Making Cities Look Like Those Who Built Them

When you drive around Chicago, or any city like it, recognition for its leaders should not just be visible in Black neighborhoods

See that highway hugging Lake Michigan? That’s Chicago’s historic Lake Shore Drive. Just last week it was renamed for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the Black man who is credited with creating a trading post and being the first non-Native permanent resident of the area that is now known as Chicago.

I was surprisingly emotional when I covered the ceremony changing the name of a downtown Chicago street from Congress Drive to Ida B. Wells Drive.

Wells, a Black woman and journalist, was one of many people the city had not adequately honored — with only a torn-down housing authority project bearing her name. This day, things were different as the new, shiny street sign was unveiled, a tribute to the woman who had created a lasting influence on the city and its people. So I wasn’t surprised when Alderman David Moore started to push for a street name change to Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Drive to honor the city’s first non-Indigenous settler, a Black man who is known as the “Father of Chicago.”

DuSable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa and built a trading post where the Chicago River and Lake Michigan meet that became a major supply station in the Great Lakes region. Their granddaughter, Eulalie Pelletier, became the first non-Native person born there.