South 70th and Yale. I pass the place at least 4 times a week, often more. I run after school programs on the south side of Chicago. Our center is located a few blocks north of the posh Hyde Park neighborhood that is home to Barack Obama, but many participants live further south, within a 6-block radius of 70th and Yale, and I drive by there regularly to pick up and drop off kids in the neighborhood. Most of the 31 Chicago school children who were shot and killed last year on the “mean streets of Chicago” attend schools that are serviced by our programs in this neighborhood and others on the west side, where the body of a young African American male was found—presumably that of Jennifer Hudson’s nephew, Julian King.
Julian King. By now, a household name. And the others?
Daniel Curtis, 14. Antonio Harris, 19. Laura Joslin, 12. Marcel Collinis, 17. Blair Holt. I’m thankful that none of them were my students because when you live and work where I do, it’s a crap-shot. Any day, it could be “one of yours.”
There will be no FBI investigation into the tragic shooting deaths of these young people, no $100,000 reward for their safe return, no GoogleNews sensation, no E! Online “Extra!”. It might make the local news, community organizers will respond.
And the community will talk—
“She shoulda moved her Mama outta there—she had the money. Englewood! Everyone knows....”
“You know he shot the boy—he was the only one who could identify him.”
We always do. Even when there's no celebrity involved, which is usually the case.
I walked down the hall, sat down on the back stairs with a woman we call “Mama Bea (MB)”. I’ve known and been working with MB for about 7 years—she’s on the maintenance staff at the facility. She lives a few blocks from me, to the south. We’re good friends. About 2 months ago, MB’s son was riddled with bullets on a street near her home. She’s been out nursing him back to health until just the other day. Today was the first chance I had to hear her tell what happened.
She’d just run out to the store and was about to enter the apartment when she heard gun shots. Her first reaction was to ignore it, but then she thought to herself, “You better go and see if your Baby’s alright.” She dashed down the street, and to her horror, saw her 17-year old son, bathed in blood and struggling to keep from falling to the ground. She ran to his side, sat down and pulled him onto her lap.
“They hadn’t even called the ambulance,” she said, shaking her head, “I just held my son in my arms and prayed, ‘God, please don’t take my son away from me now,’ and I looked up at them cops and asked, ‘Have you called an ambulance?’ and I kept praying, and they still hadn’t called no ambulance, then I just shook my head and begged, ‘Will somebody please call an ambulance.”
MB’s son is back on his feet now, but she’s got a whole new set of troubles on her plate: let’s not even start with the medical bills from the 6-week, multiple-surgery hospital stay. The post-care costs of sterile gauze, adhesive tape for wounds that need changing twice daily, medications, transportation to doctors’ visits and three times a week rehab. MB’s beat. “Where you supposed to raise a black child in this country? Where? Can’t live in no neighborhoods where the good schools are, here, in these neighborhoods, the gangerbangers will get em. No matter where you are. No matter who you are, they’ll pull em in. Ain’t no place to go.”
The real story in the Hudson family murder case is that it wouldn’t be a story if it weren’t for the celebrity draw. That’s the real story, and the real tragedy. Because it happens all the time here “on Barack Obama’s doorstep,” in an America where shots that killed Jennifer Hudson’s kin went “unnoticed.”
Unnoticed? Not really. Ignored, because they are such a regular occurrence.
Leave it to the “foreign press” to get the scoop. This article from the Telegraph UK gets it right:
When residents living near 7019 South Yale Avenue heard gunshots on Friday morning, they did not even bother to call the police.
The sound is so familiar in parts of Chicago's South Side that locals often just ignore it as they go on with life.
Neighbours had not realised the blasts came from inside the house where Darnell Donerson, mother of Jennifer Hudson, lived with various family members.
So it was only six hours later, when another relative let herself into the home, that the bodies of Mrs. Donerson and her son Jason, Miss Hudson's brother, were discovered shot dead.
The story is a telling indictment of how inured many people on the South Side – home to a million African-Americans, the nation's largest black community – have become to gun crime.
As I said to a colleague this morning, “Damn! If someone had only called the police when they heard the shots, they might have been able to find the boy.”
And another, quietly. “Yeah, they’re so used to hearing it...no one thought anything of it.”
And then there’s fear of retribution, retaliation. Not much talk about that--not even here, in my own backyard.
As one of “my” kids recently said, “Don’t nobody care if it ain’t their kid.”
All of us live and work in these neighborhoods. And we talk about it every time a tragedy like this occurs. More often than not, there are but one or two degrees of separation from the victims, and/or the perpetrators.
The south side is big, but not that big. S. 70th and Yale is
just four miles from Mrs Donerson's house to the $1.6 million neo-Georgian home of Barack Obama. The Democratic presidential candidate also lives on the South Side but in the leafy environs of Hyde Park, an island of coffee shops, restaurants and book stores next to the University of Chicago where he once taught.
Head a few streets south of Hyde Park, however, and it soon looks like another world of run-down low-rise homes and pawn shops protected by steel bars, discount stores and fast food outlets. The South Side stretches a further 14 miles, through districts that are 93 per cent black on average, to Altgeld Gardens, the bleak housing estate where Mr Obama cut his teeth as a community activist in the 1980s.
So Obama can see the neighborhood from his backyard, but that’s not why I think he’d be more qualified to deal with issues we on Chicago’s south side (and other communities like it throughout the country) want to see addressed.
Because it’s not just the guns. It is a morass of social ills, running the gamut from unemployment, social neglect, bad urban planning, bad parenting, drugs, gangs and despair. And part of the problem is that no one but us is talking about it on a daily basis.
But Michelle Obama recently brought it up, and these days, whenever I think about these things, I think about what she said in response to the risks involved for her family in this candidacy
I've talked about this before. Barack is probably safer now than he was before. Kids are dying in the street in our community. They get shot walking to class, sitting in school, taking the bus home. They are dying in the street.....
That wasn’t her main point, at the time, but it’s one of the only times I’ve heard someone two steps away from the White House speak in any real way about the tragedy of all the kids who die in the street “unnoticed.”
I know “these kids”. I love them like my own. My colleagues, friends, neighbors and I, we do what we can. By all rights and means, we would all have to live in fear, every day. Like MB prayin’ to God on the side of the street, like Michelle Obama hearing not-so-thinly-veiled death threats and racial slurs directed at the man who means the world to her, like me—driving up and down the back alleys and mean streets of Chicago’s south side to get kids safely from point A to point B, without getting caught in the crossfire myself.
I am inspired by Michelle Obama’s words.
“Fear is a useless emotion.”
And I know I’m not alone in this. Her words help us to do what we do, day in and day out. Keeping kids off the streets. Providing them exposure to new environments, new impulses, sparking their creativity and nourishing a healthy sense of intellectual curiosity that will help them find positive things to do and ways of living their lives. Even at the risk of our own lives. And that risk is real. For all of us in these neighborhoods: black, white, male, female, young and old alike.
My friends and colleagues sometimes remind me, “Man, Miss Em, you’re bold goin’ down there to pick up them kids.”
My thinking?
The kids get shot walking to class, sitting in school, taking the bus home....
So, who the hell am I if I can’t take that same risk, a couple times a week. They are subject to this risk every day. 24/7.
As the Telegraph reminds us:
the tragic killings of Ms Hudson's mother and brother are a salutary reminder that parts of America remain deeply segregated and divided, not by law, but by economics, expectation, culture and habit. As Mr Obama knows well, that includes his own South Side backyard.
And yeah, I do want someone in the White House who can see my backyard from his, and if the guy's wife is talking about the things no one else seems to care about: all the better.
There is hope in that.