Why Black residents asked Black Lives Matter protesters to leave their neighborhood
As I’ve often written on this blog and on social media, situation on the ground is often more complicated than what any activist may say. There is always more than one perspective, and nuances within any given perspective. The controversy over the Chicago Public Safety Training Center was the perfect illustration of this - supporters and opponents of the center both claimed that they had support from the community, and neither of them were entirely wrong, because there were plenty of residents on both sides of the issue.
Last Sunday (August 9), there was an incident in Englewood, a majority-Black, working class to poor neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The one thing that we know for sure is that a local resident, 20-year-old Latrell Allen, was shot (not fatally) by the police. Block Club Chicago has a pretty good rundown of why everything else is nebulous, how false rumors spread and how Chicago Police Department didn’t help the matters.
When the police went to inspect the scene, they were confronted by the angry group of local residents. Objects were thrown. And, on Sunday night, a wave of looting swept through commercial districts in some of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods - a seeming repeat of what happened in May 30 in the wake of George Floyd protests. While the police accounts suggested that the whole thing was planned as a revenge of sorts fueled by the aforementioned false rumors, but even that is starting to come under question.
On Tuesday (August 11), I was looking at the Chicago Tribune RSS feed when I came across a video and a photo essay about a confrontation between a group of activists from Black Lives Matter Chicago and some Englewood residents after the activists protested in front of the local police station. But I couldn’t find an article going into more detail - because it wasn’t published until the following morning. (hat tip to hettie_lz )
A protester yells for people to calm down Aug. 11, 2020, as a skirmish breaks out between people protesting the police and area residents who did not want nonresidents in their neighborhood. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)
As reporter William Lee (who is Black) explained, the Englewood residents were “aligned with various Englewood groups that often work with police to ease tensions.”
They consider themselves community elders and said they didn’t appreciate a protest in their neighborhood during such a tense time. Some of them say they helped calm things after objects were thrown at officers on Aberdeen Street on Sunday.
“They (protest organizers) didn’t let the community know,” said Duane Kidd. “They didn’t put flyers on the door. They got the streets shut down. What about the elders that have to get up and down 63rd Street? Now they got to take the side routes.
“Coming into our community for just one day and then run out,” Kidd said. “Everyday. If they got something to say about the police, we got to deal with it tomorrow. The community. Not them. They’ll be somewhere sipping sangria.”
(To be fair, as the Block Club Chicago coverage of the confrontation points out, some of the protesters were from Englewood, so they weren’t all outsiders.)
They also pointed out that a protest means cops in riot gear, and police feeling more twitchy
Darryl Smith, president of the Englewood Political Task Force, described how such protests upset the balance of the neighborhood.
“When they leave, the police are going to be pulling us over. The police are going to be pulling our kids out of cars for no reason. Because the police are bitter now. You come and shut down 63rd Street, all this extra manpower, they’re mad,” he said.
“So now these (television news) cameras are going to leave, those people are gonna leave and our kids are on the street playing,” Smith said. “And they’re going to get pulled over and thrown on the ground and harassed for no reason.”
And, according to Block Club Chicago’s coverage of the confrontation, at least one of those men had a philosophical disagreement with the approach that the groups that organized the protest took.
Harris also took issue with what he called the “social media cancel culture activism,” saying his organization helped young people get jobs, contrasting it with recent activism that led the city to remove Christopher Columbus statues in Chicago.
“We’ve been doing this, we’ve been fighting for Black lives and against crime and violence,” Harris said. “Our organization since 2003 have put young men and women into construction jobs. We’ve changed lives…we got young men and women here who never had a job in their lives, jobs. And now they have careers and they are raising their families and setting an example for other young men and women.
“They got a statue torn down. How did that benefit anybody? What’s the benefit of that? How many people can open up a business because that statue got torn down?”
Although the confrontation was tense, the two sides were able to calm down and discuss things peacefully. Most of the protesters left. And while one of the groups involved in the protest, GoodKids, MadCity, described the older residents as “aggressive agitators [who] were being disruptive & tried to provoke us into a violent confrontation,” per Block Club Chicago, other activists were more reflective.
One such protester, 17-year-old Saint Gates, who said he lived on the South Side but not in Englewood, confronted the older Englewood men.
“I’m 17. You’ve been doing this for 30 years; you haven’t gotten any results. We are the youth, let us try,” Gates shouted through a megaphone.
To that, Harris told a reporter, “The wheel has been around since before I was born. We don’t reinvent the wheel. If the wheel is a circle, you don’t make it square because it might not ride the way you want it to ride. You get another tire or you improve on the tire. You don’t just dismantle it.”
Later, Gates was more contrite.
“We’re approaching it two different ways. I can respect their anger because they live here. They see it every day. The kids who died are their kids,” he said.
And agreed that simply dropping in on the neighborhood was not the best approach
Another protester, 29-year-old Julio Miramontes, who is from the Southeast Side and a member of the Chicago Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, said the decision by organizers to not contact anyone in Englewood beforehand was a mistake.
“I totally understand the frustrations of someone from a neighborhood not wanting outsiders to tell them how issues should be dealt with,” Miramontes said. “I came here to support, but when I got here I found out that none of the organizers of this event had actually coordinated with anyone from the neighborhood and I think that’s wrong.”
So what’s the big takeaway from it? It’s not that the groups who went to protest were completely in the wrong - even the older men who swore at them later said their heart was in the right place, and it’s not as if they didn’t make any legitimate points. But, in any kind of activism, things tend to be reduced to simple, easy-to-digest ideas and simple, easy-to-digest solutions. It’s the nature of the beast - complex ideas and compromises don’t have as much cachet. But sooner or later, more complex realities always rear their heads.
And, in something that goes back to my point at the start of the post. Duane Kidd is a resident of Englewood, and so is GoodKids, MadCity’s Miracle Boyd. They both want justice. They both want opportunities for African-Americans. They both want to see the community get resources and jobs. But some of their goals are different, and they different views about whether the police should even exist.
Are one’s experiences and beliefs any less valid than the other’s?
After five years of writing for Austin Weekly News, whenever I hear people talking about what people in the Black community wants, my response tends to be “well, that depends on what you mean by ‘Black community.’”