After collaborating with an Evanston Township High School teacher to document the Evanston she once knew, 2nd Ward resident Colette Allen presented her findings at an April 2025 symposium hosted by Northwestern and the Shorefront Legacy Center.
Reconstructing that geography was difficult, Allen recalled. She highlighted physical locations like the hospital where she was born, schools she attended and the former Emerson Street Branch YMCA.
“It was very triggering for me because I feel like the Black community of Evanston I know — I knew — has been erased,” she said. “The Emerson Street Y is gone. I spent many, many, many, many, many hours there as a toddler all the way through high school. It’s gone. The churches, the hospitals — all that is gone.”
Allen’s accounts shaped Mapping Black Evanston, a project supported by NU’s Advancing Neighborhood & Community Health, Opportunity & Resilience grant program.
The project hosted a “History Harvest” Saturday at ETHS, encouraging Black community members to share oral histories and digitize personal artifacts, documents and videotapes.
“We thought, ‘How much even more powerful would it be to collect not just Colette’s stories, but the stories of many, many Black Evanstonians from all generations to layer onto our current Google Map of Evanston’ — those layered memories and histories of institutions and spaces that were really important to Black folks and Black students,” said Ruth Curry, program administrator at NU’s Center for Civic Engagement.
Event coordinator and history Prof. Kate Masur said events like Saturday’s benefit both organizers and attendees by expanding historical archives and giving community members a chance to digitize materials from their homes.
She added that the opportunity specifically helps community members who might lack the time or technology to scan their own materials.
“It’s sending a message, especially for African American history and the Black community in Evanston, that their materials matter and that these things are things that tell a history, that provide stories that we don’t want to lose,” Masur said.
She added that while urban landscapes are “always in flux,” processes like gentrification have targeted the physical realities that underlie Black residents’ memories of Evanston.
For example, Chicago resident Constance Fullilove, who grew up in the city during the mid-1900s, recalled her parents purchasing their home for $5,000. Today, the property is listed for more than $500,000, she said.
Fullilove, who also brought her sister and cousin to Saturday’s event, said she enjoyed gathering materials from her childhood, during which her parents worked as “urban farmers,” growing their own fruits and vegetables.
“We always talk about photographs and memories, shared experiences,” Fullilove said. “So just looking at some of these things, it does stir up a lot of things — good memories.”
For Allen, who graduated from ETHS one year before and lived “around the corner” from Fullilove during the 1960s, collecting documents also sparked mixed emotions, with “some of them good memories, some of them not.”
She brought parts of her mother’s poetry collection to Saturday’s event.
“I brought some of that in to scan, and that got too emotional for me because one of the poems that she wrote was about the lynching of my great-grandfather in Abbeville, South Carolina,” Allen said, referencing a town where many Black families from Evanston once lived.
Medill sophomore Zoey Jowers worked at the event’s keepsake photo station and filled out forms describing the metadata of digitized files. She said the gathering allowed her to connect with community members she would not have otherwise met, enriching her NU experience.
“It’s really nice to just be in a room with a bunch of different Black people who are from Evanston,” Jowers said. “I’ve taken a couple of Black Studies classes and like working at Shorefront. You really do become invested in the specific Black history of Evanston.”
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