Chicagoans are remembering a veritable renaissance man who died Thursday.

Born in 1920, Dempsey Travis grew up in a part of the city’s segregated South Side known as the Black Belt. He overcame poverty and racism to become a multimillionaire real-estate developer.

As Travis climbed, he lifted many others. Longtime cohort Timuel Black recalls how Travis helped African Americans gain footholds in all-white neighborhoods.

BLACK: Having a white friend of his buy a piece of property in places like Chatham and Englewood. Then he would sell it to a black person.

Travis helped coordinate Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Chicago in 1960. Black says movement activists appreciated having a friend with deep pockets and political clout.

BLACK: He could work from the inside, while we agitated from the outside.

Travis was also a jazz pianist.

And he wrote some two-dozen books, including the only authorized biography of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African American mayor.

Dempsey Travis was 89.