Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Timuel D. Black, Jr. came to Chicago before he was a year old. The neighborhoods of Chicago are the map of his life. He is a well-known and highly respected educator, community leader, oral historian, and political activist. He was educated at Chicago's Burke Elementary School and DuSable High School and later earned a bachelor's degree from Roosevelt University and a master's degree from the University of Chicago. He taught at DuSable, Farragut, and Hyde Park high schools in Chicago, and became a renowned teacher and administrator at the City Colleges of Chicago. He is a Professor Emeritus of Social Science at the City Colleges of Chicago. His most recent publication is Bridges of Memory: Chicago's First Wave of Black Migration (2005), an oral history based on interviews that chronicle the impact of the southern migration on Chicago's Black history. A second volume of Bridges of Memory was published in 2008.