The renewed effort is finally getting off the ground more than six months after Johnson agreed to earmark $500,000 in the city’s 2024 budget for the task force, the first time city officials have promised to use taxpayer dollars to do more than just promise to talk about what Chicago owes its Black residents as a result of the legacy of slavery and segregation.

A one-off assignment to photograph Route 66 turned into a years-long labor of love. Now, his work highlighting a more complicated side of the highway memorialized in that famous tune is being shown at Uptown’s Chicago Center for Photojournalism, 1226 W. Wilson Ave.

Carol Moseley Braun has had a storied career spanning more than three decades and six presidents. Most notably, she shot into the cultural zeitgeist in 1993 when she became the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

Chicago’s Latino lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer communities are embracing the city’s progress toward equality, while recognizing there’s still work to be done. Particularly when it comes to providing safe and welcoming environments for today’s LGBTQ+ youth.

More than 2,300 Negro Leagues players from 1920 to 1948 were added to the online database — a historical correction that’s four years in the making. It was announced in December 2020 that the MLB would be “correcting a longtime oversight.”

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is once again under the spotlight after a manager failed to consult a collections committee before purchasing a 21-star flag whose description as a rare banner marking Illinois’ 1818 admission to the Union is disputed.

Whether laying wreaths, flying American flags or donning red poppies, Chicagoans unite over Memorial Day weekend to honor veterans who served in the U.S. military.

The “Brown Revisited” recreation is being made available at brown.oyez.org. It will be part of a website, painstakingly put together by former Northwestern University professor Jerry Goldman, that allows people to hear oral arguments in decades worth of Supreme Court cases and follow along with written transcriptions.

Chicago is set to host the Democratic National Convention this summer. It will be the city’s 27th time hosting a national political convention. Chicago conventions have been some of the most memorable, raucous and consequential in American history.

Two local WWII veterans associated with a deadly ship explosion off the coast of Japan met in person for the very first time last week in Evanston. Myron Petrakis is just shy of his 102nd birthday; Marvin Elfman is 97.

The day honoring the patron saint of Ireland is a global celebration of Irish heritage. And nowhere is that more so than in the United States, where parades take place in cities around the country and all kinds of foods and drinks are given an emerald hue.

Toomey & Co. Auctioneers will devote an entire sale to Chicago artwork from the past 100+ years. The auction is titled “Elevated: Art Via Chicago.” 

The most famous ship in history is being remembered at the most famous shopping mall in Skokie. “Titanic: The Exhibition” just opened at Westfield Old Orchard.

“Route 66 was the first great American road trip,” said Amy Webb with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The trust is crowdsourcing Americans’ stories, memories and photos of the famous road that connected the Midwest to the West.

“If we didn’t take it, it would’ve gone to the scrap heap,” Gary Marine, Melrose Park’s director of public works, said of the historic Kiddieland sign that now lives in the Melrose Park Public Library parking lot.

The Illinois Underground Railroad Task Force met for the first time this week to begin devising a strategy for sharing, growing and celebrating the history of the Underground Railroad in Illinois.