High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  It was a tragedy that could hardly be called a surprise, and Stamps was less shocked than enraged. She was someone who normally used her tirades strategically; she fired off broadsides to disrupt meetings or attract the media or to announce that she would not be bullied, not by the Daleys or Charles Swibel or Jane Byrne or anyone. But there was nothing tactical in her fury now. She didn’t know Dantrell Davis, she’d never spoken to his mother, but his killing shattered her all the same. Weeping and cursing, she made her way across Division Street, over to 500 W. Oak. She needed to see the boy’s family, share in the heaviness of the loss. On her way there, she passed gang members outside their buildings, telling them she was serving notice. “Not another motherfucking baby is going to die,” she barked. “Since y’all can’t figure it out, I am.”

  “What, Marion Stamps? What?”

  “Enough is a motherfucking ’nough.” She sent word that she wanted to talk to the heads of the gangs. She told them to come to Tranquility.

  The next week, just after Mayor Daley declared war on the criminal element at Cabrini-Green, Stamps held a press conference of her own at a little Missionary Baptist church beside the Marshall Field Garden Apartments. Daley had an eleven-point Cabrini plan; she presented a fifteen-point peace plan for Cabrini. Rather than boarding up the high-rise where the rifle cartridge was found, she wanted the building repurposed to house an alternative high school, a library, a youth shelter, and a drug treatment facility. She demanded that empty apartments in other high-rises be repaired and that families who needed homes be moved into them. She asked that the local schools be fully staffed and the neighborhood stocked with a food co-op, a movie theater, a bowling alley, and an arcade. Most communities took these sorts of amenities for granted; at Cabrini-Green, their addition could mean the difference between life and death. Stamps pressed her first point most of all, calling on street organizations at Cabrini to “cease all negative activities . . . to declare a citywide truce, tell the black community you are sorry for all this pain and destruction you have caused us.” Months earlier in Los Angeles, after the riots following the verdicts in the Rodney King beating, warring gangs had honored a cease-fire. If the Bloods and Crips could pull it off in Watts and South Central, then why couldn’t guys from Cabrini-Green and all over Chicago do the same? Stamps was ready to ensure that a truce stuck: “Before I let anybody break the peace on this Near North Side, they’ll have to shoot me down like a dog in the street, ’cause I’m comin’ at ’em. I’m coming at them. You’re not going to do it.”

  When Wallace “Gator” Bradley heard about these calls for a cease-fire, he believed he was the one who could sell the idea on the streets. A South Sider who seldom traveled to Cabrini-Green, Gator knew of Marion Stamps through her activism and admired the way she refused to back down, especially to men. “She was like a present-day Harriet Tubman,” he would say. A former enforcer with the Gangster Disciples, Gator saw himself as a diplomat for peace as well. He’d grown up with Larry Hoover on the South Side, and they served time together at Stateville in the 1970s. After his release, Gator founded a public relations firm, LeGator Productions, and he worked as an aide to Cook County commissioner Jerry “the Iceman” Butler, the crooner from Cabrini-Green who’d gone into politics. In 1989, Illinois governor James Thompson, a Republican, granted Bradley a pardon, wiping clean his record, citing his work with children, and Gator ran for alderman of the ward that included the Robert Taylor Homes, losing in a runoff to the incumbent. He also continued to act as a spokesperson for Hoover, who was now leading the gang from a minimum-security prison six hours south of Chicago.

  In the summer of 1992, Gator was visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, when he experienced an epiphany. Staring at the Wailing Wall, thinking about the divisions between Jews and Arabs, those who identified with the six-point star and those who followed the star and crescent, Gator could suddenly see how little separated the black gangs back home. Whether you were Folks or People, you spoke the same language, shared the same culture, were descended from Africans and Southerners. Upon his return to Chicago, Gator started showing guys how the five-point star and the six-point star could be combined into a ten-point star by virtue of adding a single letter, the letter “L”, for Love. It was hokey, but people were killing one another over these minute distinctions. Gator needed to demonstrate that these symbols were arbitrary and mutable, that new collective identities could be formed this easily. He printed up white buttons with an image of two clasping hands surrounded by the logos of the city’s major black gangs and the words “United in Peace.”

  In response to Marion Stamps’s proclamation, Hoover decreed that there would be a truce. Shorty Freeman did the same, as did the heads of the other black gangs. In their different sections of the city, Gator and Stamps and others spread the news of the peace from street corner to street corner. Any rank-and-file member who didn’t honor it would be violated by his own crew. Someone who broke the treaty and was incarcerated would have to answer for his crimes behind the prison walls. Gator told young Gangster Disciples that he didn’t want them or their mothers coming to him after the fact, begging him for another chance; there would be nothing he could do for them.

  At the end of October, three weeks after Dantrell Davis’s killing, an actual treaty was signed at a ceremony held at Tranquility-Marksman. The leaders of each gang—every “nation”—showed up with an entourage of twenty or thirty people, filling the great hall in the back of the center. The gang chiefs brought along not only their generals but also their mothers and grandmothers, their wives, girlfriends, and children. Cousins who were in opposing gangs embraced for the first time in years. Al-Jami Mustafa, the leader of the Mickey Cobras, read from a five-page document, challenging those assembled to prove that they were descendants not of Al Capone but of great black kings. Although Stamps hosted the event, she spoke little that day. What she asked was that people think of Dantrell Davis and all the other children who’d lost their lives to the violence.

  At Cabrini-Green, no shootings occurred in November. Zero in December. Two days before Christmas, a nineteen-year-old walking with his girlfriend on Larrabee was jumped by five guys and beaten with bats. The crime was notable for being the first serious assault reported in two months. For eight months, Cabrini-Green saw just one shooting and no homicides. Citywide, the year-to-year homicides dipped slightly. The truce included only the black gangs, and it didn’t address intra-gang violence or incidents that had nothing to do with gangs. Police reported 570 major crimes, including two murders, at Cabrini-Green in 1993, compared with 717 major crimes and seven murders the previous year.

  Wanting credit for their work, Gator and others sought a meeting with the mayor, but Daley dismissed the treaty as a ruse: “They sell drugs. That’s not a gang truce. They sell weapons. They extort money from merchants. They threaten people. Forget about it.” Why, then, were there fewer murders at Cabrini-Green? Simply put, Daley said, “The heat was on.” The police had Cabrini on lockdown. In the Tribune, the columnist Mike Royko lampooned the idea that gangs should be commended, saying it had also been a long time since he’d shot anyone and there were no parades in his honor. “Gang leaders and their social activist mouthpieces apparently believe that because they haven’t killed each other for a month they deserve special recognition,” Royko wrote. “Most Chicagoans endure years, decades, entire lifetimes without shooting another human being. Imagine their frustration. . . . The average bungalow owner in this town never kills anybody.”

  Eric Davis, the police officer known as 21, said that publicly police officials couldn’t praise the gangs. But privately his superiors instructed him and James Martin, Officer Eddie Murphy, to keep the gang truce in place as long as possible. Children were jumping rope and riding bicycles in Cabrini-Green playgrounds. Students were walking to stores without scanning the upper floors of buildings for snipers. Davis and Martin helped start a baseball Little League, with teams from the different CHA housin
g projects competing against one another. No way that could have taken place before the treaty. Years later, after he’d retired from the police force, Davis would admonish himself for squandering an opportunity to change Cabrini-Green in a more lasting way. They could have used the relative calm as a lure to bring in employers, job training, drug programs, GED classes. “Was it a good try?” 21 said. “Yeah. But so what? We didn’t sustain it. Ultimately it failed.”

  Gator helped form a national peace movement, with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, and the head of the NAACP joining him and hundreds of other current and former gang members at summits across the country. They met in Kansas City, Cleveland, DC, Minneapolis, and back in Chicago, insisting that the country couldn’t arrest and imprison its way out of a crisis of youth violence. In January 1994, a day before Bill Clinton delivered his second State of the Union address, Gator Bradley and Jesse Jackson drove a white Cadillac to the White House to advise the president on the pressing issue of urban violence. It’s unclear what the president took away from the meeting. Later that same year, Clinton signed into law the most sweeping crime bill in the nation’s history, greatly accelerating what was already a twenty-year trend toward mass incarceration. The crime bill funded the construction of new prisons, enshrined a raft of additional mandatory minimum sentences, and eliminated many prison education programs.

  The following year, federal officers in Chicago charged thirty-nine members of the Gangster Disciples with conspiracy. Larry Hoover, charged as well after agents recorded him conducting business from prison, would be transferred to the supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, where he joined Jeff Fort; the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski; the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yusef; and a short list of other high-profile terrorists and organized crime bosses. All of those arrested in Chicago were reputed Disciples leaders, but with them gone the police didn’t so much rid the city of the gang as eliminate its top-down authority. Chicago gangs splintered into hundreds of cliques, smaller subgroups that warred with one another. At one of the national peace summits he led, Gator blessed the convocation, praying for the “nonviolent movement” to prosper before turning to the topic of his detractors. “Father, I ask of you that all those naysayers, all those agents provocateurs, all those who will stand in the way of this peace, I ask that you blind them, snap the limbs in their bodies, and wipe them from the face of the earth. Amen.”

  IN THE MONTHS and years that followed her son’s death, Annette Freeman alternated between thoughts of retaliation and of the stupefying fact that Danny was gone and she’d failed to protect him. She blamed everyone, though most of all herself. Why hadn’t she listened to him the night before when he talked about his fears of dying? Why hadn’t she eased up just that once and let him stay home from school? On the thirteenth of every month, she had a death wish. The only man she ever loved died September 13; then her son, the only child she ever had, died the same day a month later. She carried a gun with her, ready to shoot. She’d see a stranger and think, You want this? Let me show you how much hate and pain I got inside me. I can crush you.

  Burt Natarus, the alderman of the area that included Cabrini-Green, had clipped many of the newspaper stories about Dantrell Davis. He sent them in a carefully arranged packet to Annette: “I write to let you know that we, in government, have not or will we ever forget your son, Dantrell.” He helped pass a resolution in the city council to rename a stretch of Cleveland Avenue outside Jenner school, just feet from the shooting, Dantrell Davis Way. Annette didn’t know about the dedication ceremony. She heard about the street sign only after a friend saw it at Cabrini-Green and phoned her. She was later given a replica of the DANTRELL DAVIS WAY sign. But she stored it in a car she was living out of, and when the car was towed she lost it and her other belongings.

  People told Annette they would help her with a job, an apartment, a book about Dantrell’s life. She never saw any of it. And no one ever suggested counseling. No one helped cool her overheated mind. At one point she was arrested on a weapons charge and served a year in prison. She needed a gun, she felt, since no one else was out there protecting her. In prison, though, she was able to reflect on her purpose in life. She knew she could take the easy way out and become a drug addict, a killer, a prostitute. She could go and commit suicide because she’d lost everything. But she needed to represent her son in a better way. She didn’t want to bring down his name. She was the mother of Dantrell Davis. She would do better.

  Annette sometimes visited Danny’s street sign at Cabrini. She liked that sixty years from now or in a hundred and sixty years, no matter how much the neighborhood changed, someone walking over there would look up and say, “Hey, we’re on Dantrell Davis Way.” She came to believe that his death had happened for a reason. That was why he had smiled at her that morning and said he was doing something. Everything led up to that moment. He was sacrificing his life for others. A citywide truce lasted for two years. Many young people who might have been killed were spared. The gangs kept it going because of Danny. And if God gave His only begotten son, who was she to ask questions? That was her comfort. She had to look at it that way. He died to save others. Dantrell Davis changed Chicago forever.

  PART THREE

  ROTATIONS ON THE LAND

  12

  Cabrini Mustard and Turnip Greens

  DOLORES WILSON

  VINCE LANE SHOWED up at Dolores Wilson’s church in February 1993 to talk about the impending demolition at Cabrini-Green. He said change was coming—Dantrell Davis’s death, four months earlier, guaranteed it. High-rises were going to be torn down. Two of the twenty-three towers had already been cleared of tenants and boarded up. The world of gangs and drugs had to go. Forty residents had come to hear him at Holy Family, and Lane wanted them to understand that all the attention from Dantrell’s murder also meant there were tens of millions of federal dollars available to rebuild. Lane asked the tenants to partner with him in making the new Cabrini-Green. He promised that nothing would be done without their input and approval.

  To give a sense of what a revamped Cabrini might look like, Lane pointed to what he’d done at Lake Parc Place, a public housing development on the South Side. Four of the six high-rises along the lakefront were vacated and eventually demolished. In the two rehabbed towers, only half of the apartments were designated as public housing; the rest were rented at slightly subsidized rates to working-class and middle-class families. When the two fifteen-story buildings reopened, in 1991, all 282 apartments were filled, with public housing recipients and better-off renters living next to each other on every floor. The rehab resulted in a net loss of more than 550 units of public housing. But Lake Parc Place was now livable, Lane explained. You had people of varying incomes who wanted to live there. “High-rises weren’t the problem at Cabrini-Green,” he said. “Rich people all around them lived in high-rise apartment buildings. The problem was the high concentration of poverty.”

  Lane was a visionary. He could see where public housing policy in the country was headed. Only a couple of years earlier, Jack Kemp, the head of HUD under George H. W. Bush, said he refused to be remembered as the “secretary of demolition.” Kemp had founded the federal HOPE initiative not to tear down high-rises but to hand over responsibility for the properties to the people who lived there. HOPE stood originally for Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere. But over the next decades, HUD would award cities tens of billions of dollars in HOPE VI grants to knock down their public housing high-rises and replace them with mixed-income developments like Lake Parc Place. Demolition became something that local and federal politicians embraced proudly.

  While public housing was “never more than half alive,” as Catherine Bauer called it, the aversion to entitlement programs would come to root ever more deeply in the American mainstream. After winning a majority of seats in Congress in 1994, Republicans said they planned to scrap the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development. President Clinto
n, touting his cuts to the welfare system and proclaiming that “the era of big government is over,” preemptively reorganized HUD. He promised to “infuse market discipline” into public housing. A new law mandated that any large public housing development with a vacancy rate of over 10 percent undergo a test to determine whether a rehab made sense economically. Of the 100,000 units across the country that failed, a sixth of them were in Chicago, a total of 18,500 apartments, twice as many as in any other city. At Cabrini, only the rowhouses passed. Congress then voted to end the requirement that cities add a unit of public housing for every one torn down, ushering in the era of widespread demolition. By 1999, HUD would boast that HOPE VI had eliminated 50,000 units of public housing nationwide; a decade later, the number had doubled. Every city got in on the action: Philadelphia, Atlanta, Baltimore, Newark. But none would knock down as many as Chicago.

  Mixed-income developments like Lake Parc Place, with their blended populations and low densities, could house only a small percentage of those who had lived in the demolished public housing high-rises. But these new developments would also serve the purpose of clearing the slums—replacing the same public housing buildings that were used to clear the slums of a half century before. The majority of residents leaving public housing were given vouchers to find apartments on their own. The Section 8 program allowed cities to move away from building and operating actual public housing complexes; the government would instead pay private landlords to rent to qualifying families. By 2000, the CHA was calling itself a “facilitator of housing opportunities,” and its holdings would include 48,000 vouchers and half as many actual public housing units. The rents the government paid to Section 8 landlords in Chicago were based on an average of the city as a whole—meaning too little for a home in a diverse neighborhood with strong schools and low crime, but, it turned out, somewhat more than the asking price of a place in an overwhelmingly black and poor neighborhood. Landlords in these areas saw a profit in a guaranteed government check, and so the solution for high-rise public housing would also re-create some of its same mistakes. Many of the families relocated with vouchers ended up in areas almost as uniformly black and poor as the government housing they left.