Are Black Chicagoans Finally Waking Up?

In the most segregated city in America, there are two Chicago's

one white, one Black. The white one works really well because the Black one doesn’t

I wrote about this summer’s pandemic of violence that systematically removed young Black males from this earth. Part of this crisis has to do with Black unemployment being double that of the white community, triple when you consider how many Black males have given up the search for work.

The fact that Black people are denied access to construction jobs isn’t a new Chicago story, but the fact that it continues to be an issue should be. For the last three months, city workers have been doing major work on the streets in front and around my house. The construction crews are all white except for a few Hispanics. I have yet to see one Black person. 

Last week, 86 year old WWII War vet Ed Gardner, also the retired founder of Soft Sheen Hair Care Products, was driving three blocks from his home in the heart of the Black southside, when he passed a construction site and saw no Blacks employed. Mr. Gardner got out of his car and stood in the middle of the site bringing all work to a stop.

"They allow us to sell drugs and kill one another for the promise of drugs, yet they won't employ us in the black community," he said.

The next day Gardner led followers to construction sites for Menard's and Meijer stores, again in the hood, and again not one Black person was employed. Demonstrators also pointed to the lack of Blacks on construction crews repairing the 95th Street CTA El. When asked to comment, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, stated Chicago has increased minority contracts and pointed to the fact that the prime contractor for the 95^th Street project( remember all Black community)  is Asian. 

Amazing.  

So today, Ed Gardner lead 3000 marchers to 95^th and Western, to yet another major construction site with no Blacks working. This protest barely got mainstream coverage, but a much smaller protest downtown about puppy mills was covered on ABC News. I guess we know our place in Chicago’s hierarchy.

But could it be the Chicago Teacher's Union Strike has started to wake Black folks up?

The Chicago Tsuami Crime Wave/ Dreams Deferred Exploding

What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

A Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

So last weekend, again I was ensconced in Chicago’s  well fortified Hyde Park. But it wasn’t far enough to hide from the weekend crime tsunami.  Forty Blacks and Browns shot and six killed in a two day period, including 16 year old Joseph Briggs.  During the first wave of the tsunami two weeks ago, Briggs escaped one attempt on his life with a bullet to the shoulder. Well, last Saturday as I enjoyed a bomb fire at a University of Chicago graduation ceremony, blocks away the killers tracked Briggs to his grandmother’s doorstep and finished the job. 

We all know “Black on Black” violence is older than a pair of original Air Jordans and with our transformed American economy, this violence is increasingly and ridiculously lucrative, after all some one has to build and supply all those prisons. But what’s new is that desperately poor Black youths are no longer just wrecking havoc with flash violent episodes of public wilding in the "safe confides of the "hood", similar to what claimed the life of 16 year old honor student Derrion Albert who was stomped and beaten with a railroad plank by other youths outside of his High School,  but are now taking public transportation to white areas where the money is.

Last Saturday gangs of inner city youth attacked people, including tourists, outside of the Chicago Jazz Fest.  And Sunday night a group of youth savagely beat and robbed a man on Chicago’s Gold Coast. The good news is that one eighteen year old was arrested. The bad news is that seventeen of the youths remain on the streets with valid CTA fair cards and the public school aren’t even out for the summer.

A new form of urban math is needed to explain this phenomenon, expressed as Rapidly Expanding Inner City Job Deserts (TIMES)  The Increasing Prison Population( MINUS Educational Opportunities in Prison (EQUALS) Frequent Explosive Violence.

I predict this summer is gonna be the summer of years and years of Black Dreams Deferred finally exploding.  

This summer, 96% of young Black men in Chicago between 16 and 19 years old are unemployed.

Only 46% of Black males graduate with a high school diploma from Chicago public schools.

Only three out of 100 Black boys who start kindergarten in the Chicago Public Schools earn a bachelors degree by age 25.

70% of Black children in America are born into and live in single, female-headed households that are usually impoverished.

Black males are 6% of Illinois’ population but they represent 63% of the state’s prison population.