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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, photographers, artists, and mediamakers of all backgrounds. Volume 8, Issue 6 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor Martha Bayne Senior Editors Christian Belanger Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editors Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Literature Editor Davon Clark Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan Joshua Falk Lucia Geng Matt Moore Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Robin Vaughan Jocelyn Vega Tammy Xu Staff Writers AV Benford Kiran Misra Jade Yan
Data Editor
Jasmine Mithani
Director of Fact Checking: Charmaine Runes Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Maria Maynez, Elizabeth Winkler, Lucy Ritzmann, Kate Gallagher, Matt Moore, Malvika Jolly, Ebony Ellis, Katie Bart Visuals Editor Haley Tweedell Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Anna Mason Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Mell Montezuma, Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Davon Clark Web Editor Webmaster Managing Director
AV Benford Pat Sier Jason Schumer
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 Isabella Scott
IN CHICAGO
IN THIS ISSUE
RIP Karen Lewis On February 7, Chicago lost its most ardent labor leader in recent memory. Karen Lewis left her mark on the city by building coalitions North to South, riling up crowds while speaking from the heart, and reinvigorating CPS teacher organizing and mayoral politics. "We are the city of big shoulders and so we will put up a fight," Lewis said as she condemned Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s mass school closures before exploring a challenge to his reelection in 2014. She will be remembered for her daring integrity and her compassion for and defense of Chicago's families. At South Side Weekly, we immediately said "Rest in Power," but Chicago Teachers Union vice president Stacy Davis Gates put it another way on social media: "I keep hearing people say 'rest in power,'" she said. "No, Karen gets to rest in peace because she lived in power."
africobra through the eyes of its members
The Black Messiah No Chicagoan should not know who Fred Hampton is—except his story was a tragic one, a stain on the legacy of Mayor J. Daley, the Chicago Police Department, and the FBI, and is largely absent from school textbooks or mischaracterized by traditional media. So it's monumental that at this moment the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party is being portrayed by actor Daniel Kaluuya on big screens across America, including at cinemas in Ford City and Cicero, and on HBO. Judas and the Black Messiah is not a documentary, it wasn’t filmed in Chicago, and like all Hollywood movies, the facts are condensed or embellished. But Hampton’s passion shines through, the gritty mood of the late 60’s is reflected throughout, and his revolutionary message is heard loud and clear. The film has been endorsed by Fred Hampton, Jr.
a history of school desegregation in the
Southeast Side Hunger Strike A hunger strike by activists opposing the city’s plan to move a metal scrapper from the North Side to the Southeast Side is entering its third week. The hundred-year-old General Iron site in Lincoln Park, operated by Reserve Management Group (RMG), was closed on December 31, 2020, after multiple explosions, fires, and environmental violations. RMG is now awaiting city approval for a permit that would greenlight the move of the business to the predominantly Black and brown East Side neighborhood, where two Superfund sites already exist. George Washington High School science teacher Chuck Stark, United Neighbors of the 10th Ward member Breanna Bertacchi, and Southeast Youth Alliance co-founder Oscar Sanchez began the hunger strike, and they have since been joined by United Neighbors of the 10th Ward member Yesenia Chavez, Rebel Bells Collective co-founder Jade Mazon, Coalition to Ban Petcoke co-founder Kate Koval, and others.
covid-19 vaccine q&a
The radical Black collective’s art and politics are keenly relevant fifty years later caleigh stephens...................................4 black folks can’t get no rest
“As an organizer and a person in movement right now, of trying to figure out how to create space for rest and it always feels like there’s an impending crisis, responsibility and things to show up for.” tiffany walden, the triibe..................7 far southwest side
Scottsdale and Ashburn experienced the wrath of white supremacy against a busing program to integrate schools like Bogan High School in the 70s ismael cuevas, jr..................................10 where can i get my covid shot?
A list of locations where many South Side residents are getting vaccinated jacqueline serrato..............................14 What chicagoans need to know jim daley................................................15 cook county jail vaccinates detainees
About 150 of the jail’s 5,000 detainees received the Moderna vaccine in the first three days kiran misra...........................................16 we haven’t built it yet
In a new book about parole, the reader walks in the shoes of the incarcerated, challenging us to understand that every prison sentence, in more ways than we think, is a life sentence. malik jackson.......................................18 the neighborhood is an image of the city
Part Three: Growth Machine kristin ostberg....................................20 shelters struggle to meet the need in a covid winter
“There’s no such thing as social distancing to me when it comes to being homeless.” madeleine parrish...............................22
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AfriCOBRA Through the Eyes of Its Members The radical Black collective’s art and politics are keenly relevant fifty years later BY CALEIGH STEPHENS
A little over fifty years after AfriCOBRA’s founding, the new book AFRICOBRA: Experimental Art Toward a School of Thought (Duke University Press, 2020) works to provide an inside view of the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, the groundbreaking Chicago arts collective. Written by founding member Wadsworth A. Jarrell, the book describes the collective’s early years, as well as its relationship to history. Springing out of a small studio space on the South Side, AfriCOBRA was deeply embedded in Black Chicago culture— representing the community they lived in as well as cultivating a larger Black aesthetic that was absent from the mainstream art scene and imagination. The book describes many of the central art pieces in AfriCOBRA shows and deftly chronicles the political mood of the sixties; how a time of change informed a revolutionary arts movement. AfriCOBRA’s objective, as detailed by its radical philosophy, was to reject Western artistic standards and create a Black arts movement borne out of the community. In the pursuit of this goal, the group’s work followed a set of principles that made its work immediately recognizable, including the use of “Cool Ade” colors, free symmetry, frontal images, and "shine.” Throughout the book, Jarrell expressed disdain for the boundaries and descriptions of AfriCOBRA’s art provided by outside writers and critics. Jarrell is interested in pieces speaking to the viewers without mediation. Many of the conversations that the group had in the early days are detailed in the work, with dialogue taking center stage in discussions of program, philosophy, and individual artworks. It is important to highlight what was said and who said it. The discussions explicate the cohering of AfriCOBRA’s artistic philosophy and pushed each artist in their creative process. In December, I spoke with Chicago-born artist and founding AfriCOBRA member Gerald Williams about the first years of the collective and his reactions to the book, and the through-lines that connect their work to our present moment. After traversing the globe for many years, Williams returned to Woodlawn in 2015 and currently lives on the South Side. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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COURTESY OF DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Why a first-person narrative on the founding of AfriCOBRA? What is the value of someone writing from the inside about the founding of this art collective? Gerald Williams: Well, you can get a perspective that you wouldn't get otherwise, because everything, everything that's been written about AfriCOBRA comes from another set of eyes, you know, so people write different things. And there are things that have occurred that have been incorrect, something as simple as the location of The Wall of Respect, for example. It was at 43rd and Langley. But I’ve seen 47th and Langley written and some other locations, so, you know, it's important where it was located. So you just kind of like extrapolate that
out and see that there's possibilities for a lot of other things being incorrect or incomplete. So, AfriCOBRA created a philosophy and set of artistic principles which informed the works that the group created. What was it like to change the way that you are painting and follow this new philosophy that you came up with other people collectively? GW: One of the first paintings I did when the five of us got together was a family eating dinner. The subject was “The Black Family.” It was addressed as being a perpetuation of the Renaissance view of portraying a group—always having to be in some kind of setting. You know, like the Last Supper or people sitting at a
ARTS lavish feast or something like that, there were not a lot of alternative viewpoints in the models that we looked at. There was the idea of maybe the best way to learn how to paint is not to look at anything else. So, we kind of tossed aside the other perspectives as much as possible. And we felt like we were reaching back in our own heritage. We look back to Africa and the kind of work that was done in Africa. Picasso and Braque and a whole bunch of other artists started studying the work of African artists, who at that time were not even called artists. Their work was not fine art, it was craft. The early attempts to go that way, to adopt African forms and ways of portraying people in the twenties and thirties here in the United States, they were dismissed as being unacceptable. I remember an early exhibition at the Harmon Foundation that was reviewed that included a lot of Black American artists, and it was looked at dismissively. Well, that didn't necessarily happen with a European artist who did virtually the same thing. So, we decided to look at the features of Black people and the work that they have produced and performed. Singers, musicians—they always have a distinctive form of expression, whether gospel music or blues or jazz. So why shouldn't we? We had a meeting where we decided to look at the work that we had done just prior to becoming members of AfriCOBRA, even before AfriCOBRA was even thought of as being an organization and we were just brainstorming and talking about what is going on in the world around us. We decided to focus on producing imagery that was positive and uplifting and not depressing or expressing depressing thoughts like slavery. So, we decided to do a painting of the Black family, which was my introduction in how not to paint. Everybody brought out a piece and we critiqued it. And ironically, everyone did a portrait of a family as a group with a man, woman, and two kids. The significance was not so much the subject, the subject was there, but how do you paint this family? It was a portrait still. So, I did a second one with the family in a group setting. It was the way in which they were
painted that was significant. The idea of a unity of the family as a unit was there and it was pretty much cliché. You know, just being honest about it, it was a cliche. It's called Say It Loud and we included wording and lettering in the work, and that is what made it distinctively different from anything else that anybody in any other culture had done. Using lettering as unbalancing, and no setting or background. It was the signature element of AfriCOBRA from that point on, and we decided that we could always work within that mode. And like everything, you know, there's an evolution that takes place. I’m interested in how dialogue and criticism functioned in the process of the collective, how that worked, how important that was. It seemed to me that that figured pretty heavily in your process and in the work itself. GW: We just started off from the perspective of artists who were living in the midst of a lot of changes that were going on and within the culture at large and our community especially. I remember one of the very early meetings where the subject of Black expression came about and how there are ways that we sing that are unique to us. The articulation and in how words are expressed and the difference in intonation and so we kind of said, well, how does something like that apply to visual arts? Are there ways that we express ourselves visually that are unique and intrinsic to Black Americans, to Black people? We have some unique sensibilities and understandings about where we came from and how all of that works itself into how we exist. And then they got elaborated upon in many ways. Was it about finding the expression of a new voice? GW: Well, not especially a new voice, the voice was always there, you know. The Black Power Movement was as much about discovery and rediscovery and inward searching as about the political implications of what Black power meant, but that was key. But it was identity and expressing that identity—clarifying the
identity and expressing it in ways that were reflective and gained some kind of universal understanding of what creative people can do. That whole period of time was about rediscovering that voice that was always there. When you look at the mainstream culture there was no voice. You know, I'm thinking about how when my generation looked at television, it was very limited. You didn't see any Black commercials until the sixties and seventies on TV and the commercials kind of reflect the whole culture. But it omitted, it didn't include a lot of the culture that I saw as I looked out my windows and, you know, walked down the street and so forth. The sixties and seventies ushered in an era where our worldview became important. Not just for the world in general, but for our own community that we don't all think alike and act alike and even have the same dreams. How did you balance trying to represent and strive towards this transnational Black aesthetic with the smaller goal of representing your own community, the people on the South Side? GW: It's something that kind of like comes from your vision—what you see, think, feel, and want to tell others about. And that maybe can lead some people to think that what they think, see and believe in and experience is not important enough to put out there for the whole world to see. And it is like the store down the street is not a “work of art” unless you bring it to the forefront as part of what you see. In a way, artists want to look at and express the city on the hill, it's bright and shiny rather than what’s down the street. And this has been the reality of mainstream culture, the beautiful architecture and beautiful gowns. That always was what filtered down and was the sort of thing that the artist ought to reflect or focus on. That paradigm was blown out of the water when we started talking about how the standards of beauty are the ones that are promoted. As opposed to our worldview, which was always, you know, put into a negative connotation. All of the existential elements that we dealt with every day were dismissed as too limiting.
What were you guys able to achieve as a collective that you wouldn't have been able to just as individual visual artists pushing the envelope? GW: Working as a collective was the key. Artists generally work alone, you know. I don't like anybody seeing anything that I did until it's finished, but we decided to just bring unfinished work and talk about it, you know, determine where is this piece going? What do you want to do with it? It was a collective of ideas, a collective of thoughts and feelings and understanding enough about our history and where we came from and the state of our own existence. Today, a collective is also perpetuating the idea that there’s strength in unity. And creating one out of many. So we forged that bonding out of a collection of thoughts, feelings, sensitivities, and products. How would you characterize the legacy of AfriCOBRA? GW: I feel much better listening to what other people think. Because I think we were the baddest things. Nobody could touch us. Nobody can touch us today. AfriCOBRA is an open-ended idea. You know, we threw all this together and said, “OK, now go home and play with it and see what you can come up with.” And that’s the legacy, I think is to challenge others to take something that is there and challenge it with your own insight and perspective and sensibilities and talent. You're not going to produce the same kind of work that we did then. Because I think we have evolved from that. I think that the legacy itself, is creating something that didn't exist before and fostering the idea of coming up with a whole new milieu. When I did a couple of art fairs when I first came back to Chicago, I had some older, original work just hanging in a booth and there were a number of people who passed by and stopped saying, “Oh, AfriCOBRA,” because they recognized that style and because we showed it in Chicago and kind of gained a reputation here. So, anybody coming through, you know, saying something about AfriCOBRA would immediately respond to something
FEBRUARY 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
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they had seen. And that was like fifty years ago. What was it like to come back to Chicago in 2015 after being away for so long? GW: You ever read the book You Can’t Go Home Again? No, I haven’t.
ILLUSTRATION OF WADSWORTH JARRELL BY ASHANTI OWUSU-BRAFI
ILLUSTRATION OF GERALD WILLIAMS BY ASHANTI OWUSU-BRAFI
6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ FEBRUARY 18, 2021
GW: It’s a novel written by Thomas Wolfe in the 1920s, 1930s. He was from the South and went to study at Harvard or Yale, one of those schools. But that idea of, “you can't go home again.” It's very real. Try it sometime. I don't know where you're from, but Chicago, it's a different world. Now, when I left, it was always kind of rough and tumble and it had that reputation and that notoriety from the early days of unpaved streets and sidewalks. It's evolved. You know, there's the glitter and gleam of the downtown, the skyscrapers, stack boxes on the Midway across from gothic edifices. But I ask myself all the time did Chicago lose more than it has gained? Because when I left in 1973 there were not 190 people being shot over the weekend. The violence is uncontrollable as it was back then, but it seems to be a lot, a lot worse. This particular neighborhood right where I live reported no shootings in the last year. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking the dog and a guy was sitting in a car, he just got shot. So, to me, there are some days it feels like déja vu. Other days it feels like things are going to get better and there's progress. And I’ve been back now for like four years and this neighborhood has one square mile area of a thousand residential structures. Twenty-five percent of them were vacant, abandoned, or whatever. Nobody is living there. Some have signs of growth, you know, even as we speak. I can point out about four or five developments going up. And I always said, well, look. I spent three years in Japan. I lived in Europe and went to Germany many times. And when I came back, I said, how could Germany and Japan be completely rebuilt to the point of being world
leaders in less than twenty-five years? They rebuilt downtown Chicago. It was never bombed. No, it was the ghettos that were encroaching upon it. Taxpaying American citizens helped to rebuild Japan and all of Europe. And here is this, this area right here on the South Side, the rubble has been removed but it’s still a war zone. I feel that I can do more by going out and picking up all of the garbage. I do that about an hour every month. I'm not saying that I'm better at picking up garbage than producing artwork but I get a great deal of inspiration doing both. The art world in this community used to be very active, you know, AfriCOBRA was born in the Woodlawn neighborhood. Wadsworth J., Barbara Jones—Barbara grew up a few doors down from where I live right now. There were a lot of artists in this area who were working, several galleries. But now there’s not even [one] gallery. Do you see any similarities between the political movement in 1968 and our present current political moment? GW: I think you have to try to think in a long-range view. You might think of them as being mileposts in a revolutionary process. In the 1960s, we were in the middle of the civil rights movement, this “Black is Power” cultural movement. And it was a period of discovery and rediscovery of what a God was behind us, and fostering the idea that that Black is not a dark, ugly thing, that it permeated our own being and existence, that Black is beautiful. That we can empower ourselves to do whatever needs to be done. As long as there's the will and the understanding and the education to work at it. The sixties built all of that. ¬ Caleigh Stephens is a writer in Hyde Park, as well as an editor, dancer, choreographer and dog walker. Their writing focuses on literary criticism, art history, and political happenings. This is their first piece for the Weekly.
ACTIVISM
Black Folks Can’t Get No Rest Generational trauma and radical activism, resilience, and joy is what often forces us into Black liberation work. BY TIFFANY WALDEN, THE TRIIBE
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ovement work is a matter of life and death for many protesters and organizers in Chicago. For a lot of Black folks, organizing begins damn near at birth and continues throughout childhood—from the moment our mothers scream for the attention of doctors who ignore their labor pains in the delivery room, to the days when we’re old enough to demand that teachers pronounce our beautifully unique names correctly, to the years we’re forced to fight to keep the city from closing our schools. On top of that, for Black children there comes that life-altering moment when they’re forced to grapple with the inevitable responsibility of their Blackness. Their innocence lost each time we heard seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin cry out for help on the 911 calls. That’s why the Black Lives Matter generation sees themselves in Trayvon Martin, similarly to how those coming of age in the Civil Rights Movement saw themselves in the tortured body of fourteen-year-old Chicago native Emmett Till. In Chicago, Black liberation work dates back to at least John Jones, a former slave and abolitionist who used the wealth he amassed as a tailor in the mid-1800s to lead anti-discriminatory efforts and host runaway slaves at his home, which was a Chicago station on the Underground Railroad. Outside of Chicago, this multi-century Black liberation work runs deep—arguably through European
colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, Nat Turner’s revolt, abolitionism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the creation of the NAACP, the Back-to-Africa movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Freedom Movement, and beyond. But that doesn’t mean that the work gets easier over time. With each Black liberation movement, organizers and protesters put their bodies on the line in the fight. Sometimes they walk away with a couple of bumps and bruises. Other times they go home with long-lasting psychological and physical wounds. Then there are times when they don’t make it home at all, since this work can also imprison or kill them. Congressman John Lewis dedicated his life to the fight for freedom. As he lay dying in his hospital bed during the heart of the Black Summer 2020 uprisings, it was clear that the movement was still in him. After reading his final words in the New York Times and realizing that he spent sixty-five years of his life—ages fifteen through eighty—in the movement, it made me wonder: is it possible for Black people to get any rest while alive?
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eremey “Mohawk” Johnson can’t get the Chicago Police Department (CPD) out of his mind. They’re the antagonists in his nightmares; vivid scenes of protesters bloodied by the wave of their batons and temporarily blinded by the fog of their pepper spray. With an electronic monitor fastened to his
left ankle for the past several months, Johnson sometimes spends hours staring at the walls of his coach house, crying whenever he has a flashback to the day of his arrest. On the afternoon of August 15, Johnson went downtown to participate in the Defund CPD & Abolish ICE protest. That evening, he disappeared, last seen in handcuffs being taken by police. His friends and fellow protesters searched tirelessly for him: they called various police precincts, called the jail, called the State’s Attorney’s Office, called anybody they could think of who may know his location. On August 16, CPD shared his mugshot and home block address on social media. Since he’s been under house arrest, he’s been worried about his fate as he faces eight counts of aggravated battery for allegedly striking a CPD officer with a skateboard at the protest. CPD released a heavily edited video of the scene and labeled Johnson and the other arrestees as agitators. Johnson said he hasn’t seen any body-camera footage from that day. “This is the first time that I’ve ever been arrested,” Johnson added. “It feels like they’re trying to make an example out of me because they want to scare other protesters. And, in an environment where they’re actively trying to scare you out of protesting, I would wager that a lot of protesters feel guilty for taking this rest.”
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amon Williams, co-founder of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, an alliance of artists and activists organizing through a creative lens to imagine and build a world without prisons and police, said, “As an organizer and a person in movement right now, of trying to figure out how to create space for rest and it always feels like there’s an impending crisis, responsibility and things to show up for.” When I spoke to Williams back on August 4, the notion of rest weighed heavily on his mind. He became politically activated during the 2014 Ferguson uprisings after studying the history of rebellions and revolutionary change in college. The street-style Ferguson rebellion reminded him of the South and West sides of Chicago, of Harvey, of Ford Heights. That connection of street thought and radical revolutionary justice inspired Williams. And he’s been working nonstop ever since to liberate Black lives in Chicago, most notably in 2016 with Freedom Square, when the #LetUsBreathe Collective camped out for forty-one days in a vacant lot across from the notorious Homan Square CPD black site, offering food, mental health resources, and their vision for a policefree world. Fast forward to May 31. Williams was slammed to the ground and repeatedly hit with batons during a movement action in Hyde Park. Similarly
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PHOTOS OF AISLINN PULLEY, JEANETTE TAYLOR, JEREMEY “MOHAWK” JOHNSON BY ALEXANDER GOULETAS
to Johnson, his friends couldn’t locate him or several other organizers—Jennifer Pagan, Thoughtpoet, and Malcolm London—who were out there with him—for hours after the mass arrest for disorderly conduct on 53rd and Lake Park. Williams spent part of the night in jail with a concussion and bruises to his head. After his release, Williams wrestled with the idea of resting to repair his body. Crippling nausea, light sensitivity, and a reduced appetite eclipsed his days. He also had to move from his home because CPD shared his mugshot and home block address on social media as well. His romantic partner, Jennifer Pagan, and friends asked him to “take it easy” in the weeks after his arrest. But how could he? For the first days of the 2020 uprisings, there were nonstop movement actions: jail supports for other arrested organizers, press conferences, more Justice for George Floyd protests, and defund CPD demonstrations. On July 17, Williams attended a Black and Indigenous solidarity rally in Grant Park, called Defund, CPD, Decolonize Zhigaagong. However, he left when the rally turned into a march to a nearby Christopher Columbus statue,
because he figured protesters would try to take down the statue and that police would respond with violence. “I would do the rally. [But] I’m not really doing any marching right now,” Williams told me. “I intentionally leave things where I know there’ll be some type of standoff between cops—not only to protect myself, but also recognizing that there’s, like, a level of fear that’s been taken away from me that’s, like, kind of unhealthy. I feel like a kid that doesn’t care that the stove is hot anymore.” On July 24, at the Freedom Square anniversary rally to defund CPD, Williams didn’t seem like his usual self. He stayed to himself under a tent. After giving a powerful speech, he went back to the tent and barely engaged with anyone in attendance. When a march through North Lawndale ensued, he didn’t join. “It’s been a struggle to try to figure out how to rest and how to be in hiatus,” Williams said. “Because, you know, I am in it for the long haul.”
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lderwoman Jeanette Taylor didn’t ask to do this work. She wouldn’t have run for office in 2019 had her predecessors done what they were supposed to do for the people
of the 20th Ward, which includes most of the Woodlawn, Washington Park, Englewood and Back of the Yards neighborhoods. Three of the 20th Ward’s last four aldermen have been indicted, including Willie Cochran, who served from 2007 to 2019. “I was forced to run,” Taylor told me. “I’m sometimes the token Black girl, or the black sheep, when it comes to policies and decision-making because I make my decisions based upon what the constituents need and want—not based upon seeing who is going to fund my campaign and give me a check.” Taylor had her first child at age fifteen. In the early 1990s, when Taylor was nineteen, her mother encouraged her to join the Local School Council (LSC) at her child’s school. “And believe you me, I didn’t want to do it. Because I saw the b.s. my mother had to go through,” she explained. She’d grown up watching her mother be undervalued and silenced as a Black woman working in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) while also serving on the PTA. Throughout the early 2000s, while serving on the LSC at Mollison
Elementary, which she also attended as a child, Taylor started to get involved in the school more and more, learning about LSC policies and attending training sessions held by Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO). “I thought it would be PTA and LSC meetings then I could go home at night and rest,” Taylor said. But as she dived deeper into the work, later joining KOCO and organizing around education inequality, she would wind up taking home the anxiety, frustrations, and hardships of others in the community. “I’m worried about the elder who, to her, $56 is her medicine or her meals for the month. I take that home to bed with me,” Taylor said. Simultaneously, Taylor began to see her Bronzeville neighborhood, often referred to as the Low End, change beginning in 2007. Her family lived on 45th and Calumet, and she witnessed outsiders coming into the community, buying up property while public schools closed. When new landmarks such as the Harold Washington Cultural Center opened, Taylor said property taxes increased and it became too expensive for her to live there. Her family moved
ACTIVISM to Woodlawn in 2010, but then word spread about plans to build the Obama Presidential Center in nearby Jackson Park. She worried her family would be displaced again. “And I was, like,’No. No. No. I’m not moving again,’” Taylor said. “And I just got the will to stand up and fight. And the more I started to stand up in these meetings, the more people would come up to me after the meetings, like, ‘You right. You right.’” When Taylor got into Black liberation work, she knew it would be tough but she didn’t know how taxing it would be on her body. In 2015, she led a hunger strike for Dyett High School, where a group of parents and school activists went on a liquids-only diet for thirty-four days to protest the closing of Black schools. Right after the hunger strike, Taylor had a stroke. She had just turned 40 years old, and was beginning to feel like this work wasn’t worth it anymore. “That was kind of my wake up call, like, your body will let you know when you had enough,” Taylor said. She decided not to give up when she met a Black woman at an out-of-town conference, who cried and thanked Taylor for putting her life on the line during the hunger strike.
G
enerational trauma and radical activism, resilience, and joy is what often forces us into Black liberation work. Similarly to Taylor, Black Lives Matter Chicago co-founder Aislinn Pulley’s parents brought her into this work. As a young girl, Pulley would flip through the pages of her mother’s Black Power Movement picture book. With every photo of a Black child hosed down by police, she wondered, “How could they do that? Why would they do that?” Then, in sixth grade, she learned just how deeply racism is ingrained into the fabric of policing when she wrote her history fair project on the 1969 police assassination of Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton and Deputy Mark Clark. For Pulley, witnessing thousands of people take the streets of Chicago during the 2020 Black Summer uprisings felt like a culmination of decades of organizing against policing, police killings, and police
torture. In 2012, following the police murder of Rekia Boyd, Pulley helped lead regular demonstrations at Chicago Police Board meetings. Back then, she remembers seeing only a handful of people at their movement actions. More people caught wave of the movement in Chicago in 2014 with the police murder of Laquan McDonald. By that time, Pulley had cofounded the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter, which made a nationwide rallying cry in cities across the country with the memorable tagline “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in response to the police murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson. “The amount of violence that is normalized needs to become exposed,” Pulley explained. “There are so many stories that we all have. We just need to keep telling them.” For Pulley, connecting the dots looks like reparations for the survivors of the former CPD Detective and Commander Jon Burge’s torture ring. Her organizing led to the historic 2015 Reparations Ordinance for the survivors and their families, and also launched the Chicago Torture Justice Center, where she serves as executive director today. Additionally, connecting the dots includes understanding the link between over-policing marginalized communities and poverty, underemployment, education and wealth inequalities, and gun violence. In the midst of the 2020 Black Summer, Pulley lost two cousins—Jason Pulley, thirty-nine, and Solomon Pulley, seventeen—to gun violence. “Most of us are compelled into this movement, into this work, because we either see ourselves or we see our loved ones in all the people who have been killed and people who have been unjustly incarcerated [or] tortured,” Pulley said. “We do this because we are forced to do this, because there is no other choice. So get the police to stop killing people, and there will be a whole lot more calm on the streets. Get CPD out of CPS. I mean, the answers are simple. Redistribute the resources, and we won’t have these uprisings.”
I
n real time, Williams said, organizers within the BLM movement are trying to be intentional about healing from the abuse, marginalization, and erasure
of women and femmes present in past movement spaces, and instead working to regenerate how gender and sexuality works within liberatory movements. Black women have been the backbone of the multi-century Black liberation movement; however, they’re often erased from the historical narrative—or silenced altogether. “What we have seen throughout cities across the country as this movement is growing is that cis-het [cigendered and heterosexual] Black men carry a lot of emotional trauma,” Williams said. “It’s teaching us that, more than anything, our movement is a movement against gendered and sexual violence, intersected with racism and white supremacy.” On August 19, a Chicago organizer who goes by the name JuJu Bae shared on social media that she was sexually assaulted by fellow activist and rapper Malcolm London in 2018. “After 2 years of carrying this burden in my body, I’m choosing to share my truth publicly on my relationship to @MalcolmLondon in hopes to inspire serious reflection, intention + accountability to each other-in how we handle rape + sexual assault in our communities,” she wrote in her Twitter post. I reached out to JuJu Bae for an interview to get her perspective on this topic of work and rest within movement spaces, but I didn’t receive a response. JuJu Bae’s story sparked much conversation among the movement community on social media. This wasn’t the first time Black women within the movement had called out London—or other figures in Black Chicago movement and cultural spaces—for sexual harm. Even Chance the Rapper made a post on Twitter: “Tw: Also I hope all of Malcolm London’s victims get their justice. At this point there are too many stories about dude, and the severity of each one is getting worse. I can’t vouch for him at all and hope all these stories get amplified.” When people who come from underserved communities enter into movement spaces, they are forced to build the resources, policies, and support systems that the government, school systems and community-atlarge have failed to provide. As the current movement calls to defund the
police, organizers are often tasked with reimagining what society can be. But on the journey to Black liberation there’s not always a quick and easy solution to preventing intracommunity violence and sexual violence. In the case of Black liberation work, patriarchy is pervasive and, when coupled with gender violence, is debilitating to the movement. Williams said it breaks his heart to see survivors, or other women and femmes, do the labor of accountability for those who harmed them, or leave movement spaces altogether because they’re triggered each time they have to be in spaces with those who harmed them. As a Black trans woman living in Chicago, Zola Chatman has experienced the intersection of gendered violence, racism and white supremacy up close. Chatman entered this work at age nineteen. While existing as a Black trans artist, she liked going to the YMCA and being in community with other activists within Black Youth Project (BYP), but she often felt out of place. “Theoretically, Black people shouldn’t be within this country period,” Chatman told thousands of people at the Drag March for Change. She was referring to the start of the U.S. slave trade in 1619. “But also, figuratively, I shouldn’t have to come and relive traumas and experiences to validate and advocate for my own existence,” she added. “At the end of the day, I am an activist—not because I really want to be—but because I have to, because I want to see not even the next generation of Black trans women, but the current generation of Black trans women be able to grow and develop and live and thrive and survive.” Although each of the organizers I spoke with witnessed some great movement wins during the 2020 Black Summer uprisings, they believe there’s still more Black liberation work to be done. ¬ A longer version of this story was originally published in thetriibe.com. Tiffany Walden is co-founder of The TRiiBE. This is her first piece for the Weekly.
FEBRUARY 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
A History of School Desegregation in the Far Southwest Side
COURTESY OF THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Scottsdale and Ashburn experienced the wrath of white supremacy against a busing program to integrate schools like Bogan High School in the 70s BY ISMAEL CUEVAS, JR.
TW: racial slurs, violence, death due to racism
D
uring the summer of 1997 my family moved from Gage Park to the Scottsdale neighborhood on Chicago’s far Southwest Side. Twenty years before my family became one of the first Mexican families on the block, the beast of ignorance roamed the streets of Ashburn and Scottsdale as the area became the scene of horrific demonstrations against the integration of Black students in its eight public schools, including Stevenson Elementary and Bogan High School, which I attended. Over time these historical events from the summer of ‘77 have been largely obscured and untold to new generations of Scottsdale and Chicago residents. 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
While completing my graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, I began to research the history of my neighborhood for a class project. Far away from downtown, neighborhoods on the Southwest Side are often ignored in popular Chicago discourse. As I spent days meticulously searching the library archives and digital databases, I finally found newspaper clippings on the neighborhood. I scoured for the perspective of Black parents and civil rights activists and found a few quotes in comparison to the dozens of interviews and quotes from mainly white women against school integration. That summer of 1977, white parents from Scottsdale and Ashburn elevated their segregationist views to local and national media reporting on the
¬ FEBRUARY 18, 2021
nationwide busing movement, in which public school students were bused to schools outside their local district in an effort to desegregate them. Matthew F. Delmont, author of Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation, explains that “busing failed to more fully desegregate public schools because school officials, politicians, the courts, and the media gave precedence to the desires of white parents over the civil rights of black students,” allowing parents not just in Chicago, but in various northern cities to support white schools and neighborhoods without using explicitly familiar racist language. As the Chicago Board of Education attempted to change the school boundaries of Bogan and allow the first Black students into its campus,
white mothers picketed and disrupted meetings with elected and municipal leaders. The Bogan Community Council (BCC) planned to boycott integration efforts by “keeping their children out of eight area schools'' including Bogan, Stevenson, Dawes, Michelson, Hancock, Crerar, Owen, and Owen’s Parkview branch. In a resolution they sent to thenIllinois Governor James R. Thompson, CPS School Superintendent Joseph P. Hannon, the CPS school board, and federal officials, the BCC wrote that if the board approved the busing plan it was “conspiring to eliminate the last vestiges of white residency from the City of Chicago.” Mary Cvack, a vocal antiintegrationist of the Bogan ParentTeachers Association and later education
HISTORY chairman of the Ashburn Civic Association, told leaders in 1967 that “these recommendations [to integrate] spell the demise of the neighborhood school system... we have to anchor whites in the city.” "Whitelash" had arrived in Scottsdale and the repercussions of these actions would culminate in the mass protests and violent events of 1977 that led up to the busing of Black children from overcrowded schools to all-white schools in Scottsdale and Ashburn. Cvack told the BCC in a room of 750 people, “We are being discriminated against as a white community with the use of our white schools to alleviate overcrowding in black schools, knowing that there are seats in other schools in the black community.” She reminded the crowd that the 1977 busing plan was a “rerun of 1963,” when the first proposals of transferring students from overcrowded schools to underutilized schools were floated. Cvack’s segregationist militancy played into the irrational fears white people had about Black people moving into their communities. She said, “We demonstrated [against integration], we took to the streets and voiced our opposition because it [busing] would have destroyed our stable community.” The call to action was successful. According to an August 6, 1977 Tribune article, ninetyeight percent of students skipped classes at Bogan and seven elementary schools in the [far] Southwest Side neighborhoods. At the time, virulent racist protests were happening across many Chicago neighborhoods. In the midst of a local media spectacle, Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder of Operation PUSH, personally escorted a group of Black students from a severely overcrowded Barton in the Auburn Gresham community to Stevenson. Jackson was heckled and spat on by white supremacists, including a group of white mothers dubbed the “Bogan Broads,” who led militant anti-busing actions across the far Southwest Side. In 1965, civil rights advocates in Chicago filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Education arguing that the Chicago Board of Education violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Delmont wrote that activists argued that the Board had deliberately segregated the city’s public school system. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) briefly withheld $30 million in federal funds for probable noncompliance. But after facing backlash from Mayor Richard J. Daley, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and other elected officials, HEW withdrew the case, quickly “exposing the limits of federal authority in the face of school segregation in the North.” On August 5, 1966, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. organized a march in the Marquette Park neighborhood, three miles north of Scottsdale, to demand that properties be accessible to everyone regardless of their race. In a now-famous photograph, King fell on his knee as a mob of 700 white protestors hurled rocks that hit him on the head. King told the Tribune, “I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen here in Chicago.” Marlene Buckner, whose eightand six-year-old daughters, Toyia and Michelle, would be part of the voluntary busing plan, alluded to this widespread hostility nine years later in 1977, when she described the anti-busing protests: “down South, Blacks and whites are going to school in peace. Here we are so backward, we are fighting a 1950 and 1960 issue. And Chicago is supposed to be liberal.” Dionne Danns explains in her recently published book, Crossing Segregated Boundaries: Remembering Chicago School Desegregation, that “antibusing boycotts symbolized the desire to maintain segregation and reaffirm racial boundaries” and they regarded “busing as a symbolic affront to their desires to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods.” Chicago’s busing plan would “permit pupils in 15 severely overcrowded elementary schools to transfer to 51 schools with space. Five of the 51 schools eligible to receive children are in the Bogan [Scottsdale and Ashburn] area,” according to a June 1977 Tribune article. The plan was also described as
“Forty-four years later as I retrace the bus ride from Barton to Stevenson in my car, I look to see if there are any historical markers or plaques commemorating the success of civil rights activists at integrating Stevenson or Bogan, or even an honorary street sign for Mellaine Turner. Nothing.”
COURTESY OF THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
FEBRUARY 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11
HISTORY
COURTESY OF THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
a “permissive transfer” program that, in addition to relieving overcrowding, would increase racial integration in receiving schools. In a later Tribune article, Mrs. Buckner is quoted saying: “Blacks have fought too hard for rights to give them up without a fight … we must stop accepting the worst for our children.” Later during an August 5, 1977 BCC meeting, members of the council voted to boycott the first day of school and every Friday if the Board of Education persisted in its integration plans. Over 600 people were present in the meeting when community resident Ann Frank told the audience they “will not accept any desegregation plans.” At stake for these parents was the placement of “270 students from two all-Black schools, Raster and Barton, to transfer into six Bogan [Scottsdale and Ashburn] area elementary schools.” By the time of the August meeting only seven Black students had signed up for the program. Betty Barlow, another community member exclaimed, “That’s seven too many. It would establish a precedent.” White parents on the far Southwest Side had been successful at fighting various student transfer plans since 1963. Their pressure was showing some success when Supt. Hannon 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
indicated to the Tribune that was willing “to back down on a proposal to place allwhite Bogan in a predominantly Black administrative district.” Rev. Jackson stood with parents of bused children and told members of the press that he pressured Governor Thompson to send letters to parents of students who would be bused that local governmental agencies would provide safety for their children. On August 25, 1977, city and school officials announced the “formation of a task force of school, police, and city agencies who will work to insure the safety of bused children.” Jackson later said at the press conference that “there are many white persons who live in that [Bogan] area who are not subject to demagoguery.” Pat Johnson, president of District 20 community council, a predominantly Black student school district on the South Side, told the Tribune on August 26 that her daughter's school, Barton, was severely overcrowded, with sixty students in one classroom with two teachers. She originally didn’t intend to have her daughter participate in the busing program to Stevenson, but after seeing all the demonstrations against it, she said, “there must be something good in those schools if they don’t want us in it.”
¬ FEBRUARY 18, 2021
Even a prominent white leader in Ashburn-area school affairs wanted to remain anonymous when she spoke to the Tribune on August 28 because she feared “getting a brick through [her] front window.” She drew a map of segregationist views by neighborhood when she described that to the east of Pulaski Road along 79th Street, roughly in the Wrightwood and Ashburn neighborhood, are the “agitators” who “are getting all the publicity for their protests against school integration” and to the west in the Scottsdale neighborhood are the “passive people who prefer to ‘mind [their] own’ business and to refrain from any militant action.” She also identified the women who led the anti-integration protests, mostly white women in their 40s and 50s who have sons and daughters attending Bogan. In one of their school affairs meetings with Supt. Hannon, they asked for a three-year moratorium on busing because it would “permit the selling of property for some people before Blacks [came] into the area schools” and because Black students have a “different culture … a different lifestyle” and would not be “able to maintain the standards of education” for white children. The anonymous person confirmed Johnson’s
worries about the safety of Black children being bused in, saying, “If I were Black, I would think twice about sending my child here [Scottsdale]. I think their fears are very genuine.” A week before the first day of school, the Parent-Teacher Associations of Bogan, Stevenson, and Hancock (now a middle school extension of Stevenson) wrote a letter authorized by Bogan PTA president Joan Nykel to Supt. Hannon, asking for “assurances their children will be protected from harassment or physical attacks” and the concern of “potential intimidation of whites against other white students” in the first week of classes. All three of the PTAs were worried about white on white violence, as they “feared their children would be harassed or injured, not by Blacks, but by other whites in the Bogan area.” Nancy Ragaikis, president of the Hancock PTA, was also concerned that police presence would lead to an impact on the student’s learning environment, and told the Tribune “we certainly don’t want a police state.” She also pointed out the “lawlessness and illegality of the [anti-integration] boycott” endorsed by the BCC.
A
fter a hot summer of boycotts, threats, and negotiations, the time to integrate and reduce overcrowding in public schools had finally arrived. September 7, 1977, was the first day of classes for Chicago Public Schools students and the Board of Education issued “433 press badges to reporters, photographers, and television technicians” for a media spectacle that reached local and national news outlets. The Washington Post reported that “inspired by weeks of impassioned hyperbole on the television screens and by daily front-page treatment in the city's competitive newspapers, the early-rising reporters descended like an army on the three-square-mile Bogan High School area for the opening of school.” Four hundred and ninety six—less than thirty percent of eligible students— were bused to schools throughout the city that day. Although Supt. Hannon declared the first day of school as a “grand beginning” and the Tribune’s front page
HISTORY headline was “School busing passes test,” it certainly was nowhere near a success story for Black students. Following a prayer breakfast organized by Operation PUSH, Jackson escorted a few children from Barton in his car, followed by a CTA bus that was led and trailed by several Chicago police squad cars and carried twentyseven Black students and one white student from Byford Elementary (it has since been demolished; Brunson Math & Science Specialty school occupies the former site) to Stevenson. The Black students were greeted by white supremacists picketing in front of the school near the intersection of 80th and Kostner Avenue. Dozens of riot officers and policemen lined the street, preventing the agitators from blocking the road. Twenty-four-year-old Robert Lang, from Niles, was arrested for heckling and spitting in the direction of Jackson as he and the students descended from the bus. Pictures from the Chicago Sun-Times show adults and teens holding signs that read, “Give them bananas, not our schools,” “Official Bogan Bigot,” “They’ve take our rights, they’ve broken our rules, they’ve ruined our neighborhood, and they’ll ruin our schools,” “Italians Hate N******, Polish Hate N******, Irish Hate N******”. Some protesters placed an effigy of a person with a black bag over its head and bananas tied to its wrists atop a No Parking sign. Parents carried out their promises of boycott by keeping 150 of the 613 pupils registered home from school that day. Shortly after noon, a bomb threat was reported at Stevenson, but police found nothing after searching the building. In a true gaslight moment, Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic told reporters “the most important thing is what happened today—an uneventful opening.” By the end of the first week of school, protestors had marched to the Stevenson branch after being threatened with arrest by the 8th District police commander due to their picket line outside Stevenson. Imitating tactics from Black freedom fighters, twenty-two people blocked the eastbound intersection of 79th and Kostner. Some had the word “resist” written on their arms and foreheads,
others yelled at police: “We are on our property. We paid for it with our taxes.” The police continued to give orders of dispersal but made no arrests. Torches illuminated the sky, and hundreds of people sang patriotic songs and chanted racist taunts as they marched down commercial streets in a “torchlight parade” organized by the Bogan Community Council on the Sunday before the second week of school. About 1,000 people attended this quintessential expression of white supremacy, which ended with eleven people being arrested. Among them was Joyce Winter, one of the leaders of the Ashburn Civic Association. Organizers hung and burned effigies of Supt. Hannon, state school superintendent Joseph M. Cronin, and Edward A. Welling Jr., the school board's desegregation project manager. Additionally, four people were seriously injured when two Black drivers drove into crowds of protestors as they attempted to flee the rock pelts. On the second Monday, Black children continued to be terrorized by white adults and teenagers as they exited Stevenson. Taunts such as “N***** go home!,” “We don’t want to integrate,” and “I wish I were an Alabama trooper”—in reference to the May 1963 incidents of police brutality in Birmingham toward Black families participating in MLKs business boycott—were shouted at the Black pupils as they boarded the bus to go back home. Six police officers had to guard the school bus and wait for reinforcements as a mob of sixty people prevented the bus from leaving. The New York Times featured a picture of a mother, Mary DeLuca, being arrested for disorderly conduct and carried away by Chicago police. She and her daughter, also arrested, lived at 80th and Kilpatrick, half a mile away from the elementary school. In the evening, two boys aged thirteen and fourteen were named in a juvenile petition for mob action along with six adults taken into custody for injuring a Black family in a car and damaging six other cars of Black drivers with rocks and objects along 79th Street. Two of the seventeen-year-olds taken into custody that day would be around sixty today.
The apex of white supremacist violence came on the second Tuesday. Outside Bogan 500 students held the largest protest against school integration. About 300 students were threatened with suspension from Bogan for walking out of school, according to the NY Times, some of whom threw rocks and harmful objects at cars on 79th Street; another thirtythree students were arrested for inciting other students to join them in pelting rocks at police officers. Chicago police superintendent James Rochford told the press that “young thugs and hoodlums are about to take over our streets ...we are going to be reasonable, but we are not going to tolerate law breakers.” Rochford allegedly also said the violent demonstrations are “the expressions of young people” and accused the media for “distorting all the issues.” Joe and Helen Turner never imagined that once their daughter stepped inside the school bus with her brother Marvin it would be the last time they saw her alive. Mellaine Turner, a seven-year-old Black student participating in the Stevenson busing program became a victim of racial terror. “Go back, go back, go back where you belong!” dozens of white kids shouted as a bus carrying eighty-four Black students arrived at the elementary school. The Tribune omitted the story but both the Freeport Journal-Standard and the Galesburg Register-Mail reported that Mellaine was shaking and crying as she went to the principal's office with chest pains at 10am. Around 8pm the Wyler Children’s Hospital in Hyde Park pronounced her dead due to an apparent sickle cell crisis. Dr. Earl Fredrick, a spokesman for the Midwest Association for Sickle Cell Anemia, said at the time that if a child is “stressed enough, it is possible that such an event [with racial slurs and taunting] could trigger an attack. That it is likely, I wouldn’t want to say.” A cardiologist who asked to remain anonymous said the protest could have “created the atmosphere for the attack. The disease obviously did the rest.” Hellen Turner told Operation PUSH that her daughter's last words were, “Go back, go back, go back.” Jackson and his team called for a news conference. As word of Mellaine's
death got back to Scottsdale, youth and adult segregationists chanted “Hooray for sickle cell!” Forty-four years later as I retrace the bus ride from Barton to Stevenson in my car, I look to see if there are any historical markers or plaques commemorating the success of civil rights activists at integrating Stevenson or Bogan, or even an honorary street sign for Mellaine Turner. Nothing. From third to eighth grade, I walked through the same doors at Stevenson as those brave children. Never once did any teacher or administrator teach us about the historical significance Scottsdale had in the national struggle to integrate schools. Whether the omission is intentional or not, it is time that this history be recognized, so that current and future generations may learn from it. The fight to desegregate was not only fought in the distant deep South but was a struggle nationwide, including in our very own Chicago neighborhoods. ¬ Ismael Cuevas is the lead advisor for archival and historical research for the upcoming documentary SOUTHEAST: a city within a city. Ish was raised in Scottsdale but now resides in the Pilsen neighborhood. He studied Latinx history at UT-Austin and political science at UW-Madison. This is his first piece for the Weekly.
FEBRUARY 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13
HEALTH
Where Can I Get My COVID Shot? BY JACQUELINE SERRATO
T
he following locations are where many South Side residents eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine are getting vaccinated. Most sites require you to schedule an appointment on their website or by phone. Two popular online booking tools are MyChart.com and ZocDoc.com, and some residents who have been through the process say it’s helpful to show up in person and ask to be put on a waiting list (please stay home if you present COVID-19 symptoms or suspect you have been exposed). Check our website for an interactive map. ¬ Know of a vaccination site we missed? Email editor@southsideweekly.com. Roseland Hospital 45 W. 111th St.
Arturo Velazquez Westside Technical Institute 2800 S. Western Ave.
Provident Hospital 500 E. 51st St.
Esperanza Health Center 2911 W. 47th St. 6057 S. Western Ave.
Stroger Hospital 1969 Ogden Ave. UChicago Medicine 5841 S. Maryland Ave.
Howard Brown Health 641 W. 63rd St. 1525 E. 55th St.
Rush University Medical Center 1620 W. Harrison St.
Ruth M. Rothstein CORE Center 2020 W. Harrison St.
Alivio Medical Center 966 W. 21st St.
Pui Tak Center
UI Health 525 S. Racine Ave.
City Colleges
2216 S. Wentworth Ave.
Lawndale Christian Health Center 3860 Ogden Ave. Jesse Brown VA Medical Center 820 S. Damen Ave.
Kennedy-King College 6301 S. Halsted St.
Malcolm X College 1900 W. Jackson Blvd.
Richard J. Daley College 7500 S. Pulaski Rd.
Olive-Harvey College 10001 S. Woodlawn Ave. 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ FEBRUARY 18, 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY GABY FEBLAND
Oak Street Health 3348 W. 87th St. 1715 E. 95th St. 4327 S. Archer Ave. 4318 S. State St. 850 W. 63rd St. 3010 W. 26th St. 3046 W. 127th St. Costco 1530 S. Ashland Ave. Walmart 10900 S. Doty Ave. 7535 S. Ashland Ave. 4720 S. Cottage Grove Ave. 2551 W. Cermak Rd. 8331 S. Stewart Ave. Walgreens 3610 E. 106th St. 3843 W. 47th St. 2345 W. 103rd St. 11 E. 75th St. 3401 W. Roosevelt Rd. 5874 S. Archer Ave. 4700 S. Halsted St. 7150 W. Archer Ave. 1616 E. 87th St. 5036 S. Cottage Grove Ave. 1931 W. Cermak Ave. 501 W. Roosevelt Rd. 11833 S. Western Ave.
7111 S. Western Ave. 7109 S. Jeffrey Blvd. 2 E. Roosevelt Rd. 111 S. Halsted St. 3405 S. King Dr. 1554 E. 55th St. 6016 W. 63rd St. 1633 W. 95th St. 833 W. 115th St. 650 W. 63rd St. 4385 S. Archer Ave. 7045 S. Pulaski Rd. 4710 S. Western Ave. 6315 S. Kedzie Ave. 3000 S. Halsted St. 1926 W. 35th St. 1533 E. 67th St. 4005 W. 26th St. 3045 W. 26th St. 1320 E. 47th St. 316 W. Cermak Rd. 9148 S. Commercial Ave. 5435 S. Kedzie Ave. 1614 W. 47th St. 5414 S. Archer Ave. 11801 S. Avenue O 8628 S. Cottage Grove Ave. 7335 S. Ashland Ave. 4720 S. Cottage Grove Ave. 2551 W. Cermak Rd. 8331 S. Stewart Ave.
HEALTH
COVID-19 Vaccine Q&A What Chicagoans Need to Know BY JIM DALEY
ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA MASON
What if I’m pregnant? Earlier this month Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said that more than 20,000 pregnant women have been vaccinated against COVID-19 and there were “no red flags.” Data is still limited, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found no pregnancy risk associated with the Moderna vaccine in animal trials. If you can, talk to your OB-GYN about getting the vaccine.
Who should get vaccinated? Everyone who is willing and able to. Vaccinating as many people as possible will help prevent COVID-19 from spreading further. It’s an important step to stopping the pandemic. How can Chicago residents get vaccinated? Currently people in phases 1A and 1B qualify for vaccination in Chicago; this group includes people sixty-five and older as well as healthcare workers and other frontline essential workers (see table above for specifics). If you are in a group that is currently eligible for a vaccine, you can register to get vaccinated by appointment at one of the city’s public sites on the website zocdoc.com/vaccine. If you have a primary care provider, or if you’ve gotten other vaccines at a hospital in the past, contact them first. On
February 11, the White House started an effort to also make vaccines available at certain pharmacies. How do the vaccines work? The two COVID-19 vaccines currently approved for use by the FDA are made by the Pfizer and Moderna pharmaceutical companies. Both vaccines are administered in two doses several weeks apart. The first dose introduces harmless pieces of a dead coronavirus to your immune system so it can develop antibodies that will recognize and kill the virus if it infects you again. The second dose, or booster, acts like a “reminder” to strengthen immune response. Johnson & Johnson has this month applied for FDA approval for a single-dose vaccine for COVID-19; if approved it should be available in March.
How do I keep track of which vaccine I’ve gotten? When you get your first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, the health provider who administered it should give you a health record called a vaccination card. The card includes your name, birthdate, which vaccine you got, where and when you were vaccinated, and when to come back for your second dose. If you were initially vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine your second dose must also be from Pfizer; if you were initially vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine, your second dose must also be from Moderna. Should I get vaccinated if I have had COVID-19 already? Yes. Getting vaccinated can help ensure your immune system will be able to mount a strong response if you are infected with COVID again.
I have a compromised immune system—should I get vaccinated? If you are taking immunosuppressant medication, your immune response to the vaccine might be lower than in healthy people. But in December, Fauci said, “it would be recommended that these people do get vaccinated.” If you can, talk to your healthcare provider first. Should I be worried about side effects or an allergic reaction to the vaccine? Side effects from vaccinations are common—especially in the second dose of a two-shot vaccine—and typically mean your immune system has recognized the virus and is mounting a defense. Common side effects to the COVID-19 vaccines include fatigue, headache, and pain in the arm where the shot was given. Allergic reactions to COVID-19 vaccines have been extremely rare. The CDC found about one allergic reaction per 100,000 doses administered, or 0.001 percent. All of those reactions occurred within fifteen minutes of getting the vaccine.
FEBRUARY 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15
HEALTH
Cook County Jail Starts Vaccinating Detainees About 150 of the jail's 5,000 detainees received the Moderna vaccine in the first three days.
ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA MASON
Can the existing vaccines protect against new variants of COVID? The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were developed before the new variants of COVID-19 cropped up in Great Britain, South Africa, and Brazil, but early results indicate they still convey some protection against them. Two vaccines currently awaiting FDA approval, made by manufacturers Novavax and Janssen, also appear to protect against severe illness from COVID variants. Pfizer and Moderna have both reported their vaccines offer some protection against the South African variant as well; in clinical trials, AstraZeneca’s vaccine did not. If I get vaccinated, can I still catch COVID-19? There is a small chance of that happening, but your likelihood of developing symptomatic COVID-19 after being vaccinated is much lower. So far, the vaccines have successfully prevented anyone fully vaccinated from developing the kind of severe symptoms that could lead to hospitalization or death. But because there’s a risk you can still catch COVID-19 and pass it on even though you’ve been vaccinated, you should continue to wear a mask and practice social distancing until the pandemic is over. ¬
16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
BY KIRAN MISRA
O
n February 1, authorities started vaccinating people incarcerated in Cook County Jail for COVID-19, beginning with a small number of the most vulnerable residents. Approximately 150 of the more than 5,000 people detained in the jail had been vaccinated in the first three days of vaccine administration. Vaccinations for guards and staff at the jail started on January 20. Chicago receives its allotment of vaccines directly from the federal government and has a vaccine prioritization and distribution plan independent from the state’s. When Chicago entered phase 1b of vaccination on January 25, the city prioritized people incarcerated in the jail as phase 1b recipients, along with all other Chicagoans living in non-healthcare residential settings. This inclusion of incarcerated people in Chicago in phase 1b aligns with Illinois’s vaccine distribution prioritization plan, which also categorizes incarcerated people as phase 1b recipients. “We have been planning for months and have started with our highest-risk patients,” said Caryn Stancik, chief communications officer for Cook County Health and Cermak Health Services, the clinic in charge of administering vaccinations in the jail. “Ultimately, we look forward to offering vaccinations to all interested patients.” Vaccines are being distributed unit-by-unit in the jail, starting with units designated for incarcerated people with chronic health conditions. Unlike
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vaccinations in the outside community, those incarcerated in Cook County Jail do not need to be more than sixty-five years old to be eligible for vaccination. All jail residents are eligible for vaccination at this stage. Vaccine education and administration are occurring simultaneously in the jail, given frequent changes in living units for the incarcerated population and evolving confidence in the vaccine within jail walls, officials said. To assuage detainees’ concerns about the vaccine, healthcare providers are providing in-person education in each housing unit. Immediately afterwards, incarcerated residents can express their interest in receiving the vaccine—at which point providers retrieve refrigerated doses of the vaccine from the jail’s onsite pharmacy and administer them—or decline to receive it. Written educational materials have also been distributed and posted throughout the jail in Spanish and English. Leadership at Cook County
Health and the Illinois Department of Health jointly decided to administer the Moderna vaccine to those incarcerated in Cook County Jail. The Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) will also be administering the Moderna vaccine to its residents, allowing for continuity of vaccination if someone initially incarcerated in Cook County jail receives their first vaccine dose in the jail, but is transferred to an IDOC facility before receiving the second dose. If someone is released from the jail after receiving their first dose, but before receiving their second, they will maintain priority status for vaccination and will be eligible to receive the second dose on schedule. Like vaccine recipients in Chicago at large, people in the jail will receive a vaccination card once vaccinated and educational material on community and Cermak Health clinics where they will be able to receive the second vaccine dose if released. If, at any point, someone incarcerated in the jail who refused vaccination
ILLUSTRATION BY ELLIE MEJÍA
HEALTH changes their mind, they will receive the vaccine, whether they make that decision days or months after their unit has been vaccinated. Cermak Health Services is still determining how to vaccinate new admittees to the jail, given that many bond out within a day. Currently, 5,470 people are incarcerated in Cook County Jail—about the same number as when the jail was the country’s top coronavirus hotspot. The number of detainees has increased by over 1,300 since last summer, when a targeted decarceration campaign put pressure on the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office to reduce the jail’s population. At its lowest point in May 2020, the jail’s population dipped to 4,026 detainees. Over the last year, ten people have died of COVID-19 while incarcerated in Cook County Jail. On January 17, José Villa, who had been incarcerated in the jail for nearly two years, died after being diagnosed with COVID-19. He was eighty-four years old. On December 23, Theodore Becker, who had been
incarcerated in the jail for eight years, died after testing positive for COVID-19 while detained in the jail. Becker was sixty-four. A federal class-action lawsuit demanding the release of people incarcerated in the jail that was filed in April 2020 is still pending. In response to the lawsuit, the Court of the Northern District of Illinois ordered Sheriff Tom Dart to strengthen social-distancing measures and sanitation at the jail. When the Sheriff ’s Office appealed the decision, claiming that necessary measures were already in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the federal judge disagreed, stating, “staying the injunction would permit the Sheriff to lift measures and thereby again place the health of detained persons at serious risk. That risk cannot be discounted based on the Sheriff 's assurances alone. Again, a number of the measures he took were instituted only after the Court's [temporary restraining order] or preliminary injunction.” Nearly a year after the first
COVID-19 case was diagnosed in the jail, those incarcerated there say that conditions within the walls continue to facilitate the spread of the disease and make it impossible for residents to protect themselves—making vaccinations all the more imperative. “They have us in dorms, there is no social distance,” says Marion Johnson, who contracted COVID-19 while she was incarcerated in the jail in December 2020. “They’re lacking the proper soap, the hygiene products are not at all antibacterial, the masks that they give last a day and are very cheap. They had sixteen to twenty people to a dorm, it’s just horrible. There’s nothing you really can do in there.” Only after days of displaying symptoms and experiencing respiratory distress was Johnson hospitalized and transferred from the jail to Stroger Hospital, where she recovered from the virus. Vaccinations in Cook County Jail have the potential to affect the trajectory
of the virus’s spread throughout the city and curb infections across Chicago, because in addition to released detainees who may carry the virus, vendors and staff working in the jail travel in and out of the facility daily, potentially carrying the virus to neighborhoods across the city. While COVID-19 testing upon admission is now a standard practice in the jail, no similar practice exists upon release, which could further facilitate the spread of COVID-19 from Cook County Jail to the surrounding communities. Vaccinating everyone held at the jail will likely take weeks, an effort that doesn’t have a firm end date due to the significant, regular turnover in the jail population. ¬ Kiran Misra primarily covers criminal justice and policing in Chicago for the Weekly. She last wrote about State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s strategy for prosecuting protesters arrested during last summer’s anti-racism and police brutality demonstrations.
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FEBRUARY 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17
LITERATURE
We Haven’t Built It Yet In a new book about life on parole, the reader walks in the shoes of the incarcerated, challenging us to understand that every prison sentence, in more ways than we think, is a life sentence. BY MALIK JACKSON
H
alfway Home: Race, Crime, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration is a book about life on parole, and the wringing circumstances that the incarcerated are sentenced to even after their release. We are often barraged with platitudes about freedom and the pursuit of opportunity—rights bestowed upon us via citizenship in a country which, since its founding, has not been an equitable site for either. We are similarly told that every American deserves an equal chance at reaching their fullest human potential and that the job of policymakers is to ensure that the nation is moving toward that ideal every day. But there are caveats to that ideal. Obvious ones are made evident when you step foot in an underfunded school, or as the Red Line clambers south to the 95th/ Dan Ryan Terminal Station (though city limits extend to 138th Street). Less obvious caveats however, intentionally hidden from the public, are the lives of the incarcerated—people who, whether guilty or innocent, will never live the same lives again. 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
Halfway Home speaks not of the consequences of crime—for many inmates may not have committed a crime at all—but the consequences of simply having a criminal record, something that you can be stamped with at the whim of a bitter judge, a disinterested public defender, or a police officer having a bad day. It establishes poverty, crime, and incarceration as forces that are made hereditary by U.S. policy. Furthermore, it personifies these forces as an affliction, one that locks doors, burns bridges, separates families, and swallows the identity of an individual, overwhelming their life thereafter while working to reduce their life chances to ash over time. The book is written by Dr. Reuben Jonathan Miller, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Chicago, who has not only studied the lives of those damaged by the carceral system for nearly twenty-five years, but has been proximate to the system his entire life due to the incarceration of his father and two of his brothers. What Miller calls narrative nonfiction makes for a work
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of both rigorous scholarship and deeply human stories that reveal the nuanced impacts of a domineering carceral system. He does this by telling the stories of various people who were formerly incarcerated, how they came to be in their situation, and how they’ve struggled with the stamp of incarceration the moment they stepped beyond the gates. What he found in these individuals were common trends: a mother or father who was incarcerated, a victim of abuse in their youth, institutional violence, poverty, skin color. He describes their circumstances as that of a new form of citizenship, carceral citizenship, because as long as their lives are marked by their criminal record and the law permits discrimination on that basis, they will never have the same inalienable rights as normal citizens— there will never be a place for them. We meet Yvette from Ypsilanti, who’d been out of jail for over a decade, serving in the prison ministry with the church she joined after her release. Her job was to provide hope to those who had not yet reached the end of their sentence (and to those who never would). She is a gifted and beloved singer who Miller says has a magnetic personality. She is also a hard worker, picking up a job at the Office of Public Health and Welfare as an administrative assistant. She didn’t check the box where the application asked if she’d been convicted of a crime, and in the 1990s there was no robust screening technology that’d connect the dots. Besides, the past was behind her; she had a family now, she was sober, and she hadn’t been arrested in over a decade. But when an injury sidelined her from work and she filed for unemployment to hold her over until her return, gossip from the public aid office made its way back to the Health Department and she was let go. A shallow analysis would
ask if the circumstances would’ve been different had she told the truth on her initial application, but the reason she was let go was not just because of her record, it was because an employer like the Health Department could be sued for having a felon on the payroll. The box wouldn’t have mattered because her employment was prohibited by law. Miller deploys a number of metaphors to help the reader grasp the struggle of incarceration’s afterlife. Especially poetic was his reference to Nina Simone’s rendition of “Sinnerman,” a song about a sinner seeking to hide from his own judgment. The sinner runs to a rock, a river, and a sea for refuge, but is rejected at every checkpoint. Miller likens this rejection to the rejection that those with criminal records face throughout their lifetime—from not being able to rent an apartment, to being rejected from jobs with the lowest barriers to entry, to being rejected by companions whose love could not outlast the length of their sentence. “Just as sin puts a barrier between people and their God, a criminal record separates people accused of a crime from the lifegiving institutions of a free society,” he says. The way Miller catalogs the rules and restrictions set by parole officers throughout the book makes it clear to the reader that parolees are not meant to be free at all. In fact, any violation of the already stringent rules could immediately land a parolee back in prison. There is hardly anywhere for them to turn. When Miller caught up with Jimmy, who was recently out on parole, Jimmy was optimistic. He recently got a new cell phone, and was excited to have job postings sent directly to his phone via email. Jimmy’s plan was to get his resumé together and go to the workforce development agency that his parole officer directed him to. On the day
LITERATURE
that Miller accompanied him, the parole officer sent Jimmy to a workforce agency that was no longer operating. Not only that, but Jimmy had run out of bus fare, something he could’ve replenished at the agency if it were open. Now Jimmy would have to walk nine miles to get to the next agency on the resource list, he’d then have to walk to his court-ordered AA meeting, then he’d have to walk all the way back to the parole office for his weekly check-in. If he missed any of these appointments he could be sent back to prison. Nearly a quarter of all prison admissions in the previous year were for similar parole violations, a lot of which could’ve merely been the result of bad luck. The slightest mistake by a parolee can land them back behind bars, so it’s fortunate that Miller was there to give Jimmy a ride, one of the many favors that carceral citizens depend on in times where everyday mishaps could cost them their freedom. The system is broken in many ways. Miller powerfully ties several eras of history, law, and US policy into the stories of his companions. He tells the story of Brown v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court case in which coercing a confession was made illegal. This case paved the way for the plea deal, which Miller suggests is just another form of coercion. He tells the story of how the rise of mass incarceration coincided with the decline of Detroit’s Black middle class, creating a pipeline fed by poverty and its externalities. He ties in policies as recent as the Second Chance Act of 2007, which President George W. Bush signed into law. The legislation provided $165 million to communitybased services for formerly incarcerated people, like halfway houses and reentry programs, and it was the largest ever piece of legislation dedicated to that population. But the success of reentry programs has its extent. “Reentry programs don’t seek to remove the barriers formerly incarcerated people face. They can’t,” he says. “In Chicago, there are over seven hundred policies that keep people with criminal records unemployed. More than fifty bar them from housing.” Inmates are still locked out of society despite federal resources being poured into their
supposed reassimilation. When Miller spoke to the director of the city’s reentry and workforce-development programs, he pressed on the topic of how they measure success. “We look for certificates of completion,” the director says. But certificates only provide evidence that a person has gone through programming, they do not ensure that the former inmate has secured a job, stable housing, or upward mobility. Certificates don’t do anything to change the laws that make it easier to land back in jail than to build a life, and this is what Halfway Home asks us to understand. While there are no policy recommendations at the conclusion of the book, Miller exposes the unforgiving nature of living with a criminal record in a way that begs for change. He speaks on their predicament plainly, saying, “There is no place for them to go because no place has been made for them, not even in the public’s imagination.” As Halfway Home illustrates so well, American society is built to create the origins and the afterlife of mass incarceration, confining poor, mostly Black people to a particular fate. American phenomena that still haven’t been dealt with, like state-sponsored disinvestment, overpolicing, racial discrimination, and legal malpractice, all work together to keep communities oppressed and prone to convictions—the stamp of a criminal record works just as effectively. Through heart-wrenching accounts and vivid prose, Halfway Home accomplishes its goal of putting the reader in the shoes of the incarcerated, challenging us to understand that every prison sentence, in more ways than we think, is a life sentence. ¬ Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Crime, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, Little, Brown, and Company, 352 pages. Malik Jackson is a South Shore resident and recent graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he majored in Urban Studies. He last wrote about renters struggling amidst a housing crisis during COVID-19 for the Weekly.
FEBRUARY 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19
HISTORY
The Neighborhood is an Image of the City Part Three: Growth Machine
BY KRISTIN OSTBERG
C
hicago was volatile in the first decades of the last century in ways not unlike how things are volatile now. Big business seemed all powerful. Workers wanted more than wage concessions—anarchists and socialists agitated for fundamental change. Racial resentment erupted into a bloody race riot that started with the murder of a Black child by white racists. Then as now, volatility seems to require clampdown, some kind of control by force. Whites enforced the boundaries of the Black ghetto by custom and law, and when law failed with violence—crowds in the street with bricks in their hands. Big business rallied its Pinkertons, mobilized the force of the state to make workers submit. Though what saved big business from socialism, or decades of violent suppression, launched it instead toward a new era of prosperity, wasn’t force. It was change, the promise of opportunity. Looking back from the 1940s, the authors of Black Metropolis write that a whole class of clerical occupations came up to manage the great volumes of paperwork required by big manufacturing firms. All that clean work was something new, it opened the prospect of a large white-collar middle class, something 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
“neither radicals nor capitalists of a previous epoch had visualized.” In the 1930s, the Italian sociologist Antonio Gramsci surveyed the American economic system and called it “Fordism,” after Henry Ford, with his assembly lines. Gramsci meant a whole system of business, government, and cultural life that extended from them. At its core is a bargain reached (and not without conflict) between owners and labor. Labor gives up its control, its pride of craftsmanship and sense of self direction for a place on the assembly line. Owners find their workers will show up reliably if they’re paid enough to buy the car. For the next forty years, business, labor, and government all rallied around the virtuous circle of fair employment and mass consumption. The economy transformed from an arena of crushing conflict to something like a national faith in the cumulative expression of popular choice. Big business more or less ran the machine, chasing lower costs and lower prices in its pursuit of monopoly. Government worked as machinist—it built the regulatory framework for safe markets, and the welfare state that kept the bottom from dropping out when
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people struggle. And for when people prospered, government built a physical infrastructure to smooth the way of the consumer engine: the FHA mortgages to buy houses, the expressways to bring families out to further suburbs, and to carry the interstate commerce that would help them furnish their lifestyle as it steadily improved. To perpetuate itself, the system must be sewn into the popular imagination, it must be worked into what people want and strive for. In 1945, the authors of Black Metropolis thought that the most profound change to mark Chicago in the 1920s “was a gradual shift in the content of the American Dream as presented by men of power.” They write that nineteenth-century elites thought labor erred when it failed to see wages as a temporary condition of dependency that workers should inhabit only until they could save enough to shrug it off and open some small shop for themselves. They promoted an American Dream that turned on “thrift, the establishment of small business, and investment in large ones.” Businessmen of the 1920s had changed their minds; they “began to encourage the masses to spend rather than to save.”
They developed new arts of advertising and new mass media to inform and entertain. The advertising was to tell people what they should buy, the media to show them who they might be. It would feed their shared social repertoire by power of example. Think of the television shows of the golden era—their picture of the family, of friends and neighbors and of benevolent authorities. People might squabble but conflicts were resolved, everything was alright in the end. Then think of the police procedurals of the 1980s and 90s. When it first came out in 1981, Hill Street Blues was applauded for its edge, for its willingness to depict unlikable characters and its real world crimes. Entertainment’s willingness to be honest to men’s less attractive impulses had trumped its responsibility to represent the police as guardians of a precinct that is fundamentally safe. The sense of safety was never uniform. There was always an audience impatient for a more honest portrayal of the darker parts of life. Veterans returning from foreign wars joined bike gangs, youth rebelled against the compromises made by their parents, outsiders in their ghettos might admire the picture and still chafe at it. Philosophy professor Paul Weiss chided James Baldwin to be more upbeat about the prospects available to him on The Dick Cavett Show, in 1968. Baldwin told him, “You want me to make an act of faith… on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.”
B
y 1962, the fruits of Fordism are abundant, the nation buzzing with prosperity, and Drake and Cayton write a preface for a new edition of Black Metropolis to acknowledge “new factors which none of us could have foreseen.” The economy has achieved full employment, there is a “vigorous national concern for civil liberties,” and “renewed devotion to the American Creed.” There’s a new introduction by the sociologist Everett Hughes, who describes cycling through a neighborhood far south of the old boundaries of the Black Belt, a
HISTORY
ILLUSTRATION BY EVA AZENARO ACERO
neighborhood of grassy lawns and brick bungalows originally built for second or third generation ethnic whites. He says he began to notice Black and brown faces among the homeowners out washing their cars in the driveways, mowing their lawns, doing their Saturday morning shopping. First a few of them, then all of them. “The forces which move people toward the middle-class American ethos are tremendous among Negroes of American descent,” he observes. He believes their growing purchasing power will command respect in a way that law might not. “It is the Negro consumer who sits-in demanding the right to be served and to consume the products of American abundance and to use his leisure as other Americans do.”
Though even in 1962 he sees telling changes in the employment apparatus. There are more white-collar positions, and fewer unskilled ones. “The automated steel mill needs no large roving labor gang,” he writes. Rural newcomers once relied on those jobs to get their foothold and acclimate. They will have to learn new skills faster than their predecessors did, or “they may easily become part of the pool of permanently unemployed.” Richard J. Daley took office as mayor of Chicago in 1955, and by 1963 national magazines like Time and Holiday are publishing enthusiastic profiles with warm praise from the city’s Protestant business elite. Advertising executive Fairfax Cone, “a Republican and a gentleman,” tells Holiday, “Now let’s be frank. People
brought up as I was, in a completely Protestant atmosphere, can’t help a certain feeling about Catholics.” But Daley had won him over. He says other Protestant businessmen he knows feel the same way. “Before Mayor Daley came along, Chicago was stalled. From 1929 to 1946 not a single major building went up.” Depression and global war made that true for most big cities. And the magazine profiles all allude to uncertain urban futures, made more tenuous by racial change. They say Daley gave Chicago’s business elite something to be confident about. By 1968, Chicago’s American reports a building boom has virtually remade the city’s central area in ten years. It counts more than $2.5 billion invested, more than 35 million square feet in new office, commercial, and civic construction projects completed and underway. They include new public buildings, such as the Civic Center and a suite of new federal buildings, modern towers with wide plazas, built by famous architects—using new government powers for assembling large blocks of land. But most of the buildings on the list were private. Daley had mobilized what would later be called a growth coalition, business and government moved by a common interest in a strong city center, and by a common fear about the city’s long-term prospects. When the 1960 census came in, Chicago’s population had dropped for the first time in its recorded history. It would have dropped a lot more if the Black population hadn’t grown by more than 300,000 people in the ten years from 1950. Which makes it all the more striking that in Douglas, the original hub of Black Metropolis, the population fell so sharply— from 79,000 people in 1950, to 52,000. The growth coalition had got its start in Douglas in the 1940s. Private business and institutions took the lead, test driving the new public powers for acquiring and accumulating land. By 1960, Douglas had been almost entirely leveled and rebuilt from the ground.
Michael Reese Hospital, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and New York Life Insurance launched three synchronized projects that replaced twelve square miles of the old urban fabric with new middle-class housing and a university campus, most of it modern high-rise towers surrounded by vast green lawns. They left a small area where you can still see what the old neighborhood looked like—a pocket sometimes called The Gap, between 31st and 35th Streets, Prairie Avenue and Calumet. In the same decade that the populations of Douglas and Grand Boulevard dropped by some 62,000 people, the Black population of Englewood rose by almost 600 percent. It jumped 900 percent in Kenwood, and 1,400 percent in Greater Grand Crossing. Neighborhoods turned from white to Black. Even as it was happening, the public knew that realtors were using fear tactics to get white homeowners to sell low, threatening how their property values would fall when black families moved in. Then turning around and selling to black families at inflated prices. The courts had released the forced boundaries on where they could live, and they had the purchasing power to buy the American Dream. Meanwhile, Bridgeport’s population had continued its gentle decline, from 46,000 people in 1950, to just under 42,000 in 1960, and just sixty-five of them were counted as “Negroes.” The cottages of Bridgeport are of the same vintage as the ones in Douglas. Though Bridgeport’s homeowners had access to credit, they weren’t wanting for city services. And no one called it blight, or proposed it might be best to clear it out and start over with something new. ¬ Originally published at The Hardscrabbler: A Bridgeport Blog; reprinted with permission. This is part three in a five-part series. Kristin Ostberg works in the affordable housing field, and writes about work, art, and social life in Bridgeport. This is her first piece for the Weekly; she can be reached at ostberg.k@gmail.com.
FEBRUARY 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21
DISPLACEMENT
Shelters Struggle to Meet the Need in a COVID Winter Reduced capacity and lack of turnover due to COVID-19 has complicated things in shelters BY MADELEINE PARRISH
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s temperatures drop into the negatives and Chicagoans brace for even more snow, some people experiencing homelessness have been forced to choose between risking COVID-19 in a crowded—but warm— shelter or braving the cold to avoid an increased risk of contracting the virus. Reduced capacity and lack of turnover at many shelters due to COVID-19 has made it difficult for individual shelters to meet people’s need for a warm place to sleep at night. When someone calls 311 to request shelter, a service operator conducts an assessment and uses the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services’ (DFSS) central database to match that person to an available bed. The database currently shows 3,000 beds at emergency shelters that DFSS funds across the city, as well as other partners that don’t receive funding. DFSS has been subcontracting the Salvation Army since January 1 to answer these calls. A few days before temperatures dropped dangerously low on the first February weekend, homeless shelter provider Franciscan Outreach only had two beds open out of two hundred and seventy in all their three shelters. Right now, because of COVID-19, their guests have been there for up to nine months. Tyrone caught COVID-19 in November during a fifty-five-person 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
outbreak at the Franciscan Outreach shelter in North Lawndale in spite of doing all he could to stay healthy. “I’m very healthy, I take all kinds of vitamins,” he explained, reaching into his bag to pull out bottles of calcium, chlorophyll, super omega 3, and prostate supplements. “I even made the doctor give me some vitamin D pills. I told his ass, ‘Give me some.’” “I was trying my best to avoid COVID,” he said. “That was almost next to impossible being inside of a building where you have 200 people because you’re constantly walking past, going to pass by. You have to have some type of interactions. There’s no such thing as social distancing to me when it comes to being homeless.” That location’s capacity was reduced from 271 to 200 beds. The capacity of the Annex shelter in East Garfield Park was reduced from seventy to fifty beds, and their Pilsen shelter from forty to thirty. To make up for the lost beds, Franciscan Outreach temporarily operated a 200bed shelter at the Rauner Family YMCA. In collaboration with Rush University Medical Center and Lawndale Christian Health Center, Franciscan Outreach started to respond to the looming threat of COVID-19 in February 2020. “We quickly gathered that it was going to potentially affect a lot of our guests since many of the people that come through
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our doors are very vulnerable,” said executive director Richard Ducatenzeiler. “A lot of them have disabling conditions, they have comorbidities, many of them suffer from diabetes, heart conditions, some cancer.” Though guests aren’t tested for COVID-19 before being granted shelter, Tyrone told the Weekly that not everyone is eligible to receive shelter. “It was screening for being a sex offender, violent crimes, there was no screening for COVID-19,” said Tyrone. “The question was more in reference to whether you were violent or not, or what your past was like, rather than your health and wellbeing.” The City of Chicago provided BinaxNow rapid tests to emergency shelters across the city, though staff were told that these are not effective on people who are asymptomatic. “No one should be referred to us if they have a fever of over 101,” Ducatenzeiler said. “But a lot of times it happens somehow, either they got a bad reading, maybe developed while they were en route. We’ll accept them, but we’ll test them, if they test positive, we’ll refer them to the medical respite center and they’ll come pick them up pretty quickly.” Guests at homeless shelters who test positive for COVID-19 are typically sent to a medical respite center funded by the Chicago Department of Public Health and operated by A Safe Haven and Rush University Medical Center. The center provides twenty-four-hour in-person and telehealth care, including doctors, nurse practitioners, and behavioral health care services. After he tested positive, Tyrone spent four days in isolation at the medical respite center. “Oh, they had nurses, they had isolation beds, everything was well-
planned, I mean it was like a hospital.” He spent the last six days of isolation back at the North Lawndale shelter. All guests were told to remain in their beds, in their area. “But we still gotta come out and use the bathroom. So, how is it isolation?” he asked. Since the respite center opened on April 11, over 555 people have come through, all of whom have survived COVID-19. While the center originally had 100 beds, its capacity has since been reduced to fifty. The outbreak at Franciscan Outreach occurred right at the time when the medical respite center was forced to temporarily make drastic reductions to the number of beds available, leaving them without enough spots for Franciscan Outreach’s COVID19-positive guests. Franciscan Outreach had to create their own isolation space within their North Lawndale shelter. Though Lawndale Christian Health Center was able to check on guests once a day, it didn’t replace the twenty-four-hour care at the respite center. “Thankfully, nobody’s condition got to a point where we needed to contact the paramedics or anything like that or have them hospitalized, but it could have definitely happened,” said Ducatenzeiler. Franciscan Outreach began offering the COVID-19 vaccine to their guests on January 27. Lawndale Christian Health Center also began providing education and discussions surrounding the vaccine around that time. So far, about half of Franciscan Outreach’s guests have chosen to receive the first dose of the vaccine. “We’ve talked about possibly utilizing cots if we do need to take on an overflow,” Ducatenzeiler added. Many other shelters were already near or at capacity before temperatures
DISPLACEMENT
PHOTO BY MADELEINE PARRISH
reached lows in the negatives this month. Lincoln Park Community Services (LPCS), another homeless shelter provider with two locations, only had one or two beds open between their two facilities when they spoke to the Weekly. “We’ll probably fill them today,” said Brianne Spresser, LCPS’ Homeless Services Program Manager. LPCS is operating at reduced capacity because of COVID-19—at the onset of the pandemic, they lost thirty-one beds total between the two shelters. Right before the snowstorm last week, they were able to add sixteen beds by expanding into the common area of the church. Those filled up almost immediately. By testing each guest upon arrival and requiring them to quarantine in a five-bed isolation space until they receive a negative result, LPCS has managed to avoid any outbreaks. Their shelters are also much smaller than Franciscan Outreach’s, with thirty-two beds in one location and nineteen in the other, following health protocols. In addition to their medical respite center, A Safe Haven also operates a 400bed shelter in North Lawndale. Though they did not lose any beds to COVID-19, their beds were full as of February 7.
“We’re always at capacity,” said Neli Vazquez Rowland, the President of A Safe Haven. “The shelter in place has really created a challenge because we typically have turnover.” Usually, people leave the shelter for jobs or apartments, opening up spots for new guests. But COVID-19 has slowed down this turnover process. The Night Ministry’s emergency youth shelter, “The Crib,” which is located in Bucktown, did not have to reduce their number of beds as a result of COVID-19. But they are still struggling to meet the demand for shelter. “We’ve been approaching our capacity of twentyone, if not at it, most nights,” said Betsy Carlson, the Director of Youth Programs. At 8:30 every night, there’s a lottery for any open beds. “Some nights, we do have to call the Salvation Army to ask that they pick up a few people to be able to find a different shelter bed for them,” Carlson said. But there have been nights when the Salvation Army hasn’t been able to locate any open beds in the system at all. In these cases, the Night Ministry has a few mats which they can lay out on the floor for overflow guests to sleep on. According to Quenjana Olayeni, the Director of Public Affairs at DFSS,
the city made up for shelters’ reduced capacity due to COVID-19 by providing alternate shelters, including one at the unused Calumet High School. People calling 311 requesting shelter may also have to wait hours for a callback. “I will say that because the demand can be high one minute and low the next, the time they have to wait to be matched varies,” said Olayeni. Though Tyrone was clearly concerned by the lack of COVID-19 safety inside the shelter, he also expressed that he didn’t have much of a choice. “As far as being safe on COVID, that would never happen inside of a shelter,” he said. “But where else can you go?” Before he came to Franciscan Outreach, Tyrone had been experiencing homelessness in Chicago for three years. “Wherever my head laid, that’s where it was. Whether it be a cot, a cardboard box, a car, or anything,” he said. In the winters, he tried to stay at people’s houses. But some nights, he had to sleep outside. “Whenever I couldn’t stay at nobody’s house or stay over [at] an abandoned building or church or nothing, I would go to the back of the alley and have to sleep with the raccoons. They
knew who I was, they see me coming.” Sergio, another guest at Franciscan Outreach’s North Lawndale shelter, had been experiencing homelessness for four or five years before he came to the shelter. He had struggled to survive through the winters. “Well, we try to find empty houses,” he said. “Not only me, me and another people, we would come together to handle the situation in the winter with a lot of snow.” “We know it’s bad, but we open the houses and try to survive inside with no heat, no power, no gas, nothing. Sometimes we [get kicked] out by the police in the street because, you know, we trespassing, but we survived.” He doesn’t remember exactly how he came to the shelter—just that it was cold, in the middle of the night, during the winter, when he was picked up by Franciscan Outreach last year. “Thanks to God I’m with these people. I survived. I’m okay.” ¬ Madeleine Parrish grew up in New Jersey and is currently a University of Chicago political science undergraduate. She last wrote about North Lawndale school closures.
PHOTO BY MADELEINE PARRISH
FEBRUARY 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23