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Volume 8, Issue 10 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor 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 Mira Chauhan Joshua Falk Lucia Geng Matt Moore

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Cover Illustration by Thumy Phan

IN THIS THE JUSTICE ISSUE ISSUE Awash in police violence As we write this, the Chicago Police Department is working twelve-hour shifts and city resources are on standby in anticipation of potential protests against the ongoing police murder of Black and brown lives. On Tuesday, after two weeks with few answers and slow-moving developments, COPA showed bodycam footage of CPD killing thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo to his family.

The agency declined to make the video public, saying in a press release that they left the decision whether to do so up to the family. Across state lines, the killing of Daunte Wright by a Minnesota police officer has already resulted in the resignation of both the officer who pulled the trigger and the police chief. Meanwhile, the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd last May, sending outrage rippling across cities like Chicago last summer, is underway. The Kenosha officer who shot Jacob Blake will not face discipline. Dante Servin, the officer who killed Rekia Boyd, continues to collect a pension. Amid all this, officials admonish the public to remain calm.

RIP Earl DMX Simmons DMX, the Yonkers, NY rapper who became one of hip-hop’s best-selling artists, died last week at fifty-one. His breakout 1998 hit “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem” and distinctive lyrical style helped fill the void in hip-hop left by Tupac and Biggie, changing the genre forever. DMX frequented Chicago’s West Side and produced a tribute video for his good friend Kato, from Little Village, as the second part to the music video “Where the Hood At?”. In 2001 he performed outside of George’s Music Room in North Lawndale, and a few years ago linked up with Fred Hampton Jr. He released seven albums, was nominated for two Grammys, and acted in film and television—all while grappling in his personal life with the brutality and repression the War on Drugs brought to his doorstep. After his death, social media overflowed with touching anecdotes from fans and friends who shared endearing moments with the rapper, such as when he demanded to mop a Waffle House floor so a worker could have a break, danced delightedly backstage at a Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam concert, or was starstruck when meeting his hip-hop idol, Rakim. Last July, DMX left the world a final gift in the form of a Verzuz battle with Snoop Dogg. In his last interview, on the podcast Drink Champs in February, he said, “If I was to drop dead right now, my last thought would be ‘I’ve lived a good life.’” RIP to a Great One.

public meetings report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level. olivia stovicek and jacqueline serrato, city bureau’s documenters & south side weekly....................................5 op-ed: we are adam toledo

We can stop the bleeding and finally address the disinvestment that's hurt our communities. berto aguayo.............................................6 op-ed: blaming the victim

Media and public officials were quick to speculate about Adam Toledo’s life even as they told us to wait for the facts surrounding his death. maria gardner lara................................8 a timeline of cpd killing children

Between 1940 and 2020, Chicago police killed at least forty children. alex stein................................................11 who defines a mass shooting? the media.

Why aren’t mass-casualty attacks on the South Side covered as “mass shootings”? madison muller......................................13 sharone mitchell jr. comes “home”

Q&A with Cook County’s new public defender. kiran misra and jim daley....................16 the high price of family law

Family law representation can be expensive, but resources in Chicago offer help. corey schmidt........................................18

What’s going on with the vaccines i’m still surviving On April 19 all Chicago residents sixteen and older will be eligible to receive An oral history of living with HIV/AIDS. the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine; the Moderna vaccine remains restricted to by cordelia as told to mae and jennie persons eighteen and older, as is the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, though brier, history moves...............22 use of the latter has been temporarily suspended by city and state agencies following CDC and FDA guidance, after a handful of recipients developed blood clots six to thirteen days after receiving the one-dose vaccine. Chicago Public Health Commissioner Dr. Alison Arwady noted in an April 13 WBEZ interview that the chances of having an adverse reaction from the Johnson & Johnson shot are extremely rare (so far just six cases have been reported nationwide, out of some 6.8 million vaccines administered), but should anyone who has received the shot develop a severe headache, abdominal pain, leg pain, or shortness of breath, they should seek immediate medical attention. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has announced the state will redirect an additional 50,000 doses of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to Chicago, though availability is still expected to be limited in the weeks to come, as eligibility opens up.

AT THE POETRY FOUNDATION FREE VIRTUAL EVENTS FOR ALL AGES, POETRY RESOURCES, AND MORE! see full details at POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG

ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD

Public Meetings Report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the April 15 issue.

OLIVIA STOVICEK AND JACQUELINE SERRATO FOR CITY BUREAU’S DOCUMENTERS & SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY Mar. 26 Fifty-eight percent of Cook County Health employees were vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of February, according to a meeting of the Cook County Health and Hospitals System Board of Directors. CEO Israel Rocha Jr. said he was also encouraged by the acceleration of vaccinations in suburban Cook County, noting that nearly one in four residents had at least one dose as of a couple days before the meeting.

Mar. 29 Officials reviewed a proposed update to the Ethics Ordinance at the Legislation and Intergovernmental Relations Committee meeting of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. The update builds on changes recommended by the Cook County Board of Ethics in January 2020, and it would clarify the County’s sexual harassment policy and impose new restrictions on nepotism. Its revision to conflict-of-interest rules would weaken the Board of Ethics’s original proposal, however. Amid conflict between the Board of Ethics and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle over the board’s recommendations, Preckwinkle last year chose not to renew the appointments of two board members.

Apr. 1 Efforts to build greater awareness of the Chicago Community Land Trust (CCLT) were highlighted at its board meeting. “CCLT is a secret in Chicago,” said Kimberley Rudd, president of Rudd Resources LLC, a certified Minority/Women-owned/ Disadvantaged Business Enterprise communications firm contracted to do marketing and branding for the Land Trust. The contract comes as CCLT is creating a standalone website, expected to launch May 1.

Apr. 6 Following the killing of thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo, the City Council’s Latino Caucus voted to endorse an ordinance backed by the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA) and the coalition for a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) that would give community members the ability to sit in a civilian commission that has oversight of the police and a decisive voice over CPD policy.

At their meeting, members of the Task Force on Infant and Maternal Mortality Among African Americans Systems Subcommittee discussed how the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services can best implement the task force’s

recommendations to improve insurance coverage of the different stages of pregnancy.

A bill to expand Medicaid coverage of prenatal and postpartum doula care in Illinois has passed the state legislature and is on Governor J.B. Pritzker’s desk.

Apr. 7 The Cook County Democratic Party’s Central Committee voted to endorse a resolution supporting an Elected Representative School Board in Chicago Public Schools, following the passage of related state Senate and House bills on March 22.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has opposed the legislation that would make the currently appointed board elected and more democratic.

Apr. 8 Cook County commissioners approved two contracts for work on redrawing the maps for the county’s legislative districts at the meeting of the 2020 Census Redistricting Committee. Delays in census data are expected to create major complications for redistricting at the state level, but consultant Peter Creticos said that preliminary data will enable the county to get started.

Olive-Harvey College will launch a “career in cannabis” certificate after the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees approved an agreement with the City for nearly $1.7 million to support the program. At the meeting, Chancellor Juan Salgado also reported a July 6 target for expanding in-person instruction at CCC. An ad hoc committee on hate crimes against Asian Americans will be formed by the Chicago Commission on Human Relations in collaboration with the mayor’s office.

At the Commission’s meeting, members discussed involving representatives from Chicago Police Department districts that cover Chinatown and Uptown, as well as the business community and legal services providers.

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

OPINION

Opinion: We Are Adam Toledo We can stop the bleeding and finally address the disinvestment that’s hurt our communities.

BY BERTO AGUAYO

F

or the past couple of weeks, there have been a lot of negative comments about Adam Toledo and his background, some even going as far as to say that he brought it upon himself.

Columnists like Eric Zorn, who have likely never lived in our neighborhoods, have entertained the notion of criminalizing a child while giving Kyle Rittenhouse, the rifle-toting teen from Antioch, IL, the benefit of the doubt. As the conversations unfold, I think we need to acknowledge that many of us could've been Adam Toledo, and that in order to prevent more of these tragedies, we need to start doing things differently.

Around the same time that the public learned about the tragic shooting, a picture I posted five years ago about my transformation from a teenage gang member to a college graduate began resurfacing on social media. As people engaged with that post, I couldn't help but think about the similarities between Adam's life and my own, and how they resonate with other young people in communities like Back of the Yards.

I was a thirteen-year-old who was involved in a gang. I was a thirteenyear-old who would sneak out in the middle of the night and roam the alleys.

I was a thirteen-year-old being raised in a community with few resources or opportunities either for me as a youngster or for my mom as a single mother. A few years later, I was also a seventeen-yearold that someone believed in and gave a life-changing opportunity to, becoming the first in my family to go to college on a scholarship.

As I think about Adam, I can't help to see myself in him. I can't help to think that he, too, was just a lost boy with no one to turn to. And I can't help to think 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 15, 2021

PHOTO BY JACQUELINE SERRATO

that he, too, could have turned his life around if he had attended an art class, an after-school program, or had resources to help him and his mom navigate life in the neighborhood.

In communities like ours, street gangs fill those voids and provide a sense of belonging, purpose, and opportunity for city youth. My mom worked hours on end as a hairdresser. And despite her best

attempt at making sure we had everything we needed, she couldn’t be both a provider and supervise our every move. One of the reasons I started hanging out with the wrong crowd was simply because I was often home alone while my mom was working. Albeit it was not the best crowd to be hanging out with, it was the most accessible way for me to find a support system, with people who looked like me,

and have something to do.

Like Adam, I had a passion, not for art, but for soccer. The older I got, however, the more expensive playing soccer became and my mom just didn't have the means to be able to cover the expenses, the uniforms, or even take me to the games.

Fortunately for me, I had two opportunities that are the reason I am

OPINION

“I was a thirteen-year-old who would sneak out in the middle of the night and roam the alleys.

I was a thirteen-year-old being raised in a community with few resources or opportunities either for me as a youngster or for my mom as a single mother.” writing an op-ed instead of being dead or in jail. One of those opportunities saved my life was when I was around 14 and the other one transformed my life a couple years later. My mom was so desperate to get me off the streets that she asked a local grocery store owner to give me a job. When he replied that he couldn’t afford it, my mom said she was willing to pay part of my wage. She told him that a job would be the only thing that would keep me from a casket and so he agreed to take me on. Because of that risk he took, I spent less time on the street because I was busy working at his grocery store, washing dishes, mopping floors, and maintaining the inventory. It not only taught me the value of hard work, but it also gave me the sense of dignity that comes from being able to earn your own money.

The second opportunity that helped me develop even further as a youth happened when I was wrapping up my junior year of high school. I was sitting in the principal’s office because I had gotten in trouble. When the principal saw me, she threw me a summer job application to Mikva Challenge, an organization that engages young people in the civic process. She said, “Fill it out. If you need a recommendation letter, I’ll write one for you.” I applied and I got it. I was selected to be a summer intern with a local City Council member.

The summer of my junior year going into my senior year, I was taking the Halsted bus on 48th Street all the way to

Wrightwood in Lincoln Park to work for Alderman Michele Smith. My internship duties ranged from helping someone request a garbage bin to researching municipal ordinances that impact communities like mine.

It was a transformative experience for two reasons. It gave me the exposure that I needed to see that the world was bigger than the South Side and that there were deep inequities between Lincoln Park and Back of the Yards. Secondly, it helped me discover my purpose and agency. Working in an aldermanic office sparked my love for community work.

Being able to help people and refer them to services was something that I could see myself doing.

The exposure to new things, a newfound purpose, and the agency this opportunity gave me helped me realize that, as I wrote in my 2016 post that went viral, “although I said I loved the hood, I was the one destroying it.” It helped me understand that I could work toward finding more effective solutions for issues plaguing my neighborhood. It helped me realize that if I wanted to change my community, I had to get out of the gang and change as an individual first.

And those are the reasons I’m here today. The grocery store owner who looked out for me, the principal that believed in me, and the staff at an organization that thought I could rise up if given the chance.

The biggest tragedy of all is that we

COURTESY OF BERTO AGUAYO

will never know Adam’s potential because we didn't give him that chance. We will never know what could have been of his life if he had gotten similar opportunities or met more people that gave a helping hand. His story especially hits home because I've had my own Adams while working in the neighborhood—young people who we've lost too soon, as well as Adams who survived and are working in the neighborhood, helping other young people leave the gang life, go to college, and get connected to real life-changing opportunities.

But in order to help more young people and drive down the violence, we need to be proactive and not reactionary, preventative and restorative instead of punitive, and really tackle the root causes of violence. If we don’t take the first step to stop the bleeding, we will have more of these tragedies.

What does that first step look like?

We need to look at the environment that allows someone to pick up a gun in the first place. If you look at the top fifteen neighborhoods with the highest

levels of violence in Chicago, many of those communities are also the same neighborhoods with the highest levels of youth unemployment, and also likely with the most underfunded schools and least amount of opportunities and resources for young people and their families.

One of the steps we can take is to expand existing programs for youth. One Summer Chicago could be broadened to give young people year-round jobs (not just summer ones) in our communities while at the same time increasing the amount and of after-school programs for youth in low-income communities.

In addition to out-of-school and after-school opportunities, young people deserve safe spaces that are accessible to both them and their families. These safe spaces could take the form of community centers operated by community-based organizations or by turning some of our CPS schools into community centers that remain open in the summer or afterhours as reconnection hubs for youth and families. These opportunities and spaces can also be maximized by ensuring APRIL 15, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEkly 7

OPINION a funding increase for wrap-around services like mental health, housing, and domestic violence services that our youth and families need.

And, without a doubt, we must make a massive investment in the street outreach work that targets the individuals that are more likely to become perpetrators or victims of violence. We also need to increase the amount of funding schools receive to ensure all youth have a quality education and the classes that will stimulate students, like the art class that could have helped Adam.

But these solutions won’t be easy to secure. They require crisis-level funding to address a crisis-level issue. Currently, the City of Chicago spends less than one percent ($36 million) of its $12.76 billion dollar budget on violence prevention, while violence prevention organizations have estimated that, in order to truly address the issue, we need to increase that amount to $150 million. That figure, in addition to the increases in funding to the Department of Family and Support Services that programs like One Summer Chicago will require, puts the figure well above $150 million.

The city already gave more than $280 million to the police department that evidently hasn’t helped. And now the city is poised to receive an additional $2 billion in federal money. It’s time that we demand the same amount be used to fund the hood and stop our people from dying this summer.

Support the resolution calling for a hearing on the state of social service programs in Chicago and the city’s strategy to address increasing violence ahead of the summer. If we build enough momentum, we can have a hearing later this month and demand that the city invest in our neighborhoods and in our young people, so we can stop the bleeding and finally address the disinvestment that's hurt our communities for way too long. Berto Aguayo is a resident of Back of the Yards and the executive director of the antiviolence program Increase the Peace. This is his first contribution to the Weekly.

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 15, 2021

Op-Ed: Blaming the Victim

Media and public officials were quick to speculate about Adam Toledo’s life even as they told us to wait for the facts surrounding his death.

BY MARIA GARDNER LARA

T

ribune columnist Eric Zorn’s April 6 editorial challenging the continuing demands for justice for Adam Toledo, the thirteenyear-old boy killed by a Chicago police officer in Little Village on March 29 has been roundly criticized by community members, activists, and fellow journalists.

What continues to be glaringly apparent is that Chicago police have a disregard for the lives of Latinx and Black people.

Far more disturbing is how the mayor, city officials, and prominent voices at institutions such as the Tribune actively denigrate a child in order to protect the police.

Adam’s worth and humanity are not up for discussion. Zorn used a tired, racist trope to dehumanize Adam, so that he is no longer deemed a boy, but vilified in ways that no white child would ever be described. Zorn paints Adam as a potentially bad child who was capable of murder when he compares him to other thirteen-year-old boys and girls who have been accused of committing a crime, implying that the police could have been justified in killing him. While Zorn did not describe the background of these children, the point he is trying to make is apparent: some children are bad.

He later apologized for his “chilly tone,” but the message was clear: whereas white children may be viewed with compassion

as they struggle with mental health or behavioral issues, Chicago’s Latinx and Black children are often blamed and shamed for their circumstances.

Zorn is not alone in this effort to blame the victim and deflect attention away from the police. Mayor Lightfoot indirectly extended the responsibility for Adam’s death onto his family. At a press conference with Superintendent David Brown and Alderman George Cardenas, who represents the 12th Ward where Adam lived, Lightfoot suggested Adam’s killing was another tragedy in line with other incidents of gun violence, for which only the adults in Adam’s life can be held accountable—in particular the person who handed the boy a gun, but implicitly his mother as well. Lightfoot said, “This is a complicated story to tell, and it’s not my story to tell,” washing her hands of the matter.

Alderman Cardenas also blamed the schools and the community for enabling Adam and not protecting him from getting shot to death by police.

“Maybe the school probably knew something about this young man or the teachers or the counselors, somebody in the neighborhood knew something that this young man was going through but couldn’t say anything because now a days in the community there are neighbors, brothers and sisters who are too quiet to

say anything because we might offend somebody and I think that has to stop,” Cardenas said at the press conference.

“This young man had nobody.”

The mayor called for the police department to create a foot-pursuit policy. But CPD’s disregard for the lives of Latinx and Black people will not be addressed by adding a new policy.

The city neglects Little Village, a primarily Mexican, working-class community when it rebuffs residents’ demands for resources, respect, and dignity. The pandemic has hit Little Village particularly hard. For many residents, working from home is not an option and has led to higher risks of exposure, resulting in one of the highest number of deaths due to COVID in the city.

The mayor has left Little Village families vulnerable to environmental racism when she continues to allow companies such as Hilco to pollute the community. When the mayor and the alderman meet the interests of developers at the expense of addressing the housing insecurity and the stress that it puts on families, city officials condemn the community to strife. When the city refuses to invest in the neighborhoods, the city sets up our youth to a future with little opportunity.

The circumstances Little Village

ILLUSTRATION BY THUMY PHAN

residents confront every day are not unique to the community. They are experienced by Latinx and Black people across Chicago. Within days of Adam’s murder, police killed another Latino youth, twenty-two-year-old Anthony Alvarez, on the far North Side. Police continue to behave as if they are judge, jury, and executioner when encountering Latinx and Black youth, whom they immediately criminalize.

Despite imploring the public not to

jump to conclusions, Zorn and our public officials have effectively downplayed Adam’s humanity and innocence. Zorn argued that Adam’s killing received widespread attention only because he was so young. His age certainly makes for a disturbing headline, but just as outrageous is the extent to which City Hall and members of the media are willing to defend the police at the expense of a thirteen-year-old boy.

The murder of Adam Toledo is a

matter of a political failure. Lightfoot refuses to rein in the police, who function as an occupying army in our communities and Ald. Cardenas continues to line his pockets with developers’ money while sacrificing the well-being of our families—while people removed from the situation get to loudly speculate and shape the narrative. It's only reasonable that working-class communities want to take control of the police and ensure that dollars are better invested in Black and

brown neighborhoods so that our youth can not just survive, but thrive and be treated with compassion. Maria Gardner Lara is a Chicago resident working with a collective of organizations calling for justice for Adam and investment in Latinx and Black communities in the city.

APRIL 15, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEkly 9

JUSTICE

A Timeline of CPD Killing Children

Between 1940 and 2020, Chicago police killed at least forty children.

BY ALEX STEIN

Trigger Warning: Police Violence

S

ince March 29, Chicago police officers have shot and killed three people, including thirteen-yearold Adam Toledo, whose killing drew particular outrage because he was so young.

While most of us did not know Adam or his family, we have seen the police’s pattern of violence with impunity time and time again in recent years—a pattern that targets and disproportionately harms Black and brown communities.

This pattern is not new. Chicago police officers have a long history of killing young people. While CPD has also killed several white youths, Black and brown kids and teens are often treated by much of society, including the police, as dangerous adults, as groups like Project NIA and CopsOutCPS have described.

When CPD officers killed Adam Toledo, it wasn’t an aberration: CPD officers have killed at least forty people under the age of sixteen since 1940. I identified thirty-one instances by searching digitized archives on newspapers.com and ProQuest, and historical records at the Chicago History Museum. The Fatal Encounters database (fatalencounters.com), which tracks people killed during interactions with police nationwide, lists nine more that occured between 2011 and 2020.

These forty total instances are not exhaustive; it is also possible that some such killings went unreported or that I did not find the news articles written about them in my research.

This data also does not include the

ILLUSTRATION BY ZAHID KHALIL

dozens of older teenagers Chicago police have killed, such as Laquan McDonald, the seventeen-year-old who CPD shot to death in 2014.

Between 1940 and 2010, police killed young people all over the city, ranging as far north and west as Montclare and as far south as Morgan Park, although young

people were killed most frequently on the South and West Sides in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods. The neighborhood with the highest number of police killings of children during that time period was Englewood. The race of the victim was mentioned in a little more than half of these reports; where it was,

seventy-one percent of the people killed were Black.

In more than eighty percent of the reports I reviewed, nobody had been injured at all until the police became involved. Roughly one-third of the young people were killed by off-duty cops, and more than three-quarters were killed APRIL 15, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEkly 11

JUSTICE

outside in public spaces. Patrol officers accounted for about four-fifths of the killings, and detectives killed at least three teenagers.

Of the thirty-one killings that occurred before 2010, available newspaper articles indicate that four officers were criminally charged. Eight of the officers who killed a youth also killed at least one other person.

The Fatal Encounters database recorded nine people under the age of sixteen who were killed in police-involved incidents in Chicago since 2010. They are fifteen-year-old Tatioun Williams in 2011; fifteen-year-old Dakota Bright in 2012; fifteen-year-old Michael Westley in 2013; eleven-year-old Donovan Turnage in 2013; fourteen-year-old Pedro Rios Jr. in 2014; one-year-old Dillan Harris

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 15, 2021

in 2015; three-year-old Cabari Turner in 2018; two-year-old Danyla Owens in 2019; and ten-year-old Da’Karia Spicer in 2020.

Turnage, Harris, Turner, Owens, and Spicer were all bystanders who were killed by vehicles police were pursuing, in some cases after officers had been ordered to break off the chase.

These nine killings made the 2010s

the decade with the highest number of incidents involving CPD officers that resulted in the deaths of young people since the 1970s. Alex Stein is a lawyer and researcher living in Chicago. This is his first piece for the Weekly.

MEDIA

ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN MAC

Who Defines a Mass Shooting?

The Media.

Chicago reporters, scholars, and activists weigh in on the way the media covers mass shootings—and how it could do better.

BY MADISON MULLER

I

n March, tragedies in Boulder and Atlanta again brought America’s mass shooting epidemic to the forefront of national attention. Meeting public outcry, major news outlets ramped up their gun violence coverage with reports on weapons and lists of recent mass shootings.

But some Chicagoans, still reeling from mass-casualty shootings that added to a year already wrought with gun violence, were quick to point out the city’s exclusion from national headlines.

APRIL 15, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEkly 13

MEDIA

F "If we’re only focusing on the most extreme end of the spectrum, we’re missing out on potential solutions."

Missing from most lists: two mass shootings in Chicago’s South Side that happened just days apart from the events in Atlanta and Boulder. On March 14, fifteen people were shot at a party in Park Manor, and on March 26 eight were shot outside of a storefront in Wrightwood.

Neither Chicago shooting garnered similar national coverage.

“There’s a hierarchy to gun violence,” said Lakeidra Chavis, who reports on gun violence in Chicago for The Trace.

“I think the way we talk about mass shootings—in a very specific way that excludes the mass shootings that happen in Chicago—creates a hierarchy that disproportionately leaves people of color out of the conversation.”

Last month Chavis’s colleagues at The Trace reported that in 2020, mass shootings increased in predominantly Black communities, such as those in Chicago. This year, Chicago has already surpassed the number of gun violence

deaths that occurred during the same period in 2020, according to CPD statistics. Yet multiple-casualty incidents rarely receive mention in national coverage of mass shootings.

Eddie Bocanegra, senior director at Heartland Alliance’s READI Chicago, spends his days trying to interrupt the cycle of gun violence in the city. READI Chicago works with those at the highest risk of gun violence, giving them job opportunities and mentorship. Bocanegra said he can list several shootings off the top of his head in which multiple program participants, all “good men,” were killed.

And every time, he’s wondered where the national outrage was.

“Why is it their lives were not as worth covering as other lives?” he asked.

“Is it because we see these other people as innocent, because they were sitting in a beauty shop? Or were in a school? Or were in a movie theater? Or at a church or synagogue?”

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 15, 2021

ollowing the shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, The New York Times published a list of mass shootings that have occurred within the last five years using data compiled by the Violence Project. Neither the Times nor the Violence Project included the two incidents that most recently happened in Chicago, despite other major news outlets like CNN including them in a similar list of recent mass shootings.

South Side Weekly asked the Times reporters who authored the article why they included specific mass shootings, but not others, in the list. We were referred to the Times’s public relations department, who said to compare CNN’s list to their list was “apples to oranges.” The Times said their list was compiled according to shootings with the highest death counts, but that some shootings such as the Capital Gazette shooting were included for “other reasons.” However, the article itself does not distinguish that the shootings included were those with the most fatalities.

A 2017 study in the Journal of Crime and Justice examined the Times’s coverage of ninety mass shootings between 2000 and 2012. They found that the Times disproportionately allocated coverage to the highest-fatality shootings. For nearly seventy-eight percent of mass shootings included in the study, there were fewer than five articles written.

Coverage of mass shootings is often framed by the way a newsroom defines what constitutes one. Many newsrooms, and databases such as the Violence Project, use the Congressional Research Service’s definition: “A multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms—not including the offender(s)—within one event, and at least some of the murders occurred in a public location or locations in close geographical proximity (e.g., a workplace, school, restaurant, or other public settings), and the murders are not attributable to any other underlying criminal activity or commonplace circumstance (armed robbery, criminal competition, insurance fraud, argument, or romantic triangle).”

Other newsrooms have their own definitions. For example, CNN uses “a shooting incident that results in four or more casualties (dead or wounded), excluding the shooter(s).” Scholars argue that a less restrictive definition, such as the one CNN uses, is conducive to more accurate gun violence coverage. “[Media attention] gives our country a misunderstanding about the burden of gun violence,” said Cassandra Crifasi, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. “It over-accentuates these extremely rare mass shootings that are happening in these locations and underemphasizes the daily gun violence that’s happening, which clouds our understanding of what effective gun solutions are to reduce gun violence in our country.”

The Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy uses a definition for mass shootings that includes casualties in addition to fatalities. Their definition also removes the parameter that a “mass shooting” must occur in a public place. These distinctions are important, according to Crifasi, because they emphasize consideration of gun violence survivors and gun-related domestic violence in policy considerations. Crifasi said evidence suggests many mass shooting sprees begin inside the home.

In fact, during President Joe Biden’s much-anticipated speech on April 8 to address his administration’s gun violence policies, he too referenced the fact that some fifty-three women are shot and killed every month in gun-related domestic violence incidents.

“If we’re only focusing on the most extreme end of the spectrum, we’re missing out on potential solutions,” Crifasi said.

Based on her reporting for The Trace, Chavis has come to a similar conclusion: restrictive definitions of mass shootings have consequences. After the shooting in Boulder, Chavis said some of her sources in Chicago’s Black communities expressed feeling ignored by the media.

They didn’t understand why coverage is so different when gun violence happens in Black communities.

MEDIA

“It has very serious repercussions when public discourse around gun violence and mass shootings leaves out an entire portion of our society,” Chavis said.

“We as journalists have to reflect on the unintentional harm that causes.”

While national media outlets tend to omit Chicago entirely, local media “oversaturates” news coverage of crime without substantial discussion of context and solutions, according to Christopher Benson, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism whose work focuses on media responsibility and its role in shaping public perception.

Benson said that the daily coverage of gun violence combined with reinforced stereotypes about communities of color, especially Black communities, contributes to a sort of “detachment” from the violence occurring in Chicago. Lack of discussion about context, underlying issues, and possible solutions function to make gun violence an issue that many Chicagoans attribute solely to criminal or gang-related activity.

2018 study in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency found that when journalists reported a mass shooting was gang related, the perpetrators were generally people of color. Additionally, the stories referenced their criminal histories and framed them as being a danger to the public. When the shooter was white, they were nineteen times more likely to be referred to as suffering from a mental illness and that the incident was out-of-character or they were suffering from extreme life circumstances.

This “numbing down” or neutralizing of gun violence in Black communities makes it so that when mass casualty shootings occur in Chicago, they are less likely to garner the type of outrage seen in Atlanta and Boulder, according to Benson.

“Is there a difference between a mass shooting that makes national headlines and a shooting where eight or nine people are shot in Chicago? No, there is no difference,” Chavis said, based on her reporting with The Trace. “At the end of the day, you still have people who have either lost their lives to gun violence or

A

"While national media outlets tend to omit Chicago entirely, local media 'oversaturates' news coverage of crime without substantial discussion of context." they are now faced with a years-long journey to whatever mental or physical injuries they have from that shooting.

Trauma is trauma.”

The journalists, scholars, and activists who spoke to the Weekly agreed that something needs to change. Despite valiant and notable efforts from many journalists and local newsrooms, there should be an industry-wide reimagining of how to cover gun violence and, specifically, mass shootings.

Speaking to the Weekly in separate interviews, Benson, Chavis, and Bocanegra all emphasized the need for better community context, indepth reporting on underlying issues, centering the voices of survivors, and more discussion of solutions. While difficult to include all of this when writing wire reports or spot news stories on tight deadlines, Benson said it would be beneficial to public understanding for newsrooms to prioritize this type of coverage through enterprise stories or special reports.

“Nobody’s born bad, people are not born bad,” Bocanegra said. “Somewhere in their journey, things happen. It’s really important that as a society, we understand that not all of us have the same opportunities or level of access.”

“You have the power to control that, you as a reporter and your colleagues in this space.” Madison Muller is a graduate student at Northwestern University studying social justice journalism. She last reported on firstperson COVID-19 accounts from thirteen men incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center.

CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF AVIATION

SMALL BUSINESS INFORMATIONAL SESSION

MAY 11, 2021 VIRTUAL MEETING

10 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Come join the Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA) at the Small Business Informational Session and learn about upcoming opportunities and how to do business with O'Hare & Midway International Airports.

Presenters will provide information on the Small and Mid-Size Business Initiatives (SBI and MBI) and how they are designed to increase contracting opportunities. There will also be information on the 50/50 Payment Program, along with a workshop on how to get certified (ACDBE, DBE, MBE, & WBE) with the City of Chicago.

Businesses will learn about specific CDA projects, programs, and opportunities.

To register for this event, please scan QR code.

@fly2ohare @fly2ohare @fly2midway @fly2midway

/fly2ohare /fly2midway

/flychicago

APRIL 15, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEkly 15

JUSTICE

Sharone Mitchell Jr. Comes “Home” Sitting down with the new Cook County public defender.

BY KIRAN MISRA AND JIM DALEY

In March, the Cook County Board unanimously voted to confirm Sharone Mitchell Jr. as the county’s new public defender. Mitchell, the former director of the Illinois Justice Project, had previously worked for the public defender’s office for six years as a trial attorney handling misdemeanor, felony, and civil cases. A Chicago native, Mitchell attended Morgan Park High School and worked at Cabrini Green Legal Aid while at DePaul Law School.

Among Mitchell’s priorities in the office are challenging the norm of pretrial detention, instituting more comprehensive data collection within the public defender service to inform policy change, and ensuring Chicago residents have robust public defense in the courtroom. Earlier this year, Mitchell and the Coalition to End Money Bond succeeded in getting the Pretrial Fairness Act passed through the Illinois State Legislature. Mitchell anticipates the public defender’s office will be centrally involved in implementing the bill, which mandates major changes including eventually abolishing cash bail in Illinois.

Mitchell was one of two finalists for the public defender position along with Emmanuel Andre, an attorney at the North Side Transformative Law Center, and was chosen by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle to head the second-largest public defender service in the country for a six-year term. After the selection, Preckwinkle commended Mitchell as “a nationally recognized thought leader and policy advocate who has demonstrated the ability to lead regional reform efforts.”

Mitchell’s predecessor, Amy Campanelli, was not on the shortlist to serve a second term.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Why are you returning to the public defender’s (PD’s) office after working on the policy side of things at Illinois Justice Project (ILJP)?

What does “justice” mean to you?

I left the PD’s office not because I didn’t love the work—I loved every single day, going in and fighting for my brothers and sisters, my cousins, my friends, my family. It’s something I took great pride in. But as a public defender, I saw that we have a system that forces cases into plea bargains. Too often, I would have Assistant State’s Attorneys tell me that if I didn’t like the plea deal offer, to go change the law. I heard that over and over.

At some point, I thought, maybe I should go and change the law. So I spent about five years helping to change the law, and along with the Coalition to End Money Bond and ILJP, I had a pretty successful run in the policy space. I was always going to come back home to the PD’s office; it was only a matter of when. And I’m super excited to be here.

Part of what justice means is that your outcome isn’t determined by where you come from, what you look like, your sexual orientation, the people you hang out with, and that we are making decisions based upon the facts that are proven in court. And that punishment doesn’t come just based upon allegations, it comes when there are findings made through due process.

I think it also means thinking about the norms, and thinking about whether those norms work for our communities. I was born in South Shore, I was raised in West Pullman, and I went to high school and currently live in Morgan Park. And when I drive down Michigan Avenue, down Halsted, down State Street, I don’t think, “Man, all my community needs is more police,” or “All my community needs is people serving longer prison sentences.”

Nobody thinks that. Yet and still it has been the practice of our policymakers to offer that solution to our communities.

So for me, justice, I think is about really being serious about safety. It’s really being serious about confronting the issues that our communities are presented with. And not with solutions that only exist because that’s the way we’ve always done it, but solutions that actually work.

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 15, 2021

What are your immediate plans for the PD’s office?

I have lots of thoughts and dreams about where the office should go, but it employs almost 700 people—we have so many experts and incredibly smart people who have fought in the trenches against mass incarceration and wrongful convictions and permanent punishment. I think I would be disrespectful and not strategic if I didn’t spend my first 100 days on a

listening tour to talk to these people about the things we need to do to make the system better.

I would love to improve the way we advocate, the way we train, the way we collect data. One of the things I saw while working in the policy space is how data can change the way the system works. In the campaign to end cash bail, advocates relied on data to make these arguments.

They relied on data to draw the case out that folks who are Black and criminally accused often get larger bonds than white accused people. So I think we can make really strong policy-based arguments when we have data, and do the same for internal decision-making.

That said, our day job is defending folks in court. So we have to walk a balance: we can’t be spending so much time collecting data or doing things that are external to actually being in court, kicking butt.

But I’m really interested in how an improved data system collection, data collection, can help us improve the court system and help us improve our internal administration.

What are you hoping to focus on as inperson court reopens post-pandemic?

This is such an incredibly difficult time, because I’d like to say that we’re coming out of COVID in the next couple months, but we don’t really know how long it will last. So I think initially, our office stance makes sense that we need to be very, very careful of what we do over

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Zoom. Certainly, it makes sense for us to reevaluate our approaches to doing litigation on Zoom. All of this needs to be a balancing act. We can possibly get better outcomes for defendants from in-person litigation, but the pandemic means people’s cases have been held up. There might be opportunities to get people out of cages, or out of supervision of the state, if we are a little bit flexible in our approach. So I’m really thinking about talking to our deputies and talking to our leadership, about how we can best approach the situation. We are also hearing a lot of concerning things about electronic monitoring, about new types of electronic monitoring, and you’ll be hearing from us shortly about our thoughts on that.

During the height of the pandemic, your predecessor called for mass release and decarceration. Problems plaguing the Cook County Jail, such as poor sanitation, overcrowding, and guard misconduct will continue after COVID-19 is gone. What do you see as your role in addressing them?

Every single day, our attorneys, investigators, support staff are trying to get people out of pretrial incarceration.

The office wants to continue to be active in calls for reducing our jail population.

We’ve become normalized to pretrial incarceration and the idea that somebody can be accused of a crime, and it’s completely normal that that person will start to be punished before any piece of evidence has been put in. It’s just something that we’ve been trained to accept. And I think that’s ridiculous. The Supreme Court thinks that’s ridiculous.

In Salerno, the Court argued that pretrial incarceration should be the exception and not the rule. [Ed. note: in 1987, writing for the majority in United States v. Anthony Salerno and Vincent Cafaro, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, “In our society, liberty is the norm, and detention prior to trial or without trial is the carefully limited exception.]

So we fight that every day, and we will continue to look at creative ways to continue that work. And we’ll continue to

ILLUSTRATION BY SHANE TOLENTINO

work with our stakeholders in the State’s Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff ’s Office to see if there are ways we can work together to reduce the jail population.

How do you think you’ll be able to work with State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to push for reforms?

It’s a dance, because every stakeholder in Cook County can find ways to work together to help reduce the jail population,

and help bring more just outcomes to the system. I think the Pretrial Fairness Act was a great example of the State’s Attorney’s Office working together with the PD’s office and a vibrant coalition of organizers to get things done.

But that said, the nature of the beast is that we are in an adversarial situation.

So I think we have to walk the balance of always fighting hard for our clients’ liberation, but taking advantage of opportunities to make policy-level

changes to our clients’ benefit. As a person who has spent time working with SA Foxx, I’m excited to continue that relationship. As a person who has heard and talked to other stakeholders, I’m excited to work with them.

The success of the Pretrial Fairness Act depends, in large part, on implementation by adversarial groups like prosecutors and police. How do you plan to hold them accountable in your APRIL 15, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEkly 17

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“I know that the solutions that we offer through the carceral state and through the legal system have not worked to keep my community safe.” new office?

I think one of the benefits of hiring an advocate in our office is that they’re going to be willing to identify folks that are not doing it right, [and try] to push for doing better. The law is words on a paper, and certainly if we follow those words on the paper, we will get significantly better outcomes than we did in the past. But we’re only forty-nine percent of the way there.

One of the things about the Act is that decisions about whether somebody should be in or out are going to be much clearer. I’m excited to move toward a system in which that decision is made right, and it’s based on an evaluation of risk. And I do think that that will give folks on both sides a better understanding of how the system actually works and also more opportunity to hold stakeholders accountable if the system isn’t working the way the law dictates.

One issue that your predecessor’s office, along with that of the sheriff, was critiqued for was that not enough had been done to address the issue of sexual

harassment of PDs by clients or others in lockup. Do you have any thoughts about how to address this issue going forward?

I have colleagues, folks I grew up with in the public defender’s office with, that were subject to horrible sexual abuse, and it’s something nobody’s talking about.

We have to prioritize the health and the safety of our attorneys, and we have to listen and react when people say they’re in trouble. When people tell us about their work environment, we have to be reactive to the things that they’re telling us and we can’t just react in a way that passes the buck.

Do you personally identify as a prison abolitionist?

I’ve never called myself an abolitionist— but I’ve never argued with abolitionists.

I believe that the things that they point out about the system are completely correct. And I know that the solutions that we offer through the carceral state and through the legal system have not worked to keep my community safe. I think that too often, we have discussions about what abolition is, or what reform is, and that discussion gets in the way of really achieving substantive structural change that will stop people from being tortured, essentially, via incarceration.

I think that the work we did with the Coalition to End Money Bond and the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice is an example of folks who call themselves abolitionists and folks that don’t refer to themselves as abolitionists working together to significantly reduce the state’s power to incarcerate. So I don’t know how I would define myself. I just know that what abolitionists are saying about the system, I think is right. Kiran Misra primarily covers criminal justice and policing in Chicago for the Weekly. She last wrote about COVID-19 deaths at Cook County Jail. Jim Daley is the Weekly’s politics editor. He last reported on overtime earned by cops who raided Anjanette Young’s home.

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 15, 2021

The High Price of Family Law

Family law representation can be expensive, but resources in Chicago offer help.

BY COREY SCHMIDT

M

aria Nanos sees firsthand what happens when families can’t afford legal services or navigate the bureaucracy of the court system. As chief executive officer of Greenlight Family Services, their work centers on helping families resolve legal concerns around adoption and guardianship, and ninety-five percent of their clients are low-income.

One recent case concerned a single mother and her daughter. Both were living with the daughter’s grandmother as a family unit when, Nanos said, “the birth mother got this horrible cancer and so the family called [Greenlight] and said, ‘we want to do a guardianship plan if mom cannot make it.’” The family later got good news that the mother would likely survive her cancer and they ultimately did not pursue the guardianship plan. So when things took a turn for the worse, and the mother did pass away, the child was left in the father’s custody, which the grandmother told Greenlight was not what the mother had wanted.

“So now we have a custody battle, basically, where my attorneys are saying we are not going to win this case because the dad has every right to his daughter but it becomes ‘best interest,’” Nanos said.

“So it’s a contested case—nobody will touch those kinds of cases.”

According to Nanos, contested cases, or those in which litigants are on opposite sides of issues such as asset distribution, child support, or a variety of other issues common in family law, are rarely taken as

pro-bono cases or by low-cost agencies such as Legal Aid and Chicago Volunteer legal Services (CVLS). That’s because “it’s a lot more time and money for the attorney,” she explained.

In family law, a divorce is one of the more common forms of a contested case. In Cook County, there were 63,573 divorces and annulments between 2010 and 2016, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. The sticker price for a divorce in Illinois is between $11,000 and $14,000. According to the 2016 Justice Gap Survey, eighty-six percent of low-income Americans who had civil legal problems reported that they either had no or inadequate legal services.

As a result, some of these families utilize free and low-cost services such as Legal Aid Chicago and Chicago Volunteer Legal Services (CVLS). But while these services help guide low-income families, they remain limited in what cases they take.

Kathleen Walsh, a family law attorney in Bridgeport, said that she receives perhaps ten calls a month requesting help from families that cannot afford her services, so she gives them information over the phone.

University of Chicago student Eamonn Keenan saw a similar problem when he worked for the Greater Chicago Legal Clinic (GCLC) during the summer of 2019, which led Keenan to create SAEF (Support, Advocacy, Education for Families) Legal Aid, a nonprofit that helps match people in need

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ILLUSTRATION BY TURTEL ONLI

of legal help with appropriate services and resources. Clients fill out a survey about the nature of their legal needs online, and based on their responses, are presented with affordable options for legal representation. (SAEF Legal Aid is currently in the beta testing stage and is looking for people to test their program; information is available on their website.)

“The problem was that most of the

litigants that were coming to [GCLC] were either highly or entirely unfamiliar with the legal nature of their personal situation, which made it difficult for them to articulate...what they actually need help with from our attorneys,” Keenan said.

Often it was discovered that the litigant did not have the documentation needed for assistance or the legal issue

fell outside the realm of GCLC’s services, which include attorney assistance, advice, and support around divorce, domestic violence, child support, and other family law issues. After his summer experience, Keenan researched the issue of legal education and accessibility to find that many low-cost resources don’t diagnose what the client’s legal situation is or ascertain if their problem can even be

solved in the court system.

Once a client completes SAEF Legal Aid’s survey, they are directed to a legal service best suited for their needs, whether it be a pro-bono attorney or another organization like CVLS or GCLC. This provides a next step and contact, instead of leaving the litigant to call countless services trying to put all the pieces of the puzzle together on their own.

APRIL 15, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEkly 19

JUSTICE

“While there is nothing wrong with the sliding payment scale to help make [services] accessible to low-income residents, what we really need is a solution to income inequality in this country.”

But finances are just a small piece of the puzzle regarding legal disparities in Illinois and the United States as a whole.

Issues such as access to technology, limited education on legal issues, and language barriers are other legal accessibility concerns, according to Walsh.

“They’ve stopped a lot of community outreach in a lot of [low-income] communities [so] there are not services available if they need it,” Nanos said.

“Work, housing, education—I think that’s where the rubber meets the road. If you have those things, you’re pretty set. You’re going to have bumps, everybody does.”

Mitzi Ramos, an adjunct professor of political science at Northeastern Illinois University and lecturer at DePaul University, said such community education programs could be disappearing for a variety of causes, but emphasizes 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 15, 2021

that each type of organization, private or public, will have a different reason.

“If these community education programs were created by local organizations, then one might assume that they are disappearing because the organizations are dealing with a lack of resources (i.e. time, money, volunteers),” Ramos wrote in an email to the <i>Weekly<i>. “However, if the community education programs are spearheaded by the city, one might assume that city officials are not prioritizing the needs of these communities and opting to invest city funding in other areas.”

Walsh believes the court system is working toward limiting disparities in access to legal services. But the fundamental problem remains. “You have to be very poor or very rich,” Nanos said.

“If you’re very rich you can pay for [legal services]; if you’re very poor, a lot of the fees are waived”—but not the attorney fees.

Nanos and her colleagues at Greenlight Family Services have adopted a sliding-scale payment option to allow families that cannot afford legal services, but make enough money that their legal fees aren’t waived—the chance to have a fair fight in the courtroom without breaking the bank.

However, while the sliding scale payment model will help, Ramos said that it will not fix the overarching problem of poverty.

“While there is nothing wrong with the sliding payment scale to help make [services] accessible to lowincome residents, what we really need is a solution to income inequality in this country,” Ramos wrote. “We need to bring employment opportunities into low-income communities so that individuals not only have access to health care services, but so that they have the economic means to move up the socioeconomic ladder.”

When it comes down to it, finances make it difficult for organizations such as Greenlight to provide free representation to everyone, making some believe there need for a large-scale, systemic change.

In the last couple of years, the circuit court system has been simplifying the

process by putting standardized forms in place that make it less complicated for people to represent themselves.

The forms were developed with input from legal experts outside the circuit court system, such as Margaret Duval, executive director at Ascend Justice, an organization that represents genderbased violence survivors at no cost.

“The court has been creating standardized forms so that people are not drafting their own pleadings, that they can walk through the forms and they guide you through it so that you can answer the questions and file it yourself without an attorney,” Duval said.

She said that not all judges and clerks know how much assistance and education they can give to low-income families. But she also said she believes that Iris Martinez, the newly-elected Cook County Circuit Court clerk, will bring improvements.

“Many judges are artificially constrained in the assistance that they give to unrepresented or selfrepresented litigants,” said Duval.

“They feel that providing them with any type of assistance is unethical and inappropriate, [when actually], judges and the clerks are able to provide some legal information.”

According to Duval, the traffic of a particular courtroom, or simply a judge’s temperament, can make a courtroom inaccessible and unfriendly for a lowincome, self-represented litigant. She added that not all judges and courtrooms have this culture and there are some courtrooms that are welcoming and friendly to low-income, self-represented litigants.

“I think part of it though is not so much a lack of information but a cultural issue,” Duval continued. “To have presiding judges and the leadership from the chief judge to share that this should be the culture of all the courtrooms in Cook County, that would go a long way.” Corey Schmidt is a DePaul University student and an associate editor of 14 East Magazine. He last wrote about Illinois redistricting reform.

HEALTH

No Use in Keeping It a Secret An oral history from the exhibit “I’m Still Surviving: A Living Women’s History of HIV/AIDS.”

BY CORDELIA AS TOLD TO MAE AND JENNIE BRIER, HISTORY MOVES Cordelia is one of the narrators featured in the digital exhibition “I’m Still Surviving: A Living Women’s History of HIV/AIDS.” The exhibit presents the oral histories of women living with HIV/AIDS in Chicago, Brooklyn, and Durham. These oral histories were created using a participatory framework in which the women narrators interviewed one another, discussed the fullness of their lives before and after their HIV diagnoses, and highlighted the resources and relationships that allowed them to survive and build healthy worlds both within and beyond the medical system.

The following is Cordelia’s life story as told to Mae, a fellow participant in “I’m Still Surviving,” as well as the project director Jennie Brier. In order to respect their privacy, we are only publishing the participants’ first names.

I

am from a family of seven children— born and raised in Englewood, we’re still in the same house. And actually I was born in our home, that was when they had midwives. So I was born right there at South Peoria.

Before I was born, my other siblings and them used to live in the projects, in the Henry Horners. From what they say, they had fun. Only thing was they better not take their butt across Cicero.

Black folks could not cross Cicero. And then [my Dad] saved his money, enough to buy a home for his kids. At that time [Englewood] was a nice area, and it was just starting to be kind of mixed where you had some white and some black.

That was in ’63. Everything was fine—all of us went to school together, it was no segregation or nothing.

My parents provided for all seven of us to go to grammar school, they put us

through high school, they put all of us through college. My dad, you know, he was always a good provider. He put in an application at—back then it was called People’s Light and Gas and Coke [sic].

He started off the lowest man on the totem pole, worked his way up to digging to foreman to driving the truck. And he retired from there. My mom worked for a factory. He really didn't want her to work at all, he wanted her to just stay home and take care of the children. But she wanted to have—as she called it—a sinkhole, meaning not having to depend on my husband’s money.

My mom and dad were both from Mississippi and so they were kinda oldfashioned. They didn't believe in children out of wedlock at all, okay? And they didn't believe in us dating until we were sixteen years old. But of course, me being the baby and a spoiled brat of the six girls, I was sneakin’ around anyway. Around eighteen or nineteen, all of my siblings were away at school or this or that, and I was the last kid at home. And that kind of made me start wanting to venture out and be that fast little girl, you know, live the fast life.

I was dating a guy that was like twenty-five years older than me. Actually, he was my church’s organist. We were brought up in the church—me and all the girls were always in the choir. I ended up getting pregnant in ’82, which was the year that I was gonna graduate. I didn't want to go across that stage with a big stomach and especially trying to keep up the reputation of my family and the religion, so I secretly went and had a “D&C.” They weren’t really calling it abortion back then. After that, the same guy turned me on to drugs and I started

using cocaine with him. We were dating and he was doing whatever he wanted to do—long as he gave me some drugs, I was fine.

I would go back home, go back to my dad’s and mom’s—they basically provided for me, so I was never a street worker, I never had to get out there like that. And when I did graduate from high school, I went straight into working. I always have had good jobs. I was doing good things but bad things at the same time. That’s how I lost [my jobs], because of the drugs.

I would be tired and call in—“I can't come today”—and it just took a toll on me.

And then in 1992, it was around the time when Magic Johnson got diagnosed [with HIV], and everyone was kind of running to the little neighborhood clinics.

And I went to the clinic in Englewood because I knew I had been sleeping with a couple different people. They told me that I had HIV, gonorrhea, syphilis, and herpes. I just was like, “You gotta be kidding me!” And then people started calling those things a package, you know, like a package deal. And I'm saying to myself, “Wow, I really got that package.”

So then I felt like life was over; I ain't never going to be able to have no kids. I got real discouraged because I love children, I love my nieces and nephews.

At that point, I felt like I didn't have no reason to live. I didn't know that eventually all those things—some of them—could be totally treated and I would never see them again. And some would be treatable where I could live with them. Before I found out all that, I actually was doing everything [I could] to die…and wouldn't die. It seemed like the more I tried to die, the more I lived. God had another plan for me.

I'm like, “Okay, you still around for something.” So I started going to the women’s support group at Cook County Hospital. And we used to sit in that Radiation Center. It would be hot as a firecracker in there because there wasn’t no air conditioner, so we’d have a fan on and we sitting this close together, and we be sweating and we just be talking. It was just one big family. Because that’s all we had.

We had this little one group where we could get together and love on each other and feel, “Oh, I'm not in this by myself.”

Then they created the CORE Center.

[Established in 1998 as a partnership between Cook County Hospital and Rush University, the Ruth M. Rothstein CORE Center is one of the largest HIV/AIDS clinics in the country.] So I could go to a recovery group, I can go to a Women of Dignity group, I can go to an HIV support group.

I can do all of that at the CORE Center.

And I could see my primary doctor. The meetings and the groups worked for me.

I realized that I didn't have to be trying to kill myself.

From day one I told my mother [that I was HIV positive]. Oh my God, you could tell her anything. She was like, “Well, Sister” (that’s my nickname, Sister). “No use in keeping it a secret; it’s something you gotta live with now. You should just tell the rest of them, they’ll be understanding.” And me knowing the type of family and sisters that I had, I knew that they would handle a problem.

If anything, they would be catering to me.

I told them and that’s exactly what it was.

Still ‘til today they’ll say, “Sister, what’s your cell count?” Because now they are more aware about it, especially with one of my sisters being a doctor.

‘Til today, I’m surviving and enjoying APRIL 15, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEkly 21

HEALTH

“It was just one big family.

Because that’s all we had.

We had this little one group where we could get together and love on each other and feel, ‘Oh, I’m not in this by myself.’”

PHOTO COURTESY HISTORY MOVES

life. I got clean in 2011. I relapsed in about August of 2012, and I needed my sister the doctor to read me the riot act.

And my dad is now ninety-three years old so I'm his caretaker two days out the week. I looked at daddy like, well, “If I can't take care of my own self, how the hell am I'm going to take care of you?

So I’ve been all good ever since then, I’ve been good.”

My family is everything to me, they mean everything to me. It’s almost like a big party [at our house], because everybody’s got a car. There’s a big church across from our house, and a lot of people—when they pass by—

they think that the church is having something. Because you see like, ten, fifteen cars out there. But it’s just our family, it’s Saturday. The interview was recorded in 2015. Since then, Cordelia’s father has passed away.

To read more oral histories of Chicago women living with HIV/AIDS, visit StillSurviving.net.

History Moves is a public history project that presents underexplored aspects of Chicago’s history, led by Jennie Brier at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Its latest project is the digital exhibit “I'm Still Surviving: A

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ APRIL 15, 2021

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