Since she was a little girl, Laverne Kirby had never missed a Bud Billiken Parade — until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the South Side tradition for the first time.
On Saturday, Kirby, 66, sat in a lawn chair on the sidewalk of South Martin Luther King Drive in Bronzeville, close enough to see the glitter and twirls of the marchers but far enough to keep a distance from the families assembling closer to the parade.
“A lot of people scared because of the pandemic, cause of the virus,” Kirby said. “That’s why I’m sitting over this way.”
Kirby and her fiancé, Dennis Simmons, were most looking forward to the drill team and Jessie White Tumblers. She said the annual celebration is a source of pride for her “because it’s a Black parade,” and one 92 years strong.
The Bud Billiken Parade first launched in 1929 and returned Saturday with the theme of “Back to School, Back to Life and Back to Bud Billiken.” Its rebirth also came with telltale signs of 2021: rapid COVID-19 testing along the route, and on-site vaccinations at the end of the march in Washington Park.
The usual 250 or so groups were scaled down to 125 to better socially distance, too. But plenty of big names attended, including parade Grand Marshal and Chicago Sky forward Candace Parker, the civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and more.
“Yes, we absolutely have challenges in the city; there’s no question about it,” Lightfoot told reporters ahead of the event. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the people in the city, the vast majority of folks who live on the South Side, love their city, love their neighborhood, love their block, and just want to be able to live in a peaceful, vibrant environment. And that’s what Bud Billiken completely exemplifies.”
Bronzeville resident Timothy Anderson has also been going to the parade for decades. The ritual was instilled in him by his father, and on Saturday he brought his 7-month-old daughter for her first sighting.
Anderson, 45, noted the turnout at the blockbuster event had been dwindling even before the pandemic. When he was younger, people could hardly walk through the thick crowds. Now, he surmised that newer generations seem less interested because of social media and that the South Side has lost some of its longtime middle-class families that are the backbone of the parade’s attendance.
“I just think that it’s not a big deal anymore, but it’s something that as long as I’m in Chicago, I always come,” Anderson said. “It’s tradition. It’s something that (my children) need to be exposed to and just understand the history of not only the city, but the community and the people.”
Though this year’s parade was not what some residents remember it to be, some mainstays of the event remained. By the afternoon, the bright-red outfits of the Jesse White Tumblers drew cheers and hollers as people migrated to the fencing to watch the athletes hurtle through the air.
More telltale signs of a typical Bud Billiken — sights of residents dancing on balconies along King Drive, the smell of charred hot dogs and burgers and sounds of shaved ice vendors competing for customers — spurred one woman to briefly step away from selling sunglasses and dance on a side street.
The 29-year-old, who only identified herself as “Sunflower,” pumped her fists while keeping her tiara and rainbow outfit in place.
“It felt like a decade,” she said of the wait for the parade to return. “I kept my tears inside, but I held my head up because you know what? What’s coming is better than before.”
