Austin Weekly News 110922

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Austin anti-violence organization teams up with CPD to reduce crime

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FREE Vol. 36 No. 45

November 9, 2022

Also serving Garfield Park

‘You did not get away with this’

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City seeking k input about art, page 5

Plaque at Westgate honors Mt. Carmel Baptist Church

After 14 wounded in Halloween mass shooting on West Side, city officials vow justice will be brought to shooter By JIM VONDRUSKA & BLOCK CLUB STAFF Block Club Chicago

Police Supt. David Brown had a message for the people responsible for a mass shooting that wounded 14 people — three of them children — Halloween night: “You did not get away with this, and you are not going to get away with this.” The drive-by shooting on Oct. 31 in East Garfield Park rocked the community and left children as young as 3 wounded. On Nov. 3, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Brown, local leaders and pastors joined hundreds of neighbors to pray for the victims at California Avenue and Polk Street, where the shooting happened. The 14 victims are alive, but some remain in critical condition. One victim was present at the vigil. Eleven of the 14 shot are related, according to the Sun-Times. Brown said police have strong leads from video cameras around the neighborhood and are deploying “every resource this department has” to find the person responsible. The top cop appealed for anyone with See SHOOTING on page 3

ALEX ROGALS/Staff Photographer

Christian Harris, left, and Juanta Griffin speak at the Oct. 29 dedication ceremony for a historic marker at 1100 W. Westgate in Oak Park honoring Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, an early Black institution.

The center of early Black Oak Park was also an example of ‘urban removal’ By MICHAEL ROMAIN Staff Reporter

The 1100 block of Westgate in Oak Park is among the most valuable areas in the village. On Saturday, in the shadow of the luxury Emerson Apartments high-rise, a

crowd of several dozen people gathered to remember the history of plunder underneath the cobblestone pavement and to install a permanent marker outlining the story of Mt. Carmel Baptist Church. The church was built by Oak Park’s early Black community in 1905, just a few decades after Emancipation and Reconstruction. The congregation had originally purchased property on Cuyler and Chicago avenues but the village See MT. CARMEL on page 6

Crossing Austin Boulevard: This story is part of an ongoing series of articles that Austin Weekly News publishes about issues, events, people, places and things that take place west of Austin Boulevard, but that nonetheless resonate to the east of it, as well.


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