The Bud Billiken Parade ran from 39th and King Drive south to 51st on Saturday August 8, ending with the It Takes A Village Festival in Washington Park, free, ten to four. It is the largest African American parade in the United States, drawing more than 500,000 spectators along a two-mile route with up to 300 participating groups — floats, marching bands and drill teams. LisaRaye McCoy was grand marshal, and the whole route was carried live on local television.
Ninety-seven years. The origin is the part that should be taught in schools and is not.
It Started for Paperboys
The parade was founded in 1929 by Robert Abbott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender, and named after a fictional Defender mascot. It was created so that the Black newsboys who sold his paper would have a day of their own.
Sit with the scale of that. The Defender was the paper that told Black Southerners to come north and helped drive the Great Migration that built Bronzeville. Its publisher looked at the children distributing it on Chicago streets and decided they deserved a parade. Almost a century later that gesture is a televised half-million-person civic event, and the drill teams marching in it are from the same schools those newsboys would have attended.
There is no other parade in America with that provenance. It was not founded by a city, a chamber of commerce or an ethnic association. It was founded by a newspaper for its own child labour force, and it outlived the newspaper’s heyday by decades.
Back to School Is the Frame
The organising idea is still the children. Bud Billiken is Chicago’s Black back-to-school celebration, held in the first half of August, built around drill teams and school marching bands, and for a great many CPS students it is the event that marks the end of summer.
That is a serious piece of civic infrastructure and it explains the parade’s durability better than nostalgia does. A parade that a school band prepares for all year is not an optional cultural amenity; it is a fixture in an academic calendar, with adults organising around it because children are counting on it.
LisaRaye McCoy as grand marshal fits the pattern of a parade that has always used recognisable Chicago figures to hold the attention of an audience that is fundamentally local. The parade organisers took it citywide.
Washington Park had a busy year — the African Festival of the Arts over Labor Day weekend, Pride South Side at the DuSable in July. Details on the parade sit with the organisers and Choose Chicago.
Ninety-seven years from a publisher’s gesture to his paperboys. The hundredth is in 2029, and somebody should be planning the coverage now.
Cover image: Via abc7chicago.com