Martin Luther King Jr. was a Chicagoan. He lived at 1550 S. Hamlin with his wife and their four children. Coretta Scott King remembered the apartment building as “dingy … no lights in the hall, one dim bulb at the head of the stairs,” with a hallway reeking of urine.
With King’s time here in mind and his holiday uncomfortably sharing Monday with the second inauguration of Donald Trump, I visited his old stomping ground by hitching a ride on a King-focused private bus tour that TikTok historian Shermann Dilla Thomas conducted for United Way of Metro Chicago.
If there’s one thing that sets Thomas’s tours apart — alongside his deep knowledge and warm personality — is that the past never stays past. Right off the bat, he drew a line from King’s time to our own.
“Today we’re here to talk about Dr. King’s time in Chicago,” Thomas began. “The thing that brings him to Chicago is housing. It’s crazy to think that almost 60 years later we’re still dealing with housing issues related to segregation, inadequate housing for the poor, lack of public housing, absentee landlords, people who hold onto vacant lots and dilapidated properties and don’t do anything about them.”
The tour stopped at the Stone Temple Baptist Church, a former Romanian synagogue on West Douglas Boulevard.
“This is where King did a ton of time doing his Chicago Freedom campaign,” said Thomas. “Every year the folks connected with Skokie’s Holocaust Museum build sukkahs in North Lawndale to continue the tradition. That’s how you build community.”
The best and worst of the city freely mix — Thomas pointed out the beelove cafe, a sparkling facility featuring local honey, directly across the street from the Chicago Police Department’s notorious “Black Site.”
“Thousands of Black and brown kids have been taken in that building without due process and held for days being tortured,” Thomas said.
Next stop, the old Sears Homan Square campus.
“This was an anchoring space,” Thomas said. “What makes them leave? King’s assassination. … Dr. King was the powderkeg. King gets assassinated, there were riots here, and Sears decides too take this expansive campus and put it all in one building, the Sears Tower.”
The site of the dilapidated building where Martin Luther King lived in 1966 at 1550 S. Hamlin is now the Dr. King Legacy Apartments, a $17 million project of 45 unites of affordable housing building in 1966 by the Lawndale Christian Development Corp. The hope was to make it the center of a new King historic district, but historian Shermann Dilla Thomas says the site lacks even an official city plaque.
Neil Steinberg/Sun-Times
We stopped at 1550 S. Hamlin, now the site of the Dr. King Legacy Apartments, an attractive rental complex built in 2011.
“To show the dilapidated housing that Black folks lived in, King moved to the West Side,” Thomas said. “King was already a rock star. He had already won the Nobel Prize. He had already given the ‘I have a dream’ speech. He could have lived anywhere. He wanted to live as people actually lived. He comes to Chicago to talk about housing, and has speeches and marches everywhere.”
The building itself honors King, but the city is mum.
“The site where King lived should have a plaque from the city of Chicago, but it doesn’t,” Thomas said. “That’s a travesty. What do we call the area by Buckingham Fountain? ‘Queen’s Landing.’ Queen Elizabeth came to Chicago one time. We should have a sign in the spot where Dr. King lived for a year in Chicago. We should continue to acknowledge what he left us, a legacy to fight on, even against all odds.”
We stopped in front of the former Jewish People’s Institute, now the Lawndale Community Academy. Thomas deftly summed up the past 175 years of Chicago history as only he can.
“You know how it goes in our country,” he said. “One of the reasons why we need people like Dr. King: we’re always crappy to the new people, right? Anglo-Saxon dudes were here. Then they Germans came, and they were crappy to the Germans. It led to the Lager Beer Riots. Then the Germans Americanized, and the Irish folks have the potato famine and the Irish come. The Anglos and Germans are [lousy] to the Irish. And then the Italians come, and the Irish are [unpleasant] to the Italians. Then the Black folk come via the Great Migration, and the last group in is being crappy to the Black folks. Sometimes in that, you find this line where folks come from this same struggle, they remember that it wasn’t always nice for them. So they’re willing to be nice to others.”
After the tour, I asked Thomas if Chicago does a good job of remembering King’s legacy.
“No we do not,” he said. “It isn’t until this time of year we even mention that King has spent any time in Chicago. That’s something we should talk about outside of King Day or Black History Month, as a part of the overall history of Chicago.”