How groups in Chicago are countering the narrative their city is a hotbed of violence

Chicago has one of the highest rates of gun deaths of any major city in the country and some on the front lines say that’s rooted in a history of racism, violence and inequality dating back generations. Judy Woodruff reports for her ongoing series, America at a Crossroads.
Amna Nawaz:
Chicago has one of the highest rates of gun deaths of any major city in the country. And some on the front lines say that’s rooted in a history of racism, violence and inequality dating back generations.
Judy Woodruff reports from Chicago as part of her ongoing series America at a Crossroads.
Damarion Spann, Tour Guide, My Block My Hood My City:
This is where Martin Luther King lived and worked while he stayed here in Chicago.
Judy Woodruff:
Sixteen-year-old Damarion Spann is giving a tour of North Lawndale, the West Chicago neighborhood where he grew up.
Damarion Spann:
While he stayed here in Chicago, Martin Luther King was struck by a rock from a white mob, and he stated that he never experienced so much hatred as he did here in Chicago.
Judy Woodruff:
It’s a different story from what’s typically told of this area, where the life expectancy is roughly 12 years shorter than the wealthy downtown Loop neighborhood, where unemployment is nearly twice as high as the rest of the city and the crime rate is nearly three times higher than the citywide average.
Damarion Spann:
Starting in pre-K, we have all heard the narrative of the violence that happens in North Lawndale. But once you get to explore and see the community more, you start to understand the rich history of the community, Chicago is looked at as violent, and that’s not fear to the students and to the adults who are actually working against that narrative and who’s pushing for positive things.
Judy Woodruff:
Do you feel, as someone who’s grown up in this city, that your concerns are heard by the politicians?
Damarion Spann:
A national point of view, I don’t think students from our community get heard at all.
Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: What’s going on in Chicago?
Judy Woodruff:
Indeed, conservative media and former President Trump focus on the ongoing violence in Chicago, an example, they argue, of the failure of cities led by Democrats.
Woman:
And Chicago turned into a war zone. At least 53 people were shot, 11 of them killed.
Jeanine Pirro, FOX News Anchor:
It is time to demonize them, and it is time to send them to jail.
Lady Sanders, Program Manager, My Block My Hood My City:
They only broadcast the bad. Like, North Lawndale is way more than what they portray on the news.
Judy Woodruff:
Lady Sanders helps organize these youth-led tours of North Lawndale for a nonprofit called My Block My Hood My City. She says the tours introduce outsiders to this misunderstood neighborhood and give youth a productive outlet.
Lady Sanders:
They become more confident because it’s their neighborhood, and people are coming to see them talk about where they’re from and what they see every day.
Judy Woodruff:
With 77 so-called community areas in all, neighborhood identity is a fundamental aspect life in Chicago, the country’s most segregated big city.
North Lawndale, like many South and West Side Chicago neighborhoods, is majority-Black. Much of this segregation can be traced to the Great Migration of a century ago. Black Americans from the Jim Crow South moved north, seeking greater opportunities, but what they found was not the segregation imposed by Jim Crow, but new and different barriers.
Franklin Cosey-Gay, Director, University of Chicago Medicine Violence Recovery Program: Ida B. Wells, who was a noted activist, journalist, said Chicago was beginning to rival the Jim Crow South in its treatment of the Negro.
Judy Woodruff:
Franklin Cosey-Gay directs the University of Chicago Medicine’s Violence Recovery Program, and he researches the economic, social and historic causes of gun violence in the city. He points to over a century of racist violence against Black Chicagoans and housing discrimination that has helped create the situation today.
Franklin Cosey-Gay:
We’re talking about a $3 billion to $4 billion wealth gap between white Chicagoans and Black Chicagoans that’s directly tied to the inability to develop equity from housing.
Judy Woodruff:
Cosey-Gay recalls that, in 1919, during the Red Summer, when Black Americans across the country were terrorized, 23 Black Chicagoans were killed and hundreds more were injured in this city; 15 white Chicagoans were also killed in the violence.
And between 1917 and 1921, 58 Black Chicagoans were firebombed in their homes.
Franklin Cosey-Gay:
Not one person was arrested for those house bombings. What we begin to see is that physical violence was being used to constrain the movement of African Americans.
Judy Woodruff:
In the coming decades, that physical violence would morph into discriminatory housing policies. Restrictive housing covenants kept Black renters out.
So-called redlining by financial institutions, in concert with the federal government, limited Black Chicagoans’ ability to access loans for homes and businesses. And unable to get mortgages, they were forced into predatory contracts to buy houses at exorbitant prices, with high interest rates and harsh eviction clauses that made it nearly impossible for many to build equity or actually own their home.
Later, highways were built through Black neighborhoods. And then came the construction and later the demolition of tens of thousands of units of public housing.
Franklin Cosey-Gay:
Some of the fundamental things that help keep people safe are the ability to provide social support for each other, their ability to have beliefs on what they think their community should look like, and their ability to use their collective power to enforce those beliefs.
What you’re doing is that you’re disrupting the very things in terms of how people can support each other, which creates conditions for violence.
Judy Woodruff:
Cosey-Gay says, instead of addressing these root causes of gun violence within communities like North Lawndale, the city of Chicago has tried to manage it mainly through more policing, and that hasn’t worked.
Franklin Cosey-Gay:
It is basically a process that keeps repeating itself. It has a new face. The United States government in itself is complicit, and we need to address that.
Judy Woodruff:
Damarion Spann worries about police interactions in North Lawndale, where 70 percent of men aged 17 to 45 have criminal records.
Have you had encounters yourself with the police?
Damarion Spann:
I had an encounter with an officer. It wasn’t a good encounter, yelling in your face, pushing you around, threatening to arrest you if you don’t listen to their orders. The police is set to serve and protect, but I really don’t agree with that motto.
Pastor Phil Jackson, Firehouse Community Arts Center of Chicago: You have history of politicians for years who have downplayed or ignored these impoverished areas.
Judy Woodruff:
Pastor Phil Jackson runs the Firehouse Community Arts Center in North Lawndale, an organization trying to reduce gun violence in the community and help residents process trauma.
Pastor Phil Jackson:
A lot of companies and factories have left, so it takes a politician to take a chance, which might seem like a black hole to others, to invest in a neighborhood. It seems like pulling teeth sometimes with different powers that be to make that happen.
There are a lot of people who try to make things happen and work, but there’s a lot of systems in place that seem to pull back.
Judy Woodruff:
I mean, there are folks who look at what’s going on in inner-city Chicago…
Pastor Phil Jackson:
Yes.
Judy Woodruff:
… and say — they almost throw their hands up.
Pastor Phil Jackson:
Yes.
Judy Woodruff:
They have kind of written off this part of the country.
Pastor Phil Jackson:
Yes. Yes.
Folks who’ve been in this neighborhood 50, 60 years, they stayed and weathered the storm, weathered situations, weathered hurt in their own life. So even though things look so repetitive and so notorious and so heartbreaking, there are people on the ground that are making a difference.
Jahmal Cole, Founder, My Block My Hood My City:
I don’t want to be killed, but all my heroes doing the work that I do have been killed, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy.
Judy Woodruff:
In 2015, Jahmal Cole founded the nonprofit My Block My Hood My City to try to deal with the epidemic of gun violence between young people here. He says he loves connecting with the community, including on his occasional runs.
Jahmal Cole:
A lot of our students, they have been to 15 funerals by the time they were in ninth grade.
Judy Woodruff:
Cole, 41, was out running two years ago when he heard gunshots.
Jahmal Cole:
I thought a tire popped, because you don’t feel getting shot. I was, like, bleeding really bad. You think you’re going to die. You ain’t going to see your kids no more, your wife, your family. Yes, it’s traumatizing.
Judy Woodruff:
Cole’s organization takes a holistic approach to dealing with gun violence, trying to build community through block cleanup events, expose young people to opportunities through field trips to parts of the city they have never seen, give scholarships to local students, and pay tour guides like Damarion Spann.
Jahmal Cole:
The purpose really is, like, to just leave a love and build relationships with youth and keep them alive. How can we wrap around you and make sure we get you to college? If it is health care, OK, how can we help you with that? Is it mental health? There’s no — barely any counselors in schools.
Judy Woodruff:
What do you say to those folks who look at what’s going on in inner-city Chicago and say, yes, it’s really bad, they need to stop using so many guns, a lot of this is their own responsibility, their own fault?
Jahmal Cole:
I would challenge them to put themselves in a position of hearing gunshots every day, the position of having parents abuse drugs, the position of being afraid. I’m sorry. I’m getting emotional thinking about it.
It’s not fair. It’s not fair that people say that, because it’s like they don’t know what it’s like to be in these kids’ shoes.
Judy Woodruff:
The young people, I mean, do they have a sense that the country cares about them?
Jahmal Cole:
Oh, no. Yes, they don’t — no, the judge doesn’t care about them. That’s what they tell me all the time. The judge doesn’t want to hear my story. How am I going to listen to a teacher when I don’t have health insurance and I’m sleeping on the train?
Judy Woodruff:
Cole says this neighborhood needs help, more government funding, economic investment and social services. But after generations of neglect, disinvestment, and discrimination, he acknowledges change also has to come from within the community.
Jahmal Cole:
There needs to be 1,000 things done to reduce gun violence in Chicago, and a third of that might be legislative.
I think the best thing for people to do is to ask themselves, what’s something simple I can do that will make a difference on my block?
Judy Woodruff:
Damarion Spann is trying to do that, but says he also wants to do more to try to change the whole system.
Damarion Spann:
What I want to do is go to college and receive my degree in political science, eventually come back and run for alderperson for the North Lawndale community, start on more of a local level, alderperson, mayor.
Then I want to go to like a federal level, presidential.
Judy Woodruff:
You might want to run for president one day?
Damarion Spann:
Yes.
Judy Woodruff:
That takes a lot of self-confidence.
Damarion Spann:
A black boy coming from the North Lawndale community is expected to do the very least. So I want to do the very most and prove everyone that doubted those Black boys that’s coming from the community and show them that it is possible.
Judy Woodruff:
For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Judy Woodruff in Chicago, Illinois.