July 8, 2020

SERVICE DIRECTORY SERVICE DIRECTORY SHOWCASE:

GARDEN KEEPERS SPRING CLEAN-UP

Design • Planting • Pruning Fertilizing • Clean-Up Butterfly Gardens • Patios Sprinkler Systems Professional • Affordable

773-233-0805

Trees, Evergreens, Sod and Flower Bed Maintenance

APPLIANCES – + Refrigerators, + Full Beds - $9900 Stoves - $9800 & Up + Single Beds - $6900 + Washers, Dryers + Bunk Beds - $19900 and Freezers + Chests - $4900 + Family Tables & + Sofa Sets - $22900 Chairs - $11500 + Lamps - $29/Pair

“Furniture For All!”

MIKE’S FURNITURE

1259 N. Ashland Avenue

(773)

276-0599

OPEN 7:30 AM + FREE Layway 1000 OFF APPLIANCE with this ad

$

CARPET CLEANING –

Accurate Exterior & Masonry 773-592-4535

General Contractors

- Family Owned Since 1982 -

Complete Remodeling Services Specialists in: • Vintage Homes Restorations • Kitchens & Baths • Basements • Electric & Plumbing • Wall & Floor Tile • Painting & Carpentry

For Chicago, IL to perform bench research, sample collection & data mgmt. Bachelor’s in Bio/                                 

LANDSCAPING – GARDEN KEEPERS SPRING CLEAN-UP

Design • Planting • Pruning Fertilizing • Clean-Up Butterfly Gardens • Patios Sprinkler Systems Professional • Affordable

773-233-0805

Trees, Evergreens, Sod and Flower Bed Maintenance

PLASTERING –

KELLY

PLASTERING CO. PLASTER PATCHING DRYVIT STUCCO FULLY INSURED

(815) 464-0606

PLUMBING –

We Work With You To Meet Your Needs

773-575-7220

EXTERMINATOR – Residential Plumbing Service

Book an appointment today!

773-886-8300 claritycleaning.net

CLEANING –

708-599-7000 House Cleaning Services

SERVICES INCLUDE:

Residential and Commercial Pest Management Services offered:

• Bug Spraying • Fumigation • Exterminator Services • Insect Control • Other Pest Control • Rodent Control & Removal • Termite Control

CALL FOR FREE ESTIMATE:

(773) 590-0622

HEATING/COOLING –

Family owned since 1999

www.bestmaids.com

MASONRY – MASONRY, TUCKPOINTING, BRICKWORK, CHIMNEY, LINTELS, PARAPET WALLS, CITY VIOLATIONS, CAULKING, ROOFING.

Licensed, Bonded, Insured. Rated A on Angie’s List. FREE Estimates

Accurate Exterior & Masonry 773-592-4535 MOVING –

CONSTRUCTION –

MICHAEL MOVING COMPANY Moving, Delivery and Cleanout Jobs

Serving Hyde Park and surrounding communities

773-977-9000 Let Us Help Build Your Business!

Advertise in the Business & Service Directory Today!!

00 1

HELP WANTED - The University of Chicago seeks Sr. Translational Core Coordinators

Licensed, Bonded, Insured. Rated A on Angie’s List. FREE Estimates

JOE & RUTH REMODELING

00 1 H el p W an t e d

H e l p W an t e d

MASONRY, TUCKPOINTING, BRICKWORK, CHIMNEY, LINTELS, PARAPET WALLS, CITY VIOLATIONS, CAULKING, ROOFING.

CONSTRUCTION –

CLASSIFIED Section

To place your ad, call:

1-773-358-3129 or email: malone@southsideweekly.com

Plumbing • Drain Cleaning • Sewer Camera/Locate Water Heater Installation/Repair Service • Tankless Water Heater Installation/Repair Service Toilet Repair • Faucet/Fixture Repair Vintage Faucet/Fixture Repair • Ejector/Sump Pump • Garbage Disposals • Battery Back-up Systems

Licensed & Insured • Serving Chicago & Suburbs

10% OFF Senior Citizen Discount License #: Call 773-617-3686 058-197062

ROOFING –

Conrad Roofing Co. of Illinois Inc.

SPECIALIZING IN ARCHITECTURAL: METAL WORK:

• Cornices • Bay Windows • Ornaments • Gutters & Downspouts • Standing & Flat Seam Roofs ROOFING WORK: • Slate • Clay Tile • Cedar • Shingles • Flat/Energy Star Roof

(773)

286-6212

ZZZ FRQUDGURRÀQJ FRP

 

Carpet Cleaning

068 Landscaping

Clarity Carpet & Furniture Cleaning Special 10% Off ($180+) 15% Off $350+) 20% Off ($600+) “Carpet so clean,  773-886-8300    Cleaning

070

Best Maids      Call Best Maids 708/599-7000

118 Records/Music

GARDEN KEEPERS Spring Cleanup!                773-233-0805  ble G.J.S. Landscaping     312-344-0390 773-953-0439 Masonry

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WILL BUY YOUR VINYL     Call Mike: 312.656.4882 



CONRAD ROOFING CO.                 773-286-6212

Accurate Exterior and Masonry

            JO & RUTH         REMODELING                        773.325.1600           773-592-4535  Articles for Sale 266   Movers 123    *Since 1982* Dryjoys by Footjoy MICHAEL MOVING    We Move, Deliver, Exterminators 088   773-576-8724 773.977.9000  Real Estate Services 300 Pest Control, LLC Plastering 143    HUD/Bank Foreclosures     KELLY Plastering Co.  Call: Fred D. Clink    773-294-5870     773.590.0622 Realty Services   815-464-0606 Construction

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Furniture for Sale

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 “Furniture For All!”      773-276-0599 Home Repair

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Hanns Restoration Serving Hyde Park Since 1996      NO JOB TOO SMALL 773-592-8173    

145 Apartments for Rent-Chgo 305 Spacious 1BD/BA  1700 E 56th St.                       312-519-7221         Call Jeff at 773-617-3686 Hyde Park  To place your ad, email:     773-230-9883

Plumbing

malone@southsideweekly.com or call:

1-773-358-3129

HUNTER PROPERTIES

5724-32 S. Blackstone Ave.-Hyde Park Neighborhood! Studios starting at $875 and 1 bedrooms starting at $1245. Heat Included!

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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.

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Volume 7, Issue 21 Jacqueline Serrato Martha Bayne Jasmine Mithani

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Cover Illustration by Alejandra Fernandez

IN CHICAGO

IN THIS ISSUE

Fourth of July and #HittheHood After shootings in late June that claimed the lives of several children, Mayor Lori Lightfoot dispatched 1,200 additional cops to the streets ahead of the Fourth of July weekend. CPD superintendent David Brown was criticized for saying that cops would arrest kids selling on drug corners by those concerned that it would result in racial profiling and the criminalization of children—not to mention expose them to possible COVID-19 infection in Cook County Jail. But the city also helped the nonprofit My Block, My Hood, My City put $80,000 in small grants in the pockets of community groups and individuals that would keep young people busy through events they dubbed #HittheHood in neighborhoods like Englewood, Back of the Yards, South Shore, and Roseland, and which included a car caravan, marches, block parties, food, DJs, murals, and movies in the parks. Amid a loud weekend of heavy fireworks, however, at least seventy-nine people were shot and fifteen people killed, including two minors.

prison speaks

Utility Bill Relief Program Mayor Lightfoot, who placed a moratorium on water shut-offs when she took office last year, on Monday announced a program in partnership with CEDA of Cook County to reduce water bills and extend debt relief to residents. The Utility Billing Relief (UBR) program is available to low-income property owners and tenants who meet the requirements for CEDA’s Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). Those who enroll could get a fifty percent reduction on their water and sewer bills, not be subject to late payment penalties or debt collection, and be offered debt forgiveness after completing a year with a payment plan without a past-due balance. To ensure the program is available to undocumented immigrants, the UBR does not require documentation of residency in Chicago. To sign up, go to Chicago. gov/ubr or call (312) 744-4426. Additionally, seniors can apply for a sewer exemption and a garbage fee discount on the city website.

political cartoon

Proposal to build thousands of homes on South and West Sides Nonprofit groups are proposing the mass construction of 2,000 affordable homes, half of which would be on the South Side and half on the West Side.

The proponents, who are part of a coalition called United Power for Action and Justice, would ask to get public-owned vacant lots for free from the city's dollar lots program, an idea that the Department of Housing is entertaining.

The plan would be for the new homes to be attainable for existing neighborhood residents. However, there appears to be little community input thus far, aside from the organizations already involved, the Lawndale Christian Health Center and The Resurrection Project, which have a history of real estate development in Black and brown communities.

Torture survivor Mark Clements on the coronavirus, decarceration and more bobby vanecko...................................................4 power and healing in the face of covid-19

“COVID-19 deaths are indicative of the conditions that Black Americans have to live every day.” jocelyn vega......................................................8 coloring page

haley tweedell..............................................10 games

south side weekly..........................................11 eric j. garcia....................................................11 census spotlight

The coronavirus pandemic derailed door-knocking plans, so volunteers turned to the phones jim daley..........................................................12 the horror of gentrification

“The time for catharsis is over.” ruby rorty.......................................................13 the only constant is change

“This is a story about transience, and how the everchanging conditions within our urban landscapes are fact, not fiction.” malik jackson..................................................16 no vacancy?

“How many people have to die because of housing they won’t release?” morley musick.................................................18 in map redrawing, power and politics prevail

After each Census, political districts are redrawn— and the process is anything but straightforward. jim daley and sam stecklow.........................20 opinion: chicago desperately needs an elected school board

CPS chooses to keep the school-to-prison pipeline intact dimitriy leksanov.........................................22

JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

JUSTICE

Prison Speaks

Activist and torture survivor Mark Clements on the coronavirus, decarceration, a recent arrest, and more

BY BOBBY VANECKO

M

ark Clements spent April 7 the way he spends many days: protesting outside the Cook County Jail. That day, the police torture survivor and activist was denouncing Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart and Governor J.B. Pritzker, for the state of things inside the jail—the site of one of the largest single-site outbreaks of COVID-19 in the country— and for not releasing incarcerated fellow survivors of police torture, respectively. The protest went as planned, with the typically colorful Clements saying on Facebook that the governor needs his “ass whooped” for leaving people inside Illinois jails and prisons to die. Clements said in an interview with the Weekly that he didn’t expect the comments to be taken as a literal threat to beat up the governor; he was just trying to convey his frustration with Pritzker. So Clements was very surprised to be arrested and thrown in the same jail where he had been protesting the next day.

At age sixteen, Clements was tortured by detectives working under then-Chicago Police Department Lieutenant Jon Burge and convicted of a quadruple murder that he did not commit. Since his conviction was overturned in 2009, he has spent much of his time working with and for other torture survivors and incarcerated people through the Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC) and the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR).

One fellow survivor whom Clements has been advocating for is Gerald Reed, whose case the Weekly last covered in March. Reed, fifty-six years old, is confined to a wheelchair because of an injury he received at the hands of CPD detectives who beat him to elicit a confession. The state Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC) found Reed’s longstanding claim of torture credible it referred his case back to the Cook County Circuit Court in 2012, 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 8, 2020

but he is still incarcerated. Reed reportedly fell ill in May, which prompted groups like those Clements works with to increase calls for Pritzker to pardon and release Reed and all police torture survivors at risk of contracting coronavirus in prison.

S

ince the COVID-19 outbreaks at the Cook County Jail and Stateville Correctional Center became some of the worst in the country, groups including CAARPR, Black Lives Matter Chicago, the Chicago Community Bond Fund, Parole Illinois, the Illinois Prison Project, and others have been organizing call-ins, car caravans, marches, and other protests to pressure Pritzker, Dart, and Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to take every action available to them to decarcerate in order to protect the public health. However, these politicians have thus far failed to meet the groups’ demands. While some people have been released from state and county correctional systems, policymakers and government executives are basing their decisions on a narrow review process that advocates claim is far too slow given the magnitude of the crisis. Pritzker has used his tremendous clemency power to issue just twenty-four pardons so far in his term. The State’s Attorney’s Office opposed release in seventy to eighty percent of the thousands of motions for bond reduction filed by the Cook County Public Defender’s Office between March and May 13, according to data released by the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice.

Elected officials are likely wary of the political costs of taking bold decarceral measures. Republicans in the state General Assembly have been attacking Pritzker for the very light use of his clemency powers thus far, and in late April, the Tribune published a deeply flawed critical investigation into the workings of two local bond funds, giving the

“During booking, he heard a disgruntled employee yell, ‘The phone won’t stop ringing, everybody keeps calling asking for Mark Clements.’

BLM Chicago, CTJC, and CAARPR had organized a call-in to demand Clements’s freedom as soon as they heard that he had been arrested.” incorrect impression that their work has led to an increase in violence. Ultimately, these attacks fail to acknowledge that COVID-19 is the biggest threat to the public, and that Illinois will never be able to recover from this crisis as long as the virus continues to ravage our incarcerated population.

Jails and prisons are incubators for disease because they are perpetually overcrowded and unsanitary. Those diseases are easily spread to the surrounding communities through employees commuting home and “jail churn,” or the number of times people are booked into a jail in a year—10.6 million times each year in America, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. A recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that higher county jail incarceration rates were associated with increases in overall county mortality rates, even in normal times.

As one would expect, it gets much worse during a pandemic: according to a study recently published in the medical policy journal Health Affairs, one in six Chicago coronavirus cases can be traced back to the Cook County Jail.

D

art, in particular, continues to deny the complete inadequacy of his response to the crisis, even while federal judges have ordered him to do more to contain the outbreak. Dart’s failure to act was not a surprise to Clements, who has been familiar with the sheriff since Dart’s days as a state legislator from the Far Southwest Side in the 1990s. As the co-chair of the House Prison Oversight Committee during his time in the legislature, Dart was “the one that really destroyed, messed up prisons the way that they are now today in the state of Illinois,” according to Clements.

In the 1990s, Clements operated a radio show from prison, and he used his platform to criticize Dart for the harmful effects of his reform efforts. But Clements said that Dart did his best to silence Clements’ concerns and those of other incarcerated people. “I was doing all I could do as a prisoner to voice and raise the attention of the people to say, ‘Man, we got to go vote and get [Dart] up out of here,’ ” he said.

(Dart’s office declined to comment on the claims about Dart’s time as a legislator, writing in a statement it was “unsure of what Mr. Clements is referring to” and instead

touting one of his reforms as sheriff: ending solitary confinement within Cook County Jail and encouraging other jail administrators to do the same. An investigation published in December by the Chicago Reporter and prison watchdog nonprofit Solitary Watch raised questions about the effectiveness of Dart’s replacement for solitary, called the Special Management Unit, with one detainee housed there saying, “It’s like basically you’re still stuck in a cell outside of a cell, shackled up.”)

A few years later, Dart was defeated by the Republican nominee when he left the General Assembly to run for state treasurer.

Then he made the move to the Sheriff ’s Office—first as chief of staff to then-Sheriff

Mark Clements, center.

Michael Sheahan, then getting elected as a tier with approximately thirty other men.

Sheriff in 2006.

Guards were touching the men without Clements assesses Dart’s response to the protection of gloves, masks, or other the outbreak in Cook County Jail in this equipment while mocking the detainees, context. Clements said, “I don’t think he has saying they were certain to get infected. changed, because of all of his narratives on In a statement to the Weekly, Dart’s the news that I have heard so far, he’s stating office said, “Due to the extensive social that these safeguards are being provided... distancing measures the Sheriff ’s Office But it's people like me who have talked to has enacted in response to COVID-19, those guys [in Cook County Jail] nearly the population of that tier was 14 on April every single day, and they’re like, ‘No, they 9.... There is and has always been copious didn’t do this, they didn’t do that.” amounts of soap, hand sanitizer, cleaning Clements hasn’t just talked to people products and PPE available to detainees and in the Cook County Jail: he has firsthand staff.... Additionally, testing at the jail has experience of its recent conditions, because always far exceeded what has been available he spent almost eighteen hours there on to the general public during this pandemic.”

April 9. Clements said that he was placed in However, these assertions are directly at

PHOTO COURTESY OF MARK CLEMENTS

odds with Clements’s observations, as well as Cassandra Greer-Lee’s tragic experience of trying to save her late husband Nickolas Lee from dying of coronavirus in Cook County Jail, and the stories of many other people with firsthand experience of the jail.

While Clements was eventually separated and placed in his own cell as a protest on his behalf gained steam outside the jail, and was ultimately released on bond, he said, “The brothers and sisters who I spoke with inside of the jail, they are terrified....

That's one of the things that is not being adequately reported by most media sources...

These guys are terrified, they are muzzled, and they are controlled based off of the fact that our media is basically going off of these JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

JUSTICE

PHOTO COURTESY OF MARK CLEMENTS

Mark Clements, center. elected officials just because they are elected back from a different phone to ask why the officials, and they are giving the inmates no police were looking for Mark Clements, and credibility while the inmates are constantly after the police said that they just needed to testing positive for this virus.” Clements’ own talk to him—“he can come in and clear it up life was put at risk by his being thrown into and that’s the end of it,” Clements says they the epicenter of Cook County’s outbreak: said—he knew that something was up, so he he has asthma and is at high risk of a more refused to comply. severe case if he contracted the virus.

Approximately thirty minutes later, the police were at Crystal’s door. Clements said he dangerous conditions in the Cook that the men appeared to be detectives, and County Jail during the pandemic that there were a lot of them; some were are why Clements was so alarmed even dressed in military fatigues. Clements on April 7, after the protest at the jail, when and Crystal were alarmed and confused, so he received a call from his sister saying the Crystal did not answer the calls or knocks police had ransacked her house looking for while Clements tried to hide. The police him. While Clements originally thought then threatened to get the battering ram, that it couldn’t possibly be true because he before Clements and Crystal heard one didn’t do anything wrong, his fears were officer instruct another to go get the keys. confirmed the next day when his girlfriend Mark immediately knew that was illegal, Crystal was contacted by the police while because they did not have a search warrant she was at work. Clements called the number for Crystal’s property. “Even if they have

T

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 8, 2020

a warrant for my arrest, they still don't have a warrant to enter into her property without her providing consent,” he said.

Nevertheless, the police got the key, entered, and searched the entire house, eventually finding Clements hiding behind the shower curtain.

When the police first apprehended Clements, they told him that he had some parking tickets that he needed to take care of. When Clements replied that he didn’t drive, the police said that they were taking him in anyway, and escorted him over to the fleet of undercover cruisers waiting outside the house. The procession wound down side streets and eventually brought Clements to the Sheriff ’s office in west suburban Maywood. During booking, he heard a disgruntled employee yell, “The phone won’t stop ringing, everybody keeps calling asking for Mark Clements.” BLM Chicago, CTJC, and CAARPR had organized a call-in to demand Clements’s freedom as soon as they heard that he had been arrested. Clements eventually got to speak with a friend from CAARPR, who assured him that his supporters would be in north suburban Skokie in the morning to support him in bond court.

At the Maywood holding facility, Clements was placed in one of the fourteen dirty cells on the men’s side, where he said there was a complete lack of sanitation materials. His cell was close to six others who were locked up, so he began to converse with them. Five of them were there on unspecified charges related to alleged gang activity, potentially a result of Chicago’s error-riddled gang database. They told Clements that they had been at the Maywood station for days without access to a phone to call their loved ones or lawyers.

“They can pick up people who are associated with street gangs and take them to that police station and leave them there for three to seven days without providing them any access to a telephone call while they’re claiming to be investigating,” Clements said. “When I found that out, that was also mind-blowing, because I had worked on the black site at Homan Square... And I’m like, this is a black site!”

Clements was similarly isolated when he was tortured in 1981—when he was in police custody, his requests for his parents, an attorney, and a youth officer (he was sixteen at the time) were all denied. The use of incommunicado detention is a longstanding tactic of the Chicago Police Department, and lawyers have reported widespread abuse

of this tactic during the recent uprisings against racist police violence. Overall, less than two percent of people arrested in Chicago actually get legal representation while in custody at police stations.

Before court the next morning, Clements was interrogated by Investigator Leslie Turner from the Illinois State Police.

After a couple minutes of questioning, the officer seemed to recognize Clements and asked, “You wouldn’t happen to be Mark Clements, over there in C-House in Stateville, would you?” Both men took off their protective masks—Clements said that they gave him a “little tiny paper mask that really was nothing, it was like the masks that they're saying don’t pass out”—and they immediately recognized each other from decades ago while Clements was still incarcerated. Clements recounted the interaction: “Come to find out I knew him for twenty-five years, he just started laughing, because this is the same type of stuff that I would do inside the prison system—pulling stunts is what it was called. [Turner] said, ‘Man, if I knew it was you I wouldn’t have even come.’

[Turner] had told me that it was a stop order for Mark Clements... They had received a tip, is what they say, from law enforcement—he wouldn’t say who the law enforcement was— that I threatened to kill the governor. And I told him, ‘Well, Turner, listen here, you know how I am, we’re gonna just keep it real.’ I said, ‘What you’re looking for is on Facebook Live.

And I said, ‘I wanna get the quote correct, I said, “The governor needs his ass whooped for leaving people, families inside to die,” and he started laughing and whatnot you know...

Before [Turner] even left, he said, ‘Man, you know, I’m just gonna put down that the guy is an activist, you know, and this is what he does.’ ”

W

ith the help of civil rights lawyer Joey Mogul and a team of attorneys from the CTJC and the Cook County Public Defender’s Office, Clements was able to secure bond and was back home later that night. However, he still suspects misconduct, as do his supporters, who protested and demanded Clements’s release for almost the whole thirty-five hours he was in custody. Clements argued that the police and their unions have a history of this kind of retaliation. He said that if he had known that old warrants for his arrest existed, he would have fallen

JUSTICE

back a bit on the activism, but he was never served with any kind of notice. While one of the warrants turned out to be related to an old relationship that soured and led to both parties taking out orders of protection, Clements believes that his arrest was pretextual and that he was targeted by CPD and the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) for his activism on behalf of torture survivors and people affected by police violence.

Reports obtained by the Weekly from the Sheriff ’s Office and Illinois State Police show that the day after Clements’s protest was broadcast on Facebook Live, a deputy chief of the Sheriff ’s Police notified the department’s Street Crime Suppression Unit that Clements had two outstanding warrants—the last of which was issued in 2018. They also show that management of his girlfriend’s apartment building opened the door for police after a neighbor told the officers that Clements was in the apartment.

After officers arrested Clements, they found he had apparently not completed his annual registration as a murderer, one of the conditions of the manner in which his conviction was overturned. The State Police was also notified the same day of the “threats” Clements made against Pritzker— though its report does not say who made the notification—and that he was “later taken into custody by the Cook County Sheriff ’s Police on two unrelated charges.” The report notes that Clements told investigators that “he was merely speaking out of his emotions for those who are incarcerated” and that “he knows better [than] to threaten the Governor, especially after serving 28 years in prison.”

Clements had been wary of the possibility of retaliation ever since the conclusion of the civil rights lawsuit of torture survivor Stanley Wrice, who was exonerated after being incarcerated for thirty-one years and then awarded $5.2 million by a civil jury. Clements was present in the courtroom on the day the verdict came down, as the FOP’s president and vice president glared at him and others who celebrated after the verdict was announced.

Clements feared that his comments at the courthouse that day, saying that their presence was a waste of taxpayer dollars given the fact that Wrice was innocent, had made him a target. In addition, shortly after that trial, Clements and his coworkers at the CTJC discovered an FOP letter in which the union demanded that Foxx charge torture survivors with perjury for making claims to

the TIRC. Clements knew that the FOP and many CPD officers were probably upset with him, but he never thought that his life would be in danger.

Despite his concerns about retaliation, Clements is doing everything he can to raise his voice, tell his story, and call for the release of all torture survivors and other people at risk of contracting the novel coronavirus in prisons and jails. Commenting on Illinois’s outbreaks, Clements said, “I think that this is now a time to seriously look at the punitive aspects of our criminal justice system and the effects that it is having on not just one community, but all of the communities as a whole... These guys just weren’t sent to these prisons to die. [Elected officials] have to do a lot more.”

Clements was especially disappointed in Pritzker, the one official who has the most unilateral power to stop the spread of the virus through decarceration, by granting clemency. Since his release from prison in 2009, Clements has received countless letters from incarcerated people seeking his assistance. So when Clements got the chance to speak with Pritzker while he was still on the campaign trail, at an event with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH organization, he asked Pritzker what he would do about incarcerated survivors of police torture.

Clements said Pritzker promised him that “if he was elected governor, any torture claims that were obvious, he would pardon them... But he hasn’t done anything.”

No torture survivors have been freed by Pritzker as of the writing of this article— even Gerald Reed, whose conviction was vacated over a year ago. Clements is also seeking a pardon for himself and other survivors like him who were forced to take a plea deal in order to be released—which means that Clements still has a record, and requirements like enrolling in a state murder registry that facilitated his arrest after the April protest, for a crime that he did not commit.

As he was getting ready to hang up the phone from his interview with the Weekly, Clements explained he had to run to another Zoom call. Before we spoke, he was meeting with others from the CTJC, helping community members prepare emergency petitions for their loved ones’ release before the Illinois Prisoner Review Board. After the call, he was meeting with CAARPR members to help plan a “Free Them All” forum with the Campaign to Free Incarcerated Survivors of Police Torture (CFIST). The virtual event featured

a documentary that highlighted the struggles of incarcerated survivors of police torture who still have not received justice, as well as a panel of speakers including torture survivor Darrell Cannon, Aislinn Pulley from CTJC and BLM Chicago, Nadine Naber from CFIST and MAMAs, Brian Ragsdale from CAARPR, and Armanda Shackelford, Gerald Reed’s mother.

In an April 9 article published by Truthout, Shackelford wrote:

hundred hotspots. While the jail’s population has decreased since the outbreaks, it is back on the rise again, going from its record low of 4,026 back to 4,524. Further, Illinois’ prison population has barely budged—an alarming pattern that is being replicated across the country. As Clements continues to highlight, Dart, Foxx, and Pritzker could be doing much more. ¬

What hurts the most is that our children didn’t bring the virus onto themselves. It’s being brought to them. I have befriended many prisoners because not everyone has family to speak for them. The message I’m hearing from those inside is the same: We need help because the prisons aren’t sanitized and aren’t clean... It’s clear that a thorough rethinking of our prison system—and much else about our country and its numerous racial and economic disparities— will need to take place if we want to successfully put this catastrophic pandemic behind us. But for now, the urgent priority must be removing as many prisoners as possible, especially elderly people and those with underlying conditions or compromised immune systems.

Bobby Vanecko is a contributor to the Weekly. He is a law student at Loyola University Chicago.

He last wrote for the Weekly advocating for defunding CPD.

Additional reporting by Sam Stecklow

C

lements’s work shares this urgency, and it will not stop as long as torture survivors remain incarcerated.

Elected officials should heed his call and free all torture survivors, domestic violence survivors, and others incarcerated due to police or prosecutorial misconduct. They should also listen to Shackelford and the countless other advocates who are calling for them to free their loved ones who are most at risk of contracting the coronavirus in prisons and jails.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, “Illinois has an incarceration rate of 564 per 100,000 people (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), meaning that it locks up a higher percentage of its people than many wealthy democracies do,” including the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, and more. It has been apparent for many years that there are far too many people locked up in Illinois, but the coronavirus crisis has made it an even more urgent life or death matter. A study by the ACLU predicts that a failure to decarcerate could lead to 100,000 additional deaths nationwide, among people inside prisons and out.

Cook County Jail is the ninth largest single-site outbreak in the country as of July 6, and Stateville is also among the top JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

ACTIVISM

Power and Healing in the Face of COVID-19

Three ADOS and Black-led organizations discuss how they're lifting up their communities in a time of crisis

BY JOCELYN VEGA In independent conversations regarding the impact of COVID-19 in Chicago’s Black communities, representatives of Black Women Organizing for Power (BWOP), Getting Grown Collective, and Ujimaa Medics discussed their reactions and responses to the global pandemic. COVID-19 infection rates are significantly higher in the Black community, and Black Chicagoans made up seventy out of the first one hundred deaths related to COVID-19.

Black residents continue to contract COVID-19 at alarming rates, representing almost fortytwo percent of deaths citywide. The pandemic’s disproportionate impact on access to health care, food, transportation, and more within Black communities can be easily traced to Chicago’s entrenched segregation and long-term disinvestment on the South and West Sides.

Ujimaa Medics provides workshops on urban emergency first aid to treat gunshot wounds and asthma attacks, and defines its core values as “healing, hopeful, and hood.” The Weekly spoke with co-founder and registered nurse Martine Caverl and health justice advocate Journey Jamison.

Taryn Randle is a co-founder of Getting Grown Collective, an Englewood-based urban agriculture organization whose mission is to prepare future generations to build healthy futures and to support multigenerational engagement.

Black Women Organizing for Power (BWOP) aims to uplift Chicago’s Black community and give Black women a voice in Chicagoland politics, under the leadership of co-chairs Raquel McGee and Lonette Sims.

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These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

What has been your response to COVID-19?

organization’s

Journey Jamison, U-Medics: COVID-19 has given ignition to a lot of conversations in the Black community. You’re seeing in a very black-and-white way how little access we have to help or resources. This makes people disheartened as a difficult, initial response, asking why. Why is it my community? Why are things the way that they are?

We have to teach people in the same sense that we shouldn’t have to teach our Black sons how to advocate for themselves in front of the police. We shouldn’t have to be teaching Black people how to advocate for themselves in a hospital, where it’s their job to take care of us, but we do. You get into the hospital and they dismiss your complaints.

They don't treat you like necessarily a person but as a chart.

Our response is to give Black people a platform to not only learn but teach. For U-Medics, we are asking: what do we do?

Our niche was violence-related first aid and asthma workshops, with our mission to galvanize health justice for Black people as a whole. Now, with COVID, we had to reenvision. We want to give people more first aid skills, but also a set of skills to handle some of our most terrifying and helpless moments in the Black community. Skills [for] gaining confidence, to see yourself in your community, to take care of each other, and to take care of yourself now. This really all goes back to Ujimaa as a key Swahili word for collective work and responsibility.

It’s affirmation that we can empower, educate, and support our own communities, as they are.

Raquel McGee, BWOP: It’s just a continual reminder that the constant degradation in Black American Descendant of Slavery communities (ADOS), has never been repaired throughout the entire history of this city. We are overlaying this pandemic— this crisis—on top of a sustained 200-year crisis. We can trace a direct line in the communities that are impacted most by COVID-19 with continual racial terrorism.

For example, the epidemic has further exacerbated the already existing Black maternal morbidity crisis. Englewood has one of the highest rates of maternal morbidity in the entire country, but they shut down St. Bernard. [Ed.: On April 20, 2020, St. Bernard Hospital indefinitely closed its Labor and Delivery unit, directing women in childbirth to Mercy Hospital in the South Loop.] Having Black doctors and having someone who looks like you are important factors to feel comfortable when giving birth. What are ADOS women to do now? COVID-19 has not paused life; people are still giving birth.

I just have to laugh when I look at the solutions that our policymakers, like the [Infant and Maternal Mortality Amongst African Americans Task Force], are suggesting to address this. What we need to mitigate this crisis is to allocate state funding and federal funding to make sure maternity wards do not close. However, in the meantime, they’re sitting in their task force on a Zoom meeting and sipping on coffee while ADOS women are left without options.

Lonette Sims, BWOP: COVID-19 deaths are indicative of the conditions that Black Americans have to live every day, living in contained communities compared to other ethnic groups. I want to highlight the city’s

legacy in segregation (and lack of resources) is the reason [why Black American Descendants of Slavery] are dying in disproportionate numbers.

RM: One thing that gave me chills was looking at a redlining map of Chicago, side by side with a COVID-19 map. You can superimpose them on top of each other. Lonette [Sims] has been engaging conversations about the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave, and that was the same thing. If we refuse to fix, heal, and repair these inequities on all levels—on a municipal level, on the state level, on the federal level—we can almost expect a crisis, every decade, to happen again.

Taryn Randle, Getting Grown Collective: I wasn’t really thinking about the element of community building that would be happening through this. I was mostly responding to the circumstances when the pandemic first hit. Like, “Oh, snaps. People don’t have food? How are we going to get it?”

Black neighborhoods have experienced the closure of grocery stores and shutting off of services, not having access to LINK, and all of those things. It’s important to have local food that’s accessible. And more than accessible, but food grown autonomously.

Our role is getting more folks to be stewards of their own land. We, in collaboration with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, partnered with some chefs who were down to use the produce that we had access to. [The result], Farm Food Familias, is our project to feed families.

The significance of harvesting during this time brings to light the importance of this work to get as much food and medicine as we can. There are still pharmacies that are

“When we raise our voice, speak up, and vocalize that pain, it is an act of protest. Now in 2020, the Black community is in the stage where we’re able to be transparent, not only about what physically happens when you’re Black in America, but also the mental and emotional effects.” still not open. We need to ask: what do we have in place? In case something like that happens long-term in the future. How will the babies survive without any intervention?

An unpredictable future is upon us. But the times that we’re living [through] are also really healing work. I’m transforming chard plants with my hands in the soil and hearing the birds. I’m focusing on the smaller things, not just the tragedy. We are also trying our hardest to also make sure that we create opportunities to re-introduce farm work because of the narrative of farming as slave work. Yeah, farming was a type of slave work but that’s not all. You gotta push for the other end of that narrative. We were doing this work before slavery. It’s something for us to take to take pride in for real.

Now, we know where the builders are.

We know where the land is. We know where the soil is healthy. We know where the seeds are. We know who the growers are and all of those things. We have created a route through Farm Food Familias. All that stuff has already been put into place, so it’d be less of an emergency response in the future, because we’ll continue with the plan that we already had in motion.

Food, regardless of the human infrastructure in place and its challenges, is always powerful. Food is medicine.

How has your organization addressed COVID-19 misunderstandings or worked to center understanding?

JJ: We did three workshops within a span of a week and a half. We provided an asthma workshop layered with the implications of COVID-19 for someone who has asthma

and COVID-19 for someone who is Black.

It is important to have workshops where people can just get information. You need to be fully prepared with what’s going on, even before you get to the hospital, so you know what to advocate for.

On the ground, there’s so much to unpack, but I think what’s important is that Black leadership is crucial for any real change, especially when talking about medicine and health in the Black community. Somebody could have anti-Black sentiment as they’re distributing information. Even though the intention might be good, it is important that Black people are holding the cards and writing the book.

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Martine Caverl: There is a misunderstanding that there’s something born in Black people that makes us more susceptible to illness than other races. Some people get mixed up when health justice advocates want to call attention to have historical health disparities, economic oppression, and daily living in a racist society. We’re not saying that Black people get sicker for being Black or African. We're saying that the illnesses will hit harder and the effects are more widespread because of these factors.

TR: It’s really hard to answer that for me. In all honesty, I’m not really engaging with folks too much about coronavirus, but planning which plants need to be moved and specific things about the work. I don’t think we’ve taken the time to fully process the impacts right now because we've been dealing with the fluctuating season. But we have the understanding on the front end.

We are feeling affirmed in our decision to JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

ACTIVISM

Coloring Page do this work as a collective, and that’s the kind of impact for us. This has been the crisis point that we have been trying to be prepared for. All we can do is try our best to be safe. What we’re doing is resiliency as an understanding gained in this collective. We can show up and make sure this food grows.

People are literally just doing what they can and from where they can as reciprocal and regenerative.

RM: I hope that COVID has instilled a sense of urgency and radicalized people who are not. I can see this as a radicalizing moment because there’s just so many crises going on, not just COVID-19. There’s also the crisis of continuing to watch the degradation that results in the lynching of ADOS lives with Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmed Arbery.

LS: We need ADOS women’s leadership because we are the caregivers in our community. A lot of times we are the essential workers. We are trying our best to navigate our daily crisis that we experienced every day, on top of COVID-19. Most ADOS women also have either a friend, a family member, or know somebody that’s incarcerated. COVID-19 has affected the county jail. We are left with the burden, and it’s up to us to tell their story because it’s a firsthand experience.

RM: I’ve never gravitated towards the concepts of abolition, but that’s the kind of transformative politics needed to repair ADOS communities. This is not going to be half-stepping or baby steps. Politicians have exacerbated this— I’m talking to you, Lori Lightfoot, who claims to be progressive but is not. They need to be called out. We need to call your bluff. We need to hold you accountable.

Any final thoughts?

JJ: When you finish having a bad argument, your head hurts right? That is something clear on a black-and-white level. However, when you put that in the context of hundreds of years of oppression, it’s hard for people to have that click. As a descendant of slavery, I’m still dealing with the trauma of my ancestors in 2020. I'm still moving around and trying to dispel that trauma in 2020.

We have a history of holding on to pain.

It’s so important that people understand what’s happening because we have to take care of our bodies. The body is really 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 8, 2020

an important thing for Black people to prioritize and anybody living with trauma.

If you’re living with trauma, it really is important for you to attend to that because that trauma will find its way to manifest.

When we raise our voice, speak up, and vocalize that pain, it is an act of protest.

Now in 2020, the Black community is in the stage where we’re able to be transparent, not only about what physically happens when you’re Black in America, but also the mental and emotional effects. Speaking of our pain is a form of liberation.

TR: Black communities are not in the place of being disenfranchised because Black communities lack the skills to be more than disenfranchised. This shit is disenfranchised. The more we get resources directly to people on the ground in Black communities, the more we’ll start to see that disenfranchisement looks differently. We need more than what we can get and what we have been getting.

Redirect all of the resources and all of the funds to the ground—to people out here. They are moving. They move in small scales. There are so many initiatives happening with people that are organized but don’t have names, don't have websites, and don’t have other stuff either. We need to get more resources generating between the people that are on the ground.

RM: ADOS are dying from COVID-19.

We need resources. We are dying. We need resources in this pandemic because it is far from over. Please advocate to your elected officials and for reparations for American Descendants of Slavery. I’d ask anybody reading this, to begin to reach out to your congressional representatives and ask them to pass H.R. 40 with the edits of Dr. William A. Darity Jr. We still haven't made federal reparations a part of our conversations. Now we’re gonna hear abolish and defund and free them all, but federal reparations is what I want that on the tip of everybody’s tongue.Jocelyn Vega is a contributing editor to the Weekly. She last wrote about mental health during COVID-19 in Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities.

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Census Spotlight

BY JIM DALEY

W

hen Jenné Myers and her staff developed a Census outreach plan earlier this year, they envisioned volunteers engaging people one-on-one at CTA stops, grocery stores, barbershops, schools, and other locations on the South and West Sides. Myers, the CEO of Chicago Cares, a nonprofit that connects people with volunteer opportunities, said that the goal was to reach underserved communities that the Census designates as “hard-to-count.” These are populations for whom inclusion in the Census count is limited by geographic, socioeconomic, and other barriers.

The outreach effort was going to launch in mid-March, sending hundreds of volunteers organized into street teams fanning out across a dozen communities.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Like many other nonprofits engaged in Census outreach, the pandemic and subsequent shutdown made the in-person strategy Chicago Cares developed practically impossible. “We were supposed to go that week of St. Patrick’s Day,” Myers said. “Then 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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the stay-at-home order came down and our plans were shot.” Governor J.B. Pritzker closed schools in Illinois beginning March 17, and issued a statewide stay-at-home order starting March 21.

The organization was already contracted by the city to do outreach, and still had volunteers who had been prepped on Census talking points and were ready to go, so Myers and her staff started working on alternative approaches. “In discussion with the mayor’s office, we talked about turning this into a phone-banking and texting campaign,” Myers said. They discussed how to use technology to get the message out and still have a personal touch, even if the volunteers were not door-knocking and doing street outreach.

Chicago Cares ultimately decided to invest in a phone- and text-banking approach, which allowed volunteers to connect to people in hard-to-count communities without breaking the stayat-home order. If you’ve ever done either for a political campaign, you’re familiar with the method: volunteers are given an

introductory script and, via a platform that anonymizes phone numbers on both the sender’s and receiver’s end, call or send texts to preselected individuals.

Because the volunteers were doing outreach in the midst of COVID-19, Myers said they added a kind of remote wellness check to the outreach. “Some of the most under-counted are sometimes seniors or are very vulnerable citizens, and at that time people were filing for unemployment,” she said. “So, volunteers had a bunch of other resources should the person on the other end need other help.” Occasionally a volunteer would reach a senior citizen who just wanted to talk for a bit. “That was very important in that moment, because some of these seniors are living in isolation and that was a unique opportunity for the volunteers to have some interaction.”

Myers said that volunteers started phone-banking in May, and the outreach effort will run through the end of July.

(The Census Bureau extended the response deadline to Oct. 31 because of the pandemic.) As of the first week of July, the

volunteers had made “well over” 500,000 calls, she said.

Organizers made sure volunteers understood why Census outreach was an important part of civic engagement, Myers said. “We gave them an orientation to why the Census is important here [and] what this means in the grander scheme of systems and government, and why it’s important to the caller on the other end of the phone,” she said. “Without those Census numbers being accurate, we’re not going to have the resources we need for education, homeless services, mental health services, and all the things that are so important for any city to run.” The Weekly’s coverage of the 2020 Census is supported by a reporting grant from the McCormick Foundation, administered by the Chicago Independent Media Alliance.

Jim Daley is the Weekly’s politics editor. He last wrote about the City rescinding a cease-anddesist order issued to Chicago Freedom School.

LIT

The Horror of Gentrification

Creators Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore on the graphic novel BBTM FDRS

BY RUBY RORTY BTTM FDRS, written by Ezra Claytan Daniels and illustrated by Ben Passmore, an Eisner Award-nominated graphic novel published by Fantagraphics in 2019, was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Chicago Public Library. It unfolds in the fictional South Side neighborhood of Bottomyards, where gentrification and cultural appropriation encroach and mingle with more supernatural threats. Daniels’ storytelling and Passmore’s illustrations make for a cinematic, politically urgent take on classic horror tropes. The Weekly sat down with Passmore and Daniels for a Zoom interview in late May to talk about their collaboration, future work, and what BTTM FDRS has to say about our current political moment.

Ezra Claytan Daniels: It’s a surreal time, and it’s only gotten more surreal in the past week, with the police murders and ensuing protests. I can’t even wrap my mind around how things are changing, how things are being affected, and what to do.

When everyone’s in quarantine, you feel so disconnected from world events. I’m staving off going numb as a defense mechanism and working to find ways to use art intentionally to stay engaged with the world.

How are you doing? It’s a strange time, everyone’s inside, we’re in a pandemic— what are you thinking about and working on during quarantine?

ECD: My work has always had a political agenda, but as I get older and more experienced, I’m starting to be more intentional about how I incorporate politics

One thing you two have talked about in other interviews is using art as a processing mechanism. How did that figure into the creation of BTTM FDRS and into your creative process more generally?

into my work. I think BTTM FDRS was the beginning of that, in that writing it was a very therapeutic process. To me, it was about reconciling my role as a gentrifier, as a person of color who’s living in gentrifying spaces, a person of color who benefits from the privilege of passing as white in many situations. It was cathartic, it was therapeutic, and it was a process that led me to be even more intentional in how I incorporate politics in my work and into the stuff I’m working on now.

Ben Passmore: Yeah, absolutely. BTTM FDRS was cathartic. Something I love about BTTM FDRS is that it talks about everyone’s complicitly, including my own— It’s a clear-eyes investigation of how many of us take part in the colonization and cooption of our communities. The time for catharsis is over and has been over, in a lot of ways. It’s time to very methodically figure out we’re going to be different. That’s another reason I was really excited about the book before I drew it. It’s not a “woe is me” book. Ezra and I talk about this all the time—we’re two mixed Black men who lived in our communities. We have white adjacency and experience acceptance from white art people, and I was really excited to be a part of a conversation about our role in this.

Your main character, Darla, is an interesting character in that regard. She has the privilege of family money but simultaneously puts up with racism and violence at the hands of white privilege throughout the book. Do you like Darla?

How did you decide to build her up as a protagonist?

ECD: Darla’s a conundrum in that she suffers at the hands of oppression but also benefits from certain privileges that her family has gained within that system of oppression. She was raised within an affluent suburb and has the privilege of

that proximity to whiteness, but now she’s trying to get closer to her Blackness and explore her roots. That’s something I really identify with. I’m half-Black and half-white, and I think a lot of what I’m trying to do is flailing to reclaim the Blackness that I’ve been distanced from by being raised in Iowa, largely around white people. I really gravitated to Darla’s story, because she embodies a lot of the conflicts that I feel.

And positioning her within a world of body horror and gentrification horror is an interesting choice. Going into the book, did you have that genre and setting decided upon? Did you have an idea about what classic genre tropes you wanted to reject, replicate, or satirize?

ECD: I love body horror and science fiction, and I’m inspired by the history and tradition of hiding political messages in science fiction and horror—using genre as a Trojan Horse.

During the process, though, I realized that those genre trappings may not be necessary.

I became disenchanted with using a Trojan Horse to disseminate these ideals, because it’s too easy to obfuscate your intent and for people to take the wrong message if it’s hidden in all these layers. I think of something like X-Men. People constantly hold up X-Men as a metaphor for the Civil Rights movement, saying that mutants are Black Americans and that Professor X is MLK and Magneto is Malcolm X—people love to talk about that metaphor and how progressive Marvel is. But when you look at the X-Men, they’re almost all white people, led by white men. It’s too easy to look at that universe and have the message be that it’s white people who are oppressed, or that the impetus for oppression isn’t race, especially when they live in a fictional world in which Black people also exist...Moving forward, I want to make work that plays in these genre sandboxes because I love them, but which doesn’t obscure the political message.

JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

LIT

How does that connect to what you were saying about working on mainstream shows and trying to get political messaging in there, but have it feel intentional?

ECD: There are a lot of metaphors in BTTM FDRS that sometimes hide its ideology, but there are also more explicit parts. Two conversations happen in BTTM FDRS that are really on the nose—one in which Darla’s arguing with Cynthia about white privilege, and one in which she’s arguing with Julio in the bar. These are really pointed conversations that I have with my friends about racism and gentrification and cultural appropriation, and I included them as the keys to the political message of the whole story.

A major theme of that scene in the bar and of the book more generally is authenticity and irony. How do those ideas interact with your exploration of gentrification in BTTM FDRS? ECD: I set out to write a book about gentrification, but as I began to work on it the parallels between gentrification and cultural appropriation became more and more apparent. The system of gentrification is really complicated in a way that cultural appropriation isn’t so complicated. For example, I live in an affluent Black neighborhood in Los Angeles that’s gentrifying really fast. It complicates the issue in a way that I didn’t want to delve into with BTTM FDRS specifically, so I found it easier to wrap it in a metaphor of cultural appropriation. Using cultural appropriation as a symbolic framework was the path that seemed cleanest to me, and I did that using hip hop and rap specifically. The character of Julio is, as I said before, one of the keys to the puzzle in that he is really the confluence of all these things—cultural appropriation, gentrification, authenticity, and irony.

The story takes place in Chicago, but you’re from L.A. Is it right that the Bottomyards is based on Back of the Yards?

ECD: It’s named after Back of the Yards, but the neighborhood’s probably more like Lawndale or Garfield Park.

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LIT

“I don’t really want to make work about the inherent sort of victimization of Black people. I also want to write stories about how we’re making things happen for ourselves.”

So what role does Chicago play in the story? Could BTTM FDRS take place in L.A., or do you see the story as essentially Chicago?

ECD: I conceived of BTTM FDRS and wrote the first few drafts of it while I was living in Chicago, so it contains a lot of thoughts and experiences specific to my time there. Obviously, gentrification is an issue that’s affecting cities everywhere, and I’ve definitely seen things explored in BTTM FDRS play out in L.A. Ben was living in New Orleans at the time we started work on the book, and he lives in Philadelphia now.

And Ben was a huge influence on the later drafts of the script, too.

Can you tell me a little bit about your collaborative process? Do you write the story first, or do the drawings come first?

ECD: I wrote the book in screenplay format and sent it to Ben. We’d met at comic shows in Chicago a few years before and hit it off, and were looking to work together...I love [Ben’s] work and have the utmost respect for him as an artist and cartoonist, so I sent him the screenplay without breaking it up into panels and pages. I wanted to give Ben freedom in the world to turn that into images, and he just ran with it.

BP: One of my favorite parts of our collaboration was spending a week at Ezra’s house doing an intense BTTM FDRS bootcamp. I slept on his floor, we ate all our meals together, we talked every day about what the book would look like.

We listened to music and watched movies.

Over the preceding two years of working on BTTM FDRS, Ezra hadn’t given me a lot of feedback, in part because I had a solid idea of what he wanted me to bring to the book visually and what he envisioned for it.

The colors from BTTM FDRS are so beautiful and page-filling and really create the mood of the book. How did you approach coloring the book?

BP: It’s two-fold. First, there’s the boring practicality of having to color a 300-page book. Ezra understandably told me we should probably not color BTTM FDRS because he wanted to see it before the year 3000. I’d been really inspired by a French cartoonist who did a limited palette. I like how a limited color scheme prioritizes mood and temperature and time, rather than having a more literal approach. I foolishly suggested that five colors would be as quick as, say, four gray tones—it absolutely was not.

Some of the coloring was to help the viewer recognize where we were in the world—if we’d changed rooms or gone somewhere else in the narrative. I wanted to express the idea that as gentrifiers, the characters were trying to create a home in a place that was not constructed for them to live. A lot of these gentrified places are not places where people are even supposed to live. The units in the book are constructed as weird pieces of poured concrete and you’re supposed to think “this is not a home— this is not an apartment.” In reading other horror comics, I was intimidated because I’d never done that before. I wasn’t sure my style would be spooky enough to sell scares, but I figured I should approach everything in my own way. I also felt like since I was coming [to] it with a goofier style, I should have everything be unexpected. Rather than going for classic horror gray and brown with blue shadows, I thought I’d hit them with something bright and unnatural.

In the past week we’ve seen the televisation, through social media, of brutal police murders. How does this wave of police violence, coronavirus, and other current events interact with BTTM FDRS? Are you returning to the book with new eyes at all, and how will current events guide future work?

BP: Well, I mean, the police kill Black people all the time. I remember growing up and hearing about Amadou Diallo. I’ve been Black my whole life. I leave the house

and there’s a lot of potentialities—one is getting shot by the police. To me, there’s the creation of spectacle from these recent deaths—for example, in the case of George Floyd, we have a video that I didn’t watch, but I saw pictures of him being killed—that’s incredibly shocking. But this is America, and I’ve been in America basically my whole life.

My work is the work that it is because of the spectacle of Black death and victimization.

So in that way, it doesn’t change anything.

Honestly, the thing that is significant to me is the amount of resistance being displayed in places like Minneapolis—that’s inspiring.

In my lifetime—I’m twenty—I haven’t seen police precincts being taken over by protesters before. What role do you think social media plays in the spectacle you’re talking about, in inspiring action in the wake of publicized murders?

BP: Most of the Black people in my life erased their Instagram for a little bit. They’re not interested in seeing these depictions of Black death, or the calls for humanity– the performative aspects of this. This is important for white people—not necessarily to see depictions of Black death, but to hear critiques of police at the system level, the history of white supremacy, the history of lynching. I don’t honestly think we need social media for this—for instance, in the Watts Riots, a violent, unjust police stop brought people into the streets. There were enough people talking about it and we had the same result. Communities will organize themselves. People are getting endorphins and virtue signaling on social media and as a Black person, who’s been arrested and experienced police almost strangling him, that’s not helping me.

Is there potential for another BTTM FDRS book? Is Darla’s story going to be continued?

ECD: We had some ideas for a sequel— there’s definitely more to explore, and I think it would be interesting to get more into the

nitty gritty effects of gentrification. We were traveling to gather for something recently, and Ben and I had a long talk about what we’d like to do for a sequel. But like Ben was saying, BTTM FDRS was born in a time really similar to what we’re going through now. The rage we were feeling when we first talked about working on this together was in the wake of Alton Sterling and Mike Brown, and the feeling we are feeling now with public outrage at the public murder of Black bodies. I’m really proud of BTTM FDRS, but I think the work I’d want to make from those feelings now is different than the work I wanted to make five years ago.

BP: Also, as a Black artist, I don’t really want to make work about the inherent victimization of Black people. I also want to write stories about how we’re making things happen for ourselves. There’s an important history there—in my own work I like to read and write about Black revolutionaries. If you compare within just the Black Power Period—mid, late 60s and 70s—what happened to white radicals versus what happened to Black radicals, it’s amazing we have any Black radicals. That’s an important part of the story when talking about Black persistence and the hurdles we’ve had to overcome. I personally want to create inspiring stories, and not be part of creating content for the white gaze about Black death. Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore, BTTM FDRS. $24.99. Fantagraphics. 300 pages. (This title is currently out of print, but digital versions are available on Comixology and Google Play.)

Ruby Rorty is an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where she majors in Economics and Environmental Studies. She is the head editor of the Viewpoints section at The Chicago Maroon. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

LIT

The Only Constant Is Change The World Is Always Coming to an End explores the rifts and connections that bind South Shore together

BY MALIK JACKSON

O

n one hand, The World Is Always Coming To An End is a collage of stories about author Carlo Rotella’s upbringing on the southeast side of Chicago, and how his neighborhood, South Shore, shaped him and the way he interacts with the wider world. On the other hand, it is a story about community and how South Shore is currently a fractured one; how being a melting pot of haves and have-nots, separated in many cases by just one block, creates dissonance and aversion toward neighborly behavior. Most significantly, though, this is a story about transience, and how the ever-changing conditions within our urban landscapes are fact, not fiction.

Rotella does this by chronicling South Shore’s origins as a series of Native American settlements, then its role as home to immigrant ethnic tribes consisting of Germans and Polskis or Protestants and Catholics, and now its life as a resilient Black enclave. He tells stories from his childhood, and how the shops and landmarks he knew as a kid have now been replaced by new concepts and cultures, but mostly by nothing at all. He also recounts the rich history of community organizing in the neighborhood, and the now-distant times when South Shore residents acted as a collective. The fact of transience is currently a fear for many in South Shore, but it is also the history of the neighborhood. For current residents and community leaders hoping to build on what exists in South Shore, The World Is Always Coming To An End shows what must be stitched together in order to change course.

A map in the first few pages of the book illustrates the physical splits in the neighborhood, along with the landmarks of the community. The map speaks of ShoreBank, which was internationally renowned as a community development financial institution, and other lost artifacts like the Jeffery Theatre on 71st and the 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 8, 2020

Regal Theatre on 79th and Stony. It shows the South Shore Cultural Center cozying up with condos and lakefront high-rises along South Shore Drive and cradling the O’Keefe pocket of the community, filled with a mix of multifamily complexes, subsidized housing, and random blocks of single-family homes.

The Jackson Park Highlands—dotted with million-dollar homes that house some of Chicago’s Black elite, closed off by culde-sacs in every direction—share the map with Terror Town to the southeast, a part of the community popularized by rappers Lil Herb and Lil Bibby that gained a reputation as one of the most dangerous regions in the city.

From the perspective of a white, middleclass man who grew up in South Shore but, like many of the more fortunate residents of the neighborhood today, attended school and did most business outside of the neighborhood, this book could have been incomplete. Rotella’s experience of South Shore, from the bungalow-lined block at 71st and Oglesby where his family bought their first home, to 69th and Euclid in the Jackson Park Highlands, where they bought their second, is a leap and bound that dodges most of what gives South Shore its reputation. But coupled with the autobiographical account of his upbringing, Rotella spends a considerable amount of time filling the gaps with accounts from generations of residents, who tell stories about how far the community has come, or to some, how far it has fallen.

One interviewee, a former Black Panther turned police detective, shares his understanding of the neighborhood’s evolved conditions, and considers an evil justice system and disconnected police force as one of the larger failures of the community. Having served on the police force in the 70s and beyond, he saw firsthand how virtuous gangs like the Blackstone Rangers fractured into cliques.

But he also observed how the police’s relationship with these gangs had evolved as well. “The wrong people are the police,” the interviewee plainly states, encapsulating issues on South Shore’s streets today: officers intimidating commoners from their driver’s seats, breaking up small gatherings at random, and establishing themselves as disruptors instead of generative components of the community. This is not a story that is unique to South Shore, but the rifts here have widened since 2018, when the police killed Harith “Snoop” Augustus, a beloved barber at one of 71st Street’s many shops.

A string of conversations with patrons of St. Philip Neri’s food pantry, and a walk around the neighborhood with representatives from CeaseFire Illinois, reveals the realities for those on the lower rungs of South Shore’s economic ladder.

Many of these residents know the causal relationships that shape their neighborhood, citing gang violence and a lack of resources.

A consensus, however, is that many of the

more fortunate residents of the area, and even some of their own neighbors, are disinterested in organizing to call out the ills of South Shore. Some say that many residents won’t feel compelled to act unless the violence is brought to their doorstep.

Others argue that those in powerful positions in the neighborhood are not interested in the problems of the poor, and are more concerned with issues closer to home: development and property values.

A more controversial interviewee—a Jackson Park Highlands resident, former military man, and UChicago Lab School classmate of Rotella’s—presents the sour truth of some of the more well-off South Shore residents’ attitudes. Owning an arsenal of guns and wishing for a more sophisticated surveillance state in the Highlands, his desire for fortitude seems to physically and emotionally detach him from the greater community. He denounces shopping in the neighborhood because of poor customer service and pricing. He commends Glenn

“As in many of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods, changes in demographics were accompanied by changes in the flow of capital, and South Shore was left to what it is now: vacant corridors, stagnant or declining property values, and a characteristic nostalgia for stronger neighborhood institutions and collective efficacy.”

LIT

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 how Special Service Areas are adapting their mission due to COVID-19.

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recalls standing on the balcony of the Museum of Science and Industry and watching the 1939 Minton Cronkhite train set as it traveled between Chicago and the Northwest. Much has changed about the landscape Cronkhite built with his train set, just as decade by decade, much has changed in American cities. Rotella cycles through South Shore’s beginnings as marshes and dunes, occupied first by Native American settlers, then built upon by white ethnic immigrants, and consistently occupied by African Americans since mid-century white

economics—both political and social—of predominantly Black neighborhoods, the book’s deep dive into South Shore is both a great primer and finish. If you’re generally curious about the history of America’s urban communities and their tendency to change with the seasons, Carlo Rotella pulls back all the right curtains on what has fueled those changes, and what South Shore can do for itself as it stares its next phase in the face. ¬

69

Evans, former Police Commander of the Third District, who was charged with aggravated battery in 2013 after shoving the barrel of his gun into a suspect’s mouth.

And he views the signs of gentrification favorably, citing recent real estate trends and UChicago’s expansion into Woodlawn and Washington Park as indicators that the greater southeast side was finally beginning to turn over a new leaf.

But that new leaf has always had complex implications in American cities.

In an anecdote from his childhood, Rotella

flight. But as in many of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods, changes in demographics were accompanied by changes in the flow of capital, and South Shore was left to what it is now: vacant corridors, stagnant or declining property values, and a nostalgia for stronger neighborhood institutions and collective efficacy.

There are shifts that have been rumbling under the community’s surface for a few years now. The prospect of the Obama Presidential Center and rumors of the Tiger Woods Golf Course have served as boosters for the community. New dining spots like The Slab, Majani, and South Shore Brew are indicative of entrepreneurial confidence.

And more often than not, you can catch an article in Crain’s about newfound interest in South Shore’s housing stock from real estate investors looking to diversify their portfolios.

The gross side of this was recently uncovered by the Chicago Reader’s Maya Dukmasova, who reported on Pangea Real Estate’s persistent South Side property grab and on sinister eviction practices that landed them in eviction court with over 9,000 of their residents since 2009. These telltale signs of gentrification pose an existential threat to some residents of South Shore, and the neighborhood seems to be transitioning into the next saga of how the not-so-invisible hand forces neighborhood demographics to change, while former residents are left to reckon with history.

Rotella recalls a time when there was a will to organize in South Shore; to both facilitate and defend against change. Back in the 1970s, before white flight was complete and before subsidized housing became available, middle-class Black and white residents successfully organized around efforts like making the South Shore Country Club (now the Cultural Center) a public amenity, running a number of problematic taverns along a stretch of 75th Street out of business, and saving ShoreBank. Common interests were more obvious in the 70s, but now the mixed-income community is at odds with itself—and the market won’t wait for anyone to devise an agenda.

Tucked in between the data, the history, and the personal stories of South Shore residents, Rotella poetically recalls critical childhood memories in which he obtained “equipment for living,” the street smarts and life lessons that are taught daily in Black communities like South Shore. This mix of autobiography and literary reportage makes for a rich, raw, and illuminating read. For those who are curious about the

JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

HOUSING

No Vacancy?

PHOTO BY ADAM GOTTLIEB

Homelessness is predicted to rise; CHA may have empty units.

Why can’t supply meet demand?

BY MORLEY MUSICK

N

early four months into the COVID-19 crisis, the network of shelters, isolation centers, and hotels that the city and organizations have put together to care for people experiencing homelessness has been relatively successful—though many shelter residents have contracted the virus, no one is known to have died from it. But the situation remains precarious. As the city’s designated isolation hotel fills to capacity, some people living with pre-existing conditions are stuck in shelters, where they stand at higher risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19.

Others are falling through the cracks: Leah Levinger, former executive director of the Chicago Housing Initiative (CHI), told the Weekly she had met a man who was diagnosed with COVID-19, denied entrance 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 8, 2020

to shelters on lockdown, and was not offered a placement in the city’s hotel, nor the isolated COVID shelters. According to Julie Dworkin, director of policy at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH), elderly people and others with medical conditions isolating in downtown hotel units are not in any position to return to congregate settings.

Now, this patchwork of support services is poised to receive a new influx of residents needing homes as the crisis continues.

As temporary protections for Chicago renters begin to expire while the pandemic and related recession rage on, many signs indicate that there will likely be a national eviction surge and therefore a surge in homelessness. In response to this situation, advocates like Levinger and Dworkin have turned their attention to one resource close

at hand: the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). Levinger and Dworkin have been in talks with the CHA since April, pushing the CHA to house people experiencing homelessness in its vacant units, given the health risks posed by living in congregate settings. But the agency’s complicated bureaucracy and its inconsistent information about available units, as well as a lax federal regulatory apparatus, have thus far hampered efforts to ensure as many people are housed as possible.

Unlike other city agencies, the CHA is still in robust financial health, and may have 1,250 vacant units in its portfolio, according to Levinger’s interpretation of an April report of their units that she received via Freedom of Information Act Request (FOIA). But after weeks of discussion, both

Levinger and Dworkin said the agency has been slow to provide answers and clarity regarding their demands. To increase pressures on the agency, both are working on an ordinance to be proposed in City Council which would require that twenty percent of vacant, habitable units be given to people experiencing homelessness. Their hope is to introduce the ordinance in July, with 29th Ward Alderman Chris Taliaferro serving as the lead sponsor.

In a statement to the Weekly, Molly Sullivan, a media representative for the CHA, contested Levinger’s 1,250 vacancies figure. She claimed that the CHA actually has “more families approved for housing than we have available units,” with “193 families who are waiting for units to move in and another 590 families approved for housing who need a unit” or, in other words, they “do not have any nonleased units.” Later, CHA media staffer Matthew Aguilar clarified that actually 590 families total had been approved for housing, and 193 of those families—rather than an additional 193 families—had been assigned to specific units. In addition to disputing Levinger’s analysis, Sullivan’s statement conflicts with an April SunTimes report that said the CHA had 2,042 vacant units, 900 of them uninhabitable. If that figure was accurate, that would still leave 359 units, taking into account those that have already been leased or promised.

But Sullivan says the Sun-Times report is incorrect and that they do not have 359 habitable, vacant, non-leased units.

Dworkin said in an email that she was surprised by the CHA’s current position, given the extensive dialog she has had with the agency about vacant units. “I’m surprised if [the CHA’s] position is that they have [no habitable vacancies], that they wouldn’t have come out with that right off the bat,” she said.

Cheryl Johnson is executive director of advocacy group People for Community Recovery and a resident of the Altgeld Gardens CHA complex on the Far South Side—which, according to Levinger’s April FOIA, has 119 “unapproved vacant units,” meaning they have remained empty for longer than federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulations allow for. Johnson said she has observed that many apartments had recently been renovated and questioned the CHA’s claim, saying “If CHA is saying that these houses are uninhabitable...how is that when you just had them renovated?

HOUSING

That’s the ultimate question.” The CHA’s Dearborn Homes were renovated in 2012 and Lake Parc Place was fully renovated in 2004, and then partially renovated again beginning in 2013. They share between them 78 unapproved vacant units, according to the April report.

The push to get the CHA to utilize its vacant units to house people experiencing homelessness is not new—Levinger and CHI have been pressuring the agency since 2012, after she began hearing anecdotal evidence, which she then confirmed via FOIA requests, of huge numbers of vacant units amassing within the CHA portfolio.

In an effort to fill these up, CHI led years of pressure campaigns at the federal level in a bid to require higher occupancy rates through stricter regulations. But this project failed in 2016, after the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee decided to extend the Moving to Work regulatory program into 2028, which allows the CHA to maintain a higher vacancy rate than other public housing agencies while still receiving federal funds. From there, CHI’s focus shifted to finding city government regulations to reduce CHA vacancies, a project that Levinger said also failed.

But CHI and other housing activists have not given up, and the pandemic has created renewed urgency for the cause.

Posters now hang on the fence surrounding the tent city encampment on Roosevelt near the Dan Ryan Expressway, reading “VACANCY = DEATH” and “OPEN CHA HOMES NOW.” Norine “Lil Bit” Morehead, a longtime resident of the tent city, has criticized the CHA in recorded testimony posted on the Facebook page of the periodical The People’s Tribune. “How many people have to die because of housing they won’t release?” she asked.

Woodlawn resident Honni Harris is also participating in the pressure campaign.

Harris has been evicted six times and has become well-acquainted with the process: asking for boxes from grocery and liquor stores when she had no money to pay for them, learning what kind of dollar store tape is strong enough to seal the boxes, calling the city to see if there was a backlog in cases that might buy her time to move, going into a shelter, getting jobs, losing jobs because of her arthritis, and finding places to stay with family, only to move again. Advocates say the system is fundamentally flawed if Harris and other Chicagoans are forced to struggle to find stable residences while available units stay empty. Harris, who has been on

the CHA waitlist for six years, has given up on getting assistance from the CHA: “I’m still on the [CHA waitlist] and I don’t think I’m ever gonna be able to get it, and I’m okay with that,” she said. Her oldest son is housing her for now, but she’s hoping the CHA will act quickly to open its units for those living on the streets and in shelters.

B

y requiring the CHA to provide a portion of units to people experiencing homelessness, Levinger and Dworkin hope their ordinance will address shortcomings with the manner in which the CHA currently prioritizes homeless people, which, as Levinger and Dworkin found out through meetings, was not as robust as CCH had hoped.

According to Levinger, instead of pushing people experiencing homelessness to the front of the waitlist, the CHA currently prioritizes people on a day-by-day basis. In other words, if you are homeless and apply on June 3, you will be pushed to the front of June 3; but if you are not homeless, and apply on June 2, you will still be processed ahead of the June 3 homeless applicant.

The ordinance would also apply monetary pressure to fill these units in a timely, complete manner, requiring the CHA to maintain a ninety-seven percent occupancy rate and a sixty-day turnaround of vacant units in order to receive citycontrolled development funds. In tying funding to occupancy, the ordinance is meant to address structural flaws within the federal Moving to Work program that governs the CHA. Housing scholar Amanda Kass studied the effects of CHA’s membership in Moving to Work in 2014, publishing a report in The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability that showed how the lax regulatory framework had led to questionable outcomes within the agency.

At that time, Kass concluded that Moving to Work had enabled the CHA to routinely send out thousands fewer housing vouchers (which subsidize rent in market-rate apartments) than they could have, leaving thousands of people who needed homes without financial support. After months of poring over the CHA’s labyrinthian budgets and communicating with the agency, Kass realized that the agency had amassed an enormous reserve fund of $432 million, a huge, unspent surplus that they initially explained to her as an “accident.” It was subsequently spent on paying off pension debt early, a move she described as not in

“If CHA is saying that these houses are uninhabitable...how is that when you just had them renovated? That’s the ultimate question.” line with their mission of providing housing.

Though Kass’s scrutiny in 2014 seems to have resulted in positive changes— according to a 2017 report from the Center for Tax and Accountability, the revelation of thousands of unspent vouchers led to a sizeable increase in housing voucher spending—the CHA’s assets, in addition to its number of habitable vacancies, remain shrouded in obscurity.

In an interview, Kass explained how the current configuration of the morethan-300-page CHA bond series makes it extremely difficult to ask basic questions the public needs to know in order to effectively monitor the agency. Questions like, “How much money does the CHA currently have for building units? How many units does it plan to build this year and with how much money? How many did it actually build and with how much money?” are all difficult to ascertain given the way the CHA currently reports its budget. Funds raised from a recent bond series are posted on one page, capital spending on another, units intended

to build on another, units actually built on yet another. The document requires a complicated cross-coordination of data, which in the past occupied months of Kass’s time—and Kass is a trained academic.

Levinger said the agency’s bureaucratic issues—the difficulty of ascertaining how many vacant, habitable units are available, as well as how much money is set aside each year to construct new units and how much is actually spent—make underlying social problems in Chicago even more difficult: “We have a white supremacy problem, we have a class- and race-based disregard for Black and brown people in this country.

We have a housing authority that has been stripped of all regulatory oversight and accountability mechanisms. That is the perfect storm.” Morley Musick is a writer and reporter from Chicago. He founded Mouse Magazine with friends in 2019 and posts short essays on his blog. He last wrote for the Weekly about evictions in South Shore.

PHOTO BY ADAM GOTTLIEB

JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

POLITICS

In Map Redrawing, Power and Politics Prevail

While it’s informed by Census numbers, redistricting in Illinois is subject to the whims of political heavyweights

BY JIM DALEY AND SAM STECKLOW

A

longside federal funding, the result of the Census count that most directly impacts where we live is redistricting: the redrawing of electoral district maps for local, state, and federal offices that is often derisively (and correctly) referred to as “gerrymandering.” Much of the current attention to redistricting in Illinois has focused on the fact that, due to population loss over the last decade, we are likely going to lose a downstate congressional seat. But if recent history tells us anything, the redistricting process for state and city districts and wards will be a yearslong fight with no clear winners besides the political establishment.

In every decade since the 1980s—the first redistricting to occur after the passage of the 1971 state constitution—lengthy court battles have ensued over just about every aspect of the state redistricting process: the makeup of the commission tasked with creating state legislative districts, the facts taken into consideration by that commission, how ties are broken, and the racial makeup of the districts. Similarly, on the city side, the same fight over racial and ethnic representation on City Council, and racial and ethnic voting power throughout the city, has been fought from every angle.

Latinx groups and officials claim maps on the South and West Sides are drawn to favor Black elected officials, Polish groups claim Northwest and Southwest Side maps are drawn to favor Latinx officials, and Black groups and officials regularly make claims of diluted political power. In a study of the 2010–2011 Chicago ward redistricting process, Northwestern University sociology and Latinx studies professor Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz described 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 8, 2020

this as “casting Black and Latino political interests as a zero-sum game, [with] this juxtaposition help[ing] longstanding white overrepresentation escape public scrutiny.”

Part of this, many voting rights advocates claim, stems from the fact that the process of drawing both the state and city maps is an inherently political one, directly controlled by elected officials with a stake in the results, or their appointees. And while there are efforts to change this—bipartisan officials and advocacy groups have been pushing for a statewide “Fair Maps” amendment to the constitution for years, and last year Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she would push for an “independent citizens’ commission” to redraw the city maps—there always seems to be little legitimate political will from the city’s and state’s political leaders to do anything about it. Barring major changes in the political landscape, it seems unlikely that this round of redistricting will look any different than the previous four.

S

ince at least 1982, when Reader writer Steve Bogira examined state Representative Michael Madigan’s gerrymandering of state legislative districts, redistricting has been a means to consolidate political power and shut out rivals—political, ethnic, or otherwise. Bogira described how Madigan established a district boundary that ran south from Cermak Road to the city limits, politically walling off predominantly Black neighborhoods to the east from the then predominantly white Southwest Side.

Although the segregated district map was challenged in a lawsuit from Black state legislators, including future U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun, the courts let it stand.

Nearly four decades later, Madigan—

who became Speaker of the House (and chief legislative cartographer) in 1983 and chair of the Democratic Party of Illinois in 1988—is more powerful than ever. Governor J.B. Pritzker could present a problem for Madigan’s redistricting plans, however: the governor has voiced support for the Fair Maps Amendment. The COVID-19 pandemic prevented the legislature from voting to get the amendment on the ballot in November before a May deadline had passed, but Pritzker has pledged to veto any “unfair” redistricting map that comes across his desk, without defining what he would consider “unfair.”

“The council has done a great job of drawing the maps that have been fair on the representation side.”

Gerrymandering isn’t limited to state house districts. In the beclouted hands of Chicago's mayors and city council members, seemingly picayune ward boundaries are battlegrounds upon which political favors are dispensed to the loyal and retribution is meted out to the faithless. And the process of redrawing them is as opaque to the average citizen as it is contentious among the power brokers.

To an uninitiated observer, the way

a ward map can balloon, contort, and occasionally even shrink in size from one redistricting session to the next can appear almost arbitrary. It is anything but. In 2014, WBEZ’s Chris Hagan tracked the shifting boundaries of the 2nd Ward as it migrated northward over nearly a century.

The ward underwent its first apparent bout of gerrymandering after the 1990 Census: it changed from a relatively regular shape to one that traced a ninety-degree angle that ran north from the 31st Street Beach on its southeast corner and skirted the Loop before turning sharply west to surround the University of Illinois at Chicago campus on three sides.

In 2002, the 2nd Ward got beefier, expanding to encompass more of the South Loop, growing a hefty nodule from the base of its western end and shooting a thin tendril from its southeastern boundaries down to 37th Street. According to Hagan, this was the result of a compromise between then-Mayor Richard M. Daley and Black and Latinx aldermen, but it also resulted in the 2nd Ward becoming the city’s most gerrymandered.

The ward shrank considerably in the 2012 redistricting, becoming leaner and moving far north, a shift Hagan (correctly) attributed to retribution by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel for then–2nd Ward alderman Bob Fioretti’s lack of support.

Fioretti lost his City Council seat as a result, and later ran unsuccessfully for mayor (and state senator, and Cook County Board president, and Cook County State’s Attorney). The ward’s current boundaries never venture south of Superior Street, and extend all the way to Wrightwood and Southport in Lincoln Park—some eight

POLITICS

miles north of 31st Street Beach. The most significant contiguous land in the ward is the planned Lincoln Yards site; notably, most of the surrounding aldermen oppose the project.

Gerrymandering a ward is not as straightforward as it may seem: unlike other clout-heavy political maneuvers, ward map redistricting has to go through multiple rounds of approval before it’s adopted.

(And in some instances, as with the 1992 redrawing, litigation can hold up adoption for years.) Elliott Ramos, WBEZ’s data editor, attempted to make sense of the process in 2012. He reported that potential ward maps have to be submitted to the City Clerk as an ordinance, something any citizen or community organization can do.

But citizen-proposed ward maps rarely if ever get considered in the final redrawing of the city’s political boundaries. Because a new ward map is a piece of legislation, they need to be sponsored by aldermen. And— again, because they’re legislation—ward maps are actually written descriptions of what the boundaries will look like, rather than actual maps. Adding to the confusion, Ramos found multiple errors in ward map descriptions in the aldermen-sponsored ordinances. All of that adds up to create a system that, Ramos writes, “keeps the rest of us out of the loop and largely uninformed about the process.”

2002

The independent citizens’ commission for redrawing ward maps that Lightfoot proposed last year could avoid the selfdealing, clout-heavy political retribution and overall lack of transparency that have plagued the process in previous decades.

She faced immediate opposition from 28th Ward alderman Jason Ervin, who chairs the City Council’s Black Caucus, who stressed to WTTW that his primary goal is maintaining the number of wards with Black aldermen: “I know it’s not pretty, but we still have to create a map that could pass legal muster that represents the communities in the best fashion that can be done. The council has done a great job of drawing the maps that have been fair on the representation side.”

U

ntil city mapmakers decide to draw lines according to communities, and not to play “racial arithmetic,” as Rodríguez-Muñiz phrased it in his study of the 2010 remap process, neighborhoods that are represented by multiple aldermen like Little Village, Belmont-Cragin, and Englewood will have to continue to find ways to overcome the political fragmentation that often prevents projects from moving forward and can contribute to increased violence, according to neighborhood advocates and researchers. University of Chicago sociologist Robert Vargas, who

runs the school’s Violence, Law, and Politics Lab, found in his 2016 book-length study Wounded City, which considered the ward boundaries of Little Village, that the western portion of the neighborhood— contained within the 22nd Ward—enjoyed more stability and less violence. The eastern portion, split between the 12th, 24th, and 28th wards, lacks “access to the systemic social organization necessary for preventing violence,” he writes.

In a two-part series published last year on the political fragmentation of Greater Englewood, which has been split into five wards since the 1970s, neighborhood advocates interviewed by the Weekly described how needing to coordinate with multiple independent aldermen impacts the neighborhood. “No one really has a clear focus on the development of Englewood,” Residents Association of Greater Englewood president Asiaha Butler told the Weekly for that series. “When you have the luxury of the Obama library and the luxury of a university and the luxury of all this other development in Woodlawn, it’s really easy to forget a community like Englewood.” State Representative Sonya Harper, who ran the nonprofit Grow Greater Englewood before being appointed to her position in 2018, agreed. “When people look at the Englewood community and all the challenges that we deal with and how

we’re portrayed on the news media, the one thing that they don’t know is that we’re split up politically and that lends itself to some of the dysfunction that we have. Englewood gets such a bad rap but I believe that that is one of the biggest reasons why.”

To their credit, the five aldermen who represent the neighborhood held a first-ever Greater Englewood town hall meeting in January, and have promised to increase their coordination. But 17th Ward Alderman David Moore saliently pointed out at the meeting, “Aldermen come and go, mayors come and go, but the people will be here.

You all need to know your power, and your collective power and how to use it. No elected official is more powerful than you are.” Left unsaid is how the relative political strength of neighborhoods largely contained within one ward—Bridgeport in the 11th, or Chatham in the 6th—has contributed to the increased power residents of those neighborhoods enjoy. Jim Daley is the Weekly's politics editor. He last wrote about the City rescinding a ceaseand-desist order issued to Chicago Freedom School Sam Stecklow is one of the Weekly’s co-managing editors. He last wrote about the aldermanic response to COVID-19.

2012

PROVIDED BY THE CHICAGO BOARD OF ELECTIONS

JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

EDUCATION

Opinion: Chicago desperately needs an elected school board As calls to remove police from schools continue, CPS chooses to keep the school-to-prison pipeline intact

BY DIMITRIY LEKSANOV

This piece is part of a series that explores the various perspectives around defunding the police.

W

hile the call to remove police from schools has recently gained momentum with the public disgust over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and others, the debate has existed for many years. Police presence in schools continues to contribute to a nationwide school-to-prison pipeline, which introduces Black students and students of color to the carceral state at an extremely young age. Yet, in an act that went against shifting public opinion, in June Chicago’s Board of Education voted 4-3 to keep police officers in Chicago schools.

Chicago’s appointed school board has failed to represent the wishes of the public too many times in recent years.

This decision flies in the face of not just local, but national, opinion. In June, the Boards of Education in Denver, Milwaukee, and Madison voted unanimously to remove police officers from their public schools.

Taking it a step further, Oakland eliminated its school district-specific police department through another unanimous vote. Most recently, the Los Angeles school board cut thirty-five percent of its police force, prompting the police chief to resign. In each case, the decision stemmed from widespread protest and public outcry over racial injustice in policing, and concerns over the potential harm that police presence can bring to schools and their students.

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 8, 2020

The school-to-prison pipeline is a widespread problem for communities of color throughout America. In New York City, where NYPD officers are present in public schools, ninety percent of students arrested in 2016 were either Black or Latinx students. Moreover, New York City maintains quarterly data on police interventions in schools, and this data indicated that, since the beginning of 2019, Black students were significantly more likely to be arrested than white students. Chicago has seen the same issue, with similar inequities in enforcement. According to CPS data, Black students accounted for thirty-six percent of CPS enrollment during the 2019-20 school year, but sixty percent of police notifications. And the city Inspector General Joe Ferguson said that seventyeight percent of arrests at or near schools since 2017 have been of Black students.

Yet, while other school boards all took decisive, unanimous action that reflected changing public sentiment, the Chicago Board of Education did not. One reason for this stands out as more obvious than the rest: while these other boards are popularly elected, Chicago’s Board of Education is appointed by the mayor.

47th Ward Alderman Matt Martin critiqued this system, tweeting that Chicago needs a school board that is “accountable to our communities now.” Without having to regularly face the electorate, Chicago’s school board is under less direct pressure to cater to the opinions of that electorate—

which would presumably include parents, students, and members of the community— especially when those opinions evolve. A week earlier, 6th Ward Alderman Roderick Sawyer had introduced an ordinance to end CPS’s relationship with CPD, which was supported by thirteen other aldermen. But students had already been protesting against cops in schools. As of June 5, a petition calling for the removal of police from schools had gathered 20,000 signatures.

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or Chicago’s Board of Education, terminating CPS’s $33 million contract with CPD officers—known as school resource officers (SROs)—would have been a common-sense step towards resolving the disproportionate rate of incarceration of Black men and other people of color in the city. It also would have addressed the opinion of those who arguably matter the most in this situation: the students.

On June 24, the day the board voted to keep police in Chicago public schools, hundreds of CPS students and supporters marched in favor of removing SROs, closing several streets and, to the dismay of board president Miguel Del Valle, showing up to his front lawn. They drew widespread support, including from eight city council members and community activist and former mayoral candidate Ja’Mal Green.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot and CPS CEO Janice Jackson believe that it should be up to local school councils (LSCs) to decide whether police officers should be present in

their schools. Last year, all LSCs representing schools in which officers are stationed voted to keep their police on campus. However, some criticized the process as having failed to take students and other dissenting voices into account. Karen Zuccor, a teacher and LSC member for Uplift Community High School, told Chalkbeat that “the special meeting was conducted in such a way as to minimize the ability of concerned community groups or parents or students to have an input.”

20th Ward Alderman Jeanette Taylor, a CPS alumna, who argued for the removal of SROs in a virtual City Council meeting, asked, “Of the schools with SROs, how many of them have active LSCs?” CPS Safety and Security Chief Jadine Chou said that she didn’t know, and was unable to provide data on how many students had been arrested in CPS. Chou also argued that an LSC voting to remove officers would not reap any financial benefit because schools that remove officers would not be able to reallocate that funding for other positions.

While Chicago Board of Education member Lucino Sotelo argued that police provide a needed sense of safety in schools, the truth is that this sense of security can— and already does—exist by way of other, less risky, avenues, including, for example, the nearly 1,100 security guards who exist in public schools and vastly outnumber the roughly 200 police officers.

Ferguson has also criticized the SRO program. In 2018, he released a report

EDUCATION

stating that certain elements of the CPD’s management of the SRO program, including “specification of roles and responsibilities” are “not sufficient to ensure officers working in schools can successfully execute their specialized duties.” Then, last week, as the City Council held its first hearings on the report almost two years after its release, Ferguson expressed disappointment at the delayed action, stating, “We seem to have little appreciation for the importance of getting this program right and certainly no urgency in meeting the community where their needs and concerns are.”

Even the Board of Education’s position has begun to evolve on this matter, as three Board members, two of whom have either lived or worked on the South Side, voted for the removal of SROs. This differs from the Board’s vote last year to approve the contract with CPD, which had just one dissenter.

Robert F. Martwick (D-10) introduced HB 2267, which would establish an elected school board for Chicago starting in 2023, with representatives from twenty districts throughout the city who are yet to be determined and an at-large member to serve as board president. Although the bill passed the Illinois General Assembly with an overwhelming 110-2 majority, Lightfoot opposed the measure, describing the size of the twenty-one--member board as “unwieldy.” Hence, the bill has not even been able to get a hearing in the Illinois Senate.

Lightfoot’s concern is valid.The Chicago School Reform Amendatory Act, which was passed by Illinois General Assembly in 1995 behind pressure by former Mayor Richard M. Daley, shrunk the maximum size of the Board of Education from fifteen to seven

members, so a rapid jump to twenty-one members could be considered drastic and irresponsible. Moreover, it would be larger than most school boards throughout the country. The Denver Board of Education, for example, contains seven members, while New York’s has thirteen.

However, this issue must be revisited, and Lightfoot, who campaigned on shifting to a fully elected school board, owes it to the voters to be part of the process of coming to a compromise. A school board of reasonable size is possible. For instance, Chicago’s North, South, and West Sides are frequently divided into nine subsections (e.g. Far North Side, Far Southwest Side). While these areas are not formally defined, they could be used as a geographic guide for creating nine electoral districts with each represented

by a Board member, with a tenth member elected at-large citywide.

The contract that Chicago’s school board voted to maintain with CPD is set to expire in August and CPS youth will likely rally again against its renewal. It would be prudent for the General Assembly and Mayor Lightfoot to reconsider this issue, and finally give Chicago the elected representative school board that it has desperately needed for years. Dimitriy Leksanov is an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago and a contributor to the Chicago Maroon. He also tutors CPS students through the Neighborhood Schools Program. This is his first contribution to the Weekly.

ILLUSTRATION BY ALEJANDRA FERNANDEZ

T

his is not the first time that the Board of Education has made a critical decision that went against public opinion. In 2013, the school board voted near-unanimously to close fortynine elementary schools and a high school as part of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s grueling austerity measures to address the city’s budget deficit. While the city held hearings on the matter, over 34,000 people demonstrated against the proposal.

The mass school closures were opposed by elected officials, the Chicago Teachers Union and families of CPS students. Even retired judges serving as officers for the school board hearings lobbied for more than a dozen schools to remain open, “citing concerns ranging from student safety to the harm that could result for special-needs students,” per the Tribune.

Yet, despite this, and despite the fact that it disproportionately affected Black students and students of color, the highly unpopular move was adopted nearunanimously by the Board of Education, and a majority of schools still closed. Had the Board been elected, rather than appointed by a mayor looking to make education cuts, it is possible—probable even—that they would have paid more mind to their community’s demands.

If Chicago were to move to an elected representative school board, it would not be a radical leap. Rather, an elected school board would put the city squarely on par with ninety percent of school districts in the United States, as well as every other school district in Illinois. Last year, State Senator JULY 8, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

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