SSW 03.18.21

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.

Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor

Volume 8, Issue 8 Jacqueline Serrato Martha Bayne

Senior Editors Christian Belanger Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editors Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Literature Editor Davon Clark Contributing Editors Lucia Geng Matt Moore

Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Jocelyn Vega Tammy Xu Staff Writers AV Benford Kiran Misra Jade Yan

Data Editor

Jasmine Mithani

Director of Fact Checking: Charmaine Runes Fact Checkers: Matt Moore, Ebony Ellis, Maria Maynez, Hannah Faris, Kate Gallagher, Susan Chun, Yiwen Lu, Patsy Newitt, Anjulie Rao, Elizabeth Lindberg Visuals Editor Haley Tweedell Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Anna Mason Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Mell Montezuma, Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Davon Clark Web Editor Webmaster Managing Director

AV Benford Pat Sier Jason Schumer

The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover Illustration by Maggie O'Brien

IN CHICAGO Vaccine equity efforts After most vaccines were snagged by suburban residents just hours after the federally run United Center appointments went live, elected officials decided to set aside blocks of appointments specifically for Chicagoans.

Targeted Zip codes include 60608, 60619, 60620, 60624, 60644, 60649, 60651, 60652, and 60653. Eligible people can sign up online at events. juvare.com/chicago/ucpod. They must show that they live within the designated boundaries or their appointment will get cancelled. Chicago seniors can continue to register at the United Center by calling a multilingual call center at (312) 746-4835 Monday-Saturday 8:00am-8:00pm and Sunday 8:00am-4:00pm. Additionally, the city’s equity campaign, Protect Chicago Plus, is gradually expanding coverage in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, including Englewood, Gage Park, La Villita, Austin, Chatham, Auburn Gresham, North Lawndale, Chicago Lawn, Ashburn, Pilsen, and South Shore.

Jail resumes visits and courts reopen One year after Cook County Jail shut their doors to visitors in order to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the families and loved ones of incarcerated people who've received the vaccine were able to resume in-person visits on Sunday, March 14. Guests have to get their temperature checked and wear a face mask. The socially distanced visitations are taking place inside large tents outdoors, and video visitations will remain available for everyone. The Leighton Criminal Court Building on 26th and California is expected to reopen on March 22, according to Chief Judge Timothy Evans’ office.

Removing the use of “inmates” The Weekly’s in-house style guide describes the language and grammar rules that guide our reporting. The guide is a living document that we periodically update because language evolves and because conventional descriptions of oppressed and marginalized people are often rooted in exploitative origins or carry stigma that obscure or deny their humanity. In response to criticism from the leadership of the Northwestern University Prison Education Project, the Weekly will no longer use the word “inmate” to describe incarcerated people. A previous version of a story in this issue that was initially published online has been updated to reflect this change, and we will apply it to our reporting going forward. We welcome feedback and suggestions from our readers at editor@southsideweekly.com.

IN THIS ISSUE public meetings report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the March 18 issue olivia stovicek, city bureau documenters, south side weekly.......................................4 what’s it take to get a shot?

A day on the vaccination floor at Malcolm X College alma campos.................................................5 grocery store employees among essential workers lagging behind on vaccines

Chicago's grocery store workers are in one of the largest job sectors eligible for the vaccine in Phase 1b. charmaine runes.........................................8 frontline workers speak on their experiences with the covid-19 vaccine

A grocery store worker, a youth shelter manager, and a hospital physician reflect on the vaccine rollout yiwen lu......................................................11 everything felt like a punishment

First-person accounts of COVID-19 from Stateville Correctional Center madison muller and cheyanne m. daniels..................................14 a system beyond the individual

In Beyond the Usual Beating, author Andrew S. Baer tries to understand the role that individuals play in the carceral state. lucy ritzmann............................................17 the neighborhood is an image of the city

Part Five: Diverse Neighborhood kristin ostberg............................................20

Public Meetings Report ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the March 18 issue

BY OLIVIA STOVICEK FOR CITY BUREAU’S DOCUMENTERS & SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Feb. 18 A proposal for a $3.8 billion Bronzeville Lakefront development was approved by the Chicago Plan Commission, with affordable housing to make up twenty percent of the residential units to be built on the site of the former Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center. Public commenters asked developers to commit to including highquality jobs, particularly in hospitality.

Ridership declined fifty-eight percent from 2019 to 2020 on the CTA, Metra, Pace, and Pace ADA Paratransit. At a meeting of the Regional Transportation Authority Board which oversees those transit agencies, RTA officials noted that federal CARES Act funding provided a significant portion of the revenue that kept transit going through 2020. The board discussed how to distribute new COVID-19 relief dollars.

Feb. 26 Banks were conspicuously absent at a hearing on the gaping racial disparities in their mortgage lending in the City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estate.

Though Black Chicagoans who faced barriers to homeownership, representatives from nonprofits, and even members of Congress described the extent and impact of the problem, nine of ten invited financial institutions declined to participate. Possible solutions discussed included pressing banks to change practices or strengthening weak federal regulations to ensure banks lend in all neighborhoods.

Mar. 3 In the last week of February, fifty percent of COVID-19 vaccinations went to Black and Latinx Chicagoans. Dr. Allison Arwady reported to the City Council Committee on Health and Human Relations that new COVID-19 cases in the Latinx community, which has been disproportionately affected in the city, have improved, but COVID hospitalization numbers among Black Chicagoans remain high.

Licenses prioritizing marijuana dispensary applicants who met “social equity” standards have been delayed across the state amid conflict over how few applicants were found to qualify. Commissioner Deborah Sims asked at the Cook County Cannabis Commission meeting whether some licenses can be guaranteed to Black applicants, but no such measures can be enacted until a study—also delayed—officially confirms disparities and barriers to entry in the industry.

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

Mar. 4 A second round of $13 million in federally funded emergency grants will be available to students at City Colleges of Chicago experiencing economic hardship during the pandemic, according to the meeting of the CCC Board of Trustees’ Committee on Finance and Administrative Services.

Google Translate isn’t good enough for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago’s new website, Commissioner Marcelino Garcia said at the MWRD Board of Commissioners’ meeting. As the board approved calling for proposals for a $300,000 contract to update the website, executive director Brian Perkovich noted only that they’re looking at different technology options for translation.

Mar. 9 A push to start a birth center in the Stony Island neighborhood was the subject of a presentation at the Infant and Maternal Mortality Among African Americans Task Force’s Systems Subcommittee meeting, as it begins to develop action steps for its recommendations to improve Black maternal health. Despite the obstacles posed by current Illinois law, they hope to advocate for a legislative “tweak” and to open a birth center by the end of the year.

Mar. 10 The Taste of Chicago, the Air and Water Show, and the Chicago Blues Festival are among the events the City Council Committee on Special Events, Cultural Affairs and Recreation authorized the relevant department to execute this year.

Construction of the Chicago Park District’s new headquarters in Brighton Park is ready to move forward, with a $64.5 million contract for the project approved at the Park District Board’s meeting. Currently a vacant lot, the site will be converted to a park with athletic fields and a spray pool.

Early work for the new police and fire academy to be built in West Garfield Park has begun to move forward after the Public Building Commission of Chicago’s board approved an initial phase of construction last month. During the board’s Administrative Operations Committee meeting, about $190,000 was allocated for a feasibility study, site analysis, and concept design.

Mar. 11 The first meeting of a new City Council Subcommittee on Reparations included testimony from Kamm Howard, co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, and Evanston Alderman Robin Simmons, who testified that Evanston’s new reparations ordinance sets aside the first $10 million in marijuana sales taxes for efforts to redress harms to Black people by the city.

Forming deeper connections with Chicago’s LGBTQ+ and Asian American communities is an important goal for Nancy Andrade, new Commissioner of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, she said at the CCHR board meeting.

To read more or to see a list of upcoming meetings visit documenters.org

HEALTH

What’s It Take to Get a Shot?

A day on the vaccination floor at Malcolm X College

BY ALMA CAMPOS

W

ILLUSTRATION BY MELL MONTEZUMA

hen I arrived at Malcolm X College, the City Colleges of Chicago’s media relations director, Veronica Resa, let me in and a security guard instructed me to fill out the COVID questionnaire. I passed through the security turnstile and explained to different people that I wasn’t there to get the shot, but that I was with the media, reporting. About a dozen people waited for the elevator. Along with others, I took the stairs, as the wait for an elevator was long. They were all going to the fourth floor, where more than a dozen people waited in a hallway to enter the vaccination room.

The city is expecting Chicagoans to stay up to date on vaccine availability at the City Colleges mass vaccination sites, or “Points of Distribution” (PODs)— Daley, Arturo Velasquez Institute, Kennedy-King, Olive-Harvey, Truman, and Malcolm X—by checking the Vaccine Finder website (chicago.gov). As of press time, appointments at all PODs are completely booked.

In late January, the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) began recruiting and training staff from various city departments and sister agencies to become volunteers, including City Colleges faculty and staff during their regular working hours. Their tasks, which require no special medical licensing, include providing directions to the public, serving as social distancing or line monitors, and supporting registration and check-in tables during the six-tonine month vaccination campaign.

Inside a room normally used as a classroom, people sat on tables waiting for their turn. Student nurses and administrators stood around and talked amongst themselves. At that MARCH 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

HEALTH

PHOTO BY ALMA CAMPOS

moment, one of the nursing students was administering a shot of the Pfizer vaccine in Thessolonians “Tess” Bradford’s right arm. I sat near her as she told me this was her second shot of the COVID-19 vaccine.

We sat in front of each other between plastic glass, our face masks on. “I feel a sense of hope and relief,” Bradford said.

Even though I was not getting a shot, I too felt the thrill of anticipation.

Bradford said her daughter, Khalilah, had woken up crying one night out of frustration because every time she called the COVID-19 infoline, she’d get cut off or put on hold. Bradford said she had also called the hotline herself and had the same problem. After going through that a few more times, she said she gave up.

“I threw away the number. [Had] you had more phone lines, or specific places [to go to]—but calling one central place?” she asked rhetorically. This was mid-December of 2020.

Bradford, who’s seventy, says she doesn’t like using Facebook, but in this case it helped. Her daughter posted asking where her mother could get vaccinated.

The post led her mother to Loretto Hospital, which has been rolling out vaccine distribution at various community centers and colleges, including Malcolm X, one of the city’s mass vaccination sites.

A few months later, Khalilah drove her mother, who lives in Richton Park about forty miles north of Malcolm X, to get her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. But her daughter doesn't recall

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

where exactly she signed up. “This was in the midst of the madness and confusion,” said Bradford.

Andrew Buchanan, director of public affairs at the CDPH said those appointments were by “invite only.”

Later the CDHP’s media team said that currently those eligible for a vaccine at city PODs are phase 1a healthcare workers and residents eligible in phase 1b. Vaccinations at these PODs are by appointment only, and can be scheduled via an invitation sent from an employer.

At the beginning of February, the city announced a partnership with the online portal ZocDoc which provides additional real-time appointment availability from select POD sites, which include the City Colleges as well as from

“Bradford said her daughter, Khalilah, had woken up crying one night out of frustration because every time she called the COVID-19 infoline, she’d get cut off or put on hold.” local care organizations such as AMITA Health, Erie Family Health, Innovative Express Care, and Rush University Medical Center.

Earlier that day, a driver had transported those Pfizer doses to Malcolm X from a city-run site. While in the vehicle, the vaccines were kept inside Green Box technology, according to Erica Duncan, a spokesperson from the Chicago Department of Public Health.

Green Box technology is designed to hold vaccines at a very tight range of temperatures. The boxes are constantly data-logged and GPS-tracked, and are able to maintain a fixed temperature for up to seventy-two hours.

According to David Sanders, the president of Malcolm X, between 300

HEALTH

and 350 vaccines are administered every Friday, the day the center is open for people who qualify for vaccines in Phase 1a (healthcare personnel) and Phase 1b (persons aged sixty-five years and older, and frontline essential workers outside of the healthcare field). He says no vaccines have gone to waste since they started the program on December 28, 2020.

But Bradford, a retired CPS teacher, said she had some initial concerns about the vaccine. “Is this the real deal?” she asked. “Are we gonna get the same thing that white people get?”

“It's always worse for us,” she said, adding that this lack of trust stems from centuries of racism and brutality against Black people: “We didn’t volunteer to come here, we were forced to work, we were forced to breed children, we were not allowed to get an education, and never allowed to use our own language.

And when Black people were dying, in such great numbers….”

But she said that after her doctor got the shot, she went ahead and did it too.

“He seemed okay. I put together all the information that I could and said, I want to live, and right now, this is it.”

Despite the frustration she experienced searching for a place to get her vaccine, overall, Bradford was happy with the way things worked out at Malcolm X. She said even the president was helpful. “He was checking up on people. Everyone there I saw did a great job.”

For his part, Sanders was particularly worried about Malcom X’s nursing students, who have had problems getting clinical seats at various hospitals in the city. Clinicals are part of a student's nursing training that gives them handson experience in different specialty areas.

In order to accept the students, Sanders said, hospitals wanted to make sure that nursing students had been vaccinated.

“They were saying ‘we are all vaccinated, and you are not,’” he said. So, Malcolm X allowed nursing students, not previously eligible, to also get the vaccine as part of phase 1a. “We are a community college.

We’ve recognized that we have to hit it on both sides of the equation.”

Bukky Fajinmi, forty-four, is one of

these nursing students. It was difficult to talk with her because she was running around every time I approached her, but we were able to speak for five minutes.

She is in her second semester doing her clinical hours as a volunteer vaccine administrator at Malcolm X. She said she feels good about it. “The sooner we go about doing this, the sooner we will get back to normal.”

Fajinmi said that every Friday for four weeks, since Malcom X opened its doors as a mass vaccination site, she has administered thirty to thirty-five shots herself. She said her volunteer work is longer than her clinicals. Normally she’d be finished by noon, but it was around 12:30pm when I pulled her for a quick interview. At times, she said, the nursing students are there until 3:00pm. Fajinmi said this has helped her in getting to know the community better. “As a nursing student, there is always that first time you have to speak with a patient, so doing it every week has made it easier.”

Dr. Daniel Okhilua, who students refer to as “Dr. O,” teaches “The Fundamentals of Nursing” at Malcolm X, which is the very first class nursing students have to take. He also helps facilitate students’ clinical hours there.

When nursing students come to the classroom in the morning, Okhilua gives them an orientation, and briefs them on the do’s and don'ts of the vaccine program.

He also helps with crowd control and instructs nursing students on how to administer the vaccines, something he said students already have learned by reading, watching videos, and practicing on mannequins. “I am here to make sure everything is done right,” he said.

Okhilua also facilitates the required fifteen-minute observation period for people who have received the shot, where he watches patients for adverse effects.

According to Okhilua, no one has had any problems.

There is also a followup process, he explained. People who have gotten their shot receive weekly text messages with questions about any adverse effects that may arise. Okhilua likes the idea of his students doing the clinicals at Malcolm X and being able to get practical

knowledge. “Clinicals consist of reading, practice, then putting that into action.

And practice is what builds confidence.”

The city has stated during press conferences and communications that people who are eligible can make appointments by visiting the Chicago Department of Public Health website.

According to the website, those eligible could find appointments through their healthcare provider, a pharmacy or employer. But back in December, when Bradford was looking for appointments,there was no citywide registry to sign up to get the vaccine.

Thanks to her daughter, Bradford has been able to get her vaccinations.

But she thinks mass vaccination sites— particularly the site at the United Center, which opened Tuesday, March 8—may be challenging for older adults to access.

“Most people who are sixty-five and older need help getting around.” She thinks sites such as drugstores and park districts would have been better when the city initially was rolling out the vaccine.

“Whoever was in charge, probably thought, let’s just get a big area, because we have lots of people,” she speculated.

“It would have been better if you started smaller.”

Those appointments are currently available for people in nine ZIP Codes that have been hardest hit by the virus, and are predominantly in Black and brown communities: 60649, 60608, 60652, 60620, 60619, 60624, 60644, 60651, and 60653. The site remains open for Illinois

seniors, as well as Chicago residents who qualify under Phase 1b. According to the city, appointments can be made at the COVID-19 Help Line at (312) 7464835. An online registration platform and voucher code is being shared with people in eligible communities. Additionally, on February 25, Illinois entered into Phase 1b-plus, expanding vaccine eligibility to include people with certain underlying health conditions.

After finishing her clinicals at Malcolm X, Fajinmi, the nursing student, traveled twelve miles north to Norwood Life Society, where she cares for older adults as a certified nurse assistant.

Bradford and Khalilah left for Richton Park. More people entered the building, signed in at the security table, answered the COVID-19 questionnaire, sanitized their hands, and headed to the fourth floor. Roughly 300 people got a Pfizer vaccine that Friday. Later that same morning, the Illinois Department of Public Health announced 2,441 new cases of COVID-19 and fifty-five deaths in Illinois. Alma Campos is a bilingual reporter based in McKinley Park. Her writing has appeared in Univision Chicago, WTTW, and Crain’s and focuses on immigrant and working-class communities of color in the South and West Sides. She last wrote for the Weekly about the fight against General Iron and Mercy Hospital.

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LABOR

Grocery Store Employees Among Essential Workers Lagging Behind on Vaccines

Grocery store workers are in one of the largest sectors eligible for the vaccine in phase 1b.

BY CHARMAINE RUNES

ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE O'BRIEN

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

O

ur analysis demonstrates that many ZIP codes on the South Side still have relatively low vaccination rates for first doses, even though a disproportionately large percentage of their residents are essential workers eligible for the vaccine, according to the most recent data on where Chicago’s workforce resides.

The current vaccination phase, 1b, expanded vaccine eligibility from exclusively healthcare workers and staff in long-term care facilities to broader swaths of frontline essential workers.

City officials define essential workers as correctional workers and first responders; grocery store workers and workers in manufacturing settings where outbreaks have occurred; daycare, K-12, and early education workers; public transit; other manufacturing and agriculture workers; government and postal workers; and caregivers of medically fragile children or adults.

Chicago’s three largest industry groups are education, healthcare, and social assistance; professional, scientific, administrative, and management; and arts, entertainment, accommodation, and food. The first phase of vaccination covered healthcare workers and caregivers, while the current phase includes teachers and many food-related jobs.

Yet, it’s worth noting that restaurant workers and other frontline employees in the food sector are in phase 1c of the rollout and are not yet eligible for the vaccine, despite restaurants and bars currently being permitted to operate at fifty percent capacity.

Therefore, we became interested in mapping Chicago's grocery store workers since they are in one of the largest sectors eligible for the vaccine in 1b and—by our calculations—tend to live on the South and West Sides.

But it wasn’t so straightforward.

The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) published maps showing where many essential workers live, but did not include one for grocery store workers, whose direct contact with customers likely heightens their risk for

COVID-19, studies show.

CDPH estimates that there are 17,000 residents across the city who work in grocery stores or in food-related workplaces, though it is not clear how they calculated that number. That’s why we ran the numbers to see where the largest concentrations of Chicago’s grocery store workers live and what percentage of their neighborhoods have been vaccinated.

On the same day that Phase 1b began—and that South Side Weekly launched its vaccine Twitter bot revealing that South and West Side communities were being left behind—the City also launched Protect Chicago Plus, a campaign to increase vaccine distribution equity by targeting fifteen community areas that have been hit hardest by the pandemic.

The heart of the city’s equity strategy is a “vulnerability score” that the CDPH developed to decide which community areas to target for increased vaccine distribution. The formula is based on multiple components related to sociodemographic risk (e.g., percent of individuals living with a disability or experiencing poverty), epidemiological risk (e.g., percent of the population over 65 years old or who have diabetes), and occupational risk (e.g. percent of the population employed as essential workers).

The U.S. Census Bureau collects occupation data that describe what workers do at their primary job. There are 569 specific occupational codes that are broadly categorized into 23 major groups. Separately, the federal government uses the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) to classify the kind of business conducted by an employer.

If a grocery store worker, for example, was mainly a cashier or a first-line supervisor, their occupation code would fall under "sales and related occupations.''

If they worked in a bakery within a grocery store, their work would likely be categorized by the Census Bureau under the service occupations umbrella as "food preparation and serving." A grocery store worker would be listed under the broadest NAICS industry category of "retail trade," as would a supervisor at

a clothing store or an accountant for an electronics store.

According to a January 25 report on the COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index (CCVI), CDPH used Census Bureau data on occupation— but not industry—to determine what percent of a community area worked as essential workers. The report's list of essential workers aligns closely to CDPH's definitions, except for grocery store workers, who are defined as "[b] aggers, cashiers, stockers, pick-up, customer service, those working in feeding or at food pantries" on CDPH's website. But the CCVI report categorizes grocery workers under "material moving" occupations, along with examples such as "laborers" and "freight" workers.

In our analysis, we used American Community Survey (ACS) data to estimate where grocery workers might live—but as opposed to the city’s health officials, we looked at <i>both<i/> industry and occupation.

We used codes for workers whose work is labeled "sales and office occupations" within the "retail trade" industry. This not only includes grocery cashiers, but also workers like salespeople in clothing stores and customer service representatives in electronics stores.

Nearly nine percent of Chicago's civilian employed population—over 114,900 people —work in retail.

MARCH 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

LABOR Workers in retail sales jobs are most concentrated along the West and South Sides of the city. The three ZIP Codes with the highest shares of these kinds of workers are 60633, 60652, and 60636.

They include the Englewood, South Deering, and Ashburn community areas.

Englewood and South Deering are high-priority areas for vaccine equity, according to the CCVI report, but their ZIP Codes remain on the lower end of the vaccination data. The city’s newest mass vaccination site, the United Center, is prioritizing nine ZIP Codes on the

West and South Sides, and five of them—60619, 60620, 60624, 60644, and 60652—have disproportionately high shares of sales workers in retail.

More broadly, West Side ZIP Codes have seen steady increases in the percentage of residents with at least the first dose of the vaccine since Phase launched; but many South Side communities have not.

We looked at residents who have received at least their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine instead of those who have had both (i.e., are "fully"

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

vaccinated) because of how vaccine doses are staggered; we didn't want our maps to lag behind current vaccination efforts.

Still, we found that several South Side ZIP Codes that encompass or contain Protect Chicago Plus community areas are still reporting less than fifteen percent vaccinated with their first dose.

According to the Weekly’s COVID-19 tracker, neighborhoods like South Shore, West Englewood, and Back of the Yards have some of the highest rates of COVID-19 deaths per capita in the city.

As of publication, Chicago has

vaccinated nearly 393,000 residents— almost fourteen percent of the population—with at least a first dose.

About ten percent are fully vaccinated. As the city continues to roll out its vaccination strategy, it will be critical to ask at every phase who is still being left behind. Charmaine Runes is a graduate student at the University of Chicago’s Computational Analysis and Public Policy program. She last wrote about the city’s annual count of people experiencing homelessness.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ISABELLA SCOTT

Frontline Workers Speak on Their Experiences with the COVID-19 Vaccine

A grocery store worker, a youth shelter manager, and a hospital physician reflect on the vaccine rollout

BY YIWEN LU

W

hen grocery store worker Julian Hendrix first approached Howard Brown Health Center in Hyde Park for vaccine appointments, the response was, “don’t call us, we will call you.”

Started as a volunteer-run organization, Howard Brown Health’s primary care was built with the mission to eliminate the disparities in healthcare experienced by LGBT groups in Chicago, and has been a valuable resource for people like Hendrix in the neighborhood.

“The reality is, Howard Brown is an under-resourced clinic serving the general public, and even routine care can be difficult to get, never mind urgent care,” Hendrix said. “Seeking medical care if you are working class is a hassle.”

Since the pandemic started, Howard

Brown has expanded its COVIDrelated services, including testing and vaccinations. However, the supply has struggled to keep up with the demand.

When no doses are available for eligible patients who schedule appointments with the clinic, staff contacts these individuals when they receive the supply from the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), according to Chief Operating Officer Ken Griffin.

“We placed requests from CDPH of how much we are requesting, and then CDPH gives us a confirmation of how much we received, which is almost never the amount that we requested,” said Griffin.

Luckily, through his employer Open Produce, an independently owned grocery store, Hendrix was able to

receive detailed instructions for vaccine appointments at Walgreens. However, after receiving the first dose, he found out that his appointment for the second dose had not been booked.

Hendrix pointed out that for those without access to primary care as a result of not having healthcare insurance, getting the information about routine care was already hard enough.

Unable to find available appointments online, he ended up calling the Walgreens pharmacy where he received his first dose.

“For forty minutes, I literally just plugged in my phone, and I was doing paperwork, so fortunately I could sit on hold for forty minutes,” Hendrix reflected on the time spent on getting an appointment.

He was able to get into the wait list and eventually received his second

dose. But the experiences of making multiple phone calls and spending time on appointments with no guarantee have created barriers for many eligible Chicagoans like him.

In the sixty-five thousand-member Facebook Group “Chicago Vaccine Hunters”, numerous posts have risen over complaints about Walgreens’ scheduling issues and the lack of transparency in vaccine availability. For example, the availability of second doses had affected the appointment for first doses. But after young people brought the problem to Walgreens on social media when they attempted to make appointments for their parents older than sixty-five, the only response they received was a request for them to continue checking their app or website.

MARCH 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

LABOR JULIAN HENDRIX, ILLUSTRATED BY ISABELLA SCOTT

Now, Walgreens receives vaccinations from the Federal Retail Partnership Program, in addition to doses from the city and the state. However, there was no information from elected or health officials or Walgreens regarding how vaccines outside of the federal program are allocated.

To essential workers, getting the vaccine itself is not the end of the story.

At a small grocery store such as where Hendrix works, conversations over side effects have taken place. “We need to see if we can stagger appointments,” said Hendrix, “so that we don’t have a bunch of people out sick because of side effects.”

For both doses, Hendrix experienced flu-like symptoms for a few days; among his co-workers, three out of four who received the doses on the same day called in sick immediately the next day.

At Open Produce, workers were able to take sick leave thanks to the support from owner Steven Lucy. “I told everyone ‘get an appointment, if your appointment’s during a shift, we'll cover it’,” Lucy told the Weekly. “As disruptive as it might be for one person to be out sick one day, the real danger from a business continuity perspective is someone getting COVID and then everyone else potentially being exposed.”

For a store that focused on serving the surrounding South Side neighborhood, Lucy believed that ensuring the staff ’s safety is equal to ensuring a community’s food access.

But chain grocery stores and familyowned businesses don’t all offer the same flexibility to their employees. At larger workplaces, advocates across the nation are still calling for employers to allow for paid sick leave as an incentive for them to get vaccinated. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to say, ‘I am not so sure [if ] I want the vaccine,’” Hendrix explained. “People who have work, people who have childcare responsibilities, especially with children who are not in school, don’t have forty-eight hours to just lie when I was able to lie in bed for two days...the vaccine itself creates barriers to their willingness to get it.”

Hendrix also said that he was having back pains as a result of lying in bed for vaccine side effects. To him, getting

“I am an American worker. Yeah, I hurt, but I hurt whether I am working or not working, so I might as well go to work because I only have so much paid time off.” vaccinated is voluntarily putting oneself through an uncomfortable period. “I am an American worker. Yeah, I hurt, but I hurt whether I am working or not working, so I might as well go to work because I only have so much paid time off,” he said.

“We are trained to not seek care unless it’s really important,” he continued. “When the medical system suddenly comes to you and be like ‘oh, this [vaccine] is really important, you should do it’, well, how good do you know about it? How good is the quality?

Is this actually going to work?”

“Especially in the context of the essential worker conversation, [they say] ‘we want to do this for you, because we need you as productive laborers,” he said. “Yeah, because you exploited us, we are compelled to work, and you are not providing us with the resources that we need to not work.”

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

B

eyond vaccine availability and side effects, people in Black and brown communities in Chicago’s South Side may have long-term distrust of the healthcare system.

On February 19, the vaccination team at Heartland Alliance, the citycontracted healthcare provider at homeless shelters, arrived at the Ujima Village Homeless Youth Shelter in Englewood, the only homeless shelter for youth between eighteen to twentyfour in Chicago’s South Side. None of the youths staying in the shelter then wanted to get vaccinated. Only a third of the staff, including manager of facilities and resources, Anne Holcomb, ended up getting the first dose.

“It’s not just a problem of access,” Holcomb told the Weekly, “it’s as much a part of historical trauma as it is access.”

Ujima Village was opened in 2013 as the third low-threshold youth shelter,

which has fewer rules for admission than a regular high-threshold shelter, and thus is easier for high-risk youth who have suffered severe trauma to get in.

Until 2011, homeless youth were not included in Chicago’s Plan to End Homelessness, which means that they were not counted in the official homeless number of the city. That meant there were no beds nor city-funded shelters for these populations, leaving them with no choice but to stay with friends or relatives or spend the night in train stations. Today, almost all youth at Ujima Village are African-American, and so are all of Holcomb’s staff, she said. Holcomb herself has African-American and Native American heritage.

“The youth get up and walk away after two seconds,” Holcomb said about Zoom informational sessions about the vaccine. “They are not interested in some white talking head wearing a white coat, telling them this clinical stuff about how the vaccination works. That is not going to do anything about their fears or their resistance, or even their feelings of being invincible, because they are young, and they are tough street kids.”

The Weekly’s open-source Twitter bot showed that predominantly Black and Latinx ZIP codes, while experiencing the highest fatality rate during the pandemic, continued to be the lowest complete vaccinated areas in Chicago. IDPH data showed that, as of March 15, sixtynine percent of the statewide vaccinated population are white, compared to eight percent Black.

Former President Donald Trump’s administration rhetoric of “Operation Warp Speed”, which designated a national vaccine rollout program at an accelerated speed and mass quantity, spurred skeptics and fears on top of existing distrust of government institutions. “People are very wary of the speed that this came to the market,” said Holcomb, “the language and the marketing of that whole thing sent alarm bells, and exacerbated the historical trauma they already had, and their cultural reluctance and wariness of the medical industry.”

Holcomb was in elementary school when Rubella (German Measles) vaccines rolled out, and she received the

LABOR vaccine during its final stage of clinical trial. One year later, she got German Measles, and so did almost everyone in her school. Looking at the COVID-19 vaccine today, she expressed concerns over a vaccine that had taken less than a year to come about, in addition to the discomfort she faced when approaching the medical system as a person of color.

Even when homeless shelters are listed as one of the eligible groups during Phase 1b in Chicago, the treatment that homeless youth experienced had long lasting impacts. To Holcomb, Ujima Village was located “in a desert of every kind”: a place with few grocery stores, social services, job opportunities, and city services. During the snowstorm in early February, the residents in the surrounding areas of the youth shelter and the youth themselves had to dig out the street from snow, because the snow plows never came to the area, and 2021 was not a unique experience.

“If you are a person living in poverty, whether homeless or not, and you don’t have a bus card, how are you going to get to the clinic? How are you even going to get to Walgreens?” Holcomb asked. “It’s not just an issue of medicine, it’s an issue of we have some third world countries in the middle of our country.”

For long, low-income communities of color have been lost in the equation of the healthcare system. “When you are used to living in that situation, that’s what you expect, and you don’t trust anything that’s different, either. It’s like ‘oh, they are gonna come and bring us a vaccine when they don’t plow our streets, they don’t do anything about the jobs, they don’t do anything about our social services?’... it might not be the most trustworthy.”

W

hen asked about what healthcare workers can do about the disparity in vaccine access within communities of color, Ameera Haamid, a physician and frontline worker at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, told the Weekly, “when we are relying so heavily on virtual platforms to register people, we end up missing the most marginalized in society, so we need a better way to get these vaccines into

ANNE HOLCOMB, ILLUSTRATED BY ISABELLA SCOTT AMEERA HAAMID, ILLUSTRATED BY ISABELLA SCOTT

the community physically or with oneon-one visits, or putting mobile stations within communities that we can use so that the community doesn’t have to fight through another barrier to get to us.”

Haamid received her first dose of vaccination at John H. Stroger Hospital in December and second dose in January.

Currently, the hospital is administering vaccinations to eligible community members during Phase 1b through the Emergency Department. According to Haamid, when making appointments, some patients are able to receive same-day vaccines, and others have to wait. Haamid encouraged community members to contact their primary care provider or call the hotline for appointments.

As vaccines were distributed in the city, Haamid said healthcare facilities saw patient volume gradually returning back to pre-COVID times. But healthcare providers such as Haamid admitted that a large part of the population are still scared or doubtful of the vaccination.

“We’ve got to listen to the community and also let people of color have a seat at the table and actually lead the charge of vaccinating people within their community, because no one understands what the community needs other than another member that’s from the same group,” she said.

Holcomb, looking at a broad, prolonged history between the marginalized group and the healthcare system, emphasized the urgent needs of change in how healthcare providers approach their target communities. “[They need to] engage with them on a level that not only is clinical and talks about the facts, but also gets down deep and deals with the historical trauma and the fears, which are not [based on] facts.

Those are emotional.”

“If the public health really wants to vaccinate people who have been left out in the cold throughout American history, as far as healthcare is concerned, they are gonna have to learn to do business a little bit differently.” Yiwen Lu is a reporter for the Weekly who primarily covers politics. She last wrote about downgrades at Provident Hospital.

MARCH 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: ABDUL MALIK MUHAMMAD, BERNARD MCKINLEY, AND LESHUN SMITH. ILLUSTRATIONS BY SHANE TOLENTINO

Everything Felt Like a Punishment

First-person accounts of COVID-19 from Stateville Correctional Center

BY MADISON MULLER AND CHEYANNE M. DANIELS

R

obert Cloutier, fifty-seven, has spent more than half of his life at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois. Incarcerated for nearly forty years, Cloutier has one of the more dangerous prison jobs during the pandemic: disposing of the prison’s biohazard waste. Since the onset of COVID-19 last March, this has meant collecting the facility’s used personal protective equipment (PPE).

At the start of the pandemic, Cloutier said he would fill several bags with discarded PPE such as gloves or facemasks. These days, he can make five stops around the prison and only pick up one or two gloves, and maybe a single mask. “Whatever they are doing with biohazard waste—it ain’t in marked containers," Cloutier said. Everything he

gathers goes into a room where used PPE has been amassing since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

On March 24, 2020, the Illinois Department of Corrections reported its first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in three facilities: Stateville Correctional Center, Sheridan Correctional Center and North Lawndale Adult Transition Center. It wasn’t long before the coronavirus spread, killing nearly 100 people incarcerated in Illinois correctional facilities.

The Weekly sent incarcerated students in Northwestern University's Prison Education Program at Stateville questions about their experiences during the pandemic and feelings about the vaccinations. Thirteen wrote back.

All knew at least one person who had

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

contracted the virus. Four who responded said they tested positive for COVID-19; four others experienced symptoms but were not tested at the time.

“I have seen people I laughed with behind these walls die within the last year because of this virus,” wrote thirty-fiveyear-old Benard McKinley.

Incarcerated individuals are five and one-half times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 and three times more likely to die from it than the general public, according to the University of Chicago Law Review Online. Among the 1,091 incarcerated at Stateville, 303 have tested positive for coronavirus and at least thirteen have died.

In an effort to mitigate prison infection rates, Gov. J.B. Pritzker began granting clemencies in March 2020.

In January 2021, Pritzker announced corrections workers and incarcerated individuals would be included along with residents over sixty-five, first responders and education workers in Phase 1b of the state’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan, which began on January 25. The Illinois Department of Corrections began vaccinating prisoners in mid-February.

Despite receiving educational materials about the vaccine, distrust of prison officials and strained relationships with prison medical services complicate some the thirteen students’ feelings about getting vaccinated against COVID-19.

But while they are not entirely enthusiastic about the vaccine, they fear the alternative is worse.

“For me it’s not a matter of trust per say,” William La’Roy Peeples Jr., fifty-

JUSTICE

“Long before the pandemic, medical treatment[s] in prison were way less than subpar. Even after exposure they continue letting us fall by the wayside because we’re convicted criminals.

They believe that our conviction nullifies our rights as U.S. citizens.” six, wrote in his response. “It is about me feeling safer taking it, than trapped behind steel and concrete with the virus running rampant and having zero protection from it.”

Cloutier said that until recently those who were showing symptoms were sent to an area of the prison known as F-House. That’s a problem, he said, because F-House was also where Stateville’s kitchen workers, who prepare food for the entire institution, were incarcerated. It had been closed in 2016 because of health and safety concerns—none of which were rectified, according to the watchdog group John Howard Association of Illinois—but was reopened last May as a COVID-19 isolation unit.

"Initially they gave us disinfectant and bleach every day,” said Peeples. “But they soon stopped doing it, or when they did it was so diluted it had no real effect."

Most troubling for some of the thirteen Stateville students is the risk prison staff pose. According to them, staff were not required to get tested for COVID-19 until January. And now, some are refusing to get vaccinated.

“I asked a female correctional officer today was she gonna take the vaccine if offered,” wrote McKinley. “She replied she had already turned it down.”

Stateville Correctional Center and IDOC did not respond to repeated requests for additional comment or information.

FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: ANTHONY TRIPLETT, PIERRE JAMES, AND QUAYSHAUN BAILEY ILLUSTRATIONS BY SHANE TOLENTINO

“By not adhering to their own rules proves my life is not their priority,” said forty-year-old LeShun Smith, “the staff brought the virus in.”

A recent study found that once COVID-19 enters an ICE detention facility, it can infect between seventytwo and ninety-nine percent of detainees within three months. While Illinois prisons may not be as crowded as detention facilities, the epidemiological risk factors faced by people incarcerated by the state are still staggering. IDOC reported a statewide prison population of more than 29,000 as of December 31, 2020. More than half of those incarcerated in Illinois are Black; racism has created additional systemic barriers to healthcare access and placed higher disease burdens on Black Americans, making them more susceptible to contracting, and dying, from the virus.

“Long before the pandemic, medical treatment[s] in prison were way less than subpar,” Smith said. “Even after exposure they continue letting us fall by the wayside because we’re convicted criminals. They believe that our conviction nullifies our rights as U.S. citizens.”

While prisons are required to provide medical care to incarcerated people, it is commonly inadequate and has at times resulted in death. The problem is compounded by the fact that forty percent of incarcerated people have chronic health conditions.

Travis Dortch, fifty-three, who has MARCH 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

JUSTICE

Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, said he gets his medicine late, sometimes going weeks without it. “I would complain— but my will and spirit is broken to just have the little I have,” he said.

Many prisons require requests to go to a medical unit be made in writing, which prison officials can take up to five days to respond to, according to the Prison Fellowship. Time is something those infected with COVID-19 do not have.

Broderick Hollins Sr., forty, was hospitalized for COVID in May before being moved to Stateville’s medical unit for twenty-seven days. He remains on medication as he recovers but said he still fears for his life.

Hollins wrote that nurses are among the only Stateville prison employees who enforce mask-wearing and that when individuals held there are tested for coronavirus, the nasal swabbing often is not done properly. But he remains hopeful that he will make it to his June 2022 parole date healthy, even though he believes prison officials consider those held at Stateville to be “just money, not humans with loved ones.”

“No I don’t trust the vaccine. A lot of people of color haven’t forgot the Tuskegee Experiment in 1930-40 and the Eugenics Program of 1960-70.”

While so many struggled to adjust to the realities of life during the pandemic, for incarcerated Americans these realities were exacerbated by an uncompromising penal system. Visitation with loved ones was suspended, according to Stateville’s website, access to technology was further limited and movement was almost nonexistent.

“For months and months, the facility didn’t prioritize my health and wellbeing,” Lynn Green, forty, wrote.

“The facility functioned more like a disciplinary lockdown, than a quarantine.

We were handcuffed everywhere we went and patted down by staff with the same gloves as they searched us.”

Isolation and inaccessibility to the few privileges usually afforded to those at Stateville are, for many of the thirteen students, the most unbearable aspects of the pandemic. And although mental health counselors hold weekly check-ins, Dortch said it’s hard to open up to them.

“How can you tell someone who you know does not care if you live or die, about your mental problems,” Dortch wrote. He said efforts to distract himself are futile as he worries about the toll COVID-19 has on his loved ones. His mother has been hospitalized four times during this unprecedented time. “I have become numb to the death of people daily— thinking I could be next,” he wrote.

“There is only hope in the unseen, which tomorrow brings the COVID-19 death toll with another thousand down— and I pray I’m not next. Keep me safe in the thoughts of the innocent until relief comes.” Read the Stateville students’ letters online at https://projects.southsideweekly.com/prisonvaccines/ Madison Muller is a graduate student at Northwestern University studying social justice journalism. She last covered a Pilsen protest of a police homicide. Cheyanne Daniels is a journalism graduate student at Northwestern University studying politics, policy and foreign affairs. This is her first story for the Weekly.

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

“I do not feel safe in this institution. For one, it is not designed to protect against a pandemic of this magnitude.

This prison is designed to keep everyone in close quarters for security reasons, the exact opposite of what is needed to help stop the spread of COVID-19. I do not believe this institution is prioritizing my health.”

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A System Beyond the Individual

In Beyond the Usual Beating, author Andrew S. Baer tries to understand the role that individuals play in the carceral state.

BY LUCY RITZMANN

A

couple years ago, as a highschool intern observing a trial at the Brooklyn courthouse, I remember staring at an accused rapist across the courtroom. It was the first time I had seen a trial involving a brutal crime, and I was shocked that nothing about the accused, not his face nor his demeanor nor his aura, could tell me if he was guilty or not. He just looked like a guy —stress lining his forehead and slumping slightly against the hard-backed wooden chair.

I was shocked. I blame the Puritans for

my surprise; amongst many things they endowed our culture with the belief that devils always have horns. This, of course, led to a problematic trend of people looking to physicality to justify oppression. But the truth is that bad actors aren’t supernatural creatures acting alone on some evil scheme; they are very human. Violence in any form is human and it is sanctioned by other humans and it wears any human face. And if you aren’t fully aware of that—like I wasn’t— it just means you haven’t been victimized.

This is the thought that echoed in my head over and over as I read Andrew S. Baer’s Beyond the Usual Beating, which

ILLUSTRATION BY GABY FEBLAND

comprehensively details the torture of Black men in the Chicago Police Department’s Area 2, which went on for two decades under the direction and supervision of former Commander Jon Burge. Eager to close cases, Burge and his detectives coerced confessions through methods like beating people, burning people, electrocuting them through their genitals, and more. Burge, a portly redhead with a bulging chin, had no cloven feet.

Rather, he brutalized American citizens by day and then commuted back to his comfortable suburb. He was a “typical guy” and a torturer, uncomfortable proof that those qualities can comfortably

coexist. Baer tracks Burge’s career, as well as his victims’ experiences and the police accountability movement, through the 1970s and up to the present moment. Baer is incredibly thorough; his interviews and notes are impeccably researched, and he takes the idea of criminal justice abuse and reform down from the abstract into its real-life applications. Eschewing a national perspective for most of the book, Baer tells a Chicago story, one that unfolds on the floor of state and local government and in the living rooms of its citizens. And if you pull the threads of this historical story, you will find their fraying ends woven into the present day.

MARCH 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

LIT

Understanding the Individual, and the Individual as part of the Collective In Beyond the Usual Beating, Baer is trying to understand the role that individuals play in systemic issues like the carceral state. He spends much of this book zeroed in on specific people in an effort to understand them, which means, of course, that significant effort is put into understanding Burge.

That, initially, did not feel right to me. Baer’s approach felt a little too evenhanded and willing to excuse; it felt like yet another opportunity for Burge—who died in 2018—to avoid accountability.

But as I continued reading, I started to see some value in unpacking his life.

Burge, in many ways, was the perfect candidate for law enforcement on paper but an obviously dangerous choice in reality.

According to Baer, Burge was exceptionally brave and bright as a young man, and he excelled in his ROTC program as a teenager. He did not have an aptitude for academics nor did he have family resources, so joining the Army was a logical move. Following his deployment,

he made a seamless transition to the Chicago Police Department. Burge was opportunistic and ambitious, with an eye always towards personal advancement, and he had served in Vietnam, where American soldiers routinely tortured their prisoners. Moreover, Burge was originally from the Southeast Side, the area that he went on to police, where a territorial strain of racism was spreading amongst white inhabitants as more Black families moved in. According to Baer’s depiction, Burge was trained in brutality, filled with hatred towards Black Chicagoans, and incentivized to produce arrests as crime rates climbed—and the state handed him a gun and free rein over Chicago’s Area 2.

Burge’s biography reveals failures on many levels: the failure of Chicago government to protect its Black citizens and to alleviate the racial tensions growing within the city; the failure of the United States in the Vietnam war; and the personal failure of Jon Burge, who chose to abuse his official position to act on his own racist instincts. The point that Baer is making in examining Burge so closely is that it is entirely possible to hold Burge personally accountable for his crimes and to indict the system that created him at the same time. To be fair, this is the same treatment given to Burge’s victims in this book. Many of them were, in fact, guilty of murder, rape, and other crimes, but were still afforded a biography and an explanation of how they came to be in Area 2’s torture chambers. Baer is not simply letting Burge off the hook by humanizing him and explaining how he came to be part of a racist system; rather, he is positing that when considering an issue like institutional racism, one cannot understand the individual elements without the systemic, nor the systemic without the individual.

This has important implications for our consideration of contemporary police brutality. Often, one hears the argument that cops aren’t actually bad people, they’re merely part of a bad system. One also hears the innverse: that the system isn’t bad, it’s just a few bad apples. This false dichotomy is, according to Baer, unproductive; both the systems and the people should be held accountable.

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

“It is entirely possible to hold Burge personally accountable and to accuse the system that created him at the same time.”

What Happens when Abuse is Exposed and No One Does Anything About it?

Baer marks a turning point in the Burge torture era on Valentine’s Day, 1982. On that day, Andrew Wilson and his brother, who had shot and killed two cops a few days prior, were taken into custody.

As a “cop-killer,” Andrew Wilson was treated with particular viciousness by Burge and his crew. Wilson appeared in court bandaged and brutalized, and a courtroom sketch depicting him garnered the attention of major news outlets.

The Wilson case was a catalyst for the ultimate conclusion of the Jon Burge scandal in two key ways. First, it added tremendous fuel to the movement against police brutality. The People’s Law Office, which represented many of Burge’s victims, saw a groundswell of people coming forward to accuse Burge after Wilson’s trial. That also may have been due to the fact that there were more victims, as Burge became emboldened after torturing Wilson. This leads to the second consequence: that even after Burge had been exposed to the public and to the highest levels of the Chicago government, he was not punished. In fact, he was praised.

The ongoing torture of Black men in the Area 2 police headquarters had long been an open secret amongst CPD, and Burge’s higher-ups had unofficially sanctioned it for years. An important note: Black detectives were either participants in the torture or sent on wild goose chases by Burge to keep them out of the District while the abuse was

committed. But the Wilson case dragged everything out into the light. Mayor Jane Byrne and State’s Attorney (and future mayor) Richard M. Daley denied any knowledge of Burge’s actions, but according to retired Area 2 detectives, they not only knew, but approved of them.

This accusation is supported by the fact that following the Wilson trial, Burge received a commendation for closing the case and was promoted to commander of Area 3, where he continued his abuse.

Exposure is an incredibly fickle thing. It can end an abusive practice or it can cement it further into a society if authorities refuse to condemn the illicit action. Burge’s abuse was exposed and then validated—so he returned to torturing with added zeal, because he knew that he could get away with it.

In a recent study, researchers found that of 1,000 cases of manslaughter by a police officer, only 110 officers were charged. And of that group, only fortytwo were ever convicted. Of course, there are legal caveats in place that protect police officers given the difficult nature of law enforcement, but that absolutely does not account for this disparity. Our country has long promoted a dangerous message: if you are a cop, you can and will get away with murder.

Do You Need to Be Innocent to Deserve Justice?

Whenever a Black person is killed by police in America—which has happened approximately 1,944 times since 2013— there is an inevitable rush to either justify

LIT

or condemn the homicide. Supporters of the police search through the victim’s history, looking to vilify them; abolitionists and activists look for details that humanize them. We all begin to ascribe to an ancient concept: that what matters most in deciding if a punitive action is justified is whether or not the person deserves what happened. It is a natural instinct, but it is also completely wrong in the context of our democracy, as Baer illustrates with the victims of Jon Burge.

The People’s Law Office and other advocacy groups who represented Burge’s torture victims had a particularly difficult task in getting public opinion—which Baer stipulates as the opinion of the white middle-class—on their side because most of their defendants were, in fact, criminals.

In order to find success in court, advocates turned to what Baer describes as “simple frames of innocence, even when doing so required obscuring facts of the case.” They chose their most sympathetic defendants, like Madison Hobley, an innocent man who was beaten into confessing that he set the fire that killed his wife and child, to be the face of their movement. They did so in order to find success and save people who had been coerced into confessing from death row.

In making this choice, the advocacy groups lost an opportunity to make their actual argument: as Baer wrote regarding Burge’s victims, “none deserved the brutal treatment they received at the hands of the police.” In America, you could be guilty—and some of Burge’s victims were—but that will be demonstrated in a courtroom, not beaten out of you in a dark basement by people meant to uphold the law.

Today, when a Black person is killed by the police, it does not matter what the victim did before the time of their death: one could be in the process of curing cancer or about to start a nuclear war, and if the police apprehend you, assuming you do not pose an imminent threat to their bodily safety, they have a duty to treat you in the same manner. The guilt or innocence of a victim is irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is that in this country, we tell ourselves, we do not murder or torture our own citizens.

So What Now? It is easy to spiral after reading Baer’s account of the Jon Burge scandal. For those of us who have not experienced police discrimination and brutality firsthand, it is unnerving first to know that a Jon Burge could exist, and then to discover how many accompices and admirers he had. For those of us who have personally experienced men like Jon Burge, I imagine that this is validating, albeit in a horrible sense.

It is upsetting to become so keenly aware that the issues and violations that plagued Chicago in the 1970s have found no resolution since— but concealed in this dark narrative is a ray of light. The Jon Burge story is also the story of the immense success of an activist group that saved many people who wound up on death row via coerced confessions.

Moreover, before his death, Burge was finally forced to face his actions: in 2010 he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, and served four and a half years in federal prison. Perhaps more importantly, in 2015 the city of Chicago set up a $5.5 million fund to pay reparations to Burge’s victims and their families.

Burge died of natural causes three years after getting out of prison, disgraced and accountable. Was that enough to account for all the pain he caused? Probably not, but it was progress, and it is further proof that despite the immense wrongs that have rooted in our country for centuries, the continued work of dedicated people can one day make America the equitable place that it always claimed to be. Andrew S. Baer, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago. $45.

University of Chicago Press. 312 pages.

Lucy Ritzmann is a senior at the University of Chicago completing a B.A. in Law, Letters & Society who often writes about politics, literature, and tech policy. This is her f irst article for the Weekly.

MARCH 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

HISTORY

The Neighborhood Is an Image of the City Part Five: Diverse Neighborhood

BY KRISTIN OSTBERG

I

n the mid-1990s, Ross Miller, author of Here’s the Deal, thought he might be witnessing the extinction of the office high-rise and of the city, or at least “the city as it has been celebrated for most of human history.” In hindsight, it seems what he witnessed was a last battle of the old growth machine—that coalition of politicians and business leaders who saw their common cause in the struggle against strong forces of urban blight.

Here’s the Deal is an account of the first twenty-odd years of missteps and failed plans in the redevelopment of Block 37 in Chicago’s Loop. The first Mayor Daley told one of his commissioners he wanted that block of buildings to come down back in 1967, after earning national praise for clearing city blocks to build the Daley Center and a trio of federal buildings a few blocks away.

Miller said the humble structures of Block 37 were old but occupied, bustling with business. If the mayor saw blight there, he suggested it might have been because shoppers who once frequented the stores of Black Metropolis now came downtown to shop, after urban renewal had laid so much of their neighborhood flat.

In 1996, when Miller published his book, Block 37 was a big vacant lot with no obvious prospects. In the early years of the 1990s, Chicago’s Loop had been swept by a frenzy of high-rise development that doubled the nation’s stock of commercial

office space in a period of ten years. Now that the Loop was swamped with office space, as much as twenty-six percent of it vacant, Miller found it hard to imagine that the surplus could ever be absorbed.

He thought Block 37 was symbolic of a crisis that might end in towering board-ups, an abandoned downtown, and neighborhoods filled with a dispossessed underclass as “the achieving side of the bell curve” urbanized the suburbs and drove to work at office parks in the new edge-cities.

He wasn’t alone in his concerns.

A few years later, in 2000, the dot-com bubble had not yet burst, the nation was approaching full employment, and developers were even venturing new office projects in the Loop. In October, BusinessWeek ran a cover story asking if Chicago had failed to seize the moment.

“Other great cities can claim dynamic sectors that drive them,” like entertainment for Los Angeles or securities for New York, said the story.

Chicago was losing out in the contest to keep corporate headquarters. The city’s financial sector, even its commodities exchanges, once undisputed leaders in an industry they invented, were losing market share.

Mayor Richard M. Daley, son of the first Mayor Daley, told the magazine Chicago’s future lay in the diversity of its business base. “Chicago isn’t dependent on any one industry, that’s it’s strength.”

He was correct, it turns out—though at

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

“The gap between these two classes of workers, both necessary to the new system, was growing, and a clear cause for concern. It builds a contradiction into the system as high-wage workers change neighborhoods around them and price the lowwage workers out, one sure to reverberate through politics.” the time, BusinessWeek wasn’t convinced.

“Chicago is a great, livable city, but it’s fading as a business and financial capital.”

Ross Miller and BusinessWeek were not wrong about the trends they saw, they just weren’t fully aware of countervailing currents that were gathering force. Urban scholars were still working out the terms to describe them. Sociologist Saskia Sassen wrote her book The Global City in 1991, then reissued it again in 2001 with data from the 1990s that reinforced her points.

She found that geographic dispersal of manufacturing makes some big cities more important, even as their old industrial bases move overseas. Management of global networks is complex. As central management functions turn trickier, corporations tend to outsource them to specialists—firms providing legal counsel, accounting, marketing, consulting, all the sophisticated services that global companies consume.

These purveyors of specialized services are the real drivers of a new

HISTORY

ILLUSTRATION BY EVA AZENARO ACERO

class of global cities. And place still matters to them. They tend to cluster geographically, because being near to one another allows for “unplanned mixes of information, expertise, and talent”— all crucial for adapting their services to needs that are often highly particular and rapidly changing.

Global cities like Chicago thrive because they can provide dense information loops that “as of now,” Sassen wrote in 2001, “still cannot be replicated fully in electronic space.”

It’s true, corporate headquarters can be located anywhere; they’re a lot lighter since they outsource more of their management functions. But then, they aren’t as important as drivers of employment anymore.

The logic of the global city flipped the equation of urban development. The old growth coalition assumed business interests to be the primary driver; that if you build cities that are attractive to business, the people who live there will benefit from jobs and the spillover effects of corporate spending.

The networks of service firms that drive the global city are highly dependent on a new class of workers—like the new class of clerical workers that helped change relations between business and labor in the 1920s, except they are more highly skilled, and much better paid. In fact, the skills of the new class of workers are so important that firms will relocate to where the talent is. So you build the city where the people who could live anywhere will choose to live.

Global cities also generate a lot of jobs on the opposite end of the scale.

Many workers perform the routine tasks at professional service firms, many staff the restaurants and shops that high-wage workers patronize. They work as maids, do the dry-cleaning, deliver groceries: all the business of life the high-wage workers can easily pay for, but just don’t have time to do.

Sassen observed that the gap between these two classes of workers, both necessary to the new system, was growing, and a clear cause for concern.

It builds a contradiction into the system as high-wage workers change MARCH 18, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

HISTORY

neighborhoods around them and price the low-wage workers out, one sure to reverberate through politics.

But it was the new class of highly paid wage earners who really captured the imagination of urban observers in the 2000s.

Sassen described them soberly as engaged in a kind of self-exploitation— working hard for very long hours, they are paid well, but at a fraction of the profits they produce. And when they were laid off in large numbers during the stock market crisis of 1987, their lack of ownership was shown to matter.

Sassen thought the fascinations of their urban lifestyles helped compensate, that the lifestyle serves “an ideological function” to secure their allegiance to a system that has no particular allegiance to them.

The spending power of these highwage workers pays for a new vision of the good life, one shaped by the city as a marketplace of infinite variety. The members of this new class are generally unimpressed by the house in the suburbs furnished with mass-produced consumer goods. They cultivate tastes for the intentional, the curated, but also the serendipitous, the purchase that displays the discernment of the person who found it. “Hence the importance not just of food but of cuisine,” Sassen wrote, “not just of clothes but of designer labels, not just of decoration but of authentic objets d’art.”

A new genre of consumer studies arose to parse out these tastes. These were not the conspicuous consumers, showing off the spending power that Thorstein Veblen observed in the 1920s—they were engaged in more subtle deployments of cultural capital, a term that translates any lifestyle choice into a slightly ridiculous display.

In fact, lifestyle transforms the urban streetscape: it populates it with a profusion of restaurants and galleries, even as it appreciates street culture.

BusinessWeek thought Chicago’s quality of life was nice, but not so important. Now urban observers compete to describe what kinds of amenities should be built or fostered to draw the talent in.

Urban theorist Richard Florida calls them the creative class—not just artists and designers, but the whole range of professionals employed for their ingenuity in applying a complex set of skills. He says it is their creative capital that drives growth, and it’s not just amenities, but diversity itself that draws them. He says they find diversity stimulating, and it signals an environment open to difference, one that will allow them to find their own particular course, and express who they want to be.

As a social scientist Florida has experimented with different measures of diversity to see if they correlate with economic growth. His “Melting Pot Index” measures proportions of the foreign-born, a traditional engine of American self-starting power; his “Bohemian Index” measures proportions of artists and performers; his “Gay Index” is designed to show tolerance for difference. His “Composite Diversity Index” incorporates all of them, and he finds each of them matter to some measure of urban growth—be it population, jobs in general, or jobs in high tech or innovative sectors.

The “gaping hole” in his methodology, he admits, is that his measures of the diversity that matters do not track with portions of African Americans or nonwhites. And there is another gaping hole: they do not address income diversity, or affordability as a factor that supports it.

These things do matter to the model— the low-wage workers are essential to the system, as is the newcomer, income-poor but alert to opportunity and driven to try.

The model does not accommodate them by itself.

I

n 2001, scholars weren’t sure if Chicago ranked among the top global cities. In 2004, Sassen told GlobalChicago it certainly did.

When the results from the 2000 Census came in, they showed Chicago’s population had grown for the first time in forty years. The city’s median income was up ten percent.

The Chicago Rehab Network, an affordable housing advocate, mapped

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 18, 2021

the changes into neighborhood clusters.

A “Booming Cluster” spread out from the north Lakefront. Though it saw only modest gains in population, the high incomes there had kept growing.It had a lot fewer low-income households than when the decade started, but most new construction permits were focused there—its rental housing stock was converting to homeownership.

Population grew fastest in a “Bursting Cluster” that spread in corridors through the Northwest and Southwest sides.

They saw large increases in low-income households, overcrowded housing units, and high rates of housing cost burden—a measure of the portion of a household’s income spent to pay mortgage or rent.

Bridgeport fell in this Bursting Cluster. As an affordable neighborhood, it attracted more low-income households.

Bridgeport’s population had been falling for decades, but it now saw a surge in rates of overcrowding—maybe as households doubled up to pay rent.

Alongside all this activity, a “Thinning Cluster” spread through some of the Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, where populations were dropping and vacancy rates were still remarkably high. Douglas fell in this Thinning Cluster.

In 1993, the Mid South Planning Group, a seventy-seven-member body of community organizers, planners, and neighbors, published a thirty-year plan to restore Bronzeville. The area they called Mid-South bundled Douglas together with Grand Boulevard and Washington Park.

They proposed to redevelop historic buildings built by prominent Black businessmen, to add cultural gateways to the district’s boulevards so people would recognize it as they entered, and a hotel to link to all the convention and tourism activity at McCormick Place.

Their plan would rebuild commercial nodes that had been missing for decades and add home ownership opportunities to a neighborhood dominated by rental housing, with architecture following the visual cues of those historic homes still standing in The Gap.

The new housing would be aimed toward existing, “indigenous” residents first, and then it would attract new residents—tens of thousands of them.

It would restore the area’s population by fifty percent, to 100,000 people.

At the time the plan sounded wildly ambitious. The striking thing about it, nearly thirty years later, is that much of it has been achieved. There are new commercial nodes, large and small, where the plan suggested they ought to be.

Those landmark buildings once occupied by the Overton Hygienic Company, the Chicago Bee newspaper, and Supreme Life Insurance are fully renovated and occupied. The South Loop Hotel stands on 26th Street, and new homes are being built in The Gap in the $580,000 to $800,000 range.

The exception is that the area’s population kept shrinking. In 2000, the population of Douglas was about 26,000 people. By 2010 it had dropped to 18,000, a long fall from the 79,000 people counted there in 1950.

That was partly because the CHA’s Plan for Transformation was demolishing thousands of high-rise public housing units to replace them with less dense, mixed-income housing. In Douglas, the Dearborn Homes, the first and best built of CHA’s high-rises, was renovated.

But Stateway Gardens was demolished and replaced with Park Boulevard, that mixed-use collection with the Starbucks at 35th and State.

In fact, the private urban renewal projects built in Douglas in the 1960s and 1970s were designed to balance market rate and affordable housing. Many of them still house a mix of professionals and low-income residents today. Ferdinand Kramer, whose firm Draper and Kramer built Prairie Shores, moved in after it was built and lived there for years.

So far, the redevelopment in Douglas has maintained a place for lowincome residents to keep stable housing.

A community snapshot assembled by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning shows the median income in Douglas is lower than Bridgeport’s ($32,000 to Bridgeport’s $51,000); and

HISTORY

the rate of workforce participation among the twenty to sixty-four- year-old set is lower too (sixty-six percent in Douglas, seventy-nine percent in Bridgeport).

On the other hand, Douglas outpaces Bridgeport in educational attainment. In Douglas, fifty percent of adults over the age of twenty-five have an Associate’s Degree or higher; it's thirty-seven percent in Bridgeport. If the Douglas median income is lower partly because of students at IIT, that is not a bad thing.

In the early 2000s, as Chicago took off on its career as a global city, Bridgeport struggled to keep up. By 2010, its median income was about ten percent less than the city’s median, and its mix of occupations did not mirror the city’s so well.

In 2010, about forty-two percent of the city’s workers were employed in occupations related to management and business, science and the arts; the census had combined a set of occupation

categories that closely captured Florida’s creative class. Bridgeport reported about thirty-one percent of its workers occupied in that category; it still had larger portions of people employed manufacturing and hauling things, and preparing food.

But by 2018, forty-two percent of Bridgeport’s workers were employed in that creative class category, and even though the city’s portion had risen to forty-five percent, the neighborhood appeared to be catching up.

Both Douglas and Bridgeport have changed demographically. The majority of people in Douglas are still Black, but a quarter of them are white or Asian.

Bridgeport isn’t primarily white ethnic anymore: the neighborhood is thirtynine percent Asian and thirty-three percent white, and twenty-three percent Hispanic. It’s still just over two and a half percent Black. But in a population of 34,000, that’s approaching a thousand people, more than twice as many Black

people as there were living in Bridgeport in 2000, and an exponential improvement from the twenty-three “Negroes” the Census counted in 1950.

If you believe that the low-income worker, the newcomer, still has a place in this city, even as it gets richer, Bridgeport has retained a potential advantage. The gap between the households with the highest incomes and the lowest ones is not so great here. If you divide households into income quintiles, the incomes in the lowest quintile are a little higher in Bridgeport than for the city as a whole, the incomes in the highest quintile are a little lower. A narrower gap could mean less pressure on rents threatening to push low income workers out.

Who knows if that gap will stay narrow, or if Bridgeport will catch up in inequality too. Maybe those high-wage workers in the global service firms have found they really can fully replicate their dense information networks in electronic

space, now that COVID-19 has forced them to work from home. Probably some portion of them will try moving to other places, cute small towns, or places with better weather. That could take some of the steam out of rents.

If it doesn’t take the steam out though, and you like the area but find you can’t afford it, you might take a shot at high rise living in Douglas. Prairie Shores and Lake Meadows are affordable, they are historically significant, and the views can be spectacular. Originally published at The Hardscrabbler: A Bridgeport Blog; reprinted with permission.

This is part five in a five-part series.

Kristin Ostberg works in the affordable housing field, and writes about work, art, and social life in Bridgeport. This is her first piece for the Weekly; she can be reached at ostberg.k@gmail.com

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