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AUSTIN WEEKLY news ■
Vol. 31 No. 45
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November 22, 2017
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Davis, Boykin endorse Chris Kennedy,
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Meet Rev. John Crawford, Page 3
Tap dancing into the wider world West Side young women say the art form has opened their perspectives By XUEER ZHANG AustinTalks
The idea of pursuing African studies in college came to Austin teen Aviance Spain as she tap danced with a group of South and West Side girls led by Bril Barrett, a North Lawndale native who loves to teach tap along with a bit of history, too. “He taught us [things] like African history and African-American history,” said Spain, 17, who joined the team in 2012. She and five other girls performed their latest tap dance piece EmpoWOMENt on a recent Thursday night at La Follette Park, the final stop of the 2017 Peacebook tour hosted by Collaboraction. Spain, a 10-year tap dancer and a student at Rowe-Clark Math & Science Academy, is one of about 100 artists across the city who have been featured in the festival, which is intended to address the ongoing crime and violence in Chicago through art performance, said Genevieve Fowler, community outreach coordinator at Collaboraction. “You are having a huge variation of voices being heard and stories being told,” Fowler said. It’s the second year the West Town-based theater company has hosted a peace festival to bring together artists of different backgrounds and different neighborhoods. The festival was expanded to 24 performances of theater, dance and song this year, she said; there were performances in EngleSee TAP DANCING on page 8
ALEXA ROGALS/Staff Photographer
Marching out crime
Members of the Exodus marching band walk through the neighborhood performing on Friday, Nov. 17, during a Good Neighbor Campaign rally on Massasoit Avenue near Augusta Street in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood.
Mary Peery, Austin’s garden mother, dies at 91 Peery founded the Austin Green Team in 1995 By MICHAEL ROMAIN Editor
Mary Peery, the well-known founder of the Austin Green Team, died on Friday, Nov. 10 after a lengthy illness. She was 91 years old. Green Team member Vera Watson confirmed Peery’s death earlier this week.
The Green Team, an organization that’s become renowned for its prolific planting of gardens throughout the West Side, was founded by Peery in 1995. She had been the group’s president since her retirement in 2016, Watson said. “She was not only concerned about her block, but other blocks that had vacant lots in the area, so she began to recruit other people and showed them how they could turn ugly vacant lots into beautiful flower and vegetable gardens,” Watson recalled,
referencing the Green Team’s origins. In addition to the organization’s flagship garden on the corner of Huron and Latrobe, the Green Team has seven other gardens that it planted, all under the steady, guiding hand of Peery, who Watson said lived to garden. Peery was born on Dec. 16, 1925, on a farm in Roxie, Mississippi, where her father raised vegetables that he sold. She was the
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See MARY PEERY on page 4