Entry · catalog no. 5017
Bud Billiken
/ /bʌd ˈbɪlɪkɪn/ /BUD BILL-ih-ken
proper noun · Chicago, Illinois · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
The annual back-to-school parade and picnic on Chicago's South Side, held on the second Saturday of August and running down King Drive to Washington Park. It is among the oldest Black parades in the country.
“The whole block is going to Bud Billiken Saturday; somebody's already saving the curb.”
2.
The imagined guardian of Black children invented by the Chicago Defender, whose name the club and the parade carry.
“Bud Billiken was the paper's patron saint for the kids on the children's page.”
Origin & Attribution
The Bud Billiken Club was founded in 1923 by the Chicago Defender's publisher Robert S. Abbott and managing editor Lucius Harper as a youth club for Black Chicago's children. The name pairs Harper's nickname "Bud" with the Billiken, a good-luck figure imagined as a guardian of children. The first parade was held in 1929. It is a Great Migration institution, a showing of Black Chicago's organizing capacity, and it began as one of the Defender's projects rather than as a civic or corporate event.
1923
Chicago Defender founds the Bud Billiken Club
1929
First Bud Billiken parade
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Chicago, Illinois · 1920s
Spoken by
Chicago's South Side Black community
$BUDBILThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady103 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
75/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1923
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Encyclopedia of Chicago, 'Bud Billiken Day Parade' (Chicago Historical Society / Newberry Library)
online
■
+ Cite a sourceEarl Calloway, 'A History of Bud Billiken Day,' Chicago Defender, Aug. 8, 1998 (cited in the Encyclopedia of Chicago)
1998
See also