Chicago’s Bud Billiken Day Parade and a Village’s Dream Drum & Bugle Corps

So many wonderful things make Chicago a great City. It’s too bad it remains the murder capital of the world for young Black men today. That sad fact must change. What has not changed is the African Proverb, ”It takes a village to raise a child.”

As a youth, at the end of summer each year, my Dad would load us kids into his Dodge sedan with Mom and make the 30-minute drive to the South Side of Chicago’s Garfield Boulevard, AKA 55th Street, to see, feel, and smell the tastes of the Annual Bud Billiken Day Parade and Picnic. The Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic is an annual parade in Chicago, and the oldest and largest African American parade in the United States. Since 1929, it has always been held on the second Saturday in August. The idea for the parade came from Robert S. Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender. It is now the second largest annual parade in the United States. The focus of the parade is on educating Chicago’s youth.

In my own childhood, the event was a proud African American tradition and rite of passage for any African American Chicago youth, and a celebration for those of us small-town nearby “bumpkins” from across the Indiana/Illinois state line.

My late uncle Mike Bennett was a drummer in his boy scout troop’s drum and bugle corps. In the early 1950s, along with their team of prettiest baton-twirling majorettes, the drum and bugle corps participated in the parade every year. Growing up, Mike’s Boy Scout Troop #18 corps members shared bragging rights about how they’d dazzled the crowd each year along that broad boulevard by winning the “Best in Band” competition for several years straight.

This fete was achieved by efforts of an entire village, the New Addition neighborhood in East Chicago, who supervised, trained, and guided the corps to success, spearheaded under the dedicated sponsorship of Dr. Edward Broomes, a prominent East Chicago-area surgeon from British Guyana. Much later during my own tenure in Troop #18, sad to say, our generation disappointed Dr. Broomes as we were never able to come close to capturing the excellence of the form of Troop 18’s marching and playing prowess. Their precision and rhythmic sound elicited roars for their music while the neighborhood majorettes strutted their stuff, wowing tens of thousands along the parade route.,

That parade is a thing of the past, but memories linger. One thing is for certain: we had mentors. As kids, it was great summer fun and hard work, we had adult guidance, encouragement, and purpose, and even when we missed the mark we knew we had tried and that someone cared. Where are mentors today? We need you! The youth and their communities need you!