CHICAGO — In the Bungalow Belt on a Wednesday morning, off an unplowed street in Auburn Gresham, in an office behind his living room, hours before he heads off to work at ComEd, Shermann Thomas — aka 6figga_dilla, aka Dilla, aka my favorite Chicago historian at the moment — prepares to shoot yet another TikTok video about a slice of local history. He checks his teeth for food, then he washes his face, then he takes a quick shot of whiskey to steady his nerves. He smiles sheepishly. He’s winging this history thing, but he’s also being watched by tens of thousands, and he’s only been doing this since November. He still gets kind of nervous.
He looks down at himself.
He’s wearing a T-shirt bearing the profile of late rapper Nipsey Hussle, the same T-shirt he’s worn in a lot of his videos. “My wife said I have got to change my shirt,” he says, more to himself, and leaves the room. When he returns, he’s wearing a “Breaking Bad” T-shirt.
This morning, he’s working on a video about the Chicago roots of Black History Month. He slides a large tubular ring light into place, to brighten the look of the room. The light sits on an old wooden stool that’s fixed with a rubber mat, the sort that electricians once stood on to prevent being grounded, before safety standards changed. Thomas explains this and more. He has a propensity for nodding at the history around him, in the city around him, in the room at his feet. Hanging behind him on a wall, there’s a Black Panther manifesto; tacked to the wall, there’s black-and-white images of Martin Luther King, Jr., Earl B. Dickerson and Harold Washington.
He’s tall, almost 40, with dreadlocks dangling from beneath a truckers cap fixed with an old ComEd logo, a hat so sneakily cool it’s easy to assume the logo is from a sports franchise. “I realize I’m not an average looking historian, and that’s a good thing, right? I’m an urban historian, I guess. Just trying to engage younger people in history. Maybe it’ll help.” His arms are covered in tattoos of historical figures: Ida B. Wells and Angela Davis, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. “This one is Martin Luther King giving a peace sign,” he says, “but see, because of the angle, everyone assumes he’s flipping them off. I assure you, MLK is not flipping you off.”
He opens a ring binder stuffed with his hand-written notes from past videos, not exactly scripts so much as lists of points to deliver, to remind himself. The length of a TikTok typically is just 60 seconds.
“The way I see this, Jay-Z ruined me,” he says, “because he’s been rapping 30 years without writing down his lyrics, and so I decided, if I’m going to teach history, I really don’t want to write down a script.” He turns to his camera phone and says a line, then he recites it again, then again, then again, and again, and again, until the line comes out fluid, natural and the facts are facts.
It looks like improvisation.
“It’s all improvisation,” he says.
Which is a good thing. With about two dozen videos made so far, Thomas — using the TikTok handle 6figga_dilla — has been relaying the bottomless history of Chicago’s neighborhoods and villains and heroes and inventions in fresh, charming bursts of fact, opinion and digression. His videos sound exactly like what they are — local history being explained at nearly the same moment it’s being learned, delivered in a voice so casual and warm, whatever off-the-cuff roughness there is belies the research he actually puts into each history. Even when a subject is familiar, the approach is not, his sense of discovery infectious in a way that more formal historians rarely get across. A video about the origin of the name “O’Hare” begins: “There is a real simple way to find out if a Chicagoan loves you. Ask them to pick you up at O’Hare Airport.” Standing on the corner of Jackson and LaSalle, at a plaque marking the establishment of the national time zones, he says: “It started right here in Chicago — where everything dope starts.”
His audience has varied but is growing, anywhere from about 10,000 to 200,000 viewers per video. And even that’s relatively modest in the surprisingly smart and buoyant niche of History TikTok.
