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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists. Volume 5, Issue 6 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Directors of Staff Support Baci Weiler Community Outreach Jasmin Liang Senior Editor Olivia Stovicek Politics Editor Adia Robinson Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Food & Land Editor Emeline Posner Editors-at-Large Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Mira Chauhan, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Sam Stecklow, Margaret Tazioli, Yunhan Wen Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Editor Erisa Apantaku Radio Host Andrew Koski Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Lizzie Smith Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Elaine Chen, Rachel Kim, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michael Wasney Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Sam Joyce, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Sam Stecklow, Rebecca Stoner, Tiffany Wang Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma Webmaster
Pat Sier
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IN CHICAGO
A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors
Who Defends the Public Defenders? “We’ve talked about an injunction to stop you all from not funding me,” an incensed Amy Campanelli threatened the Cook County Board of Commissioners last week. Campanelli, the county’s beleaguered public defender, is right to be so aggressive about funding for her office; it has faced excessive budget cuts and an ever-declining staff practically since the beginning of the millennium, even as its caseload and mandate has expanded—as of last year, her office represented half of all criminal defendants in the county. Campanelli compellingly made this case to commissioners looking to slash the department’s budget even further after getting themselves into a fiscal mess with the Pop Tax. She refused to cut ten percent from her budget on request from Finance Committee Chairman John Daley, saying it would leave her with fewer than four hundred full-time attorneys and require her office to pay outside lawyers more to do the same job. The crisis is likely to further dent the public image of board president Toni Preckwinkle, which took a nosedive in the wake of the Pop Tax fiasco, since Preckwinkle has repeatedly claimed that criminal justice reform is a “hallmark” of her administration. It is markedly more difficult to make that claim after being responsible for a budget in which the public defender’s office is further diminished. The DOB’s Demolition Derby According to Judy Frydland, the Commissioner of the Department of Buildings (DOB), 359 vacant buildings in Chicago have been torn down so far in 2017. The number was 253 for the entire year of 2016. Based on data obtained from the DOB, the demolished buildings were concentrated in the West Side, the Southwest Side, and the Far South Side. The demolition program allows intervention by the city before vacant homes “get into such a state of disrepair,” said Frydland. Such language, as well as the spike in the number of buildings demolished, reminds us of the DOB’s press release in February 2016, announcing the department would fast-track demolition of vacant buildings “in high crime districts as quickly as possible” as a way to ward off gang violence, since vacant buildings are often occupied by criminal organizations. This reminds us, too, that it’s not as if vacant buildings themselves are the root of these problems. Toil and Trouble at Bubbly Creek The Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 branch swung into action this past weekend when someone noticed several animals in Bridgeport’s Bubbly Creek covered in what appeared to be oil. Scientists and service workers began their work in uncovering the source of the leak and taking steps to care for animals affected by the presumed spill. All the while, rumors are circulating that the EPA is considering closing their Region 5 branch—a step that would do a great deal of harm, were a similar spill or other environmental disaster to occur in the future. The Trump administration has shown little concern for the frequency of such disasters, and the need for a skilled and efficient staff to address them. Scientists, at least, are still working hard to determine the source of the spill in Bubbly Creek.
IN THIS ISSUE who’s who in police accountability: a
2017
update
“The work of establishing true, effective police accountability in the city is just beginning.” sam stecklow....................................4 reversing the buff
“In the communities that I’m mostly in, graffiti-covered walls don’t get sandblasted. They get painted over, sprayed with brown paint.” rod sawyer.........................................8 where the pipeline begins
“Those that structured the first districtwide security force saw this rising activism as a threat.” yana kunichoff................................10 freedom day, fifty years on
“Things have hardly changed.” elaine chen.....................................12
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Cover photo by Rod Sawyer
NOVEMBER 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3
Who’s Who in Police Accountability: A 2017 Update
Joe Ferguson & Laura Kunard
Three years after Laquan McDonald’s death, insufficient progress has been made in police accountability BY SAM STECKLOW
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LILLY LE
T
he last time the Weekly surveyed the landscape of police accountability in Chicago, just over two years ago to the date and a month before the Laquan McDonald video was released, it looked considerably different. Scott Ando, a controversial longtime DEA agent, was still running the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA)—an agency which no longer exists. Garry McCarthy was still the tough-on-crime police superintendent, Anita Alvarez was still the tough-on-crime State’s Attorney, and the most vocal reform advocate in city government, Lori Lightfoot, had just been appointed president of the Police Board. The last two years have been some of the most tumultuous in the centuryand-a-half-long battle over who will oversee and discipline the police force, and have arguably produced some of the most potentially impactful changes since the 1960s. However, as every person featured in this article would likely say, the work of establishing true, effective police accountability in the city is just beginning.
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O
ne of the more promising recent additions to the field of oversight agencies was the creation of the Deputy Inspector General for Public Safety position, which heads a twentythree-person division of the city’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) with the purpose of exclusively reviewing the practices and specific investigations of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), IPRA’s newly-opened replacement. The position was created as part of a reform ordinance that Mayor Rahm Emanuel forced through City Council last year that also replaced IPRA with COPA. Thus far, there has been little public evidence of the OIG’s work since the position was filled by academic and police reform expert Laura Kunard in April. However, city Inspector General Joe Ferguson has a far better reputation for independence and integrity than nearly any other city department (he is, on the other hand, appointed by the mayor). There are serious concerns from many regarding the lack of transparency at the Inspector General’s office. The state law that allows units of government to create Inspectors General includes broad, sweeping exemptions to the state Freedom of Information Act, barring the press and public from obtaining any files from their reports. This stands in stark contrast to the status of investigatory reports and files from COPA and CPD investigations, which— after decades of back-and-forth litigation
between the city and civil rights lawyers— are all but completely open and available. The city is using these public records exemptions to block the release of Ferguson’s investigation into the Laquan McDonald shooting, which he took over from IPRA and which led to Superintendent Eddie Johnson to file for the discharge of five officers who were at the scene—five fewer than the amount Ferguson recommended firing—after four other officers named in the report retired in quick succession. (According to files from the report leaked to the Tribune, the report also implicates Johnson in having seen the video, and deciding the use of force was justified.) This has led the Invisible Institute’s Jamie Kalven, who led a successful lawsuit for full transparency of police internal investigatory documents in 2014, to sue the CPD for its copy of the report. The suit remains pending. (The Police Board hearings for the five discharged officers have been suspended while criminal trials are proceeding.) Still, the Deputy Inspector General position has been one of the least controversial reforms implemented thus far and was directly advocated for by both Emanuel’s Police Accountability Task Force, headed by Lightfoot, and activist groups such as the Community Renewal Society, which last year authored a separate ordinance filed by 28th Ward Alderman Jason Ervin that would have created a nearly identical office. The founding ordinance also mandates that the office publish its findings after all audits and investigations, though it has yet to do so.
POLICING
Lori Lightfoot
T
he largest city-employed thorn in Emanuel’s side throughout the lurching, meandering reform process has been Police Board President Lori Lightfoot. Lightfoot also headed the blue-ribbon Police Accountability Task Force that provided much of the blueprint for reform that Emanuel claims to have been following. As the head of the Police Board—a mayoralappointed quasi-judicial body that largely exists to hear discharge and other serious disciplinary cases filed by the superintendent of the CPD—Lightfoot has not made her popular with the city’s activist groups, but she has repeatedly criticized both Emanuel and Supt. Johnson for the drawn-out, tortured nature of reform implementations. This has caused tensions in her relationship with Emanuel, who appointed her in 2015. Just two months ago, Emanuel publicly waffled over whether or not to reappoint her to the position before ultimately deciding to do so, leaving her twisting in the wind for
weeks. A former chief administrator of the Office of Professional Standards—the much-derided internal CPD precursor to IPRA— and federal prosecutor, Lightfoot has brought an intensity and highly public persona to the Police Board. Under her tenure, some controversial practices of the Police Board have been curbed. Of the forty cases that the Police Board has closed since her July 2015 appointment, the Board vacated or lessened charges in just two, according to information provided in response to public records requests. Previously, the Board was notorious for overturning disciplinary decisions—a 2009 analysis of ten years of Board decisions by the Chicago Justice Project found that the board followed the superintendent’s recommended disciplinary charges just forty-two percent of the time. However, in twelve cases under Lightfoot—including that of Dante Servin, who killed Rekia Boyd—the officer resigned before the Board heard their case, retaining their pensions.
Kim Foxx
O
ne of the only aspects of police oversight in Chicago that is not controlled directly or indirectly by Emanuel is the office of State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who was elected on a progressive reform agenda that involved calling for special prosecutors to be appointed to investigate police shootings for criminal charges. To date, she still has yet to appoint one; despite her office filing first-degree murder charges against an off-duty CPD officer and a Chicago Amtrak police officer in fatal shootings this year, the State’s Attorney’s office has repeatedly shrugged off calls to appoint special prosecutors in other cases. Just weeks ago, in a court hearing regarding a petition for a special prosecutor in the fatal shooting of Flint Farmer by the CPD, an Assistant State’s Attorney conceded that even though Foxx had promised and articulated the need for special prosecutors in police shootings on the campaign trail, she had reconsidered upon taking office and “has made internal changes to the way the office investigates police shootings,” the Tribune reported. Even when trying to fix the issue legislatively, she has stumbled; after Foxx authored a bill co-sponsored by state Senator Kwame Raoul that would require the Office of the State Appellate Prosecutor review police shootings that her office declines to prosecute, civil rights lawyers and investigators criticized the
legislation for handing over the power to the controversial, littleknown state appellate prosecutor’s office. “I’m sure Kim Foxx was unaware of [its] poor track record,” one told political reporter Curtis Black. “...It’s not an office that stands for justice.” (Governor Bruce Rauner signed the bill in August, but with the language regarding police shootings altogether removed. In its stead, lawmakers ordered the Commission on Police Professionalism, a barely-existent body created by an omnibus crime bill in 2015, to issue a completely unrelated report that offers recommendations about police training to the Governor and General Assembly next year.) None of this is to say she hasn’t made some good in some areas. Her office has vacated some convictions in cases in which defendants claimed corrupt former CPD Sergeant Ronald Watts and his team had framed them, and dropped some charges (but notably not others) in cases where similar allegations had been made about another corrupt former sergeant, Reynaldo Guevara. Regardless, to convince the public and especially the activists behind the #ByeAnita campaign that delivered the election for Foxx—who were already wary of her, as she’s still, you know, a prosecutor—she will have to do a good deal more than some internal rearranging and drafting legislation.
Lisa Madigan (and whoever replaces her)
A
fter Emanuel publicly backtracked on his promise to enter into a consent decree with the Department of Justice, many voices, from Lori Lightfoot to ousted U.S. Attorney Zach Fardon to scores of activist groups, called on the mayor to stick to his word and obtain a decree with a court monitor to ensure and enforce reforms. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan was among them, and due to her office’s independence and resources, she was in a unique position to back up the call. In August, Madigan filed a federal lawsuit asking a judge to enter the CPD into a consent
decree with her office, instead of the DOJ—with Emanuel’s grudging approval. It was the second such lawsuit filed in recent months— the first was by a coalition of victims of police brutality and community groups represented by civil rights lawyers at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago—and it drew a mixed reaction. Some reform advocates applauded Madigan’s suit, as the coalition’s suit—generally referred to by the name of one of the organizational plaintiffs, Black Lives Matter Chicago—is far more sweeping and has less of
a chance of succeeding in court than Madigan’s suit, especially with the city fighting every step of the way. At the same time, many more radical activists, such as the attorneys representing Black Lives Matter and other organizations in or supporting its lawsuit, condemned Madigan’s suit, which was filed with Emanuel’s cooperation and apparent support, as a potential backroom deal. And, more importantly, Madigan’s consent decree could shut communities directly affected by unconstitutional policing out entirely, as Madigan’s office has never brought this kind of NOVEMBER 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
case and therefore doesn’t have the precedent of community engagement in the consent decree process that the DOJ does. (The ACLU of Illinois and some community groups, including the Community Renewal Society, filed their own suit seeking a court order for the city to reform its policing of people with disabilities this month, contending the other two lawsuits had not included people with disabilities in their injunctive requests.) This view of the decree as a backroom deal cannot be helped by a recent joint filing in the case by both Madigan and Emanuel to put a confidential protective order over most documents produced during the suit. There is also the question of who will be around to keep up the Attorney General’s end of the bargain after Lisa Madigan leaves office next year. She announced she would not run for reelection after fourteen years in office shortly after filing the lawsuit against the CPD. The pool to replace her includes former Governor Pat Quinn; state Senator Raoul, an ambitious former Cook County prosecutor who represents the city’s lakefront from Lakeview down to the border with Indiana; Chicago Park District board president Jesse Ruiz; north suburban Highland Park Mayor Nancy
Rotering; former federal prosecutor and pundit Renato Mariotti; 33rd Ward Democratic Committeeman Aaron Goldstein; Erika Harold, the sole Republican candidate and a former Miss America; and Sharon Fairley, the then-head of the newly-minted Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA). Fairley, in what 9th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale described as “truly bad timing,” announced her potential candidacy just eleven days into the new agency’s life, leaving a leadership vacuum in an agency that has a lot of work to do to establish any kind of trust in over-policed communities. Her departure comes a little under two years after being appointed to reform IPRA in the wake of the Laquan McDonald video release, making her the shortest-serving head of civilian police oversight in Chicago since the system was established in 1973. (The second-shortest-serving? Lori Lightfoot.) The Weekly reached out to all announced candidates last week (with the exception of Quinn, who announced his candidacy late on Friday afternoon) to ask whether they supported Madigan’s lawsuit, and whether the community groups who have also sued should be directly participating in the creation of the consent decree. By press time, only
Sharon Fairley (and whoever replaces her)
F
airley, as a Maryland-raised former marketing executive, federal and state prosecutor, and attorney for Inspector General Joe Ferguson’s office before Emanuel appointed her to lead IPRA, was a complete political unknown in the state and still largely is. Her tenure at IPRA-turned-COPA began to result in an agency applying higher levels of scrutiny to their investigations, but was still very much unfinished. The agency crafted new rules and released them for public comment for the first time in its history, and it published critical studies of practices under previous administrations. The rates at which it sustained findings against CPD officers and reopened old cases for potential new administrative charges have begun to far exceed those of previous administrations. Written into COPA’s ordinance are a guaranteed budget floor and the power to hire its own attorneys, both things that had hampered investigations previously. The agency also cleaned house, only rehiring about thirty IPRA staffers (though, according to the Tribune, eleven of those staffers’ employment dates back to the Office of Professional Standards, which was removed from the CPD and renamed IPRA in 2007). But there have been many ups and downs in the history of civilian oversight in Chicago (though—from the civilian’s point of view— mostly downs), and there is no guaranteed sticking power to COPA or its independence. Its administrator, in the written ordinance, 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
is meant to be chosen by a Community Oversight Board—but none exists. The Board was the third promised tier of Emanuel’s reform agenda, but his office claims that it has not implemented that aspect yet due to unnamed “community leaders” requesting that the Board be created by a “communityled process.” Finding a replacement for Fairley thus now falls to Emanuel, who appointed retired Cook County judge Patricia Banks to run things temporarily. In the meantime, a committee co-chaired by his ally, 30th Ward Alderman Ariel Reboyra, who also chairs City Council’s Committee on Public Safety, and Illinois Justice Project director Paula Wolff will find a permanent replacement.
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Rotering and Goldstein had responded. In a statement, Rotering said she supports Madigan’s suit, and called on Madigan to “work with the groups that have brought the other suits to coordinate efforts.” Goldstein, who has worked in various positions in the Cook County Public Defender’s office on and off since 2001 and was a member of former Governor Rod Blagojevich’s defense team, said in a phone interview that he supports Madigan’s efforts, and that the best way for community groups to be “fully involved” with the consent decree process is for all three lawsuits to be consolidated into one case so that there is a real seat at the table for everyone. “The mayor is not a trustworthy arbiter in this. All this came about because of Laquan McDonald, and the mayor’s handling of that was not good, to put it lightly,” he said. “As members of the community, when they’re told there’s a consent decree, or we’re gonna try to get a consent decree, and the mayor’s office is involved, there’s a lack of trust—and rightfully so...We don’t know whether it’s gonna be right or wrong. It could go wonderfully and we could actually get some work done. But that’s yet to be determined.”
GAPA & Alderman Ariel Reboyras The “community leaders” who requested that the Emanuel administration delay implementing the Community Oversight Board are known as GAPA: the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability. GAPA consists of members of various community organizations, including the Community Renewal Society, Enlace, Inner-City Muslim Action Network, South West Organizing Project, and the United Congress of Community and Religious Organizations (UCCRO). GAPA is funded by the Chicago Community Trust and other foundations, and headed by UCCRO organizer Mecole Jordan. Members of what would become GAPA protested the potential creation of a Community Oversight Board and entered into an informal arrangement with the Mayor’s Office to make recommendations for how to build the Board from the grassroots level up, Jordan told the Weekly in a phone interview. In the year since the COPA-creating reform legislation passed, GAPA has conducted education sessions with its own members and the public at large, so its constituency—ostensibly, the whole city—can better understand what it is being asked. It produced a Community Conversations Report, published in March, summarizing feedback the group had received from the public. Since then, whenever she’s been asked, Jordan has said that their recommendations are forthcoming but has declined to say when. “We’re looking forward to receiving their recommendations,” a spokesperson for Emanuel told the Tribune earlier this month. In the meantime, the situation leaves far more power in the hands of Reboyras, a longtime Northwest Side alderman who has been one of Emanuel’s closest allies in City Council. As co-chair of the committee charged with finding Fairley’s permanent replacement and the chair of the Committee on Public Safety, he is a gatekeeper twice over for whoever is chosen, like he was for IPRA reform legislation efforts (though, according to the Daily Line’s CloutWiki, he has been “visibly uncomfortable” presiding over meetings dealing with police reform and has thus held many of them as joint meetings with the Committee on Budget and Government Operations, allowing him to “pass the gavel” to bombastic 34th Ward Alderman Carrie Austin).
POLICING
Superintendent Eddie Johnson
F
or everything that anyone outside of the Chicago Police Department can do, little of it will be of any good if Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who was handpicked by Emanuel over three options statutorily presented to him by Lightfoot’s Police Board, does not succeed in implementing internal and external reforms. The jury is still out and will be for quite some time: He has been busy, but the degree to which his efforts have been substantial and deep enough to stick or whether they are simply performative remains to be seen. According to a Chicago Reporter analysis, the city has only fully implemented fifteen of the Department of Justice’s ninetynine recommendations in its report—and of those fifteen, many were implemented in one fell swoop when the CPD updated its Use of Force policy for the first time since 2002. The new Use of Force policy, while much improved over the previous one, faced strong criticisms from civil rights attorneys for, among other things, not defining clearly enough when officers can use force in specific situations, such as protests, or against certain people, such as pregnant women or people with disabilities. Some of these changes improved accountability measures in the use of force review process. Another
fifteen recommendations have been partially implemented, like allowing members of the Police Board access to more information, but the majority of DOJ recommendations remain in planning phases, completely untouched or too unclear to tell what progress has been made. While not all of those recommendations in the DOJ report fall directly under Johnson’s jurisdiction, many do. The CPD has yet to require that officers with crisis intervention training respond to situations involving people in mental health crises or equip and train its officers in first aid. It hasn’t implemented its earlyintervention system or developed a foot pursuit policy—both crucial front-end components of ensuring accountability. On the back end, it hasn’t improved its disciplinary review process, or even published the annual report it said it would in September—which would have been its first annual report since 2010. The CPD’s Bureau of Internal Affairs’ website still has almost no information about its investigations, despite investigating the vast majority of complaints against police. All of which may be to say, there’s too much that hasn’t happened to evaluate Johnson’s performance—which is perhaps an evaluation in itself.
Mayor Emanuel, Walter Katz, Ed Siskel
R
egardless of whatever Eddie Johnson does, though, he is not the end of the line in police accountability. The Chicago Police Department has always been a political arm of the mayor’s office, the way all city departments are, and under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the tradition has continued. When Emanuel felt he needed a tough, physically imposing, data-driven police chief, he brought in Garry McCarthy from Newark, New Jersey. McCarthy implemented rigorous data collecting and analysis programs that were part of a “broken windows” policing strategy that made his mentor, former New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton, famous. One result was a remarkable increase in “street stops,” which are better known as “stop-and-frisks.” In the first two years of his tenure, the CPD’s use of street stops spiked by more thanfiftyeight percent. In 2015, the ACLU of Illinois found that the CPD under McCarthy used street stops at a rate that far exceeded New York City’s at the height of its program, preceding a lawsuit that resulted in reforms to the system, a court monitor to oversee the process, and an unexplained plummet in the amount of street stops conducted. When that style of policing no longer became politically viable for Emanuel—as evidenced by having to now pay for a court monitor to oversee reforms in just one small aspect of policing in Chicago, followed later that year by the release of the Laquan McDonald video—he removed McCarthy and, in a tortured public process, eventually installed CPD lifer Eddie Johnson. Johnson didn’t initially talk the talk—he famously claimed to have “never
seen” police misconduct in his nearly thirty years on the force—but at this point seems to be a perfectly compliant chief to Emanuel’s various political needs in the aftermath of the citywide protests calling for his resignation after the McDonald video. As many of Emanuel’s processes are, the post-McDonald reform of the police department has been haphazard, incremental, and with far more self-congratulatory press conferences than appropriate. There is a lot going against the mayor, but there is potential for him to get this right. His hiring of former San José, California Independent Police Monitor Walter Katz to work in his office as his top public safety aide brings a certain amount of reform credentials by itself, though there is little to publicly show for it. A more opaque recent hire is Edward Siskel, the city’s new top lawyer, who replaced controversial Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton. Though city lawyers generally keep their work behind the scenes, sometimes it leaks out. For instance, in 2015, then-DNAinfo columnist Mark Konkol reported that, along with his data-driven stop quotas, McCarthy also tried to implement reform to the accountability system, going so far as to request that Emanuel appoint a blue-ribbon panel to suggest reforms to the system in early 2013. That resulted in a little-known two-year pro bono report published in late 2014 full of recommendations later echoed in the Police Accountability Task Force and DOJ reports—which Patton blocked McCarthy from implementing, according to DNAinfo’s sources. Of course, by the time the report was completed, Laquan McDonald had been killed—and, in that case, the system had already been allowed to sweep his death under the rug. Sam Stecklow is a journalist at the Invisible Institute and a contributing editor to the Weekly. NOVEMBER 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
Reversing the Buff The Brown Wall Project reclaims what’s been erased BY ROD SAWYER
G
loria “Gloe” Talamantes is a graffiti educator, artist, Chicago native, and founder of the Brown Wall Project. Gloe created this public art initiative in Little Village in 2006 to beautify the city by painting on walls that the city has buffed—the practice of painting over walls with brown paint to remove graffiti. The Weekly sat down with Gloe to talk public art, erasure, and community engagement.
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ROD SAWYER
I started getting more into art and art education and trying to learn more about different art forms. But graffiti is what has taught me most, if not all, of what I know now of public art and space. Almost everything that I’ve ever got interested in doing stemmed from graffiti or the graffiti culture of Chicago.
What sparked your interest in art, and when did you realize it was an important tool for you?
As a graffiti artist, or “writer,” as those in the community call themselves, what does the buff, this erasure of graffiti via power washing or painting over with brown paint, represent to you?
I know I’ve been artistic and creative since I was young, I just didn’t have the resources to realize it. I started doing graffiti in 2000 as a senior in high school, and that’s how
The graffiti buff means constant erasure and control over someone’s creative expression... It means erased voices, different voices, not just [regarding] graffiti...but all types
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of voices from different neighborhoods. It means control from one end and critique of what is deemed artistic and what is not, what can stay up and what doesn’t. What the graffiti blaster program was intended to do was be something that keeps the neighborhoods beautified by not allowing graffiti pieces or throw-ups on the walls. I think it’s actually the opposite—it creates different patchwork on buildings and makes buildings really vulnerable to deterioration on the brick. I think it’s complicated when I think about what the graffiti buff means to me, because I think about so many different things when I think of the buff system we have. When you travel on the South and West Sides, where many of the kids in your
VISUAL ARTS
ROD SAWYER
programs live, what does the buff do to these areas?
So how does that relate to the Brown Wall Project? Why did you start it?
I don’t think the buff offers young people the opportunity to see their neighborhoods striving. I think the buff is a way of further stopping narration from people in the neighborhood telling their own story. If you travel the city from the North Side to the South/Southwest Side you see a huge difference if you’re riding along the main avenues. A lot of times what I’ve noticed in communities like Lincoln Park, for example, [is that] a lot of the things that do get buffed get sandblasted. In communities like Little Village or Back of the Yards, the communities that I’m mostly in, things don’t get sandblasted. They get painted over, sprayed with brown paint. That to me just tells me the inequity there of who gets that service and why.
I started back in 2006...for the sole purpose of having space to practice and work on graffiti productions. When I was painting graffiti with the crew I wasn’t able to paint on their main walls because I wasn’t good enough...so that caused me to want to get my own space, to create the space that people like myself didn’t have. It was also a response to the graffiti blaster program, and with the Brown Wall Project I was intentional about scouting walls that were buffed and brown to change the look of my neighborhood. I want it to be a project that...finds solutions within the communities that are affected by the buff, to allow the people... in these communities to take over their own narrative. I want youth to be able to think critically about those things without other people projecting their opinions on what anything is in their neighborhood, but rather let them take it in their own hands and just create what it is that they want to create to define their neighborhood and really take ownership. People have become disinvested in these communities because they don’t see
So you’re saying in some communities the stuff is actually removed while in other communities it’s just painted over? Yes.
any value in it. I’m not trying to create art for people who have the access—my purpose is to create for people who don’t have the access and don’t have the resources. What’s an example of a project you’ve run with your students? There’s a project we started two years ago painting boarded-up houses in Back of the Yards. That started because we started questioning why there are so many boardedup houses in Back of the Yards. They’re not dilapidated, or at least a majority of them aren’t, they’re just abandoned. But they’re not fully abandoned because someone took the time to cover them up. This was a way to get students to study and research the history of their neighborhood in Back of the Yards. They realized that these houses were abandoned not because their neighborhood was bad. They learned about the stockyards and... about the industry and...how a lot of that industry is no longer there. These houses aren’t being utilized because all the jobs left. They’re not necessarily being abandoned because the neighborhood is bad; they’re
being abandoned because there aren’t as many jobs as there were. You could even see in the structure of these houses, they were built pretty fast and they were built for working-class families. The action part of the project is painting the board-ups. The first one we did was a nineties-themed board-up house, in front of the Port Ministries. We created embellishments for the board-up. How have Brown Wall Projects been received by the community in neighborhoods like Back of the Yards? There’s been a lot of positive feedback. The buff ’s effects have always been a conversation we’ve had in the graffiti community. I feel like the Brown Wall Project allows the conversation to grow in a different way. It focuses on using different methods to educate young people and older people who don’t know about graffiti [and] public art and how it gets created. What’s your ultimate goal for the Brown Wall Project? The Brown Wall Project can and should be a model for other cities nationally and internationally to follow, to create space for people and artists to form discourse that’s for everyone, not just the people who are already at the table—but also to create more room for people to be at the table and be part of these discussions, and be part of the solutions. ¬ NOVEMBER 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
Where the Pipeline Begins A history of police in Chicago Public Schools BY YANA KUNICHOFF
I
spent 2016 researching Chicago’s police-in-schools program. I sought to understand the accountability system that allowed a police officer serving in a high school to return to his post only days after fatally shooting an unarmed teenager. Part of that was understanding the history of the program—I spent hours trying to make sense of when and how the school police unit was introduced into Chicago Public Schools (CPS) through years of City Council minutes and Catalyst Chicago articles from the 1960s. Ultimately, however, the history of police in schools was only a small portion of my story. The piece, published in the Reader in February, detailed a group of police officers who were outside the eye of their formal employer, the Chicago Police Department (CPD)—which already had a dismal history of punishing misconduct—and instead worked closely within CPS, a system that had eschewed any formal responsibility for overseeing police officers serving in its schools. Shortly after, Louis Mercer, then a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reached out to me. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Detention of a Different Kind,” traces the origins of the school-to-prison pipeline back to attempts to quash student organizing, as well as a quid pro quo relationship between the police and the city. Today, the consequences of the school-toprison pipeline have been well-documented, and the efforts against them are being fought by students, parents, and advocates at many levels. Understanding its origin goes a long way towards informing that battle. I interviewed Mercer about the timeframe leading up to the 1990s, when then-Mayor Richard M. Daley introduced the first formal school police unit.
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When did Chicago first bring law enforcement into public schools, and how did that role change over time? There is one very early example from the Progressive Era—there was a woman named Maire Connolly Owens that might have been the first female police officer in the United States. She worked in conjunction with the Board of Education to retrieve children from workplaces and get them back into schools—a kind of truancy officer hired by the police department. But the presence of police in schools was extremely uncommon in most of the first half of the twentieth century. That changed with the expansion of the Youth Division (first known as the Juvenile Division) of the police, which began under Mayor [Martin] Kennelly in the 1940s. The nearly one hundred officers, many of whom were women, were often assigned to jurisdictions around schools to stop any fights that might occur after school. On occasion, they would operate within schools at the invitation of principals if fights or disturbances were frequent, but it was also a rare occurrence and never a permanent arrangement. The official relationship between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department began in 1966, when off-duty police were hired as security guards. Were there any particular banner years for policing in CPS? 1966 is the year when you can see a formal relationship form between the police and Board of Education. In 1966, the Board of
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ELLEN HAO
Education of Chicago first hired security guards, all of which were off-duty police officers. The security guard force was only six people that first year because [of ] the funding allocation problems, but funding quickly grew until there were about five hundred security guards by 1972, most of which were off-duty police officers,
armed and with the right to arrest. Some principals even asked them to wear their uniforms in the schools. Two factors were particularly potent in the placement of police as security guards in schools. One was a push from the Chicago Teachers Union. From the 1940s to the 1960s, CTU President John Fewkes
EDUCATION
used instances of violence against teachers to argue for safer working conditions. This was one small aspect of the CTU’s larger effort to gain bargaining power. So unsurprisingly, when the CTU gained recognition as the sole bargaining unit for teachers in 1966, the security guard program materialized. The other factor is civil rights demands for improved education. Black activists strongly pushed for desegregation of schools in Chicago in the early to mid-1960s, earning national attention with massive boycotts and sustained campaigns against Superintendent Benjamin Willis’s efforts to maintain school segregation. Black and Latino student voices grew stronger in the mid- to late 1960s as well, with students demanding more representation of people of color in the curriculum and staffing of schools. Those that structured the first districtwide security force saw this rising activism as a threat. For example, the first director of the security department of the Board of Education, Edward “Don” Brady, was a white former principal at a South Side school. In 1965 he was assaulted by a group of students. In a Chicago Tribune article about the incident, Brady argued that the students should not face severe punishment, but he also is quoted as saying, “These assaults...are at least partially due to the unwarranted attacks on Dr. Willis, and these children hearing about unlawful sitdowns in the Board of Education building. Certain adults must quit influencing these children to break the law.” The very next year, he became the first director of security that oversaw the offduty police security guards. His mentality, and that of administrators at the Board of Education and in schools, were very concerned with Black and Latino student voices growing stronger. The presence of police was clearly meant to tamp that down. Did police involvement in student protest go beyond admonishment and policing for violence?
Yes—many students of color that led protests and walkouts in their schools were arrested for their actions. Interestingly, and disturbingly, student protest leaders were also being surveilled by police in the late 1960s. Due to the legal restrictions on publishing information from the Red Squad Files [documents from a covert police unit that targeted leftist and civil rights groups in the 1960s], I can’t give specifics on names or schools, but most of what I’ve seen were principals reporting a student protest leader to the police. Many case files describe a principal labeling a student an agitator, and the Red Squad creating a file for this student. But there are also instances where an informant would attend meetings and report to the Red Squad about an active student leader’s group. How did police in schools expand in Chicago from the 1970s to today? In the 1970s and 1980s, most of what fueled demands for off-duty police as security in schools were fears over changing demographics in schools, drugs, and gangs. Particularly on the West and South Sides, many schools quickly flipped from majority white to majority black, but during the change, racial violence often broke out, resulting in both black and white parents demanding the presence of police to maintain order. Black parents framed their demands for police presence very differently from white parents. Black parents and groups like Operation PUSH saw police as a source of protection for black students moving into majority white schools— think Ruby Bridges or the Little Rock Nine being protected by federal troops while integrating their schools. But they simultaneously asked that the police provide arrest records from within the schools to guard against racial bias. White parents frequently used colorblind language to describe their desire for police, claiming that the presence of students from other neighborhoods—read: Black—posed a physical threat to the students that had
previously attended the school—read: white. In the 1980s, gangs became the main impetus for keeping police security guards in schools. The murder of Simeon [High School] basketball star Ben Wilson in 1984 renewed a citywide focus on gang prevention, and this influenced the continued presence of security in schools. In 1991, Richard M. Daley used his tough-on-crime stance and instances of shootings involving youth around schools to require the presence of two uniformed police officers in each high school. The next year, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting in Cabrini-Green as he walked to school with his mother. Even though it happened outside of school, Daley used the press focus on gang violence to call for all schools to place metal detectors at their entrances. Surveillance technology has since grown to include cameras that send their feed directly to police precincts and the development of police sub-stations at some high schools that allow for [the direct] booking of students arrested in the school. Recently, after the school district missed millions of dollars in payments to the Chicago Police Department for officers in schools, Mayor Emanuel agreed to bail out the district and have the city pay the tab. If we follow this money trail—the offduty police padding their incomes with more hours as security guards, the police department paid directly by the district and now the city—it becomes clear that a major factor in the placement of police in schools is the steady funding stream it gives the CPD. These officers who are not trained to work with youth in any way are nonetheless given these assignments. At the same time, parents and teachers do have legitimate security concerns, but it seems the only financially supported resource available is more security. Of course, this financial relationship between the CPD and CPS works out until budgets get strained. Principals right now are having a hard time trying to find the budget for their own guards at the schools, but thanks to Rahm, the money is still there for police.
It is important to note this is a very different scheme from big cities like L.A. and New York that have their own police forces for schools. Their school resource officers are specifically trained to work with youth. That’s not to say the presence of any kind of police in schools is not problematic, but if a district feels it must place officers in schools, it seems they should be trained to be there. In Chicago, the relationship between police and schools seems to be a financial relationship rather than an actual plan to try and make schools safer. This continued presence of police is problematic in many ways. At the beginning of this school year, Mayor Emanuel told the undocumented students at Eric Solorio Academy High School in Gage Park “you have nothing to worry about” and that they will always be welcome in Chicago. However, with DACA [the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy] set to expire and the Trump administration threatening to coerce police to enforce federal immigration law, the presence of police in schools is a real threat to those students and their families. Race is central to this problem. While about fifty percent of CPS teachers are white, over ninety percent of CPS students are not white. Ample studies show that white teachers remove students of color from classrooms more often than their white student peers. Over-policing and surveillance constantly give teachers the option to use police as a discipline tool. The threat of arrest becomes a way to tamp down violence in schools, but the long-term effect of this is the continued criminalization of youth of color and schools that resemble the carceral system. ¬ Yana Kunichoff is an independent journalist and documentary producer who covers immigration, policing, education and social movements. She has worked for Scrappers Film Group and City Bureau, where she won a Sidney Hillman award. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, and Chicago magazine, among others. Follow her work at yanakunichoff.com or on Twitter at @Yanazure.
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Freedom Day, Fifty Years On Kartemquin debuts “’63 Boycott” BY ELAINE CHEN
“T
he 1963 Boycott of Chicago Public Schools was a pivotal moment in the history of education and racial justice, not only in Chicago, but in the whole country...I’ll repeat that again.” Then even more slowly and emphatically, Jay Travis, former Executive Director of Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, repeated the statement. Travis was introducing the premiere screening of ’63 Boycott, the latest documentary by local nonprofit production company Kartemquin Films. The screening was held at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the civil rights activist organization founded by Jesse Jackson, on October 21. ’63 Boycott depicts previously unseen 16mm footage of the 1963 boycott of CPS to protest racial segregation. Students, teachers, and parents marched through Chicago calling for the resignation of School Superintendent Benjamin Willis. Willis housed Black students in trailers, pejoratively called “Willis Wagons,” in the parking lots of overcrowded Black schools, rather than enroll Black students in nearby white schools. Gordon Quinn, director and executive producer of ’63 Boycott and one of the founders of Kartemquin, helped film the boycott over fifty years ago while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. Quinn grew up in Virginia, where he attended schools that were segregated by law, he said. His childhood experiences made him aware of racial inequality, and when he came to Chicago for college, he began participating in civil rights groups. In 1963, some activists tipped him off that a major boycott was about to occur, and so he and his friends, who would later form Kartemquin with him, filmed the boycott, which converged downtown from all sides of the city. Over the years, Quinn tried to sell the
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footage to groups making films about the civil rights movement, but no one wanted it. “Nobody told the story of this great civil rights demonstration,” Quinn said. As the fiftieth anniversary of the boycott approached, he “felt that it was time. No one else was gonna do it, so we were gonna do it.” Quinn and his Kartemquin team began compiling the documentary, identifying protestors from old footage and interviewing them. The team then repeatedly showed drafts of the film to former boycott protestors to collect feedback. “Something Kartemquin always does is we show the film to people who will appear in it,” said Quinn. “It’s more than just factchecking, we’re really giving them a chance to say, ‘I don’t think that’s right, I don’t think I like that.’” As the final product shows, Kartemquin’s meticulous efforts paid off; the team was able to achieve piercingly intimate portrayals of the protestors’ experiences.
“I didn’t belong in the parking lot,” said former student protestor Ralph Davis, his now elderly voice playing behind footage of Willis Wagons. “Education is about nurturing,” he said. “Do you nurture kids in a trailer?” By waiting so long to use the old footage, Kartemquin was also able to draw present connections with the boycott via footage of the current education system. In 2013, the year of the boycott’s fiftieth anniversary, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed fifty CPS schools with a majority of Black students. Young activists marched throughout the city in protest, and Rachel Dickson, a producer of ’63 Boycott, began independently recording the protests. As she became involved with Kartemquin, she incorporated her footage into ’63 Boycott. Placed side by side with the old footage, the contemporary footage appears strikingly familiar. Shots of classrooms in the sixties
STAGE & SCREEN
Visit 63boycott.kartemquin. com to see more archival photos from the boycotts. During the production of the film, the website served as a place for people who participated in the boycotts, or knew someone who did, to help identify people in the photographs and share their stories.
are immediately followed by shots of classrooms today, where the racial makeup of students remains nearly the same. Shots of protestors’ feet marching through downtown in the boycott are followed by shots of the protestors’ feet in 2013, marching through the same streets. The shots move by so quickly that they could almost be missed, but they imprint on the audience the lingering consciousness of present-day parallels. The film’s pertinence is why Kartemquin held the first screening at Rainbow/PUSH, whose national headquarters are in Kenwood (a second screening occurred the day after, at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival). Kartemquin “wanted to make sure the first screening was in the community that it’s about,” said Quinn. Boycott participants featured in the film were brought onstage for a panel discussion following the screening. When introducing themselves, the participants’ enduring passion for education activism materialized even more strongly than in the film. Former student protestor Sandra Murray described how “the echoes off the buildings that said ‘yes you can’ ” while she marched “meant something.” Sylvia Fischer, a teacher who protested and is now retired, immediately asserted that, regarding education equality, “things have hardly changed.” The encouragement that activism can produce and the urgency of activism today both emerged as clear reasons why the film is so relevant to today’s young
activists. “The film most needs to be seen by youth,” said Dickson. Fortunately, the Rainbow/PUSH screening did draw many youth, many of whom stood up to talk to the boycott participants during the panel discussion. One of them was Kyra Mylan Landry, a student at Evanston Township High School. “It’s hard to believe high school students can change the course of history,” she said, “because as a high schooler, it feels that you don’t get a say.”
“That’s what was so gratifying about screening at Rainbow/PUSH, there were all those young people who stood up,” Quinn said in an interview after the screening. Kartemquin plans on spreading the film to more youth by developing it into teaching material for schools not only in Chicago, but also nationwide, said Dickson. According to Quinn, Kartemquin is currently raising money and consulting with teachers to produce a curriculum to present to CPS. “The purpose of education is not just to get a job, but helping human beings create or recreate themselves,” protestor Lorne Cress-Love says in the documentary. ’63 Boycott illuminates this purpose, but in its efforts to use the film to educate youth today, Kartemquin also embodies it. ¬ Kartemquin plans on airing ’63 Boycott on TV and making the film available for screening soon. More information and updates can be found at 63boycott.kartemquin.com
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BULLETIN Radical Impressions: Excavating the Anarchist Past on Chicago’s Near West Side Towner Fellows’ Lounge, Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St. Wednesday, November 1, 4pm. Free. (312) 943-9090. bit.ly/RadicalImpressions Chicago’s Near West Side was historically one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city, encompassing Greektown, Little Italy, the Maxwell Street flea market, and the Jane Addams Hull House. In this talk, Olga Herrera walks us through the unique history of the area, and how it shaped labor activists such as Lucy Parsons and the Industrial Workers of the World. (Bridget Newsham)
Activation of Bryn Mawr West and East CPL South Shore Branch, 2505 E. 73rd St. Saturday, November 4, 10:30am–12:30pm. Free. (773) 664-1347. bit.ly/BrynMawrActivation The Planning Coalition and Southeast Side Block Club Alliance invites residents of Bryn Mawr West (71st to 75th, Stony Island to Jeffery) and Bryn Mawr East (71st to 75th, Jeffery to Yates) to this “activation” meeting to begin establishing an Area Council to represent the voices of the community amid all of the change happening in the greater south lakefront area. (Sam Stecklow)
Native American Heritage Month Celebration With Queen Yonasda Lonewolf CPL South Shore Branch, 2505 E. 73rd St. Saturday, November 4, 2:30pm–4pm. Free. (312) 747-5281. bit.ly/Yonasda CPS’s American Indian Education Program, with Northwestern University, hosts Black and indigenous activist, organizer, musician, and artist Queen Yonasda Lonewolf as a keynote speaker in its celebration of Native American Heritage Month. (Sam Stecklow)
Michelle Commander – “AfroAtlantic Flight” Seminary Co-op, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Wednesday, November 8, 6pm–7:30pm. Free. (773) 752-4381. semcoop.com During this talk, Michelle D. Commander, an 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, will discuss her new book Afro-Atlantic Flight, which analyzes the relationship Black Americans have with “imagined Africas” and the importance of refiguring widespread U.S. narratives about slavery. (Bridget Newsham)
The Wall of Respect Book Release and Discussion UofC Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, 5733 S. University Ave. Thursday, November 9, 6pm–8pm. Free. (773) 702-8063. bit.ly/WallOfRespect Join the editors of a new book about the Wall of Respect mural that was painted on an abandoned 43rd Street building in the 1960s. The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago is an in-depth illustrated account of the mural’s creation that collects essays, poetry, and primary documents into one text. (Sam Stecklow)
Learn to be an African Heritage Cooking Superstar! St. Ailbe Church, 9015 S. Harper Ave. Saturday, November 11, 12pm–3pm. Free. RSVP at bit.ly/ATOAHTraining Loved this year’s Weekly article “Tradition in the Kitchen” and want to get involved in more A Taste of African Heritage cooking classes? Join the Ridgeland Block Club Association in the kitchen at St. Ailbe Church to learn how to teach your own A Taste of African Heritage class. “Get equipped with the skills, knowledge, and recipes to bring ‘Health through Heritage’ back to the community at your church, mosque or community group.” (Andrew Koski)
VISUAL ARTS A Night of Kwynology: Poetry Reading and Open Mic Rootwork Gallery, 645 W. 18th St. Wednesday, November 8, 6pm–9pm. $5 donation. (917) 821-3050. bit.ly/Kwynology Pilsen’s Rootwork Gallery will host a poetry night featuring an open mic followed by a performance by celebrated South Side poet and speaker Kwynology. She’ll be reading from her book and She wrote. Come out to hear her poetry, or to perform your own. (Michael Wasney)
Chill Set, Teen Night at the Museum National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Friday, November 10, 6pm–10pm. (312) 738-1503. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org The National Museum of Mexican Art will be hosting Teen Art night in honor of Día de los Muertos. There will be a live art battle, button-making, live music, dancing, and more! If you’re a teen and you’re into art (or even if you’re not), come on over to the Pilsen museum to celebrate Día de los Muertos the right way! (Michael Wasney)
YCA On The Block: Pilsen La Catrina Café, 1011 W. 18th St. Friday, November 3, 6pm–8pm. Free. Runs every Friday for the next five weeks.
Clearing/Ford City Bus Tour
Hosted at La Catrina in collaboration with Yollocalli Arts Reach and La Catrina Café, Young Chicago Authors will be hosting free open mics and workshops every Friday. Come through and learn how to write poems and hear others perform. (Roderick Sawyer)
Corner of 63rd and Central. Sunday, November 12, 1pm. $20. forgottenchicago.com
Clinard Dance: The Sounds of Pilsen Days
The bus tour will roll by architecturally significant factories and homes in the Clearing Industrial District, which once produced toothpaste, linoleum flooring, and more. The three-hour tour, which will provide plenty of stops for photographs, will also visit the Ford City defense plant that cranked out B-29 bomber engines during World War II and other points of note. ( Joseph S. Pete)
La Catrina Café, 1011 W. 18th St. Saturday, November 4, 7pm–10pm. Free. sites.google.com/view/pilsendays
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One week after Akito Tsuda returned to Pilsen for the release of his photographic book, Pilsen Days, Clinard Dance will be performing a new interdisciplinary dance piece inspired by Tsuda’s work, occurring in fifteen-minute intervals over three hours. Swing by during any of these times—or in
between—to enjoy the performance as well as the exhibition. (Roderick Sawyer)
MUSIC $5 Fridays: Color Card, Easy Habits, Skip Trace Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan Ave. Friday, November 3, doors 7pm, show 8pm– 11pm. $5, free for Lumpen Radio members. Buy tickets online. (773) 837-0145. bit.ly/CoProFridays Lumpen Radio debuts $5 Fridays with three local bands at the Co-Pro; they promise “bleary rock music and lasers.” Color Card, Easy Habits, and Skip Trace will no doubt provide the bleary rock music; it’s unclear whether they or the Lumpen team are responsible for the lasers. ( Julia Aizuss)
I Got Life – The Music of Nina Simone The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. West. Friday, November 3, doors 7pm, show 8pm. 21+. $17–$45. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com Singer Jaguar Wright and bassist Gerald Veasley, both jazz and soul artists hailing from Philadelphia, front an ensemble whose presentation and re-imagination of Nina Simone’s oeuvre will, The Promontory promises, result in “more than a concert.” ( Julia Aizuss)
Bully Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Tuesday, November 7, doors 7:30pm, show 8:30pm. $18–$20. 17+. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com Bully may have been formed in Nashville, but they have real Chicago roots—while in college, founder, vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Alicia Bognanno interned at Electrical Audio, the legendary recording studio complex founded by Steve Albini. Most recently, the band returned to Electrical Audio to record their sophomore album Losing, which was engineered by Bognanno and released by Sub Pop on October 20. They’ll be returning once again next Tuesday; don’t miss out. (Andrew Koski)
EVENTS
Turnover Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Friday, November 10, doors 7:30pm, show 8:30pm. $18–$25. 17+. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com Turnover is touching down in Chicago this November as part of its U.S. tour. And the indie darlings are bringing friends: special guests Elvis Depressedly and Emma Ruth Rundle are starting the night off. Bring your own friends for a music-filled night in the historic venue. (Michael Wasney)
The Dojo Presents: Queendom Come The Dojo, message on Facebook for address. Saturday, November 18, doors 8pm, workshop 8:30pm, music 9pm–1am. $5 donation. BYOB. thedojochi.com The queens in question at the Dojo next month will be Jovan Landry, Tee Spirit, Freddie Old Soul, DJ Gr-illa, and host for the night Fury Hip Hop. In perhaps less queenly but reliable fashion, F12 Network will be hosting a workshop again at 8:30pm, and nonprofit organization Activist In You will be vending throughout the night. ( Julia Aizuss)
STAGE & SCREEN
revered poet’s reclusive life in Massachusetts. Kate Fry stars as the prolific Dickinson who “dwells in possibility” and famously characterized hope as a “feathered thing that perches in the soul.” ( Joseph S. Pete)
The Edge of Each Other’s Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. Tuesday, November 7, 7pm. Free. southsideprojections.org The DuSable and South Side Projections’s Margaret Burroughs Centennial Film Series comes to an end with this 2002 tribute to Black feminist writer Audre Lorde. Focusing on the “I Am Your Sister” conference in 1990, the documentary powerfully covers her poetry and politics as a whole. ( Julia Aizuss)
Re:sound Live! Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Wednesday, November 8, 7:30pm. $25. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com Part of the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s two-week curated live podcast festival, Re:sound Live!—described as a “narrative mixtape”—brings together disparate storytellers and podcast hosts for an evening of live original stories and audio experiments. (Sam Stecklow)
Filmversation and Forum about Gentrification
The Revolution Will Not Be Improvised
South Side Community Arts Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave. Friday, November 3, 7pm. Free, registration required. (773) 373-1026. bit.ly/Filmversation
The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St. Every Saturday through November 11, 7:30pm. $5–$15. the-revival.com
Tom Freeman of the North is a film by Mo Rabbani showing a young Black man’s struggles with the changes impacting his neighborhood from gentrification. A panel discussion moderated by Pemon Rami, featuring representatives from multiple community organizations, will follow the screening. (Nicole Bond)
The Belle of Amherst Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Thursday, November 2–Sunday, December 3. $35–$68, discounts available for seniors, students, faculty, and groups. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Emily Dickinson could not stop for death, but you should stop by the UofC’s Court Theatre to see William Luce’s play about the
Ever since Gil Scott-Heron, people have speculated on what the revolution will not be. The Revival’s Fall South Side Sketch Comedy Review adds to that conversation and wrings needed laughs out of the current sociopolitical climate. Max Thomas, Elias Rios, Jared Chapman, Lexi Alioto, Sara Savusa, and Mo Phillips-Spotts blend improv humor and music under the direction of Molly Todd Madison. ( Joseph S. Pete)
Spotlight Reading Series: “Trouble in Mind” South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. Shore Drive. Saturday, November 11, 3pm. Free, reservation required. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind offers
a satirical take on racism in American commercial theater, spoofing a “progressive” Broadway play about race that’s anything but. The staged reading will revive a play as part of Court’s Spotlight Reading Series, which aims to bring the works of people of color to the fore. ( Joseph S. Pete)
eta Family Theatre Initiative: “The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves” eta Creative Arts, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Through Saturday, December 23. $40, discounts available for seniors and students. (773) 7523955. etacreativearts.org
FOOD & LAND
Ralph H. Metcalfe Federal Building, 77 W. Jackson Blvd. Friday, November 3, 8am–4pm. $25, includes breakfast and lunch. sevengenerationsahead.org This daylong summit boasts a dizzying array of panels and breakout sessions, on composting, soil conservation, water quality, and local food economies—and how projects within these realms can lead to “eco-effective, socially-responsible, and economically viable results.” The price of registration includes breakfast and lunch, as well as entrance to a networking social at the day’s end. (Emeline Posner)
Bringing city, business, and educational leaders together for a series of talks, the Chicagoland Food and Beverage Network
The preSERVE community garden, founded by The North Lawndale Greening Committee, NeighborSpace, and others, is looking for help its last harvest and winter preparations on this last autumnal weekend. Come dirty your hands, join in on a potluck after the hard work’s done, and maybe even carry some fresh goods—parsley, leeks, collards, and more—home with you. (Emeline Posner)
Dolores Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State Street. Friday, November 10 through Wednesday, November 15. See website for showtimes. $11, $6 for members. (312) 846-2800. siskelfilmcenter.org
The Illinois Soil, Food, Water, and Composting Summit
Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, 3857 W. 111th St. Monday, November 6, 2pm–5:30pm. Free. Register at chicagolandfood.org/event/4509
November preSERVE Garden Day preSERVE Garden, 1231 S. Central Park Ave. Saturday, November 4, 10am–12pm. slowfoodchicago.org
Nora Brooks Blakely’s musical adaptation of a book by her mother Gwendolyn Brooks was already a fitting choice, in the year of the Brooks centennial, to start off eta’s 2017–18 season. Even more fitting, given Brooks’s dedication to youth poetry, is that the musical will launch eta’s partnership with the Chicago Teachers Union Foundation. The initiative will encourage Chicago students to read the book and then to see the musical. ( Julia Aizuss)
Sowing the Seeds: Chicago’s Leadership in Food & Agriculture Education
is looking to spark a conversation about the state of food and agriculture education in Chicago. The event will include a tour of the event’s fitting venue, Chicago’s High School for Agricultural Sciences, and talks by Chancellor Juan Salgado, University of Illinois School of Agriculture Dean Kim Kidwell, and chefs from across Chicago. (Emeline Posner)
California grape boycott organizer Dolores Huerta, who teamed up with Cesar Chavez to found the nation’s first farmworker’s union, has been hailed as a real-life superhero. She’s the subject of Peter Bratt’s documentary, recently brought back to the Siskel due to popular demand. It features on-screen interviews with Huerta herself, as well as with significant historical figures like Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton. ( Joseph S. Pete)
Olmsted and Beyond: Parks & Open Spaces on the South Side DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. Tuesday, November 14, noon– 1pm. (773) 947-0600. dusablemuseum.org At this short, lunch-hour lecture, photographer/architecture critic/new DuSable Vice President/possible Renaissance man Lee Bey will walk attendees through the South Side’s green and open spaces and the history of their development. No need to pack walking shoes, though—Bey will use slides and, presumably, his own photographs, to cover all that ground. (Emeline Posner)
NOVEMBER 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15
ext rnships,coleg andcare radvisng,andscholarships. THE LEO S. GUTHMAN FUND THE THE LEO LEO S. S. GUTHMAN GUTHMAN FUND FUND THE LEO S. GUTHMANFUND FUND THE LEO S. S. GUTHMAN GUTHMAN FUND THETHE LEOLEO S. GUTHMAN FUND THELEO LEOS.S.GUTHMAN GUTHMANFUND FUND THETHE LEO S. GUTHMAN FUND THE LEO S. GUTHMAN FUND THE LEO S. GUTHMAN FUND
Blackstone Bicycle Works Blackstone Bicycle Works Weekly Bike Sale Weekly Bike Sale Every Saturday at 10am Every Saturday at 10am Wide selection of refurbished bikes!
(most are between $120 &bikes! $250) Widebikes selection of refurbished (most bikes are between $120 & $250) Blackstone Bicycle Works is a bustling community bike shop that each year empowers over 200 boys andcommunity girls from bike Chicago’s Blackstone Bicycle Works is a bustling shop that south mechanical business each side—teaching year empowers them over 200 boys andskills, girls job fromskills, Chicago’s literacy and how to become responsibleskills, community members. south side—teaching them mechanical job skills, businessIn our year-round ‘earn and learn’ youth program, participants earn literacy and how to become responsible community members. In bicycles and accessories forlearn’ theiryouth work in the shop. In addition, our our year-round ‘earn and program, participants earn bicycles and accessories fortutoring, their work in the shop. In addition, youths receive after-school mentoring, internships andour youths receive after-school tutoring, mentoring, internships and externships, college and career advising, and scholarships. externships, college and career advising, and scholarships.
Hours Hours - Friday 1pm - 6pm Tuesday 1pm- -5pm 6pm Tuesday - Friday10am Saturday 10am - 5pm Saturday (773) 241 5458 (773) 241 5458 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. 6100 S. IL Blackstone Chicago, 60637 Ave. Chicago, IL 60637
A PROGRAM OF A PROGRAM OF
THE PUBLIC NEWSROOM Once a week, we turn our Woodlawn office into an open space where journalists and the public can gather to discuss local issues, share resources and knowledge and learn to report and investigate stories in partnership with Build Coffee. We bring in guest speakers and host workshops and hands-on presentations. For working journalists, the public newsroom is a place to find and shape stories in direct conversation with readers. For the public, the newsroom is a front-row seat into how journalism gets made, and a chance to impact the way your community is covered in the media. The Public Newsroom is always free, always open to the public. CITYBUREAU.ORG/PUBLICNEWSROOM THURSDAYS 4PM–8PM THE EXPERIMENTAL STATION 6100 S. BLACKSTONE AVE
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