Young Men's Christian Association - Wabash Avenue records, 1926-1958

Old Resource ID was YMCAWabash

The YMCA at 3763 S. Wabash Avenue or Wabash Avenue and 38th Street was designed by Robert C. Berlin and financed primarily by Julius Rosenwald, Chairman of Sears, Roebuck, and Company who added his funds to those raised by community residents. Completed in 1913, the facility provided housing, education, and vocational training for African Americans emigrating from the South who sought new opportunities in Chicago's growing industrial and commercial enterprises.

The first nonreligious institution established and managed by African-Americans was the YMCA in Washington, D.C. founded in 1853 by Anthony Bowen, a freed slave. The YMCA at Wabash Avenue in Chicago likewise thrived as a center of African-American culture, partly due to a notable lack of other alternatives. Carter G. Woodson, the second African American to receive a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University stayed at the Wabash Avenue YMCA during visits to Chicago. Dr. Woodson's experiences at the Y and in the surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood inspired him to create the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. Woodson believed that education and increasing social and professional contacts among blacks and whites could reduce racism and he promoted the organized study of African-American history partly for that purpose. Woodson would later promote the first Negro History Week in Washington, D.C., in 1926, forerunner of Black History Month.

The Bronzeville neighborhood declined during the late sixties and seventies like many other inner city neighborhoods across the country, and the Wabash Avenue YMCA was forced to close during the 1970s. Concern for the Y's role in African-American history and recent improvements in the area led to a successful drive to place the Wabash facility on the National Register of Historic Places. After the conclusion of a $9 million renovation, the Wabash Avenue YMCA reopened to serve the community in 2000.

The YMCA - Wabash Records are organized into four series: I. General, II. Board of Directors - Minutes and Reports, III. Photographs, IV. Contents of Scrapbook. Series I includes correspondence, memoranda, notes, pamphlets, brochures, schedules, program plans, budget requests, reports, minutes, clippings, forms, lists of officers, YMCA conference materials, administrative forms, newsletters, and issues of trade publications such as Institutional Feeding and Housing. Memoranda, correspondence, programs, newsletters, and reports from the Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago and other affiliated organizations are also held in this series. Series II consists of minutes and reports of the Board of Directors of YMCA at Wabash Avenue. These materials are copies and are held in sequential order. Some original minutes and reports are held in Series I, General. Series III are photographs showing the personnel, patrons, and activities of the YMCA from 1917 to 1958. Series IV consists of the contents of a disassembled scrapbook. These Records also include a small number of negatives, some of which do not have corresponding prints.

See the YMCA's website at www.ymca.net and the National Park Service's website at www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/chicago/c21.htm for more information about the YMCA at Wabash Avenue.

The Wabash YMCA donated these materials to the University of Illinois at Chicago in July 1962.

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Young Men's Christian Association - Wabash Avenue records, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago

• NamesYoung Men's Christian Association (Chicago, Ill.). Wabash Avenue. -- Archives