“Black history is undervalued across the board,” says Morris “Dino” Robinson, a graphic designer pressed into the history business. Robinson was researching his family’s background in the mid-90s when the publisher of the Evanston Clarion, a monthly newspaper, asked him to write an article about African-American history in Evanston for Black History Month. “I didn’t think I was the right person to do it,” Robinson says. “And I assumed something comprehensive had already been written. When I looked into it, I found it hadn’t.” Robinson agreed, on the condition that it be a regular feature, not a onetime effort that wouldn’t do the material justice. The paper gave him a column (without pay), and beginning in January 1996 he wrote about subjects like the Emerson Street YMCA, founded because the Grove Street YMCA (now the McGaw YMCA) didn’t admit blacks.
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“Separate facilities were needed in Evanston to conform to the racial codes for the White and Black populations,” Robinson wrote. The new YMCA was built in 1914 at 1014-16 Emerson with about $10,000 raised by door-to-door solicitation in the black community and matching funds from the Y. Fifteen years and one addition later (when Evanston’s black population was about 5,000, according to census figures) it had an indoor swimming pool, ballroom, meeting areas, and rooms for rent, and served as many as 9,000 people (some probably from other communities). African-American students at Northwestern, barred from university housing, lived at the Y, and black Evanston Township High School kids, shut out of everything from the school’s prom to its sports teams, danced and played there. The Y eventually offered job training, classes, clubs, counseling, and entertainment, including acts like Nat King Cole. “Of all the columns I wrote,” Robinson says, “that one got the most response. So many people said Emerson Street Y changed their lives.”
