Starting this week, the half-hour special “Black History Verified” will air in Chicago on WCIU and WMEU, co-hosted by journalist Brandon Pope and Shermann “Dilla” Thomas, the latter of whom has become a favorite on TikTok thanks to his deep reservoir of knowledge about the city.
Through his videos (his TikTok handle is @6figga_dilla), Thomas has emerged as a charismatic and seemingly endless font of information, digging through Chicago history and making it relevant to our lives today — details that live in his head, ready to be offered at a moment’s notice. In the special, when Pope and Thomas visit the Wabash Avenue YMCA — a hub of Black social life in the early 20th century — Thomas rattles off all kinds of trivia and Pope stands next to him with a look of delight on his face. That’s the kind of reaction Thomas tends to generate from people.
“We’re looking to tell stories in a way that’s relatable,” said Pope, “and there’s nobody more relatable right now than Shermann ‘Dilla’ Thomas and the way he’s able to make history cool and fun. He’s such a great ambassador for the city. He understands so much about it, the nooks and crannies. Every neighborhood to him has value.”
Look around enough and it can seem like all roads lead back to Chicago; the city’s influence extends beyond its geographical borders. Which is what the clunky new “Chicago Not in Chicago” city advertising campaign is apparently trying to get across. Thomas, who said he’s been contacted about doing something connected to the campaign, chuckled at the slogan. “If it were up to me, it would be: Chicago, hell yeah, Chicago.”
Last year, when he was profiled in the Tribune by my colleague Christopher Borrelli, he said, “I realize I’m not an average looking historian, and that’s a good thing, right? I’m an urban historian, I guess. Just trying to engage younger people in history. Maybe it’ll help.”
With the passing in October of Timuel Black, Chicago’s unofficial chief historian who chronicled the evolution of Black life and culture, and the retirement last year of Tim Samuelson, the first and only cultural historian on the city’s payroll, there seems to be an opening for someone with Thomas’ talents and ability to connect with people.
Ahead of the broadcast of “Black History Verified,” we talked about the TV special and his hopes of selling his own TV series that he’s currently writing. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:
Q: How did you decide what you wanted to focus on in ‘Black History Verified’?
A: I didn’t want it to be the same old thing when it comes to Black history in Chicago. Usually it’s Harold Washington — not that there’s anything wrong with Harold Washington — and then “Obama got his start here” and that’s it. And the history is richer than that.
There are people who were here a long time and did just decades of work and — because of the nature of Chicago and Chicago politics — ain’t nothing named after them. People are going to soon forget about them as the old generation dies out, so I thought it was important to highlight lesser-known people.
What was cool is that WCIU let me send them a list of who and what I wanted to focus on.
Q: In the segment about the Wabash Y, you talk about how — because of racial restrictive covenants in the first half of the 20th century — Black people across all kinds of professions and economic status lived as neighbors in Bronzeville.
A: As it relates to 2022 and wokeness, we don’t look at integration in its totality. The lawyer wasn’t living next to the garbage man because that’s what the lawyer wanted to do; he had nowhere else he could live in this city. But the byproduct was that you didn’t have to go far to find the best of anything, which is why so much greatness is born out of Bronzeville. Even as it relates to music or jazz, if King Oliver or Louis Armstrong was creating something and they needed somebody to bounce an idea off of, they were going to run into other world-renowned jazz players because they all had to live there.
So when the racial covenants went away, yes they gained access to other parts of the city. But what was lost was that closeness — of being within arm’s reach of greatness.
Q: On the show, you say Earl B. Dickerson is your favorite Chicagoan. Among other things, he’s famous for being the attorney representing Carl Hansberry and took his case before the Supreme Court to strike down restrictive covenants — and won. Do you remember the first time you learned about Earl B. Dickerson?
A: Oh, yes. My wife calls me a nerd, but I certainly do remember. I was 17 and we were in the Woodlawn area, living at those two-flats — my grandma used to live at one at 63rd and Eberhart — and my dad said, ‘Do you know why Black folks are allowed to live in those two-flats?’ And I said no. And he told me about the Lorraine Hansberry-Carl Hansberry story.
And I had seen “A Raisin in the Sun” (Lorraine Hansberry’s play) in school. So right at the moment I was getting ready to hit him with, “Yeah, I know that, I learned that in school. They got that insurance money and were finally able to move to Woodlawn,” he said, “No! They had a lawyer by the name of Earl B. Dickerson and he took their case to the Supreme Court, and Earl B. was the first lawyer to reverse a racial covenant through a lawsuit, and his precedent is what eventually undid racial covenants for the rest of the country. Each winning lawsuit uses his precedent.”
My dad being a cop, they need to have some understanding of the law — or at least we hope — so he broke that down to me, sitting in his Chevy Cavalier.
Then he was like, “You’ve never heard of Earl B. Dickerson?” I was like, “Nah.” So then we drove to State Street and there’s the Giles VFW and he explained that Earl B. Dickerson was the only Black man to be a founder of the American Legion. Then we drove to Hyde Park and the University of Chicago and he said, “Earl B. Dickerson was the first Black man to graduate from this law school.” And then we went home and I started looking him up; we had a library on 79th and Loomis back in the day and I went there and I found out a lot about the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, because he was their general counsel.
Q: It sounds like you get your love of history from your family. But maybe it’s also just your personality?
A: It has to be a part of me, right? When we used to go to Great America, I’d be like, “Why is this place called Gurnee?” My brain always asks these questions. Why is Evanston called Evanston — who is Evans and why’d he get a whole town?
Q: This was all pre-internet, so how did you find out?
A: I would call that place’s city hall. Sometimes you would get lucky and they would know. But if they didn’t, they would give me a number to call someone else and I’d be off to the races. Or I would crawl through microfilm; some person like you, who’s a journalist, maybe had the same question and wrote about the history of a place and that story is full of information.
But I also talk to people. I think people respond to my videos because they recognize that I’m a real Chicagoan and I try to deliver the history without even my own biases.
For example, as a Black man, I grew up hearing the stories of, “Stay outta Bridgeport.” But when I became a meter reader for ComEd, you can’t stay out of Bridgeport if they tell you to go to Bridgeport and read all the meters. And when you end up in people’s backyards, that’s a very personal space to a retiree. That’s their backyard, their garden, and here you are standing there reading the meter, so there’s some tension. But once you get past that, by the fifth month, she’s telling me stories. And by the ninth month I understand that the foreman at the McCormick Reaper Works told her great-grandpa every single day (in the late 19th century) that if he tried to join the union, the Black guys from the South were gonna come take his job. And he told that story to his son. And by the time his son came of age, every day there were 10,000 Black dudes getting off the train taking the steel mill and stockyard jobs. And he tells that story to his son. And by the time we’re in the 1940s, it’s like three generations of this pent-up animosity against the Black dude and ain’t none of them have ever even had a conversation with one. I mean, I understand how that can happen, though.
Q: Looking ahead, do you see yourself staying with ComEd or doing other things?
A: Thank you for asking that. Please write it: ComEd should make me their ‘Can you hear me now?’ dude. But really, I want to be the city’s cultural historian.
Q: What part of the city do you want to learn more about?
A: I don’t know enough about our Lithuanian past and our Polish history. I know the big stuff, but I don’t know enough personal stories. There have to be a lot of beautiful personal stories. Who is their Earl B. Dickerson? I want to know that and I plan to know that. I’m trying to immerse myself.
Q: I know you’re writing a TV drama set in Chicago. What can you say about that?
A: I’m writing a TV pilot right now, working with Thomas Lennon and Chris Witaske, and I think that will be a major way that I’m allowed to contribute to maintaining Chicago history. I’m focusing on a historical event and following a Chicago politician over a small period of time in the second half of the 20th century.
We treat things in Chicago today — the violence and who got shot — as this new thing that just started when Lori Lightfoot or Rahm Emanuel got elected. And what I want to point out is that Chicago has been dealing with these things for 50 years.
So even if stuff is fictionalized the way Hollywood does it, the baseline for any story I plan on telling is going to be rooted in fact. Right now I’m dropping really cool factual gems as far as the backdrop. You won’t have to question if the sidebar conversations of my main characters are accurate or not. But I also hope they illuminate the city in a positive way, too. I don’t plan on telling the Chicago Outfit story. This is something different.
Sugar23 is managing me. (Sugar23 is run by manager and producer Michael Sugar, whose credits include “Spotlight,” “13 Reasons Why” and “The Knick”).
Q: Let’s play ‘What if?’: What if your ambitions come to fruition and you sell your TV show and people encourage you to move to LA?
A: Nope. You can’t be a cultural historian for Chicago living in L.A.
As much as I want to win an Emmy, what I want more is to die at 87 and get a brown honorary street sign in Auburn Gresham because I was the city’s first Black cultural historian.
Q: What’s the story behind your nickname?
A: It comes from my mom. Anyone who has bought a used car knows, even though you knew it was going to be a piece of junk, once you get there, they talk you out of your money. And my mom said I was like a used-car dealer to her: If we were in line at Walgreens, by the time we walked out I had talked my way into the toy that was going to break before I got home. So she used to say, referring to me: “That’s a used-car dealer over there, you better watch him.” And then my brothers would just say, “dealer, dealer,” and then it got urbanized as “Dilla” and it just stuck.
Q: What do you think most reporting gets wrong about Black history in Chicago?
A: That it doesn’t matter to everybody. But it truly does.
We do a great job of making sure that American history is important to everybody and Black History Month is treated as something that only Black people need to pay attention to.
But it’s important to all of us.
“Black History Verified” airs at 1:30 p.m. Saturday and 11 p.m. Feb. 26 on WCIU, and 12 p.m. Sunday and 6:30 p.m. Feb. 20 on WMEU.
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.
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