July 27, 2023

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, artists, photographers, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 10, Issue 21

Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato

Managing Editor Adam Przybyl

Senior Editors Martha Bayne

Christopher Good

Olivia Stovicek

Sam Stecklow

Alma Campos

Politics Editor J. Patrick Patterson

Labor Editor Jocelyn Martínez-Rosales

Immigration Editor Wendy Wei

Community Builder Chima Ikoro

Public Meetings Editor Scott Pemberton

Contributing Editors Jocelyn Vega

Francisco Ramírez Pinedo

Visuals Editor Kayla Bickham

Deputy Visuals Editor Shane Tolentino

Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma

Shane Tolentino

IN CHICAGO

Welcome to the Lit Issue

This year's Literary Issue is centered around radical writing, transformative legislation, community, and self care as an act of resistance. In the featured book reviews, writers explore the complexities of Black art, the grief that comes with rest, and timeless abolitionist writing. This includes a community review of We Do This Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba, as well as a Q&A with co-author Kelly Hayes on their latest book, Let This Radicalize You. An expanded version of The Exchange, the Weekly’s poetry corner, features poems in response to this issue's central prompt; how do you practice and experience radical self-love, revolutionary thought (or action), or the reclamation of freedom and community? With the help of South Side Weekly’s team and contributors, this special issue was curated by Chima Ikoro, the Weekly’s Community Builder.

First state to eliminate cash bail

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled in favor of eliminating the state’s cash bail system. In a 5-2 ruling on July 18, the court overturned an Illinois judge’s ruling from December which held that a new law ending cash bail in the state was unconstitutional. Around the U.S., about two-thirds of people held in jail have not been convicted of a crime. Many wait weeks, months, or even years for their trial simply because they can’t afford bail. That’s because the system of cash bail has historically allowed income to be the determining factor in whether someone is forced to stay in jail before their trial, effectively criminalizing poverty.

IN THIS ISSUE

illinois outlaws book bans—but not for incarcerated people

It’s the first state to pass legislation enacting penalties for censorship in public libraries.

Director of

Fact Checking: Savannah Hugueley

Fact Checkers:

Sydni Baluch

Lauren Doan

Christopher Good

Kate Linderman

Alani Oyola

Kelli Jean Smith

Layout Editor Tony Zralka

Program Manager Malik Jackson

Executive Director Damani Bolden

Office Manager Mary Leonard

Advertising Manager Susan Malone

Webmaster Pat Sier

The Weekly publishes online weekly and in print every other Thursday. We seek contributions from all over the city.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to:

South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

For advertising inquiries, please contact: Susan Malone (773) 358-3129 or email: malone@southsideweekly.com

For general inquiries, please call: (773) 643-8533

In February 2021, Illinois was the first state to completely eliminate this system when Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the Illinois Pre-Trial Fairness Act. This was part of the larger Safety, Accountability, Fairness, and Equity-Today Act (SAFE-T Act), a sweeping criminal justice reform package introduced by the Illinois Black Caucus. Largely in response to disinformation being spread about the law, Pritzker signed a series of amendments and clarifications to the SAFE-T Act in December 2022.

Originally set to take effect in January, the new system will go into effect September 18. Under this law, judges across Illinois will not require people charged with a crime—other than those considered to be a threat to the public or likely to flee—to post bail in order to leave jail prior to their trial.

Howard Brown Health ruling by NLRB

Howard Brown Health, a LGBTQ+ healthcare organization, was found guilty by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) of unfair labor practices and union busting. Last August, employees at Howard Brown Health unionized under Howard Brown Health Workers United, an affiliate of the Illinois Nurses Association (INA). Since then, mass layoffs of more than sixty employees occurred during contract negotiations. This led to around 440 workers striking for three days in January.

Of the sixteen filed complaints by INA against Howard Brown to the NLRB, eight have been found to have merit while the rest of the accusations are still under investigation. NLRB found Howard Brown to be bargaining in bad faith, refusing to negotiate during layoffs, and surveilling union meetings. NLRB is trying to reach a settlement with Howard Brown. If a settlement is not reached, a hearing will determine remedies for workers impacted by the unfair labor practices.

Killian

gretchen sterba

4 chicago public library turns 150

From the first library being housed in a water tank to becoming an essential location in every Chicago neighborhood, CPL has come a long way.

olivia zimmerman................................... 5 black jewel of the midwest

The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature is about to become more accessible than ever.

kit ginzky

community review of mariame kaba’s we do this ‘til we free us

Four writers share how the 2021 book has influenced them.

rubi valentin, alycia kamil, melissa castro almandina, chima ikoro

8

11 op-ed: paper ban at cook county jail restricts access to letters, books and learning material

Altogether, CCJ’s new mail procedures suppress the education and connection that makes life in jail livable.

midwest books to prisoners

15 seeing yourself in the future you’re fighting for

Q&A with Let This Radicalize You co-author Kelly Hayes.

jocelyn martinez-rosales ...................

17 the exchange: marketplace

In this special segment of The Exchange, readers share how they experience radical self love, freedom, and more.

chima “naira” ikoro, c. lofty bolling, arianne elena payne, shivani kumar, lou heron, claude robert hill iv, imani joseph

19 the trayvon generation conveys the timelessness of black art

Elizabeth Alexander’s book marries essays with striking visual representations.

sabrina ticer-wurr ..............................

22 organizing and the future of the american experiment

A new book spells out where community organizing has been but stops short of imagining where it might go.

scott pemberton

23 the gospel of the nap bishop

Tricia Hersey continues to champion the freedom and grief that comes with resting and dreaming in Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto.

jasmine barnes

26 your friendly (and only) employee-owned neighborhood bookstore

Co-owner Mandy Medley talks about passion, connections, and how selling books is, ironically, not about getting paper.

chima ikoro 27

Cover illustration by Bridget

Illinois Outlaws Book Bans—But Not for Incarcerated People

With Illinois making national news for being the first state in the country to pass legislation enacting penalties for censorship in public libraries, those who are incarcerated aren’t included in the state’s victory.

On June 12, Governor JB Pritzker signed historic legislation declaring Illinois the first state in the country to remove state funding from public libraries if they were to ban books. The bill is to be enacted on January 1, 2024.

This decision comes after a recordbreaking increase in book challenges in 2022—amounting to over 1,200 challenged books, nearly double what it was in 2021, reports the American Library Association (ALA).

Alex Gough, the press secretary for Governor Pritzker, told South Side Weekly in an exclusive statement, “Across the nation, extremists are targeting literature, libraries, and books in a despicable effort to censor the material students need to thrive in the classroom. Governor Pritzker’s purported goal is to preserve Illinois libraries as bastions of knowledge, creativity, and truth. In Illinois, we embrace facts, and we trust librarians to continue maintaining a standard for what books students have access to at school.”

On July 6, the governor tweeted: “Here in Illinois, we don't hide from the truth, we embrace it. By outlawing book bans, we’re showing the nation what it really looks like to stand up for liberty.”

Even so, not everyone in the state of Illinois can feel included in Pritzker’s stance.

While punchy national headlines announce that Illinois has outlawed book bans, Chicago Books to Women in Prison board president Vicki White can’t help but point out that this bill applies only to public libraries, not Illinois jail and prison libraries, or books sent by mail that are

regulated by the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC).

In response to the governor’s tweet, White, who has been involved with the volunteer-run nonprofit organization for over a decade, urges the state to incorporate incarcerated folks in Pritzker’s declaration to “stand up for liberty.”

“I would just ask Pritzker to spearhead the same type of action in prisons, and not just prison libraries but prisons in general,” White said. “Because there are the books in the prison libraries, but books from organizations like ours go through the mail room. Another thing that would be excellent would be for an [assessment] to

third most challenged for “sexually explicit content.” The 1970 novel depicts incestuous abuse. The young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, was ranked number eight for “profanity” and being “sexually explicit;” the novel details the experiences of a young Native teenager growing up on a reservation.

Moms for Liberty is a conservative organization that advocates against LGBTQ+ and social justice-related content in school and classroom libraries. Although they mainly have found adherents in more conservative states like Florida, Indiana, and South Dakota (not far from Chicago), some Illinois parents perpetuate these

conservative talking point, Jensen says this kind of work has been happening for decades and that right-wing organizers and lawmakers are in it for the “long game.”

“I always like to really emphasize that I don't give a shit about the books,” Jensen says. “I give a shit about the people that are represented by those books, the people that are seeing themselves in those books, the people who can share themselves in those books, and at the end of the day, it's the people.”

Chicago Public Library Commissioner Chris Brown also spoke to the Weekly about the importance of representation and telling the stories of young Black and Indigenous people and other people of color.

In 2022, CPL declared all of its eightyone library branches “book sanctuaries,” meaning those who enter any given CPL space have the “freedom to read” anything, including endangered books.

happen from the top; fold in the prison library system into the Illinois library system and [take it] out of the Illinois Department of Corrections…JB Pritzker, [I] love what you're saying. Maybe just think a little more broadly.”

Last year was a monumental year for challenged books. In 2022, some of the most attempted bans included books about gender or LGBTQ+ issues— such as Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, which the ALA ranked as most challenged—or books written by Black and Brown authors. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, despite being a classic, was ranked at

extremist ideals.

Just this past November, parents showed up to a polarizing library board meeting in north-suburban Lincolnwood to debate the inclusion of children’s books discussing LGBTQ+ themes—specifically the picture book The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish.

Kelly Jensen, an editor at Book Riot, North America's largest independent book website, has worked at the outlet for nearly a decade. Previously, Jensen worked as a public librarian in Illinois and Wisconsin and has since been reporting on book censorship, especially in recent years. While the idea of book bans has become a popular

While Brown cites states like Florida and Texas as being two of the most vigilant about attempting to ban books and enact censorship across libraries and schools, he reiterates that this shouldn’t be the norm.

“I think this representation issue is incredibly important, and the danger, I think, is in creating norms in other parts of our country that others start to look at and think that that's appropriate,” Brown said.

“It's hard to say, what gets normalized in one state down the road, does that get normalized even more? Do we start to see a critical mass of people saying that this is the route we want to go as a country? […] Norms can be rolled back. And I think that's really disconcerting for our diverse communities, especially in Chicago.”

BY GRETCHEN STERBA

“Until we are all afforded the same rights and regulations under state legislation, we cannot celebrate Illinois being a champion for all.”

It’s fair to want to celebrate this legislative win in Illinois—after all, Jensen just reported that both Pennsylvania and Massachusetts are proposing antibook-ban bills in the wake of Pritzker’s decision.

But as Illinois Public Media reported in 2018, in the year 2017 alone, the IDOC spent less than three hundred dollars on new relevant educational materials throughout its twenty-eight state prisons. In the early 2000s, that cost was exponentially larger, stacking up to $750,000 spent on books each year, but by 2005 the cost shrank to $264,000.

According to a 2023-updated article by The Marshall Project about banned books in prisons by state, while most of the titles are pornographic, the list also includes books on Asian martial arts, the fundamentals of tattooing, how to write believable fight scenes, and Prison Ramen, which details prison recipes and personal narratives from incarcerated inmates. In contrast, Mein Kampf is banned in Illinois, but inmates are free to read it in Texas, according to a 2019 Illinois Library Association article.

Jensen, whose book ban reporting has also covered prisons, says that prison censorship doesn’t get nearly as much media attention as public schools and libraries because “there’s still this ongoing stigma.”

“People are far more invested in their public libraries and in their public schools than they are in the prison system,” Jensen said.

“There’s this ongoing belief that folks who are experiencing incarceration don't deserve the chance to be people or that they can't be rehabilitated or that they don't deserve that. We know and can cite that prison censorship is the worst censorship in the country.”

WBEZ reported on this in 2018 as well, citing that research showed books have an immense chance to impact an inmate’s release and can help them become more civic-minded.

“So yes, this [Illinois] legislation is awesome and important, but there's also this huge missing component,” Jensen said.

“That all said, there's really interesting legislation at the national level that is looking at prison censorship. I think if we continue to talk about that and continue to advocate for it, if we have folks on the ground who are in the ears of the legislators

at the state level, maybe we can get something going for the next term as well.”

While Chicago Books to Women in Prison is based in Illinois, the organization sends books to women and trans women across state lines to correctional facilities in places like Indiana, Mississippi, and Florida, where book bans can be more restrictive.

White says a popular book that is often requested and that is often sent back is the 2014 comprehensive resource guide Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, which covers health and wellness for trans and gender nonconforming people. And like Jensen, White said she believes that when people are incentivized or held accountable for a shift in cultural norms, that is how palpable change, for all people, especially vulnerable groups, can occur.

“If the prison libraries in Illinois could be run by Illinois prison library systems and be eligible for funding and have the same standards in terms of access to books, as people out here have, that would be excellent,” White said.

“For example, [in] Trans Bodies, Trans Selves [there are] perfectly clinical illustrations that serve an important educational purpose. People change when they're rewarded to change or when there are penalties to not changing. Sometimes that can come through public attention and protests and that kind of action. But, it has to do with the Illinois Department of Corrections.”

While Pritzker’s legislation is monumental for not just our state but as a leader of the nation, in the words of Mariame Kaba (whose book is banned in states like Louisiana), “We do this ’til we free us.” Until we are all afforded the same rights and regulations under state legislation, we cannot celebrate Illinois being a champion for all.

“We’re showing everyone what it looks like to stand up for liberty. As simple as that,” read Pritzker’s tweet. But White reminds us to challenge our leaders and policymakers to include incarcerated people in that same victory. ¬

Gretchen Sterba is a freelance journalist based in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. She’s written for the Chicago Reader, HuffPost, BUST Magazine, and more. She last wrote for the Weekly about musician Shawnee Dez.

Chicago Public Library Turns 150

BY OLIVIA ZIMMERMAN

Chicago Public Library (CPL) will celebrate its 150th birthday this year, commemorating the opening of the city’s first public library in 1873. While private libraries already existed, the Chicago Public Library system was born out of ashes, opening only two years after the devastating Great Chicago fire. The first library opened in a repurposed water tank on LaSalle and Adams that had survived the fire, and was created as a type of charitable book depository where members of the English Aristocracy donated books to the city . As time went on, CPL evolved to fit the community. What started as free libraries for the public turned into what is now a place for community outreach, teaching, and recreation, bringing Chicago’s neighborhoods together.

In 1897, the library moved to a larger, more permanent location in what is now the Chicago Cultural Center. The land where the building sits required the inclusion of a memorial hall in honor of soldiers and sailors from Illinois. This is the reason the paintings on the walls of the Chicago Cultural Center include Civil War scenes.

The new building was larger than the original water tank and designed to be “practically incombustible” in the event of a fire. To this day, the Chicago Cultural Center building is thought to have the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world.

In 1904, CPL opened its first neighborhood branch, Blackstone, in Hyde Park bordering Kenwood. The building was designed in the Greek style, inspired by the Erechtheion in Athens. The inside features marble and gold details, as well as several murals representing labor, science, literature, and art.

While the beauty of the building still draws attention, today the Blackstone Branch holds much more than books. When the <i>South Side Weekly</ i> visited the library for this story, a performer was singing songs for kids, and posters and handouts described not only library events, but also community programming, events, and meetings for Hyde Park residents. Another poster detailed how to use inclusive language when discussing substance abuse.

Simply pulling up the calendar of events for CPL exemplifies how diverse

From the first library being housed in a water tank to becoming an essential location in every Chicago neighborhood, CPL has come a long way.

the patrons of the library are, and how CPL has adapted to meet the needs of many different communities. From teen poetry meetings to classes on computer literacy, CPL has much to offer. This is intentional, according to CPL commissioner Chris Brown.

“Over the last couple of decades we’ve really built our libraries and developed them from what were primarily storefront locations. It really goes back to our history. After the Great Chicago Fire we didn’t have a public library so our first location was in a water tank. It’s also kind of poetic, our first library was something that survived the fire, something that was a beacon of hope, something that didn’t burn down.”

CPL has focused on creating branch libraries that are within walking distance for every Chicagoan, Brown explained. “A lot of our early libraries were inside stores; they were called book depositories. We also had reading rooms out of fieldhouses,” said Brown. “[However,] it was really our chief librarian, Henry Legler, in the early twentieth century who created this plan for walkable library access in every neighborhood. That is something we’ve continued to build upon.”

The first of these libraries was a regional library named after Legler, opened in the West Garfield Park neighborhood. Regional libraries are larger, with more space for programming, more staff, and larger collections of books.

Currently, Chicago Public Library has eighty-one locations serving their mission to “welcome and support all people in their enjoyment of reading and pursuit of lifelong learning. Working together, we strive to provide equal access to information, ideas and knowledge through books, programs and other resources. We believe in the freedom to read, to learn, to discover.”

Through this mission and in more recent years, the role that libraries and librarians play in their communities and branches has evolved.

This year, library cardholders have used CPL computers, which are available to the public and have become a crucial commodity for all, more than 500,009 times.

In response to the current opioid crisis, librarians have been trained to administern Naloxone, a lifesaving drug that can reverse the effects of an overdose.

The library also has “Money Smart” events, partnering with the Federal Reserve of Chicago to give financial literacy classes. For students, the libraries offer free homework help on school days.

In the current political environment, libraries are under attack. CPL has stepped up to the plate against attempts to

History and Literature was then moved to Woodson Library. Harsh was the first Black woman to head a branch in the 1930s, and the collection is “one of the largest repositories of information on the Black experience in the Midwest.”

In 1991, a new central library on State and Jackson was completed—the Harold Washington Library, named after Chicago’s first Black mayor, who had passed away in 1987.

CPL is only growing. “We are building… the first-ever library branch on a presidential center site. It’ll be the first public library that a president has invested in,” said Brown.

“We’ve also just announced this

the Little Italy branch, some on the North Side; but we most recently opened the Altgeld branch on the far South Side. [This branch] includes a childcare center,” said Brown.

For the future of the library, building the staff at CPL is imperative to continuing community support, according to Adams.

“One of the best ways to ensure that we continue to see diverse collections and welcoming spaces is to also ensure that we have a diverse staff. I want the young people in our communities that might be interested in librarianship to have access to a path to this profession. CPL has been partnering with After School Matters for many years to create hundreds of internships each summer for high school students in the library, and I’ve gotten to see former interns apply to jobs at CPL after high school or college to start their career with us.” ¬

The CPL calendar will list events celebrating this major anniversary throughout the city this year, as well as hosting several exhibitions on CPL’s history. CPL is also starting a podcast on their history and libraries.

censor books. “Last year CPL established ourselves as a Book Sanctuary,” said Deanie Adams, a CPL regional director.

“We also hosted the signing of HB2789 last month at the Thomas Hughes Children’s Library in Harold Washington Library Center—which prohibits Illinois public libraries from banning books. These book challenges are particularly insidious once you take a closer look at the titles that are most challenged, which disproportionately are books that are by and about people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community.”

In 1975, CPL commemorated Vivian G. Harsh by renaming the collection she’d worked on after her. The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American

year’s funding to update and renovate the Woodlawn library, known as the Bessie Coleman Branch. We are working with the community to really plan, develop, and design that. We have continued to evolve our libraries.”

In addition, CPL has created partnerships with various City of Chicago departments to make their services go further. Library access and the many resources that CPL offers are crucial in disinvested and marginalized communities.

“We have a number of innovations in the last decade that were in partnership with the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). These are co-locations where we both build affordable housing in proximity to library branches. We have

Olivia Zimmerman is a writer and historian from Chicago. This is her first time writing for the Weekly

“It’s also kind of poetic, our first library was something that survived the fire, something that was a beacon of hope, something that didn’t burn down.”

CPL Commissioner, Chris Brown

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Black Jewel of the Midwest

BY KIT GINZKY

In a 1949 speech celebrating what was then called Negro History Week, W.E.B. Du Bois reflected on the importance of Black history. “It is not merely a matter of entertainment or information,” he said. “It is part of our necessary spiritual equipment for making this country worth living in.”

But in twentieth-century America, even as Black literacy rates increased, educational resources and materials for the study of Black history remained scarce. In Chicago, residents of the segregated “Black Belt” waited decades for a single public library. When Bronzeville’s first Chicago Public Library (CPL) branch finally opened its doors in 1932, head librarian Vivian G. Harsh (1890-1960) worked tirelessly to build one of the nation’s premier collections of books, photographs, manuscripts, and periodicals on the African American experience.

As Harsh built her collection, the CPL branch she ran in the heart of Bronzeville became a community resource and hub for the literary and journalistic laborers of Chicago’s flourishing creative movement known as the “Black Renaissance,” including Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Now housed at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library on the far South Side, the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of AfroAmerican History and Literature has been called the “Black Jewel of the Midwest.”The collection serves as an invaluable resource for writers and students researching African American history, artists looking for inspiration from the past, and anyone interested in a hands-on encounter with the history of Black Chicago.

And the collection is about to become more accessible than ever: CPL was recently awarded a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to digitize and

process documents from the collection, including the records of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, the National Alliance of Black Feminists, the papers of communist and civil rights and labor leader Ishmael Flory, the Chicago SNCC History Project, and a selection of Harold Washington’s political papers. The work is already underway and scheduled to be completed in March 2027.

Harsh’s collection lives on under the stewardship of archivists such as Stacie Williams, chief of archives and special collections at CPL, who celebrates Harsh as someone who “believed very much in the importance of researching Black lives,” and who deeply “understood that Black lives matter.” With this grant and an increased emphasis on digitization, “CPL will continue to honor Harsh’s work by fostering greater access to Black-history-

related collections for everyone,” Williams said in a press release.

Vivian Harsh was a pioneer in Black archiving and librarianship. As the first Black “librarian-in-charge” in Chicago, she was tapped to lead the George Cleveland Hall Branch—the first CPL branch in a Black neighborhood— before it opened at 48th and Michigan in 1932. In this role, she raised funds for the library, assembled its collection, and managed a racially integrated staff of fifteen library workers. Her commitment to building what she called the Special Negro Collection established the Hall library as an eminent destination for Black writers and intellectuals, and cemented Harsh’s position as a leader in the Black Renaissance.

As construction of the Hall Branch

was underway, Harsh received critical support from philanthropist and Sears executive Julius Rosenwald, whose foundation donated the land for the library. A grant from the Rosenwald Fund allowed Harsh to travel around the country purchasing books and visiting libraries that served Black communities, including the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection, which became a guiding light for the Special Negro Collection.

Back in Bronzeville, Harsh drew upon her extensive social ties to secure donations of books, clippings, photographs, and ephemera. She especially relied on fellow members of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, a group founded by Carter G. Woodson to promote the preservation, study, and teaching of African American history as a way of fostering Black pride and contesting white supremacy. These early donations, including the bequest of 200 books from Dr. Charles Bentley, a prominent Bronzeville dentist and founding member of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP, marked an important transfer of Black cultural resources from private collections to the public trust.

The George Cleveland Hall Branch opened on January 18, 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression. The library’s opening day celebrations were scaled back due to a lack of funds, but the building itself— designed by the same architectural firm as the Art Institute of Chicago and many of the neo-Gothic buildings on the University of Chicago quadrangle—showed no signs of the market crash. The stone building’s four large reading rooms opened off of an airy octagonal lobby, and the extensive use of dark English oak created a visual continuity between the reading room shelving and an elegantly carved circulation desk in the library rotunda.

The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature is about to become more accessible than ever.

GEORGE CLEVELAND HALL BRANCH DIGITAL COLLECTION, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

Like all libraries, the Hall branch issued library cards, circulated books, answered reference questions, and hosted public events. Its resources for leisure, education, and information became all the more vital in light of the economic crisis, and it quickly became a hub of community activity: Harsh led a Great Books discussion group and a club for older adults called “Fun At Maturity,” which was designed to promote friendship and combat isolation. Children’s librarian Charlemae Rollins, a pioneering Black librarian in her own right, organized story hours, a puppet club, and a Negro History Club for high school students. And adult education was at the center of library programming: course options included Spanish, creative writing, social science, and African American History.

Reference services at Hall were especially popular: according to the Chicago Defender, Hall Branch staff answered more than 20,000 questions in 1938 alone, in person and over the phone. But it was the Special Negro Collection and Harsh’s unique point of view that generated national interest and acclaim for the library.

Within the collection are materials from a cohort of luminaries Harsh mentored and gathered into salons: manuscripts by Richard Wright, handwritten poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, letters home written by Timuel Black while he was fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. It also holds vast records of Bronzeville’s professional class— names recognizable by the institutions named for them, like Walter Henri Dyett, Earl B. Dickerson, and a long roster of Black doctors, realtors, artists, journalists, and socialites.

The collection reflects Harsh’s orientation toward community-engaged librarianship and commitment to Black public history: it preserves critical sources of Black history, and its formation is itself an important episode in the history of Black cultural and intellectual life.

Harsh was raised in one of Bronzeville’s Old Settler families, and her social life among the Who’s Who of Black Chicago was frequently reported in the Chicago Defender. This social milieu would have oriented Harsh toward notions of middleclass respectability and race consciousness. In the economically stratified and densely populated Black Belt of the early twentieth century, members of Bronzeville’s elite worked in different ways to distinguish

themselves from the flood of poor, scarcely educated Black migrants moving into the neighborhood from the South.

But Harsh was convinced that promoting education, literacy, and African American history would inspire and uplift the race as a whole. Her Bronzeville upbringing—along with years of experience working her way through the CPL ranks and a degree in library science from Simmons College in Boston—forged Harsh’s approach to librarianship.

to serving this broad public, even as it extended beyond the boundaries of the Hall branch’s main service area.

When patrons showed interest in studying African American history and culture, Harsh encouraged them to take their scholarly pursuits seriously and to contribute to the knowledge base. The late Vernon Jarrett, an eminent Black journalist, remembered Harsh as a singular source of intellectual encouragement when he arrived in Chicago from Mississippi

legendary artist Charles White, who was fourteen when the Hall Branch opened near his home on the South Side. After finding The New Negro by Alain Locke “quite accidentally” on a library visit and devouring its essays on African American art and literature, White was inspired to dig into the collection to read about great figures in Black history, including Paul Robeson, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass. It was at the Hall Branch that White “became aware the Negroes had a history in America,” he later recalled.

Indeed, Harsh and the Hall branch staff were committed to serving a broad public, which also included W.E.B. Du Bois, who addressed a letter to Harsh in 1936 thanking her for “the opportunity of looking at your very interesting library” and requesting that she send him a copy of her “bibliography of the Negro in Chicago.”

Throughout the 1930s, the Hall branch served as an informal clubhouse for the Chicago members of the Illinois Writers Project, a group which included Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, and Jack Conroy. Harsh’s special collection was a crucial source for their research project on “The Negro in Illinois,” which explored the history of African Americans in the region from 1779 to 1942. In addition to reference material and workspace, the library also provided a critical source of creative and literary inspiration for members of the group. As Wright later attested, it was while working at the Hall Branch during his Writers Project years that he first discovered the work of Gertrude Stein, whose short stories became a major influence on his own.

As Harsh continued to collect rare books and historical materials on the African American experience, the Hall Branch gained a national reputation.

“Although the district which Hall branch serves is said to be from Forty-third street to Sixty-first street,” wrote a Chicago Defender columnist in 1939, “in reality it is from northern Wisconsin to southern Mississippi, because from far and near, requests are received for special lists of books, aid in preparing programs, material for lectures, etc.” Harsh was committed

during the Great Migration. “I'd sneak right up to that library because I felt very self-conscious, being from the South and assuming that everybody in Chicago knew more than I did,” he said in an oral history interview. But Harsh quickly recognized the young man as a regular visitor to the collection, and approached him with some words of encouragement. "I hope you're not self-conscious, young man, about trying to be a scholar," she told him. "Nobody should ever apologize for being a scholar.”

Another young patron was the

Harsh took advantage of this influx of literary luminaries by founding a semimonthly Book Review and Lecture Forum, which met at the library on Wednesday evenings from October through April. In the tradition of Chicago’s public forum movement, the forum at Hall Library offered the masses an opportunity to refine their literary tastes and join in scholarly, political, and artistic debates. Each season, a committee of library patrons and staff worked to select a list of books for members of the forum to read and review. At forum meetings, attendees packed the library, dressed in their Sunday best, to summarize, critique, and debate the books du jour.

Exacting and meticulous in her librarianship, Harsh was remembered as an enigmatic perfectionist who demanded that patrons give the library the respect it deserved.

Collage of materials from the collection, by Kayla Bickham. GEORGE CLEVELAND HALL BRANCH DIGITAL COLLECTION, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

“This circle aims to enrich the leisure time of confirmed readers while at the same time it brings to the library others who may not be familiar with all its services,” wrote Arna Bontemps in a feature on the Hall library for the Defender. “It seeks to draw attention to books and authors which might not otherwise be discovered by every reader. Above all, it aims to develop through discussions the critical faculties of its members.”

Active participants hoped to ascend to the selection committee. Jarrett was “thrilled to be asked” because participation held an important status in the local literary community. “It meant that I was becoming somebody,” he recalled.

In addition to the Writers Project members, the Hall Library forum drew in a plethora of notable literary figures— including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay—to the library to share their work. White, who was then working as a painter for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, was an avid attendee and credited the forum as an influence on the political and historical content of his work.

In a series of forum meetings in 1938, Arna Bontemps reviewed C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Margaret Walker reviewed the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and read some of her own work, and Langston

Hughes presented on his trip to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. In a letter to Arna Bontemps, Hughes reported on a “most delightful” meeting of the forum, in which the “Overflow crowd fill[ed] two rooms, [and] Gwendolyn Brooks [was] well received and encored to read a second poem.” Hughes later returned to the library to work on his memoir, and in his list of “Things I Like About Chicago,” he cited, “The Hall Branch Library whose Negro book collection is excellent and whose librarians are charming.”

In allowing writers the opportunity to present works in progress to an engaged community of readers, the forum served as an important institutional link between the Harlem Renaissance and the flourishing literary scene of 1930s and ’40s Bronzeville. Community life was central to Chicago’s literary and artistic movement, as Hughes observed in the Defender: “More so than in Harlem, Chicago writers tend to work and study in groups, and to listen and learn from each other through discussion and criticisms.” And while the forum was anchored by Black literary stars, it was thoroughly open to the public. As a columnist reported in the Chicago World,“The book review and lecture forum…constitutes a veritable powerhouse for the dissemination of knowledge to all who attend them, and the public is always

invited and made welcome.”

The forum was a critical node in the network of Chicago’s avant-garde cultural production, and Harsh leveraged these relationships with eminent writers to expand the Special Negro Collection. She actively solicited library patrons to donate manuscripts, ephemera, and signed copies of their work to the library. When the Illinois Writers Project was disbanded in 1942, Harsh acquired the research files of the unfinished “Negro in Illinois” project. Independent scholar Brian Dolinar edited and published the papers more than seven decades later, an example of the kind of work made possible today by Harsh’s incredible commitment to the preservation of Black sources.

Exacting and meticulous in her librarianship, Harsh is remembered as an enigmatic perfectionist who demanded that patrons give the library the respect it deserved. As erudite as she was, Harsh was committed to public education in the broadest possible sense. Her patrons included Bronzeville’s cultural and professional brokers as well as steelworkers and meatpackers, housewives, and children. In fact, the late historian, educator, and civil rights activist Timuel Black—who eventually donated his personal archive to the collection—recalled that Harsh once threw him out of the library for mocking a group of less educated patrons who had recently migrated from the South, enforcing the rights of all classes to patronize the library with dignity. Even the Book Review and Lecture Forum was radically public and attended by people of “every walk of life,” according to the Defender, which deemed it “a milestone for the Negro and Chicago.”

“With more facts, figures and information about the Negro and American history stored in her phenomenal mind and memory, Vivian Harsh died, two years after retiring from the Chicago library system,” the Defender announced. Her obituary foreshadowed the legacy of her collection: “It would not be unlikely that [at] a future date, the more than 2,000 books she gathered on the American Negro and placed in special collection at Hall branch might someday be called ‘The Harsh Collection.’ Similar to the Schomburg collection in New York’s Harlem branch library, the collection of Miss Harsh is regarded among the finest in the country.”

The collection was renamed in 1970 and was relocated to the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library five years later, where it is housed today in a facility that includes a reading room, exhibit gallery, preservation facilities, and a large bronze and brass sculpture by acclaimed African American abstract sculptor Richard Hunt.

While visiting the collection might take a bit more gumption than accessing other library services—it does require

appointments and a bit of advance planning to visit—don’t be intimidated: the Harsh Collection is open to the public, and its treasures are collectively owned by Chicagoans. ¬

Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, 9525 S. Halsted Street. (312) 745-2080, harshcollection@chipublib.org Open by appointment on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 10am to 5pm, and on the third and fourth Saturday of every month from 10am to 4pm.

Kit Ginzky is a Hyde Parker and a PhD candidate in history and social work at the University of Chicago. She recently wrote about the history and politics of street basketball in Chicago

Flyers for the Book Review and Lecture Forum, hosted at the George Cleveland Hall Branch.

GEORGE CLEVELAND HALL BRANCH DIGITAL COLLECTION, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

Flyers for the Book Review and Lecture Forum, hosted at the George Cleveland Hall Branch.

GEORGE CLEVELAND HALL BRANCH DIGITAL COLLECTION, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

GEORGE CLEVELAND HALL BRANCH DIGITAL COLLECTION, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

Community Review of Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us

BY RUBI VALENTIN, ALYCIA KAMIL, MELISSA CASTRO ALMANDINA, CHIMA IKORO

We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is a collection of essays and interviews that explore the abolition of police and the prison industrial complex (PIC) and the power of transformative justice, written by and conducted with organizer, educator, and abolitionist Mariame Kaba.

Published in February 2021, editor Tamara K. Nopper notes in the introduction that Kaba had “declined previous requests from Haymarket Books to publish a collection of her writings,” but that “as calls for defunding the police accelerated” in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, “so did broader conversations about abolition.” In an effort to get “as many people as possible to learn more about abolition,” Kaba agreed to compile and publish the anthology.

We Do This could be said to have many authors. Several of the essays are co-written with other people, interviewers interject with their thoughts while asking Kaba to elaborate on her own, and even Kaba herself often invokes the words of fellow writers, comrades, friends, mentees, and family.

It seemed fitting, therefore, that when several writers expressed interest in reviewing We Do This for South Side Weekly, we accepted more than one perspective. In the end, we landed on four writers, each with different experiences and backgrounds, sharing what it was like to read and react to this book.

What follows is less a collective review than a collection of personal reflections on We Do This and how the book has shaped these writers’ and organizers’ lives and thinking about justice, care, and the possibilities of tomorrow.

Review by Rubi Valentin

In We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, Mariame Kaba writes time and time again, “abolition is not about your fucking feelings.” The meaning is simple: emotions shouldn’t cloud political commitments to

the basic principles of abolition, but Kaba demonstrates that it’s more difficult to do so than it seems, even for committed abolitionists.

I experienced that difficulty in my own life. Then, in my freshman year of college, my uncle was murdered in Mexico.

I saw the distress it put on my mom and two aunts living with us at the time. He was the baby in the family, nineteen years old, when it happened, only a year older than me. I felt useless at home when my mom and aunt flew to Mexico to handle the services.

When my mom came back, I learned that my uncle had been killed by another family member. That alone left permanent chills down my spine. She told me how the police in Mexico didn’t do anything to help, no arrests or investigations. If anything, they had to be paid by families to do their jobs. She said that the police were corrupt in Mexico, and I stood silent as she spoke. After what happened, I tried to talk to my family about abolition, and my mom and I would go in circles around the idea. Sometimes I was able to change a little in her thinking surrounding prisons and punishments, but in other moments she was rigid as a steel bridge. However, I didn’t want to push her and be insensitive, I always had to talk as if walking on eggshells.

In the essay “Transforming Punishment: What Is Accountability without Punishment?” Kaba and Rachel Herzing discuss users on Twitter, including self-proclaimed abolitionists, who were happy with R. Kelly’s conviction because there was finally “justice” for his history of harm and abuse of Black women. #RKellyisgoingtojailparty was trending on the site and countless tweets were excited by the news. But Kaba and Herzing write, “Let’s be clear though: advocating for someone’s imprisonment is not abolitionist. Mistaking emotional satisfaction for justice is also not abolitionist.”

Four writers share how the 2021 book has influenced their organizing and conversations with friends and family.

Kaba admits that her instinctual response to these situations is not always abolitionist. However, she continues to ground herself in her political commitment to abolition, constantly fighting our conditioning of punishment equating justice, because as she states, “they are systems that live within us, that manifest outside of us.”

I remember not too long ago at a family party, when I brought up abolition to my aunt, she asked a lot of questions I couldn’t answer. Still, she said that even if we started all over, not only would it not happen in our lifetimes, but we would recreate the same systems. And I was worried she was right. If “they are systems that live within us, that manifest outside of us,” how do we fight this?

When harm is done against someone you love and care about, more often than not, we want the person to be harmed, often in a worse way. In the case of R. Kelly and other famous abusers, people approve of their incarceration from a distance because it’s our measure of justice. Abolition invites us to interrogate our preconceived notions of justice and ask whether the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) eliminates harm from our world in its rendition of justice. As Kaba and others show, the answer is no; it just continues to cause more violence, an endless cycle.

In another chapter, “Moving Past Punishment,” an interview by Ayana Young,

policing, arrests, criminal records, prison, or cruel punishments—but this only adds fuel to the fire.

Kaba mentions potential alternatives to punishment, such as removing R. Kelly and his accomplices from their positions of power and not being able to produce any more music. Another idea is that the money from his estate, including incoming music sales and streams, be allocated among the survivors. The potential for accountability outside of prison is experimental, but endless in its possibilities.

Human nature is not absent of emotion. We are allowed to feel hurt, angry, sad, resentful, and more. Mostly, we need to grieve when harm has been done, and it must be done in community. Violence does

how we address harm. The reason I’m an abolitionist is because I know that prisons, police, and surveillance cause inordinate harm. If my focus is on ending harm, then I can’t be pro deathmaking and harmful institutions. I’m actually trying to eradicate harm, not reproduce it, not reinforce it, not maintain it. We have to realize that sometimes our feelings—and our really valid sense of wanting some form of justice for ourselves—gets in the way of actually seeking the thing we want.”

Rubi Valentin (they/she) is a recent graduate from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and studied Gender and Women Studies and Professional Writing. They are a first time contributor for South Side Weekly,

actions that we forget to step back and dream about what the world we’re working towards will look like. Removing the imagination from the work we do can lead us to severe levels of burnout, anguish, and ultimately feeling hopeless about whether or not we can reach that liberated world.

In the first chapter alone, which only encompasses four pages, we’re being challenged to reanalyze our understanding of crime versus harm, the ways we as individuals can be complicit in the perpetuation of harmful ideologies onto other community members, practices we can engage in to lessen contact with the carceral state, breaking down the many ways the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is thrust into our everyday lives, and most importantly, being open to change by answering that very important question, “What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?”

Young states how it feels irresponsible to apply a personal quest for justice to a society as the standard, and then asks, “so where is the balance between having policy and response that is both less personal but is still informed by survivors?” In policy, the response to harm is more harm, either with

not heal wounds or the pain in our hearts, only lets them fester and blister until the hurt consumes our entire body. Wanting to hurt another because we were hurt is falling into these systems of violence. “Vengeance is a lazy form of grief,” Kaba wrote, a line I remember vividly because as much as we wouldn’t want to admit it, it is.

This chapter made me think about my uncle and what would be justice for him and for my family that doesn’t include the PIC, but I’m not sure yet. I know if I ever tell my mom about these ideas, she might get upset. I’m not going to tell my family what they should feel because we’re allowed to feel all of our emotions. One day, I’ll slowly introduce these abolitionist ideas to my family, I just don’t want them to feel like I’m trying to force them into anything.

We Do This ‘Til We Free Us doesn’t have all the answers, but it was a good start for me to think, learn, and reflect on what it means to be an abolitionist.

My practice and thinking is grounded by this section from Kaba:

“As an abolitionist, what I care about are two things: relationship and

and is currently an editor and writer for Bonfire News

Review

by

Alycia Kamil

Ipicked up this book in low spirits from the hardships that transpired in the summer of 2020. After an exhausting past three months of seeing so many of my friends, myself included, being harmed by the systems we were fighting against, stepping away from the frontlines was painfully needed. I turned to what initially brought me into these spaces—literature. I was familiar with abolitionist concepts like transformative justice and the carceral state, and thought this book could help add more language to my organizing vocabulary.

Within two pages of the first chapter, I was prompted to reflect on something I haven’t been asked to in years: “Let’s begin our abolitionist journey not with the question ‘What do we have now, and how can we make it better?’ Instead, let’s ask ‘What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?’” As organizers, we spend so much time on the logistics of planned

The question has weighed on my heart in the years since first reading the book, and especially as it relates to themes throughout the book: imagining and experimenting with strategies of community care instead of depending on punitive systems to do things that they weren’t created to do; and viewing hope as a discipline to be practiced while engaging in our fight for liberation.

We Do This ‘Til We Free Us calls attention to the generational trauma marginalized communities have experienced at the hands of the state and the cycles that continuously repeat when the majority relies on the same systems that evoke massive waves of harm in the first place. Through Kaba’s research, onthe-ground experience, and narratives from those she’s in community with, readers are shown the domino line of disappointments that the PIC and its many offspring project onto Black and Brown individuals. These sections may be eye-opening for those who believe there has to be at least some aspects of the system that are worth preserving.

In Part 3’s “We Want More Justice for Breonna Taylor than the System That Killed Her Can Deliver,” Kaba writes about the slippery slope that comes with trying to find the silver lining of the justice system after the conviction of a police officer. Arresting one cop will not eliminate the embedded systemic policies that allowed for the death of Breonna Taylor to occur. Thinking an arrest is a solution to that problem only works to validate the same

“Let’s begin our abolitionist journey not with the question ‘What do we have now, and how can we make it better?’ Instead, let’s ask ‘What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?’”

ILLUSTRATION BY JULIE MERRELL

system we’re trying to move away from. In her analysis, Kaba is pushing readers to see for every one occurrence where the justice system provides a sense of “justice,” there will be hundreds of other cases where there will be injustice. Why bite on our fingernails awaiting an outcome we’ve rarely been shown when we can do the work intra-communally to see what real justice, investment, and compassion look like?

Until we truly push ourselves away from the dependency of harmful structures, we’ll be forced to see different faces relapse into the same heart-wrenching stories community members and freedom fighters have been fighting against for centuries. These systems don’t guarantee us safety, at any point we could fall prey to the mosh pit of identities in which the carceral system shows up. Just because we step away from a punitive frame doesn’t mean we aren’t working toward accountability. As Kaba states, “We want to direct our energies toward collective strategies that are more likely to be successful in delivering healing and transformation and to prevent future harms.”

Hosting grieving circles, food pantries, mutual aid services, educational workshops, and creating spaces where these tough conversations can happen are just some of the strategies we can use toward those aims. In the process, we can come to see the power that lies within spaces that are led by community for fostering community power.

“I believe ultimately that we’re going to win, because I believe there are more people who want justice, real justice, than there are those who are working against that,” writes Kaba, an expression of her journey in developing hope as a practice.

It’s a rollercoaster ride doing organizing work and often you find yourself becoming quite cynical after experiencing so much loss and grief. It’s easy to put yourself on autopilot, floating by in a constant loop of actions, vigils, and City Hall meetings. It’s a routine where if you don’t find something to keep you grounded, you begin to lose yourself in it.

Being hopeless in work that requires you to create a future world where these problems don’t arise as often seems counterproductive. Hope doesn’t erase feelings of disappointment or frustration, and it doesn’t only encompass moments of joy. It’s the willingness to continue doing the work regardless of what the outcome may look like. It’s moving forward knowing a change will come either way, and you’re still working towards the end goal no matter what direction the circumstance may blow you in. It’s knowing the work doesn’t start nor end with you—we’re simply marking our particular spot of the movement timeline by laying down a foundation for those after us to follow. It’s a lifelong practice that will exist as a hovering presence while battling a tough fight.

Alycia Kamil is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator from the south side of Chicago.

Review by Melissa Castro Almandina

Ididn’t have the words for it. I grew up with abolitionists and organized as a teenager in revolutionary collectives, read zines and distros, and attended community abolitionist trainings, workshops at the Allied Media Conference, community meals and community political education readings. I learned abolitionist politics by living through the world created by the most caring individuals who dared to see a world where we aren’t disposable.

My commitment to abolitionism solidified when I was arrested and cops swarmed me on the ground and handcuffed me, and later when they starved me. It solidified through the money I lost just to get forced to take a plea deal and lose my most precious commodity—my time— and then pay the state $50 a month for over a year of probation. I was lucky to be around family, around community, and with an abolitionist politics that kept me grounded as the terror of the state was unleashed upon me.

Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us gave me the words and guidelines of imagining a life where our relationships to others were the most valuable asset we have against a common enemy; a world where there is this understanding that while we are all capable of harm, we are deserving of the dignity to change; a world where there is no carceral state, where there is only us reaching for one another.

This book was a going back to basics, the perfecting of a tendu, the instructions on how-to-unfurl and strengthen my toes to create a strong base and form a solid view of the world through previously read abolitionist texts, through my lived experiences of seeing how the police terrorized my community and terrorized me. It served as the first formal text of how to maintain accountability in an actual abolitionist and taut way.

The book challenges the reader to envision a world where we are to politically uphold abolitionist principles and have designated safe spaces where it is normalized to address harms in ways that involve the community. These should be spaces where we solve problems collectively, don’t shame one another, work with both the survivors and abusers, and where we’re not separating families as the PIC does or working with the police as the NPIC does, but collectively figuring out how we can mutually get our needs and our need for safety met.

We deserve safe spaces within our communities where we make mistakes— and yes, where we address harm, because all have the capacity to cause harm. Throughout the book, this notion that none of us are exempt from that held me and gave me hope that the sooner we all realize this, the sooner we can be better with one another and the sooner we can be on our way to building a better future.

That’s how Nebula, the mutual aid organization I’m part of, was born, as a gaseous nursery full of pulsating brilliance and possibilities. It happened while I was tenant organizing. I, along with other organizers, realized that we weren't only dealing with landlords, illegal lockouts, and the rampant inequities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—we were also dealing with domestic violence within these family units.

We decided to create this space that wishes to collectively identify and attempt

to address the root causes of harm within the community. We don’t have the answers, but we are trying to build and inspire others to build similar organizations grounded in mutual aid in their communities. We want others to build more organizations that value community cooperation, selfdetermination, healing, rehabilitation, and dignity.

Having a neighbor being harassed by the police can put the entire community in danger. What is the alternative? Nebula, along with the input of the community, are attempting to figure that out. We, at Nebula, are learning as we go, through lived experiences, being on-the-ground, listening to our neighbors, making art and being in community with families in crisis—collectively figuring out what needs are what it means to operate from a revolutionary love ethic.

Some of us come from the background of working directly with men who have caused harm, some of us are yoga instructors and some of us are artists and art educators that use what we’ve learned in our fields to make art in community, to express, to dance, to make beautiful things—because we have the right to heal. We make time in our lives for building and organizing because our collective liberation is of utmost importance, and as Kaba puts it, “My conviction is that we ought to be organizing steadily always. All of the time. When the protests and the uprisings happen we can meet those moments, because we’ve actually been building all along.”

It can be very isolating when going through trauma, so it’s integral to have a community around who are calm, who are compassionate and who can welcome you to your new life. A lot of us in Nebula are former survivors and former non-profit workers who understand the role that NPIC has with PIC and we have seen how this affected those people who didn't follow the perfect victim narrative, who are criminalized, and who don’t have the resources needed to receive the help they deserve. They fell through the cracks. As we collectively envision and build that new world, we want to be ready.

In the book, Kaba writes about how her father, who is not only an important organizer in his own right but also her influence, encourages her to solve issues with one another and reminds her, “You

ILLUSTRATION BY JULIE MERRELL

are interconnected to everyone, because the world doesn’t work without everyone. You may think that you’re alone, but you’re never actually alone.”

Moving with dignity and working through conflict while maintaining our relationships through struggle is a seed that Nebula attempts to embed in the anti domestic violence work we do. At this time, Nebula is still in its seed stages and is at capacity. We are currently helping six families and could really use the support to grow and build our organization to add more members.

The new world is possible, it is here, and it exists, we are it, we’re all we got, and with all the love in the world, I encourage you to build mutual aid organization, talk to your neighbors, your friends, and build stronger communities now, because we will win, we will win, we will win.

Melissa Castro Almandina is an anarchist, poet, & resident artist at AMFM gallery. They write poetry, make zines, & dance ballet in their spare time. Find their work online, in zines, & in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext.

Review by Chima Ikoro

It was easy for many of us to agree we didn’t like the police before we ever had the language to describe why. We saw law enforcement jammed into every crevice of our lives, creating more problems than solutions.

Many young Black and Brown folks from disenfranchised neighborhoods interact with the police for the first time early on. Whether directly, by being adultified on the street or ordered around at school, or indirectly, by seeing an adult in their life harassed during a traffic stop.

For a lot of my life, I lived at the edge of the city in a neighborhood called Beverly Woods. Here, I was part of Beverly enough to have close friends whose parents were cops, and close enough to walk to the houses of friends who those police officers did not want their children hanging out with.

My dad always preferred I hang out with kids whose parents were cops, assuming that he knew he could trust them. But why? He was afraid of the police; he tells stories of cops stopping him and roughing him up, knowing that

ILLUSTRATION BY JULIE MERRELL

he could not do anything because he’d recently immigrated.

He saw cops everywhere in South Shore, where we originally lived, and folks still got their cars and homes broken into. He’d never described one positive experience with a police officer, and yet always mentioned that badge when talking about my friend's parents.

Part of me believes it was because they

without the full scope of what abolition really is, people may not know they align with these ideas.

My father, like many others, does not want to defund the police despite never being helped by them. Being harmed by cops has not stopped him from thinking that there needs to be more police. This is probably because he’s also been robbed and harassed by people who look like him, so the idea of fewer police means more chances for his safety to be at risk.

That’s not what abolition is. The abolitionist framework looks to remedy the circumstances that would make a young man hold a cab driver at gunpoint in the first place—poverty, unresolved mental health issues, housing insecurity, etc.

Food and a safe place to live can stop more crime than an officer ever could considering that police show up as a response; there’s no way for them to get ahead and determine when something is going to happen before it does. Black and Brown people in marginalized communities know this already, they’ve

conflict resolution tactics, for example, can be the difference between life and death.

In this same section, Kaba goes on to write “...only building power among those most marginalized in society holds the possibility of radical transformation.” So by that logic, the “work” and its ideologies must be made accessible to the most marginalized.

When asked where to start on the journey to understanding abolition, justice, and liberation, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us has taken its place at the top of my list since being published. The usage of concrete examples, whether they’re providing factual evidence or detailing a personal experience, give context that allow the reader to relate their own understandings and experiences. And that’s what makes abolition tangible; folks being able to understand how it directly affects them and their communities, and why they should care about how it affects everyone else.

Literature that is as transparent and comprehensive as We Do This ‘Til We Free Us becomes a guide for individuals who have been doing the work to continually transform their thinking, and grow as well. For example, Kaba implores readers to challenge the idea that indicting police officers is a viable solution.

“Beyond strategic assessments of what is most likely to bring justice, ultimately we must choose to support collective responses that align with our values,” Kaba wrote.

were Black; this created a separation in my mind as well at the time. But I started to form my own resentment toward them as adults because of the language they used to describe my peers just because they lived on the other side of the tracks.

Abolition is about more than just a disdain for policing. It compels us to understand how many of the traps designed to cage Black and Brown folks revolve around the construct of policing.

Abolitionist writing like We Do This ‘Til We Free Us is vital because, despite our desire to create a better world, the language of these movements is yet another barrier for reaching the people who would benefit from them the most. It’s hard to imagine that words like “defund” are jargon, but

probably seen it with their eyes, but they might not make the connection.

“Defund the police” is an abolitionist demand not only because that is where the money for these other services will need to come from, but because the police are actively harmful. In section three, ‘The State Can’t Give Us Transformative Justice,’ Mariame Kaba explains that she never calls the cops. “It takes practice to do this,” she wrote. “As such, we need popular education within our communities about alternatives to policing.”

Some people would agree that the police are not helpful, but without knowing what else to do, they might still resort to calling them. Educational materials and books that teach community members

“Demands for arrests and prosecutions of killer cops are inconsistent with demands to #DefundPolice [...] We can’t claim the system must be dismantled because it is a danger to Black lives and at the same time legitimize it by turning to it for justice.”

To me, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us stands out as an important piece of abolitionist literature because of its writing. Kaba continues to steward important conversations and share information by creating work that is honest and understandable. It’s important that everyone is able to see how they fit into the tomorrow we are trying to create today. ¬

Chima Ikoro is the Weekly’s Community Builder.

“You are interconnected to everyone, because the world doesn’t work without everyone. You may think that you’re alone, but you’re never actually alone.”

Op-Ed: Paper Ban at Cook County Jail Restricts Access to Letters, Books and Learning Material

BY MIDWEST BOOKS TO PRISONERS

Roughly two months after the Cook County Sheriff’s Office prohibited most paper from entering Chicago’s largest jail, Cook County Jail (CCJ), Illinois became the first state to outlaw book bans. Upon signing the bill, Governor Pritzker asserted: “Book bans are about censorship, marginalizing people, marginalizing ideas and facts. Regimes ban books, not democracies.”

Despite the bill, in CCJ, new policies limiting paper’s entry and circulation have threatened to do just that: censor and marginalize incarcerated peoples’ access to ideas, facts, and history, and deny them access to education and self-expression, essential mechanisms for coping and selfimprovement.

Critically, the Cook County Department of Corrections spent zero dollars on library books or reading materials last year, according to the director of individuals in custody in a 2022 FOIA request. With no investment in new reading materials and the books already in the facility subject to confiscation, access to education has been greatly reduced in what was already a barren learning environment.

As volunteers operating the largest independent educational services for incarcerated people in the state, we work with hundreds of people on the inside each week. Our frequent contact with people on the inside and partnerships with educational facilitators in CCJ has put us in a unique position to see and hear how the jail is run and how its policies are implemented. This uncommon access to incarcerated people often gives us a perspective on CCJ’s policies that might not otherwise be heard by correctional officers, officials in the Sheriff’s office, or the general public.

As we have repeatedly and frequently

been told in great detail, CCJ’s policies— however intentioned—are, naturally, not always implemented according to plan. Our observations here are based on thousands of interactions with incarcerated people, rooted in our belief that their sustained, widespread feedback is essential to the public discourse surrounding CCJ and incarceration.

In a May op-ed for the Sun-Times, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart justified the new policy by citing an apparent rise in overdose deaths this year allegedly caused by paper soaked in substances entering the facility. As an organization committed to the welfare and development of our friends on the inside, we agree with Dart that we must “confront this [drug crisis] and adapt” accordingly.

However, intensified search practices have threatened the efficacy of learning and educational programming for many incarcerated people and have ultimately harmed their well-being. The heightened security and screening of mail has jeopardized access to donated books, letters

ILLUSTRATION BY MEG STUDER

approved, printed, or delivered in time for class.

Even before these heightened restrictions, the jail reportedly seized 11,000 pieces of mail in one year. Under the guise of concerns such as stains and a no-

smell the cologne, perfume, and the house fragrance of my family and friends and it reminded me of the outside... The jail has found another way to repress our happiness. They found a way to hack into our joy in receiving one of the few things we cherish and look forward to the most well behind bars. Our mail. One of our only ways of staying connected with the outside.”

Some student groups have had educational materials confiscated, and said they have later been prohibited from bringing in replacements. Program facilitators have said they witnessed the seizure of Bibles and Qurans, paper shakedowns, and books tossed on the floor and thrown away by officers. Regardless of the policy’s intent, these discretionary actions taken by officers violate personal liberties.

The same restrictions that affect programming, education, and learning also hurt people incarcerated in CCJ in other ways. The delays and oversights in paper screening that hinder jail programming are equally harmful for loved ones with timesensitive issues. While lawyers are now permitted to bring laptops into the jail as a replacement for paper, loved ones hoping to bring in important legal and financial documents are not.

from family, and more. As we previously wrote, “after a decade without problems, our books are suddenly being rejected at high rates.”

While Dart contends that the CCJ’s new practices aim to maintain the jail’s educational programming, in reality, these new restrictions have created an untenable learning environment. CCJ’s program facilitators have seen similarly superfluous seizure of mail and educational materials, in addition to paper materials not being

fragrance policy, CCJ not only blocks our books from entering the jail, but routinely seizes them instead of returning them, with no recourse to us.

Altogether, CCJ’s new mail procedures suppress the education and connection that makes life in jail livable. Reading, writing, and connection to family are not luxuries, but means of survival for the incarcerated.

As one person incarcerated in CCJ wrote about the new policy banning any mail with a fragrance: “[in letters,] I used to

Furthermore, as one educator described, despite Sheriff Dart’s assertion that incarcerated people still have full access to their legal materials, not having access to paper can make it difficult for people to look over their own court cases.

Sheriff Dart has argued that calling these new restrictions a “ban” on paper represents an “intentionally misleading disinformation campaign aimed at scaring the public”. However, while CCJ has “not changed [their] policy” regarding the number of books allowed per person, for

Jail volunteers say the heightened security and screening of mail has jeopardized access to donated books, letters from family, and case documents.

Altogether, CCJ’s new mail procedures suppress the education and connection that makes life in jail livable.

example, from what we have seen, their enforcement of the policy has changed. The culmination of these new practices is not a humane policy in which at least some paper is being permitted.

In reality, all paper—regardless of its importance, urgency, or value—is presumptively banned unless granted an exception. Entering the jail, volunteers recounted that multiple signs read: “Effective immediately, the following items are not allowed inside DOC: Books, coloring books, NO SHEETS OF PAPER OF ANY KIND [among others].”

As a result of the paper ban, officers are not only enforcing the three book limit, but, at their discretion, forcing incarcerated people to give up even the books they’re allowed to have. Dart has shrugged off the notion that this is some “ham-fistedly banning all paper”—even though that’s precisely what the enforcement of these rules amounts to. CCJ’s new practices severely limit, delay, and reduce access to paper through discretionary enforcement and excessive screening and confiscation practices.

To assuage the public’s concerns, Dart has suggested that educational electronic

tablets sufficiently replace the need for paper. But from interviews conducted by facilitators across the jail’s various divisional units, it has become clear that these tablets have narrow use, value, and access. Typically, individuals can use public tablets for a few hours per day. Use is restricted to a shortform messaging service and watching educational videos to accrue points, which can then be spent on entertainment.

But these tablets, which primarily offer consumable content, do not allow the space for self-reflection through writing and art that paper provides. For folks on the inside, writing is a critical coping mechanism. It is this space for reflection that enables emotional transformation—and is that not the purported goal of incarceration to begin with? Imagine late at night, having no activity for much of the day—all one can do is think, read, and write. A few hours of tablet use per day is incomparable to the value of paper in those many empty hours.

To stop this overdose epidemic, we believe it is essential to treat it as a health crisis first and a security problem second, using harm reduction solutions that go far beyond simply banning paper. ¬

SUMMER MUSIC SERIES

Seeing Yourself in the Future You’re Fighting For

Let This Radicalize You co-author Kelly Hayes on balancing journalism with activism and the importance of caring for ourselves while doing the work.

BY JOCELYN MARTINEZ-ROSALES

Acouple times a month, I factcheck Kelly Hayes’s transcript for her Movement Memos podcast on Truthout, a non-profit independent news organization dedicated to reporting on social justice issues. Kelly is a writer, organizer, and movement educator, cofounder of Chicago’s Lifted Voices and the Chicago Light Brigade, and my colleague at Truthout

Hayes usually hosts people on Movement Memos from the frontlines of movement work, from journalists to activists leading the way to social change. I learn a lot from fact-checking Kelly’s transcripts, and so was more than happy to help when she approached me to fact-check chapter 6 in her book, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, co-written with Mariame Kaba and published in May.

Chapter 6, titled “‘Violence’ in Social Movements,” explores the summer of 2020 in Chicago when the liberation movement was at its height and Black Lives Matter actions were taking up every corner of the city. During that time, people were protesting and showing up against police brutality en masse. People were angry and grieving, and in response to inaction from the government, some residents took to the streets to commit acts of property destruction. Hayes and Kaba write, “the destruction of property is usually viewed as violent only if it disrupts profit or the maintenance of wealth. If food is destroyed because it cannot be sold while people go hungry, that is not considered violent under the norms of capitalism.”

In chapter 3, “Care is Fundamental,”

they recount an incident at the Chicago Freedom School (CFS), co-founded by Kaba. When youth were left with nowhere to go after then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot issued a curfew and raised the bridges downtown, CFS opened its doors and fed the kids pizza. It was then that police showed up and “the city inspector claimed the city had received complaints about CFS preparing food and housing young people without a license.”

Often overlooked, Hayes and Kaba write, is that “the main perpetrators of violence are these extractive systems, which—in varied but connected ways— extract the resources that sustain life.”

Let This Radicalize You intersection of capitalism, individualism, environmental racism, and mental health through anecdotes, advice, and personal experiences. It touches on police brutality, the prison industrial complex, climate change, and the interconnectedness of not just these movements but all “movements against dehumanization.”

The authors warn readers that this book is not to be viewed as a manual, but rather as a love letter, or a deep conversation with a pal. I sat down with Hayes to talk about Let This Radicalize You and what she learned through her writing.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

South Side Weekly: When you began writing Let This Radicalize You, did you sit down to make a list of everything that you wanted to include in the book, or did you just let it all pour out?

Hayes: There were jumping-off points that we knew we needed to include that felt really relevant. And then there was a lot that just kind of cropped up along the way. It was like, “Oh, well, if we’re going to mention this idea, then we should really talk about this group and the work that they did,” and, “Oh, if we’re gonna touch on Palestine, then we should really talk to Leah.” The book kind of kept perpetuating itself in a way in that we were constantly challenged by what we had already written, or what we were trying to say to include more, much to our editors' chagrin. It just kept getting longer.

In your podcast, Movement Memos, you introduce yourself as a writer and an activist. There’s this tabooness to

identifying as both an activist and a journalist. Part of your work is journalism. Do you think that it’s possible to be a good journalist and an activist simultaneously?

I think that it’s important to recognize that all journalism has a political perspective, and that some people are just in denial about that, right?... How did this concept even arrive in journalism as a marketing ploy, as a means of selling penny papers to wider audiences? And so even within that frame, right, it never stopped having a political perspective, it never stopped having a political framework. It’s just about trying to make that invisible in many cases, by acting as though some midway position between sort of various extremes, or what are perceived as extremes, as though that makes something non political. When really, you know, what's depicted as centrism in the U.S., of course, is pretty far right. And what's depicted as sort of mainstream is actually really extreme in a lot of ways. We talk in the book about how normalized some forms of violence are in the United States. Structural violence, normalizing the fact that people are being tortured daily and dying in prisons. That’s a mainstream position. That’s a status quo position. And so yeah, it helps me to understand that there’s no such thing as not really being political. It’s just about what politics you’re embracing, and whether or not you’re being honest about it. And so my jumping off point is that I’m honest about it. And also, I don’t think it’s an extreme position, you know, to start off from a place of acknowledging that the world needs to change drastically.

Kelly Hayes ILLUSTRATION BY SYDNI BALUCH

This book was a learning experience for me, was it a learning experience writing it?

The chapter on burnout was groundbreaking for me personally. I thought that I had already learned some pretty important lessons, just from my years of work and also from becoming disabled while doing the work and the ways in which that had forced me to learn to pace myself differently. But listening to Sharon Lungo talk about how you have to actually visualize yourself in the future that you’re fighting for—that we can’t treat ourselves as disposable for the cause.

Allowing ourselves to have things and modeling that for the next generation of young folk. That like, actually, yes, you should have hobbies, you should be caring for yourself, you should be indulging [in] creative pursuits, you should have more. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself. And in fact, that’s kind of a bad thing to be teaching other people to do. Those conversations, I think, saved me a lot of lessons that I would have had to keep learning on my own the

hard way.

For a while, I think, I was spared some tumult and some grief by getting to hear from folks who were just, in some cases, a couple of years ahead of me on the journey, but whose footsteps I had been following in. In a lot of ways, in terms of not treating myself as being as valuable as what I was fighting for. And, you know, I think that what Ruthie says about where life is precious, life is precious. It’s become so central to my way of thinking, because it’s like, well, life is us too. You know, it’s like that means I have to be precious too. So what do I need to be okay in this world? And what do I need to be showing? As someone who was looked up to, to some degree, what do I need to be modeling about how we should be caring for ourselves, while also not giving up on other people? ¬

Jocelyn Martinez-Rosales is a MexicanAmerican from Belmont Cragin, Chicago. As an independent journalist she’s passionate about covering communities of color with a social justice lens. She’s also the labor editor at the Weekly

Marketplace

The Exchange is the Weekly’s poetry corner, where a poem or piece of writing is presented with a prompt. Readers are welcome to respond to the prompt with original poems, and pieces may be featured in the next issue of the Weekly.

This special edition is more than just an exchange. It’s a marketplace where readers and writers have traded in an array of poems in response to a prompt that serves as the guiding theme for this Literary Issue: “How do you practice and experience radical self-love, revolutionary thought (or action), or the reclamation of freedom and community?”

ratios

by c. lofty bolling

Determined to be equal parts poem and person. I crawl into syntax like my double sided comforter a comforter is comfortable and I recon with my ambivalence very gingerly in the mornings. before returning to bed, a choice, equal ratio of desire and intention, work and rest

my morning coffee takes any shape it needs before we open our doors to the world.

Black People Deserve Beautiful Sentences. We Really Do

by arianne elena payne

I returned to righteous riots, a realm of crossroads for a college grad.

Chaos. Niggas violated cause we had been violated. The bars of the beauty supply bent like a wilted bouquet, a topsoil of glass for a dad.

We wanted justice. My mom made gumbo in waiting. Fixed a thick roux dark as Truth.

The okra seduced the onions & delivered bell peppers covered in an ancestral storm.

Andouille sausage rolled dice on the corner till the chicken came home to stew.

Fabulous, flush, & late—the shrimp strutted in. The rice was seated.

An experiment in searching for warmth, this meal caressed a desert as if to say, I don’t have the answers & I’m as scared as the fire is red—

but I have this heart to share. I imagine my granny packed a pot for her daughter:

this mirror now veiled by hard love showing me beauty as what I was born for. Outside, designs for tomorrow, endings like grass blades, a hood heavy with sentences.

Not Your Good Girl

by shivani kumar

after Dr. Eve L. Ewing’s “what I mean when I say I'm sharpening my oyster knife”

Can you hear me being a good girl, mouse girl speaking over your catch-all catcalls. Glove me. Scalpel me. Precisioning soul deep scars over your lazy-tongued eyes. Don’t look. Don’t touch.

Can you hear me dropping poems on your floor, down your throat leaving you wondering how grade school innocence grew legs bronzed, mind goldened,

existence quick-silvered. You must hear me take to my skies ink soaked, tresses blazed, skin silked. A flight you can no longer board.

I hear me allowing you to think you slipped your fingers into my mouth. But I swallowed you whole before you learned to speak. Before you could stumble through my syllables carrying my lineage’s legacied lore; too bad, too loud, too messy to hold still on your confused tongue.

From the dregs of my soul to the poor— The Jade Diamond

A tree is drawn to the meaning of waiting and earth is held there to knowledge by the rain

that leaf contains a triumph to alter as the observer perceives there—once a leaf now a sparrow held there to knowledge by the rain

…

Place a small bowl within the foliage and sparrows will build their nest at the azimuth for all to see

by lou heron

Sentient beings then shall walk through leaves chanting I AM THE BODHIDHARMA

…

two stone lions embark from stasis trans-versing golden straw

Where sages study the organ of dreams to make conscious the field giving birth to infinite awe

…

Together now! What she does is she—on earth held there to knowledge by the rain

Everyones on strike

Working like a bee for free Waves crash in Abundance or scarcity

Big up sleeping till noon Getting my life together May be a hot meal

In summer storms the wind is sharp enough to drink High up my room is nicely chilled

I will keep the bonfire fed All night in between the function Picking sticks off the ground

The lake gives off a breeze Tanned ashy n glittering Everything swoons in shade

by imani joseph

I read novels in glumps Biting into juicy pickles

Sharpeningggggg

My needs

A silly treat a day Keeps the depression at bay

It's the time of lonely months Dating multiple accounts I be up overthinking dust

I wish the buses weren’t this crowded Up late going south a beautiful person Close to me smells like tea tree

When’s the last time we haven’t practiced Capitalism my neighbors hate gentrification As much as we hate littering

A Father’s Dreams Disguised as You

by claude robert hill, iv

One tree. Father and son. The same deep roots. A future disguised as waving leaves. Those precious times spent together. A daddy with his dream. A mini version of himself. His blood. His immortality. Love wins. Son, never forget me! As you go forth and become...

The man that you are destined to be. To become more than me. My dreams and Your dreams realized. You are the Divine twinkle in my proud father’s eyes come alive. My future with you in it is a treasured gift from the loving divine. This is why I am glad; that you are mine. You are the reason that I cling to life. You are the motivation behind my eyes.

Chima Ikoro is the Weekly’s Community Builder.

The Trayvon Generation Conveys the Timelessness of Black Art

Elizabeth Alexander’s book marries essays with striking visual representations.

BY SABRINA TICER-WURR

To call The Trayvon Generation a book of essays would be an incomplete description. An extension of Elizabeth Alexander’s New Yorker essay of the same name, published at the height of mass protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, The Trayvon Generation is a multimedia project. Comprising nine essays across three sections, it explores the power of Black art as a catalyst for reflection and social change.

Through a thoughtful assemblage of visual art, personal and historical anecdotes, and excerpts of poetry and speech, the book is a cautiously hopeful letter to a young adult audience she names “the Trayvon generation.”

Apart from the first essay, the titles of Alexander’s essays are pulled from quotes. The title of the second essay, “here lies,” is taken from the lines of Lucille Clifton’s 1989 poem “at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina,” a poem which is itself reprinted within the essay. “here lies” discusses the pervasiveness of racism in American collective memory, as reinforced by public monuments such as the carvings of confederate leaders found at Stone Mountain Park in Georgia, the largest Confederate monument in the world.

The strength of The Trayvon Generation lies in the connections Alexander makes between seemingly disparate works of art spanning different generations. Alongside her discussion of Clifton’s poem, Alexander includes an image of a 2015 installation by visual artist Kara Walker, “The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin,” which depicts the brutality of slavery and the Civil War. By presenting visual art created by a Black woman in tandem with written work by

a Black woman who passed before the exhibition of said visual art, Alexander conveys a broader narrative about the timelessness of Black art.

Alexander’s writing resembles the work of authors like James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, who uses autobiographical prose to deliver sermon-like essays on the Black condition. Alexander employs images in a style similar to that of Claudia Rankine in Citizen: An American Lyric, using photographs and paintings to lay bare what words cannot. While Alexander does not construct her essays as pointedly as Rankine, opting for Baldwin’s first-person rather than Rankine’s piercing “you,” her essays still capture the sentiments of a generation of Black Americans seeking to harness creative power as a subversive tool to disrupt white supremacy.

More than just a meditation, Alexander’s book reads as an anthology of artwork that speaks to the legacy of Black creativity and imagination. A personal highlight of the book was an essay in Part III titled, “we dress our ideas in clothes to make the abstract visible.” Opposite the title page of the essay is a striking image by Chandra McCormick titled “Daddy’O, The Oldest Inmate in Angola State Penitentiary.” The essay details McCormick’s project of photographing incarcerated people within the penitentiary as a practice of reinforcing dignity within a prison system that constantly undermines it.

Later in the essay, Alexander discusses artist jackie sumell’s project in reconstructing the dream home of Herman Wallace, who spent forty-one years in solitary confinement while incarcerated at Angola. sumell’s culminating product, named “The House That Herman Built,” was a radical practice of imagination.

Alexander writes, “Before I saw Angola prison myself, and walked where the thousands and thousands of human beings whose lives have been affected by it lived, these artists showed me so. More of us can know because the art sees for us and carries traces of the lives of the human beings who are remembered by their loved ones and whom we cannot turn away from.”

Essays like “we dress our ideas in clothes to make the abstract visible” stand out not for their particularly thoughtprovoking analysis, but because of the way they engage visual art and writing simultaneously. Given Alexander’s background as a poet and scholar of African American literature, such inclusions were well-selected and poignant.

While Alexander’s connections between the creative expression of different generations is effective, her connection to the experiences of younger generations is less compelling. Alexander’s perspective as a mother is clear—especially within the titular essay—and generally self-aware, compassionate, and earnest. But the book doesn’t fully recognize the realities “the Trayvon generation” that she identifies faces.

Alexander writes, “But I worry about this generation of young black people and depression,” which she attributes to the “specter of race-based violence and death…compounded with the constant display of inequity.” She recognizes the societal conditions which have given rise to poor mental health amongst Black GenZers and “The Trayvon Generation” but falls short in identifying the circumstances, such as the aversion some Black elders have toward addressing topics ranging from mental health to police abolition, and lack of institutional access for Black youth, that enable it to persist.

For this reason, though the content suggests that the essay is about and for young people, the titular essay reads more as a personal account of being a mother of young Black kids, written for other parents of Black young people.

Small flaws aside, the merits of Alexander’s essays and grounded optimism toward the power of Black joy and creative expression are sure to resonate with audiences of all ages. “Art and history are the indelibles. They outlive flesh. They offer us a compass or a lantern with which to move through the wilderness and allow us to imagine something different and better,” Alexander writes.

The Trayvon Generation is a quick read with prose that is elegant and direct. At its core, it contains intelligent insight into the importance of creating radical Black art and memorializing Black history. Readers who appreciate Alexander’s wellresearched and concise writing, and her eclectic taste in Black visual art, will enjoy this book.

Whether you are familiar with the writing of Gwendolyn Brooks or less familiar with Amanda Williams’s “Color(ed) Theory” project featuring brightly painted houses in Englewood, Alexander’s book will meet the reader where they are at, introducing or re-introducing interesting cultural touchstones and Black art interspersed with eloquently written and spot-on commentary. ¬

Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation. $22. Grand Central Publishing, 2022. 144 pages.

Sabrina Ticer-Wurr is a writer and college student from the South Side of Chicago. This is her first time writing for the Weekly

Organizing and the Future of the American Experiment

BY SCOTT PEMBERTON

In 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama characterized his three years as a community organizer in Altgeld Gardens as “the best education I ever had.” From this talking point during the presidential campaign, community organizing stepped into the national spotlight.

Keeping it there was Sarah Palin. “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer,” the Republican vice-presidential candidate noted, “except that you have actual responsibilities.”

No matter. In the end, he got elected, and she didn’t. But Palin did hit upon basic questions that have long plagued organizers and confused even some supporters: What do organizers do, exactly? What is community organizing all about?

Activist Gale Cincotta once put it simply: “You just have to have the will to change something.” A one-time Austin neighborhood resident and a national leader in the fight against redlining, Cincotta was interviewing Chicago journalist Studs Terkel in 1977. Simple on the surface, yes, but there is oh-so-much more. Cincotta’s “The will to change something” is the what. But where is the how?

An informative and engaging book published just this year, Occupation: Organizer by Clement Petitjean, tells the story of finding a key part of that how. Not the how-to, mind you, but the how-

it-all-came-about. And, despite its snappy red-white-and-blue cover and workaday title, the book is not a high school career guide but, as the subtitle clarifies, A Critical History of Community Organizing in America. Appropriately, it’s published by Chicago’s Haymarket Books, which describes itself as “radical, independent, nonprofit.”

Much of the story of community organizing plays out in Chicago with Chicagoans in crucial roles. Early in his narrative, Petitjean describes Chicago’s place in community organizing today: “There is no equivalent in the rest of the U.S. to the tightly knit, highly selfconscious, dense institutional fabric that is the community organizing milieu in Chicago.”

During their conversation, Terkel and Cincotta lamented that the news media were ignoring the “community movement going on” at that time. She also issued a plea: “Community organizations need organizers, they need professional help.”

With the publication of Organizer, Petitjean, a French social science professor, addresses that plea, in part, by persistently making the case for organizing as a profession. His contention is that even though organizers have long behaved and performed as professionals, they still are not formally recognized the way lawyers, physicians, engineers, architects, and others are.

Why does that matter? For one

thing, the pay is better. (Salary.com lists the median annual community organizer’s salary in Chicago as $58,060.) For another, the job itself is important in so many ways for so many reasons. As Organizer makes clear, organizing efforts are in fact critical to an America still struggling to maintain—even to fully realize—its promise of democracy. Organizing offers a way for individuals to effect change in their lives locally, where it matters most, as well as regionally and nationally. The ability of communities to organize themselves to identify and pursue common goals enables them to challenge much larger, more powerful entities and conditions.

Organizer is at its core a work of scholarship. But it’s not written as a scholarly work and doesn’t read that way. It is a detailed and well-documented recounting of how organizing developed from a vague and loosely defined function into a profession, albeit one at times misunderstood even by its practitioners and maligned by its critics.

During the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests in the 1960s, organizers were derisively, if not altogether incorrectly, called “outside agitators.” In 1967, yet another Chicagoan, Saul Alinsky, known as the “father of organizing,” was characterized by Newsweek magazine as “the veteran professional agitator who shows the poor how to fight City Hall.” At the time, he was negotiating with Stokely Carmichael

(not a Chicagoan) to train organizers of Carmichael’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, “to give [SNCC’s] amateurs a touch of professionalism,” as Newsweek put it. Carmichael’s “Black power speech” the year before had made him a national figure at twenty-four, who rivaled “[Martin Luther] King as a media sensation.” It also made him a target. Petitjean wryly notes: “He was now at the top of the FBI’s Rabble Rouser Index.”

These details are characteristic not only of Petitjean’s diligent research but also of the straightforward way he tells the story, without academic jargon or terminology but with a light touch and at times a sense of humor. He provides context, presents new information, and offers perspectives that today’s organizers might use to work together, not just with supportive messaging but also with shared methods and assessments of which ones work and which do not.

Curiously, perhaps due to the French connection, this work calls to mind Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. That’s the classic account not of what made America great—not in 1835, anyway— but of what made America tick and the pitfalls it needed to avoid to keep on ticking. Both books explore different, though new-to-the-world American phenomena: democracy for Tocqueville and modern, professional community organizing for Petitjean. The two ideas are symbiotic in a way: democracy

A new book spells out where community organizing has been but stops short of imagining where it might go.

allows community organizing to do its work; community organizing supports a working democracy.

Tocqueville, in fact, described the fundamental idea of democracy as the “equality of condition,” way before its time Tocqueville identified equality as a principle that goes to the heart of what community organizing is all about.

Several publishing courtesies make this book accessible for casual readers. There is precious little academic language or terminology. Myriad footnote superscripts are barely noticeable, and the thirty-two pages of corresponding citations, explanations, and clarifications are tucked neatly away in the back. Meanwhile, the book’s many acronyms are listed and deciphered in the front. That’s important because acronyms are scattered throughout. And something you don’t often see: historical dollar amounts are consistently translated to contemporary equivalents, which goes a long way toward putting things into perspective.

Saul Alinsky, for instance, made a pretty penny. Though he grew up poor, for the most part, he was not the popularized picture of a downtrodden, cause-inspired social justice organizer. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1930, Alinsky did much of his pioneering work in and for Chicago causes, but he later enjoyed national reach and was sought after to do what today would be called management consulting. He was the author of the touchstone book Reveille for Radicals, published in 1946. In 1947, he was paid a salary of $15,000 by the Industrial Areas Foundation, which he helped to found, or $195,000 in 2021 dollars. He was also a pioneering beneficiary of the civic, academic, and entertainment professional-speaking circuit, a classic example of doing well by doing good. Alinsky’s career arc supports author Petitjean’s contention that community organizing became a profession quite some time ago and ought to be recognized as one now.

On the other hand, Petitjean keeps the flip side in play: many, if not most, community organizers in the 1960s and afterward were downtrodden and cause inspired. “Panic Point. Bank balance

$4.09” read a sign posted in “the dining room of [a] Cleveland ‘project house’” for young SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] organizers in 1963, reported one journalist. “Newark project workers have to call ‘friends in the suburbs’ for $5 or $10 [for the] necessities of life . . . The kids are the very antithesis of paid organizers of the unions or political parties.”

For Petitjean in this book, community organizing began with Alinsky and his initial organizing work in the early 1930s. That’s when community organizing began to define itself and be taken more seriously. That perspective might also account for the otherwise surprising omission, without explanation, of the impacts of at least two earlier significant organizing movements in America,

but not immediately apparent, is the scope of the work done by Alinsky, Cinnota, and other organizing leaders. Over decades, they organized not only thousands of individuals for local causes but also brought together hundreds of organizations for common purposes nationally. The book also takes pains to explain the basics of organizing philosophy (mainly, Alinsky’s). The idea was that identifying and achieving a goal must come from the community itself, not from some outside force. The method was to identify communities that might warrant support—public housing projects, for instance—and then for Alinsky organizers to live in those communities as residents.

Over time, these on-the-ground

saw organizing’s newer leadership— Ella Baker, SDS, SNCC, and others— reshaping the role of an organizer from “human resources management consultant” to “radical spade worker.” Spade workers were not so much oriented to projects as to “social movements and collective struggles.” Finally, overlapping with Alinsky’s death in 1972, a “burgeoning community organization movement” challenged the organizer’s role as one of “an outside, detached, manipulating expert” and criticized Alinsky for overlooking “central issues of race, gender, and ideology.”

If all of this seems a little messy that’s because it is. But as a social scientist and historian Petitjean does a conscientious, even-handed job of sorting through the elements of community organizing, including theories, events, and their roles in its evolution.

both powered by women. One was responsible for Prohibition and the other for establishing voting rights for women.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, known for her antilynching efforts in the South, also helped Black men find work and housing after she moved to Chicago in 1894. Petitjean also ignores the much more recent Black Lives Matter movement. Each deserves consideration. They executed grassroots, organizing efforts, if in different ways, with specific goals for change and “equality of condition.” The book also ignores social media. Although social media is mainly a tool, Petitjean might have at least reflected on its impact on organizing innovations, such as flash mobs. He can be forgiven for not contemplating artificial intelligence, which has only recently entered the public consciousness.

Despite these oversights, Organizer offers rich insight into the topics it does explore. Especially impressive,

organizers learned about gut-level issues face-to-face, developed trust as “curbstone counselors,” and identified “natural leaders,” who then did the handson leading with their support. The leaders spoke at public meetings, for instance, and the organizers worked behind the scenes. They might choreograph approaches at public meetings about specific issues down to who sat where, who said what, and what might happen in the aftermath. In other words, things didn’t just happen. What might be labeled “inside agitators” were responsible. Alinsky also advocated for more confrontational ways to push buttons, which other organizers first challenged and then developed alternative approaches.

Petitjean breaks the history into three eras. Alinsky came first with “militant liberalism” in the 1930s, forties, and fifties. Next came the “Long Sixties” (late 1950s to early 1970s). That period

Who might want to read this book or even benefit from reading it? Casual readers trying to make sense of “how we got here”—to such a “condition of inequality,” that is—and the nearly century of efforts to prevent it. Chicago history aficionados, especially those delighting in “nuggets” (Saul Alinsky’s dissertation research led him to the Chicago mob). Serious researchers requiring an accurate and detailed accounting of resources and accompanying elaboration. And, of course, community organizers themselves looking to understand how their profession developed and how its history affects the way they operate now and into the future.

And let’s not forget Sarah Palin. Occupation: Organizer might well clarify that small-town mayors and community organizers both have “actual” responsibilities—sometimes overlapping—and that meeting those responsibilities is more difficult, and more important, than ever before. ¬

Clement Petitjean, Occupation: Organizer. A Critical History of Community Organizing in America. Paperback $22.95. Haymarket Books, 2023. 340 pages.

Scott Pemberton is the public meetings editor at the Weekly.

“There is no equivalent in the rest of the U.S. to the tightly knit, highly selfconscious, dense institutional fabric that is the community organizing milieu in Chicago.”

Meet E'mon Lauren and Raych Jackson

BY CHIMA IKORO

Raych Jackson is an educator, voice actor, playwright, poet, and political commentator from the South Side of Chicago. Alongside Toaster, Jackson is co-host of Big Kid Show, formerly Big Kid Slam, which started as an adult poetry competition in April 2018 and now welcomes artistic performances of all disciplines.

Her debut book of poetry, Even The Saints Audition, features pieces that lead readers through the complexities of growing up a church baby, reclaiming, reflecting, and unlearning. Her book was published by Button Poetry, and Jackson’s spoken word performances have continued to gain traction on their Youtube channel as well, her poem “Period Rules” reaching 1.8 million views and counting. With more than 130,000 followers on TikTok, she also lends her comedic essence and smooth delivery as the face of The TRiiBE’s political commentary videos.

I probably met Raych while she was teaching a workshop, or hosting a poetry slam when I was in high school. In January 2020, I won a women-only Big Kid Slam; this one in particular was special because the slam served as a qualifier for the Womxn Of The World Poetry Slam (WOWPS). They sent me off to Dallas that March with all expenses paid to represent Chicago where I took fifth place on the final stage right before the world shut down.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Raych recently to talk about her book, her many interests, the importance of community, and more.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

South Side Weekly: Has being from the South Side had any impact on your identity or how you navigate the world and what you create?

Raych: Definitely. I think just seeing different resources—for example, I went to Morgan Park [High School], and I was on the volleyball team (for a hot minute, let me not pretend like I was an allstar) and we went to a school on the North Side. The gym at Morgan Park isn’t—you know, it's a good gym, but we went to that gym and I was like, “Oh…wow.” I think just in general, it shapes your mind when you’re like, “Oh wow, these are not the same resources at all.” But that’s a negative; there’s also a different sense of community here.

I currently live a five-minute drive from the church I grew up in on 46th and Drexel. And I went there for the church picnic last Friday because I wanted some barbecue (she laughs), so it’s still home. I'm happy to live near where I spent the majority of my childhood. In my case, sneaking out and doing non-godly things with my church friends; hopping on the bus and jumping double-dutch at Rainbow Beach, and stuff like that.

I think that I owe a lot of my artistry specifically to a Black church on the South Side. That is the first place I ever performed. That is the first place I learned about tech. That is the first place I learned how to jump rope. I don’t think a church on any other side of the city could have done that for me. ¬

Check out the rest of the interview at www. southsideweekly.com

Ea program manager, artist, educator, poet, writer, director, visual artist—the list is endless. Representing the South and West Sides of Chicago, E’mon was the first Youth Poet Laureate of the city. Her book of poetry, COMMANDO, was published by Haymarket Books, and she’s been featured in Vogue Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. Her work has been featured in the Chicago Reader, and she was South Shore’s neighborhood captain for the Weekly’s Best of the South Side 2022. E’mon is also host of her own podcast, “The Real Hoodwives of Chicago.”

The Weekly sat down with E’mon to discuss how her upbringing shapes her reality, being a Black girl with a dream, and radical self love. She also shares the title of her new book for the first time.

Content warning: This interview includes mentions of self harm and abuse. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

South Side Weekly: How do you practice and or experience radical self love?

E'mon: I guess it requires me to break down what is radical to me. What I always identify as radical is pushback, but

but not necessarily gray area—clarity, but being clairvoyant. So thinking about those is like, what is radical to me? I be alone. I be alone. That’s a real one lately, I be the f*ck alone. And that is reclaiming it to me, considering that I was a lonely ass kid, and felt like everybody f*cking hated me, and all I had was like, you know, it was me against the f*cking world. I’m at this point now where I’m reveling in gratefulness and constantly renewing myself.

I guess just really trying to take care of myself and really allow myself rest. I’ve been teaching since I was fourteen with Kuumba Lynx—most Chicago kids, we all been teaching since we was fourteen, damn near, but like being in this work for a long ass time, it requires you to be an adult and a kid at the same time, especially when you’re a kid. I had to teach myself how not to [attach] my livelihood to a check. I don’t want to be surviving; I had to make a choice where I was like I don’t wanna survive, I want to live, I want to thrive. I had to learn how to rest, I had to learn how to take care of myself and also learn how to forgive myself. ¬

Check out the rest of the interview at www. southsideweekly.com

E'mon, Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate, has continued to be a force in the creative community, while Raych discusses her many interests, Big Kid Show making it out of the trenches, getting doxxed, and more.

E'mon Lauren and Raych Jackson

ILLUSTRATION BY SHANE TOLENTINO

The Gospel of the Nap Bishop

Tricia Hersey continues to champion the freedom and grief that comes with resting and dreaming in Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto.

BY JASMINE BARNES

Self-ordained “Nap Bishop” Tricia Hersey doesn’t look to anyone for permission to rest. “I am clearly stating that to center rest, naps, sleep, slowing down, and leisure in a capitalist, white supremacist, ableist, patriarchal world is to live as an outlier,” she writes in her 2022 book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto

Hersey’s literary debut was inspired by her own journey after a deeply exhausting season of her life. While at Emory University in pursuit of her Master of Divinity degree, Hersey found herself beyond the point of burnout. Raising her son and working while also being a fulltime student pushed her to make some radical changes. “I just had to have a faith walk,” she said on the For the Wild podcast, referring to her decision to commit to rest.

“I had to leap without a net […] Similar to my grandmother who left the deep part of Mississippi to go to Chicago during the Great Migration running from racial terror there [...] this idea of hoping for the future, of leaping, of imagining, of trying to make space to just be. To allow yourself to tap in, to slow down [...] it's a political refusal.”

In 2016, Hersey founded The Nap Ministry, which was inspired by an artistic performance called Transfiguration in which she “explored reparations, resistance, Black Liberation Theology, and the spiritual practice of rest, and how it can be used as a direct line to our Ancestors,” according to the Nap Ministry website.

“The Ministry started while I was daydreaming, napping and slowing down because my body and my Ancestors told me so,” she writes. “The idea of living in a world but not being part of it is a long-held tradition taught to me by my Ancestors.”

In 2017, Hersey started leading Collective Napping Experiences in Atlanta, Georgia. In these sessions, which

she would later refer to as “community rest activations,” people would come together to take collective naps and process the experience of resting in community.

Hersey continued to expand this work in other cities, including Chicago, and developed a social media presence (@ thenapministry) doing what she called “deprogramming” for supporters who felt they’d been brainwashed by hustle and grind culture. This growing social media following catapulted Hersey into a level of visibility that supported the launch of her first book.

The choice to structure the book as a manifesto allows Hersey to cement and deepen the thoughts and values she’s been developing through The Nap Ministry for years. Readers who are also engaged with her social media will see familiar phrases peppered throughout the book, supplemented with anecdotes from Hersey’s life and deeper dives into her wisdom.

At the beginning of Rest Is Resistance, Hersey writes, with both humor and seriousness, “I hope you are reading this while laying down!” The book shares this urgency, with each of its four parts labeled “REST!” “DREAM!” “RESIST!” and “IMAGINE!” Each section of the book focuses on one of four core tenets: First, that rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. Second, that our bodies are a site of liberation. Third, naps provide a portal to imagine, invent, and heal. And fourth, that our DreamSpace (her coinage) has been stolen and we want it back. We will reclaim it, she preaches, via rest.

The prose of Rest is Resistance ebbs and flows with the melodic power of a pastor and poet—two identities with

which Hersey is deeply familiar. Growing up the daughter of Willie Hersey, an assistant pastor of Robbins Church of God in Christ in south-suburban Robbins, Illinois, she knows intimately the power of spiritual Black spaces. In the book, Hersey describes the charismatic and mystical experiences she had in the Black church as an opportunity “to test out our freedom in a sacred space created for just us.”

As an adult in the late nineties, Hersey taught poetry in Chicago Public Schools and after-school programs, and wrote and performed poetry in the city. Today, her writing is an homage to and an embodiment of the richness of her experiences in the religious and creative communities that are a hallmark of the Black South Side.

Rest was something that was not taught to Hersey explicitly, but it was consistently modeled in her family. She writes about being raised by Black folks who were fleeing the Jim Crow South seeking spaces of safety, joy, and freedom. Influenced by somatics, womanism, womanist theology, Black Liberation Theology, Afrofuturism, and her ancestors, Hersey’s book invites readers into what she calls “a pilgrimage infused with softness, intentionality, and community care.”

Hersey’s book does not ignore the experiences we all face under capitalism. She mentions early on that the need for space to connect with our highest self is often deprioritised when we fear our basic needs will not be met unless we work like machines. She further emphasizes that “[this] rigid binary, combined with the violent reality of poverty, keeps us in a place of sleep deprivation and constant hustling to survive.” It’s the reality of this cycle that makes choosing rest an extreme form of resistance and an act of faith.

When faced with hopelessness, she invites readers to “take to our beds and

dream ways to find motivation again.”

An evocative and unexpected element of Hersey’s book centers around the grief that rest allows for. She names early on how slowing down makes room for “grieving the reality of being manipulated to believe we are not enough, divine or valuable outside of our accomplishments and bank account.”

In this way, the book allows for moments to lean into both grieving and imagination. Hersey invites readers to step into daydreams or “downloads” she’s had related to our collective liberation. She offers ways to create conditions for rest in our lives, including powerful imperatives such as, “Begin to heal the individual trauma you have experienced that makes it difficult for you to say no and maintain healthy boundaries.” She offers questions for journaling and meditations for readers to use while increasing the number of naps and the amount of quiet time in their lives.

At the heart of the book is a tenderness and fierce love that radiates from each sentence. Hersey speaks directly to the reader with a benevolence and conviction that calls on her roots in the Black church. The Nap Bishop’s message is both revolutionary and simple. Rest saved her life, and she wants it to save yours, too. ¬

Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. $27. Little Brown Spark, 2022. 212 pages.

Jasmine Barnes is a writer and space maker based in Woodlawn with a deep commitment to relational healing and creative self expression. As a self-identified “disciple of joy,” she brings a deep curiosity to all aspects of her life.

Your Friendly (and Only) EmployeeOwned Neighborhood Bookstore

Mandy Medley, one of the owners of Pilsen Community Books, talks about passion, connections, and how selling books is, ironically, not about getting paper.

BY CHIMA IKORO

Pilsen Community Books, founded in 2016, made a historical shift in 2020. That March, the shop became Chicago’s only employee-owned and operated independent bookstore. Mandy Medley, who has worked in bookstores for many years, ten of which have been in Chicago, is one of the store's three owners.

When the store went up for sale in 2019, its former owners found it imperative that the cozy shop on 18th Street landed in hands that were passionate about bookselling. As career booksellers, Medley and her friends made the decision to buy the store and to run it in a meaningful way.

“We wanted to try to model a different way of owning a business, where the workers own the whole store and are entitled to the profits they make to [be] split equally,” Medley said.

“The current business model under capitalism is not sustainable for the people who actually put in the work to build the ‘things,’ more specifically the book industry.

“My colleagues and I have been selling books our whole adult lives,” she added, “but the book industry more often than not just pays minimum wage. And that doesn't reflect the labor that we do, the amount of expertise that we have, and our passion for this.”

Passion considered, the shop is more than just a place to purchase books. As organizers themselves, Medley said that they find it important to open up their space to other organizers. All of their merchandise is union-printed and designed by artists from Chicago. The store changed hands just ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a slow reopening, but despite this the owners still strive to

be a resource for community members. Medley even offered the space to me and anyone I know as we spoke.

“We want people to know that this is what it's for. So we've had film screenings here, we've had fundraisers here, we've had banners and sign making here, we've had button making here for union drives,” Medley said. “We also try to come out very publicly in support of different struggles here in Chicago, but also things like Stop Cop City [in Atlanta], or the fight for abortion rights.”

What caught my eye about Pilsen Community Books last year was their book subscription, Seeds of Change. Oftentimes, those looking to learn more about organizing work and radical movements question where to start and what books to read. Seeds of Change offers six books of introductory radical literature delivered on

a bimonthly subscription cycle. The store also offers a subscription called Bread and Roses, which pairs a historical or theorybased radical text with a book of fiction, poetry, or drama as a complement.

“We send those out every other month,” Medley said, “and even if you're not subscribed, we announce it on social media, so everyone can read along together.”

Books are powerful tools and gateways to different worlds. When spaces like libraries and bookstores are stewarded with the communities they serve in mind, the result can be extremely impactful. Like many bookworms, Medley fell in love with reading when she was young, and her passion is fueled by helping others discover whatever they may be searching for.

“It sounds so cheesy, but I fell in love

with being in a physical space with books and with people who are passionate enough to come and seek them out,” she said. As we chatted, she took a moment to assist a patron that walked in. Medley recognized them immediately and rejoiced that they'd come to pick up a book they had ordered online.

“One of my other favorite things is having conversations with organizers that come in. They're looking for a book on a certain topic or a certain period in radical history and hearing about the organizing that they're doing and what they're doing in their community,” Medley said. “That is my absolute favorite part. It makes me feel so much more connected to people who are fighting for a better world.”

According to Medley, no one goes into bookselling for the money, because there’s not much to be made. But places like Pilsen Community Books are reminders that we are made rich by the connections we forge with one another.

“It's just irreplaceable to me, and it speaks so much to the way I want to live,” she said. “I feel like it's such an honor to be able to be a guardian of this space and do it for a living.”

The store is open seven days a week. “I always love to hear, again, what folks are working on and organizing around and what other people are reading,” Medley said. “So please come in and talk to us.” ¬

Pilsen Community Books, 1102 W. 18th St, pilsencommunitybooks.com, @pilsencommunitybooks.

Chima Ikoro is South Side Weekly’s Community Builder.

Inside of Pilsen Community Books.

PHOTO BY KAYLA BICKHAM