Today, however, I wish that I knew more about a pioneering black journalist and activist named Evelyn Cunningham (incidentally her “Wikipedia page is paltry). I am stunned to learn that no one has yet written a book about this extraordinary woman’s life and her accomplishments. She passed away in 2010 at the age of 94. She was a friend of Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, and many others. A feminist before it was cool, she covered the rise of Dr. King in the black freedom movement as well as Malcolm X and others. She was a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier for 20 years. She was nicknamed the “lynching editor” because she was relentless in covering “hard news.”

Listen to her talk about this in her own words:

While reporting in Birmingham and other places during the black freedom movement, Ms. Cunningham was jailed and harassed. An article in the Amsterdam News from 1990 captures a bit of her indomitable spirit.

I really hope to read a biography about her soon…

Sidewalk outside of CPS Headquarters (Chicago, 5/22/13) – photo by Sarah Jane Rhee

There’s a young man named Brian Stirgus who has spent countless hours organizing to keep CPS schools open over the past few months. He’s 17 and a high school senior graduating in just a few short weeks. Brian is a leader with Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools (CSOSOS) which is a youth-led group established to fight against the school closures. You can listen to him eloquently explain the damage that closings will cause for students and to their communities here.

After the Board voted, several members of CSOSOS and their allies gathered for a candelight vigil and press conference outside of CPS Headquarters. As someone who graduated from one of the elementary schools set to close, when Brian spoke, it was with tears streaming down his face:

“They have failed us again. What’s next?” he asked. He added: “It’s like they want to wipe my race out of existence.”

Brian and Chuy (Chicago, 5/22/13) – photo by Sarah Jane Rhee

This photograph of Brian, taken by my friend Sarah Jane Rhee, is seared in my mind and so are his words. Young people have had their eyes opened to the corrupt politics in this city. I don’t know Brian personally though I know dozens of other incredible young people just like him in this city. Some of those young people have also been involved in fighting for education justice. It is for this reason that I am not despairing tonight despite the Chicago Board of Education’s shameful vote. There were tears today but there was also a resolve to continue to fight.

I believe in the creativity and the resilience of the young people in this city. I do. We are not making their path into adulthood any easier. Yet in spite of our detrimental policymaking, Chicago’s youth are by and large making their way through the obstacle course. Some are falling down and we are duty bound to reach out our hand to them. But I am consistently amazed that so many of our youth remain optimistic about the future. So tonight, I’ll take my cue from them and will keep moving forward in the struggle for education and social justice.

For those who are looking for ways to keep fighting, I suggest that you get involved in advocating for an elected school board. We also need to start organizing now to ensure that Rahm Emanuel is a one-term Mayor. Tomorrow, the Chicago Teacher’s Union is organizing an informational event for those who want to learn how to register voters. We have work to do.

As Brian finished his comments, he was embraced by his peers and allies in a group hug.

photo by Sarah Jane Rhee (Chicago, 5/22/13)

This image too is permanently imprinted in my mind. La lucha continua!

As I listened to several speeches and then marched along with friends, allies, and strangers, I caught myself smiling. Why should this be the case?

It seems unlikely, after all, that these major protests will prevent the majority of the proposed school closings. The Chicago Board of Education will almost certainly vote to close dozens of schools at its meeting this Wednesday. CPS seems to be preparing for this outcome. Rahm Emanuel thinks that black and brown folk in this city have short memories. In fact, he is counting on it. I personally think that he is wrong.

Yesterday the Chicago Sun Times published an editorial calling for 21 schools to be removed from the closure list. This would still leave 33 schools on the chopping block which is one too many.

Given these odds, why shouldn’t those of us who want education justice and vehemently oppose mass school closures succumb to despair and hopelessness?

At yesterday’s rally, I stood with people from every walk of life to resist the attempt to further decimate our communities. We raised our collective voices to say that we would continue to fight back no matter what “decision” the Board announces on Wednesday. THIS is cause for hope.

When I looked around, I noticed the joy and even more importantly the love that was reflected in the chants and in the protest. Yes, it was love that I could feel in the crowd but also hope. It’s important to be reminded that social justice movements are rooted in hope. This one for education justice in Chicago certainly is. To remain hopeful no matter our circumstance is to already be victorious. I am profoundly grateful to everyone who stands in a place of hope while organizing to change the world.

There is an essay by Howard Zinn that I always return to and last night the brilliant and committed scholar-activist Nancy Heitzeg reminded me of it. I’ll share the part that most resonates with me and that seems most relevant to the current struggle for education justice:

We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Watch the individuals who were arrested yesterday as they staged a sit-in at City Hall after delivering over 10,000 petition signatures to Mayor Emanuel. Notice that they are singing throughout:

There is hope embodied in these acts of civil disobedience. Knowing that there are many who will put their bodies on the line to say “No, you will not destroy us without a fight” is a manifestation of radical love.

photo by Sarah Jane Rhee (5/20/13) – City Hall Elevator Blockade

Listen to the impassioned words of 9 year old elementary school student Asean Johnson as he excoriates Mayor Emanuel for his plan to close 54 schools.

How can we lose hope when we have young people like Asean to fight for? We cannot. Instead we must ask if we’ve done our very best by Sean and if our answer is no then we must do better…

Once again, I am privileged to share Sarah Jane Rhee’s beautiful photographs documenting three-days of protest against school closures here in Chicago. I’ve decided to share photographs of children & youth in the spirit of hope and justice.

photo by Sarah Jane Rhee (5/2013) Chicago

photo by Sarah Jane Rhee (5/2013) Chicago

photo by Sarah Jane Rhee (5/2013) Chicago

photo by Sarah Jane Rhee (5/2013) Chicago

photo by Sarah Jane Rhee (5/2013) Chicago

photo by Sarah Jane Rhee (5/2013) Chicago

photo by Sarah Jane Rhee (5/2013) Chicago

One example from the book is below:

On July 2, 1937, an inmate in the Texas state prison system sent the NAACP an anonymous letter requesting assistance for combating cruel prison conditions: “Please hear our cries…These officials are sure cruel to us, we have in each building two prisoner as building tenders they is allowed to kill you if they see fit. They have whips with iron handles and dirka knives. Each one of these buildings tenders are first grade student and they will do what the captains and guards tell them.”

Below is a letter of protest that Marshall wrote to the governor of Kentucky about these complaints:

July 31, 1937

Dear Governor Allred:

We have received complaints concerning the treatment of Negro prisoners on the Ramsey State Farm, Camp #1, near Houston, Texas. We are informed that the Negro prisoners are beaten and, in many cases, killed for trivial reasons.

We are informed that on July 28th of last year, one Booker Smith, in charge of prisoners, killed a prisoner and claimed it was in self-defense. We are also informed that Captain Shaw chained a prisoner with a quarter-inch chain around his neck and fastened it to his feet so that his neck was pulled down to his knees and that the same Booker Smith whipped this prisoner, whose name was James Brown, to death.

We cannot too strongly urge upon you the seriousness of such offenses which, even though committed by persons in charge of a prison, are, nevertheless, brutal murders. These are only a few examples of the intolerable conditions reported to us in the prison camps in Texas, and we urge you to immediately cause an investigation to be made.

Very sincerely yours,

Thurgood Marshall

In reply, Governor Allred simply asked for more information and added: “I am sure that neither the Manager of the State Prison System nor the members of the Prison Board, as well as myself, will tolerate any brutality if they can find evidence that it exists anywhere in the System.”

Catharsis (n):
1: purgation
2
a : purification or purgation of the emotions (as pity and fear) primarily through art
b : a purification or purgation that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension
3: elimination of a complex by bringing it to consciousness and affording it expression

After all of these years, I have gotten used to the early morning phone calls. They never bring good news. Yesterday, a young man I’ve known for three years was shot. He was one of over a dozen people shot and/or killed in Chicago overnight. We are used to these numbers. This was actually on the low end of the usual range.

I was alerted about the shooting by his cousin: another young person I’ve known for a few years. I went to the hospital to check on him. He will recover. The temporary relief was quickly replaced by dread that cannot be dislodged in the pit of my stomach. I learned from his cousin that his friends were already planning their retaliation for the shooting. The cycle of violence is unbroken.

As I waited to see him, I spoke to his family members and what came across was a profound sense of weariness and of resignation. He’s been talking about dying violently since he was 10 years old, his aunt tells me. What is the antidote to this certainty about one’s impending mortality? Whenever I start to slip into a mode of thinking about death as an abstraction, I am slammed right back into reality by events.

When I finally see him, he smiles wanly. His first words are: “Think I’ll be on the news, Ms. K?” I burst into tears.

This is what it’s about, isn’t it? Even lying in the hospital shot, he can’t show any vulnerability. He is still sarcastic and ‘tough.’ He’s a teenager, not yet a man. He’s scared and I know it. I’m sobbing. “Awww, don’t Ms. K. Look, I’m good. I promise, I’m good.” But he’s not “good.” I apologize and ask if he needs anything. I don’t ask what happened. I don’t care.

Driving home, I try to gather my emotions. It’s difficult because I know that most people don’t give a damn about this young man or about his life. He lives in a community rife with structural and interpersonal violence. While I was lying in bed unable to sleep, I read an op-ed in the New York Times that captures the unremarkable routineness of violence in such neighborhoods.

“to be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.” – James Baldwin (quoted in Joan Didion’s “The White Album” 1979, p.30)

I think also about the unrelenting societal hatred and oppression directed at him and at his peers. Earlier this week, conscious black people in Chicago had more reason to be enraged. A white woman said she was robbed in broad daylight on Michigan Ave by a mob of black teens. Coverage of the event saturated our local airwaves:

An elderly woman was confronted on the Magnificent Mile by a mob of young men on Wednesday, who proceeded to take $100,000 worth of jewelry she was wearing.

A Chicago police source said the 69-year-old woman from Homewood Flossmoor was accosted by 10 to 12 African American men while walking in the 700 block of North Michigan around noon in front of Saks Fifth Avenue.

By Friday, it was revealed that she had lied. She fabricated the story but to many this doesn’t matter. Her name has still not been released. She remains anonymous. All we know is that she is a wealthy elderly ‘philanthropist’ who lives in the South suburbs. The young men who she accused of robbery are also anonymous, nameless. But they aren’t faceless, she said that they were black. Just the accusation is enough to impugn an entire race (still). We know this nameless “criminalblackman.” This is a familiar story.

An anonymous person writing in “The Independent” on September 18, 1902 explained the process of criminalizing black people:

Whenever a crime is committed in the South the policemen look for the negro in the case. A white man with face and hands blackened can commit any crime in the calendar. The first friendly stream soon washes away his guilt and he is ready to join in the hunt to lynch the “big, black burly brute.” When a white man in the South does commit a crime, that is simply one white man gone wrong. If his crime is especially brutal he is a freak or temporarily insane. If one low, ignorant black wretch commits a crime, that is different. All of us must bear his guilt. A young white boy’s badness is simply the overflowing of young animal spirits; the black boy’s badness is badness, pure and simple (in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, edited by Gerda Lerner, 1972, p.168).

The trope of the “criminalblackman” serves as the key organizing principle in the treatment of blacks in this country. I can’t imagine how it will be dislodged. What I know for sure is that it has been and is killing us slowly as a race. So many of our young have to swallow their rage as they find themselves surveilled in stores and on the streets, as they try to make themselves small in elevators and in school, as they are targeted by cops for endless stop & frisks and as they are locked in cages by the thousands. I am amazed that so many are resilient and don’t lose their sanity. But some are in fact dying slowly…

I am a child of America
a step child
raised in a back room

-Pat Parker

I think again of his first words to me: “Think I’ll be on the news, Ms. K?” I hear them differently now. This is a young man living in exile in his own country. His humanity is unacknowledged. He languishes in a place that Richard Wright has called “No Man’s Land.” He is allowed no feelings. He is just a threat: all of our fears rest on and in him. I realize that perhaps he is asking whether he has been “seen” by the larger world. Have we taken notice of him? Do we know that he exists? Maybe this is his way of writing himself back into our national story. I don’t know.

I feel exhausted and want to close my eyes to what’s happening. In this moment, I wish I could be oblivious. So many others seem to be… My tears are uncontrollable now; the tissues are soaked. I pull over and call a friend. “Stay where you are, I’m coming to get you,” he says.”It’s OK, I’ll drive to you,” I respond. Somehow, I make it to his place still in one piece. I haven’t broken apart. He makes lunch. I try to breathe. Hours later, I’m still struggling to catch my breath…