From 1966 to 1983, the community literary magazine Chicory was published in Baltimore by the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Called “the most authentic microphone of black folks talking ever devised,” by the Afro-American newspaper in 1969, Chicory developed both out of the liberalism of the War on Poverty, which helped fund it, and the militance of the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of Black Power. Centered around working-class Black communities in East and West Baltimore, community members—from children to elders, social workers to incarcerated men—expressed themselves in its pages…mostly unedited or as dictated to an editor…making the magazine a remarkable resource for hearing the voices of those often marginalized in archives and traditional historical sources. In 1983, the library stopped publishing it. Librarians boxed up the issues and stored them for unknown users in the future.
In 2014, while conducting research about Baltimore for Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire, I came across a reference to Chicory…The next time I went to Baltimore, I made an appointment at Pratt library to take a look…
I sat there all day and the next, flipping through the issues, photographing them because there was so much that I couldn’t possibly read it all…I realized quickly that this was an important document of the past. Its pages reverberated with the voices of Baltimore, of working-class Black life, especially youth, in one of the most politically and socially tumultuous eras in US history. That it was mainly poetry added to its power. Poetry has been the language for some of the most visceral descriptions of the Black experience in US history.
Since 2017, a group of former Chicory editors, university-based scholars, librarians, poets, teachers, and youth in Baltimore have collaborated…as the Chicory Revitalization Project. We use Chicory to catalyze intergenerational civic dialogue around social justice, place, and race through a traveling exhibit titled “Soul of the Butterfly: Chicory Magazine and Baltimore’s Black Arts Activism,” writing workshops, public events, digitization of the magazine, and social media…In 2024, team members Victor Rodgers, Devlon Waddell, and Kevin Johnson Jr. launched a new Chicory print publication, bringing the project back to its roots.
Baltimore’s Black Arts Then & Now documents our work to offer guidance to public historians and humanists, librarians, and high school and college teachers who want to use African American literature, specifically poetry, for engaging students, youth, and other members of the public in creating intergenerational dialogue between past and present. One of our guiding principles is that history is a tool for addressing the critical social issues of our time.
As this book attests, Chicory affects its publics in several ways. For some, it fills the gaps of the history silenced in textbooks, showing that regular folks in cities like Baltimore made art. For others, it is a space to connect with the past and create new art in the present in response to it. In other cases, it raises questions about the goals of artistic activism when so much has stayed the same in Baltimore and elsewhere. In any case, it amplifies these voices, both then and now.
For more information visit thechickoryproject.org.