by Ben Austen
AT THE FUNERAL service, four days after his death, Dantrell Davis was outfitted in a white tuxedo with a powder-blue cummerbund, a bow tie, and a white leather cap that covered the damage to his head. The pastor described Danny as a warrior, a little David toiling in a community assailed by Goliaths. A soloist sang the lament that ends the Cabrini-Green movie Cooley High—“It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday.” People heard the song and crumpled. At the cemetery, Annette Freeman kissed a red carnation and tossed it onto her son’s casket. As the coffin descended into the ground, she yelled that Danny had been the only one left who loved her.
Annette’s mother, Janice Freeman, had moved to Cabrini-Green for safety. She was escaping an uncle who had tried to kill her—a different uncle than Jerome Freeman, known as King Shorty. He was the leader of the Black Disciples, a Chicago gang with thousands of members. He’d joined the gang as a boy, running errands for its founder, David Barksdale. When Barksdale created the Black Gangster Disciples Nation, he became King David, and his Folks alliance adopted as its emblem the six-point star—the Star of David. The People alliance used the five-point star as its symbol. During a Blackstone Rangers ambush in 1970, Barksdale was shot in the abdomen. He survived, but the complications persisted, and four years later he died of kidney failure. The Disciples Nation died along with him. Shorty Freeman took over the Black Disciples, and Larry Hoover the Gangster Disciples.
At the time of his grandnephew’s murder, Shorty Freeman was two years into a twenty-eight-year sentence for drug trafficking. Hoover and Jeff Fort, of the Blackstone Rangers, were also serving long sentences in prison, all three leaders reportedly running their street operations from behind bars. At Stateville, Freeman held regular meetings in the prison chapel, and Annette was driven to the penitentiary to talk to him about Dantrell’s accused killer, Anthony Garrett. In a recorded confession, Garrett admitted to standing on a bathtub in an empty apartment in 1157 N. Cleveland and firing an AR-15 rifle at a group of teenagers outside Annette’s building. The weapon lacked a scope, and he’d missed his target and struck Dantrell by mistake. The next day, Garrett claimed he was innocent and that the confession had been coerced. He said he’d been held in isolation for five hours and beaten until he agreed to whatever police told him to say—not an implausible charge in Chicago. Revelations were emerging then about a police unit under Commander Jon Burge that had tortured more than a hundred black suspects over the previous twenty years, beating them with phone books, suffocating them, and shocking them with electrical devices on their genitals and in their rectums.
Garrett was known around Cabrini-Green as Quabine. A former army specialist fourth class trained in marksmanship, he’d racked up nine convictions from the time he was eighteen, six of them weapons related. In 1981, on the same day that Mayor Byrne announced her plans to move to Cabrini-Green, he’d been arrested for killing another resident in a high-rise stairwell. Although he would be found not guilty of the crime, police said he admitted to the shooting and bragged about being a Cobra Stone leader in charge of multiple buildings. Months before Dantrell was killed, during one of Vince Lane’s door-to-door sweeps, police discovered a loaded gun in his Cabrini-Green apartment. A judge later ruled that officers illegally seized the weapon, since the CHA raids violated all sorts of protections from unlawful searches, and Garrett was released.
Like many people at Cabrini-Green, Garrett wasn’t just one thing. He umpired baseball games at the housing development, volunteering for free for three years until he was able to earn $8 an hour for his time. He was Dantrell Davis’s Little League coach, and Annette knew him. “He used to like on me and everything, but I wasn’t leaving Danny’s daddy,” she would say. “I was very loyal.” Garrett makes an appearance in Daniel Coyle’s Hardball, a book documenting a Little League season at Cabrini-Green over the months before Dantrell’s murder. Coyle writes that Garrett was the best umpire the teams saw: “A muscular man with a coal-black biblical beard, he approached the game with extreme seriousness, bellowing ‘ball’ and ‘strike’ with an undisputed authority.” “‘I like working with kids,’” Garrett tells the coaches. “‘I ain’t always been straight in my life, but if I can keep a few of them out of trouble, then I done my job.’” One of the league’s corporate sponsors was so impressed by Garrett that he helped him land a maintenance job a short walk from Cabrini at the posh East Bank Club (“a membership to East Bank Club is an invitation to live well”).
The rifle that killed Dantrell was never found, and some police officers at Cabrini assumed Garrett was the fall guy for a heater case that needed an immediate culprit. But neither Annette nor Shorty Freeman were concerned with whether Garrett was innocent or guilty. They both figured that Quabine killed Dantrell by accident. Plus, Annette was insane with grief. And Shorty knew people were waiting to see his reaction. The moment required that he be a big man. Because Dantrell was kin, his murder had the potential to set off a series of deadly reprisals. No one wanted that. Not unlike Mayor Daley or Vince Lane, the gang leaders needed to demonstrate that they could impose order on a city that more frequently seemed without any. Organized crime was one thing, disorganized crime something else entirely.
Shorty let it be known among his associates that there would be no revenge. Too many people were already getting hurt under his name. But when Garrett began his hundred-year sentence in a Stateville cell house where Shorty called the shots, he didn’t stop guys from delivering some private retribution.
EXACTLY A WEEK after Davis’s shooting, also just after 9:00 a.m., hundreds of Chicago police officers and city officials rolled into Cabrini-Green, joined by officers from the CHA’s security force, the Cook County sheriff’s department, the DEA, ATF, and FBI. The police brought in their blue militarized mobile command vehicle, planting it in front of the red high-rises. Platoons of armed officers went floor to floor in two of the high-rises, searching every room in every apartment. Another hundred recruits from the police academy joined the sweeps. Men and teenage boys were flushed from the buildings and searched repeatedly. One resident who joined a lawsuit against the CHA complained that he was searched seven times in one hour, and not just pat downs but police going inside his underwear; his two-year-old son was frisked. The officers turned up just one firearm—a .45 caliber replica of a gun unable to fire ammunition.
In addition to the show of force, Mayor Daley sent in a hundred street and sanitation workers. They put in floodlights, laid out poison traps for rats, filled potholes, and scoured the project for abandoned cars to tow. Workers applied fresh coats of paint to graffiti-covered walls. Trimmers lopped off branches, and electricians repaired wires. Carpenters nailed plywood over vacant units that had remained accessible for years. Thirty men who had struck deals with the county to exchange jail time for community service cleared the grounds of trash and weeds. Teams installed metal detectors and guard posts, while crews of counselors from the city’s Department of Human Services met with residents who’d been forced from their homes.
Reporters were allowed to embed with roving teams of social workers, clergy, CHA officials, and armed policemen. Ethan Michaeli, the publisher of Residents’ Journal, a newspaper by and for public housing tenants, was then a cub reporter with the Defender and joined one of these tours. The sense was of an emergency relief force showing up in a disaster zone—“We’re the government, we’re here to help you.” At one high-rise apartment, a well-dressed young woman who answered the knocking was asked if she needed any assistance. She was confused: “With what?” Staring at the crowd outside her door, however, she couldn’t help but mind her manners. Would they like to come in? Michaeli said the reporters, eager to experience an actual Cabrini-Green public housing unit, crammed into the woman’s home. But they were disappointed. The living room and kitchen were simple but clean. A shag carpet covered the floor and long, white curtains decorated the windows. A neatly attired toddler stared up at them in wonder. When Michaeli lingered later on one of the ramps, surprised
by the vista of downtown, someone from the CHA ran up to him, breathless. “I thought we lost you,” she cried.
Residents of Cabrini-Green had been pleading for regular maintenance, for new light bulbs in the stairwells and roach fumigation and elevator repairs. In the name of Dantrell Davis, all the stored-up service had finally arrived at once like something out of a fable. With the truckloads of heavy equipment, the workmen bustling about, and the sounds of the chain saws and welders, it was as if a Hollywood crew were creating the set of an imaginary public housing project from scratch. It also seemed like a bizarre reenactment of events from 1970 and from 1981, after the killings of Severin and Rizzato and the arrival of Mayor Byrne. The city’s entire apparatus appeared to be focused again on a seventy-acre patch of the Near North Side, home to only 8 percent of the CHA’s population. There were miles of land on the West Side that still hadn’t been rebuilt since the fires in 1968. At the Henry Horner Homes, half of the 1,800 units were vacant, up from just 2 percent only a decade before, as the CHA wasn’t bothering to repair or refill empty apartments. Seven other public housing developments in the city had rates of violent crime that exceeded Cabrini’s, and the neighborhood including the Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens had the highest proportion of murders in Chicago. “They’re putting a lot of manpower in Cabrini now, but other neighborhoods need the help as well,” a bewildered West Side alderman complained. “And what happens after it’s not front-page news?”
In the midst of this blitz, Mr. T dropped by Cabrini-Green with his signature mohawk, feather earring, and bib of gold chains. The A-Team star stepped out of a Rolls-Royce, telling children that a car like that could be theirs if they studied hard enough. It was just two weeks before the 1992 presidential election, and Bill Clinton stumped at Daley Plaza downtown, asking supporters to help him oust President Bush, who he said would never pay for the additional cops needed to keep Chicago safe. “We owe it to Dantrell Davis!” Clinton shouted to cheers.
One of the more elaborate dedications to Dantrell Davis was an architectural contest held by the Chicago Tribune. The newspaper put out a call for designs of a “safe, livable” Cabrini-Green. It was an ideas contest; the winner would not be hired to design anything, but the hope was that the results would offer a template for the actual remaking of the Near North Side development. “Bricks and mortar didn’t kill Dantrell Davis,” wrote Blair Kamin, the paper’s architecture critic. But Kamin did blame the avant-garde modernism of tower-in-the-park public housing for its part in turning Cabrini-Green into an island of poverty. “Apartheid, American style,” Kamin wrote, adding that these designs imposed “an ideological straitjacket on the free-flowing fabric of big-city life.”
One of the three hundred entrants in the competition was a second-generation architect named Marc Amstadter, the son of Lawrence Amstadter, the original architect of the Cabrini Extension towers. The younger Amstadter said that his father’s work was held up as the embodiment of an ill-conceived, faulty design. He wanted to win the contest to liberate himself—and his father—from the trauma of this past. Another entrant proposed outfitting Cabrini with an amusement park: the Big Hell Ferris Wheel. Someone else envisioned a medieval village with dramatic spires topping the high-rises. Yet another suggested connecting Cabrini to the tidal currents of Lake Michigan. But the winners all adhered to the New Urbanism that was then coming into fashion, taking their cues from old-school town planning and the antimodernism prescribed by Jane Jacobs. The winning team, a group from Fargo, North Dakota, of all places, drew up a traditional small-scale cityscape, reattached to the street grid, of low-rise rowhomes built around a neighborhood square that included commercial buildings, several schools, churches, and a daycare center. It would be an area no longer set at a remove or distinguishable from its surroundings. A half century later, it demonstrated a return to the country’s first model for public housing, the Cabrini rowhouses redux.
In the past, demands to knock down Cabrini-Green and the rest of Chicago’s high-rise public housing elicited charges of racism or shrugs of helplessness. Almost 100,000 poor, black residents lived in the city’s public housing, with an additional 44,000 on the CHA waiting list and 70,000 homeless. Where were public housing residents supposed to go? In the most racially divided city in America, however, Dantrell Davis created a bit of consensus. “Now is the time to start tearing down the Chicago Housing Authority high-rises,” declared an editorial in the Tribune. “Now while the memory of Dantrell Davis, shot dead at Cabrini-Green on his way to grade school, still burns our civic memory.” Like Ayn Rand’s protagonist in The Fountainhead, those who formerly supported government housing for the poor were ready to fill the towers with TNT and be done with them. In a survey conducted by the Defender, two-thirds of the respondents thought Cabrini-Green should be demolished. The city’s newspapers opened up hotlines for callers to suggest solutions. Vince Lane looked to expand an experiment along the lakefront on the South Side in which CHA towers had been rehabbed and filled with a fifty-fifty mix of public housing and market-rate units. “If we can take Cabrini and turn it around without wholesale displacement of the people who live there, I think that can be a blueprint for this whole country,” he announced. Gary Becker, the University of Chicago Nobel Prize–winning economist, suggested that Cabrini privatize, with the government selling the apartments to their current occupants. The CHA floated the idea of buying single-family homes in the suburbs and moving residents there.
Cabrini-Green did in fact need to be made safer and more livable, and maybe even replaced entirely with something better. But acting out of fear, spurred on by a moral panic, almost guaranteed that those who lived there would lose out with whatever succeeded it. Looking beyond the Dantrell Davis memorials to see the underlying problems that caused the current conditions in the city’s public housing—the segregated site placement and overabundance of children, the mismanagement and poor maintenance, the deficits and declining fortunes of cities, the loss of nearby jobs and the departure of working families, the gangs and drugs and the stigma—seeing any of that had become nearly impossible. Fewer and fewer Americans believed they had a collective responsibility to provide enough for those who had too little. Most serious debate about inner cities, social services, and housing subsidies gave way to tough talk of police, prisons, and demolition. The mayor of suburban Bolingbrook let it be known, just in case, that his village of forty thousand would be accepting zero families from Cabrini-Green. The December after Dantrell’s death, word spread at Schiller Elementary that there wouldn’t be enough donated Christmas gifts for all 325 eighth graders. In their desperation, some parents began to hoard the remaining presents. With the name Cabrini-Green attached, the “Grinch parents” became national news, a story of public housing dwellers so debased that they would steal Christmas itself. One of the television news anchors reported sorrowfully, “Not even the season of giving could protect the needy from the greedy at Cabrini-Green, one of the poorest and meanest of housing projects.”
SEVERAL MONTHS EARLIER, around Easter of that year, Marion Stamps awoke from a dream. The Cabrini-Green activist looked at the clock—4:00 a.m.—and then she began writing out the letter that had appeared to her in her sleep. She was not a churchly person; she didn’t spend her Sundays in the pews. Her profane outbursts could startle even the gang members she worked with. But she did consider herself spiritual. “The Lord was revealing to me what He wanted me to do,” she said of the dream. That entailed hosting a four-day feast for the Cabrini-Green community, a unity festival, breaking bread with the “street organizations,” which is how she referred to the gangs. The letter she copied out was a plea not just to them but also to everyone at Cabrini-Green. All bore some guilt for allowing the damage to their community, herself included, even if only by resigning themselves to the appalling normalcy of gun battles and the inevitability of their collateral damage. The letter addressed first the men: “You say you sell drugs because you can’t get a job. You brothe
rs will do anything but stand up and be the brave black men you were born to be.” Then she called out the women: “You should be sick and tired of being sick and tired. Sisters in the ghettoes, trenches, valleys, or whatever you want to call where you live and raise your children, get raped every day for real.” In a Cabrini-Green divided by gang boundaries, Stamps’s Tranquility-Marksman was directly across the street from the two Cobra Stones–controlled towers and alongside white high-rises overseen by the Gangster Disciples. She insisted that her community center be a safe haven, and she regarded herself as a leader of all Cabrini-Green, as well as someone who fought for the rights of poor black people throughout Chicago and the world. She signed the letter Queen Nzinga, after the seventeenth-century Angolan monarch who defeated the Portuguese in battle.
Stamps was forty-seven in 1992 and had lived in the area for almost thirty years. That August, a week after the murder of Laquanda Edwards, she joined Cabrini residents as they marched from their home to city hall. “The residents are entitled to protection and security as United States citizens,” a coalition of Cabrini-Green tenants wrote in a statement they delivered to the mayor’s office. The group pointed out that guns and drugs were transported easily through the development, that police didn’t patrol the buildings, and that vacant apartments and abandoned floors were never sealed off. “The citizens of Cabrini-Green have [exhausted] all options at their disposal regarding this frightening situation and have come to you for effective leadership and firm action.” In September, Stamps hosted her annual Labor Day block party in front of her center, an event that she held for twenty-two consecutive years. It included games for children, burgers, ice cream, and music. Stamps talked about her letter and the need for residents to take responsibility for ending the violence. At the fields across the street, the J. P. Morgan Ewes defeated the First Chicago Near North Kikuyus to win the Cabrini-Green Little League championship. Then, a month later, Dantrell Davis was killed.