7764: The Black Y.

From The New York Times…

Memories of a ‘Black Y’ Provoke Smiles and Tears

By Dirk Johnson

EVANSTON, Ill. — In his barbershop on Church Street here, 78-year-old Sam Johnson can close his eyes and dance once more as a teenager inside the cracker box Emerson Street branch of the Y.M.C.A.

“Oh, the music, the ballgames,” said Mr. Johnson, who also remembers scraped knees, games of checkers and first kisses. “It was the place to be.”

The place not to be, for Mr. Johnson and other blacks in the 1950s, was the main branch of the Y.M.C.A. in this lakefront Chicago suburb. Even in Evanston, a place that likes to boast about its diversity, African-Americans were forbidden to join the main Y, just as they were unwelcome at many clubs and beaches.

“It was the only place we could go,” said Byron Wilson, 91, recalling his childhood at the Emerson Street branch.

Known around town as “the black Y,” it served as the heart of the African-American community for more than 50 years after opening in 1914. Young people played basketball, learned to swim, box and play Ping-Pong. The little Y.M.C.A. branch hosted proms for black students, father-and-son banquets, even a performance by Nat King Cole.

The closing of the Emerson branch in 1969, part of the move toward racial integration, provoked a deep sense of sorrow in the black community here, a sense of loss that has not been fully voiced until lately.

Many whites could not have imagined the emotions caused by the closing, said Delores Holmes, 73, an alderwoman who represents the Fifth Ward, which includes the grassy lot where the branch once stood.

“So much of the burden of integration was put upon the black community,” Ms. Holmes said. “It was blacks who were bused, who lost their hospital, their Y. People watched their whole community come apart.”

To honor the Emerson experiences and sentiments that had long been ignored, the Y.M.C.A. here commissioned a filmmaker, Susan Hope Engel, to produce a documentary: “Unforgettable: Memories of the Emerson Street Branch Y.M.C.A.”

In the film, Karen Boyd Beamon recalled the giddiness of her days at Emerson. “My Saturday mornings were wonderful,” she said, “because I knew I was going to the Y.”

For many black people, it took a long time before they were willing to step inside the larger Evanston Y.M.C.A., now known as the McGaw Y.M.C.A.

“Sometimes I think people mistake hurt for anger,” said Ms. Holmes, the alderwoman. “And it’s not anger. It’s just hurt.”

During planning of festivities this year for the 125th anniversary of the Y.M.C.A. in Evanston, it became clear that some of the feelings about the closing of the old Emerson branch were still unresolved, said Bill Geiger, the president of the McGaw Y.

Mr. Geiger, a white Evanston native who graduated from high school in 1970, acknowledged that, in those days, the main Y “did not have a very welcoming feel for blacks.”

Bill Logan will never forget what it was like. In the 1950s, when he was a police officer, he applied for membership to the main Y with another black man who was on the force.

“We pulled up in front of the Y in our squad car in our uniforms and got out, guns on our hips,” he recalled. “The guy said, ‘I’m sorry, but we don’t allow no negroes to join.’ ”

Mr. Logan would go on to become the chief of police in Evanston and eventually serve on the board of the McGaw Y.

The film was unveiled at a recent celebration of the Emerson branch. Now copies of it are being passed around town to black and white families, and schools are planning to use the documentary as part of the curriculum to teach about race relations.

“It’s been very healing for the community,” said Ms. Engel, the filmmaker.

Like so much else in America in the first half of the 20th century, Y.M.C.A.’s were typically segregated. The first branch for blacks was opened in Washington in 1853, according to Jessica J. Wylie, a spokeswoman for the organization. She said the Y.M.C.A., which is headquartered in Chicago, began desegregating around World War II.

The roots of the Emerson Street branch go back to 1909, when James Talley, an African-American who lived in Evanston, asked the Y.M.C.A. if black children could join. Rebuffed, he recruited other black men in Evanston to supervise activities for children in a lot behind a welding shop off Emerson Street.

White civic leaders and Y.M.C.A. officials in Evanston were “embarrassed” that black children had been, quite literally, left out in the cold, and ultimately opened the Emerson branch in 1914, said Dino Robinson, the head of Shorefront, an organization that chronicles the history of African-Americans in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

Over the decades, relationships formed at the Emerson branch that would change lives forever.

If not for Emerson, Lorraine H. Morton said she “would never have hooked up” with her husband, James T. Morton. Even in the flurry of basketball, Ping-Pong and dances, she could spot a fellow who was going places. Mr. Morton would become a clinical psychologist (he died in 1974).

Ms. Morton was going places, too. She would become the first African-American mayor of Evanston.