SSW 03.10.22

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, artists, photographers, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 9, Issue 12 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor

Adam Przybyl

Senior Editors Christopher Good Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Martha Bayne Arts Editor Education Editor Housing Editor Community Organizing Editor Immigration Editor

Isabel Nieves Madeleine Parrish Malik Jackson Chima Ikoro Alma Campos

Contributing Editors Lucia Geng Matt Moore

Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Jocelyn Vega Scott Pemberton Staff Writers Kiran Misra Yiwen Lu Director of Fact Checking: Kate Gallagher Fact Checkers: Grace Del Vecchio, Hannah Farris, Savannah Hugueley, Caroline Kubzansky, Yiwen Lu, and Sky Patterson Interim Visuals Editor Jason Schumer Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Colleen Hogan Shane Tolentino Webmaster Pat Sier Managing Director Jason Schumer Director of Operations Brigid Maniates The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We publish online weekly and in print every other Thursday.

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Cover Illustration by Kevin Moore Jr.

IN CHICAGO Quid pro quo After a political career spanning fifty years came to an unceremonious close last year amid cries of scandal, Michael Madigan is now facing legal consequences for leading what prosecutors are calling a "criminal enterprise" that enriched himself and associates. Madigan, who was the Illinois Speaker of the House for all but two years between 1983 and 2021, and the Chairman of the state's Democratic Party from 1998 to 2021, was indicted by a federal grand jury on March 2 on twenty-two counts, including bribery and extortion. The 106-page indictment, in part informed by former alderman Danny Solis’ cooperation, alleges Madigan exchanged political favors for job appointments and for gaining new clients at his private law practice. According to legal experts interviewed by the Tribune, the prosecutors' case looks strong but not invincible— Madigan was apparently careful to use vague language like “You should go ahead and process that” or “Okay, alright, very good” when speaking with associates about alleged criminal schemes. (Contrast that with former governor Rod Blagojevich who was recorded as saying about a senate appointment seat “I’ve got this thing and it's f***ing golden.”) Meanwhile, Madigan has denied all wrongdoing. As prosecutors try to squeeze a prison term out of the evidence, it raises an interesting question: how do we actually address the harm caused by one of the state’s most powerful men, entrusted to lead the party for decades, abusing his position for personal gain?

High schools get full rides Students from five South and West Side high schools will be receiving full, debt-free scholarships to college. These scholarships were granted to the entire student body at Noble Johnson College Prep in Englewood, Al Raby High School in Garfield Park, Farragut Career Academy in Little Village, Benito Juárez Community Academy in Pilsen, and Morgan Park High School by Hope Chicago, a non-profit led by former CPS CEO Janice Jackson. Students at these schools can choose from twenty colleges, and one of their parents will also receive a scholarship for college or a job training program. The excitement from students, parents, and staff was palpable, though questions abound about the sponsoring organization that seemed to come out of left field. According to Hope Chicago’s website, its advisory board includes Arne Duncan, the former CEO of CPS who allowed mass school closures, and financial executives such as the CEO of Sterling Bay. Last year, it received a $50,000 donation from former mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Congress passes Bobby Rush’s Emmett Till Antilynching Act Sixty-seven years after Chicago teenager Emmett Till’s murder in Mississippi, lynching will soon become a federal hate crime. The U.S. House and Senate passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, introduced in the House by Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush, who is retiring this year. As of press time, the bill was yet to be signed by President Joe Biden. If passed, the act will impose fines and up to thirty year prison terms for people who commit hate crimes that result in “death or serious bodily injury” and allow those crimes to be prosecuted at the federal level. There have been some two hundred attempts to pass antilynching legislation since 1900, when George Henry White, a North Carolina representative and the only Black member of Congress at the time, proposed the first such law. All attempts, until now, have failed for one reason or another. In a statement, Rush said, “Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy,” and that passage of the act “sends a clear and emphatic message that our nation will no longer ignore this shameful chapter of our history.

IN THIS ISSUE public meetings report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level. documenters, india daniels, scott pemberton...............................4 a message from chicago: the war must stop

Students in an adult computer literacy class in South Chicago send uplifting messages to Ukrainians. samuel du bois...................................5 a culture of denial

Investigating CPD's pattern of FOIA denials. matt chapman..................................7 'promotores' prepare health education push

This is how immigrant advocates aim to remove health barriers for immigrants in Illinois. dhivya sridar...................................11 the south suburbs's little known underground railroad

"Over the years, 3,000 to 4,500 freedom seekers came this way." dierdre robinson............................13 a look back at the chicago freedom movement

"If we can break the system in Chicago, it can be broken in any place in the country." igli velcani......................................15 toward a world without sweatshops

"Almost everything that we're wearing is being made in sweatshops." reema saleh.....................................18 the exchange

The Weekly's poetry corner offers our thoughts in exchange for yours. chima ikoro, victor m. serrano, delandis adams...............................20 calendar

Bulletin and events. south side weekly staff.................22

Public Meetings Report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the March 10 issue.

BY DOCUMENTERS, INDIA DANIELS, SCOTT PEMBERTON

Mar. 3 Muddy Waters’ North Kenwood house will receive a $250,000 grant for repair of its brick facade, windows, and entry door. At its meetings, the Commission on Chicago ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD Landmarks approved the use of Citywide Adopt-A-Landmark Fund money, which Feb. 23 receives ten percent of zoning and density fees that downtown developments pay the The beginning of the City Council meeting focused on celebrating Secretary of City. The grant does not cover replacement of the home’s iconic steel flamingo storm State Jesse White, which tied in with recognizing other notable Black Chicagoans doors, which were special-ordered by Waters. The doors are no longer on the building during Black History Month. The City plans to buy a closed Aldi grocery store in but can be seen in photographs. Commission Chair Ernie Wong suggested that perhaps West Garfield Park listed at $700,000, a move designed to keep it out of the hands of Mick Jagger or Eric Clapton, who both drew inspiration from and performed with non-grocer buyers. At the meeting, council members voted to greenlight the purchase. Waters, would be willing to foot the bill for replica flamingo doors. The Monumental There have been questions about how the City decides to use its land acquisition Baptist Church at 729 E. Oakwood Boulevard has been given a preliminary landmark power and whether this type of use is an effective economic development tool. Earlier recommendation status and moves to the next phase of getting historical landmark this month, representatives of the City’s Department of Planning and Development recognition. Black community leaders bought the building in 1925. Headed by several (DPD) reported that they had not yet identified a future tenant, meaning the store civic-minded pastors, it went on to host events during the civil rights movement, will remain closed even after the City buys it. In a controversial move, Andrea Kersten collaborating with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Cleophus was confirmed as chief administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability Lee, the current pastor, joined the meeting to say that the congregation is excited to (COPA). Kersten came under fire for her summary report on the Chicago Police restore the building and work for community revitalization.

Department’s wrongful raid on Anjanette Young. The report recommended discipline of Officer Ella French, who was killed in the line of duty after the report was completed Mar. 4 and officially submitted.

This year's property Scavenger Sale ended on March 2. Nearly 30,000 parcels were offered; the Land Bank successfully bid on 1,951 properties. Deputy director Darlene Feb. 24 Dugo said it was very competitive this year, especially among tax buyers bidding on Now in its second of five years, a $25 million initiative to reduce violent crime through particular properties. Sometimes bids went in increments of $100 or $1000. A vacant beautification and maintenance of vacant lots across South Side neighborhoods aims lot at 6104 Roosevelt Road is the planned site of a charging station to serve the rising to double the land it maintains. At the Chicago Police Board meeting, president number of electric vehicles on the road. At its meeting, the Cook County Land Bank Ghian Foreman spoke about the initiative known as Terra Firma, which he is leading Authority (CCLBA) Land Transactions Committee sold the property for $115,000 through Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative. Launched in 2021, to Oak Park entrepreneur Yves Hughes. He said the T-Station will fulfill a future Terra Firma focused on the 63rd Street and King Drive commercial corridors. The community need while creating a more sustainable environment, as fifty percent of all program covered about twenty acres of vacant lots and provided youth internships, job cars sold in the U.S. will be electric vehicles by 2030. Since an electric vehicle can take training, and $400,000 in local contracts. This year, Terra Firma plans to clean, beautify, hours to charge, Hughes plans to offer restaurants and other entertainment for drivers and maintain an additional twenty acres. By 2025, Terra Firma aims to include 205 while they wait. vacant acres in Washington Park, Woodlawn, and South Shore and to collaborate with the neighboring Obama Presidential Center, Foreman said. Funding sources are the The City is testing a 911 response team that includes a mental health clinician, a state’s Restore, Reinvest, Renew (R3) program, which itself is funded by cannabis sales community health paramedic, and a police officer. At a meeting of the City Council tax revenue designed, in part, for communities experiencing incarceration, violence, Committee on Health and Human Relations, representatives from various city and lack of investment. Several corporations and nonprofits are partners. departments shared updates on the pilot, also known as the Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) program. Public commenters called for an alternative Feb. 28 responder model without police officers, but presenters emphasized that police officers With low risk of community transmission of COVID-19, Chicago is entering a enable the team to respond to potentially violent situations. Latisha Newsom, a licensed new phase of the pandemic, Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said clinical social worker, mentioned Quintonio Legrier, who called 911 and was fatally at a meeting of the City Council Committee on Health and Human Relations. shot by a responding Chicago cop in 2015. Other commenters expressed support for Arwady said the city’s daily COVID case count peaked after Christmas at 10,032 the Treatment Not Trauma campaign. Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady but is now averaging 250 cases per day—the lowest since July 2021. Seventy-seven compared the pilot, launched in September 2021, to the first phase of a clinical trial. percent of Chicagoans had received at least one vaccine dose and “most” had some The University of Chicago will be assessing the safety and feasibility of the hybrid level of immunity against the virus from vaccination or infection. Vaccination rates in model. A same-day walk-in clinic and prescriber services, 24/7 community crisis beds, the Latinx community have increased, with seventy-five percent of Latinx Chicagoans a housing referral network, and care for intoxicated people are other supports being having gotten at least one COVID shot—the same rate as white residents. Vaccination planned, she said. rates in the Black community continue to lag at sixty-one percent. Alderman Byron Sigcho Lopez (25th Ward) questioned whether the City’s mask mandate should be This information was collected in large part using reporting from City Bureau’s Documenters dropped in higher risk communities. at documenters.org 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

OPINION

A Message from Chicago: The War Must Stop A teacher reflects on friendship with former student who escaped Ukraine days before Russia’s invasion.

BY SAMUEL DU BOIS

I

was teaching adult education at Harry S. Truman College when I met Olga.

Every Friday, during our class break, we’d head over to the Emerald City Café—named after the Wizard of Oz, written in nearby Humboldt Park—and order double espressos. Sometimes Olga brought croissants with chocolate. We’d talk about trips, art, literature, politics, and afterwards have a smoke outside.

Then we’d return to our computer class in Room L935 in the basement of Truman College where rows of old desktop computers sat on very thin tables. I’d plug in a projector, roll a chair to the front of the room, stand on it, and pull a string lowering the screen. We’d have class.

between the ages of twenty and ninety, and came from all around the world. For instance, Munever was in his eighties, from Bosnia, and worked on images of flowers. Mario was from Mexico and was in his fifties, creating videos about his family back home on the farm. Hugh was from Chicago, also in his fifties, and made videos of roller skaters. There were women from Nepal, Somalia, Afghanistan and Korea who made videos about education programs for girls, world travel, heart anatomy, and crochet. A woman in her nineties from a New Mexican reservation made videos about her pueblo’s history and people. In this small cinderblock classroom with no windows, we brought

One of the most popular lessons was PowerPoint. We’d save presentations full of images, text boxes, transitions, and animations as video files and upload them to YouTube, where we’d then add music to the videos. The students were adults

creativity, heart, and knowledge. Olga made videos about her granddaughter, cartoon skeletons dancing to jazz music underneath L tracks, and gardens as well as art museums in Paris.

At the beginning of the pandemic,

“Everything that I love and everyone I love remaining in Ukraine is in danger.”

Olga left Chicago to be with friends and family in Kyiv, Ukraine. She has a home there that has been in her family for generations. I reached out in early February to ask how she was doing and how people in Ukraine were feeling. A few days before the invasion, she wrote back and said her friend, an artist, had painted her portrait.

For today: people are tired of being afraid and worried. Life goes on.

My friend painted my portrait.

Anxiety is in the air, but there is no panic.

The situation is escalated in the media. Many foreigners from different countries who live in Ukraine haven’t left yet.

And then she wrote again about her

ILLUSTRATION BY KEVIN MOORE JR.

plans to go to France: I’m ok. I’m in Kyiv. The situation around and inside is very disturbing. I think I’d better fly to Paris. I give myself 3-4 days. Sam, thank you so much for your letter. But as always, today is Friday, and our Emerald City Café is waiting for us I hope :) Our coffee and cigarettes on Friday are our friendly creativity.

I remembered that it was at that café, just past the Red Line Wilson stop, where Olga told me she used to be a paleontologist, and how it was one of the best times in her life. She had discovered the skeletal remains of thousands of year old horses and excavated them to be studied. I emailed Olga and asked if she brought the portrait that the artist Matvei Vaisbur created. She replied: MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

OPINION My portrait will be waiting for me in Kyiv. I’ll be in Paris for a few weeks and then [I’ll] come back.

I now teach at Olive Harvey’s South Chicago Learning Center. As my class arrived that Saturday, they showed proof of their COVID-19 negative test results to Mr. Green, the security guard.

After getting some assignments out of the way, I shared with them how Olga was a student in this class for many years.

I told them that some of the PowerPoint examples I used in class were created by her, and that she had escaped to France before the Russian bombing of her city, Kyiv—a city with nearly the same population as Chicago. I said that if they wanted to, they could write a message

of support for her and her country, to lift her spirits during these trying and difficult times. No one hesitated. Their hearts had opened to Olga. These older adults and elders of the Southeast Side community wrote: We are with you through this trying period.

Stay strong We stand with you!

Estamos con ud y familia What can I do? What can I say? I pray for you and your family. God is able!

Trust, love, obey.

Chicago Supports you!

Slava Ukraini!

Mr. Green, the security guard, took a class picture of us holding signs

with the messages of solidarity to the Ukrainian people.

As an instructor of adult education, we learn from each other and create communities of friendship and support.

Whether at Truman College or OliveHarvey, we are here for each other.

On March 4, Olga wrote: Everything that I love and everyone I love remaining in Ukraine is in danger.

Russia’s war in Ukraine is completely unacceptable. There is no justification for what Russia and its government is doing to Ukraine and the world. Putin is a war criminal and needs to be stopped.

We are now in the second week of the invasion. The Russian military is bombing Ukrainian cities while its soldiers are

shooting and killing people, including families. The international community needs to do more to stop and then arrest Putin for crimes against humanity. Send him and his generals to The Hague. End the war. Samuel Du Bois is an educator at the City Colleges of Chicago, and is a writer represented by Craig Literary. This is his first story for the Weekly.

PHOTO BY SAMUEL DUBOIS

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

POLICE

A Culture of Denial

A Weekly investigation of hundreds of public-records denials found the police aren’t adhering to state law.

BY MATT CHAPMAN

T

he Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), a civilian police oversight body established by City ordinance in 2021 set to ramp up later this year, will have legal powers to request information about police activities from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) and the Chicago Police Department (CPD).

Such requests will be similar to those the public and journalists can make through the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows anyone to ask public agencies for data and documents.

But FOIA requests in Chicago often run up against denials of varying legality. The CCPSA may find its requests similarly held up by one of the City’s most abused reasons for denying

view into how CPD will respond to the Commission’s requests for information.

The CPD is by no means shy in denying the public access to information about its operations, and often cites ongoing investigations in doing so—often with dubious reasons and scandalous outcomes. In 2019, Anjanette Young submitted a FOIA request for footage from body-worn cameras (BWC) of the police officers who wrongfully raided her home earlier that year. The police department’s FOIA office denied Young’s request because an investigation of the raid was ongoing.

Young ultimately filed a lawsuit to compel the department to comply with her FOIA request.

To understand whether the denial of Young’s request’s was a rare one-

GRAPH BY MATT CHAPMAN

the public access to information: if the commission requests records tied to an ongoing investigation, the City can deny access to those records.

While it’s difficult to predict whether the City will deny the committee access to information, its history of withholding information in consistent violation of the law may be the public’s clearest

off, or one that typifies the Chicago police department’s approach to FOIA requests, the Weekly pored over hundreds of FOIA requests that the CPD denied based on legal rationalizations similar to those cited by the department when it denied Young’s.

This research adds to an evergrowing body of reporting and

litigation surrounding the City’s flagrant disregard for the transparency mandates it’s required by law to follow.

The Illinois FOIA allows certain records to be exempt from disclosure, and describes such exemptions in section 7(1) of the law. Some examples include: private personal information in section 7(1)(b), documents related to ongoing investigations in section 7(1)(d), and administrative proceedings in section 7(1)(n).

I reviewed 350 FOIA requests that were denied by CPD under 7(1)(d), the portion of the Illinois FOIA that deals with ongoing investigations, between January 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021.

When I submitted a request for all such denial letters, the department initially argued that identifying requests denied under 7(1)(d) would be unduly burdensome, meaning it would overwhelm their office with the work required to fulfill it.

One reason that the request was considered “burdensome” stemmed from a limitation in the police department’s FOIA tracking software that only allowed the recording of one denial reason, while requests are often being denied with multiple exemptions. The only way for CPD to find all requests denied under 7(1)(d) was to review all denial letters sent during the timeframe on the chance that 7(1)(d) was used in addition to the exemption recorded by CPD in their tracking software.

To compel CPD to keep track of all exemptions for all requests going forward, I am currently suing CPD, arguing that CPD is in violation of FOIA by not making an index of exemptions used in requests public, as required by the law.

Since the start of the lawsuit, CPD has updated their software to allow it to track more than one exemption per request.

The problem seems common; I requested a log of all FOIA requests and an index of exemptions from all thirtysix agencies listed on Chicago’s FOIA contacts page, and only seven agencies shared the exemptions they used.

T

he analysis in this article covers the time periods between 2020 and early-mid 2021.

Four months after the request was submitted, CPD completed the request and provided 286 requests. To cover the time periods after Mayor Lori Lightfoot promised to make it easier to request BWC footage, in October 2021 I requested all requests denied under Section 7(1)(d). CPD again argued that it would be unduly burdensome to release that many documents and we agreed to narrow the request down to January 1, 2021 through April 1, 2021. Once we provided the narrowed request, CPD completed it in under a week.

Through one of the most common reasons for denying FOIA requests, an agency can deny access to records as “unduly burdensome” if completing the request is so time consuming that it prevents the city from doing its day to day work. The common exemption has its limitations to prevent its abuse by government agencies, including losing access to the exemption if the City doesn’t respond within five days—as happened with Charles Green’s FOIA request that led to the release of tens of thousands of misconduct investigations.

Additionally, the law prohibits the City from claiming an unduly MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

POLICE

ILLUSTRATION BY KEVIN MOORE JR.

burdensome exemption in cases where there is “overwhelming public interest” in the records that outweighs the cost to the City of reviewing them. The law also requires the City to provide “clear and convincing evidence” supporting any assertion of the contrary.

CPD showed a deep disregard of the public’s interest and press access to information for two 2020 police shootings that sparked major protests across the city.

Despite the unmistakable public interest in both police shootings, CPD denied all requests for body-worn camera (BWC) footage of them, arguing that reviewing the footage in preparation of releasing it would be unduly burdensome. The news organizations that were denied the footage included The Chicago Reporter, CBS 2, the Sun-Times, WBEZ, ABC

7, WGN-TV, Chicago One Media, and NBC 5.

Merrick Wayne, an attorney at Loevy & Loevy, has litigated many FOIA lawsuits against CPD, including my own.

He says CPD hasn’t followed the law when it used the “unduly burdensome” clause to deny these requests because the department didn’t estimate how long the review would take and didn’t show how the cost of reviewing them would outweigh the public interest in seeing them. Wayne adds that by not providing opportunities to narrow the scope of such requests, CPD waived the legal use of the unduly burdensome exemption. In their denials, CPD argued there was no way to narrow those requests, but failed to say how.

During my investigation with Matt

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

Harvey for the TRiiBE, of one of the two shootings, CPD also denied a request for logs from ShotSpotter devices, citing ongoing investigations. Despite its denial, two months prior to the TRiiBE’s request to CPD for ShotSpotter logs, COPA released videos that contained the same information CPD had denied—audio of the shooting from multiple cameras in the area.

The TriiBE escalated the request to the Illinois Public Access Counselor (PAC), which hears administrative appeals of FOIA denials. CPD responded several weeks later with ShotSpotter logs, over three months after the request was submitted. The document provided describes fewer recorded shots than what police officers claimed in reports they filed.

However, even though COPA released the footage from that police shooting, the City continues to fight a lawsuit that was filed in September 2020 seeking the same footage. Attorneys for CPD filed an appeal in July 2021 that claimed the department is not obligated to release the footage. If a government agency denies a request, it has the legal obligation to provide clear and convincing evidence that the information it’s withholding is exempt from disclosure.

This is made clear in the PAC’s FOIA Guide for Law Enforcement, which notes that under FOIA, all records an agency holds are presumed to be open to inspection, and any assertion that a record is exempt from disclosure must include “clear and convincing evidence” that that record is in fact exempt.

POLICE The PAC’s Guide goes on to say, “Perhaps the most common error the PAC encounters in reviewing FOIA denials is the failure of public bodies to explain why and how the asserted exemptions apply to the records that they withhold.”

Despite the heavy burden of proof required to deny records, of the hundreds

GRAPH BY MATT CHAPMAN

of requests I reviewed that were denied for being related to an ongoing investigation, it was exceedingly rare for the City to provide any meaningful explanation of how releasing those records could compromise an ongoing investigation.

When a government agency exempts information, it is required to review and redact information only if it’s considered exempt under the law. With few exceptions, the agency does not have the legal ability to simply not provide a full document solely because it contains some exempt information. It must redact only the exempt information, and disclose the rest of the document. The PAC’s guide for law enforcement is clear in this regard.

In my investigation, I found five requests that were denied even though the associated investigations had already been closed, or cited an already-passed court date. Similarly, I found fortytwo requests that were denied simply because they were associated with a filed complaint against a police officer that is still under investigation.

In one instance, CPD denied a man in prison access to video and audio records, arguing that providing the records as a CD would have endangered the physical safety of others.

The denial gave the man no option to view the requested media without a CD.

A

ccording to records from CPD, of the 7,196 FOIA requests sent to CPD in 2020, 1,469 of those were marked as closed thirty days after they were submitted, with around 300 taking longer than 100 days.

If an agency doesn’t respond to a request in the legally mandated time

frame of five to ten business days, it then loses the ability to claim that a request is unduly burdensome, regardless of how long it would take to complete the request. This places a strong requirement on the city to respond on time. However, of the 350 requests I reviewed, around forty percent were completed after the time limits allowed under state law, with twenty of those taking longer than 120 days to complete.

It’s unclear whether any agencies intentionally delay responses to FOIA requests as routine habit, but an email from the Jones Day email hack shows at least one request where the City intentionally delayed responding. And last year, the Department of Law’s FOIA log showed that the city again delayed its response until the last possible time, noting to “wait to respond until due date.”

CPD denied access to requesters looking either for rosters of CPD officers assigned to schools as school resource officers (SROs), or records related to a school’s assigned SROs, arguing that releasing the records could endanger the lives of the officers assigned to a school.

As with a majority of CPD’s denials, it provided very little detail explaining how the release of the records could endanger the SROs. In one denial, a requester was denied access to the misconduct records of police officers stationed at Hyde Park

Academy simply because the request “encompasses information related to the security measures put into place by CPD in conjunction with the Chicago Public School System to prevent as well as respond to potential attacks upon the school community population.”

Merrick Wayne at Loevy and Loevy called the citations “sweeping and generic exemption claims” that give no factual basis about how releasing SRO names puts SROs, or anyone else, in any danger. He added that even if the records contained exempt information, CPD must still provide all other non-exempt information, which it did not do.

CPD additionally denied access to information from forty-five requests for defendants in criminal trials, arguing that the release of the respective records “would clearly jeopardize the fairness of the ongoing criminal trial.”

trial is to prevent that same person from accessing their own records.”

It’s difficult to say whether CPD will continue its patterns of non-transparency in the years to come. Frank Chapman, a community organizer who was key in pushing for the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, said he is cautiously optimistic.

“We're in a new set of circumstances,” Chapman says. “CPD has an opportunity to act accordingly. They have an opportunity to gain trust with the community and the [Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance].”

But significant work is still needed to show that the City has a legitimate interest in being open and transparent.

The extensive efforts needed to review their transparency practices are made much more difficult by a lack of

GRAPH BY MATT CHAPMAN

Despite its legal requirement to provide “clear and convincing evidence,” none of the forty-five requests explain how the release of those records would jeopardize fairness as required by law, and simply points to a section of the statute without any supporting information. In four of the denial letters we reviewed, the court date mentioned in CPD’s denial letters had already passed.

“CPD is merely reciting the statutory language, which Illinois courts routinely reject,” Wayne said. “The response letters fail to explain how disclosure of any portion of any case incident report or even a person's own mugshot would create a substantial likelihood that a person would be deprived of fairness at their trial or interfere with any proceedings. CPD's denials seem to imply that if CPD arrests a person, the only way to have a fair

adequate tracking of information about how requests are handled, with very little oversight or repercussions when consistent FOIA violations occur. To date, the Office of the Inspector General has yet to review any of the City’s FOIA practices. This reporting was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Matt Chapman is a freelance journalist in Chicago who focuses on issues of transparency and policing. He last wrote about a mayoral advisor whose contract skirted City hiring regulations.

MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

IMMIGRATION

'Promotores' Prepare Health Education Push

Immigrant advocates prepare to train promotores in South and Southwest suburbs to aid immigrant families needing help accessing healthcare.

BY DHIVYA SRIDAR

I

mmigration advocates in Illinois are preparing for the second stage of the Immigrant Health Academy, which launched last fall to educate immigrants about their healthcare rights and to remove fears around health access. Now that advocates are nearly finished creating the academy’s curriculum, the next phase is to start training staff—hopefully by next month, according to advocates.

Trained community leaders, many of whom are immigrants themselves and understand the challenges immigrants face, will be helping people in their communities access Medicaid, hospital financial assistance, COVID-19related services, and more in their

roles as promotores (community health workers). While the focus of the academy is primarily in Chicago’s south and southwest suburban communities, which have significant immigrant populations, advocates may later include metro Chicago.

The academy is a two-year pilot program funded by the Healthy Communities Foundation to its grantee partner, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), and the coalition’s partners: Mano a Mano Family Resource Center, Southwest Suburban Immigrant Project, Arab American Family Services, Mujeres Latinas en Acción, Shriver Center on

PROVIDED BY THE ILLINOIS COALITION FOR IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE RIGHTS

Poverty Law, and Legal Council for Health Justice.

For immigrants, “health care is often associated with fear, whether it’s fear of immigration [enforcement] or fear of not being able to afford it or mistrust in the government and medical systems,” said Edith Avila Olea, the policy manager of immigrant communities for ICIRR. In a 2021 survey released by ICIRR and the Center for Community Health Equity at Depaul University, out of 114 immigrants in Chicago and the suburbs, almost sixty-five percent reported that they were concerned with how they were going to pay a hospital bill or had problems paying.

Suzy Rosas arrived in the U.S. from El Salvador about sixteen years ago.

Today, she is a promotora (community health worker) for Mano a Mano in Lake County. Rosas was inspired to become a promotora after her mother tested positive for COVID-19. Her mother also had a brain aneurysm that was partially caused by the long term effects of COVID-19.

Medical staff said the life-saving surgery Rosas’ mother needed was too expensive without insurance.

“I had never heard of hospital financial assistance and didn’t know that that was even an option for us,” Rosas said.

Two months later, ICIRR and Mano a Mano helped Rosas apply for and receive hospital financial assistance and advocated for her mother. Rosas said she knows there are many families in her community who are in need of the

same type of assistance and advocacy she once needed.

Advocates have almost finished creating the six-module curriculum, which will be customized for each community partner. The curriculum will focus on healthcare access themes, such as confidentiality and other “health knowyour-rights” topics, accessing Medicaid, hospital financial assistance, and COVID19-related services. Organizational staff will train community leaders on the information in the curriculum, and these leaders will then educate the community members affiliated with the organizations, according to Olea.

Access to healthcare services is a significant issue for immigrants, but getting people to share personal information with clinics and hospitals is a barrier that the academy wishes to remove. “People do not want to share their information with medical providers,” Olea said. “Many individuals associate medical providers with being the government. They’re afraid if they share their address and their income and if they receive financial assistance, that somehow that information will end up with immigration offices or with ICE.” Additionally, when immigrants are sick, there is often an immediate hesitance to go to the doctor because of fear of a medical bill or fear of not being understood and not having access to interpretation services, Olea added.

Accessing health care can be especially complicated for members of the community who do not have health

MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

IMMIGRATION insurance and or face discrimination based on their immigration status, according to Bertha Morín, the director of community engagement and mobilization for Mujeres Latinas en Acción. That organization serves Spanish-speaking immigrants, particularly women on the South Side of

Suburban Cook County on immigrant health rights and building power to push for policies that improve health outcomes for immigrant communities,” Morín said.

About 1.76 million immigrants live in Illinois, comprising approximately fourteen percent of the state’s population,

Chicago and in the southwest suburbs.

The curriculum was inspired by community experiences and community voices, she added. Topics came from questions heard by health navigators and community health workers in different communities. “Our hope is that the academy will deepen the capacity of Mujeres Latinas en Acción community leaders and promotores in Western

according to ICIRR’s 2021 report about the health academy. “Leading countries of origin include Mexico (36 percent), India (10 percent), Poland (7 percent), the Philippines (5 percent), and China (4 percent),” according to the report.

The Shriver Center on Poverty Law in Chicago is providing policy support for the academy’s curriculum at the direction of ICIRR and other community partners,

“I had never heard of hospital financial assistance and didn’t know that that was even an option.”

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

according to Andrea Kovach, a senior attorney for health care justice at Shriver.

For instance, when there is a change in a law, new law, or change to an existing law, Shriver will be providing assistance to make sure the curriculum is accurate and updated, Kovach said.

One example is a new Illinois law that went into effect on January 1, 2022 which will require hospitals to allow uninsured patients, including immigrants, to apply for financial assistance before receiving services. The bill also decreases the maximum amount of money uninsured patients must pay for hospital services from twenty-five to fifteen percent of their income.

“It’s a dynamic process,” Kovach said. “We’re going to need to make those changes to the curriculum. And so, you know, it'll be important to make sure that the curriculum is always accurate, since it is an ever-changing environment.” She added that there is no other program of its kind in the United States.

Rosas was very emotional when sharing the story about her mother expressing she is everything to her. She

noted tearfully, “I really want to convey to the community that in moments of hardship, they are not alone. I really want to uplift community members who think that they don’t have any options or don’t have any rights.”Dhivya Sridar is a graduate student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and a medical student at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She last wrote for the Weekly about an organization that provides a critical support network for immigrants recently released from detention.

HISTORY

The South Suburbs’s Little Known Underground Railroad Historians and activists push to recognize the history of Underground Railroad stops and guides in the south suburbs.

BY DIERDRE ROBINSON

T

he Underground Railroad was neither a railroad nor was it underground. It was a secret network led by people that included free Black and anti-slavery white people who helped escaped slaves, or freedom seekers, travel north for the promise of freedom.

Along the way, they were offered shelter in secret hiding places, small amounts of money on occasion, clothing, and food.

Many of the trails fanned across Illinois and into what is now the south suburbs of Chicago. According to Larry McClellan, a historian and retired professor who has researched and published on the subject, “ten to fifteen percent of the activity of the Underground Railroad came through Illinois, literally through our backyard.”

Despite the region’s significance in the Underground Railroad, Illinois is rarely included in conversations about that history. McClellan and other members of the Little Calumet River Underground Railroad Project are leading the way to recognize and memorialize the places and people around Chicago who played a role.

Even though The Underground Railroad had nothing to do with an actual railroad system, railroad terminology was often used to confuse slave catchers and maintain secrecy. Terms such as stations referred to safehouses, passengers were freedom seekers, and lines were another way to indicate the roads being followed.

Guides were known as conductors while trains and engines were covert references to farm wagons and teams of horses.

The Underground Railroad

ART BASED ON WILLIAM STILL’S 1872 BOOK, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, COURTESY OF SHUTTERSTOCK

started at the place of enslavement and followed natural and manmade modes of transportation such as rivers, canals, bays, the Atlantic Coast, ferries, roads, and trails. According to the National Park Service, freedom seekers went in many directions—Canada, Mexico, Spanish Florida, Indian territory, the West, the Caribbean, and Europe.

Freedom seekers made their way into the south suburban regions of Chicago from various locations in an effort to escape bondage. According to McClellan, one known example involved the journey to freedom undertaken by Barney Ford.

Born into slavery in Virginia, Ford escaped captivity in 1848 and found assistance to travel overland to Chicago.

While his exact route is unknown, he walked much of the way, passing

Champaign and Kankakee on his route.

He eventually married and played an active role in assisting other freedom seekers in the Chicago area.

“The stories of Illinois need to be included in the national story of the Underground Railroad and currently, they are not,” McClellan said.

McClellan, who said that he was increasingly drawn to the history of the region and particularly to places reflecting African-American settlement, wrote the book titled The Underground Railroad South of Chicago, which came out in 2019.

He has been researching the subject for over thirty years. “Along the way, I ran into references to the Underground Railroad and began to see that this has been a vital but almost forgotten part of

our region’s history.”

McClellan found evidence to suggest that freedom seekers traveled through Crete, Lockport, New Lenox, Mokena, South Holland, Park Forest, and Sauk Trail. Situated twenty to forty miles outside of Chicago, these suburban locations were known as stopping off points or places of refuge for freedom seekers.

“There really is a lot to be proud of that this area was very much a part of the Underground Railroad story. Literally, hundreds of freedom seekers came right along the Sauk Trail,” he said. “Over the years, 3,000 to 4,500 freedom seekers came this way.”

While the nature of the Underground Railroad was a secret, current efforts are not, and there is an attempt to identify

MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

HISTORY Stories such as these serve to underscore the important role played by those willing to assist those formerly enslaved. There were a significant number

Wagoner was also a typesetter and journalist who played an active role in the anti-slavery movement both through public writings and covert Underground

of African-American people directly involved with and providing leadership for the networks of the Underground Railroad, McClellan wrote in his book, and in the region south of Chicago there were Black residents scattered across the area helping freedom seekers.

One noteworthy example was Henry O. Wagoner, a Black abolitionist and one of the key leaders of the efforts of the Underground Railroad in Chicago.

According to historical accounts,

Railroad activities. In 1843, he settled in Chatham, Ontario, which was a popular terminus for the Underground Railroad.

Anyone interested in learning more about the Little Calumet River Underground Railroad Project, the historic markers and/or upcoming events can follow the group through their Facebook page. ¬

“Probably ten to fifteen percent of the activity of the Underground Railroad came through Illinois, literally through our backyard.”

COURTESY OF THE COLLECTION OF LARRY MCCLELLAN

former Underground Railroad sites and garner national recognition for them in the south suburbs. Tom Shepherd— who is the lead organizer of the Little Calumet River Underground Railroad Project—McClellan, and other members of the group are spearheading it, but similar efforts date back to 1999.

In order to be recognized as an historic site in the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom registry, a site must be a location that has a demonstrated and verifiable association with the Underground Railroad, and applications are accepted twice a year in January and July.

Making a case for these sites and raising public awareness has been the focal point for the group. “We have three particular missions,” said Shepherd, “and one is to get some type of a memorial at the Ton Farm site or nearby.”

The former Jan and Aagje Ton Farm, which is listed in the national registry, sits on the Little Calumet directly south of the area generally referred to as Altgeld Gardens and the Golden Gate neighborhood. The Golden Gate neighborhood extends from 130th Street south to the Calumet River.

The actual site of the original home and outbuildings of the Ton Farm is now home to Chicago’s Finest Marina, a Black-owned motorboat marina located at 557 E. 134th Place in Chicago.

“We’re also looking at the Beaubien Woods and the forest preserve,” he said.

The farm was located near the Beaubien Woods Forest Preserve and is said to have been one of the stops where freedom seekers could find shelter.

“Our number two mission is to establish what we call the ‘freedom trail,’ and the third is to get our curriculum into local schools,” Shepherd said.

The Crete Congregational Church and the I&M Canal Headquarters building in Lockport are listed on the national registry as well.

“A lot of the focus and energy right now is looking at the markers and the history signs that we’re trying to establish,” said McClellan. The group hopes to install the signs by the end of May at which time a celebration and, hopefully, a tour can take place.

The group received a $4,000 grant from the National Park Service and $1,800 from The Illinois State Historical Society to establish these markers. “What we really want to point to is the reality of freedom seekers coming through the region and the reality of Ton Farm and the Dutch settlers that responded,” McClellan stated.

One account of the role that the Ton Farm played in assisting freedom seekers recounts how the Tons worked closely with friend and fellow Dutch settler Cornelius Kuyper to assist three young runaway slaves. Kuyper hid the slaves in his home, then pretended to join the slave catchers in a futile attempt to re-capture them.

When the slave catchers retreated empty-handed, Kuyper called the men from their hiding place and packed them into the bottom of a large wagon, which he drove to the home of Jan Ton, wherein Mr. Ton ensured their safe passage to the next station. This system was repeated until the men reached Canada safely.

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

Diedre Robinson is a writer and manager in Chicago. She last wrote for the Weekly

COURTESY OF NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

HISTORY

A Look Back at the Chicago Freedom Movement

A coalition led by radical Black organizers in the 1960s challenged the city’s racist housing system.

BY IGLI VELCANI

H

istory teaches us about important lessons, people, and events. It shapes a nation. It tells us who we are and where we came from.

It tells us about our past evils and also about our good deeds. As we conclude Black History Month, I want to tell you an important part of history, a movement that took place in Chicago, in our own backyard, but that gets neglected and lost in history. I want to tell you about a movement that inspired many people and changed a city forever: the Chicago Freedom Movement.

The Chicago Freedom Movement was a coalition led by radical Black organizers in the 1960s who raised awareness and pressured city officials to address racist housing discrimination.

The seeds of why and how the movement came about can be traced back to the Great Migration, in which some seven million African-American people left the racist repression of the Jim Crow South to look for work and safety in northern cities, and its legacy is the creation of the Fair Housing Act. More than half a million came to Chicago between 1916 and 1970.

“Before this migration, African Americans constituted two percent of Chicago's population; by 1970, they were thirty-three percent,” according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Yet Black people continued to face discrimination in the north, as Chicago was segregated along ethnic and racial lines. Irish, Polish, German, Italian, and Black people lived in their own segregated communities.

At first there was discrimination against Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants, but eventually, they were integrated into American society, accepted, and treated as equals.

Through policy and force, Black Americans were kept isolated and not allowed to live in large swaths of Chicago.

The Chicago Freedom Movement Program would later state, “Racism, slums, and ghettos have been the essentials of [Black] existence in Chicago. While the city permitted its earlier ethnic groups to enter the mainstream of American life, it has locked [Black people] into the lower rungs of the social and economic ladder.”

For many years, U.S. cities relied on racial zoning ordinances that legally barred African-American residents from living in certain neighborhoods under the guise of "separate but equal." But after these laws were struck down as

PHOTO BY BERNARD KLEINA

unconstitutional in the 1917 Supreme Court case Buchanan vs. Warley, cities, homeowners, and developers began relying on other segregation tactics like restrictive covenants and redlining.

Racially restrictive covenants were agreements between property owners that they would keep the neighborhood white.

If an owner decided to sell his property, they could not sell to Black Americans— only to white Americans. There were hundreds of covenants in neighborhoods across Chicago, in neighborhoods like South Shore, Hyde Park, and Humboldt Park. A 2001 article in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society found that in 1939, Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) vice-chairman Robert Taylor estimated that eighty percent of Chicago's land area was covered by racial restrictive covenants.

Redlining was another tactic used,

MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

HISTORY

PHOTO BY BERNARD KLEINA

developed by Homer Hoyt, the chief economist for the Federal Housing Administration in the 1930s. With America in an economic depression, President Franklin Roosevelt wanted banks to give out low-interest loans to people so they could build homes and rejuvenate the economy. This policy of subsidizing homeownership helped the country emerge from the depression and create suburbs, mainly benefitting white Americans.

But these loans were not given out equally. Mortgage lenders and banks across the country designated some neighborhoods as desirable and safe for loans, and others as undesirable, commonly using a red color to outline these neighborhoods on maps. People living in so-called redlined neighborhoods, who were predominantly Black, were denied mortgages and loans. The practice allowed white people to build homes and create wealth while Black people were forced to keep renting in segregated communities.

In 2017, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago concluded that redlining “had meaningful and lasting effects on the development of urban neighborhoods through reduced credit access and subsequent disinvestment.”

As a result of redlining and racially restrictive covenants, Chicago was one of the most segregated cities in America

by the 1960s. In 1960, sixty-nine percent of the city’s 813,000 Black [people] lived in eleven of the city’s seventysix community areas. These confined pockets where Black people could live became overpopulated and the quality of life and housing deteriorated over time.

Many Black residents were forced to live in dingy, unsanitary apartments, which lacked heat and hot water, and were often rat-infested, according to a 2008 law review article.

Throughout the twentieth century, Black activists fought these practices and called for change. One such activist was Albert Raby. Al Raby was born in Chicago in 1933 into a poor family. He dropped out of school in eighth grade to support his family and became involved in union activity before joining the army.

After coming back, he attended day and night school to earn his high school diploma, and then his teaching degree in 1960. He taught seventh grade at an all-Black school on the West Side and helped create the Teachers for Integrated Schools, a national network of educators and civil rights groups that was based in Chicago.

Raby was picked as the delegate to the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), which was an organization that wanted to end segregation in public schools

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

across Chicago. In his role, he organized protests, marches, boycotts and was the spokesperson for the organization. By 1965, he knew that he needed help. To create real change, he needed to place national pressure on Chicago politicians.

So he called upon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to bring his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to Chicago and hold demonstrations like those held in Selma and Montgomery. In the South, the SCLC would host sit-ins, nonviolent protests, and marches to demand action from the federal government.

By January 1966, King and his family had moved to 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in North Lawndale. The SCLC and CCCO formed a coalition to bring awareness to housing segregation. This was the birth of the Chicago Freedom Movement, in which Raby played a crucial role. As the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was involved in Operation Breadbasket, would later say that Raby's contribution “was probably the single biggest reason that Dr. King came to Chicago [in 1966].”

King hoped that the SCLC could have the same success in Chicago as it did in Selma and Montgomery, which inspired the passage of the Voting Rights Act. He hoped Chicago could achieve a

gathered to listen to King speak on housing discrimination and the “slums” that Black Chicagoans were left to live in. King proclaimed, “We are here today because we are tired. We are tired of paying more for less. We are tired of living in rat-infested slums...We are tired of having to pay a median rent of ninetyseven dollars a month in Lawndale for four rooms while whites living in South Deering pay seventy-three dollars a month for five rooms. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children."

After the speech, King led a march to City Hall. There he placed his demands on the door of the building, asking thenMayor Richard J. Daley to make changes that would ensure fair and open housing to all Chicagoans, such as “Public statements that all [housing] listings will be available on a nondiscriminatory basis” and “Public statements of a nondiscriminatory mortgage policy so that loans will be available to any qualified borrower without regard to the racial composition of the area.”

The movement energized Chicagoans to march in the streets demanding change and equality, but it also inspired counter-

“If out of [the Chicago Freedom Movement] came a fair housing bill, just as we got a public accommodations bill out of Birmingham and a right to vote out of Selma, the Chicago movement was a success, and a documented success.” — The Rev. Jesse Jackson system of fair and open housing. King also wanted to use Chicago as a model for other cities. At a summit of community organizations in 1965, he said, “If we can break the system in Chicago, it can be broken in any place in the country.”

The movement started to gain traction across Chicago because of its demonstrations and marches that culminated in July 1966, with a march to Soldier Field. Around 30,000 people

protests from those who did not want an integrated city. They attacked marchers led by King by throwing bricks, bottles, and rocks at marchers while screaming racist profanity and waving Nazi and Confederate flags. King was disappointed but not deterred. He was going to continue calling for change using nonviolent demonstrations.

Daley faced pressure from King, who threatened to take demonstrations

HISTORY Chicago Freedom Movement] came a fair housing bill, just as we got a public accommodations bill out of Birmingham and a right to vote out of Selma, the

year anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Chicago, and cities across the country, continue to be segregated. Black

Chicago movement was a success, and a documented success,” said Jackson.

The act was a step toward fair and open housing across American cities.

The Housing and Urban Development Department explains that the Fair Housing Act protects people from discrimination when they are renting or buying a home, getting a mortgage, seeking housing assistance, or engaging in other housing-related activities. The FHA provided people with a legal roadmap to fighting housing discrimination through the courts by instituting fines and other consequences for discriminatory practices.

April 11 will mark the fifty-four-

Chicagoans still face discrimination when seeking mortgages and many struggle with high rents, evictions, and poor housing conditions. As today’s activists seek to tackle these issues, we’d do well to see these fights as a continuation of the efforts of groups like the Chicago Freedom Movement and organizers like Raby and King. ¬

“If we can break the system in Chicago, it can be broken in any place in the country.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

PHOTO BY BERNARD KLEINA

across white neighborhoods in Chicago if something was not done. Not wanting his city engulfed with violence, he agreed to host a summit with King, the CHA, and other business leaders. An agreement was reached on August 26, 1966, when the CHA promised to build public housing and the Mortgage Banks Association promised to not partake in redlining and denying loans on the basis of race. King knew it was going to be an uphill battle and this was only the “first step.”

After the agreement, the movement

started to fizzle out. Raby decided to go back to school and study history at the University of Chicago. By January 1967, King had left Chicago to continue his efforts in other parts of the country.

The city continued to be segregated and Black Chicagoans still faced housing discrimination despite the promises made. Because of this, some critics believed the movement was a failure.

Others counter that it was not a failure, because it inspired the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. “If out of [the

Igli Velcani is a second-year law student at UIC Law and a student attorney at the Fair Housing Legal Clinic. He was born in Albania and immigrated to the United States in 2000. He grew up in Mount Prospect. This is his first piece for the Weekly.

MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

DEVELOPMENT

Toward a World Without Sweatshops Blue Tin Productions, an apparel worker-cooperative, reimagines the fashion industry and raises funds for a collaborative community center.

BY REEMA SALEH

W

hat can bottom-up, systemic change look like in the garment industry— and beyond—when exploitation and violence are replaced by community and care?”

The central question of an exhibit housed at the architectural and urban design firm Studio Gang is one that Blue Tin Production has been trying to answer since its inception. Officially starting production in 2019, Blue Tin’s focus has been creating an alternative to sweatshops in the fashion industry.

Blue Tin Production is a Chicagobased apparel manufacturing cooperative setting the bar for sustainable fashion and production. With its name coming from the blue metal Danish cookie tins that people often keep sewing materials in, Blue Tin was founded by Hoda Katebi, a political activist and writer. The workerowned cooperative is run by immigrant, refugee, and working-class women of color, and all members collectively make decisions about daily operations and share profits equally among themselves.

“The first [goal] was to provide an alternative for designers in terms of manufacturing and thinking about an alternative to sweatshops because right now…almost everything that we’re wearing is being made in sweatshops, both here in the United States, as well as abroad,” Katebi said. “Labor is this big question mark within fashion and fashion supply chains.”

For Blue Tin, social justice for the fashion industry requires organizing at the intersection of labor rights, immigration, racial justice, and community development. At the center

of Blue Tin’s work is building a creative approach to systems change. Simply put on their website, “we cannot end sweatshops alone when they are so deeply intertwined with other structures of violence that plague our communities.”

As an abolitionist organization, Blue Tin has been advocating for the dismantling of the underlying oppression within the fashion industry and becoming a model for sustainable manufacturing and labor practices.

“As we start peeling back the layers of all the different intersections of violence that garment workers face, we see that it's a massive problem. We see a lot of gender-based violence on factory floors, a lot of that is required at fast fashion productions to manage the speeds and quantities that they need. The wages are so low because of colonialism and ongoing economic imperialist powers that allow and enforce [it].” Katebi said. “[Blue Tin’s existence is to] think about the world we actually want to exist. If we’re calling for an end of sweatshops and violent methods of manufacturing, how do our clothes need to be made? … What does it mean when we have some of the most silenced women, who have gone through hell and back, and create a space where all of us can grow and thrive and build something within fashion supply chains?”

O

ne of the biggest strikes in Chicago history was launched by female and immigrant garment workers. When 40,000 laborers began walking out of their shops in 1910, they did so to protest unsafe working conditions and low wages. The Chicago Garment Workers’ Strike lasted for

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

almost five months until labor leaders had secured a deal. While the garment industry is still plagued with these same concerns today, Blue Tin's existence is set up as its antithesis.

and working-class women of color in their operations—those who often see themselves exploited through systems of fast fashion. It’s also what led them to the 63rd House development.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BLUE TIN PRODUCTIONS

Worker cooperatives like Blue Tin can create better opportunities for workers, who may face challenges or be at risk of exploitation in the industry.

They are businesses that are collectively owned and controlled by their workers.

As an alternative to traditional business models, they can offer more equitable pay structures and better anchor themselves in their local community. According to the Illinois Worker Cooperative Alliance, over half of worker cooperatives in Chicago are based in or led by communities of color. While worker cooperatives can face unique economic and legal challenges, this is beginning to change. In 2020, Illinois became the fourteenth state to legally recognize worker cooperatives.

Blue Tin’s worker-centric approach is what led them to center immigrants

From a formerly abandoned post office on the corner of W. 63rd Street and S. Albany Avenue, 63rd House will be adapting the 11,250 square-foot space into a new production studio. Designed in collaboration with the design firm Studio Gang and community organizers in Chicago Lawn, 63rd House will become home to a hybrid organization for Blue Tin’s manufacturing and a community center. Half the building will be dedicated to creating a multi-purpose community center, including a small library, coworking spaces for organizers and youth after school, a media and technology space, and office space for mental health practitioners.

As part of Blue Tin’s work to reduce waste and minimize the garment industry’s carbon footprint, sustainability is a key aspect of the building’s design.

DEVELOPMENT By installing solar panels, they are aiming to generate enough energy to achieve net carbon emissions. Additionally, 63rd House plans to offer events space for political education and mutual aid work, as well as an exhibition and gallery space to feature art from incarcerated people and local artists. After receiving an initial $250,000 grant, Blue Tin is currently fundraising a total of two million dollars to complete development.

“Oftentimes, factories are like basements or in [factories] off outside the city, so part of the violence of supply chains is that workers are invisibilized,” Katebi said. “We want to…center worker power. And in building that power and agency, we should be firmly rooted within community spaces and not hidden in back alleys.”

Blue Tin has been operating in Irving Park, but with many of Blue Tin’s members living in the South and West Sides, moving the production studio to Chicago Lawn was a natural fit according to Katebi. Part of the 63rd House approach has been centered around desiloing movements for social justice and liberation. Like how Blue Tin’s work operates at the intersection of fashion and labor rights, 63rd House is “an extension of that, but on a neighborhood scale,” Katebi said. By housing spaces for economic development alongside mental health and the arts, they hope to create a place for organizers to interact with one another and cultivate intersectional, systems-based movement work.

“We don’t want 63rd House to be just like a non-profit that’s providing services, but actually building agency and building power and building particularly the power of working-class workers,” Katebi said. “A lot of the mainstream types of

other types of organizing so that workers can build the political education, build the language, [and] build the sort of the ability to become advocates for themselves.”

Since the project’s beginnings, Blue Tin and Chicago Lawn community leaders have been in conversation about what the future of 63rd House can be.

Among their community partners are TGi Movement, Southwest Organizing Project, Good Kids Mad City Englewood, the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, and the Prison+Neighborhood Arts/ Education Project.

Community organizers have been essential towards shaping everything from the mission of the space to how it will function.

“Their input was the space. We would reach out to friends, and they would bring their friends, and we would just walk through the space and then have conversations, like ‘what do you imagine?’” Katebi said. “And then from there, it's just all through relationships and trust that that was already built, to be able to start bringing people into the space who lived right around the block and asking ‘what do you want to live across the street from?’”

Devonta Boston is the founder of TGi Movement, a community organization focused on youth and community development, and a member of the 63rd House advisory board. For Boston, the 63rd House development will help meet community needs and create opportunities in Chicago Lawn, which has seen years of disinvestment from the city.

“We’ll actually meet in the building and just visualize it, even though there’s nothing there. Just being in the space gives us the opportunity of what could

organizing today are very inaccessible to a lot of the people we call our community, I think that's also why it's really important for Blue Tin as a working-class, worker cooperative to be able to interact with

be there,“ Boston said. “On 63rd Street, there’s a ton of vacancies, so it's really filling the gap that’s needed—giving space and giving opportunities for people who usually wouldn't have them.”

“We should be firmly rooted within community spaces and not hidden in back alleys.”

Melanely Cortez is a youth coordinator with Southwest Organizing Project’s Teen Reach Program. She first got involved with the project last summer as part of the 63rd House advisory board. She talked about how many of the suggestions for 63rd House came from young people identifying problems in their neighborhood or what they imagined from the space.

“I think it’s important to hear the

always backlash. We have to build those connections with the community and get their input,” Boston said. “We’re also trying to get them involved in our community…and to give them a seat at the table during the process, which is a seat that they usually wouldn't have when people bring in something like this to a community.”

Blue Tin has raised $500,000 for the 63rd House development—a quarter of

PHOTO COURTESY OF BLUE TIN PRODUCTIONS

voices of the youth of the community because they’re the people of tomorrow, the heroes of tomorrow,” Cortez said.

“It's important to realize what their needs are…and give them opportunities as well so that they could thrive in the community.”

Fundraising for the project has come with its own challenges. Other than Blue Tin’s mortgage, 63rd House is committed to raising the funds through crowdsourcing or outside grants. Katebi emphasized how the 63rd House board comes to decisions about funding is largely a collective effort.

“We’ve been very open to accepting funding from everybody, as long as it has no strings attached,” Katebi said. “We really want this building to be financially stable and financially independent, without replicating power dynamics via financial dependency.”

Their timeline is more financially dependent, but taking their time has let them build deeper and extensive relationships with the community.

“A lot of times when people go into a community they’re not from, there's

the way to their goal. They are hoping to complete the project in 2023.

“My love would be for 63rd House and Blue Tin to be able to help lay the foundation of imagining and envisioning what we could actually start building for ourselves, rather than relying on a city and a state and a country that is not built for us and will never be for us,” Katebi said. “But instead, being able to build our power on our terms, and what that could look like and create that for ourselves.” Reema Saleh is a journalist and graduate student at University of Chicago studying public policy. She can be followed on Twitter at @reemasabrina. This is her first piece for the Weekly.

MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

LIT

Our thoughts in exchange for yours.

T

he Exchange is the Weekly’s poetry corner, where a poem or piece of writing is presented with a prompt. Readers are welcome to respond to the prompt with original poems, and pieces may be featured in the next issue of the Weekly.

THIS WEEK'S PROMPT: “HOW HAS THE VIOLENCE IN YOUR COMMUNITY AFFECTED YOU PERSONALLY AND WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO FIX IT?”

THIS COULD BE A POEM OR A STREAM-OFCONSCIOUSNESS PIECE. SUBMISSIONS COULD BE NEW OR FORMERLY WRITTEN PIECES. Submissions can be sent to bit.ly/ssw-exchange or via email to chima.ikoro@southsideweekly.com.

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

LIT

T

his segment of The Exchange features the work of incarcerated folks who wrote to us. This week's prompt is brought to you by Dixon Performing Arts whose motto is “Transformational Therapeutic Rehabilitation Through the Arts” and provides a creative outlet for incarcerated men at Dixon Correctional facility.

DELANDIS ADAMS, DIXON COUNTY CORRECTIONAL

VICTOR M. SERRANO, STATEVILLE CORRECTIONAL CENTER IN HIS LETTER, SERRANO WROTE “I THANK YOU FOR THE WORK YOU ARE DOING. AWARENESS BRINGS US TO KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.”

MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

ILLUSTRATION BY THUMY PHAN

BULLETIN Become the 11th Ward Alderperson Online, March 11. chicago.gov/ ward11application

Upon the conviction and resignation of former alderman Patrick Daley Thompson, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is inviting aspiring candidates to apply for the seat appointment. They must have lived in the ward for at least one year and demonstrated their commitment to service. Find the application form online, fill it out and email it to aldermanicvacancy@cityofchicago.org, along with your resume and cover letter

by March 11. The selected candidate will have the option to run in the 2023 elections. ( Jackie Serrato)

Guided Tour of Historic Former Wabash YMCA

Former Wabash YMCA, 3763 S Wabash Ave, Saturday, March 12, 10:30am– 11:30am. bit.ly/FormerWabash Every other Saturday, the Renaissance Collaborative is leading tours of the former Wabash YMCA, an historic center of Black social life. Built in 1911, in the heart of the Black Belt, it was the only Y in the city that admitted Black people for many years. In 1915, the

Association for the Study of Negro Life was founded here and went on to create a precursor to Black History Month. The tour uses archived newspaper articles and archival photos to tell the story of the building and the people who congregated there. (Adam Przybyl)

Adler Planetarium Free Days

Adler Planetarium, 1300 S Lake Shore Dr, Wednesday, March 16, 4:00pm–10:00pm.

Free. bit.ly/AdlerFreeDays The Adler reopened March 4 and is once again holding free days for Illinois residents on Wednesday evenings.

Whether going on a date or taking your family, your ticket will let you watch a simulation of the Chicago night sky without light pollution, learn fun facts about the solar system, and examine old telescopes and sundials. You'll have the option to pay to upgrade your ticket to include sky shows, half-hour movies in the dome theater about the moon and a mysterious ninth planet, among other topics. (Adam Przybyl)

EDUCATION LSC 301

Virtual, Wednesday, March 16, 6:30pm– 8:00pm. Free. bit.ly/LSC301RYH2 Hosted by Illinois Raise Your Hand, LSC 301 is a Local School Council

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 10, 2022

election support workshop, which will provide resources and strategies for LSC candidates for winning the 2022 election. They will discuss tips to engage with your school community, what to expect during the election process, and strategies to mobilize voters to win your seat. Register at bit.ly/LSC301RYH2.

(Maddie Parrish)

FOOD & LAND Spring Flower Show: Knock Knock

Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 N Central Park Ave,Through Sunday, May 8, 10:00am–5:00pm. Free, reservations recommended. garfieldconservatory.org/ visit/ Spring is just around the corner, but if you want to take a sneak peek, go see the playful spring flower arrangements at the Garfield Park Conservatory. There are tulips, hydrangeas, daffodils, and more, along with 'knock knock' jokes and colorful art-doors. While you're there, check out the cacti in the desert house and waterfalls in the fern room, which looks like a time capsule of when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. If you go on a Saturday morning, you may run into a master gardener who can answer questions and give tips about planting your spring garden! Reserve spot online to guarantee entry. (Adam Przybyl)

61st St. Farmers Market

Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave., Saturday, March 12, 9:00am–12:00pm. Free to attend. experimentalstation.org/market As winter comes to an end, get a headstart on finding farm-fresh vegetables, seedlings, and other products from local farmers and creators. The 61st St. Farmers Market is continuing a monthly hybrid indoor-outdoor market at the Experimental Station.

Vendors include Ellis Family Farms, Mick Klug Farm, Gorman Farm Fresh Produce, Faith's Farm, Mint Creek Farm, Stamper Cheese, The Urban Canopy, and others. As ever, the market accepts LINK and Senior Farmers Market Coupons, and will match LINK purchases up to $25 per customer per market day, as long as funding holds out.

Customers must wear masks while inside the building. Look for one more hybrid market on April 9 before they go fully outdoor on May 14. (Martha Bayne)

ARTS Pilsen Vendor Market

Pilsen Art House , 1756 W. 19th St. Sundays through March 27, 12:00pm– 5:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3m9yMID This family-friendly weekly market

CALENDAR invites artists and vendors to sell their wares such as candles, jewelry, woodwork, apparel, handmade goods, and more. There are both indoor and outdoor spaces, and masks are required throughout the event. (Alma Campos)

who recently graduated from SAIC. The exhibit coincides with Women's History Month and runs until April 8. (Adam Przybyl)

Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott

Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St, Sunday, March 13, 7:30pm. $20. bit.ly/3KhC4CR

Chicago Culural Center, Exhibit Hall, Fourth Floor, 78 E. Washington St., Through Sunday, May 29, Free. chicago. gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/colescott. html A comprehensive retrospective exhibit of the work of Robert Colescott, a Black twentieth-century artist and satirist who took aim at race, class, and gender in America, will be on display through May 29. ( Jim Daley)

Young Chicago Authors Wordplay Open Mic

Instagram Live, Every Tuesday, 6:00pm–7:30pm. Free. instagram.com/ youngchicagoauthors One of the longest-running youth open mics, Worldplay, is back every Tuesday on Instagram Live. The virtual open mic is hosted by DJ Ca$hera and showcases music, spoken-word performances, and a featured artist. (Chima Ikoro)

Eruption At The Seafloor's Opening Reception at Silver Room The Silver Room, 1506 E. 53rd St, Saturday, March 12, 6:00pm–8:00pm.

Free, register online. bit.ly/EruptionSeaFloor

Eruption At The Seafloor is a collection of screen prints, collages, and paintings that "expresses a dormancy that's resurfaced through meditation [and] idleness" and "highlights the cracking of our surfaces." The exhibit features Puerto Rican painter Amanda "Raspy" Rivera, South Side Chicago-raised Alexandria Valentine, whose archival and collage practices "explore themes of Black latent thought [and] ancestral landscapes," and Denver-raised artist Cortney Anderson

Everything is Terrible! Kidz Klub Tour

Everything is Terrible! is an art collective that edits together found footage from the 20th century into bizarre and hilarious collage films. They're on tour to promote Kidz Klub, featuring "forgotten DVD & VHS tapes aimed at yesterday's youth," including "skateboarding websurfers, rapping math equations, gigantic baby ducks," and more. There will also be a live show with life-size puppets, singing and dancing. Ages 17+.

Community Film Workshop's 50 Years of Chicago Women in Film Green Line Performing Arts Center, 329 E Garfield Boulevard, Friday, March 11, 7:00pm–9:00pm. Free, register online. bit.ly/CFWC50Years

The Washington Park Arts Incubator will host the final viewing and closing reception of artist Rose Blouin's exhibit To Washington Park, With Love. The exhibit features a series of photographs Blouin took in Washington Park during the summer of 1987 that "allow us to see a conversation unfolding, about the relationship between the community of Washington Park and the land itself."

She will be interviewed by Dr. Carol Adams, followed by a Q&A. Doors open at 3:00, and the event starts at 3:30.

(Adam Przybyl)

The Billboard: A Play About Abortion Book Launch

Haymarket House, 800 W. Buena Ave, Monday, March 14, 6:30pm–7:30pm. $0$5. bit.ly/BillboardAbortion Writer Natalie Moore's new book, The Billboard, is a play about a fictional

Black women's clinic in Englewood that fights with a local anti-abortion gadfly running for City Council via a series of provocative billboards. Along with a performance of the play, the event will feature Moore in conversation with director TaRon Patton. The event is inperson but will be livestreamed for those who can only attend virtually. Doors open at 6pm. (Adam Przybyl)

Latin Oldies Dance

Providence of God Church, 717 W. 18th St., Sunday, March 26, 7:00pm–12:00am. $20. bit.ly/LatinOldies After a hiatus due to COVID-19, Providence of God's popular fundraiser returns this year with the support of St. Procopius, the church it merged with.

Reminisce on the good old days on 18th Street with DJ Mike Hernández and his selection of "Latin Oldies." Buy tickets online. ( Jackie Serrato)

Scan to view the calendar online!

In honor of Women's History Month, Arts + Public Life presents an evening of films and discussion to celebrate 50 years of Chicago women in film. Films by alumni of the Community Film Workshop of Chicago will be shown, starting with the feature-length The G Force by Pamela Sherrod Anderson, about grandparents stepping in as full-time caregivers. There will also be five-minute shorts by Natalie Battles, Melanie Brezill, Devorah Crable, Susan Carlotta Ellis, and Safiya James. After the screening, CFWC director Margaret Caples will moderate a discussion.

(Adam Przybyl)

To Washington Park, With Love - Artist Talk + Closing Reception

Washington Park Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd, Saturday, March 19, 3:00pm–7:00pm. Free, register online. bit. ly/35N6xtt MARCH 10, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23