The last building of the Cabrini Green housing project will demolished Monday.
Karl Klockars has a touching piece in today’s Chicagoist with an accompanying striking picture of Cabrini Green suffused in light in which he discusses the final building at the housing project being demolished on Monday and a public art installation that will honor it.
Posted in Current Books
Tagged Beauty Turner, Brad Hunt, Cabrini Green, James Fuerst, Karl Klockars, Sudhir Venkatesh, The Wire
The late Beauty Turner figures prominently in a powerful new documentary.
I wrote yesterday about Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities.
Today, I am posting about a film that also deals with education: Interrupt The Pipeline.
The film’s genesis occurred a couple of years ago, when Flavian Prince was working as an administrator at an alternative school in Champaign, Illinois.
Within a short period of time, he made four important and related realizations:
a. He was receiving many students from jail, including youth as young as 12 years old.
b. The vast majority of those students were black.
c. Many of them were former public housing residents who had relocated with their families from Chicago in search of a better life after their homes had been demolished as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan For Transformation.
d.Part of the pattern was driven by a strong mismatch between the inner-city students and their interactions with their new teachers and administrators, who were woefully unprepared to teach them.
Last year, Prince moved to Chicago and started teaching at John Harvard Elementary School in the city’s Englewood neighborhood, where, again, his students were almost all black.
Harvard was a turnaround school. This means that, while the students stayed the same, an almost entirely new crew of teachers and administrators were hired to help boost the students’ previously poor performance.
But Prince quickly understood that his students at Harvard were experiencing the same confluence of race, poverty, and physical and psychological dislocation through the city’s housing policies.
He also saw quickly that many of his students were headed to the same destination as the youth in Champaign.
Pushed and motivated by his students and their fates, Prince decided to do something about it.
Interrupt The Pipeline, a film that was a collaboration between Prince and his students, is the result.
Full disclosure: I worked with Prince on the film and The Chicago Reporter, the publication where I work, undergirds an accompanying chapter guide. I am also a board member of the mentoring program he has created.
Interrupt the Pipeline starts in Chicago and ends in Champaign, but Prince and his students show indelibly how the two are linked.
Prince’s students drive much of the action-they did a lot of the filming, appear throughout the film, and did all of the music-but a wide array of adults, including parents, business owners, community activists like the late Beauty Turner, and teachers also appear in the film.
The film has many poignant moments that illustrate the students’ innocence and youthful vitality being strained and shaken by the confluence of factors with which they must contend.
One particularly painful story involves Daniel, whose mother has moved him, despite her instincts, from school to school for fear of his safety. This included sending him to her former elementary school-a move she had hoped never to make.
In one scene, filmed in a car, Daniel recounts to Prince a litany of violence and death he has witnessed during the past five years .
Daniel calls his father to see if he has the forms Daniel needs to register for high school. “Hello, HELLO?” he yells repeatedly into the phone, trying in vain to make himself heard. Telling his father that he is right outside the house does not elicit an invitation. The father does not have the forms. And Daniel says afterward that he is giving up hope.
In another scene, Corey, who wants to be a massage therapist, stands in darkness outside the door to his home after having told about being shot at the week before. A siren blares in the background. Anxiety grows as the shot, which is taken from the ground and shows the boy at the top of a flight of stars, head slightly bowed, stays on the screen for 10, then 15 seconds.
Corey’s admission into his house is just a temporary relief, though, as the viewer knows he must return to the same dangerous streets the next day.
In a different way, the Champaign section of the film illustrates the utter mismatch between student background and needs and what the system is providing. Student after student from Prince’s former alternative school tell heart-rending tales of violence they experienced by adults at school and of being arrested for jaywalking-he shows many students at the nearby University of Illinois campus crossing the street with impunity.
The result: the students are placed on an academic track that heads to prison, rather than to graduation, let alone a college education. One of the film’s most jaw dropping interviews comes with the man who provides the single hour of academic instruction per week for suspended students.
Interrupt the Pipeline is far more than a collection of individual stories designed to elicit pity from the viewer toward the helpless victims. Far from it.
Beyond the agency the students demonstrate in making the film, in interrogating a first-year teacher at Robeson High School about what it has to offer them, the film includes healthy doses of analysis, some of which is provided by Chicago Reporter Editor and Publisher Alden Loury and former colleague Fernando Diaz. The fiery Turner is her inimitable and inspiring self-her embrace and encouragement of Sharhonda, one of Prince’s students, toward the end of the film is profoundly moving.
And Prince himself plans to make the film part of a larger effort to engage and empower youth. He has created Project MAROONS, a mentoring program that will combine mentorship, internships and a curriculum in which The Chicago Reporter may appear prominently. Part of Prince’s vision is to have the students eventually become mentors themselves for younger children.
A first effort by Prince and his friend and fellow filmmaker Daniel Rudin, Interrupt The Pipeline has some rough patches with sound and transitions between scenes. The film’s focus takes a while to emerge, crystallizing in the Champaign section. Still, these minor challenges, which respectively illustrate Interrupt The Pipeline’s grassroots foundation and reflect a storytelling approach, in no meaningful way detract from the film’s power, moral outrage and call to action.
Tribute to Beauty Turner
The late Beauty Turner doing her daily fighting for justice, this time in 2007. Souce: ChiTown Daily News
A lot of people talk about giving voice to the voiceless; Beauty Turner lived it everyday.
She did it in many ways, and did it with class and grace and heaping amounts of generosity.
Her name fit her perfectly.
She radiated inner and outer beauty, dressing elegantly and always treating people with dignity and respect. Her style showed how you could start with so little and end up carrying yourself like a queen without losing a common touch.
Born the youngest of 16 siblings, Beauty came up hard, survived and ended an abusive marriage, and eventually discovered a mission she embraced with gusto.
“I’m a writer and a fighter,” she declared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and to anyone she met.
The two were related, and she gave herself completely to both.
Her writing for years was in Residents’ Journal, a publication by, for and about residents of public housing. It was the premiere source of stories about the community.
In its pages Beauty wrote stories that garnered national awards and that showed repeatedly that the Chicago Housing Authority’s claims of a smooth Plan for Transformation were anything but that and that the pronouncements of politicians like Mayor Richard M. Daley were often a bunch of self-serving hype and lies.
Deadly Moves, for example, a collaboration with The Chicago Reporter, where I work, showed that the drop in the city’s murder rate had less to do with community policing, as Daley maintained, but with the moving of the people from public housing to suburban communities, where the number of killings rose.
Beauty also wrote for South Street Journal for years, and, after her departure from Residents’ Journal, on her blog.
Writing was just one part of Beauty’s repertoire.
She was the driving force in Dislocation, a video Sudhir Venkatesh made about some of the last people in the Robert Taylor Homes. She hosted a cable television show earlier this year.
She created the highly successful Ghetto bus tours in which visitors of all ages and backgrounds from the city, from the suburbs, from around the country and even around the world learned about, and listened to, residents of public housing telling their stories.
Her fighting also took many forms.
There was the public work she did, like attending community meetings, speaking up at public events and participating in marches.
But she also constantly did unheralded work that was no less central to her mission.
In the summer of 2007, I was getting started on an investigation of fatal police shootings in Chicago.
My brother Jon, Beauty and I were planning to go to a press conference on the West Side, but had to make a stop at the federal building first. A woman distraught about a legal difficulty had locked herself in the bathroom and refused to leave.
In her loving manner, Beauty spoke to the younger woman, advised her and coaxed her out of the room.
“You are the only one who came,” the woman said after we went to the sixth floor, tears streaming down her face, after she eventually emerged.
Beauty hugged her, connected her to a lawyer and let her know it would be all right. Other community organizations had said they would be there, but Beauty was the one who actually showed the woman know she was on her side.
We missed the meeting, but the action had moved to the police station. On a “work schedule,” I headed back to the office, but Beauty kept right on going, not stopping until early in the morning, when she rested for a few hours and then started the same cycle all over again.
Her actions inspired a song by young men and made her the subject of magazine covers stories and a key figure in multiple documentary films. Beauty soaked in all the affirmation like a warm bath, but never forgot who she was or what she was about.
Where most of the outside world looked at Robert Taylor and saw crime and violence and poverty and a symbol for all that could and had gone wrong in public housing; Beauty saw family and community and people she would do anything for.
No one was better connected to people in public housing throughout the city. No one had such a pure relationship with the people on whose behalf she worked. No one worked harder and listened better.
In short, she loved what she did and the people with whom she worked.
Love is critical to include when talking about Beauty because only talking about her actions and accomplishments misses a central part of her essence. Coupled with a hunger for justice, love was her life’s driving force as well as her most common greeting.
I never saw her call anyone anything but ‘love,’ although I didn’t take her up on her offer one day to meet Mayor Daley, so I don’t know how that would have turned out.
In many ways, Beauty she was fully getting launched on her own.
The split with Residents’ Journal after many years had been painful, but she had emerged speaking highly of her former colleagues. The Ghetto and gallery tours had been rousing successes. Her children were doing well and she was working on a book about her life.
She was seemingly midway through her life’s journey and flourishing.
Which is why her death hurts so much.
In the week before she died, she wrote a piece for our publication’s blog about Barack Obama’s election.
In the piece, she recounted dreaming about being back in slavery with prominent black leaders like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and others.
“They told me it was time. The red blood of our ancestors was crying out from the ground for justice.” She wrote. “We danced around flickering candles to the beat of a drum-a Ngoma with the ancestors.”
In Beauty’s vision, Obama emerged in the 21st century, eliciting a loud cheer from the people. Three days of rain followed, which represented the tears of the people who had been enslaved.
She concluded:
“The ancestors told me to keep him focused concerning the plight of the poor and to tell him “Forget not from which you came!”
Mr. Obama, all eyes of the nations are focused on you; so stay focused on the mission that was ordained by God, which he has laid upon you to do!
Be a president not just for some of the people but for all.”
This was vintage Beauty: the dream; the connection with the ancestors; the joy of the victory; and her mission of urging of those in power to remember the powerless.
Now she is gone, and we are much the poorer for it.
Chicago and the world became a little less brave and a lot less fun on Thursday. Beauty’s death leaves a gaping hole in the city and among the community of people who strive to leave the world better than we found it.
Of course the love she spread and the message of her life will be remembered and honored and heeded by those of us who knew and loved her. Of course her writing and actions and advocacy will endure in all of us.
And the loss is undeniable and heartbreaking.
Thank you, Beauty, for your life. Thank you for your gifts. Thank you for your example. Thank you for your love.
We will miss you. We respect you. And we love you.
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Posted in Commentary
Tagged Beauty Turner, Chicago Housing Authority, death, fighting, love, Residents' Journal, The Chicago Reporter, writing