SSW 08.19.20

SOUTH CHICAGO SOUTH CHICAGO

STEEL RIDES

Are you a Chicago South Side business owner interested in pitching your business idea in front of a virtual, city-wide audience and competing for a top prize of $8,000?

STEEL JOIN US FOR A 45RIDES MIN BIKE RIDE JOIN US FOR A 45DISTANCING! MIN BIKE RIDE WHILE SOCIAL WHILE SOCIAL DISTANCING!

ALL ALL ARE ARE WELCOME! WELCOME! Ages 13-17 will need a permission slip at registration.

Ages 13-17 will need a permission slip at registration.

Bikes and Helmets available first come first serve or bring your own.

Bikes and Helmets available first come first serve or bring your own.

Children under the age of 13 will need guardian supervision and must bring their own helmet & bike.

Children under the age of 13 will need guardian supervision and must bring their own helmet & bike.

EVERY EVERY MONDAY, MONDAY, WEDNESDAY, WEDNESDAY,

Then apply for the 7th annual South Side Pitch competition!

& FRIDAY WEATHER PERMITTING!

9108 S. BRANDON AVE,

CHICAGO, IL IL 60617 60617 CHICAGO, AUGUST 3RD - AUGUST 28TH

AUGUST 3RD - AUGUST 28TH

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM SNACKS AND WATER WILL BE PROVIDED, AS WELL AS PPE. IN ORDER TO FOLLOW CDC GUIDELINES.

SNACKS AND WATER WILL BE PROVIDED, AS WELL AS PPE. IN ORDER TO FOLLOW CDC GUIDELINES.

Only a few more days left to apply!

Deadline extended to August 31st For more information and to apply, visit https://southsidepitch.com/

If you are interested, have questions or would like to sign up please contact Sara (773) 734-9181 • (312) 685-5225 • saraiv@claretianassociates.org If youatare interested, have questions or would like to sign up please contact

Sara at (773) 734-9181 • (312) 685-5225 • saraiv@claretianassociates.org

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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 newly renovated, move-in ready condominium, in the heart of Hyde Park, is sunny and spacious. The historic building has both an elevator and stairs. Newly renovated kitchen has all new stainless steel appliances, slate floors, new cabinets and granite countertops. Bathroom has a Carrara marble shower surround and Carrara floor and new bath fixtures. Each of the two bedrooms can accommodate king size beds and each has ample closet space. One of the walk-in closets may be able to accommodate a stackable washer and dryer unit. The separate dining room can double as an office. The inviting living room has built-in shelving and a beautiful decorative fireplace. Windows in the apartment are fitted with custom blinds.

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

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 25 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor Martha Bayne Senior Editors Julia Aizuss Christian Belanger Mari Cohen Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editors Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Literature Editor Davon Clark Nature Editor Sam Joyce Food & Land Editor 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, Ebony Ellis, Katie Bart Visuals Editor Deputy Visuals Editor Photo Editor Staff Photographers: Staff Illustrators: Tolentino

Mell Montezuma Shane Tolentino Keeley Parenteau milo bosh, Jason Schumer Mell Montezuma, Shane

Layout Editors Haley Tweedell, Davon Clark Webmaster Managing Director

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 Mell Montezuma

IN CHICAGO Downtown Chicago on lockdown From August 11 to the 17, Mayor Lori Lightfoot made tangible the longheld truism that there are two Chicagos by insulating the Loop and keeping residents from the neighborhoods shut out after dark—while reiterating that these actions did not constitute a curfew. It was a tone-deaf response to the civil unrest that unfolded on the Mag Mile August 9 after Chicago police flooded Englewood when their officers shot a man. City departments, such as CDOT, Streets and San, and Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, ensured that bridges were pulled up, all expressway ramps leading to downtown were blocked, and trains and buses stopped running by 9pm. On August 15, a peaceful daytime protest in the Loop was met with police batons, kettling, and pepper spray that made headlines and produced eight COPA complaints. The police controlled the narrative by releasing edited video clips of the episode to the media, doxxing young protesters online (a practice they have since walked back) and attempting to conflate the events of August 9 and August 15. South Side Weekly is collecting first-person accounts, photos, and videos of the August 15 conflict and related events. Submit your own at sswk. ly/protests East Siders file a complaint against the city for environmental racism Three community groups on the Southeast Side filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, alleging that the city’s plan to move a scrap-metal recycling plant from wealthy, mostly white Lincoln Park to a predominantly Latino neighborhood violates the Fair Housing Act. The plant, General Iron, was reportedly ticketed for emissions violations eleven times in five months before an explosion forced it to close down temporarily in May. General Iron’s planned move to the East Side would make way for the controversial TIF-funded Lincoln Yards luxury development. The complaint, filed jointly by the Southeast Environmental Task Force, Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke, and People for Community Recovery, accuses the city of intentionally discriminating against residents of South Chicago and the Southeast Side community by planning to move the plant there. "I'm tired of policing polluters and policing politicians," Gina Ramirez, co-chair of the Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke, told The Hoodoisie and South Side Weekly.

Renewable energy, urban farming, and health care services coming to Auburn Gresham The hotly anticipated outcome of the $10 million inaugural Chicago Prize competition was announced August 6. The winner: “Always Growing, Auburn Gresham,” a collaboration between the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation, Urban Growers Collective, and Green Era Partners. The plum community development prize, administered by the Pritzker Traubert Foundation, will be used to transform an empty building at 79th and Halsted into a “healthy lifestyle hub” featuring medical, dental, and behavioral health services as well as a Black-owned restaurant and a suite of social service options, and a renewable energy and urban farming campus at 650 W. 83rd St., on a site formerly used as a CPD impound lot. The project is expected to provide more than 600 temporary and permanent jobs, as well as (when completed) provide healthcare to 11,000 people and generate more than 14,000 pounds of fresh produce annually. The city and state have also kicked in $6 million toward the project, and the foundation has pledged an additional $2.5 million to runner-up projects in Englewood, South Chicago, Little Village, North Lawndale, and Austin.

IN THIS ISSUE census watch: chicago coalition for the homeless

jocelyn vega......................................................4 climate apartheid

During a respiratory health crisis, the city has mobilized to protect property over its protection of air, water and Black and brown communities alexandra arriaga...........................................5 opinion: the violence of displacement continues through illegal lockouts and invisible evictions

Even amidst a statewide pandemic and eviction moratorium, people throughout Chicago continue to be forced from their homes. bobby vanecko...................................................6 the museum of the future

The National Public Housing Museum listens and gives back during COVID-19 carlos ballesteros..........................................7 a century of black fortunes

Three new books explore how Black fortunes were built and lost in the first half of the twentieth century eileen li.............................................................9 how south side high schools voted to keep or remove cops

SRO decisions were left to Local School Councils jackie serrato.................................................12 who’s keeping the peace?

Joseph Williams on mediating the conflict between police and residents after the police shot Latrell Allen cordell longstreath.....................................14 absence of proof

Without video evidence, facts in Englewood shooting remain in dispute jonathan ballew............................................16 line language

Sage Smith discusses the therapeutic process of her art roderick sawyer.............................................17 seeking solidarity

Mutual aid organizers speak about their work alex y. ding, justyn stanford, and linghua (lily) qi............................................................20 coloring page: promontory point

kayla ginsburg................................................20 croSSWord puzzle & south side trivia

jim daley & martha bayne.............................21

POLITICS

Census Spotlight: Chicago Coalition for the Homeless

BY JOCELYN VEGA

T

he Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH) is on a mission to ensure that people experiencing homelessness are counted in the 2020 Census by increasing awareness that housing status does not bar one from census participation. Gloria Davis, CCH’s Census 2020 project manager, is leading outreach efforts with unhoused populations, despite COVID-19.

Her work at CCH is “trying to find a way to have [the census] be a fair and accurate count—because it really hasn't been for us,” said Davis. CCH’s campaign, which is part of a joint effort across the state to reach hard-to-count communities, emphasizes the importance of census participation to accurately reflect this community’s visibility and increase funding for under-resourced programming in the future. According to Davis, years of undercounting has influenced the extent of present-day resource disparities, despite community needs.

Individuals are counted in the census regardless of their living situation. However, historical and contemporary challenges exist that make it difficult to reach an accurate count for individuals experiencing

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ AUGUST 19, 2020

homelessness.

Davis said, “we [originally] organized our census around regular outreach,” but that has drastically changed. Before the stayat-home order, Davis led in-person forums, hosting sessions at venues such as Old St. Patrick’s and Haymarket Center.

Often, within these sessions, individuals raised their hands to share their experiences of living disparities across the city. After listening, Davis would then explain the census’ impact on resource distribution and political representation for the next decade.

Her goal was to help audiences experiencing homeless recognize that they shape this process through their direct participation.

CCH’s census outreach has taken a significant hit because of COVID-19.

Outreach challenges remain as Davis’ team digitally organizes communities without consistent internet access and now a shortened census deadline. “We did not foresee the fact that we wouldn't be able to go out to the masses,” Davis said. “This was discouraging to me…but I just had to shake it off, because it's still going to happen.”

She emphasized her team’s dedication to continue fostering awareness. They have deployed additional strategies like

taping posters at grocery stores and being intentional about spreading information through word of mouth. For example, “a great idea was, ‘I tell two people, you tell two people, and ask that person to tell two people,’” Davis said.

Davis and CCH’s development team are also utilizing social media channels and strategizing best practices for the upcoming in-person, census homeless count.

From September 22 to 24, there will be a census count at service-based locations like soup kitchens, shelters, and food vans. An outdoor count will occur from September 23–24. Individuals do not have to wait for this date, which is a last-ditch effort to count people who are homeless and may not have internet access. This in-person count date was delayed from March 30–April 1 and rescheduled due to safety precautions.

Davis is working with service providers who interact with individuals experiencing homelessness to determine the best timing for the service-based enumeration when people enter their facilities.

According to Davis, individuals can also disclose that they are “doubling up” without fear of landlords gaining access to this information due to the census’s

constitutional mandate around privacy.

Davis said that for individuals who are doubling up or couch surfing with friends or relatives, everyone living in that household should complete the census together, as a single submission, not separately as their own family units or as individuals.

As a message for the community facing homelessness, Davis said, “You know you count. You go and make sure everyone knows you count.” To complete the Census online, visit my2020census.gov or call 844-330-2020. If you are not living in a physical dwelling, your address can reflect the closest intersection to where you live, bridges, or nearby landmarks.

The Weekly’s reporting on the 2020 Census is supported by a grant from the McCormick Foundation, administered by the Chicago Independent Media Alliance.

Jocelyn Vega is a first-generation Latina and a tree hugger. She is a contributing editor to the Weekly and last wrote about how BIPOC activists are leading mental health justice during COVID-19.

POLITICS

Chicago’s Climate Apartheid

During a respiratory health crisis, the city has mobilized to protect property over its protection of air, water and Black and brown communities

BY ALEXANDRA ARRIAGA

O

n August 15, the city saw a glimpse of two possible futures for Chicago.

In one, riot police clashed with protesters in the shadow of raised bridges that walled off the Mag Mile. In the other, a coalition of activists mobilized on the South Side to resist environmental injustice and envision a world free from pollution, policing, and incarceration.

The coalition, composed of community and youth-led environmental organizations, came together in McKinley Park to demand the defunding of CPD and envision the decade of the Green New Deal. This action was part of an ongoing campaign to shut down MAT Asphalt, a two-year-old asphalt plant at Pershing Rd. and Damen Ave. that residents say is filling their community with pollution. The campaign also demands Mayor Lori Lightfoot fulfill her campaign promise to create a Department of Environment.

The organizations included the Chicago chapter of Sunrise Movement, the 12th Ward IPO, Neighbors for Environmental Justice, and the Southwest Environmental Alliance, a coalition that has raised concerns for two years about the MAT Asphalt plant spewing pollutants in McKinley Park. Since the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the coalition has escalated its campaign to pressure the city to shut the plant down.

The protest of about one hundred people was an exercise in imagination.

Leaders asked attendees to meditate and imagine a world with clean air and freedom from police brutality. They sang, drew, and asked community members to write inspiring messages in chalk.

Speakers demanded that resources currently allocated to policing be instead put toward environmental remediation and the health of South Side communities.

“My group is here today [because] we know how money flows from companies to the city and back again. Prioritizing profits over people and prioritizing private companies over the health and safety of Chicagoans,” said Neighbors for Environmental Justice organizer Alfredo

Romo. “But let’s be clear, it has always been about property and profit over people to benefit the rich and politically connected.”

The activists also called for the creation of the Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC), a proposed elected body that would oversee police rules and regulations and appoint the police superintendent and members of the Police Board.

It appeared that a disproportionate number of police officers were attending the protest, possibly as a precaution to protect the statue of William McKinley, after whom the park is named.

“We researched [McKinley] and I didn’t think he was that controversial, [but] one of our guys found he had something to do with slaves, so we suspected there might be something, but this was largely peaceful,” said Ninth District Commander Don Jerome said of the protest, where an activist was accusing CPD of “babysitting” a statue.

Before McKinley was the twenty-fifth president of the United States, he enlisted in the Union Army. He never owned slaves but as president he went to war with Spain and colonized Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii. His biggest legacy was imperialism. But his statue was left alone.

The target on Saturday was the MAT Asphalt plant, adjacent to the park, and its impact on the health of neighborhoods across the South Side.

“This is not just about a little asphalt company. We want the asphalt company out, but it’s bigger than that,” said McKinley Park resident Theresa McNamara, of Southwest Environmental Alliance.

That’s where protesters were heading, taking up one side of the street on Western when one person was arrested. Jerome said the protester was arrested for “being in the street when he was told to go on the sidewalk.” The arrested person, Jimmy Rothschild, was charged with misdemeanor obstruction of traffic by a non-motorist.

Rothschild was the only person taken into custody at the largely peaceful protest,

but many others were arrested in the city on Saturday. Later that day, Chicagoans would witness police pepper spraying, kettling, and beating protesters in front of the nowcommon sight of raised bridges downtown.

“The response that the city’s had to what’s happened downtown is the same valuing of property of wealthy white people over the lives and well-being of Black and brown people,” Rothschild said.

McKinley Park is in the 12th Ward, which is represented by alderman George Cardenas, who chairs the City Council’s Health and Environmental Protection Committee. This despite supporting the owner of MAT Asphalt moving into the community as early as February 2017, the Weekly reported, and accepting generous political donations from the Tadin family.

In March, local elected officials including Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, State Senator Tony Munoz, and State Rep. Theresa Mah urged Lightfoot and Gov. JB Pritzker in a letter to use executive powers to stop the operation of the plant, which is currently running on an expired permit.

The IEPA indefinitely postponed a public hearing on the plant that was supposed to happen in March.

The climate urgency in Chicago has changed this year—but like many urgent issues in Chicago, the effects are disproportionately felt. In April, Hilco’s botched demolition of a smokestack at the Crawford power plant left Little Village covered in dust. That’s the neighborhood with more COVID fatalities than any other Illinois zip code.

In May, two explosions at the General Iron recycling plant resulted in the shut down of the Lincoln Park plant, but have not halted plans to move the plant to the Southeast Side. The pressure on the city to shut down the MAT Asphalt site is coupled with the neighborhood hitting 2,212 confirmed COVID cases.

Cardenas said because two thirds of the city’s population is Black and brown, “the majority of [industry] is going to fall on

Black and brown communities.”

Since she first used the tactic to stifle protests in May, raising the bridges has become a common practice for the city to keep downtown closed off. Rothschild, who lives in Uptown and worked as political director of Matt Martin’s aldermanic campaign last year in the 47th Ward, said it was important for him to defy the division between the North and South Sides to protest pollution and demand environmental justice.

“People from the North Side need to go and stand in solidarity,” Rothschild said.

“When these neighborhoods have been disproportionately disinvested [from], to then turn around and talk about looting is ludicrous.”

Last week, Georgetown Philosophy assistant professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote an article in Dissent Magazine in which he argued that imminent climate crises ahead make imaginative abolitionist demands and community control over decisions more urgent. “The safety and stability of spaces for affluent residents is generated from the very insecurity that their policing creates for others.”

This past weekend Lori Lightfoot showed the world a glimpse of Chicago’s own version of climate apartheid.

Environmental activists asked Chicagoans of the South Side to envision a world with clean air and freedom from policing and incarceration. The raised bridges and police violence warn of a different future. These tactics sent a message about who is welcome in their own city, and who gets what in Chicago. For some, clean air and protection of property. For others, pollution and police brutality. Alexandra Arriaga is a journalist from the Southwest Side currently based in Pilsen, where she lives close to family and a crew of street cats.

She is a civic reporting resident at City Bureau.

Her last piece for the Weekly was about how Black and Latinx solidarity keeps mouths fed during COVID-19.

AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

HOUSING

Opinion: The Violence of Displacement Continues Through Illegal Lockouts and Invisible Evictions Even amidst a statewide pandemic and eviction moratorium, people throughout Chicago continue to be forced from their homes.

BY BOBBY VANECKO

I

n a time of economic and public health crisis, when additional tenant protections are desperately needed, it is incredibly frustrating that one of the most essential tenant laws continues to go unenforced. Anti-eviction advocates hope that increased public awareness and pressure around illegal lockouts will force the city’s lawmakers to enforce its municipal code.

In a June interview with the Tribune, Obama CBA Coalition organizing member Ebonée Green discussed how the fight against the “violence of displacement” parallels the fight against police violence, and how both are an integral part of the Movement for Black Lives. In an interview with the Weekly, Javier Ruiz of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization elaborated. In terms of evictions, said Ruiz, the violence of displacement comes in three main forms: standard evictions through the court system, “invisible evictions,” where landlords serve thirty-day notices to force month-to-month tenants out without using the courts, and “illegal lockouts,” in which landlords remove tenants by changing the locks, shutting off utilities, throwing out personal property, or other forceful methods.

Governor Pritzker recently extended the state of Illinois’ moratorium on evictions through August 22, but landlords 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ AUGUST 19, 2020

are challenging it in court. Nevertheless, illegal lockouts continue—Ruiz said that throughout the pandemic, MTO has constantly been getting calls from tenants who were subjected to such tactics. As MTO reported to the Sun Times, from mid-March to mid-June, the organization has received roughly double the normal monthly averages for calls about illegal lockouts. In addition, invisible evictions have continued during the pandemic, and as the Weekly reported in June, even for government-subsidized tenants who were supposed to be protected under the federal CARES Act. While the legality of invisible evictions has been defended by landlord advocates like Richard Magnone, an attorney whose firm runs the blog ChicagoEviction.com, there is no question that lockouts are illegal. Chicago municipal code § 5-12-160 provides, “It is unlawful for any landlord or any person acting at his direction knowingly to oust or dispossess or threaten or attempt to oust or dispossess any tenant from a dwelling unit without authority of law,” by changing locks, interfering with utilities, removing property, using force, etc. The municipal code tasks the Chicago Police Department with investigating calls about illegal lockouts, and if landlords are found

ILLUSTRATION BY GABY FEBLAND

to have violated the code they are subject to fines ranging from $200-$500 for each day that the tenant is locked out, and possibly even arrest, according to Ruiz.

However, he and MTO’s clients have found that the police have been enabling landlords to conduct lockouts by failing to take action against landlords who violate the municipal code. Ruiz said that police typically don’t take these violations seriously because they are technically a civil matter, which raises the question of why the police are tasked with enforcing this code, and many other civil and criminal matters, in the first place. Demonstrating their true role in upholding whiteness as property, in the words of University of California Los Angeles School of Law Professor Cheryl I. Harris, the CPD had no problem with

making an arrest when it came to protestors who were occupying the space outside the Daley Center to demand the cancellation of rent and a stop to all evictions for the duration of the pandemic on August 17.

Ruiz also said that increased public awareness is essential because many tenants just assume that landlords are within their property rights to conduct lockouts and invisible evictions. He said that, “People think, when they get the thirty-day notice, that they are being kicked out the thirtyfirst day,” no matter what, and that most people aren’t aware that the landlord can’t evict them without going through the entire court process. Further, most people do not have the resources to hire an attorney, or they are not aware of the free legal aid that is available.

HOUSING

In addition, the demand for legal aid services for civil issues like eviction in this country far outpaces the supply—the Legal Services Corporation’s most recent “Justice Gap” Report found that “[Seventyone percent] of low-income Americans experience at least one civil legal problem per year, yet [eighty-six percent] of them receive either minimal or no legal help to deal with it.” According to the Lawyer’s Committee for Better Housing (LCBH), in Chicago between 2010 and 2017, seventynine percent of landlords had attorneys in eviction court, while only eleven percent of tenants did.

There was an average of 23,000 cases filed per year, and tenant access to counsel made a significant difference—by having an attorney, tenants decreased their chances of getting an eviction order by almost twentyfive percent. Consequently, LCBH and other tenant advocates and elected officials are pushing for Illinois and Chicago to implement a “Right to Counsel” for tenants in eviction court.

S

tacey—who preferred not to share her real name for fear of retaliation during or after ongoing negotiations with her landlord—said that "I'm a tough person and I will research the law to figure out what my rights are, but a lot of people are not gonna do that. So I actually saw people with bags leaving in the middle of the evening, so some of those conversations [with landlords] probably didn't go too well because people probably don't know what their rights are. People were pressured to leave."

"One tenant [was] leaving with her kids, I felt really bad. I almost wanted to say to her well you don't have to do that, you need to get a lawyer and try to get some help, but I think some people just don't know.

So when you have management walking around knocking on doors saying 'Hey can you leave?' People feel uncomfortable and they feel pressured.… You’re not supposed to do that. There were actually some landlords saying 'Hey we're gonna waive April/May [rent] and we know what everyone is dealing with.' Cagan was the exact opposite."

While Stacey did fall behind on rent, she fortunately was able to remain in her apartment while negotiating with her landlord, Cagan Management, after she contacted MTO and was helped by Ruiz.

But she only found out about MTO by

calling 311 after figuring out that Cagan had illegally disconnected her electricity in May, after months of texts and apartment visits from Cagan employees pressuring her to pay up or move out. Stacey was also one of the 78,000 Chicago renters who were denied relief in the city’s completely inadequate housing grant lottery program.

But Stacey was fortunate that while she fell behind on rent and lost income due to the coronavirus pandemic, she was able to replace some income relatively quickly through the state’s unemployment insurance system—which was overwhelmed with record claims numbers—and now the federal expanded unemployment insurance program has expired.

While the continued extension of the eviction moratorium is urgently necessary, without further tenant protections like the Just Cause eviction ordinance or State Representative Delia Ramirez’s rent cancellation bill, many thousands more people will be forced from their homes whenever the eviction moratorium expires.

While it is important for tenants to have adequate moving time if they choose to move out, the recently-passed fair notice ordinance is wholly inadequate to the crisis at hand, much like the voluntary and unenforceable “housing solidarity pledge.”

Mayor Lightfoot’s non-binding version of Just Cause will not prevent people from being displaced.

Even before the current pandemic, the housing crisis in Chicago required at the very least the implementation of rent control and the construction of thousands of units of social housing. The city currently has a deficit of around 182,000 affordable housing units according to KenwoodOakland Community Organization (KOCO) executive director Jawanza Malone in a recent interview with the Weekly. Further, because coronavirus cases are once again rising in Illinois, it is now even more imperative that we ensure that all Chicagoans have a safe place to stay.

The effects of a surge in evictions, like the effects of another surge in coronavirus cases, would all but certainly be disproportionately felt by Black and brown Chicagoans. Much more must be done to prevent that from happening. Bobby Vanecko is a contributor to the Weekly.

He is a law student at Loyola University Chicago. He last wrote about his conversation with police torture survivor Mark Clements.

The Museum of the Future

The National Public Housing Museum listens and gives back during COVID-19

BY CARLOS BALLESTEROS

S

oon after graduating from Al Raby High School in East Garfield Park, twenty-four-year-old Shakira Johnson started working as an office coordinator at the National Public Housing Museum.

Her duties mostly consisted of answering phones, scheduling meetings, processing donations, and giving the occasional tour.

As a lifelong public housing resident, Johnson was eager to join the museum.

She wanted to get her foot in the door so she could someday tell her own story.

“What people know about public housing isn’t always great. I wanted to show how living in public housing was being part of a community, a family,” she said.

Johnson soon figured out that the best way of telling her story was to help others share their own. Three years ago, she became an oral historian for the museum, tasked with building up its online archive of interviews with current and former public housing residents. “Learning more about what it means to truly listen to someone as they shared their story, I realized how important it was to preserve these histories,” she said.

COVID-19 has turned Johnson’s job on its head. Instead of interviewing people face to face, she’s now mailing out voice recorders with a list of questions. But the pandemic has also opened up other ways for the museum to listen and give back, like handing out free face masks and groceries to public housing residents in Oakwood, Cabrini-Green, and to Johnson’s neighbors at the Westhaven Park Apartments on the Near West Side.

“We don’t want people to just give us their story and have us forget about them,” she said.

As museums across Illinois scramble to stay afloat—especially those that depend on entrance fees to keep the lights on—

the National Public Housing Museum has leveraged its nimbleness to directly aid those whose stories it wishes to preserve, reinforcing its vision for what museums should look like in a post-pandemic world.

“The pandemic has heightened efforts to decolonize museums, to ask critical questions about who are the community members that museums are responsible to and for, even if they can’t buy a ticket to get in,” said museum executive director Lisa Yun Lee. Like any business dependent on groups gathering indoors, the pandemic has upended museums across Illinois.

Between March and May, museums laid off or furloughed 183 staff and lost $14 million in revenue, according to a survey of twenty-six museums in the state by the Arts Alliance of Illinois. Those museums projected cutting another ninety-three jobs and losing $13 million more in revenue by the end of June. The state allowed museums to reopen earlier this month at twenty-five percent capacity, but some have chosen to remain closed, including the Adler Planetarium, which laid off 120 employees in May so that it could “survive,” according to a statement released at the time.

Reasons cited in news reports by museum executives for the prolonged closures and layoffs revolve mostly around high overhead costs and figuring out how to adhere to social distancing protocols.

The National Public Housing Museum doesn’t have either problem.

The museum recently secured a $47,000 loan through the Paycheck Protection Program, which allows it to keep paying its nine staff members and six interns through the end of the year. “We made an early commitment that we wouldn’t let anybody go,” Lee said.

AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

HOUSING

And even after a decade of fundraising, the museum still hasn’t secured enough money to move into its permanent home: a three-story, boarded-up brick building on Taylor Street in Little Italy, the sole survivor of the Jane Addams Homes, the first public housing complex in Chicago. The building was erected in 1938 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration and vacated in 2002.

The museum hoped to move into the vacant building by the end of 2018, according to the Chicago Reader. But a Sun-Times article from June of that year said the museum wouldn’t open until 2019.

Bloomberg CityLab reported in December that the museum pushed back its grand opening to 2021.

Lee’s hopeful for a 2021 move-in.

The museum is about $3 million shy of its current $15 million fundraising goal, thanks to a recent $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a $2 million grant from the state as part of the $45 billion Rebuild Illinois capital plan enacted last year.

As the pandemic disproportionately ravages through working-class Black and Latinx communities in Chicago—where

crowded housing conditions make it easier for the virus to spread—Lee hopes the museum’s mission to “preserve, promote, and propel the right of all people to a place where they can live and prosper” will resonate with donors.

“COVID has made people realize that public health depends on having affordable housing for all people,” she said. “The story of public housing is at the heart of those discussions.”

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the museum has moved its programming online. It recently hosted a two-and-a-halfhour teach-in on land trusts with L. Anton Seals, Jr., lead steward of Grow Greater Englewood. And last month, the museum broadcast the oral histories of several former prominent Black public housing residents in Chicago on Facebook, including Francine Washington, a member of the CHA’s board of commissioners, and Rep. Bobby Rush, who grew up at the Hilliard Homes in Bronzeville.

Johnson interviewed Rush at his office on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in 2018. Like with all of her interviews, Johnson said having grown up in public housing made it easier for her to connect

with Rush about his own experiences living in buildings that were left to rot. “There’s still a stigma around public housing that sometimes makes it hard for people to open up,” Johnson said.

Lee argues the mass protests against the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has shaken off some of that stigma.

“I think we’re entering into a new era of public housing,” she said. “The word ‘public,’ which was starting to become maligned as a dirty word, has become reinvigorated as people become less afraid to demand more from their governments.”

But Johnson and Lee said they’re not waiting to see if she’s right.

“When we go out and hand out masks or groceries or just check up on people, I know that this is part of doing what the museum set out to be, even if it doesn’t seem like something a museum would do,” Johnson said.

“When I tell people I work for a museum, it’s not what they expect.”

Lee and her staff have lofty plans for the museum’s permanent home. They envision space inside the building for public programming like concerts and spoken

word poetry; an entrepreneurship hub for nonprofits and social justice groups; and a courtyard in the back filled with animal sculptures by Edgar Miller from the 1930s that had been removed from the site in the early 2000s for restoration.

But most importantly, Johnson envisions a museum that doesn’t stand still.

“Most museums are places where old things are on display, you look at them, and you’re quiet. I don’t think our museum will be that way,” she said. This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. For more stories about the effect of COVID-19 on museums, please visit the Prairie State Museums Project at PrairieStateMuseumsProject.org.

Carlos Ballesteros is a journalist born and raised in Chicago. Earlier this summer, he joined Injustice Watch, a nonprofit newsroom focussed on covering the criminal justice system.

Prior to that, Carlos spent two years at the Chicago Sun-Times covering the South and West sides as a fellow with Report for America.

Carlos was the Pilsen neighborhood co-captain for South Side Weekly’s Best of the South Side 2019 edition.

PHOTO BY JASPER DARIS

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ AUGUST 19, 2020

LIT

Skyscrapers and Segregation: A Century of Black Fortunes Three new books explore how Black fortunes were built and lost in the first half of the twentieth century.

BY EILEEN LI

“M

oney is a wonderful thing,” an editorial in The HalfCentury Magazine declared in 1922. “If you have enough of it, the world voluntarily places a coat of white wash over your blackest crimes. Money opened the doors for some of the most exclusive places to the Jews. Enough money would blind the eyes of the white race to our own color.”

The Half-Century Magazine was established by Black businessman Anthony Overton as a forum for advertising his personal care products company. In 1922, Overton controlled a fortune of $300,000$500,000 through his Bronzevillebased Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company.Nearly 98% of his wealth would disappear in just two decades.

Three recent books, including a biography of Overton, trace the accumulation and loss of Black wealth on the South Side of Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago, by Wichita State University history professor Robert Weems Jr., provides a richly documented account of the life of Overton and his particular talent in advertising. In Binga: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black Banker, Don Hayner, the retired editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times, explores the life of Black banker Jesse Binga with storytelling that reads like a fast-paced novel. Both born around 1865, Overton and Binga’s lives intersected through their collaborations, their rivalries, and their downfalls, painting a rich picture of Black ambition in the first generation after emancipation. Moving Up, Moving Out, by Metropolitan State University historian Will Cooley, traces these patterns forward into time, diving into the battles for desegregation waged by middle-class

Black Americans from the 1910s through the 1970s.

Together, the books cover over a century of Chicago history. But it is the 1920s—the so-called golden age of Black business— that rises to the fore. During the 1920s, Binga and Overton were at the height of their wealth and prominence. Their business empires included a newspaper, personal care products, life insurance, apartments, storefronts, two banks, and investments all across the South Side. They socialized at lavish Christmas parties with the who’s who of the city’s elite, and commanded respect in Black and white publications around the country.

The 1920s both set the bar for dazzling accomplishments in a segregated world and set the stage for how far these moguls would fall. Tracing to the root of the moment when the South Side became associated with Blackness, these revived stories dispel the narrative that the disparities in racial wealth we see today were natural and inevitable, and ask us to question the circumstances that led to their formation.

I

n 1900, the Black population in Chicago was about 30,000 in a city of one million. But as waves of Southern migrants arrived in the coming decades, this population would double again and again.

New arrivals to the city would find that most mainstream economic opportunities were closed to them: they could not join a union, learn a trade, work white collar jobs, or live outside the Black Belt, the chain of neighborhoods on the South Side that held most of the city’s Black residents in the 20th century.

But the growing Black population had another effect: enabling Black entrepreneurs

to rise by catering solely to their own.

Increasingly, an economically successful class of Black Chicagoans had to confront new questions: What does success mean in a world where most doors are still closed to you? And what are your responsibilities to other Black people, who face the same discrimination as you?

Anthony Overton and Jesse Binga represented two archetypes of success in the boomtime decades. Overton was considered a refined businessman and known as “a polished man with a regal bearing”; before arriving in Chicago from the South, he had gone to college and law school. He made his fortune selling face powder and makeup to Black women with a message akin to modern-day body positivity, telling Black women that they did not need to aspire to white standards of beauty and that they were inherently beautiful. As his wealth grew, Overton leveraged his success into broader financial ambitions, helping to open the Douglass National Bank in 1921 and founding the Victory Life Insurance Company in 1924.

Binga, on the other hand, was a polarizing figure. In Cooley’s history of housing in Chicago, Binga is portrayed as one of the worst slumlords. After coming to Chicago as a street peddler, he built a real estate empire by renting out rooms and subdividing apartments, capitalizing on Black population growth. He negotiated deals in white neighborhoods and, once the white tenants fled, charged new Black residents rents that were forty to fifty percent higher. By 1909, he was the landlord to over two thousand people.

Binga made his fortune as a Black real estate agent at a time when real estate was soaked with tension and violence. Caught

between Black tenants who complained about his high rents and white people who resented his incursions, Binga himself appeared to simply believe that he was doing what he was supposed to as an American: making money off of opportunities. This belief in capitalistic exceptionalism led him to found perhaps the biggest symbol of Black wealth in the city: Binga Bank.

Then as now, the world of high finance, where fortunes are made, was seen as a critical piece of the struggle for racial equity. Banking was a powerful symbol of the path to a better future. Together, Binga and Overton controlled “36 percent of the combined resources of all Negro banks in the United States.” And for both men, banking was inseparable from a broader agenda for racial uplift. When asked for advice for other Black Chicagoans, Binga told them, “Learn business: Establish a credit: Provide for your own wants. That is my message to our group.”

Overton, meanwhile, made a forceful case against using white banks. When Black people deposited their money in white banks, he said, “These same Negro funds are loaned to white business institutions that likewise would not give employment to one of our race in any capacity. The Negro’s money is used to close the door of opportunity in his own face.”

Because of the rarity of their wealth and the smallness of the Black Belt, Overton and Binga inhabited much the same world, and both Hayner and Weems, Jr. bring it to life with a glittering array of side characters.

Langston Hughes famously commented that “midnight was like day” on South State Street, as Bronzeville nightlife thrived in jazz clubs. Black business leaders navigated a lifestyle somewhere between that of AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

LIT

“An economically successful class of Black Chicagoans confronted the questions: What does success mean in a world where most doors are still closed to you? And what are your responsibilities to other Black people, who face the same discrimination as you?“ policy kings, the Black heads of gambling enterprises, and those of white business leaders like Julius Rosenwald and Marshall Field III. Binga had a close relationship with Robert Abbott, the publisher of the famous Chicago Defender, and attended events with pioneering journalist Ida B. Wells. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois appear throughout both books, exchanging letters and corresponding with the two Chicago bankers.

In Weems, Jr.’s book, the chapter on the Great Depression is entitled “What Goes Up Must Come Down.” The Great Depression ended this period of success, with the Binga State Bank closing in 1930 and the Douglass National Bank following in 1932. But while Overton’s reputation remained largely intact, Binga was accused and convicted of embezzling from his bank—a controversial charge that some felt was trumped up because of racism.

After decades of opulence, Binga spent nearly three years in prison in his seventies.

Those who had trusted him—who had wanted to support a Black-owned bank— lost their life savings. But reading Hayner’s account, you come away with the distinct sense that Binga did not get justice. Caught up in the tide of the Great Depression, hundreds of banks failed—but not every bank president suffered the same fate. You question whether white members of the parole board could have done more for an old man who was in danger of dying in prison, and who was in jail for embezzlement but now controlled no financial assets. In prison, Binga was denied executive clemency, then denied parole the first time; it was a year and a half before his plea was heard again.

Hayner and Weems, Jr. portray their subjects with a fair hand, and Binga and 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ AUGUST 19, 2020

Overton were both imperfect businessmen.

They hired too many family members and did not observe strict rules between their many business enterprises; this habit of playing fast and loose with legal and accounting technicalities became especially problematic for Binga. But it’s not hard to see why they did business the way they did—they sought to be singularly in control, because they had singularly succeeded against impossible odds.

Were their mistakes impossible to overcome? How did other business empires survive and rebuild after crises when Black entrepreneurs could not? The first answer we find in overt racism. At the critical juncture when the Binga Bank may have been saved, the Chicago Clearing House Association refused to lend Binga the funds, even though he was entitled to assistance as a member of the group. After Binga personally went to him for help, Melvin Traylor, the head of the association, “was later quoted as saying, ‘The Binga Bank was a little [racial slur] bank that did not mean anything.’”

Perhaps even more importantly, by relying on Black consumers, Binga and Overton’s empires experienced by the compund effect of the discrimination that each person in the Black Belt faced. Their entire world hinged on catering to the Black population, but during the Depression, Black workers were the “first to be laid off and last to be rehired.” According to Weems, “In 1929, black America’s 24,969 retail stores generated aggregate sales of $98.6 million dollars. Six years later, in 1935, the aggregate sales for black America’s 22,756 retail stores had plummeted to $47.9 million.”

Binga and Overton had poured money into Black real estate; the values of those homes collapsed when Black families could

no longer pay rents and mortgages. Over time, properties that had been lucrative when Binga had wrested them from white people became worth less and less, as they became entrenched Black neighborhoods.

Hayner even identifies the specific “tipping point”—when a block becomes twenty-five percent Black, all the remaining whites leave.

It is at this juncture that Cooley picks up the story in full, narrating the history of those who were the first to move, buy, and rent in white neighborhoods. In pushing the boundaries of segregation, the “aspiring class” of Black Chicagoans suffered sustained harassment and violence from anonymous whites: phones ringing at all hours of night, threatening letters, shot-out windows, and bombed-out porches. When chemist Percy Julian’s family moved to Oak Park, a city commissioner refused to turn on their water and, on Thanksgiving eve, two men broke into their home and soaked it with kerosene. Cooley's book traces this oppression well into the twentieth century.

In one testimonial from the 1950s, a Black man living in a contested area said: “When I leave for work in the morning, I leave with the haunting dread that my own home and family may be the victims of violence in my absence.”

As a highly visible leader of Black real estate, Binga was frequently targeted: his own home was bombed five times in six months starting in late 1919. Despite police protection assigned to the house, no one was ever caught. When rumors circulated that he would move, Binga declared: “I will not run… if they can make the leaders move, what show will the smaller buyers have?”

But the threats took a psychological toll— Hayner reports that Binga was constantly looking over his shoulder, shuddering at the sound of a car or the slap of a newspaper.

We are fortunate to have the stories of named, known, biographized Black people from these eras, who could share their experiences and triumphs. At the same time, Black economic leaders are endlessly scrutinized on whether they did enough for their race. As Cooley writes, “While the black middle class was constantly on trial, the white middle class rarely had to answer for anything.”

Hundreds of white people appear in the backgrounds of the three books. They act as the unnamed, unknown enforcers of the racial hierarchy, including the bombers of Binga’s house, the policemen who conveniently left their shifts, and the property associations of neighborhoods like Hyde Park, Kenwood,

and Woodlawn. In Hayner’s vivid account of the 1919 Chicago race riots, crowds of white civilians murdered John Mills and Oscar Dozier, who were trying to get home from work, and shot Paul Hardwick in the Loop. Of thirty-eight murders that occurred during the riots, only four people were ever convicted.

Another haunting anecdote from Hayner recounts the story of two Black families moving into apartments on West 46th Street in February 1917. A crowd of nearly a hundred white boys, aged twelve to sixteen, “came from surrounding schools to throw a hail of stones at the Black families’ second-floor apartments, breaking many of the windows and letting in the cold winter air. When police arrived, the boys scattered.

After the police left, the boys returned and finished breaking every window on the second floor. The two Black families moved out.”

In contrast to the Black subjects and interviewees identified in his book, Cooley does not have names or faces for the white neighbors who made threats, or the ones who voiced racial liberalism only to immediately move away. Yet he endows them with humanity by keeping their anonymous, but targeted, words. A white Marynook resident began to believe that the local high schools were “catastrophic” after the Black population in the neighborhood rose, and left for Flossmoor. A Chicago realtor voiced white parents’ fears of interracial dating: “That’s one of the most basic things in the whole business. They don’t want their children to mingle.”

In the cases that Cooley studies, new Black neighbors were always of “equal or better class backgrounds” compared with existing white residents. By unpacking the racial animus white homeowners cited when moving to the suburbs, Cooley emphasizes how white flight is a form of “social violence against cities and their minority residents.”

Race in Chicago is often discussed as a problem tied to the South and West Sides.

But Cooley lays open how the choice to move to Evanston, Oak Park, Glen Ellyn, or Flossmoor is also a choice based on race; their abundant resources are the mirror image to the city’s lack.

The common thread through Cooley, Hayner, and Weems, Jr.’s works is the hope of early Black Chicagoans. People hoped to live in a safe, quiet home on wide, leafy streets, instead of a tiny apartment that was falling apart. They hoped that they could choose the neighborhood in which to raise

LIT

Binga Arcade and his bank building were demolished to build the Illinois Institute of Technology campus.

Overton’s buildings, on the other hand, got lucky. The Chicago Bee building is still there, reopening in December 2018 as a branch of the Chicago Public Library.

The Overton Manufacturing Company building has become an incubator for new Black businesses. In 2020, these buildings remind us that Black entrepreneurship, Black homeownership, and Black financial management are not new ideas—they are, in fact, the original dream of those who moved North for a better life. As Cooley writes, “Migrants came to the city for decades, inspired by visions of prosperity. Though this belief was strained and appeared at several points to be on the verge of collapse, the black middle class kept it from completely falling apart. Chicago, in all its glory and faults, was held together by black dreams of progress.” ¬

Will Cooley, Moving Up, Moving Out: The Rise of the Black Middle Class in Chicago, $29.00, Northern Illinois University Press, 200 pages Don Hayner, Binga: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black Banker, $24.95, Northwestern University Press, 312 pages

SPOILER ALERT! SSW GAME KEYS "Veeps" croSSWord Answers!

Robert Weems, Jr., The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago: Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire, $24.95, University of Illinois Press, 248 pages Eileen Li grew up in Atlanta and attended the University of Chicago, where she was deputy news editor of the Chicago Maroon. She last wrote about “SLAYSIAN,” an Asian American art exhibition.

Post Office Trivia Answers!

1.) The Sears and Montgomery Ward mail-order catalogs 2.) Henry Wadsworth McGee Sr. 3.) Unique Clay 4.) Richard Wright 5.) Roseland Station 6.) Cesar Chavez 7.)

Muddy Waters 8.) The Auburn post office at 83rd and Ashland 9.) Canaryville, at 4217 S. Halsted 10. ) H.H. Holmes’s legendary “murder castle”

their kids. They hoped that their neighbors would get to know them, see them as individuals, and stay. In the early days, we catch glimpses of a city where Black-owned newspapers and Black-owned banks seemed to be planting the seeds of success. After all, they had built so much in just fifty years since the end of slavery, and anything was possible if they kept this trajectory.

Binga’s biggest dream was to build a skyscraper in the Black Belt. To him, skyscrapers evoked what drew people to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century—the fact that Chicago was beginning to look like modernity. In his determined fashion, he made it happen, building the six-story Binga Arcade on the northwest corner of 35th and State.

But his larger dream has yet to come to fruition. The Binga Arcade was not the beginning of the revitalization of the Black Belt; there is no skyscraper district on the South Side that rivals the Loop.

As of 2020, just one Black-owned bank remains in Chicago. Traces of Binga’s success are vanishingly hard to find, as the

AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

EDUCATION

How South Side High Schools Voted to Keep or Remove Cops SRO decisions were left to individual Local School Councils

BY JACQUELINE SERRATO

I

n contrast with school districts in other cities, Chicago’s Board of Education voted in June 4-3 against terminating Chicago Public Schools’ $33 million contract with the Chicago Police Department. Officials said that cops-in-schools decisions were better left to seventy-two individual Local School Councils (LSCs) and that they had until August 15 to do so.

Seventeen schools in the city did not have enough votes (aka quorum) and nine schools in the city had no LSCs or had “nonfunctioning” LSCs, which the CPS website defined as those unable to convene members besides the principal. Charter schools don’t participate in the School Resource Officer (SRO) program.

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ AUGUST 19, 2020

With Mayor Lori Lightfoot reluctantly allowing CPS to do full-time remote learning for the fall semester under pressure from parents and teachers due to consistent COVID-19 trends, the school board recently had to slash its CPD budget in half. The board expects to vote on renewing its contract August 26. Here’s how South Side high schools voted. Visit cps.edu/votesro for final tally Jacqueline Serrato is the editor-in-chief of the South Side Weekly. She last wrote about the intersection of Black Lives Matter and decolonization.

EDUCATION

ILLUSTRATION BY ALEJANDRA FERNANDEZ

AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

PHOTO BY TROY GUENO

Who’s Keeping the Peace?

Mediating the conflict between police and residents after the police shot Latrell Allen

BY CORDELL LONGSTREATH

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

Around 7pm on Sunday, August 9, I started seeing Facebook Live videos of a familiar scene: Black male voices, a phalanx of cops, and the disjointed yells of humans under duress. The first two videos were from people I didn't directly know, but what I did know was the location that was tagged on each video—Moran Park at 57th and Racine. Realizing something big was happening, but not knowing what, I started searching online for other friends who happened to be there.

Joseph Williams is a millennial who ran for 15th Ward alderman in 2019. He entered my brain during that election cycle, and my work this year as a member of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood has put me in close proximity with him often—at RAGE's end of the year party and then volunteering with him during the emergency relief food distribution. When I saw his Live that Sunday he was cool, calm, and collected. What stood out most was when he stated he would turn off his livestream to focus on mediating the conflict that was happening between police and residents after the police shot Latrell Allen. I felt his purpose and wasn’t surprised when his video went viral. When I saw the South Side Weekly team was looking for on-the-ground recounting of the story, I knew I could raise a voice in Englewood.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I think something that the mainstream media and just any media has been missing about what happened at 57th and Racine is understanding the social media impact. Could you recap how social media gave you your call to action to even go over to 57th Street?

Absolutely. I was in the bed with my son. We were about to watch a movie. It just so happened my Facebook was [open] on my phone and I saw a Live, and I'm like, “What is this? That's down the street!” So I just like flew out the door and went straight over there.

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ AUGUST 19, 2020

My wife was like, “Where are you going?” I'm like, “Hey, I got this. I got to get over here and try to help out in some way.”

You could see that the tension was high. You can see that the police were not being as responsive as they could have been to the community by showing them respect back or communicating with them. And I just kind of started to assess the situation. One person was saying, “A guy got shot this many times.” Another person was saying, “They just beat up my cousin and pulled him.” You get the chance to just hear all the different stories.

I went to [Chicago Police Department director of community engagement] Glen Brooks, and asked him, "Hey, what's the condition on this young man?” And I was able to tell the community he's stable, really, to try to calm it down. Because you've got community, police—everybody's aggressive towards one another. It was a really tense situation. The police had a crime scene that they were supposed to be behind, and they put yellow tape in front of them. And what I noticed them do was reach past that crime scene and pull individuals in. And after pulling them in, they beat 'em up! And one guy, I watched him pull his shirt and rip his shirt up, but why they was doing that...it caused more friction.

It was just a blessing that…when I first went on my Live, [other organizers] got a chance to see where I was at and they started to respond to the call. They started coming out. And when the organizers started to come out, they helped me organize a little bit better. We were able to build a link chain, build a wall up with each other to protect the community. And then the community stayed behind us, the police stayed on their side, and nobody crossed paths. And it was to keep everyone protected and safe.

Eventually, a bullhorn came out, and… I was able to [say], “I need all women and children [to get out] because more police are flowing into the community,” while I'm on the bullhorn. I'm talking about at least an extra 200 additional police were coming out, running down the streets with batons in their hands, assault rifles strapped to their chest.

“Somebody has to step up to the plate and say, you know what, we're going to mediate this. We're going to find a way to de-escalate this. And until that happens, money should be pulled from the police department and put into resources that can really help when it comes to this.”

Before you went out, you didn't have any actual clue what you would be doing, correct?

Nah, nah, man. Not other than what I do on the regular. I love to organize events and just organize people and try to do my community work. I just wanted to help so I just ran out the door. Didn't know what I was about to walk into, but I knew I had to find some way to try to help.

And when you got there earlier, you said, the organizers and activists, they came afterwards. Were there some folks on the ground when you first got there?

When I first got there, it was only me. And then another gentleman, [Simeon Career Academy Basketball Hall of Fame player] Tim Flowers, he called me directly and said, “Joe, where you at?” So Tim was one of the first people on the scene with me. And from there we just kept trying to balance it out. And then other organizers and activists started showing up in bits and pieces, and it was just a blessing to have them come out there because it helped.

Like I said, those same police that rushed into our community, disrespecting them, and being so hostile to the community were the same police, they had to leave back out of the community. And with me working with those organizers, we were able to open a pathway up for them to leave and go right back to their cars safely, get back home to their family safe.

And it's something that I tell everybody, they didn't give us that same opportunity when they rushed into Englewood.

You have to treat a community with a little bit more respect. A lot of the community members that were out there was actually like, “Hey, where's [Officer] McClain? Where's [Officer] Shelton?” because these are the community-engaged officers that are usually out there and they know the community members. But they wasn't out there. They had Ninth District police from Bridgeport out there—there was like a few Seventh District, but the majority was Ninth District and they didn't know how to react with our people.

I worked with Commander Snelling, the Seventh District commander.…He was also the one who gave us updates with the young man that got beat up by an officer, so we can connect him back to his family. Snelling realized, like everyone else, that it was too many police officers on one block so he wants to start deploying and get rid of some of the police officers. So we worked with him and he was able to send them away.

With a lot of what's going on with the civic unrest in terms of police brutality and stuff, you hear people talking about funding community violence prevention and crisis response. And it sounds like you did the job that officers like Shelton usually do when they're in a situation like that. Those skills that you learned, did you learn them from one source? Do you think there's a training that other people from the community could learn?

I would love to do a training with other individuals to teach them about this, to teach them how to organize when things like this are happening in their communities. This is a big piece that we are missing. We organize for other things, but our communities don't know how to organize when their emotions are up high and people are upset. People don't think like, “You know, what if we click arms, you guys, and we build us a wall?” We can protect each other and stop the police from coming on our side at least.

JUSTICE It's good to have these types of skill sets because the simple fact is that when you don't have that setup, it looks totally different. When I arrived, everybody was scattered in different portions on the street.…There was no structure, really. Everybody wasn't together. So it made it easier for the police to run in on people and easier for children and women and people to fall and trip because of the fact there was no protection for them.

I would love to host sessions where I can come out and organize communities and teach them what it looks like when responding to the police in these types of situations.

Did you read the Tribune article? The one that highlighted you? I liked how they paired [UIC professor Kishonna] Gray's view of the historical disinvestment in our community and everything. Do you think there's any existing apparatuses that can be focused on in terms of getting that funding to actually reinvest in the community?

Because we see the friction between police and you know—[I read an article] not too long ago, it says seventy percent of police are denying the fact of doing restorative practice, doing community engagement and community relationship trainings and things like that. So if seventy percent are denying to do it, why do they even work in a community or serve a community that they're not willing to build a relationship with? So thinking of it from that standpoint tells me that we need to pull some money away from the CPD budget. We need to use some of that money to invest into some of the stuff that we're talking about today, to invest into some of these resources that could be boots on the ground and helping out.

We can't continue to invest so much into a police department that's continuing to say, “We don't want training on how to build relationships. We don't want to come into your community and know you. We want to come over here and basically tell you what to do.

And we're going to be aggressive. And we going to do it how we want to do it.”

Somebody has to step up to the plate and say, you know what, we're going to mediate this. We're going to find a way to de-escalate this. And until that happens, money should be pulled from the police department and put into resources that can really help when it comes to this.

You ran for alderman; you probably felt a new presence that you had whenever you entered a room. After going viral, how do you feel your presence in the world? Has there been any shift or anything? Do you feel like you've been pushed to a further point in your career? Or how has going viral impacted you?

Oh, I was just speaking from my heart and I went to sleep. I was tired after that day. I went home, I went to sleep and I woke up to so many phone calls and it was like, "Hey, you're going viral on Twitter!" I'm like, “Well, I don't have a Twitter account, so can you share the video?”

I'll say this: for me, the standard has always been set to a very high bar. I don't think the work should ever stop. I don't think I could ever stop the work that I'm doing. I ran for alderman based on some of the same principles that I'm continuing to fight for, trying to protect our women, our children, bringing men back into the household; protecting our communities on any level, no matter if it's getting a stop sign put up just so guys won't fly past the stop sign and possibly hit children; fighting for our schools and making sure schools have the resources they need. Going viral just put probably more pressure on me to make sure that I can continue to fight, even if I fight even harder now. Now not only are people watching, but people that are watching us can also be a part of the change. I would never change my vision or [what] I want to feel about our community. I have hope that [our community can] one day be beautiful, can be something that our children grow up proud. And I just want to continue to fight to bring that type of quality and bring that type of positive vibe. And I’ll never stop. Cordell Longstreath is the community engagement and outreach specialist for the Resident Association of Greater Englewood. You can catch him rambling about the importance of the census. He previously helped report a piece on Black and brown communities arranging a truce for the Weekly.

AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

JUSTICE

Absence of Proof

With no video documentation, the facts in the police shooting of Latrell Allen remain in dispute

BY JONATHAN BALLEW

ILLUSTRATION BY MELL MONTEZUMA

I

n 2016 then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that by 2017 all Chicago police officers would be equipped with body cameras. Body cameras have become the number-one tool for police departments across the nation to remain accountable.

By providing video footage of encounters with the public, they are intended to keep both citizens and officers safe from false narratives. Though their efficacy remains a matter of debate, one thing is clear: they only work if they are worn and activated.

On Sunday, August 9, at around 2:30 pm, in Englewood, CPD officers shot and wounded a man who allegedly shot at them 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ AUGUST 19, 2020

while fleeing. But no video exists of the incident, as none of the officers involved were wearing body cameras.

The man shot, twenty-year-old Latrell Allen, has been charged with two counts of attempted murder and one count of unlawful possession of a weapon. He allegedly fired two shots at officers before they returned fire, hitting Allen. He was eventually transported to the University of Chicago Medical Center.

The man’s brother, Earl Allen, told the Sun-Times that he had been with Latrell and several others at Moran Park, at 57th and Racine, and that someone in the group

made a comment to officers in a police vehicle, which led to a pursuit.

“My brother ain’t fired at no police,” he told the Sun-Times.

On Monday, the Weekly spoke with Englewood resident Keith Smith, fortynine, who said he was hanging out near Moran Park, close to where the shooting happened.

Smith said a police vehicle came up on Allen in an intimidating manner, with great speed and jumping a curb as it approached him. “They didn’t have to roll up on him like that even if they thought he had a gun,” he said. “I think it caused him to panic.”

Smith said he saw Allen turn a corner and then heard gunshots, but did not see the shooting.

The facts of the case are widely disputed between the police officers who were involved and Allen’s defense. The state says that officers recovered a gun with shell casing after following a trail of blood to Allen’s home. Allen’s public defender said on Tuesday that Allen was shot in the cheek and back; the bond proffer says he was shot in the cheek and in “the side area.”

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) told the Weekly that there was no video evidence of the shooting from officer body cameras or surveillance POD cameras.

“Preliminary investigative efforts have determined the involved Chicago Police Officers assigned to the newly created Community Safety Team did not have body worn cameras,” said a spokesperson for COPA in a statement.

In July CPD Superintendent David Brown announced a newly created “Community Safety Team” that would comprise almost 300 officers on the South and West Sides. “Let me be clear, this is not a roving strike force like CPD has had in the past,” Brown said in July.

Brown said the team would receive special training in crisis intervention and community policing and 1st and 4th Amendment rights. He said the team would

focus on initiatives like peace marches, prayer circles, and food drives. “This team will be community policing based and community policing at its finest,” he said during the press conference.

In an op-ed, the Weekly wrote last month, “Some of the most corrupt and abusive CPD officers came from this very kind of unit.”

On Sunday, officers from the Community Safety Team began a foot pursuit of Allen that would end in an alleged shootout. They were deployed without any body cameras.

The Weekly asked CPD if it is standard procedure for officers on the Community Safety Team not to be equipped with body cameras. CPD said they have been “actively working” to equip the Community Safety Team with body cameras and that they “have prioritized all officers who are a part of these teams to receive body-worn cameras under the 2021 budget if they don’t already have one.”

According to CPD’s body camera policy, “The decision to electronically record a law-enforcement related encounter is mandatory, not discretionary.”

A source within CPD told the Weekly that part of the problem was that the policing contract under the previous administration is restrictive, and prohibits the sharing of body cameras by officers who are on different shifts.

But University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman disagreed with CPD’s assessment. Futterman focuses on civil rights and police accountability and was one of the lead attorneys on the communitybased lawsuit that ultimately led to the current consent decree.

Futterman said that not equipping the Community Safety Team with body cameras “has to be an intentional decision”

by CPD leadership.

He said that the issue of which units in CPD are equipped with body cameras is “an issue that hasn’t gotten enough public attention.”

“They have decided that these teams VISUAL ARTS most in need of monitoring are the very units they are exempting and ensuring that no video evidence of these encounters will ever exist. It has to be an intentional decision.”

Sage Smith discusses the therapeutic process of

Line Language

linework, motionwork, and pattern-making “CPD officers are not assigned and can activate if you end up interacting with a in her art

or required to wear body cameras, it’s ridiculous,” he said.

Futterman said while CPD isn’t breaking the law by not providing officers on the Community Safety Team with body cameras, they are “violating the spirit of the consent decree,” which is designed to ensure that officers who engage with the public the most are held accountable, through the use of body cameras and other tactics.

He said the issue is widespread within the department. Special units such as the Community Safety Team, SWAT, narcotics units, gang units, and units regularly conducting dangerous raids are often not assigned body cameras.

Futterman believes CPD is avoiding transparency and accountability. “The units that have been the most abusive and are engaging in these encounters everyday are ironically the very units that CPD refuses to issue body cameras,” he said.

Futterman has been critical of mistaken CPD raids where officers were found to not have their body cameras turned on.

“This is a matter of CPD policy,” he said.

“They have decided that these teams most in need of monitoring are the very units they are exempting and ensuring that no video evidence of these encounters will ever exist.

It has to be an intentional decision.”

Furthermore, officers who do have body cameras are often not turning them on—as required by CPD policy—and they are not held accountable when they do not, he said.

Alderman Matt Martin (47th) has been very hands on when it comes to enforcing the consent decree and enforcing its directives. On Tuesday’s meeting of the Committee on Public Safety, Martin asked why officers responding on Sunday did not have body cameras.

Martin told the Weekly that CPD’s response that they were actively working to equip officers with body cameras was “not an acceptable answer.”

“When you respond to calls for service, you should have a body camera that you

member of the public,” he said.

Martin said he can appreciate the difficult position Superintendent Brown is in, inheriting a department that still has a long way to go for true reform. “There are a lot of moving parts,” he said.

Martin said the city missed a major opportunity to prove the city and its police department are making strides in implementing the consent decree. “It was a mistake not to have [body cameras] in this situation,” he said. “I hope we make body cameras available to all officers as quickly as possible.”

The footage reviewed by COPA from the POD camera on the corner of 57th & Racine does show the individual who, according to CPD, “matched the description of the person sought to be in possession of a firearm,” but the camera did not capture any evidence beyond that, said a COPA spokesperson.

On Tuesday, Judge Susana Ortiz gave Allen a $1 million bail. The bond proffer confirms that the officers responding did not have body cameras and that their squad car was not equipped with dashboard cameras because the “Community Policing Unit is a newly formed Unit.”

Ballistics and DNA evidence are still with the Illinois State Police and has not yet been processed.

Ultimately, the case against Allen is likely to hinge on the sworn testimony of the same officers who shot him. Without body camera, dashboard camera, or POD camera evidence, Chicago may never know what truly happened that Sunday in Englewood. Jonathan Ballew is a Chicago-based freelancer who lives in Uptown. His work has appeared in Block Club Chicago, Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Reporter, and the Sun-Times, among others. He last wrote for the Weekly about the proposed Tiger Woods golf course in South Shore.

BY RODERICK SAWYER Amid a pandemic and civil uprisings, many artists are trying to figure out how to make social and personal impacts through their work. For Sage Smith, her work both speaks to the importance of her identity and transcends the idea of being mono-cultural. She grew up on the South Side and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Arts Education and Bachelor’s in Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She just completed her first solo show, The Barriers That Create Us, at Connect Gallery (1520 E. Harper Ct.) in Hyde Park, which ran from August 2 to August 9 and featured an in-person, socially distanced artist talk at its opening. Smith sat down with South Side Weekly to talk about her therapeutic relationship with patterns, line work, and motion, and how she strives to create work outside of what society believes Black creatives should be making. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How do you mentally set up your environment to create?

It’s definitely different working at home after having gone to Baltimore, [where] I have a studio space. All of our dorms have giant studios that you can go work in, and not having access to that I started working in just the corner of my house, but I know that personally what I need is a level of comfort. It was really about finding that space here because I had already established that in Baltimore, sort of like purchasing a bean bag chair so that I could sit and focus on making a pattern for hours. It just has to be extremely peaceful; I don’t really like a lot of music, I’ll usually listen to a book. It’s not high energy, it’s very meditative.

How do you start your creative process?

Usually, I start off with a line drawing—I don’t really plan too much or sketch things out a whole lot. I’ll section off the piece and then I build up a color language from that, and then from that, I’ll build up a pattern language. They all usually start out with a line drawing of sorts that gets layered upon.

What has your first solo show at Connect Gallery meant to you, especially now?

I sort of developed an aversion to making political work in college. I think that even more so during this time there was that expectation, and I saw this tweet that said “Artists during this time, just create.” And it didn’t say anything about what we should be creating about, it just said create, and I think I really took that to heart as validation that I don’t have to create work about the time, and it’s still work about the time.

I had done group shows before, but this is the first time that I could really say anything [about my work]. It was very important for me to talk about something that I felt was very important to me, which was this environment, this space, that’s really what the show became about, but it was so many different ideas bouncing around in the show which made it amazing. It was the first time I had ever gotten to say anything that I wanted, I compare it to like, your first creative writing assignment where you just write anything. It doesn’t have to be a story, it doesn’t have to be a poem, write anything. So that’s kind of how I felt.

AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

“It didn’t say anything about what we should be creating about, it just said create, and I think I really took that to heart as validation that I don’t have to create work about the time, and it’s still work about the time.”

Has that worked well with the group shows, or is there another way that you show your work that allows you to get that feedback or interaction?

I think that’s why I dive so heavily into abstraction. I don’t use a lot of symbolism in my work. … You take what you want from it. I don’t necessarily enjoy having to explain it. I know it’s weird because I’m doing an interview [laughs] but it’s very hard for me because I told you where I’m at, where I’m creating is just a peaceful, cozy moment and it’s really hard to let other people into that moment because it just seems so private. Then once you put the work out there it’s for everyone else. I’m still coming to terms with that aspect.

Is this something that you felt like you haven’t been able to do, or is it just a different method of doing it than your work has been able to do?

Yes, I just felt unfiltered, unedited, unapologetic. It was just raw, it’s what I felt like creating without having to justify it or tweak it into someone else’s idea or make it for a homework assignment for school. It felt like, wow, I just made these [paintings] just to make them and this a story that I was talking about, and it all kind of came together.

How do you think language works within the motion, line, and pattern work that you do?

The way I use the word “language” is usually to convey stylistic choice, like I’m using this language of style to communicate this from one line to an extremely flat piece that sort of conveys depth but was not made with one line. I think a lot of what I’m talking about when I was using the word “language” was using the same sort of letter but just in a different word.

My pattern work and my avatar character, who I drew since high school, helped me to convey these emotions of existence in different spaces throughout this show. I’m not sure what I wanted people to get from it. I got a lot of different responses on race, on homosexuality, on a lot of these things, which I didn’t necessarily intend because I think that’s of course part of my prerogative, you know, not necessarily making outright comments on those.

As an artist, putting work out there in a very direct way can be limiting. Art can be about complexity, it can tell the intended story but then it can tell so many different other stories as well.

Yeah, I’m not one for imposing my meaning on others. I really enjoy listening and learning what different lenses and different perspectives and different people take from different pieces. That was probably the best part of the entire show.

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ AUGUST 19, 2020

Do you feel like going into depth about that process is exposing that private space?

Where do you feel like that line is between what you put out and what you try to keep for yourself?

I definitely talk about my process, but it’s always something that I do alone. Most recently [I] started filming time lapses just to see, but I usually don’t like people in my space while I’m working. I’m like, get out of the way! [laughs] You know, it’s just a very private way to create. I know other artists who need someone around to create because they need to bounce ideas off of people. But I think that’s something that will always remain private, whereas the work, I’m gonna put it out there and it won’t be mine anymore. It’ll be open to all these other things, but I think my creation process will always be a lot more personal.

How important is it to know your background of Afro-Latinx queerness in looking at your work?

It was a big part of The Barriers That Create Us, just talking about how different environments and experiences have shaped you, and I think I wanted to acknowledge how a lot of my experiences have shaped me. Whether it was being at a predominantly white institution, whether it be my cultural influences, racial influences, that aren’t necessarily in the work outright but definitely affect how I move through the world and how I will always process things. I think it’s always important; in no way is me not talking about race in my work [meaning] that I do not want to be acknowledged by race. It’s not as if I’m trying to edit it out by not talking about it. I just think as an Afro-Latinx queer person I don’t necessarily always have to talk about those things in order to be acknowledged as an Afro-Latinx queer artist.

Where do you see your work going in the next couple of years?

I don’t know! [laughs] I’m just trying to focus on getting my degree and wherever that goes, I will follow. I’m definitely excited for bigger, probably have more of my avatar show in my work, I really enjoy the way that people talked about him because of course my experience with him is deeply personal but how he also becomes a way for people to project themselves into the environment. You know, so I thought out of my social experiment of an art show [laughs] that was very interesting that I definitely will keep up with.

Have you thought about utilizing any different mediums or methods in the future?

Definitely interested in a lot of the above. I have a lot of classes that I’m taking in architecture, printmaking, weaving, and fibers, so I’m definitely planning on in the next couple years experimenting a lot more with surface, medium, language. I’m definitely still experimenting and not limiting myself to only one language. Roderick Sawyer is an artist, writer, and Chicago native. Sawyer occasionally contributes arts stories to the Weekly.

AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

Seeking Solidarity Mutual aid organizers speak about their work

BY ALEX Y. DING, JUSTYN STANFORD, AND LINGHUA (LILY) QI As millions take to the streets to defend Black lives, mutual aid groups are forming to protect and care for communities on Chicago’s South and West Sides. “Seeking Solidarity” is a shortform digital series that features interviews with organizers, artists, and everyday people who are coming together in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic and police violence.

Created by Free Spirit Media fellows Alex Ding, Justyn Stanford, and Lily Qi, the series aims to highlight efforts within the communities to support each other as well as to offer information and resources for community members. To watch all the videos in the series, go to southsideweekly.com/seeking-solidarity/.

An edited transcript of the interview with West Side Mutual Aid organizer Lydia Wong follows below.

So in the simplest sense, mutual aid is just neighbors helping out neighbors. Mutual

aid really takes the values of the movement … this idea of personalism, that we are personally responsible for each other. That is not up to a nonprofit or government organization, or anyone else, but that if there's a need that my neighbor has, then it's really my duty to help take care of them.

Currently West Side Mutual Aid, we have focused on groceries and food access. So we started the first week of the shutdown, with the pandemic, doing grocery deliveries to maybe a dozen or so families.

So these needs are nothing new. Right?

Food insecurity was already a struggle here prior to coronavirus.

In North Lawndale, which is the neighborhood that I live in, the median income, I believe, is $13,000.

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ AUGUST 19, 2020

We saw an immediate spike in food needs.

These are neighborhoods that have been divested from and systematically oppressed for many years. So it's no surprise that there are already many pre-existing needs that are just sort of amplified through coronavirus.

But along with that, there are many needs for things like rent assistance, for financial assistance.

Many folks are unemployed, but unable to access unemployment insurance, due to the type of work that they had, whether it was under the table or babysitting their neighbors’ kids while their neighbor works.

That is a mutual aid network we frankly can't meet right now. It's so overwhelming.

And so we've really just pinned down. “You know what? Let’s find one need. We can't solve it for everybody. But let's figure out how we can do it well, for these 130 or so on our list and go from there.”

We honestly did not have any sort of strategy of how do we get [the] word out of what we're doing? And that was entirely done through informal networks and word of mouth.

A lot of the faith-based institutions also are very well-connected and already had the organizing set up in place prior to this happening. So here in North Lawndale, that has been really neat to see both getting on Zoom calls where there is a multigenerational group of folks working together for the neighborhood and folks who also already have some trusting relationships with each other.

For many people, this is a brand new idea that, you know, we can be the ones who help each other and help ourselves. And so I think that shift in understanding and philosophy, and also sometimes the realization like, hey, the city, the government, you know, they're not necessarily going to come pick us up. We gotta—we gotta take care of ourselves out here. That's a huge benefit that I'm hoping is lasting. Alex Y. Ding is a filmmaker, organizer, and writer based in Chicago. You can find them on IG @alexyding. Justyn Stanford is an audio engineer, composer, and motion graphics animator from the South Side of Chicago. You can find him on Instagram @ronansphere.

Linghua (Lily) Qi is a multimedia journalist based in Chicago. You can find her on Instagram @lily7.q.

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BY MARTHA BAYNE

1. Chicago’s Old Main Post Office was built in 1921 but vastly expanded in 1932 to meet the surge in mail generated by what two Chicago-based businesses?

2. The Bronzeville Post Office is named after this man, the first African American postmaster of a major postal facility.

3. A South Side essential worker became the first Chicago postal carrier to die of COVID-19 in May, shortly after giving birth to her third child. What’s her name?

4. What celebrated Chicago writer, whose searing midcentury indictments of racism and its impact on young Black men in particular led to his immortalization on a stamp, worked as a letter sorter between 1927 and 1930?

5. Which far South Side post office—featuring Art Deco lines and a blue-gray brick exterior trimmed in Indiana limestone—was built as part of the New Deal’s Public Works Administration?

6. The Pilsen post office is named after what famed organizer of farm workers?

7. Which South Side blues legend (whose Kenwood home was recently preserved and is to be turned into a museum and community center) was honored with a 29-cent stamp in 1994?

8. According to news reports, at which South Side post office have residents been forced to wait up to three hours in line for mail this summer?

9. The offices of the American Postal Workers Union Local One are located in what South Side neighborhood?

10. The Englewood post office at 611 W. 63rd sits on the site of what alleged house of horrors?

ANSWER KEYS ON PAGE 11!

AUGUST 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

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*HUKDUGW 5RRÀQJ and Chimney &KLPQH\ ZRUN %ULFN ZRUN 7XFNSRLQWLQJ /LQWHO ZRUN 3DUDSHW ZDOOV 5RRÀQJ \HDUV H[S 773.325.1600 $ Z %%% Misc for Sale

267

For Sale - Best Offers 1. Autographed 8 x 10 picture of Muhammad Ali plus a bonus - reverse side has magic marker artwork

by Muhammad Ali. One of a kind - very valuable. 2.

773-592-4535 Boxing Record Book & misc. books & magazines. 3. “LivMovers 123 ing Blues” Blues Magazine.

15 years of issues complete.

4. Civil War History Books.

MICHAEL MOVING 5. Several hundred ‘Spy and :H 0RYH 'HOLYHU 070 Detective’. All in excellent DQG 'R &OHDQ 2XW -REV condition.

Most with jackets.

773.977.9000 773-504-4915

Clarity Carpet & Furniture Cleaning Special 10% Off ($180+) 15% Off $350+) 20% Off ($600+) “Carpet so clean, LW·V DOPRVW VHH WKURXJKµ 773-886-8300 FODULW\FOHDQLQJ QHW

Best Maids :LOO FOHDQ \RXU KRXVH RU DSW 5HIHUHQFHV DYDLODEOH Call Best Maids 708/599-7000 Construction

valstor.net

10% OFF Senior Citizen Discount Let Us Help Build Your Business! www.bestmaids.com License #: GJS Landscaping 1BX B&S 07.02.20.indd6/25/20 1 1:31 PM

Advertise in the Business & Service Directory Today!!

–

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

Serving Hyde Park and surrounding–communities

100 to $500 Cash!

Contact Rod: (773)

–

(815) 464-0606

Moving, Delivery and Cleanout Jobs

$

–

PLASTER PATCHING DRYVIT STUCCO FULLY INSURED

Residential Plumbing Service

312.344.0390 773.953.0439 –

Help Wanted Wanted Help

083

Plastering

143 Sidewalk Sale

KELLY Plastering Co. 3ODVWHU 3DWFKLQJ 'U\YLW 6WXFFR )8//< ,1685(' 815-464-0606

268

ELLIS COOP MULTI-SIDEWALK SALE CORNER 54TH & ELLIS FRI: 8/21, 9-3 SAT: 8/22, 9-3

JO & RUTH Real Estate Services 300 REMODELING Plumbing 145 :H 6SHFLDOL]H LQ 9LQWDJH HUD/Bank Foreclosures +RPHV DQG 5HVWRUDWLRQV &LW\ 6XEXUEV The Plumbing Department 3DLQWLQJ 3RZHU :DVKLQJ Call: Fred D. Clink $YDLODEOH IRU DOO RI \RXU 'HFN 6HDOLQJ %ULFN 5H 773-294-5870 UHVLGHQWLDO SOXPELQJ QHHGV SDLU 7XFNSRLQWLQJ &DUSHQ Realty Services Consortium /LF LQVXUHG 6HUYLQJ WU\ 3RUFK 'HFN .LWFKHQ &KLFDJR 6XEXUEV %DWK 5HPRGHOLQJ Apartments for Rent-Chgo 305 6HQLRU 'LVFRXQWV *Since 1982* Call Jeff at 773-617-3686 Directly on the lakefront!

Furniture for Sale 092 ([SDQVLYH %' %$ Z Records/Music 146 GRZQWRZQ ODNH YLHZV VWRUDJH KU VHF IXOO 0,.(·6 )851,785( ÀWQHVV FHQWHU PLQ ELNH WILL BUY YOUR VINYL “Furniture For All!” ULGH WR 82& +\GH 3DUN 5HFRUGV LQ JRRG WR 0LQW %HGV 6RID VHWV /DPSV RU Z DVVLJQHG VKDSH SUHIHUUHG %OXHV .LWFKHQ $SSOLDQFHV LQGRRU SDUNLQJ 5RFN HWF Call Mike: PRUH Call Terry at 312-659-0179 312.656.4882 773-276-0599 Home Repair

102 Self Storage

Hanns Restoration Serving Hyde Park Since 1996 *HQHUDO &RQWUDFWLQJ &XVWRP %XLOGLQJ NO JOB TOO SMALL 773-592-8173 K\GHSDUNEXLOGHUV #JPDLO FRP Landscaping

118

GARDEN KEEPERS Spring Cleanup!

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149

ValStor 6HOI 6WRUDJH %LJ 6WRUDJH 6PDOO 3ULFHV 6L]HV $YDLODEOH 1R /RQJ 7HUP &RQWUDFW valstor.net 773-496-5248 9VVÄUN

CONRAD ROOFING CO. 6SHFLDOL]LQJ LQ $UFKLWHFWXUDO 0HWDO :RUN *XWWHUV 'RZQVSRXWV %D\ :LQGRZV &RUQLFHV 5RRÀQJ 6ODWH &OD\ 7LOH &HGDU 6KLQJOHV )ODW (QHUJ\ 6WDU 5RRI 773-286-6212

Let Us Help Build Your Business!

Advertise in the South Side Weekly’s Business & Service Directory Today!! Email:

malone@ southsideweekly.com

LIVING IN THE PRESENT, PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE

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Empower Southside students through one-to-one tutoring this fall.

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Consultations Available via One-on-One Meeting or Video Conferencing. To Schedule Your In-Person or Video Consultation Call:

Michael Malloy (312) 241-4490 or Cage Memorial Chapels (773) 721-8900

Illinois Insurance Producer License #18281122

1508 E 53RD STREET #210 Hyde Park commercial office space rental in the Business District. This space can be divided into 870 sq. 1508 ft. or 1,500 sq. ft. with contiguous E 53RD STREET #210 space overlooking 53rd street.

Hyde Park commercial office space rental in the Business District. This space can be divided into 870 sq. ft. or 1,500 sq. ft. with contiguous space overlooking 53rd street.

SHIRLEY SHIRLEY WALKER WALKER

SWalker@BHHSChicago.com | 773.230.9883

SWalker@BHHSChicago.com | 773.230.9883

Real Estate Group

Do you know how much your property is worth?

We are actively looking for houses and condos for qualified Buyers.

Call the experts at Meliora Real Estate Group: Madelaine Gerbaulet-Vanasse 773-818-6318 mgerbaulet@melioraregroup.com

Amy Gelman 773-454-1020

Kandis Martin 847-687-4721

Corey Chatman 312-414-9928

Mary-Ellen Holt 312-560-6566

Tijana Velarde 847-630-1022

Phil Gerbaulet-Vanasse 773-406-9831

agelman@melioraregroup.com meholt@melioraregroup.com

New Listing: 5119 S Woodlawn Avenue

kmartin@melioraregroup.com

tvelarde@melioraregroup.com

New! Sold before print!

5230 S University Avenue #O

Brick home with large yard and two car garage. 4 bedrooms, 3 full updated baths and 2 half baths. Great layout, fully finished basement and new kitchen appliances. $1,024,000

Updated and freshly painted 3 bedroom, 2 and a half bath townhouse with roof top deck and private garage. $465,000

Featured Listing: 5216 S Dorchester Avenue #3

Price improvement!

Open House Saturday 1-3 4719 S Greenwood Avenue #2

3 bedroom, 2 bath totally rehabbed condo with central A/C and washer/ dryer in unit. Lovely common back yard and oversized deck. $369,000

Pristine and luxurious 3 bedroom/2 bath condo with all the bells and whistles. Balcony, A/C, in unit washer/dryer. $349,000

cchatman@melioraregroup.com

pgerbaulet@melioraregroup.com

Open House Saturday 1-3 4737 S Kimbark Avenue

Lovely Queen Anne on quiet cul de sac in Kenwood. 5 plus bedrooms, 2 and a half baths, newer luxury kitchen and income producing coach house. $975,000

Feature Listing: 5301 S Greenwood Avenue

Spacious home on corner lot close to everything. 5 bedrooms, 3 and a half baths, beautiful garden and income producing coach house. $1,175,000

South Kenwood land for sale!

4725 S Kimbark Avenue

Huge buildable lot in South Kenwood. $550,000

Feature Listing: 1755 E 55th Street

Two extraordinary units available at the Parkshore: unit 704 is a totally remodeled luxurious 1 bedroom at a fabulous price: $98,500. Unit 1201 is a spacious 3 bedroom/ 3 bath penthouse listed at $280,000.

Both have awesome corner views.

1007 East 53rd Street • 773-582-1500

www.melioraregroup.com • We are social: