July 22, 2020

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, photographers, artists, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 7, Issue 19 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editors Martha Bayne Sam Stecklow Deputy Editor Jasmine Mithani Senior Editors

Politics Editor Education Editors Literature Editor Nature Editor Food & Land Editor

Julia Aizuss Christian Belanger Mari Cohen Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Jim Daley Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Davon Clark Sam Joyce Sarah Fineman

Contributing Editors

Mira Chauhan Joshua Falk Lucia Geng Robin Vaughan Jocelyn Vega Tammy Xu Jade Yan

Staff Writer

AV Benford

Data Editor Radio Exec. Producer Social Media Editors Maya Holt

Jasmine Mithani Erisa Apantaku Grace Asiegbu, Arabella Breck,

Director of Fact Checking: Tammy Xu Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Maria Maynez, Sam Joyce, Elizabeth Winkler, Lucy Ritzmann, Kate Gallagher, Matt Moore, Malvika Jolly, Charmaine Runes Visuals Editor Mell Montezuma Deputy Visuals Editors Siena Fite, Sofie Lie, Shane Tolentino Photo Editor Keeley Parenteau Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Siena Fite, Katherine Hill Layout Editors

Haley Tweedell, Davon Clark

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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 The Collaborative Printshop at UIC’s School of Art and Art History

IN CHICAGO

IN THIS ISSUE

Obama Center CBA advances Despite Mayor Lightfoot initially not cooperating with residents of Woodlawn, Washington Park, and South Shore in crafting a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) that would protect them from the planned Obama Presidential Center development—and residents organizing protests, caravans, and even a "Lightfoot's Tent City" to show the city what displacement could look like—both sides had an amicable sit-down this week.

Twentieth Ward Alderman Jeanette Taylor and 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston are supporting changes to an ordinance from the mayor that would designate thirty percent affordable housing on a quarter of the vacant lots owned by the city. A grant program will loosen requirements for homeowners of more than five years. And the Department of Housing will seek $675,000 in federal grants to supplement $500,000 in existing funds to help longstanding residents buy homes in their neighborhood. Although Taylor's original CBA proposal pushed for thirty percent affordability for all new construction and the creation of a public trust fund, community organizers still call the negotiation a victory.

essential work: china smith and miracle boyd of

Voting for cops in schools during a pandemic More than seventy Local School Councils (LSCs) have until August 15 to vote individually on whether to keep or remove CPD School Resource Officers (SROs) in their schools. Northside College Prep was the first in the city to vote unanimously to eliminate cops in schools. In an advisory vote, Roberto Clemente Community Academy also voted in favor of removing officers. Pilsen's Benito Juarez Academy’s LSC—which voted unanimously to retain SROs last summer—became the first on the South Side to cancel cops in their school this week. They were also the first to publicly discuss the report from the Office of the Inspector General, which was not in the "LSC toolkit" that CPS provided administrators ahead of the vote. However, other South Side schools such as Goode STEM Academy, Kenwood Academy, and Corliss High School have voted to maintain a police presence. Many schools are still collecting input, while over a dozen schools with SROs have no LSCs or have LSCs without voting power. Now, CPS plans to have high school freshmen and sophomores only attending school twice a week in the fall, and upperclassmen doing remote learning full-time during the pandemic. Will the school board renew their contract with CPD in August, and would our tax dollars be used for cops to patrol nearly empty buildings?

The Weekly tracks state grants distributed to boost Census outreach jim daley............................................................8

Here come the outside agitators Two days after a violent confrontation at the Christopher Columbus monument in Grant Park, President Donald Trump threatened to deploy 150 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents to Chicago to crack down on gang violence and civil unrest. Many who have been following the military-style intervention in Portland, Oregon, after a series of protests, fear that the same unconstitutional practices will be applied here. The immigrant community is all too familiar with being the target of unidentified agents in unmarked vehicles who conduct overnight raids and what amount to public kidnappings. But most residents don't know the multiple agencies and units under DHS—which include Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—and the dangerous tactics they employ when they partner with local law enforcement. A recent report found that, in the past three months, ICE asked CPD to help them detain immigrants fourteen times, but police refused in accordance with the city’s Welcoming City Ordinance, which designates Chicago a sanctuary city. But last week, Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara sent a letter to Trump asking for help. The mayor said she would welcome a partnership with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). It's unclear what local protections there are, if any, for protesters and other civilians who could be the target of these outside agitators.

goodkids madcity

Two youth organizers on their fight to transform the city erisa apantaku & adeshina emmanuel..........4 op-ed: for roving cpd units, the third time will not be the charm

Superintendent Brown’s latest plan to curb gang violence has already been proven to fail emma perez & maira khwaja..........................5 what does reinvestment look like?

The promise and caution surrounding the city’s Invest South/West jonathan dale..................................................7 following the census money

people's media: resistance prints

Linocuts for the movement william estrada.............................................10 covid-19 contact tracing comes to chicago

Exposure or not? Explainer and visual game elora apantaku & erisa apantaku................13 history, home by home

“John Mark Hansen is willing to dive into all aspects of the University of Chicago’s role in Hyde Park.” sam joyce..........................................................16 browsing at a distance

“Even with local support, bookstores are struggling to break even.” guillermo zapata...........................................18 activists discuss healing justice as mental health

“This is the time to rebuild and to connect, and to redeem people of color and our dreams.” jocelyn vega...................................................19 a city of extremes

Comparing the COVID-19 pandemic with the 1995 heat wave elora apantaku & charmaine runes............22 crossword puzzle

jim daley..........................................................27 political cartoon: lightfoot and columbus

fernando delgado..........................................27

JUSTICE

Essential Work: China Smith and Miracle Boyd of GoodKids MadCity

Two youth organizers share their experiences with activism and trauma, and their advice for others

BY ERISA APANTAKU AND ADESHINA EMMANUEL

China Smith: My name is China Smith.

Miracle Boyd: This is Miracle Boyd. I live in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood.

CS: I am from the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. I am eighteen.

Last Wednesday, July 15, Injustice Watch and South Side Weekly released the first in a series of first-person stories of young Black activists in Chicago. In it, two youth organizers with GoodKids MadCity—China Smith, 18, of Greater Grand Crossing and Miracle Boyd, 18, of Chicago Lawn—shared what they’ve learned and what they strive to do as organizers trying to transform the city of Chicago.

On Friday, July 17, at the #DecolonizeZhigaagoong #DefundCPD Black Indigenous Solidarity Rally in Grant Park, Miracle Boyd was punched in the face by a police officer while she was filming a man getting hauled away by police. Over the weekend, a GoFundMe started to support Boyd’s healing

PHOTO BY DAVON CLARK

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

raised almost $84,000, well beyond the goal of $50,000. In a Block Club Chicago article, Boyd said she plans to use a portion of the excess money to fund therapy for Black and Brown women.

China Smith, talking to Injustice Watch about what happened to Boyd, said, “Black women aren’t protected enough.”

In the audio piece from last week, Smith and Boyd both talked about the huge toll structural racism and the fight to end it can have on them as young Black activists. Listen to last week’s audio story from Smith and Boyd at sswk.ly/ essentialwork-GKMC, read the full transcript below, and stay tuned for more in the “Essential Work” series, a partnership between Injustice Watch and South Side Weekly.

MB: I'm eighteen years old.

CS: And I am an organizer in GoodKids MadCity.

MB: ...Organizer with GoodKids MadCity.

CS: You know you're traumatizing yourself when regular actions and functions become triggering to you.

MB: I know when I'm traumatizing myself, when I start to overthink about the situation and just constantly think about it, because then I'm reminding myself of the trauma that just happened. And I feel like as long as I think about it, it gives me a chance to

not forget about it. I'm traumatizing myself every time I relive that moment.

CS: The chant, I can't breathe, for a proportion of time, it was really triggering for me. And I realized that being in these movements and constantly seeing Black death and just seeing the display of my people dying, it traumatized me. So sometimes when I hear people chant, "I can't breathe" or I see a shirt that says “I can't breathe.” I get a little triggered. One specific time, I saw a post on Facebook and there were these officers and they had shirts that said “I can breathe” and in that moment I was so outraged and hurt I started crying.

And from that moment on, it was just pretty traumatic for me. Not only do we have to see this constant display of Black death, this trend of a chant from a man who actually died, but people are making mockery of it.

It's trauma.

MB: Activism is needed in my community for the simple fact, there are a lot of things

PHOTO COURTESY OF CHINA SMITH

¬ JULY 22, 2020

JUSTICE

“The most important thing that I've learned over this time is that no matter what the dream is or the goal is, is to always go for it. Fight for it.” wrong within my community that needs to be changed. Poverty, gun violence, antiBlackness, police brutality, COVID-19. It's a lot of things going on. And then especially when the looting started, people were like only talking about the looting and I'm like, it's bigger fish to fry than just be worried about the looting that's happening. We don't really care too much of that because merchandise can be replaced. Black lives cannot be replaced. Brown lives cannot be replaced. Lives period cannot be replaced.

CS: Activism is needed in my community because it will help bridge the disparities that people don't even know about. When I learned about the gang database, I was like, wow, this is something used against us.

There's a whole database of suspected gang members. There's no actual proof behind all of this especially since a lot of Black people don't know if or when they're put on a gang database. That's something that we need to know about. And once we learn about these things and we know about these things, it will create outrage and that's what's needed.

We need to be upset that things like this are in place. We need to be upset that things like this can hold us back. And once we get that outrage, activism happens.

MB: Youth and Black and Brown people in the city of Chicago, if we all come together on one accord, despite the racial problems that people might have with one another, put that all to the side, because at the end of the day, we're better united.

CS: Those disparities can be faced if everybody works together.

MB: The most important thing that I've learned over this time is that no matter what the dream is or the goal is, is to always go for it. Fight for it. With this whole defund CPD, we're still working. We're still going to put that work forth to go out there and stop what we think is wrong because we don't want cops in our schools and the school to prison pipeline is real and people

just need to wake up. That's one thing that I've definitely learned.

MB: Another thing that I've learned is to always save money, because you never know when the rainy day is going to come and due to the coronavirus stay-at-home order, it was a lot of people that was misplaced and a lot of people are still misplaced even after the stupid government assistance that they were giving out because that wasn't enough and it's not enough. It never will be enough.

That's temporary money that will be gone within the next few weeks. People deserve so much better than what we're getting.

And that's just the truth.

CS: I've learned that I'm a human. I'm young. I am motivated, but I also have emotions. Being on the front lines of protests, constantly having to scream at people to get your point across, it hurts, especially when you see slow progress. I've just decided that the activism is worth it for me. And I think that anybody who is in that field, anybody really, but this is really to my young Black activists, we're human. We need to regenerate too.

CS: Thank y'all for listening to me talk.

Young Black queen, South Side of Chicago, I'm going to do great things. You're going to hear my name somewhere and it's not just going to be to eulogize me. It's going to be because I'm going to grow up and do big things. I'm going to fix this community. I'm going to fix as many communities as I can.

Y'all just going to have to watch out for me and the rest of the youth. We coming strong.

Period. Erisa Apantaku (@erisa_apantaku) is the executive producer of South Side Weekly Radio. She recently helped produce a piece on COVID-19 in Cook County Jail.

Adeshina Emmanuel (@Public_Ade) is an editor at Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, multimedia journalism organization.

Opinion: For roving CPD units, the third time will not be the charm

Superintendent Brown’s latest plan to curb gang violence has already been proven to fail.

BY EMMA PEREZ & MAIRA KHWAJA

C

hicago Police Superintendent David Brown recently announced plans to create a permanent, “anti-gang” mobile unit as a response to ongoing gun violence this summer. He faces a daunting challenge as new police chief: 2020 has already seen 353 homicides, compared to 254 during the same period last year— an increase of thirty-nine percent, CPD statistics show. To staff a new citywide unit, CPD will deplete the “gang, gun, and saturation” units of each of the department’s five Police Areas and assign them to a centralized unit. But his new plan to address the gun violence crisis is a failure of imagination and a denial of a violent history.

The history of past roving units weighs heavily on the proposed new division of CPD. CPD Former Supt. Garry McCarthy disbanded the mobile strike force—the most recent iteration of a roving unit— in 2011, and its predecessor, the Special Operations Section (SOS), was likewise disbanded in 2007 after evidence of abusive policing and corruption surfaced. Supt.

Brown tried to distinguish the proposed unit from previous ones by emphasizing police officers’ expected role in the community,

such as mentoring young people or helping senior citizens. As a means to overcome the strategy’s violent history, this reassurance is empty—particularly to those who have suffered the trauma of being “jumped out” on or “shaken down” by specialized law enforcement. Simply put: roving, anti-gang units encourage officers to use their power and subjective judgement to the fullest extent, exacerbating abuse with impunity.

According to Supt. Brown, adding a community-oriented component would make this plan “not your father’s citywide unit.” He’s right; it would make it worse.

First, a plan that puts children and police officers together in a community service or mentoring setting, increasing the interactions between them, only serves to further criminalize children and mocks the notion of community policing. In our work with the Invisible Institute’s Youth/Police Project, we have learned from multiple generations of students that cops-and-kids programs carry an undercurrent of deceit and uneven power dynamics. Where kids might see an officer not wearing a badge and uniform, playing basketball or chess, as an off-duty cop who can’t get them in JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

JUSTICE

trouble, the unstated reality to the kids and community is that those officers hold all the same power as they would with a badge on in their encounters—to detain, to arrest, to shoot. Anything a kid says or does can inform an arrest, and information a kid shares in a false sense of confidence can be used to criminalize them.

This unit is not to be confused with the Summer Mobile Patrol Unit, a force of up to 200 officers that was just unveiled in May and during summer months is deployed to crime hot spots, according to police spokesman Luis Agostini. Supt. Brown used the same community rationale to announce that unit. "We’re adding a component... to do some type of community service project as part of their workweek,” he said. “We don’t want them (to be) perceived, or in actuality, a strike force, or something that’s not connected to the community,” the Tribune reported.

Roving citywide units have a history we cannot revive in any iteration in good conscience. Some of the most corrupt and abusive CPD officers came from this very kind of unit. Consider the SOS of the CPD formed in 1998. SOS operated through the late 1990s and early 2000s as a response to elevated rates of crime and violence in the city, much like Brown’s proposed unit. SOS was meant to target narcotics dealers and traffickers. They were given broad deference to roam across the city to seize drugs and weapons in the name of public safety. With a blank check to reduce crime through whatever means necessary, SOS terrorized Black and brown neighborhoods in Chicago.

On top of being indiscriminate in their persecution of Black and brown people, officers in SOS were corrupt. They shook down suspected drug dealers and bystanders alike and raided peoples’ homes without warrants, pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars and contraband. Some of our city’s most notorious officers racked up dozens of complaints during their time in the Special Operations Section. Most of these complaints were for use of force or illegal search. These official complaints likely only represent a slice of the individual acts of harm caused by these officers.

S

OS was able to operate undetected for many years, in large part because roving, citywide units face very little scrutiny from the CPD. The scandal blew up because lawyers from the State’s Attorney’s Office informed the CPD that SOS officers were 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

ILLUSTRATION BY KAHARI BLACK

consistently missing court appearances. The investigation was not triggered by the CPD, but by the State’s Attorney’s intervention.

Because they are centralized units, the task of overseeing divisions like SOS often falls through the cracks of CPD’s supervisory structure. As evidenced by the high volume of complaints against officers in SOS, few of which resulted in disciplinary action by the department, CPD turned a blind eye to abuse from SOS reported by citizens.

Consider the “jump-out boys.” In 2003 CPD created an Enhanced Foot Patrol Unit, known colloquially, and notoriously, as the “Jump-Out Boys,” to patrol high-crime neighborhoods. The official unit was closed soon after, in 2004, but a similar “jumpout” initiative was created in 2013 under Supt. McCarthy’s Operation Impact. The jump-out boys concentrated their efforts in Black and Brown neighborhoods, stopping primarily young men through use of force.

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) published its findings that described the “jump-out” tactic. Officers in plain clothes or unmarked cars will often suddenly drive toward a group of pedestrians in a high-crime area, and then an officer is tasked to chase or “zero-in” on a fleeing person.

According to the DOJ report, “Some of the most problematic shootings occurred when that sole officer closed in on the subject, thus greatly increasing the risk of a serious or deadly force incident."

In a complaint made to the Office of

Professional Standards (OPS) in 2004, for example, one Chicago resident alleged that her nephew was beaten in the alley outside her West Side house by ten police officers.

According to the complaint, they jumped out of their squad cars, held him down, beat him with batons, stomped on him, arrested him, and put him in the paddy wagon, where they continued to beat him as they drove away. The complaint contains 141 pages of evidence and investigatory documents.

The OPS, headed at the time by current Mayor Lori Lightfoot, found that evidence insufficient and ruled the complaint was unfounded.

A specialized unit would give officers nearly unfettered access to random passersby, empowering them to stop, frisk, and criminalize Black and brown people.

Even without such a unit, officers do so on a regular basis by entering names into the flawed gang database. If CPD were to send officers into communities of color and task them with stopping as many “suspicious” looking people as possible, based on superficial markers like clothing or proximity to a hot spot, the gang database would be more overrun with the names of Black and brown people, including many innocent people, than it already is.

Headlines recently lamented the loss of seven-year-old Natalia Wallace and fourteenyear old Vernado Jones to gun violence. The loss of any life, and particularly a young life, is heartbreaking and frightening. In moments

of fear for our safety, society often turns to what it knows: police and violence. But Supt. Brown’s plan to address gun violence is an overplayed strategy that is doomed to fail, much like its predecessors. Brown has already attempted to quell the summer violence by putting 1,200 additional cops on the street. “Flooding the zone” is a tactic employed every year in the summer heat, and yet, our gun violence persists. Embracing an old strategy that has proven to lead to police abuse and impunity will worsen, not prevent or stop, violence in Chicago.

An uptick in gun violence and shootings of children points more towards urgent, desperate mental health and economic crises that need immediate attention and funding.

This crisis cannot be solved by police officers, whose objective is to put more suspects in jail.

The roving, citywide police unit’s directive is antithetical to the response needed to endemic street violence, as policing leads to a revolving door between poverty and jail that exacerbates gun violence. Creating a community service-themed reprisal of the “jump-out boys,” emboldened to criminalize based on their instincts, will not lead us to a safer future, but a more fearful and violent one. Emma and Maira work at the Invisible Institute, a journalism production studio on the South Side of Chicago. Maira and Emma last wrote about the treatment of detainees in Cook County Jail during the pandemic.

DEVELOPMENT

What Does Reinvestment Look Like?

The Invest South/West initiative lands small business grants along commercial corridors at a highly charged moment

BY JONATHAN DALE

A

t the end of June, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Department of Planning and Development (DPD) announced the first-phase winners for this year’s Neighborhood Opportunity Fund.

The fund, which former Mayor Rahm Emanuel started in 2016, awards grants to small business owners on the South and West Sides. Lightfoot has revamped the NOF, and is using it as a main piece of her new development initiative, Invest South/ West, with first-round grant amounts ranging from $8,800 to $250,000.

Invest South/West is billed by Lightfoot and DPD commissioner Maurice Cox as an attempt to “re-activate neighborhood cores,” highlighting and injecting resources into ten South and West Side commercial corridors and the neighborhoods they anchor. The NOF portion of the program will distribute among small businesses who apply successfully $10 million annually for the next three years. Of the thirty-two awardees from this year’s first cycle, twenty-five were located on the South Side, and sixteen of those were on corridors prioritized by the city’s initiative.

Money from the city comes at a crucial and highly charged moment. The coronavirus pandemic has decimated business, and civil unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder hurt South Side economic corridors and sent a strong message yet again that the city has failed so many of its Black and brown residents. Lightfoot, who remains steadfast in her support of police and isn’t doing enough to protect renters, has done little to engender trust. The city’s development gatekeepers must ask themselves how a path towards equitable development can be forged. How can Invest South/West

truly invest in the communities it purports to serve, and not become a tool for invasive private development, displacement, and gentrification?

The city has touted the promise of putting $750 million in public funding toward Invest South/West, and holding the purse strings is Cox, the city’s new planning commissioner. Before coming to Chicago, Cox worked in politics, architecture, and design, then served as Detroit’s planning director for four years. He is a proponent of the twenty-minute neighborhood, a concept championed by urbanist Jane Jacobs that holds that a community should have everything it needs within walking distance.

Neighborhood reinvestment, if done correctly, could be a start at healing decades of racist planning and reversing the alarming trend of Black depopulation from Chicago.

Cox believes that keeping Black Chicagoans in the city starts with reviving historic corridors like Englewood’s 63rd Street, which he refers to as a neighborhood’s “front door.” These commercial stretches are usually right off CTA stops, and he’s betting that more focused development around them will encourage activity and accessibility. “When I look over and think ‘where do we start,’ it became obvious to me that if we want to hold on to those residents who live in those neighborhoods, we have to give them the option to shop locally,” said Cox.

A

siaha Butler, co-founder of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E.), believes that the city’s planning leadership has a long way to go if they want to make lasting change. In Englewood, the only Invest

South/West neighborhood that didn’t receive NOF funding this cycle, “every single unjust system has hit our community.”

Butler views the city’s lack of active listening as a consequence of the same racist system that created the capital flight they are now trying to correct. “I’m not seeing tangible things. The things they are pushing, it’s not what people [in the neighborhood] have been working toward for the last ten to fifteen years. People are dying, people are sick, and this process doesn’t seem to be responding to those urgent needs. If you aren’t going to do anything bold and radical with Invest South/West, to me you are practicing white supremacy.”

What Butler and other Englewood leaders have been working toward is building out necessary spaces to accomplish the Englewood Quality of Life Plan II, a wideranging and coalition-built plan to stimulate neighborhood development. Go Green on Racine, a neighborhood-led project meant to align with the Quality of Life plan, aims to create a hub of resident-centered growth on 63rd and Racine. It will contain, as Butler puts it, “everything that is acutely urgent in our community right now”—a fresh market, workforce re-entry services, a health clinic, and more.

Neighborhoods targeted by Invest South/West like Englewood, Austin, and North Lawndale, through Quality of Life plans, are clear on what they need. “We’ve shared this concern with DPD, and other neighborhood Quality of Life plans have also shared their concern,” said Cecile De Mello of Teamwork Englewood. “We don’t want Invest South/West to operate outside… of the values and strategies [that] were created by the community.”

Cox and DPD are aware of these existing efforts. “[These neighborhoods] have gone through the deliberate process of planning—communities had already prioritized what they wanted to see, so that allowed me to move immediately to the question of implementation,” said Cox. To Felicia Slaton-Young, director of the Greater Englewood Chamber of Commerce, the city should be focused on “helping us to identify investors who are really interested in communities of color, like Englewood, Bronzeville, and Roseland.

We need them to help us market the vision of what [these neighborhoods] could be.”

Echoing Cox’s vision of the walkable neighborhood, Slaton-Young says every community wants to be able to “buy all the goods and services that we need without having to leave our neighborhood.”

Butler agrees that the city's main role should be identifying capital. “This infusion of capital and resources needs to first hit the pockets of the people in this community. It needs to be economic stimulation. Most of the support and capital for Black developers is not there.”

In South Shore, another Invest South/ West target neighborhood, Chamber of Commerce executive director Tonya Trice is optimistic about what Invest South/ West could bring to the neighborhood.

South Shore has high levels of commercial vacancy, especially along stretches of 75th and 79th Streets.

“Cox spoke with great admiration about Motor City Match, a Detroit program that links entrepreneurs in need of space with real estate opportunities,” said Trice.

Run by the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, Motor City Match has awarded $8.1 million to 170 entrepreneurs since 2015. Trice believes similar programs could be worthwhile for Chicago as well.

“There are barriers that hinder businesses from leasing space in our community,” she said. ”We need to find different ways to approach the problem.”

W

hen the city considers urban planning, large development projects like the Obama Presidential Center often attract the most attention. Invest South/West and the proposed OPC are separate projects, but inextricably linked. The decision-making surrounding both will determine whether longtime residents can reap the benefits of these investments or are left unprotected and priced out of their own communities.

JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

DEVELOPMENT

Commissioner Cox has his focus trained on the smaller scale projects that Invest South/West intends to support, under the philosophy that incremental development is more effective and crucial for long-term, measured neighborhood support.

“I think that’s what the community is looking for, they’re looking for ‘fill in the gaps,’” Cox said on the Fran Spielman Show, with projects like greening vacant lots or rebuilding existing housing stock.

In a perfect world, he said, incremental and monumental development efforts would inform each other. “Projects like the OPC are catalytic investments,” said Cox, but their effectiveness in boosting neighborhoods themselves relies on “position[ing] the rest of the neighborhood to benefit from that catalyst.”

“Development is going to come,” said Alderman Jeanette Taylor, whose 20th Ward includes Woodlawn and part of Englewood. In anticipation of the OPC, a coalition of neighborhood stakeholders in Woodlawn and Washington Park came together to push for a Community Benefits Agreement, proposed to City Council in 2019, with the intention of guaranteeing jobs and housing for longtime residents. Put forward by Alderman Taylor and 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston, the CBA was at first mostly ignored by Mayor Lightfoot’s Woodlawn Housing Ordinance, announced in February of this year. Earlier this week, the CBA organizers reached a compromise with the city when the mayor’s office and Woodlawn community groups announced an amended ordinance aimed at better protecting low-income renters. “People who don’t live in our community will want to come in here,” Taylor said. “So yeah come in our community, but you’ve got to hire us, you gotta make sure that we have a seat at the table when it comes to your development.”

Herein lies NOF’s potential promise. If neighborhood corridors are properly invested in before monumental development starts, then they will be in a position to harness the increased activity that something like the OPC will bring. The city leadership pushing

Invest South/West is hoping that direct financial support of small businesses will be a step toward empowering these corridors.

At NOF recipient CBQ Facial Beauty Bar in Bronzeville, Nichole Doss plans to use her $37,500 grant to expand into a larger space as well as hire more estheticians.

In Brighton Park, grant awardee Xavier Lebron received $68,000 to improve his bar, Xavier’s Club. He not only wants to upgrade his space, but to “change the area.” Lebron said, “We want to put a patio outside.

There’s a lot of areas in Chicago that have already done that, and I want to be the first in Brighton Park.”

Free Street Theater, the only performing arts organization to receive NOF funding, plans to renovate their Back of the Yards theater space. But since COVID-19 has halted live performance, Free Street is “also thinking about how that space can currently be in direct service to the community,” according to executive director Karla Estela Rivera. This summer, for example Free Street has set up a “grab and go pantry” to provide non-perishable hygiene products, masks, and art kits to residents. To Rivera, being a part of the Back of the Yards community means being a responsive advocate for it—and while the NOF grant is a boon, money from the city is welcomed with some reservations. “There’s a lack of trust when it comes to agencies that come in and are not grassroots-level,” said Rivera.

Butler, of R.A.G.E., echoed Rivera’s concerns about top-down, city-controlled development. “[The] community has very little input, and the input we do have, there’s always a circle we need to go around in,” she said. Her frustrations stem from outside entities believing they know what’s best for her neighborhood. “They could be better listeners,” she says. “They could really work alongside us, and not think they’re doing something for us. It’s with us.” Jonathan Dale is a freelance journalist focusing on issues related to the urban built environment.

He is a Chicago native; this is his first piece for the Weekly.

Every community wants to be able to buy all the goods and services that we need without having to leave our neighborhood.

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

ILLUSTRATION BY DENA SPRINGER

Following the Census Money

The Weekly tracks state grants distributed to boost Census outreach

BY JIM DALEY

L

ast summer, Governor J.B. Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) made $20 million available to organizations across the state to bolster Census outreach, and—after hiccups early this year—the money was distributed to thirty “regional intermediary” organizations. Roughly $11.6 million of it went to nine intermediaries in Chicago.

Each of these regional intermediaries spent a portion of the funding they received on internal operations and outreach, and passed on the rest to dozens of smaller community organizations. The goal of this arrangement was to ensure outreach money reached organizers who were closest to socalled hard-to-count populations—groups of people the U.S. Census Bureau officially recognizes as at risk of being undercounted due to economic and demographic factors, such as language barriers, housing instability, or an undocumented status.

The Weekly interviewed representatives from each of the city’s nine intermediary organizations about how they used the money internally and to how many partner organizations each one had given grants.

Habilitative Systems, Inc. (HSI) HSI serves communities on the South and West Sides, primarily Austin, West Garfield Park, North Lawndale, and Englewood. HSI’s CEO, Donald Dew, said the organization’s focus from the start has been on the “fundamental issue of the social determinants of health.” When COVID-19 hit and HSI began distributing personal protective equipment, they included information packets about the Census with the packages.

Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) ICIRR has three contracts with the state, which cover its operations in Chicago, the suburbs, and the collar counties, respectively; in total, IDHS allocated $4,839,000 to ICIRR across these three regions. ICIRR organized car caravans and phone-banking events that resulted in a five percent increase in Census response rates over a single week in Little Village alone, said Maria Fitzsimmons, ICIRR’s Census campaign director.

POLITICS

ILLUSTRATION BY JASMINE MITHANI AND PETER MEYER REIMER

Rincon Family Services (RFS) Rincon Family Services provides mental health and substance use treatment to communities on the Northwest Side.

Rincon’s Census project director, Ruben Feliciano, said that with the advent of COVID-19, the organization combined its Census outreach with distributing personal protective equipment to community and essential workers. “We have sought to think outside of the box...with the intent of engaging and encouraging as many people to complete their Census,” he said.

Community Assistance Programs (CAP) CAP provides job placement to unemployed and at-risk populations in twenty communities in Chicago and seventeen south suburban areas. CAP’s CEO, Sheryl Holman, said the organization was “very strategic” about how they distributed funding and closely supervised how partner

organizations spent the outreach money allocated to them. “There are a lot more people out there than we thought” who are hard to count, Holman said.

YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago The YWCA concentrated on reaching the LGBTQ+ community and those experiencing homelessness. The organization’s chief equity officer Martina Hone said that when the pandemic hit, YWCA “redirected funds to support Streetwise staff and especially vendors who had no market for their newspapers during the COVID-19 crisis.”

(YWCA acquired Streetwise earlier this year.) “We were able to pay them stipends to serve as Census ambassadors to those experiencing homelessness.”

focused on making sure children ages zero to five—a population that was undercounted in the last Census—are counted in this one, said Choua Vue, the organization’s vice president for community impact.

Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC) The Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Humboldt Park hired four part-time Census outreach navigators and a full-time Census program director. Jessica Gutiérrez, PRCC’s director of advocacy, policy, and community outreach, said “it was vital...to have community-based organizations there to provide comfort and understanding and empathy to communities that look like them and trust them as the main communicators of our Census count.”

analysis, data visualization, and program evaluation services to help other regional intermediaries track and focus their outreach efforts. Kathleen Yang-Clayton, a clinical assistant professor of public administration and one of the project’s principal investigators, said researchers developed an online reporting platform and worked with the regional intermediaries “to make sure they had a balanced approach.”

Pilsen Wellness Center (PWC)

Illinois Action for Children (IAC)

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)

The Pilsen Wellness Center serves ten predominantly Latinx community areas in Chicago and four in the south and west suburbs. Paul Naranjo, the corporate compliance director at Pilsen Wellness Center, said the money kept in-house went to outreach, marketing, and hiring a fulltime Census outreach project manager. ¬

Illinois Action for Children supports access to early care and childhood education. IAC

Researchers at the UIC College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs provided data

Jim Daley is the Weekly’s politics editor. He last reported on Census outreach by Chicago Cares.

JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

PEOPLE'S MEDIA

Resistance Prints Linocuts for the movement

BY WILLIAM ESTRADA

The Collaborative Printshop Course was made up of twenty students in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois-Chicago who focused on the creation of graphic images within a social and political context in order to amplify the stories and concerns of historically marginalized groups, with specific attention given to Chicago neighborhoods.

Using accessible printmaking techniques, such as linoleum cuts, students responded to the needs expressed by community organizations doing grassroots organizing to develop and distribute images that support their movements. We analyzed the work of groups such as justseeds artists’ cooperative, For the People Artists Collective, Chicago Act Collective, and other contemporary artists working with people to challenge oppressive systems as the inspiration for the work we wanted to create. William Estrada grew up in California, Mexico, and Chicago. He is currently a visual art teacher at Telpochcalli Elementary School in Little Village and faculty at UIC. This is his first contribution to the Weekly.

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

BY ANDREA REYES

PEOPLE'S MEDIA

BY SARAHI RODRIGUEZ

JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

PEOPLE'S MEDIA

BY RAVEN AVERY

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

HEALTH

COVID-19 Contact Tracing Comes to Chicago The city plans to add contact tracing to its arsenal in August

BY ELORA APANTAKU

O

n June 26, Chicago moved into Phase Four of reopening after initiating a shelter-in-place shutdown three months earlier to limit the spread of COVID-19. At its peak in late April, there were 1,400 new confirmed cases every day, but daily new cases now number around 200. Yet reopening to phase four, during which businesses are allowed to open—albeit with a number of regulations in place to reduce COVID-19 transmission— raises concerns that the city’s number of COVID-19 cases will again rapidly increase.

To limit that possibility, Chicago announced in late May that it plans to begin widespread contact tracing in August.

Contact tracing is the process of identifying and isolating people who have been exposed to a disease to minimize their likelihood of spreading it. According to Dr. Allison Arwady, the Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), contact tracing has thus far been limited to patients who have been in congregational settings such as correctional facilities, nursing facilities, group homes, and homeless shelters. (Some hospitals and clinics, such as Howard Brown Health Center, have been doing independent contact tracing for their patients.) An additional 100 contact tracers will begin work in August to help track cases, and the hope is to have 600 contact tracers and resource coordinators employed within the next three months. The goal for CDPH is to have contact tracers capable of reaching 4,500 new exposed contacts every day. This has worked well in other countries and there is hope it will work in Chicago.

Contact tracing, also known as contact investigation, is the root of epidemiology, the process of monitoring and preventing diseases as they affect populations. The earliest record of it dates back to the 1500s after syphilis arrived in Europe, likely brought there from the Americas by Christopher Columbus’s crew members.

Its use during the last century to contain diseases such as tuberculosis, STIs, measles— and more recently Ebola and Zika—was similar to the contact tracing used to combat COVID-19. In all these diseases, patients who test positive are interviewed to ascertain if any one of their contacts may be at risk of infection. Then those contacts will be called and interviewed to determine if they need to be treated or quarantined to avoid further spread. These diseases all have different modes of transmission and the recommended protocols for case investigations is different for each, but the goal is the same: to prevent people who are at increased risk of having a disease from spreading it uncontrollably.

In countries that have successfully reduced their COVID-19 case numbers, contact tracing played a critical role. In New Zealand, authorities began contact tracing almost immediately. Their approach was thorough: any contacts a person who tested positive had made in the fourteen days before their test were also isolated.

Additionally, New Zealand—whose population is twice the size of Chicago and is spread across an area 450 times as large— also restricted travel early on during their outbreak and achieved stricter lockdowns for non-essential businesses. As of July

20, New Zealand has had 1,200 cases and twenty-two deaths compared to Chicago’s 57,000 cases and 2,727 deaths. South Korea implemented a digital contact-tracing system it originally developed in response to the MERS outbreak of 2015 that uses a combination of smartphone GPS, credit card history, travel data, and medical records to inform citizens whether they need to self-quarantine. Amazingly, in a country of 50 million people that is roughly the size of Indiana, South Korea has only had 296 deaths.

The United States is unlikely to use digital tracing for its COVID-19 outbreak, given concerns regarding individual privacy and our lack of a centralized medical system. Several COVID-19 apps have been developed to help people keep track of their contacts, but without widespread adoption, they will have little effect. Both the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) have recommended contact tracing to slow the spread of COVID-19.

But whether and how to implement contact tracing is left up to the states. Illinois has received $326 million through the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act to address COVID-19related issues.

On June 11, the mayor’s office announced that it would be allocating $56 million from the CDC and the Illinois

Department of Public Health to create 600 new public health jobs, including 480 contact tracing positions, for the next two years beginning in August. As implemented, Chicago would rely on a group of contact investigators comprised of public health officials and volunteers at the CDPH to call individuals who test positive for COVID-19 and identify anyone they had been within six feet of for at least fifteen minutes within forty-eight hours of developing symptoms (or within ten days of a positive test result for asymptomatic patients). Investigators share a list of potential contacts with other tracers who work on contacting and informing them that they were at risk, requesting they quarantine for fourteen days after the contact occurred, and telling them where to get tested if they have or develop symptoms.

Coordinating the effort to get widespread contact tracing completed throughout Cook County is the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership (CCWP). On June 30, the City tasked the CCWP with hiring contact tracers through community organizations based in high economic hardship areas.

When Lori Lightfoot first announced the contact tracing initiative on May 26, she said that she’s excited to “expand health equity” in the city. “If we train up a legion of people from these same communities where there are health disparities, by virtue of the fact that they are involved in health care, their neighbors will know that they do this work,” Lightfoot said. “We hope that one of the residual benefits is … people understand they can be engaged with the health care JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

HEALTH

system on a preventative basis and not just when they’re urgently ill.” She also noted that high-paying contact tracing jobs will get more people from these communities into public health roles even after the need for COVID-19 contact tracers diminishes.

CEO Karin Norington-Reaves said the CCWP has already started working with several community-based organizations to acquire contact tracers to hit the phones by August 15, and plans on having a total of 480 tracers working in September. Training will consist of a basic contact tracing course at Malcolm X College with refreshers every six weeks on updates for contact tracing best practices, as well as public health topics from Malcolm X, UIC’s School of Public Health, and the Sinai Urban Health Institute. An additional 120 resource coordinator jobs will be managed by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), which also holds contact tracing contracts in Delaware and Maryland. Resource coordinators will help connect affected contacts with resources and support in their communities to help with issues such as testing and self-quarantine.

However, while contact tracing is an important means of curtailing the spread of COVID-19—especially because people can spread the illness even when they have no symptoms—it won’t stop the pandemic on its own. Ayo Olagoke, a community health scientist at UIC’s School of Public Health, said "combating this pandemic requires integrated measures, including cohesive leadership, strong communication, physical distancing policies, and preventive measures like hygiene and wearing face masks. Contact tracing on its own will not be effective, it requires a joint effort." She also noted that in order for contact tracing to be effective, Chicago needs to have easily accessible testing facilities. "The longer we delay testing, the more it weakens the effectiveness of contact tracing."

In addition to Chicago’s order directing arriving travelers to self-quarantine for fourteen days, the creation of a larger contact-tracing network is part of a large effort to help keep Chicago's COVID-19 cases down even as spikes are seen throughout the country. So, at the risk of occasionally hearing from unwanted telemarketers, make sure you pick up your phone in the coming months. Elora Apantaku is a medical doctor and writer.

This is her first piece for the Weekly.

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

Exposure or Not?

Figure out who in Amaya’s web of contacts was exposed to the novel coronavirus

BY ELORA APANTAKU AND ERISA APANTAKU

Solve the contact tracing puzzle using your knowledge of how the novel coronavirus spreads, or just basic math! Put a star next to the positive exposures!

Using math to find out who’s been exposed?

Contacts that add up to odd numbers are positive exposures. Contacts that add up to even numbers are not exposed. Don’t forget your order of operations: multiplication and division first, then addition and subtraction!

For COVID-19 contact tracing, a close contact is defined as anyone who was within six feet of an infected person for at least fifteen minutes starting from forty-eight hours before the person began feeling sick until the time the patient was isolated.

If you are identified as a close contact, you will be asked to self-quarantine for fourteen days after your last contact with the infected person. If you develop symptoms and test positive for COVID-19, you must remain quarantined for at least ten days after your positive test and until you’ve been symptom-free for at least seventy-two hours.

HEALTH ILLUSTRATION BY TURTEL ONLI

D. Darren had Amaya watch his pet cat Lulu last week. Two days ago, he went inside Amaya's apartment to pick up Lulu.

Amaya and Darren played with Lulu for half an hour before Darren and Lulu left.

H. Hilda lives with Carlos, her boyfriend. She has been working out at home and thinks it's ridiculous Carlos had to go out with his friend to work out!

But she's also happy he's having fun.

E. Elena is Brianna's roommate.

They have been sharing the bathroom and kitchen, but Elena's been pretty strict about not leaving the apartment.

She even gets their groceries delivered.

I. Isiah is Darren's landlord. He stopped by today to tell Darren that he'll only be asking for half of the rent next month. They talked without masks for fifteen minutes.

B. Brianna and Amaya went to a local forest preserve three days ago and ate paninis together while sitting on the same beach towel. They were wearing masks, but took them off to eat.

F. Felicia is Brianna’s pharmacist.

When Brianna went to pick up a prescription, they talked through a plexiglass partition and were both wearing masks.

C. Carlos is Amaya's gym partner. They worked out together inside the gym five days ago. Carlos’s legs still hurt.

G. Gary asked Brianna out on a date. They went to a bar together two nights ago.

J. Jasper is Elena's bandmate.

They decided to meet today for the first time in three months to jam out in Jasper's garage. The garage door was open and they wore masks.

K. Khalil is Gary's neighbor.

They talked briefly about their lawns while sitting on their respective porches.

L. Lionel is Isiah's partner.

They've been living together for fifteen years.

M. Manuel is Felicia's hairdresser. They were both wearing masks when Felicia got her hair cut two days ago.

Erisa Apantaku (@erisa_apantaku) is the executive producer of South Side Weekly Radio. She recently helped produce a piece on COVID-19 in Cook County Jail.

Elora Apantaku is a medical doctor and writer.

KEY: B) POSITIVE EXPOSURE; 7+26 = 3. C) NOT EXPOSED; 2+2+2 = 6.

D) POSITIVE EXPOSURE; 3+3+3 = 9. E) POSITIVE EXPOSURE; 16-5+2 = 13. F) NOT EXPOSED; 1+5+4 = 10.

G) POSITIVE EXPOSURE; 1x3x5 = 15. H) NOT EXPOSED; 2x2+2 = 6. I) POSITIVE EXPOSURE; 3x3x3 = 27. J) NOT EXPOSED; 5x5x2 = 50. K) NOT EXPOSED; 3x3+3 = 12. L) POSITIVE EXPOSURE; 44/11-1 = 3. M) NOT EXPOSED; 9/3+1 = 4.

A. Amaya started feeling tired two days ago. When she developed a cough and fever yesterday, she went to a drivethru testing facility. Today she got a call from a contact tracer at the Cook County Department of Public Health— she tested positive for the novel coronavirus! She's now a Person Under Investigation (PUI). The contact tracer needs to know who Amaya has been in close contact with. Help her figure out if she got anyone else exposed!

JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

LIT

History, Home by Home A new examination of Hyde Park and Kenwood paints a pleasantly thorough but incomplete picture

BY SAM JOYCE

H

is time in Hyde Park, the poet Langston Hughes wrote in the pages of the Chicago Defender, helped him understand how the luxuries of a wealthy neighborhood “can make people who live clean, quiet, library lives scornful of those whose lives are shattered by the roar of the el trains.” But even before white flight and urban renewal turned the neighborhoods into a bubble of wealth on the south lakefront, Hyde Park and Kenwood stood apart from the rest of Chicago, defined by their progressive politics, their role in Chicago’s history, and

the outsized influence of the University of Chicago.

John Mark Hansen, a professor of political science at the UofC and a longtime resident of Hyde Park, has taken on the ambitious task of writing The City in a Garden, a “chronicle” of Hyde Park and Kenwood published last December. He explains in the book’s introduction that the book is not a history, or at least that his purpose “is not the historian’s purpose.”

Instead, he sets out to “fulfill a resident’s curiosity,” guiding readers through the experiences of residents in past iterations of

the neighborhoods.

Accordingly, he’s prepared a book with an unusual structure. Seeking to “emphasize the ‘place-ness’ of our history,” the book moves through the stories of individuals and their homes, always identifying characters by the places they lived. The section on Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, for example, is titled “James Henry Breasted residence • 5615 S. University Ave.” Notably, this format mirrors Hansen’s popular historical bike tours. While he is a leading scholar of American politics, he is best-known on campus for the bike tours of

the South Side he hosts in the spring and fall. The tours visit a selected set of historical sites, where the riders pause and Hansen explains the history of the building and the people who lived there. His book proceeds

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5132 SOUTH WOODLAWN AVENUE This beautiful house differs from later Wright houses, with its high ceilings and large kitchen with 4 pantries. A National Historic Landmark treasure, the house is in fabulous condition and has 7 bedrooms, magnificent oak floors, enormous closets, stained glass windows, 4 fireplaces, new 2-zoned heating & cooling & a newly renovated elevator that services all floors. The third floor can be used as a separate 2-bedroom apartment. On a 75x165 lot, the house has a 2 car garage.

This beautifully updated four-bedroom Greystone, on one of Hyde Park’ s loveliest streets, retains many original architectural features: stained glass windows, hardwood floors, two decorative fireplaces, original built-ins and a grand staircase. Renovated bathrooms include one with a jet tub. The kitchen has white quartz counters, stainless steel appliances, extra storage and an additional breakfast area. Spacious bedrooms on the second floor have high ceilings, crown moldings and stained glass windows.

CO N TAC T U S AT 3 1 2 . 3 37. 24 0 0

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

LIT

from the book, but they will have an incomplete picture of more recent (and possibly more meaningful) events. It feels a little silly to suggest reading more area history after consuming 300-plus pages of it, but that may be what a full picture of the neighborhood would require.

Despite those concerns, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which I feel contributed to what Koehler calls my “sense of local citizenship.” As a Hyde Park resident of four years now, I could visualize many of the addresses Hansen mentions, and learning the history of the houses I’ve passed every day feels like I’ve unlocked some valuable knowledge about the place I live. My current residence doesn’t appear in the book, but learning that the house across the street was once home to the scientist who discovered radiocarbon dating adds something to my experience of Hyde Park. While perhaps not offering a comprehensive look at the history of Hyde Park and Kenwood, Hansen’s book includes thousands of similar details that have made my walks through the neighborhood just a little more interesting. John Mark Hansen, The City in a Garden. $34.98. Chicago Studies Publication Series.

359 pages Sam Joyce is the nature editor of the Weekly. He last wrote about three recent histories of race and labor relations in Chicago.

SPOILER ALERT! SSW GAME KEYS "Can You Feel It?" croSSWord Answers!

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jim.daley@southsideweekly.com

like the curve in Kenwood Avenue between 52nd and 53rd, remain unexplained.

Where the book falls short is, unfortunately, a consequence of the same format that makes it such an interesting read. It’s not a narrative history, which allows it to delve into some of the unique stories of neighborhood residents that would be difficult to shoehorn into a more traditional format. At the same time, this format can sometimes feel like a selection of Wikipedia articles, with only the faintest of chronological narratives offering any direction. The story of Jesse Jackson, for example, occurs first on page 322—for a section on his house—and again on page 344, when Hansen discusses the Rainbow PUSH coalition headquarters. The placebased method of historical storytelling also means that Hansen’s book contains little mention of the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe nations that inhabited the land before European settlement. While we know which tribes lived in the area, we can’t assign contemporary street addresses to any particular buildings, and so Hyde Park’s history is presented as starting in 1834, rather than including the stories of those earlier residents.

The book peters off toward the end: midcentury only happens on page 265, followed by the sixties on page 311. The late twentieth century gets seven pages at the end, and a final coda on Barack Obama is all Hansen ventures into the twenty-first.

Integration and urban renewal play out relatively quickly, and more recent history hardly appears at all. Notably, the book does not include a bibliography, just a selection of other resources, so readers interested in learning more about those specific topics will have to do that digging on their own.

These flaws don’t necessarily undermine the book itself, which provides an extraordinarily detailed history of much of the history of Hyde Park and Kenwood.

They do, however, raise some concerns about the use of the book, as Associate Dean of the College Daniel J. Koehler suggests in the book’s foreword, as a “companion piece” meant to “complement the depth of coursework, research, and creative activity taking place in Chicago” through the university’s Chicago Studies program, which offers a variety of opportunities for UofC students to engage with the city, from Chicago-focused courses and research projects to a structured certificate program.

A student newly arrived in Chicago may glean some useful historical information

O R D

into all aspects of the UofC’s role in Hyde Park, including those where the university comes across as a bad actor. The university’s major role in promoting racially restrictive covenants, for example, is a sordid and virtually unknown chapter of the UofC’s history that Hansen discusses in detail— attorney Earl B. Dickerson’s criticism of Robert Maynard Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the UofC from 1929 to 1951, for “placing dollars above human rights” echoes in current activist criticisms of the university. The role of the Klan in the neighborhoods, including a “klavern” reportedly based at the UofC in the 1920s, is another bit of history that the university may prefer not to discuss. The section on urban renewal gives fair weight to the displacement, and the racial disparities, created by the university-led program in the 1950s.

Kenwood, especially the portion between 43rd and 47th, also does not seem like an afterthought, as it often does in Hyde Park-focused stories. Hansen notes in the book’s introduction that Kenwood, split at 47th by urban renewal, is often divided into (white, wealthy) “Hyde Park–Kenwood” and (Black, poor) “Kenwood–Oakland,” a division he seems to successfully navigate.

Though most of the people and places in the book predate the racial transition of the 1960s, many are located in north Kenwood, and no neighborhood feels like it’s getting short shrift.

Hansen’s book is at its best as a repository of interesting trivia, often solutions to longstanding neighborhood mysteries. The large stone basin outside of 57th Street Books, for example, was originally a drinking basin for the neighborhood’s horses, while the numbers faintly carved above the doors of the Pepperland apartment building further down 57th are a relic from when buildings were numbered based on their distance from the lake. The fact that Martha, the last known living passenger pigeon, lived in the backyard of a UofC faculty member on 54th Street is another delightful bit of knowledge.

Much of this history resonates through the present: to this day, the northeast corner of 55th & Cottage Grove doesn’t feature any large buildings, thanks to the foundations of a cable car powerhouse making development too costly. While this can occasionally become tiresome—I’m not sure what I gained from learning that a toboggan slide existed at 44th and Drexel in the 1890s— Hansen includes enough details to keep it entertaining. Fortunately, some mysteries,

63

in the same way, as if he was giving a bike tour down every street in Hyde Park and Kenwood, stopping every few houses.

The book begins in 1834 with Nathan Watson, a farmer and tavern-owner who was likely the first Hyde Park resident of European heritage (his tavern was around East 53rd Street and South Hyde Park Boulevard). It then moves through the arrival of the Illinois Central Railroad, the development of the South Park System, the annexation of Hyde Park Township by Chicago, and the Columbian Exposition.

During that time, Hansen begins to develop themes that resonate throughout the book and offer some insight into how the neighborhoods function today. The history of Hyde Park as a progressive outlier in a city dominated by machine politics, for instance, first pops up in the form of the temperance movement (a favored cause of progressives), and Hansen quotes an unidentified source describing former alderman William Kent, “an inveterate foe of the aldermanic plunderbund,” as having “opposed the gang … at times almost single handed.” The Independent Voters of Illinois, established by Hyde Parkers in 1944, and the predecessor organization of the Congress of Racial Equality, created by activists in Kenwood in 1942, were another pair of progressive organizing moments that set the stage for independent 5th Ward Alderman Leon Despres and the election of Hyde Park’s own Harold Washington. That culture of activism is, incidentally, also why the Metra Electric exists: the Hyde Parkbased Chicago Anti-Smoke League led a campaign to electrify the line in the early 1900s.

Echoes of the present pop up throughout the book, though Hansen doesn’t always make the connection explicit.

Aaron Montgomery Ward (of catalog fame) led a legal campaign blocking the Field Museum’s construction on the lakefront at Congress Parkway in the early 1900s, with some obvious parallels to the fight over the Obama Presidential Center today. Ward, in fact, organized the lawsuit requiring that the city keep the lakefront “forever open, clear and free,” establishing a precedent that has shaped how we use lakefront space today.

I was initially skeptical that the book, published by the undergraduate college rather than the UofC Press and authored by a faculty member, would present a fair account of the university’s role in Hyde Park and Kenwood, but my skepticism proved unwarranted. Hansen is willing to dive

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Browsing at a Distance Bookstores adapt to business under COVID-19

BY GUILLERMO ZAPATA

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ess than six months ago, the experience of walking into a bookstore and browsing the shelves, being reminded of titles you’d been hoping to read, and becoming inspired to read others, was taken for granted by book lovers and booksellers alike. The “third space” a bookstore provided was in and of itself valuable, not just as space for commerce, but for community. Author events and other public programming connected readers to writers, and simply chatting with a bookseller about what was new and notable was a social act. But with the onset of COVID-19, and the mandated March 20 stay-at-home order, Chicago bookstores had to shut their doors to the public. Bookstores have had to adapt, and us with them. Now, with the city cautiously entering Phase Four of reopening, booksellers are still finding their way amid a new reality.

Norma Jean Henderson works at Powell’s Books Chicago, a store full of towering shelves stacked with used books on 57th Street in Hyde Park.

“Our store was always about browsing,” Henderson said. “We’re very old school. We don’t have a computer system where you can just walk in and ask, ‘Hey do you have this book?’ and we can type it in and say ‘no we don’t’ or ‘yes we do.’ We had so many books coming in and out on a daily basis, that for us to be able to put the books instantly online would be impossible. And so for us it’s been huge that the store’s needed to be closed and people can’t come in to browse.”

Sales in the store have been down at least ninety-five percent since Powell’s had to close its doors, and Henderson is unsure when it will be safe to reopen to the public.

The bookstore’s shelves are closely arrayed, and she doubts that they could be moved to make social distancing possible in the store.

They haven’t been moved since the store opened fifty years ago, an anniversary that Norma regrets missing. For now, they are relying on online sales.

Powells, which is part of the 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

independent Portland, Oregon-based chain, has a warehouse of more than two million new and used books to draw from, and an infrastructure for shipping that made the transition to online bookselling relatively simple. Other stores, like Hyde Park’s Seminary Co-op, had to rearrange shelves and furniture in order to create a makeshift shipping warehouse to process the increased volume of online orders, which even after a total drop in sales of thirty-eight percent, have gone up eleven-fold since the start of the pandemic. (Full disclosure: I worked at the Seminary Co-op for the past year as a bookseller.) Meanwhile, Frontline Book Publishing, a Rastafari and Pan-African publisher, has a storefront in Hyde Park but does much of their business as a thirdparty seller through Amazon. The store had at least three or four weeks in which they sold nothing at all, due to books not being classified as an essential item and thus not able to be shipped per an emergency Amazon policy prioritizing some products (such as cleaning products and shelf-stable food) over others, like books.

By mid-April that policy was rescinded and now Sekou Sankara, Frontline’s owner, says that thanks to the George Floyd protests and the consequent spike in awareness of racial injustice, there has been a surge of interest in Black literature that he hasn’t seen since the mid-90s. He believes it is especially important to Black youth in the city of Chicago who are trying to learn about themselves and Black culture, and who he has seen begin to frequent his stores. Since May, sales and foot traffic have increased by fifty percent.

“You have more people taking time to read and to find out who they are. So people want to read James Baldwin; they want to read Toni Morrison; they are trying to find themselves in terms of who they are, and as people, and where they first came from,” Sankara said. “If you want to find yourself as a Black person, as an African born in America, you’re gonna find that in a book

about yourself, and the only way you’re gonna find that in a book about yourself you gotta go to a Black bookstore.”

Frontline Publishing manages two other stores in addition to the main space in Hyde Park: an Evanston outpost that has been closed indefinitely since December; and Frontline Books and Kultural Emporium, which opened on December 26, 2019, at 63rd and Cottage Grove. On June 14, the Kultural Emporium experienced a break-in and a friend of the store launched a GoFundMe to try and recoup their losses.

Both Chicago stores have continued selling books and cultural items such as Black Lives Matter T-shirts while adhering to safety guidelines.

Bookstores have not only continued serving as resources for education and self-discovery during the pandemic. Ryan Jackson is the managing director at Open Books, a nonprofit bookstore and literacy organization with locations in Pilsen and the West Loop, that works to get books into the hands of kids.

Before the pandemic, Open Books also worked to get books into classroom libraries, but with schools closed they’ve had to rethink their entire model. Now, as the pandemic progresses, they are shifting their focus to home libraries—in other words, the personal book collections of children.

“We’re going to end up focusing on home libraries a lot more next year because if people don’t feel safe going to libraries and people don’t feel safe in schools, who knows what they’re going to do in fall with the schools—we just don’t know,” Jackson said.

“But we do know that if we can get books into under-resourced communities’ homes, that is an effective, impactful thing for us to do. So we’re going to change our focus to make sure that we can do that.”

This spring, Open Books started working with CPS meal sites to give books to families when they’re picking up food, and the organization has set up a way for supporters to donate money or buy books

directly for kids through their website.

Jackson isn’t certain if the extra community attention was because of the pandemic, but so far their Gift of Books campaign has raised $11,000, which helped them buy 2,800 bilingual and culturally relevant books for kids on the South and West Sides.

Still, even with local support, bookstores are struggling to break even.

Jeff Deutsch, the director of the Seminary Co-op (and sister store 57th Street Books), said that the pandemic has just exposed faults in what has been a largely dysfunctional industry for the past couple of decades. It’s well known among booksellers that bookstores have been struggling, just as all retail has, to compete with Amazon and other online retailers. Bookselling in particular has very thin margins and different constraints when it comes to merchandise.

“The experience of a bookstore is about having thousands of books to look at, and you find the one that’s right for you, and that’s just a completely different model from every other retailer,” Deutsch said. “So, you can’t scale it. It doesn’t work the way that other retail works—the way you would buy a pallet of socks, or a pallet of umbrellas, you can’t do that with books.

“Now more than ever,” he said, “publishers and booksellers need to reimagine what they do. Let’s start now having those conversations and let’s see if we can’t answer the question of ‘How would we build this industry if it started today?’” he said. “The urgency is at its peak, and I think it’s only going to get worse. Because we’re not built to recover from a day’s worth of lost sales, much less a week’s worth, and what so many of us are struggling with in our personal lives, whether it’s a missed bill, rent, a mortgage payment, tuition, whatever expenses it is that all of us are struggling with that’s the case for institutions as well, and we’re not built to come back from that.”

Instead, Deutsch has been advocating for a new business model.

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“For us, the not-for-profit model makes a lot of sense. We are a cultural institution.

We’re interested in alternative forms of funding. We’re interested in changing the conversation within the industry about what bookstores’ roles are. We recognize that buying books used to be the primary role a bookstore would play, i.e., getting a book from a publisher to a reader. Now, it’s much more about the discovery of books and the experience of being in a place created to facilitate browsing, which is its own deeply fulfilling endeavor, and to find ways to support that, recognizing the retail part is broken, and it’s some mix of changing how the industry think about themselves, how readers think about themselves, and in some sense how municipalities think about themselves.”

The idea is not unique. In 2018, the city of San Francisco gave cash grants totaling $103,000 to local bookstores because of their civic importance as gathering places, and it’s something that Deutsch discussed in an interview with Block Club Chicago as inspiration for and justification of the Seminary Co-op’s new nonprofit model.

Pilsen Community Books, a newand-used bookstore on 18th Street, had just reopened as a worker-owned co-op in March, mere weeks before the stay-at-home order was issued. Mandy Medley, one of the owners, spoke to me about the experimental nature of their business and how risky that experiment has turned out to be with COVID-19.

As a co-op, each worker owns a stake in the business; each earns a base wage, and then based on the amount of their stake, receives a percentage of store profits.

With COVID-19 they have been able to break even and pay base wages, but Medley is unsure whether they will turn a profit anytime soon. One of the co-owners has already had to step away due to financial concerns, but the rest of the staff has kept working, invested in their vision for the store.

Many of the booksellers I spoke to expressed this same sense of civic mission, such as Paragon Book Gallery, an art book retailer located in the Zhou B. Art Center in Bridgeport.

“Publishing and bookselling is proving to be a labor of love,” the team at Paragon said in a statement. “It has been tough economically, and we have been much more dependent on online book sales, but we remain committed to our mission as a cross-cultural resource, promoting respect

ILLUSTRATION BY GREG ROGERS

and understanding between international communities.” As the city moves cautiously into Phase 4, bookstores are continuing to adapt. Some, such as Open Books or Pilsen Community Books, are even opening their doors, though neither is sure how long that will last if cases of COVID-19 begin to rise again in Chicago. Both are taking precautions: limiting the amount of customers in the store, making hand sanitizer available at the door, installing sneeze guards at registers, sanitizing surfaces regularly, and requiring that customers wear masks. Pilsen Community Books is also instituting a policy where books that are removed from the shelves are put into a box

so they can be sanitized by employees before being reshelved.

Other stores will keep their doors closed for now, either because they can’t physically rearrange their stores to make them safe for both customers and staff, or because—with the added costs of shipping, curbside pickup, delivery, and the staffing that all requires— operating an open storefront as well would be cost prohibitive. Whether or when they’ll reopen, they don’t know.

Build Coffee in Woodlawn, which sells books and zines in addition to coffee, recently reopened for window pickup of coffee beans, bread, and books on Saturdays during the 61st Street Farmers Market.

Co-owner Hannah Nyhart sounded a note of hope.

“Think about what you want to see on the other side of this, and throw your weight behind that, whether it’s a neighborhood spot you love, or a community, or a movement,” Nyhart said.”The things we protect and sustain right now are going to be what we have to build off of in a year, and nobody can do it alone. ” Guillermo Zapata grew up in Athens, Georgia and attended the University of Chicago. This is their first contribution to the Weekly. They are working on their first book.

JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

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Activists Discuss Healing Justice as Mental Health As part of the Healing Justice Retreat Series, activists talked about the vulnerabilities communities face during COVID-19 and envisioned transformative futures

BY JOCELYN VEGA

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n June 13, Alternatives to Calling the Police During Mental Health Crises and the #LetUsBreathe Collective co-hosted the online event Dialogue: Surviving COVID-19 Pandemic and Mental Health Crises as part of the Healing Justice Retreat Series. The monthly sessions center Black, Indigenous, and People of Color activists, healers, and health care practitioners. In this space, session participants and community members can share their lived wisdom and knowledge in relation to social justice and the decriminalization of mental health, said Euree Kim, the co-founder of Alternatives to Calling the Police During Mental Health Crises.

“It is really important to talk about the mental health needs and challenges, especially during this time,” Kim said.

“Often this is not being talked about a lot, and even if it happens, it often centers a very white perspective without considering the many factors affecting [our] communities.”

Damayanti Wallace, an activist with GoodKids MadCity, moderated the open discussion with members of Assata’s Daughters, Brave Space Alliance, the Chicago Torture and Justice Center, and Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD). Miguel Lopez, an OCAD organizer who was scheduled to attend, was unable to do so after his brother was deported by ICE just days before, so a fellow member stepped in as a panelist.

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

While organizing the event, Kim stressed the importance of hearing personal stories about surviving COVID-19 as opposed to merely reading analytics. In that context, “we can feel that voice and how many people are affected by COVID-19,” they said. “We can make a virtual connection.”

Wallace kicked off the event by asking panelists how the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted their overall mental health and what their biggest struggles had been.

The impact of COVID-19 on mental health “didn’t start to kick in until like a few weeks later when I realized that I couldn’t exist as I normally do,” said Brittney Thomas, the director of programs at Brave Space Alliance. “I was just reaching a point of security and ability in my personal life [before] stuff hit the fan.”

Many of the panelists described similar emotional and personal breaks in life, social foundations, routines, and safety as they watched COVID-19 spread at alarming rates, along with the recent uprisings against police brutality and oppression. Combined with the mental health crisis COVID-19 can trigger, these events seemed to cascade all at once.

Theodora (Theo) Cunningham, revolutionary support coordinator at Assata’s Daughters, paused and explained how COVID-19 had only intensified existing struggles. “[In] February and before, I had a lot of life going on, [and] it was not rosy— not easy by any means,” she said. “And

ILLUSTRATION BY EUREE KIM

then, we have March, which was bad shit, COVID.... And, then of course in the last couple of weeks, we got bad shit—tonguein-cheek I’ve been saying bad shit, race war.”

Overlapping social injustices have been disorientating for many who were struggling with balance and survival against disproportionate disparities even before the pandemic hit. Now, COVID-19 has pushed many communities into a busy intersection where marginalization is gaining speed against individuals who are impacted from nearly all corners, Cunningham said.

“I realized that the things that I needed to sustain my well-being were being altered significantly,” Thomas said.

And not only that, but there’s a pandemic disproportionately impacting Black people, and then the uprisings. My anxiety has been through the roof, but I’ve been trying to be honest about how my body is responding to the things happening around me, and its impacts on well-being and safety.”

Over time, COVID-19 took shape as it reached closer to communities and individuals. The pandemic shifted from being faceless numbers and statistics to names and personal connections between shared lives.

“I had to have tough conversations with my parents about staying home from

work, even though for a lot of people that’s actually not an option,” said Irene Romulo, a community organizer at OCAD. “As a child of immigrant parents who don’t speak English, and don’t have a lot of knowledge of how hospitals work, I took on a lot of the work of figuring that shit out,” she said.

“And also having to talk to my dad to try to get him to tell me what he felt, what he was experiencing. When we first had to take him to the hospital, he would not admit to being sick, that he couldn’t breathe, or that he wasn’t feeling well. When the ambulance came, they didn’t want to take him.”

Romulo said her father wound up in the intensive care unit, a couple of other family members also became sick, and her grandfather passed away from COVID-19.

“It's been a really difficult time for a lot of us, I think, just having to deal with the grief that comes from watching so many people around you having to deal with unknowns and having to deal with death,” she said.

Many panelists also described living in a state of both knowing and not knowing when dealing with the constant worry of COVID-19 possibly killing their loved ones. Discussing her father’s hospitalization, Cunningham said “trying to coordinate his medical care without being able to go in the building...a Black man is in there without

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an advocate, is very stressful.”

“It's challenging for us to change our whole way of life, and it’s not based on change for good. It's based on change [where] you could die,” said LaTanya Jenifor Sublett, a Survivors and Family Advisory Council member at the Chicago Torture Justice Center.

“I am formerly incarcerated, so to be free is really difficult,” Sublett said. “You tell yourself for years, ‘if I just make it out of this.’

You become your own kind of superhero.

Then, for COVID to come, restrict your movement, and restrict how you live. There is something that goes on in your head. How am I free? And I can’t go anywhere? There’s a chance I can go somewhere, become ill, and die.”

Within a few months, COVID-19 transformed from distant information about a global pandemic to insurmountable human loss and grief. Collapsing aspects of life are being upheld in a tight balance between the pandemic’s unfolding impact and a shifting world.

Wallace then asked the panelists how they and their communities are supported, and which of their needs were not being met.

Sublett said she has to go outside of her South Shore community for resources.

“If we had those things to begin with, we wouldn’t see the disparity in the lives that we live,” she said. “But it takes a crisis for us to finally say we never had it, they never wanted us to have it and so now we have to create it.

“The South Shore area needs some help.

And I’m also exhausted,” she added.

Cunningham said the lack of resources in communities is a reflection of the “flaws of capitalism,” and Romulo described it as a “failure of capitalism and how we can’t depend on the institutions that exist for our care.” COVID-19 has demonstrated how Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities are intentionally cut from institutional lifelines: the pandemic’s timeline is a reflection of historical inequalities in the U.S. “I see a lot of folks blaming people who are out on the street corners hanging out without masks, or who are out in the alley, drinking with their friends, or, who are out gathering in groups, but sometimes I think we may forget that for a lot of people that’s their way of dealing with all of this pain,” Romulo said. “Not everybody has access to therapists or spaces where they can share their feelings openly and be vulnerable or

even have a place to be. They don't have a home where they can just be by themselves in their thoughts or even being alone... often the way that our care or our mental healthcare looks like is being in groups of people.”

The historical denial of institutional resources and environmental stability both contribute to the lack of lifelines for communities to address pain and seek support. “Historically, Black communities are underserved and under-resourced, and seeing community members have to try to figure out how to survive during a pandemic has been very difficult to watch,” Thomas said. Cunningham added, “Black communities and support don’t often go together and that is a fundamental issue.”

The panelists discussed not only factors but also ways Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities live with marginalized foundations as underlying conditions during COVID-19.

People literally cannot work and also, therefore, can't provide for themselves and their families, and that’s not their fault,” Cunningham said. “Capitalism has created that mythology that it is personal responsibility.”

“We should already have access to all the things that we need, even before this pandemic,” Romulo added. “Not even the jobs that we should have—I am talking about the things that we need to live without having to work. All of this just shows all of the gaps that our communities have experienced for so long.”

“I feel like this moment is going to radicalize a lot of people because we’re realizing a lot of the things that the government has been telling us we can’t get, they exist,” Thomas said. “These things do exist. And the only reason they haven’t been happening is because they didn’t want [them] to.”

Romulo said that despite lack of institutional accountability, people are stepping up to fill in voids of critical care.

“We know what we need and the help to provide that,” she said. “But it sucks to see that people, with the least monetary resources, are the ones that take out their last five dollars that they have and give it to somebody else who needs it [the] most. And that's beautiful to see, but it also sucks that that’s what we need to do.”

“It's been really beautiful to see the amount of mutual aid and people shifting their language to be community-oriented and

really pouring into communities,” Thomas added. “I don’t want to see it die down once the pandemic has passed. I definitely want people to be more encouraged and inclined to support their communities and remove themselves from this individualistic mindset that a lot of Americans have. So, I hope we continue to use this wonderful mutual aid language and continue to support our community members and not rely on people outside of those communities to do it for us.

I really hope that folks push for our divine, human right to have the things that we need to sustain our well-being,” Thomas said. “Nobody should be able to dictate who gets that right.”

As the final question, Wallace asked what panelists and their communities currently need, what support strategies should be continued, and what new ones should be developed.

“When I drive down 79th Street on the East Side, I look at what could be businesses and [see] that it’s all torn down,” Sublett said. There are places where individuals could live, that are boarded up. I think my community needs a chance.”

As additional resources dwindled, Cunningham noted, the city closed mental health clinics. She said she perceives people’s behaviors as a reflection of our environments and relations in communities that we witness. “There is a whole lot of trauma and for as many humans as there are on earth there are also that many number of trauma responses. It may look like really isolating and going into yourself and not talking to people; it may look like lashing out; it may look like not really wanting to focus on emotions. It may be to cry and to really feel those emotions,” she said. “As we’re moving and interacting with each other, everybody to some extent is in their trauma body.”

Despite the pressure of surviving a pandemic, economic deprivation, mental health crises, and widespread inequality, the panelists agreed that current dynamics have the potential to lead to community driven, transformative futures.

“My community needs a chance to say, ‘let's start over, let's rebuild,’” Sublett said. “It’s enough money, and it’s enough dreams and there are enough skills in the communities of People of Color and for us to change the whole world. I know this. I know that we could be so self-sufficient…. This is the time to rebuild and to connect, and to redeem people of color and our dreams, in our communities, and for our communities.”

Seeing the current moment as an opportunity to rebuild, Romulo said, “What we’re seeing is making the call for abolition even stronger. And remembering that doesn't just mean getting rid of the carceral state and the prison industrial complex, but actually investing, building, imagining, and creating all of the things that we need to take care of each other and to really thrive.”

She added, “Even if you don't call it abolition or you don't define yourself as an abolitionist, what we're experiencing makes those needs more real. We don't need all these systems to continue incarcerating, deporting, or everything that has led us to this point.”

“Seeing the benefits of widespread mutual aid is so beautiful,” Thomas said.

“People not relying [on] these systems and institutions that exist to help sustain them has been the most wonderful thing to see.

And I’m so happy there’s so many people realizing that it’s all shit.”

Toward the end of the event, Thomas delivered the takeaway message: “Abolition Now. Defund the Police. All Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. Abolish ICE. Black Trans Women Matter. Protect Black Trans Women. I would like to see folks stop excluding Black LGBTQ+ folks from the social justice movements because they have contributed a shit-ton over the years. They are always at the forefront fighting.

“And if we’re all fighting the state, and if we’re all in this together, if we want liberation for all Black folks, we cannot exclude Black LGBTQ+ folks because they are Black people that exist as well,” Thomas said. “And so I just really want to add that to the conversation, I want to push people to talk about that more and be more supportive of Black trans women because their life expectancy is 35 years old. And it’s simply because they’re being brutally murdered for existing. And that is not something that should be ignored and more people need to talk about it and more people need to acknowledge, support, and uplift organizations that have Black trans women in leadership roles, because it’s not common, and it’s bullshit that it’s not because Black trans people have contributed a shit ton to movements over the years.” Jocelyn Vega is a tree hugger and contributing editor to the Weekly. She last wrote about how three Black-led organizations are organizing power and healing during COVID-19.

JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

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A City of Extremes

How two public health crises twenty-five years apart show what’s changed and what hasn’t in Chicago’s health equity landscape

BY ELORA APANTAKU AND CHARMAINE RUNES

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n Wednesday, July 12, 1995, Chicago sweltered. A heat wave rolled in and clung to the city for five days. Roads cracked open and bridges were hosed down to prevent them from locking in place under the sun. And even though infrastructure faltered, the city waited four days to declare a heat emergency, delaying the mobilization of additional workers in the fire and police departments to check on elderly citizens and get more ambulances on the roads. Mayor Richard M. Daley, staying as cool as possible and alluding to the city's ability to manage hazardous weather events, said during a news briefing: “It’s hot. It’s very hot…. We go to extremes in Chicago.

And that’s why people like Chicago. We go to extremes.” The decision to not treat this natural disaster seriously would cost the lives of hundreds of Chicagoans.

Now, twenty-five years later, Chicago faces another extreme public health crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. And like the heat wave of 1995, COVID-19 disproportionately impacts older Black and brown Chicagoans, leaving residents and officials questioning the policies that have divided the city and weakened communities of color, all the while wondering what can be done to repair the decades-long inequity in Chicago’s public health infrastructure.

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ack in 1995, 105 degree Fahrenheit days seemed like business as usual in a city known for its hot summers. But the city’s citizens began to suffer in the second week of July as the heat index reached 125 degrees F, coupled with high humidity. Thousands of fire hydrants were opened up across town as people tried to cool off, and the demand for air conditioning overloaded a strained electricity grid, hurling tens of thousands of residences into blackouts. Calls to 911 for medical assistance skyrocketed above daily 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

norms, and emergency departments became so overwhelmed that at one point, twentythree different hospitals, mostly on the South and Southwest Sides, stopped taking new patients from ambulances. By that weekend, the city had hired refrigerated trucks to sit outside the chief medical examiner's office to hold the additional bodies that could not fit in the city morgue, which only had room for 200 occupants. Bridget Vaughn, a lifelong South Sider who was in her thirties during the heat wave, recounts: “The scary part of the heat wave was to every day listen to all the numbers of people dying. It was like the city really didn't have a plan.”

(Vaughn has been a South Side Weekly contributor over the years.) The final toll was 739 lives lost, dead from heat exhaustion and complications resulting from the heat wave. Those who died were mostly older and poorer Chicagoans, and Black Chicagoans were disproportionately affected.

The Mayor’s Commission, tasked with determining what had led to so many deaths, declared the event “a unique meteorological event.” But some people disagree with this assessment. Eric Klinenberg, a social scientist born and raised in Chicago but currently at New York University, wrote in his 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago: “Hundreds of Chicago residents died alone, behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, and neighbors, unassisted by public agencies or community groups. There’s nothing natural about that.”

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n the aftermath of the heat wave, Chicago invested in policies, community education, and cooling centers designed to limit future heat-related deaths—but did nothing to change what had caused some neighborhoods to be overwhelmed by the emergency, such as weakened transportation systems, rising utility costs,

shuttered hospitals, and failing commercial districts. When another heat wave hit the city in 1999, only 103 people died and it was celebrated as a victory of Chicago’s “Extreme Weather Operations Plan.” But the same demographic was hit: older Black Chicagoans living alone in apartments.

Many who died were living in apartments with air conditioning units that had gone unrepaired or were no longer functioning because of power outages.

In 1999, Klinenberg published an academic paper on the heat wave, in which he wrote that “Chicago has at least learned how to handle the heat during isolated emergencies, and it is unlikely that another heat wave will prove so disastrous for the city again. Will something else?”

The COVID-19 pandemic is that something else, once again bringing to light the devastation that can occur at the intersection of public health emergencies and structural racism.

As of July 10, the total number of COVID deaths in Chicago has surpassed 2,600, with eighty-one percent of these deaths occurring among people of color. On April 20, 2020, the Mayor’s office deployed the “Racial Equity Rapid Response Team” to attempt to lessen the burden of COVID-19 in three communities of color on the South and West Sides where cases were concentrated. At that time, there had been 683 COVID-related deaths in Chicago, eighty-four percent of whom were people of color.

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n 1995, not all South Side neighborhoods were affected equally by the heat. In fact, some majority Black neighborhoods on the South Side—Washington Heights, Morgan Park—suffered few casualties during the heat wave. Similar patterns have played out during COVID, which suggests that it isn't just poverty or race which makes people vulnerable. Klinenberg points to city abandonment as the larger issue that explains why some die and some survive. Areas that

suffered from the heat wave most had been abandoned—by city resources, private industries, and residents. Abandonment and decay made social support systems difficult to maintain. These causes for increased death during heat waves were not addressed as part of Chicago’s Extreme Weather Operations Plan. This process of addressing an issue but not its underlying causes has perpetuated health inequity in the city of Chicago and leaves the city's populace vulnerable.

"I don’t have a lot of shopping options in my neighborhood. In recent times we’ve had more options, but what we would do is shop at the stores we like, which were Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Because those weren't in our community, we found ourselves driving out of our community to get the things that we liked.”

—Bridget Vaughn

Even though COVID-19 and heat waves are more dangerous for older adults, the people who die from heat waves are not necessarily the same people who die from COVID-19. Heat waves impact older people who live alone and in buildings with non-functioning air conditioning units. COVID-19 is less likely to infect you if you’re living alone, and it doesn’t care about your thermostat. Additionally, if you experience heat stroke, getting to an emergency room where you can get intravenous fluids might be enough to prevent you from dying. If you contract COVID-19 and require hospitalization, there’s a thirty percent chance you will require some time in an actual ICU bed for additional oxygen therapy.

And yet, despite these health conditions being so different, in Chicago they have affected the same people. Even the Chicago measles outbreak of 1989, a disease of infants and young children that claimed the lives of eight, was disproportionately represented in Black and Latinx patients.

That COVID-19 is affecting the same communities that have seen a disproportionate amount of school and hospital closures, as well as economic disinvestment, is hardly surprising, because ultimately it is not about the emergency.

A disinvested community will have less resources and less resilience in the face of any emergency that comes to threaten it.

During the two-and-a-half decades between the 1995 heat wave and the COVID-19 pandemic, the standard of

living for many Chicagoans worsened.

Healthcare, education, grocery stores, and well-paying jobs were continually driven from the South Side of Chicago. This not only affected residents’ lives, but accelerated Black flight from these communities, further depleting neighborhoods of tax revenue and community support. Between 2000 and 2014, three South Side hospitals were shut down, representing a loss of 660 inpatient beds and over 2,000 full time jobs in those areas. Even now, amidst the COVID crisis, four safety-net hospitals on Chicago’s South and West Sides— Advocate Trinity, South Shore, St. Bernard, and Mercy Hospitals—that have been annually underpaid through state Medicaid reimbursements and have a combined yearly deficit of around $76 million, are struggling to stay afloat. Their plan to recoup a billion dollars in funding and merge into a larger healthcare network was denied by the state in May 2020, in the midst of a pandemic which requires hospitals to be functioning at peak efficiency. Now their futures—and the futures of Chicagoans who depend on them for healthcare—remain uncertain.

But it’s not just hospitals that have been hurt by disinvestment. Homes on the South Side have been torn down and not built back up, and public transportation options have long been inadequate. These issues lead to communities being “less livable” and less commercially viable. It’s a slow-burning disaster that, over time, has perpetuated the city’s life expectancy gap. Research has shown that Chicago has the largest life

JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

HEALTH

expectancy gap between zip codes of any large city in America; people who live in 60611 (Streeterville) live on average thirty years longer than people living in 60621 (Englewood).

Chicago physician and epidemiologist Dr. David Ansell investigates this problem in his book The Death Gap. According to Ansell, people make assumptions about why the gap is so large, blaming gun violence as the driver for the life expectancy difference, when the real causes of early death in poor neighborhoods are heart disease, exacerbated by poverty, stress from poor housing standards, unfair policing, low wage jobs, lack of access to healthy food, and inaccessible healthcare due to the large numbers of uninsured and underinsured Chicagoans living on the South Side.

Addressing just one of these issues is not enough to make a meaningful impact. All of these inequities—known together as “structural violence”—must be addressed and challenged to ensure that people are no longer caught up in the laws, policies, procedures, and norms that make them easy targets for the next crisis.

H

ealth inequities—the preventable disparities in health outcomes between different groups of people—touch every sphere of life, and are consequently impossible to address through a single policy channel. Health inequity has always been a pressing issue in Chicago, but there are multiple community organizations—and even groups within city government—dedicating themselves to equalizing the huge health gaps that are affecting citizens. In November 2018, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle revealed a five-year road map for Cook County that was built on pillars of equity, naming the government’s historical role in creating and maintaining racial inequities.

And during the inaugural Racial Equity Week in September 2019, Preckwinkle opened with a speech calling for specific initiatives around equity in transportation, healthcare access, and broadband internet access.

Dennis Deer, a Cook County Commissioner and clinical psychologist, introduced a unanimously passed ordinance one year ago, in July 2019, titled “Declaring Racism and Racial Inequality a Public Health Crisis in Cook County.” At a recent online convening discussing the heat wave and COVID-19, he said he wanted to make sure that racial justice isn’t just talked about 24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 22, 2020

HEALTH

A HEALTH CARE WORKER WALKS IN FRONT OF A REFRIGERATED TRUCK USED TO HOLD BODIES DURING THE 1995 HEAT WAVE. FROM THE DOCUMENTARY COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE ON PBS INDEPENDENT LENS.

and then forgotten, and that Cook County commits to considering legislative outcomes with a racial equity lens moving forward.

The ordinance calls for increased diversity in the office under the Board President, educational training for staff about how racism affects individuals, and advocates for relevant policies that improve health in communities of color and initiatives that advance social justice. Commissioner Deer wanted to make sure that the city does more than just “talking the talk.” But only time will tell what the current government will accomplish.

As part of the report from her transition team, Mayor Lightfoot received recommendations on how to address racial equity in her first 100 days in office, like publicly setting benchmarks that need to be met to demonstrate measurable improvement. A year later, she has managed to accomplish only a few of those goals, such as creating the Office of Equity and Racial Justice and hiring Candace Moore as the Chief Equity Officer.

However, a number of community organizations have taken it upon themselves to minimize the life expectancy gap. Founded

in 2013, by Robbin Carroll, I Grow Chicago was started to address the negative impacts of violence and trauma in the community of Greater Englewood. Over time, their goals have become more holistic, realizing that to make change you have to look at the entire picture. They now address social determinants of health to improve the lives of their community. During COVID, they have been bringing groceries and supplies to neighbors, running tutoring classes for kids stuck at home, donating laptops to children who need to complete remote classes, and hosting free COVID testing. So far, they have donated thousands of masks, gloves, and thermometers. Zelda Mayer, I Grow Chicago’s director of development, said that she hopes that one day their services will not be required, a day when “residents of Chicago no longer need deliveries of clean drinking water or food, a world where all our neighbors have safe housing, good schools, fulfilling work, and loving communities.”

In order to move to that future, Mayer said structural racism needs to be addressed by the city.

“We must all acknowledge, confront, and dismantle racism in all areas of life,” she

said. “As part of this work, our city agencies must look at our resource structures and how accessible they are. I Grow Chicago, and other small nonprofits, [are] not the end-all be-all solution. We are working towards a world beyond nonprofits filling in the gap created by unjust distribution of resources in our government.”

The push to provide basic goods and services to individuals within the city has extended beyond traditional nonprofits into mutual aid groups supporting communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and, more recently, in reaction to the uprisings over the murder of George Floyd and police brutality. The compounding of issues has left everyday Chicagoans helping each other, filling the gaps left by inequities never meaningfully addressed by the city.

Bridget Vaughn remembers watching television during the 1995 heat wave: “It was disproportionately African-American people that we saw dying, and that always makes me angry, that we are always the ones who are affected. That has always been frustrating to me.” At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vaughn was impressed by the way the city moved quickly to turn McCormick Place and the United Center into emergency field hospitals. But quick, emergency responses do nothing to address chronic crises like food deserts and inaccessible healthcare. “The systemic racism in Chicago has been there since its founding,” she said. “And it's rearing its ugly head the older and older and older it gets.

And it pisses me off.”

The city has shown that it can improve the way it responds to extreme crises. With the spotlight on racial equity around the country and leaders of its government calling for equity driven approaches, maybe during future crises, deaths in Chicago will not fall so predictably along the lines of race. Elora Apantaku is a medical doctor and writer.

She also wrote about contact tracing in this issue.

Charmaine Runes is a fact-checker for the Weekly and a graduate student at the University of Chicago’s Computational Analysis and Public Policy program. She codes for the people.

JULY 22, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

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croSSWord "CAN YOU FEEL IT" BY JIM DALEY 1

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29 4-Down: "I Need ____ ____" feat. Jamie Principle (1986) 34 Creative thoughts, at the Sorbonne 35 They get stuff done 36 Criminal law requires both Actus reus and Mens ___ 37 "Bill and ____ Excellent Adventure" 38 DJ Sneak: "_____ That Jack Built" (2013) 39 Perky, lively 40 Cubs outfielder Billy, Giants slugger Mel, or Pirates catcher Ed 41 "It's _ ____ point" (irrelevant) 42 Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother, and _____ 43 Fast-paced dance style performed by Era Crew 45 Jackson Park picnic-hosting DJ collective, with "Few" 46 X, phonetically?

47 One of Noah's sons

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ACROSS 1 Chuck Roberts: "In the Beginning There Was ____" (1987/2018) 5 The ones and twos: turn ______ 11 Most House music is set to about 128 of this (abbrev.)

14 Wise __ __ owl 15 Shakespeare: "_ _____ new world that has such people in't!"

16 Non-discriminatory hiring abbreviation 17 One half of Mork's goodbye 18 Cajmere: "It's Time for the __________" (1992) 20 Fortnite developer ____ Games 21 Some T-bones 22 90-degree steel rods 23 It's tied 25 Number one?

26 Aly-Us "______ Me" (1992)

54

48 Bill of Rights: "Congress shall make" this 51 Take _ ___ from (emulate) 53 "When _ ___ your age..."

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29 Check-in query?

30 Kanye's surname, in Catalonia?

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49 Odd, in Edinburgh 50 Fourth member of 1-Down DJ ____ D 51 Raise _ ___ and cry 52 And and/or or (abbrev.)

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JULY 22, 2020 ÂŹ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 27

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