Young Men's Christian Association - Wabash Avenue records

Historical note

The YMCA at 3763 S. Wabash Avenue 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 YMCA at Wabash Avenue in Chicago thrived as a center of African-American culture, partly due to a notable lack of other alternatives. Carter G. Woodson 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.