhoda Jean Hatch Remembered
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Pascal Sabino, a Report for America corps member, wrote a beautiful tribute to the late activist, educator, and NPHM supporter Rhoda Jean Hatch in a recent issue of Block Club Chicago. Family members were interviewed at the New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in West Garfield Park where Rhoda’s brother, Rev. Marshall Hatch Sr., is the pastor. Sabino writes: It was through Hatch that the family learned of the sankofa, the West African word for “go back and fetch.” It is symbolized by a bird with its feet planted in the present and its body facing forward, but its head turned back, looking at the past. As keeper of her family’s collective memory and an educator who empowered younger generations with the wisdom of the past, Hatch herself embodied the sankofa, Hatch Jr. said. ‘Reaching back and learning from the past, or retrieving that which has been stolen in order to move forward, she taught us that and she lived it,’ he said.”
The Museum is proud to be telling the Hatch family story in one of the restored historic apartments at the future permanent site.
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The Chicago Freedom Movement and The Radical King
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The National Public Housing Museum and Elmhurst Art Museum invited audiences to dedicate an hour on Martin Luther King Day, to hear about the “radical King” from enthralling activists and scholars, who share their stories and work that remind and challenge us to grapple with the lessons of MLK and beyond, including Nate Marshall, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Rev. Dr. Marshall Elijah Hatch Sr., Bernardine Dohrn, and Mary Lou Finley. The program also includes a special sneak peek into two riveting new exhibits about the Chicago Freedom Movement with John McKinnon and Lisa Yun Lee. Watch Online on Youtube
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Out of the Archives!
Episode 10: Black Is Beautiful II: Reflections on Family, Activism, and Perseverance
February 5
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Join us for the tenth installment of our oral history audio listening series, Out of the Archives!, which will be available on our SoundCloud page and website on February 5. This episode, entitled, Black Is Beautiful II: Reflections on Family, Activism, and Perseverance, features stories of Black residents sharing stories about their musical pursuits, what led them to activism, and more. The episode will be released in tangent with Black History Month.
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Love is The Antidote: 36 Questions for Civic Love
Featuring San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Multimedia Journalist Yesica Prado
NPHM opens the San Francisco Urban Film Festival
February 14
7-8pm CST
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This Valentine’s Day, join NPHM at the opening night of the SF Urban Film Fest as we celebrate and center practicing love as an antidote to the relentless crises in our cities worldwide. How can love lead us to decriminalizing homelessness, rethinking incarceration, acing hunger, and a pandemic?
NPHM will present our toolkit, “36 Questions for Civic Love,” with special guests San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and multimedia journalist Yesica Prado, who will ask and answer a set of 36 questions, specially curated for the SF Urban Film Fest, that include a focus on housing, self-care, and community healing.
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Let’s Make Civic Love
February 19
6:30-7:30pm CST
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Join us virtually for this interactive event! Participants will be paired with a stranger to ask and answer as many questions as possible in the allotted time on the theme of Civic Love. Learn and get to talk with a stranger – the cornerstone of democracy.
This program was inspired by the National Public Housing Museum’s (NPHM) 36 Questions for Civic Love, which was recently updated to include a focus on questions of housing, self-care, and community healing. In 1997, psychologist Arthur Aron explored whether intimacy between two strangers could be accelerated by asking each other a set of 36 questions. NPHM adapted his questions for use in a new kind of social experiment, aimed at helping us all fall in civic love.
The interaction will be held in Zoom break-out rooms. Those who don’t finish all 36 questions (and want to) are encouraged to exchange information with their conversation partner and find time to reconnect in the near future.
Register here.
For the full experience, please watch the films for the program People-led Solutions – models for our shared future, curated by independent journalist and filmmaker Yesica Prado during the break from 7:30 – 8:30pm CST. Then join SFUFF at 8:30 pm CST on Youtube Live for a panel discussion with Berkeley and Oakland-based housing activists, and a community planner from the Kibera district of Nairobi, Kenya.
Download the updated civic love toolkit at nphm.org/civiclove.
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Donor Profile: Applegate & Thorne-Thomsen
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Ben Applegate
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The Museum received a gift of $25,000 to the Power of Place Capital Campaign from Applegate & Thorne-Thomsen, P.C., a law firm that specializes in affordable housing and community development. Ben Applegate, a treasured NPHM board member, is the firm’s former managing partner and one of its founders. The firm started small, working primarily with developers in the Chicago area, and now has a nationwide practice representing investors, syndicators, lenders, public housing agencies, and service providers.
Ben remembers driving into Chicago from Columbus, Ohio to attend law school, and seeing the imposing towers of the (now demolished) Robert Taylor Homes along the Dan Ryan Expressway for the first time. “While there was a broader recognition that I had been fortunate in life where others had not,” he said, “living in the city that first year really opened my eyes.”
When he started practicing law, he took on pro bono cases representing non-profit developers utilizing low income housing tax credits in the very early years of the program. “Having been exposed to my clients’ community development efforts and meeting the people they serve, I developed both a personal and professional passion for doing what I can to expand the supply of safe and affordable housing,” he said.
“In the early 90s, I was a commercial real estate lawyer,” Ben said. He took on a pro bono case with an SRO in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. The work cemented his commitment to affordable housing and he has worked with Mercy Housing Housing Lakefront in one capacity or another – as lawyer, volunteer and board member – since 1986.
Ben heard about the efforts of the NPHM through a friend and joined the board over the summer. When asked why it is important to support the Museum, he said that its important for people to see how public housing can be reimagined. Ben works a lot with public-private housing projects, and believes it is important that we keep the public part in mind. “There is so much negative stereotyping of what public housing looked like,” he said. Public housing in the 1980s was in a decline, which is what Ben saw when he first came to Chicago. “I think that one of the most compelling things about hearing stories of people who grew up in public housing is how much of a sense of community there was in the early days,” he said.
Ben Applegate is also a member of the Power of Place Capital Campaign Committee. To learn more about the Museum's Capital Campaign and invest in the future of the museum, click here.
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As a museum we adapt and change in these challenging times. We persevere—and we thrive because of you, and with you.
NPHM draws on the power of place and memory to preserve, promote and propel the right of all people to have a place to call home.
You can help sustain our work by making a donation today to support our programs and exhibits that educate, inspire, and spur people to action to create a more just future.
Thank you!
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The 1968 Fair Housing Act was inspired by the work of Civil Rights Movement — in particular the Chicago Open Housing Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, and Al Raby. During the same period, there was another grassroots movement in the Northeast headed by Dorothy Mae Richardson (1922 – 1991), a Pittsburgh resident who was moved to action after encountering so many difficulties trying to find affordable and safe housing for a blind African American couple. In the 1960s, discriminatory lending practices and urban renewal created so many hurdles to homeownership. Richardson founded the Citizens Against Slum Housing (CASH) that advocated for the improvement of dilapidated houses and federal support for revitalizing neighborhoods. In 1968, CASH became Neighborhood Housing Services that evolved into a partnership with financial institutions that would secure loans for home buyers. In addition to supporting homeownership, CASH advocated for code enforcement and new public housing.
In October of 2019, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission honored Dorothy’s legacy with a historical marker.
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The Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois opened the exhibition There is Black Housing in the Future: Equitable Public Housing as Memorial recently as the precursor to a major exhibition exploring fair housing that is scheduled to open in March 2021. This installation, taking over the modernist Mies van der Rohe McCormick House on the museum’s campus (an exterior view is pictured above), is a collaboration between Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist Alisha B. Wormsley and Chicago-based conceptual artist Ayanah Moor. Both artists, through their layering of images, text, and their use of common household objects, seek to inspire activism and to support mothers fighting for the future of Black housing by connecting viewers with organizations that advocate for affordable housing. Because of the pandemic, the museum has to temporarily close its doors, but virtual programs are in the works (including one with NPHM). For a satisfying deep dive into the work of these two powerful artists, and their examination of Blackness and language in their work, tune into this conversation hosted by the Goethe-Institut Chicago.
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