In a scene in my novel The Worried Man, main character Q.C. Davis becomes disoriented. She uses Congress Parkway as her guide to get back home. Chicago recently renamed that street Ida B. Wells Drive.
The name change reflects changing times, yet shows how slowly change occurs.
The City And The Street
The short street now known as Ida B. Wells Drive forms the border between downtown Chicago and the Printers Row neighborhood just south of downtown where I live.
It’s a street a lot of Chicago area residents don’t think about. Or if they do, they know it only as that street that the Eisenhower Expressway turns into when it hits the city.
I’ve been aware of it since college, though.
Longer ago than I want to say, I attended Columbia College, commuting by train from my parents’ home in the near west suburbs. As I walked from Union Station, sometimes in below-zero temperatures, Congress Parkway was my signal that I had only a few blocks left to go.
Ida B. Wells Drive also forms the north border of my favorite summer book fair.
Its name has also changed. The fair is now the Printers Row Lit Fest rather than the Printers Row Book Fair. (You’ll be able to find me there this summer on Saturday morning, June 8, 2019, under the Chicago Writers Association Tent.)
The Corner Of (Slow) Change
Nearly twenty years ago I moved to the Printers Row neighborhood. It’s where my Q.C. Davis novels are set.
Almost every day now I cross the street at the corner of Wells Street, a key north-south thoroughfare in Chicago, and Ida B. Wells Drive. That means every day I’m reminded both that things have changed and that change comes slowly.
Chicago was incorporated as a a city in 1837. Its population reached 4,000 that year. Now over 2.7 million people live here.
Though the settlement that later became Chicago was founded by a black man, Jean Du Sable, Ida B. Wells Drive is the first Chicago street named for an African-American woman.
Ida B. Wells
Born in 1862, Wells was an African-American journalist as well as a feminist and abolitionist. She led an anti-lynching crusade in the 1890s. She also worked with the National Equal Rights League, advocating for an end to discriminatory government hiring practices, and helped found the NAACP.
As the site Biography noted about Wells:
- With her writings, speeches and protests, Wells fought against prejudice, no matter what potential dangers she faced. She once said, “I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”
Life And Fiction
I could leave the street name in The Worried Man as is. The book isn’t history but a mystery/suspense novel.
But many readers tell me part of what they love about the Q.C. Davis novels is how they depict Chicago. One of my aims is that the city almost become a character in the novels, much as it is in Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawki books or as Three Pines is for Louise Penny’s series.
So as the real Chicago changes and does a better job recognizing contributions of people like Ida B. Wells who strive for justice, it seems right that Q.C.’s Chicago do the same.
