By Melanie Eversley

Longtime Chicago activist Timuel Black, who worked with the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and and mentored Barack Obama, died last week at the age of 102.

The cause was prostate cancer.

As a young high school and college teacher in the 1950s, he was so moved by King’s work that he flew to Alabama to meet him and later helped build support networks for him.

Black was one of a circle of Chicagoans who encouraged the late Harold Washington to run for mayor, leading to Washington being the first Black person to hold that seat. In the 1990s, he mentored a young Barack Obama. 

The former president wrote in a statement published on Medium, “Tim was a testament to the power of place, and how the work we do to improve one community can end up reverberating through other neighborhoods and other cities, eventually changing the world.”