Chicago banker Jesse Binga opened doors for fellow African Americans and once was the king of State Street. Now he's forgotten.

Of all the Chicago names to have faded away, to be buried by history's dust, Jesse Binga's is among the most baffling.

That is because for a time "in the 1920s just hearing the strange and poetic sound of his name conjured up an image as constant and permanent as the chiseled letters on the front of (his) bank."

Those words were written by Don Hayner and Binga's name has been wandering around the head of this retired newspaperman for decades.

"I first came across it in the 1980s when I was researching a story about Chicago's oldest white and black