View from the Ground from the archive 2001-2007 View from the Ground from the archive 2001-2007 “ The View From The Ground is an occasional publication of the Invisible Institute— a set of relationships and ongoing conversations grounded in the Stateway Gardens public housing development on Chicago’s South Side. In the tradition of human rights monitoring, our aim is to deepen public discourse by providing reliable information about conditions on the ground.” With those words, we launched The View in the spring of 2001. Over the years, we have sought at several junctures to further clarify our purposes to our readers and to ourselves. We began the adventure that became the Invisible Institute with the conviction that victims of structural violence possess essential knowledge. They know things the rest of the society is organized and mobilized not to know Our “beat” thus necessarily came to include not only the view from the ground but also the willed ignorance—or, as James Baldwin puts it, “innocence”—that resists acknowledging that view. Much of the early reporting in The View centered on the living conditions in abandoned communities. Gradually, our focus shifted to patterns of policing that enforced those conditions. The process of documenting human rights abuses by the police led in turn to an inquiry—an inquiry that continues—into the underlying institutional conditions that enable such abuses and confer impunity on the abusers. In 2005, we observed: “We have no illusions about how difficult it is to tell such stories. It is not simply a matter of providing reliable information. Good journalistic work can readily be assimilated to the prevailing structures of perception. It is necessary to subvert those structures— to break through —in order to create space for fresh perception. This is the work of art and nonviolent resistance, as well as human rights reporting. The View is a point of intersection between these traditions, sensibilities, and conversations... “We don’t know where our inquiries will take us. We have a strong sense of direction but no map. We invite readers to join our ongoing conversation about how best to tell particular stories. What are the requirements of the narrative? the most effective lines of inquiry? the best means of making the invisible visible? “This much is clear. Conditions of structural exclusion are ultimately enforced by violence: by particular blows inflicted by particular hands on particular bodies. That is our point of departure— the ground from which we take our bearings...” The journey continues. Jamie Kalven November 5th, 2020 Conditions of structural exclusion are ultimately enforced by violence: by particular blows inflicted by particular hands on particular bodies. That is our point of departure— the ground from which we take our bearings. Vigil Against Violence For five years—from January, 1994 to December, 1998—a group of citizens gathered on the corner of 35th and State at twilight on the first Sunday of each month to read the names of those lost to violence on the South Side. Vigil Against Violence was at once an expression of resistance and an occasion for reflection. It was, as one regular participant put it, a way of “making oneself available to the problem.” The following words were spoken at the first vigil on January 31, 1993: A vigil is a period of wakefulness when one would ordinarily be asleep. We have gathered here today to help one another—and our society—to wake up. To wake up to levels of violence that are intolerable yet are tolerated. To wake up to the ways violence and fear poison our relations, corrupt our institutions, and diminish our lives. To wake up to the truth that the carnage in our streets is not a local phenomenon but a product of the larger society—of unjust social and economic patterns in which we are all implicated to the extent we do not actively resist them. October 6, 2002 In the midst of much confusion, this much is clear: violence is prepared in the domain of words before it is inscribed on the bodies of human beings. September 11, 2001 Two weeks after the September 11 attacks, we published our first report on police violence against a Stateway Gardens resident with this preface. When news of the terrorist attacks reached me, I was working on the piece that follows. It is the story of a single act of violence—a blow inflicted by a police officer on the body of a citizen. In the course of the day, as the scale of atrocity became apparent, it seemed an indulgence to concentrate on arranging words on a page in an effort to craft a report on this incident. For a time, I lost my bearings. Two weeks have now passed. The world remains shrouded in ashes. Reverberations from New York and Washington continue to unsettle our lives. Thousands of tragic individual narratives— some known in sketchy outline or by way of a telling detail, countless others not yet known— bear in on us on all sides, dwarfing our moral imaginations and confounding grief. Many have observed that the events of September 11th changed everything. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they disclosed the underlying terms of existence. As a survivor of violence once observed, “There is knowing, and there is knowing .” In the midst of much confusion, this much is clear: violence is prepared in the domain of words before it is inscribed on the bodies of human beings. Consider what had to happen in the semantic realm in order for those who planned and executed mass murder on September 11th to be capable of such acts. Consider our national efforts to come to terms with what happened on the 11th: the fates of whole populations now turn on the choices we make between words, on the metaphors we adopt, on the stories we tell. As The View From The Ground resumes publication, we rededicate ourselves to the work of resisting violence wherever we encounter it, and in whatever form, by using language responsibly to call things by their true names. September 27, 2001 We rededicate ourselves to the work of resisting violence wherever we encounter it, and in whatever form, by using language responsibly to call things by their true names. On the Inside Looking Out I recently ascended to the seventeenth floor of 3517-19 South Federal, a doomed public housing high-rise at the Stateway Gardens development. The elevator wasn’t working, so I climbed the stairs and had the mountaineer’s satisfaction of earning the view. Known as “The Kingdom,” 3517-19 affords one of the great skyline panoramas available anywhere in the city—an almost unbroken vista extending from the west side to Navy Pier. That view is about to disappear, for the Kingdom is at this moment being demolished as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s “Plan for Transformation.” Within a few weeks, all that will remain of this structure that once housed 230 families will be a large vacant lot. One by one, CHA high-rises throughout the city are being razed. Soon we will no longer be compelled, as we drive from here to there, to confront the questions they pose. But what of the views of the city from these buildings—the perspectives from the inside looking out—that will be lost when all the high- rises have come down?... It always amazes me to encounter analyses of this or that aspect of inner city life—family dynamics, drug use, street gangs, or whatever— in which the catastrophic impact of the disappearance of work is not mentioned. Before the catastrophe, the land on which Stateway stands was the most densely populated area of the city, the heart of the old Black Belt, the place to which Southern blacks came for jobs and found jobs. After the catastrophe, it came to be known, on the basis of the 1990 census, as the single poorest neighborhood in America. This is a distinction some residents contest. My friend Francine Washington, president of the resident council, always corrects me when I speak of poverty at Stateway. “We’re not poor,” she says. “We’re broke. There’s a difference. To be poor is a condition of the spirit. To be broke is a temporary inconvenience.” This is an important distinction. Yet the fact remains that Stateway is, by any conventional measure, a very broke place. We have become accustomed to talking about isolated urban poverty. This is, in some respects, a comforting formulation. It suggests that the poor somehow pulled up stakes and moved away from the rest of us. Looking out at the world from the Kingdom, one cannot easily maintain this fiction, for “the poorest neighborhood in America” is surrounded by powerful institutional neighbors... From the top floor of the Kingdom, one looks out on an intimate landscape that contains great social distances—a geography created not only by where we place expressways but by how we use language and deploy our imaginations. It’s a perspective from which certain questions become immediate. Are the current demolitions the expression of a moral awakening? Are they the necessary prelude to addressing injustices from which we have long averted our eyes? Or are they the culmination of such patterns of denial—a machinery for disappearing the victims of those injustices, so that they will no longer intrude upon our vision and trouble our consciences? Poor—or as Francine would have it, broke— communities such as Stateway aren’t isolated. They’re abandoned. They can’t afford to be isolated. It requires a large investment of individual and collective resources to insulate a community from the conditions of life around it. Looking back at the city from the seventeenth floor of the Kingdom, the question is inescapable: who has isolated themselves from whom? March 25, 2002 One Strike: Jennie Williams In the public housing setting, false arrest by the police can result not only in criminal charges for the victim but also eviction under HUD’s “One Strike” policy. In a two- part article, we reported on the case of Stateway resident Jennie Williams. A small, wiry woman of great intensity, Jennie Williams has lived at the Stateway Gardens public housing development for twenty-two of her forty- six years. For the last two years, she has lived in 3547 South Federal. For the previous twenty, she lived in 3617 South Federal—the first building at Stateway to be demolished. I got to know her in 1998 in the midst of the residents’ unsuccessful struggle to save their building. Jennie is illiterate yet lives through language. Two years ago, she expressed her indignation at the prospect of being forced from her home with fierce, rapid-fire eloquence. “I’m used to where I’m at. We’ve been living in this rat hole for—what?—twenty years. No matter what it look like, it’s home to us. A lot of people get sick and die, when they leave this building. Who wants to meet new friends, when you got old ones? People should never be less important than money. We’re not fucking animals. They may got all the money in the world, but they can’t buy my life.” The words “they can’t buy my life” have a particular resonance coming from Jennie who grew up at one remove from slavery in the Mississippi Delta as one of thirteen children in a sharecropper family. Her mother, Savannah Williams, worked on the plantation of a man named Philpot. The Williams family was particularly prized by Philpot because it was so large. “We used to pick cotton. Even the little ones. Philpot would say, ‘If they can walk, they can pick.’” From Jennie’s perspective as a little girl, the cotton fields stretching to the horizon seemed “never- ending.” “Picking cotton is hard in the hot sun. Sometimes it be so hot that people fainted. From five in the morning to four in the evening, mama worked. And she had us there with her. She’d set the baby on the sack. And she was pregnant too. It was hard for her.” Savannah Williams, according to her daughter, “wanted to be on her own—to do her own work, to plant her own things.” With the help of her first husband who was working as a crane operator in Chicago, she acquired some land and built a house. “We had our own little home. Mama owned the land. We had cows and pigs. We growed corn, tomatoes, okra, cabbage, greens. We didn’t have to go to no store, unless we needed salt or pepper or flour. The rest of the stuff we didn’t need, cause we had it. But they ran us off.” “Who?” “The Ku Klux Klan, we called them, with masks on their faces and sheets. They burned our house down and our crops...” The Klan raids forced Savannah and her children back to Philpot’s plantation. “He would tell my mother, ‘You my slave.’ We were all his slaves.” Savannah could read and write. “In those days, they had to sneak and read. The white man wouldn’t let us read. They’d whup you for that.” With a note of pride, Jennie told me that her mother wrote letters to President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King about the conditions the family was living under in Mississippi. Jennie first went to jail when she was three years old. She was riding on her mother’s shoulders when Savannah was arrested for participating in a civil rights demonstration in Jackson. “We were marching down the street with signs. And we were singing.” Smiling broadly, she recited the words of one of the freedom songs: “We’re gonna keep on walking and keep on talking. Marching to freedom land. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.” [Jennie went to visit a friend in a neighboring building. As she tells it, she was stopped by police officers who forced her to knock on doors in order to facilitate their access to residents’ apartments. When she refused, they arrested her on a drug charge.] On May 29, some nine months after her arrest on August 29, 2001, Jennie Williams was evicted from her apartment at Stateway Gardens. She was evicted, although the criminal case arising from the events of August 29 is still in progress. The eviction cost her not only her home in a community where she has lived for more than twenty years, it also cost her the benefits of lease compliance under the CHA’s Plan for Transformation—a Section 8 voucher and the opportunity to return to the mixed income development to be built at Stateway. In the course of the eviction case, her claim that she was the victim of police misconduct was never heard and considered by the judge. In a recent conversation, Jennie recalled her mother’s courage—how she had fought for her rights in the Mississippi Delta during the civil rights movement. “She was marching down there. She’d get locked up for her rights. She’d rebuild and they’d burn her house back down again and tear up her land.” “So she kept fighting for her home in the South, and now you’re fighting to keep your home here,” I suggested. “It’s about the same, isn’t it?” she said tentatively. “You kinda wonder if there’s a connection.” June 19, 2002