Black police work in Chicago (Renault Robinson)

CTL-E-1332 · Practice · other · 1970–1979

Verified evidence grade of this record

The experience of being among the few Black officers in the Chicago Police Department in the 1970s — documented in Studs Terkel's Working.

Notes

Merged into canonical KG 2026-10-03 from LIFE-001; source entity IDs: CTL-DR-LIFE-001:CTL-LIFE-E-069; source research type(s): practice.

Sources

NPR 'Working Then and Now' (Sept 25, 2016); Fast Company (Sept 2016) (primary source)
Nonprofit Quarterly (Sept 30, 2016); NPR (Sept 25, 2016) (primary source)

Record CTL-E-1332 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: Verified · CTL research: LIFE-001.
Directory: all entity records · the knowledge graph

Cite as: CultureTechLens, “Black police work in Chicago (Renault Robinson) (CTL-E-1332),” October 4, 2026. https://culturetechlens.com/graph/entities/ctl-e-1332/

From the Archive

The archive in pictures

Black enterprise — the shops, banks, and trades that built it. Photographs from the CultureTechLens research record — rights-cleared, credited, and cited like everything else here.

Only Negro store of its kind in the U.S., at 2933 State St., Chicago, Ill, Chicago, 1941Photo: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963, collector, FSA-OWI, Public Domain, via Library of Congress

Policeman talking to employee of Ten-cent store whose trade is predominantly Negro. Chicago, Illinois, Chicago, 1941Photo: Lee, Russell, 1903-1986, FSA-OWI, Public Domain, via Library of Congress

The Overton Hygienic Building, 3619–6227 S. State St., Chicago — Anthony Overton’s Black Metropolis business headquartersPhoto: Andrew Jameson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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