Curtis Hewston <curtis@magicnet.net> Date: Fri, 27 Dec 1996
Chancellor Broski,
I would like to add my comments to those you've received regarding the redevelopment of Chicago's Maxwell Street. When considering our landmarks of American music, I'm struck by a general observation that seems both readily evident and all-too-easily overlooked. It leads me to ask, "What's in a place, and why should one ever be honored?"
Clearly, it's not a place that should become important but the memory of its people and the acknowledgment of their purpose. We preserve the thing because we want to regard its people and events as worthy measures for the judgment of future endeavors. This is no less true of Maxwell Street than of Valley Forge, Gettysburg, or Normandy. It may also be true that a place becomes UNimportant because we neither remember its people and their time nor regard their contributions as valuable, or by introducing another measure, more valuable.
Jazz and blues are indigenous to our country, as are their many popular offspring. I'd venture to say that it would be a good thing as a society to acknowledge and encourage original artistic expression. But the origins of our jazz and blues represent many more significant values to which we should adhere -- among them, strength of community, courage and humility, pain and reward, spirituality and peace.
Jazz found an early home along Basin Street in the Storyville district of New Orleans. Years later, it lived along 18th Street in Kansas City, then Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The blues was born in and around Dockery's Plantation in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, found its freedom on Memphis' Beale Street, and came of age in Chicago -- along Maxwell Street. These are arbitrary places. They are no more or less deserving of their fates than any others. But they are where their people poured the foundations of their lives, and where we go to remember them. We hope that you will accept your role in perpetuating their traditions along historic Maxwell Street.
Respectfully,
Curtis Hewston
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