A Saturday Health Fair on Woodlawn Ave In Chicago(Updated)
UPDATE 5:15 Central Time April 26 There are conflicting reports that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is prepared to offer concessions concerning the mental health clinic closings in Chicago. This comes after many days of protest that include 35 arrests. Two Nobel Prize winners visited the Woodlawn Occupation this morning to offer their support. If I can confirm any news, I’ll pass it on.
It’s a long ride on the CTA Green Line from Oak Park to 63rd and Woodlawn Ave where the Mental Health Movement has occupied an unused lot in front of the Woodlawn clinic. I’ve taken that ride several times in the past week or so, most recently on Saturday April 21st for the Mental Health Movement’s day-long health fair.
The Mental Health Movement is made up of mental health workers, mental health clinic users, plus their supporters. It has been fighting the closure of 6 mental health clinics in Chicago. Thirty-five people have been arrested so far in the struggle. More about that HERE and HERE. Yesterday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel offered free bus passes to patients of the closed clinics(!)
Photo of the original tent encampment
Back to Saturday’s health fair. An hour of Saturday travel took me through the now-gentrifying West Side, through the shady towers of downtown and to the city’s South Side, where institutions like the Illinois Institute of Technology and Sox Park stand amidst Chicago’s ever changing working class neighborhoods.
Woodlawn, just south of affluent Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago, was once the stronghold of the Blackstone Rangers, aka the Black P Stone Nation, aka the El Rukns. Led by Jeff Fort, aka Prince Malik, they were the most feared black street gang on the South Side. Decimated by deaths, prosecution and the aging process, they have disappeared from the public scene. Jeff Fort is now incarcerated at the Florence Supermax prison in Colorado. He will no doubt die there, alone in a cell that amounts to a medieval dungeon updated with 21st century technology.
Few mourned the end of the El Rukns and few will mourn the passing of its former maximum leader. According to Horace Howard, a grad student at Governors State University and one of the leaders of the Mental Health Movement, the street violence on the black South Side is now largely among small groups and aggrieved individuals seeking revenge. Ironically Jeff Fort’s daughter Ameena Matthews is an anti-violence activist on the streets of the South Side and one of the subjects of the award winning 2010 documentary film, The Interrupters.
The University of Chicago has long coveted the traditionally black Woodlawn neighborhood. After I descended down the long flight of stairs from the CTA station at 63rd & Cottage Grove, last stop on the Green Line, I walked a few blocks east to Woodlawn Ave past vacant lots awaiting developers to perform the seemingly inevitable process of gentrification and working class displacement.
At the corner of 63rd and Woodlawn, just across from the Woodlawn Clinic is the Robust Coffee Lounge, full of University of Chicago students and neighborhood residents working on laptops and engaging in intense conversations. Members of the Mental Health Movement are frequent visitors and the owner wears a button supporting their efforts. Besides the warmth, the Wi-Fi and the conversation, this quaint coffee house also has two functional toilets, a powerful attraction to the Occupiers who are its neighbors.
When I arrived at the Health Fair a little after noon on Saturday, there were about 75-100 people making up the racially mixed crowd who had gathered on that clear cool spring day. People came and went all afternoon and numbers seemed to hover around 100 most of the time.The familiar Chicago smell of outdoor BBQ was in the air, wafting over the canopies and health fair attendees. It had the atmosphere of a traditional Chicago block party or neighborhood picnic.
63rd and Woodlawn: Site of the health fair
There was a nurse doing blood pressure tests while delivering free advice about hypertension. A woman was getting a massage on a portable massage apparatus. The food table was busy with people receiving chili and chips while waiting for the ribs to cook.
The BBQ. This also served as a warming fire in the evening.
There was dancing to urban sounds from a portable sound system while others gathered in small discussion circles. T-shirts supporting the clinic struggle hung from an improvised clothes line while young people stamped out “Our City Our Clinics” buttons on a manual button making machine.
The buttonmakers. Horace Howard is seated with red jacket
People were encouraged to create their own button slogans with a sharpie marker on pre-made templates and then stamp out their own custom buttons. Others took leaflets and petitions to circulate in their neighborhoods. An AFSCME organizer babysat with the sometimes cranky sound system.
Dancers
Around mid-afternoon there was a break in the music. Mental health clinic users and mental health workers gave short speeches. Horace Howard, one of the original arrestees and a grad student at Governors State University was among the speakers.
He told of how he had been abused by the private mental services he had been receiving. He wanted very much to enroll in a masters degree program but was discouraged from doing so by his caseworker. He was told that seeking higher education was just the “manic” phase of his manic-depressive condition and his therapist wanted to increase his medication. Of course doing that would have made him unable to study properly or interact with the other students.
He went ahead and enrolled in a Governors State graduate program despite the “diagnosis”.
Howard made a link between the clinic closings and the globalization of the economy. The shift from a higher paying manufacturing base to a lower paid service economy has had devastating consequences in working class communities, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial disaster. The increased stresses in peoples’ lives have made mental health services more crucial than ever.
But working class people with health issues are being told by the LaSalle Street financial barons to take their problems to private providers who will then profit from their distress. Of course if there is no profit to be made, no care will be given. They are also expected to go quietly and not make a public fuss about it. Occupy Chicago has called this “The Sit Down and Shut Up Policy.”
Howard named both Bill Daley (brother of former Mayor Richie Daley) and Rahm Emanuel as major Chicago political players in this transformation. From Howard’s speech and my own reading, it looks to me that Rahm is presiding over a globalized increasingly gentrified Chicago whose local rulers are the City’s financial elite, with their international connections to global capital.
They want a shrunken low wage non-union working class They see that as more profitable, whence the headlong rush into privatization and unionbusting. Many of the traditionally unionized jobs that built the city are gone and with them much of the political pressure for public services to working class communities.
Howard’s analysis of the city’s social crisis tallied with what Occupy Chicago has been saying about the Windy City 1%. Dr. Pauline Lipman of the University of Illinois at Chicago has written extensively in a similar vein within context of education. There is an ugly racial component to all of this, with black and brown Chicago the target of the most drastic public service reductions.
The cold shoulder toward working class black and brown Chicago was echoed by another speaker who talked about the decision of the University of Chicago Hospital, located just a few blocks from 63rd and Woodlawn, to close its trauma center. There is now no trauma center on Chicago’s South Side, despite the obvious need for one.
Youth activist Damian Turner was shot dead just 2 blocks from the University of Chicago Medical Center in August of 2010. He bled to death while being transported to Northwestern Memorial Hospital 10 miles away. For those familiar with American history, it was all too familiar. In the Jim Crow South, blacks were routinely transported to far off hospitals even when their lives hung in the balance.
According to Dr. Marie Crandall, an associate professor of surgery at Northwestern University:
“We finished our analysis of Illinois State Trauma Registry gunshot wounds from 1999-2009 and we did find that there was a difference if you lived more than five miles from a trauma center both with respect to transport and mortality,”
Crandall believes that survival from gunshot trauma depends heavily upon access to Level 1 trauma care as soon as possible. Since 2008, South Side Chicago has experienced 40% of the homicides due to trauma.
There is a march to the University of Chicago hospital to demand a South Side trauma center planned for May 12 at noon that will begin at 61st and Cottage Grove. It is sponsored by FLY( Fearless Leading by the Youth).
A community gathering with the generally festive air of a picnic or block party may seem like an inappropriate place to discuss globalization, access to mental health services and gun violence, but the speakers were all greeted with enthusiasm. People know that lives are at stake, but their morale and optimism was high.
Even when the police showed up demanding that tent canopies be taken down that were shading the blood pressure screening and literature tables, peoples’ spirits were not dashed. It was not a day for confrontation and besides the sun was low in the horizon by then and they were not really needed anyway.
An AFSCME organizer makes nice with the police
I left around 4 pm because of another commitment, but the fair was still going strong. We may be up against some of the most powerful and wealthy people on the planet, but they are finding that working class Chicago does not bend easily, quietly or without a good party.
Note: I would have posted this on Monday but a bout of the flu got in the way of editing my notes.
Sources consulted:
10 arrested outside Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic from the Chicago Tribune
Woodlawn Mental Health Center Protests: 10 Arrested As Police Break Up Another Demonstration from the Huffington Post
Emanuel: Mental health clinic closures mean more patients served by Fran Spielman
Lack of South Side trauma center may be costing lives, new study indicates by Ariel Ramchandani
Thu Apr 26, 2012 at 3:09 PM PT: There are conflicting reports that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is prepared to offer concessions after the many days of protests that have included 35 arrests.
Two Nobel Prize winners visited the Woodlawn Occupation this morning to offer their support.
If I can confirm any news, I’ll pass it on.