by Ben Austen
Annette made sure Danny played baseball at Cabrini and boxed in the Seward Park field house. She never let him miss a day of school. No way would Danny grow up to be in a gang and sell drugs. She sold drugs, but that was to keep Danny in the shoes and clothes she couldn’t afford on a public aid check alone. She took one of the rotating shifts outside her building. With so many others needing the work, she barely got any hours. When Dantrell acted up and was sent to a kindergarten for children with behavioral problems, Annette’s friends told her she was lucky. She could claim an SSI, supplemental security income, for someone with a disability. “I’m not going to claim shit extra,” she said, “because my son is intelligent.” He was hardheaded, that’s all. He didn’t listen to anyone but his mother and father. She rode the bus with him to the school each day, making sure he was taken seriously as a student. She lobbied to get him reassigned to a school at Cabrini for first grade.
In the spring of that kindergarten year, in 1992, with Dantrell asleep on their couch, Annette left him for a shift outside the building. At 4:00 a.m., a woman who lived next door heard Dantrell’s screams before she smelled the smoke. A man from the building kicked in the door. A cigarette by the couch must have started the fire. An ambulance rushed Dantrell to the emergency room while firefighters put out the blaze and the police located Annette. The burns covered half of Dantrell’s body, mostly on his left side, over his stomach and arms and face. His cheeks were polka-dotted in pink where the skin seared, his fingertips hardened like wood. He spent the next few weeks in the hospital, Annette and Kelvin by his side. After the skin grafts, you could see the burns, but they were much less visible.
They got another apartment in 502 W. Oak. Annette was ordered to take parenting classes. She was happy to do it. She was told she couldn’t leave him alone again. She understood. After weeks in the hospital, Dantrell was ready to start first grade at Jenner. That was perfect. The elementary school was right outside their high-rise, not a hundred feet from their front door. Although he still couldn’t read or print out letters, his new teacher said it would be only a matter of time, and Danny believed him. At the start of the school day he sat transfixed as the teacher read stories to the class. He won second place in a boxing tournament, and his coach thought his wide smile electric. Annette felt they were doing good. They’d both overcome so much. Dantrell told her all the time that he loved her. He’d repeat it like a song—I love, love, love you. He was only seven, but he had an old soul. “He didn’t give up on me, even when I gave up on myself,” Annette would say. “Not my little soldier, not my best friend.”
Then on September 13, a week into the school year, Kelvin Davis died. He was twenty-seven, his body discovered in bed at his mother’s West Side home. Annette would blame asthma; official reports stated that he choked in his sleep, the likely result of a drug overdose, either heroin or methadone. His rap sheet was long on petty crimes—possession, assault, shoplifting. He had nine children total, but Annette said he’d been a good father to Danny, and he was the only man she ever loved. They’d been together ten years, almost half her life, and the death made her want to drink herself senseless or die or hurt other people. She held it together for Danny. “I miss him, too,” she’d tell her son. “But it’s only us now.”
In October, a couple of weeks after the funeral, Kelvin’s sister dropped by to check on them. The night was cold, and as they walked Dantrell’s aunt back to the bus stop Annette looked down at her son trudging silently between them, his face twisted in worry. “Man, Ma, I don’t want to get shot,” he said. It was a peculiar thing for him to say. He’d never fretted over the violence before. Their building was Vice Lords, and the towers flanking them were controlled by Gangster Disciples. When Annette was in high school, she and her friends started their walk to Lincoln Park each morning by counting down before breaking into a sprint, with guys from the surrounding high-rises dropping things on them or streaming outside with golf clubs and giving chase. Annette trained Dantrell from an early age to stay clear of the blacktop, to walk away when fights started. At the sound of a gun blast, he knew to fall on the ground. He knew the drill. She told him not to worry. “Don’t I always got you, Danny?” she said, pulling him into her waist. “I’ll take care of you.”
The next morning, October 13, 1992, was a Tuesday, and Dantrell loafed in his room, watching cartoons while Annette dressed. That wasn’t like him; he usually set the pace, beating her to the door. “You’re not going to school today?” Annette teased. He said he wanted to stay home and spend the day with her. But skipping school wasn’t part of their plan. When he still didn’t budge, she agreed reluctantly to walk him downstairs. They came out of the building, and Annette waited for him to cross the street to Jenner. Several teachers were outside greeting students. Parents in shiny yellow vests worked as crossing guards. Two police officers idled in a squad car at the corner. Annette pointed to Danny’s friends. “There goes Doo-Doo,” she told him. But he didn’t move. “Didn’t I tell you to go over by the school?” She urged him on with a flick of her hands, irritated in the way parents get when their children are slow to react. “Do something,” she snapped.
“I am doing something, Ma.”
Then the 9:00 a.m. school bell sounded. A moment later, Annette heard the first of the shots. She dropped to the ground and yelled for Dantrell to do the same. When she looked over, she saw him already on his stomach, and a bit of pride blossomed in her. “That’s because of his learnings,” she told herself. She had prepared him; she was keeping him safe. The shooting stopped, and Annette crawled over to her son. “All right, let’s get up. Let’s go in the building,” she said. But he couldn’t get up. Bystanders said she screamed, “Please, baby, don’t die!” and, “Please, come and get my baby! Please hurry!” She didn’t remember any of that. A half hour later, at Children’s Memorial Hospital, Dantrell Davis was pronounced dead. A bullet had entered the left side of his head.
DANTRELL DAVIS WAS the 782nd person murdered in Chicago in 1992. That was in October, and by year’s end the official count would reach 943—more homicides than in any year in city history except 1974, when Chicago had 970 killings and almost 600,000 more residents. Much of the violence was blamed on gangs and drugs. It was the height of crack addiction, with dealers and buyers and hard-core users congregating in vice districts like Cabrini-Green. Dantrell was also the seventy-fourth child to be killed that year. He wasn’t even singular as far as victims from Jenner Elementary. Three months earlier, it had been Laquanda Edwards, buying milk on Larrabee Street, struck down by a sniper; in March, second-grader Anthony Felton was standing almost exactly where Dantrell died when thirteen-year-old Rodnell Dennis fired blindly into a crowd and killed the younger boy. “There were lots of Dantrell Davises before Dantrell Davis,” Dolores Wilson’s daughter Cheryl said.
It is a trick of fate, the perfect storm of circumstance, that raises any one tragedy into something other than an installment in a city’s daily accounting of horrors. The shameful rule is that bystanders are gunned down, boys are shot by police, children murder other children, and what’s shocking today elicits no extended public outcry. Dantrell Davis proved to be the rare exception. “Dantrell will go down in the history books of this country,” Vince Lane, the CHA head, announced to reporters in the days after the shooting. “Dantrell has gotten the world’s attention.” That he became, as the editor of the Sun-Times declared, “the symbol that Emmett Till was,” was due in part to the circumstances of his death. He stood only a couple dozen steps from his school’s entrance, first thing in the morning, surrounded by teachers and police. He and his mother were side by side. He represented any seven-year-old starting not merely his day but a lifetime of untold experiences. That he was vulnerable even then captured the growing feeling that the city had finally broken. It had lost its capacity for mercy. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin said that Dantrell’s death underscored “the social pathology that we have refused to acknowledge.”
Still, D
antrell’s brief life would likely have been forgotten if he had not been from Cabrini-Green. Dantrell Davis and Cabrini-Green were talked about together as the manifestation of the crisis of inner-city America. In the extended coverage, the media outlets each ran long treatises about the woeful history of the development. “Cabrini-Green was born in Little Hell,” wrote the Tribune. “The name is still sadly apt.” On national news shows, Cabrini-Green was “Fort Cabrini,” compared with Beirut, Sarajevo, and Somalia. “A public housing hell-hole of poverty and crime,” reported the CBS Evening News. One of the hundreds of newspaper articles on the shooting stated, “Now the very name ‘Cabrini’ is synonymous with what many people fear most about urban America: rage and hopelessness spiraling out of control.” The reactions made sense, almost, when considering that Dantrell Davis and Candyman were complete contemporaries. On the last night of Dantrell’s life, as he walked with his mother and aunt, the horror movie set at Cabrini-Green was premiering at the Chicago International Film Festival just four blocks away.
On the morning that Dantrell was shot, at roughly the exact same time, three hundred officers were raiding Altgeld Gardens, the 190-acre public housing village on the city’s southern edge. A young Barack Obama did community organizing there for three years in the 1980s, trying to get asbestos removed from the buildings and an after-school program started for teenagers. He found that the absence of any of the social order he’d witnessed in the slums of Jakarta as a child “made a place like Altgeld so desperate.” Obama wrote in his memoir, “It wasn’t as bad as Chicago’s high-rise projects yet, the Robert Taylors and Cabrini Greens, with their ink-black stairwells and urine-stained lobbies and random shootings.” He was right about the “yet.” With the closing of the steel mills that were the reason for building Altgeld way out there in the first place, the development’s thousands of residents were cut off from both the city and from jobs. It was now part of what was colloquially known as the Wild 100s, the dangerous and depressed three-digit streets of the distant South Side. The officers conducting the early-morning raid turned up twenty guns, a small cache of drugs, and portable two-way radios that officials said drug dealers were using to coordinate their operations. Thirty-five people at the development were arrested.
But Altgeld, sixteen miles from the city center and a world away, was hardly news. When Lane got word of the shooting on the Near North Side, he sped across town. He knew that Dantrell’s death would be a sensation. “It was Cabrini-Green!” he explained more than two decades later with a cry. “Nobody cared about the other projects. Cabrini sat in the heart of the city. The world knew about Cabrini-Green.” By the time he arrived, mothers and grandmothers had already collected their children from Jenner. Studentless teachers huddled together in a daze. Dozens of police cars with their whirling blue lights were parked at uneven angles. A traffic jam of news trailers had formed along the streets, while reporters and city officials ran clumsily between buildings with their heads ducked, fearing additional fire. A spent rifle cartridge was found in one of the high-rises facing 500–502 W. Oak, and sixty officers charged into the building. They determined that the shot likely came from a window in an abandoned tenth-floor apartment in 1157 N. Cleveland, about three hundred yards from where Dantrell fell. By noon the next day, the police had arrested Anthony Garrett, a thirty-three-year-old lifetime Cabrini resident.
Richard M. Daley was forty-nine and had been mayor for less than three years when Dantrell Davis was shot. He had defeated Harold Washington’s successor, Eugene Sawyer, in a special election in 1989, and two years later was reelected to his first full term, his 63 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary exceeding even his father’s best electoral showing. After twenty-one years of Old Man Daley, five different mayors ran Chicago in a little over a decade. The younger Daley seemed like a kind of stability, especially after the turmoil of the Council Wars that beset Washington’s mayoralty. And unlike Jane Byrne, who made several racial missteps early in her tenure, Daley appointed minority members to his cabinet and to head many of the city’s departments. He formed alliances with leaders in the city’s black and Latino communities, and he became the first mayor to march at the head of the city’s Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade. Prior to becoming mayor, Daley had served two decades as an Illinois state senator and the Cook County state’s attorney. But he distanced himself from his father’s Democratic machine, whose faithful still blamed him for splitting the white electorate with Byrne in 1983, thus allowing Washington to win office.
In the thirteen years between the two Mayor Daleys, the party machinery had actually been rendered somewhat obsolete. The Shakman decrees that were signed into law in entirety in 1983 illegalized much of the patronage system that bartered city and state positions in exchange for political support. By the 1990s, political bonds were sealed not through the doling out of city jobs but through the dispensing of city contracts. The younger Daley proved adept at the new system, forging ties with Republicans in the suburbs, where many city companies had relocated. He began filling vacancies on the city council with aldermen loyal not to the Democratic Organization of Cook County but to him. He reordered city bureaucracies, made sure the White Sox remained in Chicago, and invested heavily in a resurgent downtown. He also benefited greatly from an improved economy. After forty years of population declines, a net loss of 837,000 people, Chicago began to add residents again as Daley took office. His was the new gleaming Chicago of Michael Jordan and Oprah and Charlie Trotter. Daley himself would move, in 1993, from the old sod of Bridgeport to the luxury Central Station, a former rail yard just south of the Loop that had been one of the primary targets for redevelopment in the Chicago 21 plan.
While Daley had managed the city up to then with a low-key style, he’d yet to show much leadership on the growing problem of violent crime. The number of murders in the city rose each year he’d been in office—742 in 1989, then 851 in 1990, and 928 in 1991. Throughout his tenure, Daley would be mocked and also praised for his sometimes garbled speech—a sign, trusted aides would say, of his too-fast-for-his-mouth thinking. In a press conference, he denounced “drive-by shootalongs.” At another he proclaimed, “The more killings and homicides you have, the more havoc it prevents.” At the time of Dantrell Davis’s murder, Daley was visiting his daughter at Connecticut College, and he didn’t gauge the political significance of this death. In a record bloody year, Davis seemed another painful loss, a tragedy, but not an all-hands-on-deck civic emergency, or even cause for a public comment. Jane Byrne figured out early on the space that Cabrini-Green held in the civic psyche, and she’d turned a shooting spree there into the most prominent political moment of her career. By contrast, Daley’s ongoing absence was compared with the schmoozing of Los Angeles’s police chief, Daryl Gates, at a Brentwood cocktail party as rioters tore their way through his city earlier in the year. The Sun-Times wrote of the Chicago mayor, “This city cried out for leadership last week, and the biggest chair of all was empty.” Daley slammed his critics, saying that family was of the utmost importance, reminding more than a few Chicagoans of his father’s response to reports that he’d helped the younger Daley and his brothers get lucrative city contracts and court appointments. “If I can’t help my sons, then they can kiss my ass,” Richard J. Daley had said in 1973. “If a man can’t put his arms around his sons, then what kind of world are we living in?” But rather than return to Chicago after visiting his daughter, Richard M. Daley traveled to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, to join the Kennedys at a golf tournament.
With Daley gone, Vince Lane stepped onto the public stage, announcing into a bouquet of microphones that he would do whatever was needed to turn the infamous public housing project into a “normal neighborhood.” He was ready to send in a thousand additional state and federal law enforcement officers to sweep every building. The tower from which Dantrell’s killer had fired the fatal shot already had an official vacancy rate of over 75 percent. Lane declared that the building would be permanently clo
sed—“And I don’t mean with plywood; I mean with masonry.” He called on the National Guard to police Cabrini-Green, demanding that armed troops form a perimeter around the development’s twenty-three towers and all six hundred of the rowhouses.
Daley decided it was time to cut short his trip. Lane couldn’t be the one making all the pronouncements. The mayor announced a meeting with his advisers for Monday morning, six days after Davis’s killing. Then the emergency meeting with twenty of his top officials was moved up to Sunday. At the press conference afterward, Daley appeared sunburned—his aides said from activities the mayor did in Chicago, before his golf trip. Daley presented an eleven-point plan for Cabrini-Green. He adopted several of Lane’s impromptu proposals as part of his own strategy, saying that he would shutter up to four Cabrini high-rises and outfit the remaining buildings with metal detectors and one-way turnstiles. He’d place armed guards in the lobbies. His agencies would expedite evictions, putting together a team of lawyers who’d work pro bono to remove drug dealers and gangbangers. The city would pay 270 off-duty officers to sweep every building in the project of weapons, at a cost of upward of $500,000. Adopting the language of the War on Drugs, he promised Chicagoans that he would take their city back from gangsters and make it safe for all law-abiding citizens. “We cannot surrender,” Daley pledged. “We refuse to stand by in a city where a seven-year-old can’t walk from his home to his school without fear of death.” Echoing Sean Connery’s character in The Untouchables, who promised to take down Al Capone the “Chicago way,” the mayor said he would do what was necessary to eliminate the gangs in areas like Cabrini-Green: “We have to have a war here, and we have to go after them the same way they go after innocent people.”