Young Chicagoans like Shayla Turner say they have seen too many black people killed by police or had friends shot dead in cases that go unsolved.
“It’s not just George Floyd. It’s Laquan McDonald. It’s Breonna Taylor. I feel like we are fed up and this is the last straw,” Turner said after nearly a week of local protests sparked by the Minneapolis police killing of Floyd. “I don’t loot or destruct, but I don’t judge anybody that does, because we are angry. … We need justice for everybody.”
Students such as Turner, 18, a senior at Chicago’s Sarah Goode STEM Academy, have been on the front lines of protests and cleanup efforts in neighborhoods devastated by looting and destruction. Young activists in Chicago have long advocated for more resources and fewer police officers in their schools, and many say Floyd’s death compelled them to take to the streets and make their voices heard.
Turner saw tear gas for the first time. Her ankle was hurt when a clash with police toppled a metal gate into protesters.
By Thursday, she was back on her feet, protesting the placement of city police in public schools. She’d already filled out a survey on the topic.
“‘Do you feel safe with cops in schools?’ I honestly said no,” Turner said. “Even though I have a decent relationship with the cops in my school, no, it’s unnecessary. There’s no such thing as good cops to me. … You see a cop, you get scared.”
The Chicago Public Schools survey was started while Floyd was still alive, but his death at the hands of police has underscored a campaign for schools to be free of sworn officers. Activists want Chicago to follow the lead of the Minneapolis Board of Education, which last week ended its contract with that city’s Police Department.
It’s one of many steps Turner believes is necessary to fix racial inequities hurting children in Chicago.
Despite progress achieved through programs and equity initiatives, CPS has been unable to eradicate inequities between white students and students of color. This school year, the Chicago Teachers Union organized Black Lives Matter at School week and CPS embraced The New York Times’ “1619 Project.” But students still live in neighborhoods that are effectively segregated. Controversial school closings have disproportionately affected students of color.
And the teaching staff is much less diverse than the student body. Half of the teachers are white but only 11% of students are white, while 36% are black and 47% are Latino. Yet in many of the city’s most selective public high schools, white students have a disproportionate number of seats compared with their black and brown peers.
Deep inequities have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has especially devastated black and Latino families who make up a large portion of the essential workforce. Students from these families have been less likely to log into online learning platforms than their white and Asian peers, and more likely to lose a family member to the virus. They know the health risks associated with large gatherings, but to many, the bigger threat is police.
“It’s messed up because black and brown communities are being affected by (coronavirus) the most and we are being forced to come out here and march for our lives,” Turner said. “We have to do it.”
‘Nobody’ wants to sing the national anthem
For many high school seniors, the response to George Floyd’s death comes during an already strained graduation season.
At Whitney Young Magnet High School, senior Molly Clemente, 17, reluctantly agreed to sing the national anthem for a graduation video. Nobody else wanted to, she said.
“With everything going on, it’s not surprising no one wants to sing a song about freedom in America,” Clemente said. “If one of us isn’t free, none of us are free.”
She decided if she was going to sing it, she’d include a personal message. She put on her blue and orange cap and gown. When she got to the “land of the free” line, she held up a handmade sign: “His life mattered. Stand United!”
In response, Principal Joyce Kenner said Clemente had performed a beautiful rendition — but asked her to rerecord the song without the sign, saying, “I don’t think that was the most appropriate time to make your stand.”
But Clemente, buoyed by support from her peers, is steadfast in her belief that to sing the anthem without the sign would be to stay silent in the face of discrimination.
“I’ve lived here in Chicago my whole life and America has given me so many opportunities, but it has taken so many away from everybody else. I have friends who are scared to walk outside,” Clemente said. “My mother is Irish and my father is Filipino. They are two different races and they always taught me the same thing, that if you proceed with love in your heart you always win.”
Kenner told the Tribune that for the graduation ceremony, she wanted all students to be part of a unified message. Rather than during the anthem, she said there will be a collective action with all seniors addressing the current movement.
“I try to make sure that the student voices are being heard in the most appropriate way. It wasn’t about her message at all. I believe in her message,” Kenner said.
In a video addressing students, Kenner condemned looting that has ravaged her neighborhood and asked them to be part of the solution. She also asked students to remain focused on school, so they could go on to college and one day have a seat at the table.
“I know you’re hurting. I’m the same color as you are and I’m hurting too,” said Kenner, who is black. “But I’m going to keep my eye on the prize.”
Some students took issue with that framing.
“I shouldn’t have to be at a seat at the table to voice my opinion,” said Whitney Young senior Adelina Avalos, 18, who has also worked on the Youth Climate Strike. Though Avalos has been avoiding crowded protests because she’s immune-compromised, she’s donated to groups including the Minnesota Freedom Fund, Chicago Community Bond Fund and On the Ground Chi. Avalos, who is Mexican American, said she supports these efforts and the Black Lives Matter movement “because it’s the right thing to do.”
Fellow Whitney Young senior Briyanna Jones, 18, said that she didn’t understand why showing the sign during the anthem was controversial and that she appreciated Clemente’s stand. Many students think issues get swept under the rug at school, she said.
“I can really just hope that they start to listen,” Jones said.
“Being a black girl in America, I am really sad with all problems that are going on, the mistreatment of black Americans,” Jones said. But at the same time, she said, she feels powerful and hopeful, especially after walking from Lincoln Park High School to the police academy near Whitney Young during Thursday’s protest against police in schools.
“It was amazing seeing so many people outside protesting and caring about black issues, no matter the skin tone,” Jones said. “We have to keep fighting.”
She’s also participated in the women’s march and a climate march. Growing up on social media, it’s been easy to connect, sharing not just information and events but opinions and art.
“I definitely think that with my generation, with my peers, there is this need to get out and have this hands-on experience and be a part of things, and see things for yourself,” Jones said. “Things are commonly sugarcoated on TV and social media. We have to actually get out and be a part of it.”
Solidarity among black and Latino students
Though racial tensions developed after reports of violence against black people in Little Village last week, Latino students such as Avalos and Diego Garcia, 18, have remained focused on how they can support each other. Students have participated in actions to show solidarity among black and Latino residents.
At protests, Garcia, a senior at Mansueto High School, has carried signs saying, “We can’t breathe,” echoing Floyd’s last words, and “CPD out of CPS.”
Outrage over police violence has been especially strong “during a pandemic when most American families have been deprived of resources by the government,” Garcia said. “A lot of families are struggling to get food on the table, to pay rent. Living on the Southwest Side of Chicago, we know what those issues are as low-income families. … When you’re facing poverty and violence at the same time, you use any opportunity to stand up for your community.”
He wants to be an example to his little brothers, along with other students “who thought they wouldn’t make it or they live in communities with little to no resources” and often feel ignored.
Over the past two years, he’s taken part in aldermanic campaigns, gun violence prevention, the Youth Climate Strike and other community improvement work. When the pandemic forced schools shut and students had to resort to mobilizing online, he helped organize Chi Student Pandemic Response, which has used Twitter and petitions to push CPS to reform its grading system and cancel the police contract.
On Friday, 19-year-old Makafui Searcy stood at 47th Street and Vincennes Avenue and helped out with a grocery drive organized by Youth for Black Lives, handing out food and water to passing cars.
Days before, Searcy’s collaborative project, FourtuneHouse, led hundreds of youth on a 6-mile journey from the Harold Washington Cultural Center to the Central District police station to City Hall. They protested police brutality and shared intersectional civil rights messages.
A Loyola student and King College Prep graduate, Searcy said he doesn’t consider himself an activist, but an advocate for freedom. He’s continuing a vision of what he’s seen his leaders and ancestors do, inspired by a trip at age 14 to his mother’s native Ghana.
“Seeing not only my village, but a lot of my cultural history, a lot of the symbolism and the power in simplicities, the power in words … I internalized a lot of those things,” Searcy said. “I’m only just a piece.”
He takes inspiration from the sharing mentality of such villages and from his peers.
“What’s fueling youth actions out of public schools is youth are underserved in public schools,” Searcy said. “There’s kids that go to school and are fearful in the hallways because they feel like they are at risk of being arrested. … That could cause trauma, distrust in authority. That’s why kids are ready to activate when necessary, because they are rightfully angry.”
Generation Z, born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, is America’s most diverse generation. Those entering the workforce are already on their second economic recession, and they’ve reported higher rates of pandemic job loss or pay cuts affecting them or household members than millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers, according to a March Pew Research Center survey.
Charity Freeman, a computer science teacher at Lane Tech College Prep, said it’s time for Generation Z’s voices to be amplified. They’re a “completely different generation” in the way they approach social change and problem-solving, she said.
“How do you convince adults you’re worth listening to?” she asked. “Millennials, we tolerated those different microaggressions and the way that adultism was inflicted on us. Gen Z, they’re not going for that and I admire them for it.”
Freeman, who is African American, said if teachers’ faces don’t reflect their students, the school-to-prison pipeline is more likely to be perpetuated, with more white teachers bringing their implicit biases to the classroom. “Not that we don’t all have biases, but in certain instances those biases can turn deadly, as we’re seeing.”
“When you have a person of color who is teaching, who is instructing, who is caring, who is interacting with our students, those are extraordinarily humanizing moments for students of color who everywhere else in society are being told their voice doesn’t matter because their face isn’t white,” Freeman said.
Shayla Turner, the Goode STEM Academy senior, plans to study education. She realized she wants to be a teacher after her own teachers comforted and encouraged her, stayed late and helped her when she was nervous about giving a speech for the Youth Climate Strike.
She also intends to keep advocating for justice. “We have to do it, because who’s going to do it?”
