Zelda Galewsky
While Greenline works to show that Woodlawn can support a business, Currency Exchange has set about proving that their business supports Washington Park.
“He points out into the overgrown green where his sister Bertha once gardened,” writes Pria Anand, in the journal she kept in Colombia. “I see bananas and trees and long grass, but only one flower, a tiny one, growing like a weed by the shed.”
Lexi Drexelius
Todd St. Hill is an organizer with We Charge Genocide’s Cop Watch programming, which trains and promotes on-the-ground recording of police activity. St. Hill came to Chicago from Washington, D.C. He draws parallels between police violence in the two cities, and when he recalls growing up in the capitol, he talks about friends being followed down the street, harassed, or beaten by cops. At thirty, St. Hill is the oldest member of a delegation that has stressed leading by the youth. He talked with the Weekly about the goals of the delegation, and the brutality it names and demands redress for. Continue reading
Lexi Drexelius
Mariame Kaba, a longtime educator and activist, has advocated for black youth on issues ranging from prison justice to women’s empowerment. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, an organization dedicated to ending youth incarceration, and has had a hand in founding numerous other justice-based projects. In June, she called together organizers across a spectrum of Chicago anti-racist groups to address police violence against black youth. The collective would generate the We Charge Genocide report and its related accountability projects, including ChiCopwatch trainings and a viral campaign. She spoke with the Weekly on the morning before last week’s CPD budget hearing at City Council, for which We Charge Genocide members had published a set of questions about accountability for aldermen to ask at the hearing. She talked about the history of brutality and resistance, recent and decades old, that grounds the U.N. report, and her hopes for the future the delegation might help create.
Dominique Franklin, “Damo” to friends, was twenty-three-years-old when he died. He spent the last two weeks of his life in a coma at Northwestern Memorial Hospital after being tased multiple times by a Chicago police officer. Witnesses, speaking anonymously to the Tribune, said he’d been turning to run away. The following month, activists in Chicago came together in answer to a call from tenured organizer and educator Mariame Kaba, spurred by his death. Next week, this same group of activists will send a delegation to the United Nations to argue that the unchecked violence of the Chicago Police Department must be recognized as torture. Their report is titled “We Charge Genocide.” Continue reading
COURTESY OF PAUL HOPKIN
MARY ELLEN MARK
What is grace?” asks Anna Deavere Smith, onstage in character as Reverend Peter Gomes. “What is grace? Well, that’s no small question.” This not-small question fueled a three-week artistic residency at the University of Chicago, culminating in the presentation of Smith’s ongoing work, “Conversations on Grace.” Continue reading
JULIET ELDRED
“Chicago Arts District” is an ambiguous designation, as much a brand as a region. The label was crafted in 2002 by John Podmajersky III to promote his family’s properties and the artists who lived and had gallery space within them. Podmajersky Inc. owns at least one hundred lots in East Pilsen; many of them form blocks of contiguous artist lofts and studio spaces along Halsted, concentrated between 16th Street and Cermak Road. There the company also hosts monthly 2nd Fridays Gallery Nights and an annual Pilsen East Artists’ Open House that pre-dates the district but is now run by Podmajersky staff. Continue reading
Zoe Kauder Nalebuff
On Saturday, September 14, 18th Street is covered in the colors of Mexico. It’s almost Independence Day, and Pilsen is wearing its heart on its sleeve. Flags wave from second-story apartments and car roofs. Glittering tassels, alternating pennants, and tissue-paper flowers boast red, green, and white. On the temporary stage at Paulina Street, a singer sways in an equally blooming dress, crooning Mexican tunes for an eager crowd at the Mercaditos en el Zócalo. At Racine, music floats from empty doorways, and in the late afternoon, the sidewalk begins to fill with a scattering of neighborhood cookouts. Continue reading
Jonah Rabb
Quick to balk at the typical outsider’s offhand impression of Beverly as a suburb, the neighborhood is fond of the tagline “Village in the City.” It feels a bit like having your cake and eating it too, a desire to affirm disparate identities as a community unto itself, and one that is still fundamentally of Chicago. Seated at the southwest edges of the city limits, Beverly most resembles the sort of small-but-not-too-small town young parents move to in search of good schools and a tree to hang a tire swing on. Continue reading