Margaret Bouroughs

Hyde Park would not be the same without Maraget Borroughs. For one, the DuSable Museum of African American Art would likely not exist-or at least as we know it.

As an artist, poet, and teacher, Margaret Burroughs wore many hats to make her creative mark on the world. But as a Chicagoan, Burroughs left a lasting legacy that can still be found in the city today.

Born in 1915 in Louisiana, Margaret Burroughs moved with her family to Chicago in 1920 as part of the Great Migration – a decades-long movement of Black families from the South to northern and western cities. According to the biography on her website, Burroughs attended Englewood High School, where she was classmates with the influential poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

Burroughs went on to get her teaching certificate in 1937, and two years later, she helped found the South Side Community Arts Center (SSCAC). The center started as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). One of the projects within the WPA promoted arts and culture by paying artists, musicians, writers, and other creatives, including a group of Black artists working in Chicago – and Burroughs was among them.

“We had no place to exhibit, so some of us got together and we decided what we would do was try to get a place,” Burroughs told WTTW in 2010 as part of the documentary DuSable to Obama: Chicago’s Black Metropolis. “We decided that we needed to get the money to buy the building, so I and quite a few of the other young artists … we got collection cans.”

After fundraising, sometimes just dimes at a time, Burroughs and other Black artists in Chicago were able to purchase a mansion at 3821 South Michigan Avenue. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at the dedication of the building in 1941. According to the SSCAC, the center is the “only African American Art Center of its kind opened under the WPA Initiative to remain continuously open.”