Englewood High School
6201 S. Stewart Avenue
Chicago, IL 60621
(Englewood)
I wrote constantly. Rhymes, mainly. It was wonderful to have the Defender accept my things... I wrote about seventy-five poems by the time I was sixteen, while attending Englewood High School.
Gwendolyn Brooks’s Report From Part I
According to Chicago Public Library records, “In 1859, Englewood’s first school opened in a two-story frame house. Englewood High School was established in 1873 at 6201 S. Stewart Avenue. A new school facility was built in 1979. The last class graduated in 2008, the school closed and reopened as two schools: Urban Prep Charter Academy and Team Englewood Community Academy.”
In Englewood’s early years, the high school, like the neighborhood, was nearly all white, with Irish, Germans, and Swedes making up the largest ethnic groups. The neighborhood’s racial makeup, bolstered by The Great Migration and also the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway, changed following World War II, with Black residents rising from 10 to almost 70 percent of the population in the 1950s. The number of Black residents continued to rise and the number of white residents continued to fall. Englewood High School eventually surveyed at nearly 100 percent Black students. Debra Williams, writing for The Chicago Reporter on October 5, 2005, portrayed a stable, vibrant neighborhood into the 1960s that deteriorated due to a myriad of factors. “But as the 60s waned, so did Englewood, which began a downward spiral following riots after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Blocks of tidy residences and businesses were abandoned, boarded up and later torn down, leaving a wake of litter-strewn vacant lots,” Williams wrote. “As housing deteriorated and community investment dried up, families—particularly those who were economically better off—moved away, and Englewood’s public schools took a beating, too. Enrollment plummeted, teacher turnover went up and problems with student behavior and discipline escalated steadily.”
Englewood High School produced a steady stream of students who would go on to make important contributions to American society, especially in the literary arts. Six future Chicago Literary Hall of Fame inductees graduated from Englewood High School between 1929 and 1948, and a seventh, Timuel Black, Jr. attended there before deciding to transfer. Notable visual artists Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1914) and Richard Hunt (1953) were also products of the school.
Willard Motley, Jr. (Class of 1929)
Margaret T. Burroughs (Class of 1933)
Gwendolyn Brooks (Class of 1934)
Oscar Brown, Jr. (Class of 1943)
Lorraine Hansberry (Class of 1948)
Sam Greenlee (Class of 1948)
Reading, Viewing and Listening List
What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black
