October 28, 2021

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 9, Issue 4 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Interim Managing Editor Jim Daley Senior Editors Christian Belanger Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Martha Bayne Arts Editor Politics Editor Education Editor Housing Editor Community Organizing Editor Immigration Editor

Isabel Nieves Jim Daley Madeleine Parrish Malik Jackson Chima Ikoro Alma Campos

Contributing Editors Lucia Geng Matt Moore

Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Jocelyn Vega Scott Pemberton Staff Writers Kiran Misra Yiwen Lu Data Editor

Jasmine Mithani

Director of Fact Checking: Kate Gallagher Fact Checkers: Susan Chun, Hannah Faris, Maria Maynez, Ebony Ellis, Grace Del Vecchio, Savannah Huguely, Yiwen Lu, and Peter Winslow Visuals Editor Haley Tweedell Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Anna Mason Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Tony Zralka Webmaster Pat Sier Managing Director Jason Schumer Director of Operations Brigid Maniates The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

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, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover Illustration by Emily Hammermeister

IN CHICAGO

On Cloud 9 with Chicago Sky! Thunderous roars heard out of Chicago a couple of weekends ago did not come from Soldier Field; they came from a packed Wintrust Arena as the Sky, Chicago's WNBA team, won their first title in franchise history. The only reason they didn't dominate the airwaves until the last minute was because that's what tends to happen with women's sports leagues. Hometown heroes Candace Parker (the GOAT) and Allie Quigley, along with Kahleah Copper and Courtney Vandersloot, stomped the opps 5-0 at home in their playoff run. This was Parker's first season with the team on what could have been her farewell tour. The team also featured perhaps the first married couple as teammates in a professional sport. Many Chicago fans took the CTA Green Line or the Cermak and Martin Luther King Drive buses to the stadium in an unprecedented show of local support for women's basketball. The city dressed the lion statues in Sky jerseys and held a daytime rally for the champions at Millenium Park.

Ambassador Rahm On October 20—the seventh anniversary of the murder of seventeen-yearold Laquan McDonald by then-CPD officer Jason Van Dyke—former Mayor Rahm Emanuel appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that is considering his nomination for ambassador to Japan. Only one Senator, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, asked Emanuel about McDonald at the hearing. It was under Emanuel’s leadership that the City attempted to bury the murder; he was elected to a second term while the City’s Law Department was still fighting to withhold video of the murder. (The City later settled with McDonald’s family for $5 million; that deal was finalized the day after Emanuel was reelected.) Once the video was finally released in November 2015, hundreds of protesters shut down the Mag Mile the day after Thanksgiving, and Black pastors later boycotted an interfaith breakfast hosted by Emanuel. The scandal led to Police Superintendent Gary McCarthy being fired and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez losing her reelection bid by nearly thirty percentage points. Rahm declined to seek a third term, but in the eyes of the national Democratic establishment he remains salvageable. His confirmation as ambassador would send a clear message to Chicago and the world: attempting to cover up the police murder of a young Black man is not a disqualification from representing the United States in its diplomatic missions abroad.

Are the Bulls back?

After staging a few convincing wins over the Detroit Pistons and New Orleans Pelicans and outlasting the Toronto Raptors away from home, the Bulls have started the season at 4-0 for the first time since the 1996-97 season, a year in which they began their second three-peat NBA Championship run. The beauty of it all is that instead of only being able to attribute the success of the team to one or two players, the team’s recent acquisitions of Demar Derozan, Lonzo Ball, and Alex Caruso, as well as its deep and athletic bench, has the Bulls sharing responsibilities on both sides of the ball in ways we haven’t seen since the team won sixty games in the 201011 season. It’s one thing to be able to argue that management and coaching changes marked the start of a new era in Chicago, but to have acquired the talent and be playing at this level barely a year and a half after personnel changes could mean that what was once a slow-rebuild project could actually be a conference title chase.

Whatever the outcome, it will be a significant improvement, and for that might it be fair to say that the Bulls are back?

IN THIS ISSUE public meetings report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level. documenters, scott pemberton, india daniels, jaqueline serrato.........................3 chicago powwow returns

After a COVID-19 hiatus, the Native dancers returned in full regalia. emily dreibelbis............................4 all tracks lead to pullman

Q&A with Ve’Amber Miller, a Pullman National Monument park guide. helena duncan..............................6 a singer for the people

Remembering Jesús “Chuy” Negrete. jacqueline serrato and alma campos..................................8 the black history teacher

The late Timuel Black in his own words. maira khwaja and south side weekly staff............10 civil rights champion timuel black passes on at 102

An obituary of the Chicagoan by our sister publication. aaron gettinger, hyde park herald.......................13 lightfoot pac paid consultant while she worked at the mayor’s office

A City Hall consultant’s curious contract. matt chapman.............................17 the future of work

Where did all the good jobs go, and what’s replacing them on the South Side? max blaisdell..............................19 the exchange

The Weekly’s poetry corner. dontay m. givens, chima ikoro.................................21 calendar

Bulletin and events. south side weekly staff............22

Public Meetings Report ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD

Oct 6 At a hearing of the City Council Committee on Budget and Operations, Rachel Arfa, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (MOPD), reported that assistance finding jobs, making homes accessible, and using technology are the top requests the office receives. To date in 2021, MOPD has completed more than twenty home modification projects for people with disabilities. With a $7.85 million proposed budget for 2022 and thirty-six full-time employees, MOPD plans to round out its employment and housing support initiatives and audit City departments for physical and program accessibility.

Oct 7 Since Fall 2020, 910 debt-burdened students have returned to class via the Chicago City Colleges’ Fresh Start Debt Forgiveness Program. During meetings of the </ b>City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) Finance Committee and Trustees</b>, Vice Chancellor of Institutional Effectiveness Christian Collins explained that the program encourages students who did not complete their studies to return, forgiving fifty percent of participating students’ debt in their first semester back and fifty percent upon completion of their studies. It also supports them in building their credit score.

The Fall 2020 cohort had a sixty-two percent retention rate. To date, $318,000 in debt has been forgiven, and 105 people have had all of their City Colleges student debt forgiven.

Oct 8 In-person visits to the Chicago Public Library (CPL) are about forty percent of pre-COVID rates, but “virtual visits” to the library’s website have doubled, Library Commissioner Chris Brown told alderpersons during a hearing held by the City Council Committee on Budget and Operations. Brown added that the website can be thought of as one of the system’s branches. The proposed 2022 CPL budget is $131 million and would serve one million cardholders. The budget includes a twenty-five percent increase for materials—the funds available to stock the shelves—to ten million dollars. That figure is more in line with materials budgets for other library systems of similar size across the country, Brown said.

Oct 13 As the Chicago Police Department (CPD) revamps its existing gang-data practices to create a more centralized Criminal Enterprise Information System (CEIS), the Chicago Police Board plans to create a process for people to appeal their inclusion in the new database. During a meeting of the City Council Committee on Public Safety, Police Board Executive Director Max Caproni and President Ghian Foreman explained that if CPD rejects a request for removal from CEIS, the rejection could be appealed to the Police Board for a confidential review. While the committee voted to approve this new function, members left the meeting with many remaining questions about CPD’s rollout and design of CEIS. Oct 14 Electric scooters will ride again in Chicago after passing a City Council vote at the

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the October 28 issue.

BY DOCUMENTERS, SCOTT PEMBERTON, INDIA DANIELS, JACQUELINE SERRATO

Council’s meeting. Under the addition to the municipal code, as many as three scooter companies can operate in Chicago at one time, with a maximum of 12,500 scooters on the streets. Scooters must have sidewalk-detection software and hardware. About an hour of this meeting was spent on a resolution celebrating the eightieth birthday of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Alderperson Walter Burnett (27th Ward) recalled Jackson’s visit to Burnett’s childhood home of Cabrini-Green. Alderperson Michael Scott (24th Ward) said he encountered Jackson while his father worked with him on Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign. Alderperson Susan Sadlowski Garza (10th Ward) shared that she marched in the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests with Jackson and actor Susan Sarandon.

Oct 15 The sale of one hundred City-owned empty lots west of Douglass Park, phase one of The Reclaiming Chicago Communities Initiative (formerly known as INVEST South/ West 1,000 Homes), was approved at the City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estate meeting. Each lot is valued at “under $50,000” and will sell for a dollar each to a development team made up of the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation (LCDC) and Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives (CNI). LCDC and CNI will perform environmental remediation and build one hundred homes at an affordable price point of $250,000 each. United Power for Action and Justice has received ten million dollars in state funding and will subsidize up to thirty thousand dollars of the cost of each home. The proposed sale will go to the November meeting of the City Council for approval.

Oct 20 A proposal from Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez (33rd Ward) to invest ten million dollars of $151 million in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds in the City’s mental health clinics conflicts with what Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady proposed at the Chicago Board of Health meeting. The board oversees the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH). The proposed 2022 City budget would allocate the ARP funds to the CDPH. Rodriguez Sanchez introduced an amendment, co-sponsored by twenty-five other Council members, to earmark a portion of those dollars for City-run community mental health clinics. Arwady and Mayor Lori Lightfoot have emphasized funding mental health service providers, while Rodriguez Sanchez and others advocate bringing the services back in-house and reopening public mental health clinics. Arwady and board members discussed contacting alderpersons directly to express their opposition to the amendment. In 2021, the City tripled its investment in mental health services to thirty-six million dollars.

Oct 21 The former Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) public housing complex known as LeClaire Courts, which was allowed to fall into disrepair and remained vacant for fifteen years, will be transformed into a mixed-use development. The proposal presented at a Chicago Plan Commission meeting and backed by Alderperson Michael Rodriguez (22nd Ward) included 725 apartments, more than half of them considered affordable housing, along with a clinic, a charter school, and other commercial space right off of the I-55. CHA is reserving a fraction of units for former African American residents who were displaced, but acknowledges that reaching those families will be a challenge.

This information was collected in large part using reporting from City Bureau’s Documenters at documenters.org.

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Chicago Powwow Returns

PHOTO BY RAFAEL CALDERÓN

H

The powwow’s comeback reflects the resilient spirit of the Native community despite COVID.

BY EMILY DREIBELBIS

undreds of people in the Chicago area gathered on the weekend of October 8 in the Schiller Woods Forest Preserve about an hour west of Chicago for the 68th Annual Chicago Powwow. The event was cancelled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately affected Native communities across the country despite them having the highest vaccination rates of any ethnic group in the U.S. At the event, emotions ran high as the attendees balanced the trauma of the pandemic with the joyous, festive occasion of being together and enjoying these traditions in person again. “I lost my cousin to COVID,” said Kiniw Cleland, twenty-two, who is from the Ojibwe 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

and Odela tribes and currently lives in Canada. He was a vendor at the powwow.

“And he just lost his niece,” Cleland said as he pointed to an elder man sitting next to him. The man, who had long gray hair under a black baseball hat, and a gold watch with inlaid white and turquoise stones, quietly stared ahead as Cleland spoke.

An alarming number of people at the event mentioned having lost loved ones, echoing the harsh statistics reported throughout the pandemic. The CDC found that compared to white Americans, Natives in the US are 1.7 times more likely to test positive for coronavirus, 3.7 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 2.4 times more likely to die from the virus.

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

In the Midwest specifically, as recently as early October, Native populations saw a spike in weekly cases that was almost two-times that of any other ethnic group.

Per 100,000 people, weekly cases were 292 for Natives, compared to sixty-nine for Asian, 119 for Black, 126 for Latinx, and 181 for white people.

"That’s why days like today are so important,” said RoxAnne LaVallieUnabia , fifty-five, the executive director of the American Indian Health Service of Chicago (AIHSC).

“Whenever I see the jingle dress dancers I am always drawn to them for their healing aspect, and the history behind them. We’re hoping that through all of the powwows this summer we are able to come together and mourn those

we’ve lost to COVID,” she said. “But also the healing through the dress and the dancing makes days like today so important to us.”

The powwow occupies a large, circular, grassy area about the size of a football stadium. The event is fenced off, so attendees must first visit the registration booth to pay a small fee and get a bright pink wristband. Once inside, people can visit a variety of arts and crafts vendors, food trucks, and other information booths under white farmers market-style tents that line the perimeter.

In the center, the dancers perform to an audience sitting on a circle of lawn chairs.

The event is full of pride and community identity, which is both traditional and evolving. Several event

CULTURE

PHOTO BY RAFAEL CALDERÓN

attendees explained that most people prefer to be referred to as ‘Native’ or part of the ‘Native Community.’ ‘Indigenous’ was said to be fine, too, but nobody referred to themselves as such. Other terms like ‘American Indian’ and ‘Native American’ are on their way out.

President Biden’s recent announcement to recognize October 11, 2021 as the very first Indigenous People’s Day along with Columbus Day, reflects this change in vernacular. However, within many tribes, they refer to themselves as ‘The People’—or Diné for the Navajo, Anishinaabe for the Chippewa.

A free vaccination station near the powwow’s registration booth was a reminder of the high positivity and mortality rates among Natives and the importance of continuing to promote vaccinations. So far, Natives have the highest vaccination rates of any ethnic group in the US at fifty-eight percent, compared to forty-five percent of Asian Americans, forty-three percent of white Americans, thirty-seven percent of Black Americans, and forty-four percent of Latinx.

By mid-afternoon that Saturday, four people at the powwow had been vaccinated at the booth, and more were signing up.

However, there are multiple challenges that make it difficult to get vaccination rates to 100 percent, including generational trauma stemming from a long, searingly painful history of mistreatment by the U.S. government.

LaVallie-Unabia’s clinic offers free COVID testing and vaccines to members of the Native community.

They have been a robust resource for the community during the pandemic, but one of their biggest challenges is getting the vaccination data they need from the City of Chicago. The City’s COVID data does not include “Native” or “Indigenous'' as a category. It only has Black, white, Asian, Latinx, other, and unknown.

“One of the hardest parts for me wasn’t getting people to come in to be COVID tested, but to get the data collected from the City,” LaVallie-Unabia said. “We were originally told we weren’t a big enough population to be tracked.

But recently, I have been working with the state to get things added into the system and they’ve been very receptive.”

This data will help LaVallie-Unabia focus the clinic’s outreach efforts by tracking trends in vaccinations, infections, and deaths.

The AIHSC also tracks its own data.

Anthony Anderson, Jr., who is twentyseven and of Native, Black, and Latinx heritage, was hired during the pandemic to manage IT, but he also uses his degree in computer science to manage the clinic’s data. Anderson says the data confirms the higher positivity rates among the Native patients the clinic sees compared to nonNatives, even with the vaccine.

“It has a lot to do with their health,” Anderson said. “There are a lot of cheap, unhealthy American food in the Native community and overweight individuals, and that’s one of the main things that helps COVID kill you.”

Anderson also mentioned the high diabetes rates in Native populations.

According to the CDC, Natives have a higher chance of having diabetes than any other US racial group. In a deadly intersection of public health issues, diabetes weakens the immune system, making it less able to fight off infections like COVID-19.

Another roadblock is vaccine hesitancy, rooted in mistrust of the government. Anderson’s grandfather, who he describes as “full blooded Native,” was taken as a child from his community in Indiana by the American government on the alleged grounds of domestic abuse, and brought to be educated in a government-run boarding school in Illinois.

The school, like many others created in the U.S. and Canada in the twentieth century, was intended to strip him of his Native identity and forcibly assimilate him to mainstream American culture.

Anderson’s grandfather, who later fought in WWII, had been known to cry on at least one occasion when discussing his experience of losing connection to his heritage, Anderson said. He died recently at ninety-seven from old age.

From the 1960s to the 70s, the U.S. government also sterilized as many as

twenty-five percent of childrearingaged Native women. “People forget this,” LaVallie-Unabia said. “We always have to wonder what is in the vaccine and why it’s being pushed to the Native community first.”

However, LaVallie-Unabia and others at the event confirmed that most people they know did continue to move forward with getting vaccinated in the best interest of their community, especially with the Delta variant. “Within the Native community, we always pull together. At this point, the biggest thing we need is events like today.”

Most people at the powwow were there to forget about all of this. They are keenly aware of the past and present challenges and are quick to bring them up, a sign of how top-of-mind they are.

More than anything, the event was a chance to get a moment of respite from the pandemic and to come together over their shared culture and unique, beloved dances.

As the afternoon carried on, dance groups continued to perform in what seemed like an infinite supply to the constant drumbeat of music pumping through large, concert-like speakers in the center of the event. Dancers who were either done or waiting their turn walked around the event like royalty in colorful feathers, bells, beaded jewelry,

and ribbons. They, like the rest of the attendees primarily dressed in simple t-shirts and shorts, enjoyed frybread and explored the vendor booths.

The dancers were all ages, but many of them were children who will practice their cultural traditions for years to come.

Carmine Day-Bedeau, fourteen, was one of them. He proudly stated that he is both named after a member of the Italian mafia, and that he is a member of the Oneida, Navajo, and Ojibwe tribes. It was a big day for him to share his dancing, which he trained for by running five miles a day, dancing fifteen or twenty songs a day, and playing basketball.

He showed a video on his phone of him dancing. His routine was spectacularly athletic, including cartwheels, splits, and constant movement—all while wearing a heavy, feathered regalia from head to toe.

After about thirty seconds, he paused the video, cleared away a Snapchat notification, and looked up with a smile and a sense of confidence behind his brown eyes. “It feels great to dance for other people. I dance for the people.” Emily is a master’s student at the Medill School of Journalism. She’s in the Magazine Specialization, and is studying local news, as well as business and technology reporting.

This is her first piece for the Weekly.

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

HISTORY

All Tracks Lead to Pullman

A Q&A with Ve’Amber Miller, a Pullman National Monument park guide.

BY HELENA DUNCAN

P

ullman is many things: a vibrant South Side neighborhood that was constructed as the first model industrial community in the country; one of the most important sites in the history of American labor, civil rights, and transportation; and most recently, Chicago’s first and only national park.

Pullman National Monument celebrated the grand opening of its new visitor center, housed in its historic clock tower, this September. New exhibitions will help tell the story of Pullman—or rather, the many intersecting stories that comprise this place.

There’s the figure of George Pullman, who in 1880 created the company town to house workers of his Pullman Palace Car Company, which made luxury railroad sleeper cars and was at the time the largest manufacturing company in the world.

There’s the Strike of 1894, when workers walked off the job to protest cuts to their wages while their rent, which they paid to Pullman, remained the same. The National Guard was deployed to break up what had become a major national strike; some troops shot and killed workers in violent clashes. Labor Day was declared a national holiday shortly thereafter, in a gesture of reconciliation toward the labor movement.

There are the porters who serviced the Pullman train cars, some of the first of whom were formerly enslaved Black men from the South, and who formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the country’s first all-Black union, in 1925. The Brotherhood, and its founder A. Phillip Randolph, played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement.

Now, many hope that the site’s newest chapter as the Pullman National Monument Visitor Center and State Historic Site will provide a springboard for economic revitalization in the surrounding neighborhood.

National Park Service rangers help visitors from Chicago and afar enjoy and understand Pullman. The Weekly spoke with Ve’Amber Miller, who has been a park guide at Pullman since 2017.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you come to be a park guide at Pullman?

I grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago, specifically in Matteson, but my family, my grandmother and my mom all kind of lived in Chicago before then. Our church was on the South Side and I always had family here.

I went to Cornell College in Iowa to get my bachelor’s degree in archeology 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

ILLUSTRATION BY ZAHID KALIL

and English. [After graduation] I ended up finding this internship with the Student Conservation Association, which is this organization that partners with the National Park Service, and so I ended up going all the way to Connecticut [to] ​​Weir Farm National Historic Site, which is now National Historic Park, where I did my museum services internship for ten months.

While I was there, they’re like, “So you’re from Chicago, did you know there’s a national park in Chicago?” Through my internship I was able to get enough hours to get priority to get a job here at Pullman, and that's how I was able to wear this ranger uniform, which has been a very fun journey, because beforehand, the National Park Service was not on my radar at all in terms of careers. And since then, it’s also inspired me to get my master’s in public history.

Tell us about the new visitor center.

We were sharing a space with our partner, the Historic Pullman Foundation, but now we have moved out of Mom’s basement, I suppose, and moved into our own building.

So, this is where everyone starts, but we want visitors to come to explore all of our partners here in the neighborhood, including Historic Pullman Foundation’s exhibit hall, but also the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum and a variety of other different things happening in the neighborhood that will be coming up in the

HISTORY

“The passion that you find in this community is just very unique for where I am, and also the story itself is very special.” spring. Our idea is to introduce these stories that are connected to Pullman and then send people off to learn more and explore more.

What do your duties entail?

My every-day is to greet visitors as they come here to the visitor center, but also to tell this really complex story, and we want to start giving tours and ranger programs that help people explore all of those different things, like labor and race and architecture.

My job is also to help reach out to the community, to go to events around the neighborhood in Pullman and Roseland. We also do events with the Forest Preserves of Cook County, and we also try to get connected to schools—we love schools, we want them to visit us and we’re happy to visit them. And my own little particular duties are helping with social media and web content.

What are some of your favorite parts of what you do, and what’s special about being at Pullman in particular?

My favorite thing is the people. And so that not only involves the visitors who come from all over, from different states and different countries, but also interacting with our partners and volunteers. Something very special about Pullman in particular is that there are a lot of people who are very passionate about telling the story and telling it right. When we’re having tours in the neighborhood and things like that, we sometimes even have our neighbors inviting people into their homes, they’re like, “Do you want to see a historic home?” And they’re passionate about it too, so the passion that you find in this community is just very unique for where I am, and also the story itself is very special.

The phrase I like to use is: All tracks lead to Pullman. So, the Pullman Company was the company that was known for making these luxurious train cars. The neighborhood of Pullman was built in the 1880s, and the strike of 1894 was a large national strike that would inspire and influence us having Labor Day as a national holiday, and then also the workers who crafted and made the cars, and the Pullman porters who were African-American men who serviced the train cars and would have their own labor story with the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters—I mean all of that, all of that is what makes Pullman special.

These core stories expand so much of what we know now and that we deal with even in our everyday lives [with] unions and strikes and workers’ rights, something we’ve been talking a lot about in the past year, service workers and essential workers.

Pullman is very special in that way. It’s not hard to find those connections to the present.

they start to visit the clock tower, they’re like “What’s the monument, exactly?” and we’re like, “What you just drove through to get here is the monument!” And so that scale, a lot of people right away, that hits them.

Now that we have the grounds open and renovated for the old manufacturing site, people can see the leftover remnants of that. So there’s this system called transfer tables and it’s this complex way of how they manufactured cars in an efficient and fast way. We sometimes compare it to a precursor to the Ford factory line, but it’s really hard to wrap your brain around if you’re not here on the site.

When you walk down the street past all of these historic buildings as well there’s a different sense. A lot of people describe walking through the neighborhood as taking a step back in time. It’s this magical experience that you just can’t have reading it in a book or looking at photos. It’s something that you have to physically be there for.

There’s been a lot of talk about economic revitalization in the neighborhood, and the new visitor center bringing in more tourist dollars. How do you see the park continuing to shape the surrounding neighborhood?

We already have a lot of visitors coming into the visitor center that immediately after they finish walking through the exhibits, they go, “So where’s the snack bar? Where’s the place to eat?” Kind of like if you went to the Field Museum or the Museum of Science and Industry they have all of that in there. But I think what we want to do is encourage people and the community to create those [economic] opportunities. It doesn't just have to be provided by the National Park Service, it can be provided by someone else. And so looking to the community to really take that opportunity and jump on it. People are looking for places to shop and things to do for their kids. So many things that could come to fruition here. And I think some of it has already started here in the neighborhood and people are already taking that opportunity.

Why should visitors come to Pullman?

When I first got here I literally knew nothing about Pullman, even though I grew up nearby...When you come here you realize that you could have a personal connection to Pullman. It happens every day [that] someone walks through the door and they say ‘My grandfather worked in the shops’ or ‘my great-grandfather was a Pullman porter’ and I think those connections are so powerful.

I really do encourage people to come and find out what is their connection to Pullman, and how does that fit into their lives. Because there is a connection there somewhere, and I’m sure it would only help enrich their lives. The Pullman National Monument Visitor Center is located at 11001 S. Cottage Grove Avenue. It is open to the public daily from 9am - 5pm. Masks are required in all National Park Service buildings, and in crowded outdoor spaces, regardless of location or vaccination status.

Helena Duncan is a writer based in Hyde Park. She last wrote about the photography of LaToya Ruby Frazier for the Weekly.

What can you glean from walking through Pullman that you can’t get from just studying it in a history book?

There’s been about a year and a half of us doing virtual programs and things like that, so I think a lot of people have come to appreciate in-person things. But also in terms of visiting Pullman specifically, I think a lot of people don’t understand [that] the monument is the entire neighborhood, and so when people get here, particularly when OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

ARTS

A Singer for the People

Remembering Jesús “Chuy” Negrete.

BY JACQUELINE SERRATO AND ALMA CAMPOS

A

ztec dancers opened the celebration of Jesús “Chuy” Negrete’s life last month in a manner reminiscent of the way he would often start his own performances: by acknowledging the elements and four cardinal directions, sometimes blowing into a conch shell.

Negrete was a Chicago folklorist, writer, and activist known for singing corridos—Mexican ballads—about the Chicano Movement and other social causes. Wherever there was a crowd, he sang Spanish-, English-, and even Nahuatl-language verses filled with wisdom and snippets of Mexican history rarely found in textbooks. In between stanzas, he would joke, give advice, or translate his lyrics.

He was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and when he was an infant he immigrated with his Guanajuatoborn family to Texas. They then moved permanently to the South Chicago neighborhood when he was seven, where his father worked as a steelworker until he retired. Negrete passed away on May 27 at seventy-two from health complications, but he was not publicly memorialized until September 12 at the National Museum of Mexican Art. “In the year 1521…” he would often break into song to the fingerdrumming of his acoustic guitar as he lyrically summarized five hundred years of tragic and heroic stories. The melodic 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

composition was always traditional, but his lyrics were grounded in reallife experiences that primarily took place in the United States: the stories of immigrants and Mexican Americans or Chicanos.

But while his ethnic pride was inspired by his parents, it wasn’t popular to be a proud Mexican in a northern city like Chicago fifty-plus years ago, recounted his older sister Juanita Negrete-Phillips, who formed a band with her brother and sisters called Flor y Canto. He was greatly influenced by California artists and activists who made several visits to the Pilsen neighborhood, such as El Teatro Campesino, a farmworker theater group, which prompted him and his talented sisters to start El Teatro del Barrio, a guerrilla theater group that performed on the street. And he was radicalized by popular struggles that he learned about after he left for college.

Negrete graduated from Chicago Vocational High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and a master’s degree in education from Chicago State University. He worked as an educator in many capacities: as a bilingual teacher for Chicago Public Schools; teaching assistant or adjunct faculty member at various universities such as University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign, Malcolm X, Robert Morris, Roosevelt, and Morton, among others;

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

COURTESY OF THE NEGRETE FAMILY

and as an advisor of UIC’s LARES program for Latinx students when it first launched.

Negrete had an impact all over the country. “He had a national and international life, too,” his wife Rita Rousseau said. They met at the museum during a Day of the Dead exhibit, and she carefully documented his collection of work ever since.

A close friend of his, Lorenzo Cano, of the University of Houston, said he knew Negrete for the entire Movimiento.

“One of his main contributions was that he inspired and uplifted people,” Cano said. “When you’re involved in a strong political movement… you need that spirit, that kindle to fire up the people.

He came to Houston, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago… all over the

country… small towns and fields to talk to laborers, students, and he inspired us to move forward and embrace who we are as Chicanos, as Mexican Americans.”

He was also known in Kansas City, Berkeley, New Mexico, and all over Michigan.

“Vámonos para El Norte Vámonos a trabajar.

Vámonos pa’ Chicago Vámonos a trabajar.

Pisqué cherries en Minesota, cuidé perros en Nor Dakota Wisconsin también conocí.

Y el algodón en Oklahoma, las minas en Arizona y hasta California me fui…”

ARTS

(Let’s go to The North Let’s go to work.

Let’s go to Chicago Let’s go to work.

I picked cherries in Minnesota, I took care of dogs in North Dakota I also went to Wisconsin And to the cotton in Oklahoma, To the mines of Arizona, and I ended up in California)

A

n elaborate ofrenda for Negrete stood in the atrium of the Mexican museum in Pilsen.

The altar featured photos of Negrete with family and countless friends. Rows of sunflowers and red roses in vases decorated the floor and altar. Dozens of books, a Che Guevara shirt, skulls, candles, and a bottle of Cholula hot sauce decorated the display. A vibrant painting of Negrete stood on the ofrenda’s top tier. In the painting, Negrete holds his

guitar while in the background, an Aztec warrior looks up at the moon.

Negrete visited schools, hospitals, universities, prisons and senior homes to play his music. In an interview with the Latino Native American Cultural Center at the University of Iowa, Negrete shared that “the corrido has helped our people with mental health.” He said that when he visited incarcerated men and played his corridos, they started to cry. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, vato,” he would tell them. “The corrido redistributes grief so that you can be born again.”

Negrete would show up, wearing a guayabera and prominent sideburns under the shade of his palm-woven sombrero, with a guitar or harmonica in hand. Many songs were pre-written, but much of his delivery was also improvised.

The corridos would talk about your average José, who worked in the fields or the factories, and adjacent heroes like

Lucy González Parsons, the Chicago labor leader of Mexican-American, African-American, and Native descent.

Keenly familiar with the agricultural and industrial workplaces that Mexicans were relegated to, he celebrated labor strikes and supported the César Chavezled international grape boycott by singing about it from the flatbed of a pickup truck. He would mention the factories in South Chicago and in East Chicago, Indiana, where his family members and neighbors were employed before the companies shuttered and abandoned the area: Inland Steel Corporation, Republic Steel, and U.S. Steel.

Negrete liked to go on radio stations all over the country and sing a few lines.

He also had his own radio show called Radio Rebelde 98.7 FM on Saturday afternoons, where he sang and gave political commentary.

He was frequently called upon to compose corridos for different people and

events, and he wouldn’t charge a dime, including songs about class-conscious aspiring politicians such as Mayor Harold Washington, activist Rudy Lozano, and most recently Chuy Garcia when he ran for mayor.

At the memorial, Garcia recalled when Negrete sang at St. Pius Church after Lozano was murdered. “Through his song he conveyed a sense of courage, he gave us ánimo not to be afraid, even though we didn’t know if Rudy’s assasination was political, may have come from the mafia or from other shady labor organizations. He instilled in us a resolve to stick together.” Jackie Serrato is the Editor in Chief of the Weekly. She last wrote about the Jackson Park trees that were cut down to make way for the Obama Presidential Center. Alma Campos is the Weekly’s immigration editor.

She last covered Hegewisch for the 2020 Best of the South Side issue.

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

The Black History Teacher

PHOTO BY MARC MONAGHAN

Timuel Black in his own words

BY MAIRA KHWAJA AND SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY STAFF On October 13, Civil Rights activist, educator, historian, and author Timuel Dixon Black Jr. passed away. He was 102 years old. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Black grew up in Bronzeville, served in the Army during World War II, and taught in public schools in Gary, Indiana and in Chicago for decades. He was an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was pivotal in convincing Harold Washington to run for mayor of Chicago in 1982, and mentored a young Barack Obama. In June 2021, Maira Khwaja sat down with Black for an interview in his home. What follows 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

are Timuel Black’s own words, as told to Khwaja and filmed by Kahari Blackburn.

Find the edited video interview at southsideweekly.com.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I

n August of 1919, I looked around Birmingham, I was eight months old—this is a joke, but it’s the truth in terms of the period—and things were so bad in Birmingham, I said to my mama, “shit, I’m leaving here.” Mama said to

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

Daddy, “this boy is getting ready to leave here and he ain’t gonna have nobody around to change his diapers. I’m going with him.”

That’s humorizing that period, but for Black folks in the South, African Americans whose parents or grandparents had been slaves and who were sharecroppers, there were Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan.

Now, to describe the background a little better, my father was considered a bad-ass n*****. He escaped lynching only because he had a white friend whose

ancestors had been the slave owners of his ancestors. Now that's a part of history that many people may not understand, the complexity. Hugo Black—[whose slave-owning ancestral family is] where I get my name—became a Supreme Court justice, and the most liberal of the Supreme Court justices. I tell you this background to help you understand my heritage, my experience.

HISTORY

“My father was Black nationalist, and my mother was an integrationist and they loved one another.”

On teaching history in Chicago Public Schools, the differences and segregation between youth of the first wave and second wave of Great Migration, and the Blackstone Rangers at Hyde Park High School.

I was in demand [as a history teacher]. I had taught at my alma mater, DuSable, and [Wendell] Phillips, and then I was teaching at Farragut High School on the West Side. And that's when I was inspired more directly, when I joined Dr. Martin Luther King in the struggle.

The principal on the West Side drafted me to be over there, where there were only just a couple of other Blacks.

The population was primarily Eastern European. So when I inserted Black history into U.S. History, which I was teaching, that stirred the students to all want to be in my class.

But the faculty and administration and the parents didn't want this n***** talking to them. So, [the principal] was instructed to get rid of me. Now when I left Gary to come back to Chicago (I was teaching at Gary Roosevelt, that’s another story), wherever I was drafted, I demanded that I have security.

Anyway. [Farragut] couldn't fire me. It just transferred me. And so by that time, my Jewish friends who lived in Hyde Park and many of whom I had grown up with before the old Black Belt

[was created]. They wanted me at Hyde Park [High School] and so that's when I went there. I forget the year, but that's when I transferred from Farragut to Hyde Park High School. [I think it was] the late fifties, I think, I forget when.

When you get to be 102 you'll find out, your memory isn't what it was when you were younger.

[Hyde Park High School then] was very middle class, mixed racially.

And that's when they had a tracking system with the newcomers coming to Chicago [from the South]. That's the story of the second migration of African-Americans. My generation fled the South. The second migration, during World War II, they were pushed off the land [of the South] because they were no longer needed because of the new agricultural technology. The new cotton picker technologically could pick more cotton than twenty hand pickers. Now those hand pickers had been denied the chance to get any education. They were different than my generation, [the first wave of migration]. [In the first wave,] the families lived close to the urban area [in the South]. My father worked in the steel mill and the coal mine right outside of Birmingham, at Bessemer Steel.

And so [my father and his peers of the first wave of migration] had become urbanized. They had learned how to, what became popular for my generation, to bullshit. Bullshit the Boss. Go home and be Black. But while you out there act like you’re white, so you can keep the job.

Now the newcomers had been denied the chance to get any education and always were subject to lynchings. So the new generation [of migrants] during and after World War II put my generation distanced socially.

At Hyde Park High School that difference in treatment was very obvious.

My daughter was in the upper track, separated from her less fortunate, who were in the bottom track. [The tracks] were isolated from one another, so even though my daughter wanted to hang out with them, she couldn’t except maybe in the music program.

When I first went to Hyde Park

High School, the population was dominantly Caucasian and Asian. And in the beginning, middle-class and poor Blacks, but the numbers [were less], because many of the college professors at the University of Chicago wanted their children to go to a public school, a good public school, rather than the private school in Hyde Park. Academically, if you graduated [from Hyde Park HS], you were supposed to go to Harvard or Yale.

That was the culture.

Now bringing me to Hyde Park High School was the mission of my Jewish upper-middle class friends who lived in Hyde Park, but formerly lived in the old Black Belt, to have their children have the advantages of a Black teacher who is academically qualified and at the same time, kind of off to the left politically.

When I was asked to come to Hyde Park High School and South Shore High School, at that same time, I demanded that I have a class at the lower level with the less fortunate. They wanted to be up there teaching in the upper track. Since I had the [personal] security, I could make certain demands.

I could deal with them. In my growing up on the South Side of Black Belt, I hung out with the hoodlums, so I knew how to deal with those socalled lower class. I had [students who were] the members later organized as the Blackstone Rangers, [including Blackstone Rangers founder] Jeff Fort.

I could handle them and inspire them and inform them. Some of them went on to college.

Well, I remember [the Blackstone Rangers], they had bought property in Hyde Park. I went to their headquarters.

They said “come on, come on, come on, come on, come on back here.” And they said, I think Jeff [Fort], “oh, Mr. Black, they don't want us there. We’re going to take over the whole damn thing.”

And they began to terrorize. Now the Blackstone Rangers were organized, they were smart, they just weren't educated.

By this time, Carl Hansberry had taken his second case to the Supreme Court, which said restrictive covenants [were] unenforceable anywhere in the

country. By the way, Hugo Black by that time was on the Supreme Court, and he read the majority decision.

And so the population changed.

Because the South Side was geographically and physically and socially desirable, they had begun to build [housing]—not public housing, but build [higher priced housing] and terrorize those Blacks [who were living there]. Middle-class Blacks who had bought all that nice housing in the north end of the Black Belt, then traveled through that neighborhood and wondered, well, why did those white folks leave?

Middle-class Black folks were pushed off the land by the building of new [public] housing, like Ida B. Wells [public housing]. And so they came to Woodlawn buying housing and their children were separated from the newcomers, like Jeff Fort, who were living in the housing that was rented to them by the [middleclass] owners of the housing, which the white population had fled and sold to this middle-class Black neighborhood, whose children were going to Hyde Park High School.

Now, my intellectual friends wanted to make Hyde Park High School a central, attractive school, and then make the high schools around South Shore feeder schools [to Hyde Park High School], but the politicians were opposed to that. And that's when they built [Kenwood Academy].

At Hyde Park High School, I asked all students, whether Black, white, rich, poor, “when you go shopping, what do you go looking for?” And eventually one of those youngsters will say, “Mr. Black, When I go shopping, I look for the best I can find for the cheapest price.” I remind them according to the color of their skin, that we are all mixed, but our ancestors were African. And so, who do you choose?

The best I can find for the cheapest price.

What do you think the slave traders did?

[So] I said to the Black students, “You come from the cream of the crop. Act like it.” I had almost no absences [among my students]. I’d play jazz music in class: Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. And I was a classmate of Nat’s in that period,

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

HISTORY and they would be thrilled to learn that history.

And that was the beginning of attempts to teach Black history in public schools at that time.

On the legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and World War II

T

he wealth of this nation and the wealth of the world was built on the backs of our ancestors, African ancestors. That slave system was used more in South and North America than it was in almost any place, but it had been used in other places. And [they got] the best they could find at the cheapest price. And I joked with those youngsters.

Most of them by numbers had this spirituality of life that said, Before I be your slave, I'll be buried in my grave.

They didn't know the song, but they had the spirit, and they died. My, and your African answers had the attitude of I'm so glad that trouble don't last always, oh my Lord. And that places on your shoulders with that legacy and demand that you keep on keeping on. And those of us who came up who were part of the Civil Rights Movement, it was easy to be.

We felt a responsibility; if it wasn’t for Grandpa and Grandma, I wouldn't be here.

So, that younger generation feels a responsibility to keep on. And those who were closest, when Dr. King appeared, as others had appeared before that—Rosa Parks and all—they said what we wanted to hear. And we got into the Civil Rights Movement in the fifties and sixties. And what we saw, and that is experienced today. In Europe with the Holocaust— see, Hitler had served in World War I and he wrote a book, Mein Kampf, in which he inserted...that one of those Negroes, one of the n*****s, would take a precious life like his in WWI. So the first victims in the Holocaust were German Blacks. Then, the unorganized whites, and eventually, poor Jews.

But those, like myself, in World War II, who saw that and said, “How could you let this happen?” And that [German] natives, said “Oh, Sergeant Black, it wasn’t us, it was the Fuhrer.” But the economic conditions of Europe in that period was 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

so bad that anything that would help them survive was alright—including their friends and former friends and neighbors.

Well, I witnessed it. I didn't participate in the Holocaust, but I witnessed the results. Those who witnessed, who were Holocaust [victims], I had to help feed them. I was in a supply unit. My unit won four battle stars, American battle stars, and the French Croix de Guerre. They bombed us to cut out the supplies. And that's another story.

And then [they’d ask], “Sergeant.

Black, why do we see white officers over Negro troops, and we never see any white soldiers under Negro officers?”

My attitude was, I didn't say it, but my attitude was, It ain’t none of your goddamn business. We gonna straighten that shit out when I get home. Again, given the legacy and heritage, I came home.

People may ask, why aren't you rich? Well, when I was a little boy, I lived with my father, who was a radical.

He was a Garveyite. Read the story of Marcus Garvey.

My father was Black nationalist, and my mother was an integrationist and they loved one another. They wouldn't let me not go to college. I was making more money than my brother, who's a college graduate. But my Daddy said, “do what your Mama say, boy.”

The point I'm trying to make here is, we were Americanized, dedicated to the ideas included in the Constitution. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal—we took out “men”—and that was the attitude that we kept, Black and white.

I came back home and began to get into the struggle. I helped to form CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, before I went to the Army and that was mixed.

That was Hyde Park also, by the way.

And so with that attitude and with that information, we came home determined to make this a better, more fair [nation].

I tell this story: Daddy said, “Mattie, pay the rent, get plenty of food,” and then [he’d say] laughingly, “get plenty of toilet paper. If you have those three, you can be as independent as you wish. You can be rich, but that's all you really need.

This apartment, this house, I've always

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

been able to pay the rent [since] before I married, buy plenty of food, and always had plenty of toilet paper.”

So I could be, you could fire me, but I didn't care, because I had paid the rent, had plenty of food, but also preparation that you are in demand. Somebody needs you. And when they need you, you can make demands about what you [want].

Frederick Douglass was offered all kinds of opportunities if he would ‘just shut up’ during the Civil War. But he was able [to speak out] because he had paid the rent [and] bought plenty of food; he could tell Lincoln, as the Confederates were winning the Civil War, he was able to say, “free the slaves and win the war.” And Lincoln issued, because he wanted to win the war, the Emancipation Proclamation.

That's another part of history...they couldn't buy him because he had paid the rent.

On the Obama Presidential Center, policing, and a changing Chicago

T

he community [of Woodlawn] is gentrifying. And one of my friends, Leon Finney, who's dead now, owned a lot of property in that neighborhood. Finney graduated with some very famous people from Hyde Park High School, but he had a lot of property and wanted to have that [Obama Presidential Center] library there.

I wanted it to be in Washington Park because historically, logically, that's where it belongs. And I took Barack Obama when he was running for Senate to the Bud Billiken parade, not to Jackson Park, but to Washington Park.

When I was teaching there [at Hyde Park Academy, across from Jackson Park], there was no feeling of need for police. It was a pretty open area. Now there were the usual police, but not unusual in those days of the late fifties and sixties when I was teaching there. But [in response to] the gangs, the police force increased.

And the idea was to protect the students coming and going to school. And that's when many parents took their children out of Hyde Park, even though they lived in the neighborhood.

For people like me and my generation, we have done quite well. We Americans.

We have been accepted into the middle class and some of us into the intellectual world as friends, but the division now is along class lines.

The children of the second Great Migration who were so separated from the culture of the well-to-do, and the successful, are less well because [they didn’t have the same] the economic opportunities that I had. See, I never worked outside the Black Belt, I didn’t have to go to college. We had businesses.

I was a grocery boy. I was a carrier. I was a newspaper boy delivering the news. For those youngsters [of the second Great Migration] that opportunity doesn't exist. And they don't believe in the future because they don't have the academic information. And so for them, many of them, they don't believe they're going to live past twenty, twenty-one. So why should they care about you?

If life depends on having food, clothing, and shelter, and they can't see another way to obtain those things except take them. And since you [a person of color] look like them, they believe they can take it from you and not be punished as much as they would be if they took them from a Caucasian.

Schools are impacted by that attitude and the streets of the old Black Belt have been affected now, because that area is being gentrified fairly quickly. [Many of those leaving Chicago] are children of the second Great Migration, because they don’t see a future here. Children of my generation [of the first Great Migration] are all over the world, because they’re doing pretty good. Maira Khwaja is a contributor to the Weekly and a community representative on the local school council at Hyde Park Academy. In her role at the Invisible Institute, she worked in the broadcast media class at Hyde Park Academy and documented the changing student population and their experiences with policing amid the gentrification of the surrounding neighborhood. In her most recent article for the Weekly, she investigated patterns of CPD abuse during home searches.

OBITUARY

Civil Rights Champion Timuel Black Passes On at 102

Black played pivotal roles in the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago and nationally.

BY AARON GETTINGER, HYDE PARK HERALD

D

r. Timuel Dixon Black Jr., the son of an Alabama sharecropperturned-steelworker who came to Chicago as a baby a month after the 1919 race riots, served in Europe during World War II, worked in union organizing and on the Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King Jr., loved jazz and became a celebrated educator and historian of the Black experience on the South Side, died on October 13.

He was 102.

In his childhood, Black lived in a bustling, expanding Bronzeville metropolis built up by African American immigrants from the South.

He also experienced firsthand the racist, restrictive legal mechanisms and violent conflicts with which white Chicagoans maintained a regime of segregation. (His own family moved to Hyde Park-Kenwood after the Supreme Court ruled against restrictive covenants in 1939.)

As an adult, he was an ardent, independent-minded activist, a progressive force that maintained a degree of separation from any political establishment.

And toward the end of his life he turned to scholarly work, producing two volumes of oral history that memorialized the people who populated the South Side of his youth.

“We have been change-makers, and we are not done yet.” — Timuel Black

H

e was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on Dec. 7, 1918, to Mattie and Timuel Black, an admirer of the Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey. All four of his grandparents were enslaved. His grandfather’s enslaver’s son was Hugo Black, the United States senator and Supreme Court justice. (“These are facts,” Black wrote in his 2019 memoir, Sacred Ground. “I’m not proud of it, but I can’t throw these facts away.”)

As his often-told story goes, as a baby, he looked around and said, “Shit, I’m leaving here,” and his mother said that the family ought to accompany him.

“The story is humorous but has a serious point,” wrote Black. “My family knew we were not safe in Birmingham, especially since my daddy … did not put up with any nonsense.”

Birmingham was the South’s steelworking center, and Chicago at that time had steel industry jobs. The family—with sister Charlotte and brother Walter — arrived in August 1919; a baby sister had previously in the Spanish Flu epidemic. Black grew up in Bronzeville during the first wave of the Great Migration, as African Americans, segregated into Chicago’s so-called Black Belt, set up a largely parallel society with its own economic and social institutions.

He attended Edmund Burke Elementary, 5356 S. King Drive, and DuSable High School, 4934 S. Wabash Ave. He wrote of the importance that “a few Black agitators among our teachers” had “to our dawning political interest,” including the teaching of Black history.

While working his first job in a shop as a cleanup boy at thirteen or fourteen, Black met a union organizer who asked him why he wasn’t working behind the cash register, and the two began to organize African American clerks into the Colored Retail Clerks Union, as the whites’ union was segregated. Salaries rose from $12 to $18 a week and employees got a week of vacation.

T

he bombing of Pearl Harbor happened on Black’s twenty-third birthday; he heard about it while listening to jazz on the radio with friends in a bar. He was drafted into the Army in

August 1943. His response to the notice that his Uncle Sam needed him was that he did not have an uncle named Sam. “I was very much against being in the army at that point, not only because of the abuse within the military, but more generally,” Black wrote. “There was a race riot in Detroit just before I was inducted, and another in New York. My daddy’s position was, ‘Why are you going to go over there and fight when you should be going up to Detroit and fighting those battles?’ It was hard to argue with his logic.”

His mother, meanwhile, considered the opportunities an honorable discharge would provide him and told him to earn one.

He was assigned to the 308 Quartermasters Corps, the Quartermaster Railhead Company, and in Normandy four days after D-Day, running transportation along the Allied advance

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

OBITUARY

PHOTO BY MARC MONAGHAN

across France, Luxembourg and Belgium.

He marched down the Champs-Elysees during the liberation of Paris; crowds yelled out “Louis Armstrong!” as he and other Black soldiers passed. He also fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Hearsay from the combat soldiers motivated Black to go into Germany after the battle with his white commanding officer to see Buchenwald.

The experience—the smells, the cries, the mechanisms to commit industrial genocide—first made him want to kill all the Germans, before he realized that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and some of his other military colleagues were also of German descent.

“This got me thinking,” he wrote, “and I thought, this can happen anywhere to anyone.”

Years later Black said it was then, aged twenty-six, that he decided to dedicate his life toward peace and justice 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

for all people.

He received four Battle Stars, the Croix de Guerre, the Legion of Honor and an honorable discharge.

After the repeal of racially restrictive covenant laws for returning veterans, Black and his family moved to Hyde Park-Kenwood in 1953, where he lived for the rest of his life. With his first wife, Norisea Cummings, whom he later divorced, he had two children, Ermetra Black-Thomas and Timuel Kerrigan Black, who went by his middle name and preceded him in death. He later married and divorced a second time.

A religious skeptic, he joined the First Unitarian Church of Chicago, 5650 S. Woodlawn Ave., around 1954, after his daughter asked where God is; he wrote he did not have the right to impose his beliefs on his daughter, but that his children would be exposed to many views there.

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

Writing for the Herald in 2016, he recalled working against racial discrimination as a member of the University of Chicago’s 1942-founded Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter (Black earned a master’s degree from the school in 1954).

“Hyde Park has always been an intellectual, activist, social, cultural and civic-minded community,” he wrote.

“Living in Hyde Park for these sixtyfour years, I have enjoyed developing relationships with the people in this community. I believe that we should pass this legacy on to the young newcomers so that it will encourage them that change is going to come and they can help to make that change a positive one,” he wrote, going on to endorse the Obama Presidential Center and an associated community benefits agreement for the project.

Black first saw Dr. Martin Luther

King on television in December 1955.

“His presence on television was so impressive to me because, not only was he a very handsome man, he articulated for me a feeling I had carried most of my life, what had been given great expression when I was in World War II, in combat areas in Europe,” Black told the Herald in 2018, for a piece commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination.

“He articulated a feeling about violence and peace and cooperation. And that idea in terms of race in America, taking what Rosa Parks had said earlier when she started the boycott: ‘I’m tired.

I’m tired of segregation. I’m tired of war.’

He did it so beautifully that that day I got on a plane and went to Montgomery, that same evening.”

The next year, Black invited King to speak at a conference of Unitarians and Universalists. The First Unitarian Church was too small, so church members asked the university to host King at Rockefeller Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave., instead.

In a Chicago political scene that has long valued patronage and paths of succession, “(Black) challenged the insularity of black politics from a maelstrom of activism,” historian Dr. Charles Branham said in 2018. “He was one of those storming the barricades of complacency to liberate marginalized… communities from the de facto and de jure white supremacy that had entrenched wealth and power in the hands of a few and denied resources and opportunities to people of color.”

That fall, Black was part of a “Protest at the Polls” committee organizing to increase Black representation in Illinois legislative politics and mobilize Black voters. He ran unsuccessfully for 4th Ward alderman in 1963.

In 1966, he withdrew as a candidate for the Illinois House, lambasting the General Assembly’s passage of a bill replacing a primary with state party conventions. He told the Herald that a convention was “a cut-and-dry affair” and that the nomination of an “anti-civil rights and anti-fair government Negro” machine Democratic candidate to replace the retiring incumbent, Abner Mikva, who later went onto a career in Congress

OBITUARY

PHOTO BY MARC MONAGHAN

and the Clinton White House, was a “slap in the face of the Negro and the liberal white community.”

With A. Philip Randolph, Black, after a challenge from AFL-CIO President George Meany, helped form the Negro American Labor Movement, best known for its role in organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Black co-mobilized the Midwestern contingent of attendees to the protest in the capital. More than 4,000 Chicagoans went.

Three years later, Black took part in King’s Chicago Freedom Movement, including the protest against housing discrimination in Marquette Park.

“Many of the people who walked with us were Catholics, black and white, and Marquette Park was primarily Catholic. They were so vulgar towards their fellow Catholics. And then someone

hit Dr. King, and still Dr. King got up and forgave that unknown person,” Black said in 2018. “I had said to myself, ‘If one of them hit me, the nonviolent movement is over.’ Others had refused to be in the march because that’s how they felt. Dr. King was knocked, and then he continued.”

Black was also working against the machine Democratic Party of Mayor Richard J. Daley in the mid-20th century.

His 1963 run for alderman was as part of a coalition of independent Black candidates running against “Silent Six” Black machine incumbents. He led protests against the “Willis Wagons,” the portable classrooms installed, and left to deteriorate, outside overcrowded, predominantly Black Chicago Public Schools buildings under the tenure of Superintendent Benjamin Willis, which culminated in a boycott of Black CPS families “End plantation politics,” was his

refrain.

Black taught at several high schools (in Gary, Indiana, and in Chicago at DuSable, Farragut and Hyde Park). In 1969, he became dean of Wright College, part of the newly formed City Colleges of Chicago system. A promotion to vice president of academic affairs at Olive Harvey College followed in 1972.

After a controversial firing in 1973, a protest campaign backed by heavyhitting reporters such as Lu Palmer and Vernon Jarrett ensured his reinstatement as community affairs director for City Colleges. That position was terminated in 1975 and Black went back to teaching, this time at Loop College—since renamed Harold Washington College— until 1989.

A committed member of the Independent Voters of IllinoisIndependent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO), he ran for state Senate in

1978 and again for the state House in 1980, losing both times.

His deep aversion to Daley’s machine could override his commitment to the Democratic Party. Former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, a longtime ally and staunch Democrat today, remembered in 1976 that the two of them worked for Republican James R. Thompson, who was her boss when he had served as a U.S. attorney, in his successful 1976 gubernatorial run against then-Secretary of State Michael Howlett, whom Daley had endorsed. She compared that political action “to taking your life in your hand.”

“Tim was fearless,” she said. “I’m grateful to him for that leadership.”

He was a classmate of Mayor Harold Washington, also a World War II veteran, at DuSable and Roosevelt. At a Hyde Park Historical Society event on the twentyfifth anniversary of his death, in 2012, he noted that a bit of Chicago political lore—that Washington’s father had been a Democratic precinct captain passed over for an aldermanic endorsement in the 3rd Ward—was ironic, because at the time most African Americans were still Republicans.

Washington’s father was an independent Democrat, and so was his son, who became a state representative in 1965. “(The community) was independent,” Black said. “We took our agenda to him, and he would introduce our ideas.”

When Black community leaders pushed Washington to run for mayor in 1982, he told them, “There has to be a war chest of at least $250,000 to $500,000, and you have got to prove that you can get at least 50,000 new people registered.”

In response, a group of activists started the People’s Movement for Voter Registration; Black served as co-chair, playing a pivotal role in the push to get 263,000 new African American voters registered before Washington’s run.

It was at this time that Black met his third wife, Zenobia, who survives him, as does his daughter.

In 1992, he helped on the Senate campaign of an old associate, and a friend of his wife’s, Carol Moseley Braun.

“Tim Black has lived an impactful

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

OBITUARY

102 years,” she said as he was ailing.

“He gave to his community and made a big difference in a lot of people’s lives.

And I’m just hopeful that he can be remembered for the contributions that he made, that he gave more than he took, and that he, hopefully, will be part of the city’s legacy.”

B

lack first met Barack Obama at the Medici, 1327 E. 57th St., in the early 1990s—at a time, he wrote, when the young man was already talking about running for president and ingratiating himself with South Side power players.

He fully supported his 2008 presidential run and attended his Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration, describing it in his memoirs as “a day I never dreamed I would see, as magical as the March on Washington.”

Black was also involved with the Civic Knowledge Project (CKP) at the U. of C., an effort started in 2003 by Dr. Danielle Allen to help “overcome the social, economic and racial divisions among the various knowledge communities on the South Side.”

Black led history tours through Bronzeville and taught courses for U. of C. students with the CKP. In 2009, the CKP started the Timuel D. Black Edible Arts Garden at 5710 S. Woodlawn Ave., donating its produce to a local food pantry.

“Calling him the Senior Statesman of the South Side scarcely begins to do justice to this extraordinary man, who has been actively fighting for social justice for longer than most people have been on earth,” Dr. Bart Schultz, Allen’s successor at the CKP and editor of Black’s memoir, wrote in 2016.

At his 100th birthday symposium at the U. of C., Dr. Eve Ewing, who interviewed Black over the phone for a school project as a girl—his number was always listed in the phone book, and he typically answered it himself—predicted his legacy, “not only as a knowledgeproducer but a knowledge sharer,“ would last another 100 years.

His talent as a writer earned him several awards. He published two 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

volumes of his narrative history project Bridges of Memory about the Great Migration in Chicago. Winner of the Paul Cornell Award from the Hyde Park Historical Society, the first book includes oral history interviews with residents who “found work in the stockyards and steel mills of Chicago, settled and started small businesses in the Black Belt on the South Side, and brought forth the jazz, blues and gospel music that the city is now known for.”

He was a lifelong jazz enthusiast, writing authoritatively on the genre’s Chicago maturation—how it came north from New Orleans during the Great Migration and spread here over generations, neighborhoods and the color line over the 20th century—for the Herald in 2000.

“Jazz,” he wrote, “is a history and a real contribution of an oppressed people who found a creative way to make joyful and unique music in spite of oppressions and rejections. It is now universally accepted as the only truly original folk art form of America. Chicago jazz enhanced that development.”

In a statement, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush said that one of his favorite memories of Black was when he told jazz pianist and composer Herbie Hancock, a Hyde Park Academy graduate who is now eighty-one years old, about his relationship with his father, Wayman Edward Hancock, and seeing the gleam in Herbie Hancock’s eyes as he told the story.

“Tim’s enthusiasm as an author and educator was inspiring, and his impact is utterly incalculable,” Rush said.

Writing in the Herald during final days of Obama’s presidency, Black said he believed that his legacy would be that “younger people of all races, gender and ethnic groups“ would think that “the impossible can be possible,” alongside the Affordable Care Act and Obama’s foreign policy. “I know that we will overcome Trump’s ideas of a ‘great’ America because I have inspiration that was given to me by the success of Barack and Michelle Obama,” he wrote.

Obama released a statement the afternoon after Black’s death. “Today, the city of Chicago and the world lost an icon

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

with the passing of Timuel Black. Tim spent decades chronicling and lifting up Black Chicago history. But he also made plenty of history himself,“ he said. “Above all, Tim was a testament to the power of place, and how the work we do to improve one community can end up reverberating through other neighborhoods and other cities, eventually changing the world.”

At the close of his memoir, noting the “Dixie Republicans” had gotten the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act, Black wrote he was aggravated but not discouraged “because we have seen what the power of an awakened people can accomplish.” He mused that Justice Clarence Thomas could not be reasoned with, as some had suggested he could, and argued that a constitutional amendment that protects voting rights and makes all men and women equal is necessary.

He wrote that Chicago’s government tramples on its Black community and institutions, especially its schools, arguing that state and local legislators need to be confronted, especially those on finance committees, “so that they hear our demands and consider their political futures.”

“They ignore us at their peril,” he wrote.

Last year, two weeks before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Black wrote a commentary for the Sun-Times acknowledging that he had been born in the worst year of the Great Influenza pandemic, and saying he was not “ready to leave in the year of COVID-19.”

He wrote that society would have to fight the pandemic as hard as it fought World War II, and that young people would have to become the new Greatest Generation. He wrote that certain politicians’ dismissiveness amid the pandemic towards older Americans infuriated him, noting his contemporaries’ vast reserve of talent, ideas and positive experiences.”

“We have been change-makers,” he wrote, “and we are not done yet.”

He urged people to talk to their grandparents and ask what they had been through. He urged support for needy and incarcerated people. He hoped for the

defeat of the former president in that November’s elections.

“Our great cause in the days of my youth was the defeat of tyranny worldwide. It took an international effort.

Every young person came forward,” he wrote. “We did it then and we can defeat this enemy today.”

In a June 2020 interview with Chicago magazine, amid the riots and protests, Black did say he was glad not to be a teenager, because of their lack of optimism. Today’s instant communication enables them to “see as they feel,“ he said, to see “reality in terms of the negative part of life.”

“If my ancestors hadn’t had that optimism about the future, given the conditions that they were in,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here.” This obituary was originally published by our sister newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, and is reprinted with permission.

Aaron Gettinger is a staff writer at the Hyde Park Herald. Aaron last wrote for the Weekly about the race to fill Alderman Willie Cochran’s seat.

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POLITICS

Lightfoot’s PAC Paid Consultant While She Worked at the Mayor’s Office

Joanna Klonsky’s contract avoids Hiring Plan rules by calling her a “pro bono consultant” rather than a “volunteer.”

BY MATT CHAPMAN

M

ayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration may have violated political hiring rules when it brought Joanna Klonsky into the Mayor’s Office as a pro bono policy consultant beginning in 2019. Klonsky continued to be paid by Lightfoot’s political action committee (PAC) for more than a year after she began working for the Mayor’s Office.

A source familiar with Klonsky’s contract told the Weekly that Lightfoot’s campaign paid Klonsky $8,000 per month while Klonsky worked for the Mayor’s Office, long after the campaign had concluded. The Weekly confirmed via the nonprofit watchdog Illinois Sunshine that Lightfoot’s political action committee, Light PAC, began making monthly payments of $8,000 to Klonsky’s consulting firm in January 2020 and continued to do so through at least September of this year.

Why the mayor’s political action committee continued paying Klonsky’s firm despite the fact that she was consulting for the Mayor’s Office is unclear.

Klonsky, a media consultant whose former client list includes numerous Illinois and Chicago politicians, started working for Lightfoot’s campaign during the 2019 mayoral election as a paid senior political advisor. With her help, Lightfoot

won the election, and Klonsky was reported by the Tribune to have stayed on as a member of the mayor’s transition team. When the transition team was officially disbanded on Lightfoot's first day in office, Klonsky continued working alongside Lightfoot in the new administration, and was brought into complex policy conversations from the start. But the administration apparently violated hiring rules by failing to obtain the necessary approval for Klonsky to work for the City.

C

hicago’s Hiring Plan—its rules for hiring City employees— resulted from a lawsuit originally filed in 1969, Michael L. Shakman v.

Democratic Organization of Cook County.

The lawsuit challenged the Democratic machine’s entrenched culture of political patronage, and over the ensuing decades, a series of federal consent decrees, known as the Shakman Decrees, placed Chicago and Cook County under federal oversight and mandated the creation of a thorough plan for preventing the over-influence of politics in hiring. In 2014, Chicago was freed from federal oversight, and the responsibility fell upon the Office of the Inspector General, which remains the City’s watchdog for Shakman compliance.

Hiring former campaign operatives

PHOTO BY KEN LUND

to help run a new administration isn’t at all uncommon—and the Shakman decrees allow for that. But often such hires come with more rules and more documentation, and often require formal exemptions that require approval from the city’s oversight agencies.

While the City’s Hiring Plan doesn’t require a Shakman exemption for contractors, rules for hiring them are clear: City contractors cannot be hired for

political reasons. A spokesperson for the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) told the Weekly there is “no distinguishable difference” between consultants and contractors, adding that OIG considers consultants to be “personal service contractor[s].” In its watchdog role, OIG requires all consultants to obtain written pre-approvals from both the Department of Human Relations (DHR) and Office of the Inspector General prior to being

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

POLITICS

hired. Public-records requests the Weekly submitted to the DHR and the Mayor’s Office turned up no records of any preapprovals of Klonsky’s hiring from either office.

The Hiring Plan is explicit in stating that contractors must be truly independent of the City and not act as employees of the City. There are fourteen different criteria to test if a contractor is employeelike in the Plan. Criteria include: the extent of direction by City employees to the contractor’s work, similarity of work to work done by existing employees, the nature of the work, whether the work is highly specialized, the location of the work, how hours are determined and so on.

Not all fourteen criteria are used in deciding whether a contractor is an employee, but taken together, it’s difficult to see how Klonsky’s work was much different from that of a City employee.

The person who spoke to the Weekly

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

said that consultants typically offer expert guidance on principles of governance, but that if Klonsky was directing communications personnel or other City employees, that would indicate she was a City employee, not a contractor.

Lightfoot has come under fire for her hiring choices before. On her second day in office, the Tribune revealed the mayor’s head of security was married to a City lobbyist for ComEd. In 2019, the Tribune likewise reported that the Mayor’s Office apparently violated the requirement that City employees live in Chicago when it brought on Lisa Schneider-Fabes, who lives in Wilmette, in a volunteer role. Schneider-Fabes, who served as the manager of Lightfoot’s transition team, was hired by World Business Forum, a nonprofit partially funded by tax dollars and chaired by the mayor, the Tribune reported.

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

D

uring Klonsky's first three weeks in the Mayor's Office in late May and early June 2019, there was apparently no documentation to make her role with the City official.

It’s unclear how the City designated her role under the Hiring Plan, but she still contributed a significant amount of policy and communications work to the Office of the Mayor. Email records show that in those three weeks, Klonsky sent an average of twelve emails every day to Mayor’s Office staffers, media, and other recipients from a Gmail address.

On June 6, 2019, the Office of the Mayor received a Freedom of Information Act request from the Tribune for, “the full list of the names of everyone currently employed by the Mayor’s Office, their start dates and salaries. Please also list anyone employed in the mayors [sic] office through a contract as a special advisor or any other contract job.”

On June 10, 2019, Celia Meza, who was then Lightfoot’s counsel and senior ethics advisor, sent Klonsky a “consultant agreement” to sign, which Klonsky would return the next day, June 11. Before signing the agreement, Klonsky was effectively indistinguishable from a City employee. The contract was written with language that attempts to back-date them by “retroactively memorializ[ing]” the work she did for the Mayor’s Office before it was signed.

The Mayor’s Office did not include Klonsky on the list of volunteers they provided to the Tribune on June 20, 2019, despite Klonsky already having signed the consultant agreement nine days earlier (after the Mayor’s Office received the Tribune’s request, but before they fulfilled it) and had already begun working for the Mayor’s Office before then. It’s unclear whether the investigation by the Tribune prompted the writing of Klonsky’s contract.

After Klonsky's first contract expired in 2020, she continued to work for the Mayor’s Office under no contract for three months. Many of last year’s protests happened during those three months, and she played a key role in the City’s communication strategy to the public and creation of policy.

Records the Weekly obtained via public-records requests for emails between Klonsky’s Gmail address and mayoral staffers show a sliver of her communication and policy approach during the 2020 protests. Most emails that involve any discussion of policy are mostly or entirely redacted, but they indicate that Klonsky was also consistently a primary point of contact in the Lightfoot administration for press and elected officials.

Klonsky’s contract appears to have been carefully worded to comply with the letter of the Hiring Plan by avoiding calling her a volunteer contractor—terms that are included in the Hiring Plan— instead referring to her as “pro bono” and a “consultant.” The Hiring Plan has rules regarding work done by “volunteers” and “contractors,” but not for pro bono consultants. City contracts typically also use “volunteer” and “contractor,” not the language used in Klonsky’s contract.

It is unclear why the City’s normal contractual language wasn’t used in Klonsky’s case. The Mayor's Office responded to the Weekly’s questions with a single sentence that reiterated the contract’s awkward imprecision: “Joanna Klonsky is a pro bono consultant to the Mayor’s Office.”

When the Weekly reached out to Klonsky with clarifying questions about her contract, she referred us to the Mayor’s Office. Klonsky likewise did not respond to an email inquiring about outside contracts she had, with Lightfoot’s campaign or otherwise, during her time volunteering—or, as the Mayor’s Office prefers, consulting pro bono—for the City. Matt Chapman is a freelance journalist in Chicago who focuses on issues of transparency and policing. This is his first piece for the Weekly.

LIT

The Future of Work

Where did all the good jobs go, and what’s replacing them on the South Side?

BY MAX BLAISDELL

A

rriving last year in Chicago, I couldn’t help noticing that the red-brick, chimney-stacked public schools looked like factories; shuffle students in, and churn them out. So, too, did University of Chicago Medicine look like an industrial plant, with smoke billowing from its rooftop pipes, the tremendous din from its generators and loading docks, and the cavernous parking garages on both sides—warehouses for storing the modes of transport for all the bodies moving in and out of the conveyor belt of care.

I have since read about how manufacturing jobs made Chicago a hub for Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. I learned that tensions between returning white soldiers from World War I and newly arrived Black workers prompted one of the deadliest race riots in American history in 1919. I grimly read about City efforts to stem the wave of meatpacking and factory closures dating from the 1950s and 60s that largely failed to stem the decline. And

then there was US Steel’s South Works, which after more than one hundred years of operation shuttered its doors in 1992.

If the South Side’s heavy industrial past leaves a mark on the architecture, infrastructure, and imagination of its inhabitants, might its waning economic power hold implications for our area’s future too? This question is posed and answered in The Next Shift by University of Chicago labor historian Gabriel Winant.

He examines the decline of industry and the rise of the healthcare economy, and the implications of this transformation.

Although Winant’s history deals with the particular case of Pittsburgh, many of its core insights apply to the South Side, and more broadly to Chicago.

Winant begins with the revelation that University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a nonprofit research hospital with 85,000 people working in numerous care centers and clinics, claimed in legal filings to have zero employees. Zero employees.

Winant explains this as “fissuring,” a common practice in today’s service

economy in which major corporations and institutions subcontract labor to third parties that do not pay workers livable wages or ensure them safe working conditions. To illustrate the concept, Winant highlights the case of Diana Borland, a medical transcriptionist, whose pay went from $19 an hour to $6.36 after UPMC reclassified her as a contractor to be paid for her transcriptions on a perline basis. To relate this case to Chicago, think Aramark, a multi-billion-dollar, publicly traded corporation that Chicago Public Schools contracts to handle its janitorial work and University of Chicago Medical Center contracts for its food services. These workers remain outside the purview of organized labor, and many have said that the company fails to pay its hourly employees livable wages.

Even as Chicago’s pharmaceutical (AbbVie, Abbott Laboratories, and Baxter Healthcare), health insurance (Blue Cross Blue Shield, United Healthcare, and Humana, Inc.), and medical technology companies rake in

enormous profits, hospitals and nursing homes in the area operate on slim profit margins, leading them to suppress wage growth among care workers since they cannot reduce staffing in these positions.

Entry-level medical assistants in Chicago can expect hourly wages lower than $15. Phlebotomists, customer service, triage, and scheduling representatives only command a couple dollars an hour more. Walk into any Whole Foods or Mariano’s, and you’re likely to be offered about the same. Despite these low wages, the care sector has grown tremendously in Chicago, almost doubling from 408,000 jobs in 1990 to nearly 700,000 jobs in the present day, coinciding neatly with the decline in manufacturing from 187,000 jobs in 1992 to 58,000 in 2013.

The rapid expansion in the number of care jobs signals their crucial role in our community, even while care workers themselves remain chronically underpaid.

What to do about low-wage, socially important work like health care and education results in what Winant terms

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

LIT

the “trilemma” for policymakers. They can pick two out of three from: low unemployment, high wage growth, and low public expenditure, but not all of them, because the low productivity gains inherent to service sector work mean that, absent public investment, market forces will tend to suppress wages. Thus, policymakers can either hold down wages for low unemployment and low deficits, or accept high unemployment for good wages and low deficits, or embrace costly state intervention to have low unemployment and sufficient wage growth. These choices have massive implications for the United States broadly and Chicago specifically, as the city’s population of residents between the ages of sixty-five and eighty-four is expected to double by 2040, indicating an even more acute need for elderly and infirm care.

Winant’s core insight is that the decline of the manufacturing industry

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

and the rise of the care economy are not disparate, unrelated, or coincidental phenomena. Rather the latter is the historically informed product of the former. Winant reveals how a bargain struck between labor and industry after a series of nation-wide strikes mid-century led to the creation of a privatized health care system, and later a public safety net for the elderly and disabled (Medicare) and for the poor (Medicaid). As these privately health-insured industrial workers aged or succumbed to injuries, they required greater and greater amounts of care, necessitating an expansion in the number of care workers. “The insurance they had won and the system of supply built to meet their collective demand,” writes Winant, “endured through the decline of their own industry and buffered them somewhat against that shock.”

Public subsidies through Medicare and Medicaid meant the number of Americans with insured healthcare

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

expanded rapidly after the 1960s, thus adding to the care labor crush.

Winant’s detailed history charts this interwoven process through the context of steel manufacturing in Pittsburgh, from its heyday in the post-WWII years to its demise in the 1980s, and the growth of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center after the 1970s into the economic behemoth it is today. He draws on the perspectives of steelworkers themselves, both Black and white, and their battles with management throughout the postwar era over working conditions.

Chapters devoted to roles of race and gender in the steel industry detail how caring for children and the infirm, seen as women’s work, became normative within the structure of the nuclear family in the 1950s. When husbands worked night shifts, wives stayed up to prepare their dinner hot, only to wake up a few hours later to ready the children for school; when husbands got home, they did not assist wives in the cleaning or cooking; and when husbands were laid off, wives picked up the slack, scrounging, asking for relatives for assistance, and making due with odds and ends.

Black workers were typically the first to get the pink slip as automation, capital flight, and overseas competition erased the industry’s profitability. Stuck at the lowest rungs of the steel plant’s seniority system as unskilled workers, they were “likely to be hired last and laid off first” and “exposed to the most dangerous and difficult work.” While Winant offers tantalizing snippets relating the decline of industry to mass incarceration, the opioid epidemic, and drug and rehab centers mushrooming all over the country, he does not explore these topics at length.

Perhaps these will be the subject of his next book.

His sources are as varied as memoirs written by steelworkers, journals kept by their wives, and oral interviews with care workers recorded by sociologists and the author himself. One healthcare worker he interviewed noted that, “[The healthcare] industry is heavily dominated by working mothers, some of them single mothers, all of us doing everything we can to build a good life for ourselves and our families.

We are the mothers and the caretakers in the hospitals but it seems like there’s no one taking care of us or looking out for our wellbeing.” Another woman tore both her rotator cuffs because of the heavy toll of cleaning thirty hospital rooms by herself.

Many workers, requiring care themselves for stresses and injuries developed on the job, end up mired in medical debt to the very hospitals that employ them.

In the epilogue of The Next Shift, completed just as the COVID-19 pandemic began, Winant smirks at the irony of calling care workers “essential” or “frontline heroes,” even as thousands got sick and died often working without hazard pay, proper protective equipment, or sufficient training. He concludes by offering a glimmer of hope that increased labor militancy among care workers in the past decade will lead to better pay and conditions, and with an empathetic plea from one: “Healthcare workers like me are taking care of people with serious diseases and chronic illnesses—lifting them, emptying catheters, giving them baths. For that, I am only making $13.32 an hour. Is that really all I am worth?”

For the South Side, with over 9,000 care workers employed at University of Chicago Medicine alone, not to mention the thousands of home health aides working in one of the largest personal care markets, the implications of this question are just as profound. Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. $35. Harvard University Press. 368 pages.

Max Blaisdell is an educator and basketball coach based in Hyde Park. He is originally from New York City and later served in Peace Corps Morocco. He last wrote about Afghan refugee resettlement for the Weekly.

LIT

blue is darker than Black

by Chima “Naira” Ikoro

Our thoughts in exchange for yours.

T

h e 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 WEEK'S PROMPT: “TALK ABOUT A TIME WHERE SOMETHING THAT FELT SAFE TRIED TO SINK YOU.”

This could be a poem, a stream-ofconsciousness piece, or a short story.

Submissions can be sent to bit.ly/ssw-exchange or via email to chima.ikoro@southsideweekly.com.

Featured below is a reader response to a previous prompt.

has cracked, the markings have bled; I have paid

THE SINNER, THE CHASM, AND THE EARTH THAT CRIED FOR RED DEW DRENCHED FLOWERS

by Dontay M. Givens

the ratking by the pound. All that is left: my debts. I fear surrendering my existence, I have lived a self-seeking life exiled by my body, rejected by Earth.

I have been long lost, my humanity must pay a debt, in blood.

I have drank, I have

Barren Sister Earth, forget the blood I have spilled, the wailing of the flowers covered in red dew won’t leave my ears.

consumed, forbidden nothingness that lays hidden behind the gate of the gods.

My skin diffused,

Forgive me, oh merciful Sister, forget me: my name, my face, my smell, my vagabondage, my sins.

Condemn me to Dead Man's Path,

I burned marks into my flesh.

For myself, fashioned ruby red curses; for others, I’ve drawn marks of nugatory

I will walk until the cosmos forgets how to hold itself up without your touch.

Oh, God of charity, our atlas will one day implode, Sky will vomit fire and brimstone,

grief—the immutable chasm that is carnage has distorted, the small semblance of humanity remaining.

Isolation and hermitage have writhed my body, my flesh

Sun will wail a long sinless song— blood debts will never be paid, will you forget me then?

Dontay M. Givens is a writer from East Garfield Park. You can find him on Instagram @nappy.loc!

I’m at work sitting at the hostess stand when a Black man walks up to me and lingers in my peripheral.

I try not to look up at him until he speaks.

His voice caches on his lips-it sounds like he’s at the end of a long shift. or a rope. maybe? maybe he is bored; it’s almost quitting time.

I could hear it in the shifting of his feet; “almost quitting time.”

He asks me questions about the restaurant—tryna see if he can get in.

I think he should go home. He knows I don’t wanna talk to him so why is he talking to me?

Maybe I remind him of his daughter, or a girl he knew when he was younger.

Maybe he sees that instead of looking him in the eyes I am staring at my own reflection in his badge and he thinks his soft voice can heal me— ain't it quitting time, officer? you could have been anything in the world, but instead you picked a shade of blue that is darker than Black and impossible to see past.

It’s not my fault that you decided to wear yourself inside out, all of your brown parts read like wounds, opening over and over, every word you speak is to the tune of flesh rotting— a nightmare. a sheep in wolf 's clothing. someone my daughter or younger self might mistake for an ally, a slide of a hand that reaches for mine, a diversity trick up the mayors sleeve.

It is not my fault that you wake up every morning and dress yourself as a stranger.

I know you know I am uncomfortable, and yet you’re tryna pry your small talk between my anxiety— if you wanna fill these gaps so bad then ain't it quitting time? Officer?

A cop walks up to me while I am at work.

He is Black, and he is tired, and that is not my problem.

Could he even imagine how tired I am?

Chima Ikoro is the community organizing editor for the Weekly. She last wrote about Artists from Roseland.

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

Scan to view the calendar online!

ILLUSTRATION BY THUMY PHAN

BULLETIN Climate Justice Rally and March

Pritzker Park, 310 S. State St., Friday, October 29, 2:00pm. Free. bit.ly/FedUpChi A coalition of environmental and community organizations will rally to call on the Federal Reserve to stop fossil-fuel financing and align their actions with the Paris Climate Agreement's aims. The rally will also highlight regional fights against oil pipelines. ( Jim Daley)

Día de los Muertos Xícago

National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St., Saturday, October 30, 3:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3mazoxw Join the National Museum of Mexican Art to celebrate Día de los Muertos by transforming the museum and its surroundings into a beautiful space to remember loved ones. Guests will enjoy ofrendas created by community members, live musical performances, art activities, and a large illuminated ofrenda projected outside of the museum. Submit a photo of a loved one or register for an ofrenda space at bit.ly/3mazoxw.

(Maddie Parrish)

City Council Committee on Special Events, Cultural Affairs and Recreation Online, Thursday, November 4, 10:00am. Free. chicityclerk.com

The committee will meet to report on ongoing matters, and to discuss a proposed ordinance that would use Open Space Impact Fee funds to reimburse NeighborSpace for their work expanding Chicago Farmworks. Information on online attendance can be found on the City Clerk's website. To submit written public comment, email Marge.Durkin@cityofchicago. org by noon on November 1. ( Jim Daley) 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2021

City Council Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety

City Council Committee on Budget and Government Operations

The committee will meet to report on ongoing matters and consider new business. Written public comment may be submitted to pedestrianandtrafficsafety@ cityofchicago.org until noon on November 1.

Information on online attendance, and the agenda (when it is finalized) can be found on the City Clerk's website. ( Jim Daley)

The committee will meet to report on ongoing matters and consider new business.

Written public comment will be accepted at Committeeonthebudgetandgovernmentoperations@ cityofchicago.org until 10am on November 9.

Information about online attendance, and the agenda (when it is finalized) can be found on the City Clerk's website. ( Jim Daley)

Online, Thursday, November 8,10:00am. Free. chicityclerk.com

City Council Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards, and Committee on License and Consumer Protection Online, Thursday, November 8, 1:00pm. Free. chicityclerk.com

The committees will meet jointly to report on ongoing matters and discuss new business. Information on online attendance as well as the agenda (when it is finalized) can be found on th City Clerk's website.

Written public comment will be accepted at Nicole.

Wellhausen@cityofchicago.org until 10AM on November 5. ( Jim Daley)

Online, Wednesday, November, 10, 2:00pm. Free. chicityclerk.com

EDUCATION CTU Delegates and School Leaders Training

Online, Saturday, November 6,, 9:00am–3:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3vK1oeP The Chicago Teacher Union's Delegates and School Leaders Training will feature workshops such as New Delegates 101, Safety Committee and PPCs in Action, and Assertive Grievance Strategies. Find workshop selection and register at bit.ly/3vK1oeP. (Maddie Parrish)

City Council Committe on Housing and Real Estate Online, Thursday, November 8, 10:00am. Free. chicityclerk.com

The committee will meet to report on ongoing matters and consider new business. Written public comment may be submitted to phyllis.goodensmiley@cityofchicago.org until 3PM on November 8. Information on online attendance, and the agenda (when it is finalized) can be found on the City Clerk's website. ( Jim Daley)

ARTS Spooky Fest

McKinley Park Community Garden, 3518 S. Wolcott Ave., Saturday, October 30, 11:00am–2:00pm. Free.

Children and their families are invited to Spooky Fest, featuring pumpkin decorations, arts and crafts, trick or treating, and movies such as It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Hotel Transylvania. Families can bring a blanket. (Alma Campos)

BULLETIN

A Time to Grieve: Día de Los Muertos Exhibition National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St., Thursday, October 28, 10:00am–5:00pm. Free. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org

This year’s exhibition pays tribute to and remembers the numerous individuals from Mexico and the U.S. who have died from COVID-19. The National Museum of Mexican Arts invites all to contemplate this moment with new artistic expressions by local artists and site-specific installations created by artists from both sides of the U.S.Mexico border. Adam Toledo, the thirteen-year-old whom Chicago police shot and killed earlier this year in La Villita, is also being remembered at the museum's exhibit. The museum is open Tuesday-Sunday; closed on Monday.

(Alma Campos)

Future Fossils: SUM

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., Thursday, October 28. Free. bit.ly/3aqQVe6 Future Fossils: SUM, a major new sculpture exhbition by Chicago artist and SAIC professor Lan Tuazon, visualizes the sum of a lifespan’s worth of human material traces in the world, nestled together as a one-bedroom house built to scale and exhibited inside the two-story gallery at the Hyde Park Art Center. See website for times. (Isabel Nieves)

Paint Your Own Alebrije with Puech Ikots' Carlos Orozco

Online, Thursday, October 28, 12:00pm– 1:30pm. $10-$35. bit.ly/3rkP1Ua Learn how to make your own handcarved alebrije with artist and Indigenous activist Carlos Orozco from Puech Ikots, an Indigenous arts collective of eighty families based in Oaxaca, Mexico. Their mission is to preserve their traditional artistic traditions, especially the creation of copal wood alebrijes in traditional Oaxacan style, while also learning about their culture, sustainability practices of Indigenous peoples, and the beautiful artistic traditions of Mexico's Isthmus

region. This event recurs every Saturday through the end of the year. (Alma Campos)

Día de Los Muertos Celebration: Altares en Cajuelas/Altars in Trunks

Farragut Career Academy Parking Lot, 2345 S. Christiana Ave., Saturday, October 30, 4:00pm–7:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3vJDIqA At this Dia de Los Muertos/Day of the Dead celebration, attendees can bring their vehicles and use them to set up and decorate an altar in their trunk to remember their loved ones.There will be music, calavera face painting, free tamales, and champurrado. (Alma Campos)

Artist Run Chicago Bike Tours Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., Saturday, October 30, 11:00am– 5:00pm. Free. bit.ly/2ZnHCt6

Join Hyde Park Art Center on two bike tours to visit their Artist Run Chicago 2.0 spaces in Pilsen and Garfield Park. Register for one or both at bit. ly/2ZnHCt6. (Maddie Parrish)

Pilsen Vendor Market

Pilsen Art House , 1756 W. 19th St., Sunday, October 31, 12:00pm–5:00pm.

Free. bit.ly/3m9yMID This family-friendly weekly market invites artists and vendors to sell their wares such as candles, jewelry, woodwork, apparel, handmade goods, and more. There are both indoors and outdoors spaces, and masks are required throughout the event. (Alma Campos)

Free Painting Sessions at Pilsen Arts Community House

are matched up to $25. (Martha Bayne)

Toward an Anti-Racist Art Ecosystem in the US

61st Street Market

Online, Wednesday, November 3, 6:00pm– 7:45pm. Free. bit.ly/3BavpFv Join the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for this discussion (the second of three) on how to build an anti-racist art ecosystem. The event features a panel of artists and designers to discuss the impact of segregation, successful examples of anti-racist work, and how to work together to remove barriers to entry for Black, Indigenous, and people of color. A Zoom webinar link and password will be sent to all registrants prior to the event. (Isabel Nieves)

Center Sundays: Rot and Grow Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., Sunday, November 7, 1:00pm– 5:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3EcmHZl

Join Hyde Park Art Center's monthly Center Sundays activity in November for workshops and discussion centered around food and sustainability. (Maddie Parrish)

FOOD & LAND Wood Street Farm Stand

Wood Street Farm Stand, 1844 W. 59th St., Thursday, October 28, 11:00am–5:30pm.

Free.

Hosted by Growing Home, the farm stand includes cooking demonstrations with free samples and recipe cards for healthy meals. Free farm tours are also available. WIC, SNAP, EBT, and Senior Coupons are double valued. The farm stand runs every Thursday through October 31. (Maddie Parrish)

Pilsen Arts and Community House, Tuesday, November 2, 12:00pm– 4:00pm. Free. https://www. pilsenartscommunityhouse.org/

Plant Chicago Farmers Market

Join artist Julia Kay Morrison for weekly painting sessions designed to help you tap into your imagination. Materials will be provided. Participants should feel free to bring ideas, photographs, images, and sketches that inspire or speak to them.

(Isabel Nieves)

Plant Chicago hosts a weekly farmers market through November 15 featuring locally grown produce and flowers, plus honey, coffee, baked goods, and more.

The nonprofit also runs a community composting site where residents can drop off their food scraps. Link card purchases

Davis Square Park, 4430 S. Marshfield Ave., Saturday, October 30, 11:00am– 3:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3A2TBtd

Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave., Saturday, October 30, 9:00am– 2:00pm. Free. bit.ly/2UqRuQo Chicagoland farmers, cheesemakers, bakers and others hawk their wares every Saturday outside the Experimental Station. The market accepts LINK and Senior Farmers Market Coupons, and all LINK purchases are matched up to $25.

(Martha Bayne)

Not Me We Mutual Aid

Parkside Elementary, 6938 S. East End, Saturday, October 30, 11:00am–2:00pm.

Free.

Not Me We, a housing and mutual aid organization in South Shore, will be giving out free food, candy, groceries, and baby supplies for Halloween. (Malik Jackson)

Austin Community Market

5713 W. Chicago Ave., Saturday, October 30, 10:00am–3:00pm. Free. healthauthority.org Enjoy food and crafts sold by local vendors—including Forty Acres Fresh Market and Thank God 4 Raw & Vegan Treats—along with live entertainment at this weekend community market organized by the WestSide Health Authority. The market is seeking licensed vendors and musicians; email menewman@healthauthority.org or call (773) 378-1878 for vendor/performance opportunities. Market runs Saturdays and Sundays through December 19. ( Jim Daley)

HOUSING Chicago Tenants Movement Weekly Casework Meeting

Online, Monday, November 1, 6:00pm– 7:00pm. Free. bit.ly/ctm-casework Every week, the Chicago Tenants Movement hosts a session where tenants facing hardship can register to join the organization and workshop the issues they're facing. Register at bit.ly/ctmcasework. (Malik Jackson)

OCTOBER 28, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23