When organizers of the 2024 Democratic National Convention first visited Chicago to consider it as a potential host city, local urban historian Shermann “Dilla” Thomas took them on an architecture boat tour along the river.
As he led the tour, Thomas said that he didn’t limit himself to only describing the legendary skyscrapers of the Loop visible during the river cruise. He also talked about the neighborhoods that the DNC organizers weren’t seeing.
“I made clear to them that if Chicago is chosen, they need to also make sure that they include Chicago neighborhoods (to the south of) Cermak,” Thomas said, referring to the street that runs along McCormick Place, the daytime venue of the convention. “So once Chicago got chosen, I guess they remembered me.”
As the convention kicked off Monday morning, around twenty visiting delegates from states including Montana, Vermont and New York piled into a bus leaving McCormick Place at 11 a.m., heading south towards the historically Black neighborhood of Bronzeville.
Projecting archival images on the bus screen, Thomas took participants on a two-hour tour on the South Side, past landmarks from Chicago’s Black history and culture. Stops included a monument for Black WW1 veterans, the church where 14-year-old Emmett Till’s open-casket funeral was held in 1955 and the homes of journalist and activist Ida B. Wells and singer Nat King Cole.
“A tour like this brings everyone together, people from all over the country, to learn a little bit about the Black history of Chicago, Chicago being the epicenter of many firsts in the nation,” said J.B. D’Santos, a delegate from East Hampton, New York.
This week during the convention, Thomas will lead two free tours daily for visiting delegates and politicians. The tours will take them to neighborhoods on the South and West sides of Chicago not covered in a typical downtown architecture cruise.
On Tuesday, delegates will visit North Lawndale and Garfield Park on the West Side, following key locations from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism during the civil rights movement. Wednesday’s tour will focus on the labor history of the far south neighborhoods of Pullman and Roseland, while Thomas will highlight the Mexican-American heritage of Little Village and Pilsen on Thursday.
“I just wanted to make sure that we properly represented Chicago,” Thomas said. “We’re not just solely the people by McCormick Place and by the United Center. I picked neighborhoods that I thought reflected the full spectrum of Chicago.”
Robyn Driscoll, chair of the Montana Democratic Party and a former state senator, plans to attend Thomas’ tours on all but one of the convention’s days. While on the bus on Monday, she said that she was happy to get away from the high-security zones around McCormick Place and the United Center to see more of the real Chicago.
For many of the visiting delegates, the DNC was their first time being in Chicago.
“I’m really interested in learning more about Chicago history,” said Addie Lentzner, a 20-year-old delegate from Bennington, Vt. “I just got in yesterday, this is my first time really seeing the city.”
As hundreds of delegates filed towards the entrance of McCormick Place on Monday, Thomas began his tour at an African Methodist Episcopal church just blocks away on 24th Street on the Near South Side. Quinn Chapel was the first Black church in Chicago, as well as the oldest Black-owned property in the city of any kind, Thomas said.
Thomas led the tour participants up a narrow staircase into the church’s cavernous central chapel. They sat in the pews facing a painting of a Black Jesus Christ.
“To paint that in 1905, it’s absolutely scary to have a Black-looking Jesus in your church,” Thomas said. “In 1905, that would have been enough to get your church burned down in certain spaces, and so this is why Chicago is such a great place to have this national convention.”
While standing in front of the altar, Thomas explained the church’s significance as a stop on the Underground Railroad, a site for speeches by Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, a central institution for the Black community during the Great Migration and the home of a pastor whose sermon influenced MLK’s “I Have a Dream” address.
The church’s current pastor Rev. Troy K. Venning, who sat watching Thomas speak, added that he had received a personal letter from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris just the day before.
The tour then set off into Bronzeville, where Thomas highlighted over 150 years of Chicago history, spanning from the Civil War to the origins of jazz and gospel music.
The bus itself had been branded especially for Thomas’ tour, featuring the slogan, “Everything dope about America comes from Chicago.”
Wearing patriotic colors and slogans on bracelets and t-shirts, delegates peered out of the bus windows to see the buildings that Thomas pointed out, including the first YMCA to admit Black members and the home church of the first ordained Black Catholic priest.
Thomas runs the tour company Chicago Mahogany and got his start on TikTok, where his informative videos about Chicago history went viral. He was recently named the City of Chicago’s Tourism Ambassador of the Year by Choose Chicago.
Thomas’ tours – which are presented by the DNC host committee and U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth – aim to introduce visitors to Chicago’s history and highlight what he calls “policy in action.”
On Monday, Thomas pointed out the dozens of vacant lots where the now-demolished Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens public housing complexes once stood, noting that the Chicago Housing Authority had not built new housing in their place for multiple decades.
Thomas also discussed the influx of migrants to Chicago, who come primarily from Venezuela, and mentioned that Chicago’s population has, in fact, declined by a million since the city’s “heyday.” “There is room for everybody here in Chicago,” he told the tour participants.
Thomas wants to use his tours to truly communicate with delegates and policy-makers regarding the stakes of decisions made in Washington, he told the Tribune in an interview last week.
He plans to show delegates ongoing infrastructure projects funded through President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and clinics built because of the Affordable Care Act, he said.
“Sometimes folks pass laws, but they’re not necessarily fully aware of the byproduct of those laws, right?” Thomas said. “I want to take them by our closed schools, I want the delegates to see the byproduct of redlining. But I also want them to see when policy in action works.”