Black Men of Measure: Stories of Skilled Labor, Creativity, and Community is a work-in-progress by Tieshka K. Smith that explores her father’s career as a skilled train mechanic for the Chicago Transit Authority, situating his life within the broader history of Black labor, union organizing, and the emergence of Chicago’s Black middle class.

As a member of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), he contributed technical expertise while advancing workers’ rights. He also graduated with honors from Chicago State University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.  A serial entrepreneur, he enjoyed photography and urban gardening.

Through photography, writing, and archival investigation, she aims to document the stories of men like her father across the country, a generation of Black men who were skilled, educated, civically engaged, and creatively active—Renaissance men whose stories have largely been overlooked.

Working on Black Men of Measure in Philadelphia, while focusing on her father and his family who remain in Chicago, is an act of bridging distance—geographic, generational, and emotional. It asks her to hold the histories of a place she no longer lives in alongside the life she leads here. In doing so, the project becomes both a personal reckoning and a public gesture: a way to honor lineage, preserve memory, and trace the ways family stories move across cities, spaces, and communities.

This work is goes beyond documenting indivdual lives. It's also about bearing witness to presence, resilience, and connection across time and place. By situating these images in a Philadelphia context, she is creating a site where Chicago-based histories can be recognized, reflected upon, and valued outside their original geography—inviting new audiences to engage with, and acknowledge, the significance of these lives.

ISBN: 979-8-90148-042-7 (Paperback, forthcoming December 2027)