Creative Grounds

Hearing Officer Carl McCormick recommended against closing Overton Elementary in Bronzeville, arguing that district officials were not making good on their promise to send all students at shuttering schools to better-performing ones. CPS argued that McCormick and other Officers who came to similar conclusions either did not understand or over-stepped their role. Mollison Elementary, which was the receiving school for displaced Overton students, filed a Title VI lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Education against CPS the following year to investigate whether the overcrowding that followed was a violation of its students’ civil rights.

Bronzeville earned the title of the ‘Black Metropolis' of Chicago during the Great Migration. It was the center for Black culture and business until white flight, and later the demolition of the Robert Taylor public housing development, set off dominoes of disinvestment across the whole of the Black Belt and other predominantly Black communities on Chicago’s South and West sides. At its height, the narrow strip of Bronzeville was home to more than 300,000, but lost more than 75% of its population between 1950 and 2010. In 2013, Overton was one of six closed schools in Bronzeville joining Attucks, Mayo, Wells, and Williams Elementary and Middle schools.

Since 2017, Borderless has partnered with the Washington Park Development Group through Creative Grounds to organize community-led design activation projects at Overton. Community activations are focused on cultivating exchange and collaboration. For the past five years, Overton has hosted dozens of collaborative creative projects including art and design installations, workshops, exhibitions and more recently a mutual aid market. These projects reflect on the history of the school, celebrate its legacy and introduce its renewed identity.