“The Weight of Now”

A Statement from Laurice Bell

March 28, 2025

What we are witnessing right now in this country is not new—but it is increasingly brazen. The erasure of Black history, of community histories, of lives that made this country possible, is happening right before our eyes.

As a Black woman, a U.S. citizen, and the Executive Director of Shorefront Legacy Center, I feel the weight of this moment. We started Shorefront 28 years ago because our histories had been disregarded, cast aside, undervalued. In 1995, our founder, Dino Robinson, visited the Evanston History Center in search of records about Black life in the city. He was handed two slim folders labeled simply “Colored.” That was it. That was the record.

We knew better. We’ve always known better. We’ve lived the stories that didn’t get told.

I’ve been reading the powerful words of others who refuse to stay silent—Angelique Power, Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, and Rachel Cohen—and I am reminded that I am not alone in this fight. Their voices—and their actions—have inspired me to speak clearly and urgently.

Shorefront is a community archive—one that holds the stories of resistance, love, migration, and survival from Black communities on Chicago’s suburban North Shore. Our archive helped lay the foundation for the first municipal reparations legislation in the country, right here in Evanston, Illinois. What we have collected—and what we continue to preserve—matters. Community archives exist because too often, no one else has done the work to document our lives with care, context, or continuity. We are rooted in place and accountable to the people whose stories we preserve. At Shorefront, we don’t wait to be granted access—we build the archive ourselves, in collaboration with the communities we serve. We don’t just collect—we listen, remember, and resist erasure in real time. That is what a community archive does. It doesn’t just preserve history—it protects it.

Our collection includes more than 2,000 funeral programs—not because we set out to document death, but because for so many in the Black community, these small printed pages are the only public record of their lives. Too often, Black people have been formally acknowledged only at the time of our passing, not while we live, lead, and shape the world around us. These programs often serve as the first and only time someone’s name, work, and legacy are preserved in the public record. That truth is not just heartbreaking—it is evidence of how easily our lives can be overlooked, omitted, or erased. Shorefront has changed that—and we continue to do this work to ensure that our stories are not only remembered, but never erased again. OR That fact alone should give us all pause—and galvanize us to do more.

We were redlined out of neighborhoods, so we built our own—tight-knit communities where we knew each other, looked out for one another, and created joy amid adversity. When told we couldn’t join the YMCA, we created our own Y. When white hospitals refused to treat us or dismissed our pain, we built our own hospital.

Even as we continue to make remarkable strides—politically, economically, culturally—there seems to be a persistent desire to erase, dismiss, or dismantle the very spaces we create to thrive. That is why Shorefront exists. And that is why we will continue to speak out.

We’ve long been in a house on fire—we are simply moving through it gingerly, with care.

We were denied formal education. Then, when admitted to universities, we were denied housing. We built HBCUs and filled them with brilliance. We were excluded from government aid and federal programs like Social Security and Medicare through job exclusions, yet we took care of one another.

The recent removal of racial context from military and public history narratives—whether in the story of the 442nd, at Arlington National Cemetery, or in LGBTQ+ and Black military history pages—is not an accident. It is political. It is strategic. It is dangerous.

Erasure is not neutral. It is intentional. It is violent.

Removing race, gender, and identity from public history does not make the story more objective—it makes it false. These acts strip away the context in which lives were lived, sacrifices were made, and futures were stolen or carved from nothing.

Shorefront is not neutral. We were not created to tell stories through someone else’s lens. We were created to ensure our people are seen, heard, and remembered with truth and dignity.

We call on archivists, educators, artists, institutions, journalists, and community members to hold the line—and to push back. History does not belong to the loudest or most powerful. It belongs to those who lived it and those who remember it.

We owe it to our ancestors. We owe it to our elders, many of whom are aging, whose memories we are racing to document before they are lost. We owe it to the children who will one day look back and ask what we did when the fire was burning.

When you enter Shorefront, you are surrounded by your ancestors.

You feel it—in the quiet, in the stories, in the faces looking back at you from photographs and newspaper clippings. I have always felt protected in this space—filled with our knowledge, our joys, our struggles, and our resilience.

People often come in expecting to find one thing—and end up staying far longer than they planned, discovering so much more than they came for. That’s the power of our stories. That’s the work we do.

And we will keep doing it. With care. With love. With truth.

We remember.
We resist.
We remain.

 

Laurice Bell

Executive Director, Shorefront Legacy Center