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What is 'coming out'?

Telling people about your sexual orientation or gender identity is called coming out. Coming out is not necessarily a one-off event - lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) people may have to come out many times during their lives. It's also very individual and people may face different challenges when coming out.

There is no one prescribed way to come out. You may feel comfortable being open about your sexual orientation and gender identity with some people, but not with others. Coming out may be difficult and takes courage. Reactions to someone coming out can range from very positive to less welcoming. Once you have made the decision to tell people, you may want to think about how you tell them. We have set out a few thoughts on coming out, and links to where you can find further advice and support.

Why come out?

Whether you've come to terms with your sexual orientation or gender identity, or you're still thinking about it, it can be difficult dealing with that on your own. You may get to a point where you need to talk about it with someone, to get support or simply get it off your chest. To hide who you are from other people often means lying and pretending. You'll need to think about whether hiding is more or less stressful than being open about it.

Don't feel under pressure to come out - take your time. Only you will know when you feel comfortable and ready to do it.

If you decide to come out, but are unsure how others might react, you could consider making contact with a support group first. There are helplines, community groups and agencies across the country who are there to support and advise you.

What will my friends say?

Most people worry about how their friends will react when they come out. Your friends might be surprised, have lots of questions, not know what to say or may have even guessed already. At first, choose a friend you trust and who you think will be supportive. Think about how you'll answer some of the things they might ask like, 'how do you know?'.

If a friend reacts badly, remember they might just need some time to absorb what you've told them. Although you can't predict what people will say or do, when you tell a close friend that you trust, the chances are they'll be pleased you've shared something so personal with them.

How do I tell my family?

There's no right or wrong way or time to come our to your family. However, it's a good idea to take time to think about what you want to say. Coming out when you're arguing or angry isn't a good idea. Some people tell their family face to face while others prefer to write a letter or send an email. Your family might be shocked, worried or find it difficult to accept at first. Remember, their first reaction isn't necessarily how they'll feel forever, they might just need a bit of time to process what you've told them.

Coming out at work

Stonewall knows that people perform better when they can be themselves. This means it's is in your employer's best interest to support you to be open and honest about who you are when at work. Some employers have LGBT staff networks which you can join for support and to meet other people.

The Equality Act 2010 bans discrimination and harrassment on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender reassignment (gender identity) in employment and vocational training. This includes direct and indirect discrimination, harassment and victimisation, and you are protected throughout the entire employment relationship, from recruitment to dismissal. Discrimination applies to terms and conditions, pay, promotions, transfers, training and dismissal. You can read more about these protections on our information pages under Discrimination At Work .

Stonewall works with employers across England, Scotland and Wales through its Diversity Champions programme. This is Britain's leading best-practice employers' forum for sexual orientation and gender identity equality, diversity and inclusion. You can see who is a member of this programme, and explore our Top 100 Employers for LGBT people 2018.

Other useful sources of support

You can find LGBT-friendly solicitors and other useful contacts through Stonewall's online database What's In My Area.

For further information contact Stonewall's Information Service.

Text PRIDE to 70003 to donate £3

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What is 'coming out'? Telling people about your sexual orientation or gender identity is called coming out. Coming out is not necessarily a one-off event - lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) people may have to come out many times during their lives. It's also very individual and people...

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Coming out is when a person decides to reveal an important part of who they are with someone in their life. For many LGBTQ people, this involves sharing their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.

Coming out isn't always easy. After thinking it through, you may decide not to come out. You are valid and deserve support no matter who you do or do not share your identities with. Remember, there isn't one right way to come out, and it's YOUR choice.

The Trevor Project's Coming Out: A Handbook for LGBTQ Young People, is a resource that covers a wide range of topics to support LGBTQ young people in exploring what coming out safely can mean for them. The handbook includes:

Basics of gender: gender identity, gender expression, and transitioning

Basics of sexual orientation: physical attraction, romantic attraction, and emotional attraction

Coming out: planning ahead, testing the waters, environment, support systems, and safety

Healthy relationships, self-care, mental health, and warning signs of negative mental health outcomes such as seriously considering suicide

Young people in search of support in their identities can contact The Trevor Project's TrevorLifeline 24/7 at 1-866-488-7386. Counseling is also available 24/7 via chat every day at TheTrevorProject.org/Help, or by texting START to 678-678.

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Coming out is when a person decides to reveal an important part of who they are with someone in their life. For many LGBTQ people, this involves sharing their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Coming out isn't always easy. After thinking it through, you may decide not to come out.

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Dynasties in sports are rare because competition at the highest level is so incredibly tough. It's what makes teams like the New England Patriots of the past two decades stand out.

And the 1990s Bulls, led by Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson are arguably the best.

They won six championships in eight years, a pair of three-peats. Had Michael Jordan not retired, it could've been eight straight. Or if the Bulls stayed together after 1998, they could've added another one in a lockout shortened 1998-99 season.

But alas, those Bulls teams were remarkable.

Click here to download the new MyTeams App by NBC Sports! Receive comprehensive coverage of your teams and stream the Bulls easily on your device.

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6 facts about the '90s Bulls dynasty with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen

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Dynasties in sports are rare because competition at the highest level is so incredibly tough. It's what makes teams like the New England Patriots of the past two decades stand out. And the 1990s Bulls, led by Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson are arguably the best.

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The greatest decade in Bulls franchise history began with a headache.

It came to an end perhaps with some head scratching. But if you give it some thought, it ranks as perhaps the second greatest era in NBA history behind the Boston Celtics nine titles in 11 seasons.

And it probably was all worth it the way it left the Detroit Pistons and the rest of the NBA in pain over the torment of watching the Bulls dominate sports arguably worldwide to become one of the great teams of all time.

It was Scottie Pippen's famous migraine headache in Game 7 of the 1990 Eastern Conference finals that many believed might be the enduring photograph of franchise misery, Pippen in excruciating pain before the game, a towel draped over his head and rival Pistons players mocking him and the Bulls.

It could have been an end, but it was a beginning even with the desperate loss to the eventual champion Pistons.

After that game, Michael Jordan was as committed and determined as he was during any fourth quarter of his career. Jordan generally displayed some acceptance after previous Bulls playoff disappointments. He'd say the team had progressed from the previous season, which they basically always did, going farther in each playoffs. It was progress. But Jordan sensed previously the Bulls were not more talented, as difficult as it was for him to admit.

This time he would not accept that.

The Bulls had won their three home games against the Pistons in that 1990 conference finals, the last one by 18 points. Each time, the Bulls scored more than 100 points. Phil Jackson had counseled that was the Bulls formula: Get the score over 100 and the Bulls would win because their athletic talent was superior. That Game 7 would be Pistons 93-74.

Jordan was fuming afterward, telling every player never again; never again would they lose like this, and lose to the Pistons. It was Jordan's strongest message and met willingly. Instead of scattering for the summer, as usual, almost every player was back in the Multiplex training facility within days working toward the 1990-91 season.

So take a journey with me of my recollections of the 90s and those great Bulls seasons.

That 1990-91 season was all about beating the Pistons. Really, hardly anyone was talking title. The unofficial formula for ultimate success in the NBA was get to the Finals, lose-thus learn like the Pistons did, the 76ers-and now it was the Trailblazers turn. And when Portland started the 1990-91 season at 19-1, it made sense. This would be Portland's turn and maybe the Bulls after that.

The Bulls had a huge setback in December, losing badly in Detroit. Jackson afterward said this group might not be good enough. The talk was if they didn't make it this season it was time to start again, perhaps make those trades Jordan was suggesting of Pippen and Grant. Though Isiah Thomas was out injured, the key game of that season was just before the All-Star break in Auburn Hills. The Bulls won with B.J. Armstrong making big shots down the stretch. Though Thomas was injured and didn't play, the players felt it was a turning point to win in Auburn Hills. The Pistons scoffed at it and would win in Auburn Hills later that season. But the Bulls would with the two playoff wins there, win 10 of the next 12 games in Detroit. The Evil Empire would be no more. The wicked witch was dead.

The Bulls would sweep the Knicks to open the 1991 playoffs, creating the opening for Pat Riley to become coach. Then it would be 4-1 over the 76ers and Charles Barkley and then the sweep of the Pistons. After three quarters in Game 1 of the conference finals, the Bulls barely led. It was time for Jordan's break. A group of Bulls reserves regained almost a double digit lead; Jordan came back to finish it and the phrase, "My supporting cast" was born.

The Bulls went to Detroit for Game 3, got their score over 100 points and the Pistons were done. On the off day leading 3-0, Jordan let it all out, telling media the Pistons were undeserving champions because of their cheap shot, dirty tactics and an embarrassment to basketball. Not so politically correct. The Pistons heard about it the next day in the newspapers, which was how things worked then, and decided to sort of boycott the ending. They did their famous walk off with about seven seconds left, essentially validating Jordan's view.

Suddenly the Bulls were in the Finals, and the Lakers and Magic Johnson were there after a surprise win over Portland. "If we're going," Jordan declared, "we may as well win," Really, there was little title talk until then.

The Bulls lost Game 1 at home when Sam Perkins forgot he was supposed to try a two to tie and made a three to win. The Bulls then dominated the Lakers in Game 2 and with the game long decided, Jordan made his famous switch hand layup that is much shown in clips. Jordan pulled out Game 3, the pivotal game many Bulls felt they needed to win to get the series, by going full court in the last seconds to tie the game with a jumper. And then the Bulls won in overtime as John Paxson hardly missed anything. Jackson had Pippen and Jordan harassing Magic Johnson out of the backcourt-hello, anyone, that's how you play the Warriors this season-and the Bulls blew out the Lakers in Game 4. One game away from the Bulls' first title.

The Lakers held on until late in Game 5 when Jackson famously demanded of Jordan, "Who's open?"

Paxson.

Five Paxson baskets later the Bulls were dancing, Jordan and his dad were crying and a dynasty was emerging.

The defending championship season started amidst controversy, Jordan skipping the traditional White House visit (the Bulls only went two of six times) in what later was disclosed to be a gambling weekend. There was my "Jordan Rules" book and cries it was the end. So the Bulls went on to win 67 games in one of the most dominant seasons in NBA history. They won 14 straight almost to start the season and were 36-5 at home.

The Pistons were dead and the Cavaliers, a lesser version with Ron Harper gone, were closest, 10 games behind and little true threat. The Bulls were at least 10 games ahead of everyone in the league.

But after a routine first round sweep over Miami, the Bulls faced only their second seven-game playoff series in their title years.

Riley had built a team of borderline thugs with John Starks, Anthony Mason and Xavier McDaniel to beat them up if you didn't have the talent to beat them. McDaniel famously brutalized Pippen until Jordan literally challenged McDaniel to a fight during one of the games. The Knicks surprised the Bulls in winning the opener in Chicago, and the Bulls were fighting up hill the rest of the way, then facing Game 7 at home. A one year fluke?

Jordan's father, James, counseled a frustrated Jordan before the game to be aggressive. Jordan usually came on strong later in games, preferring to watch how opponents were playing him early to develop his response. This time it was scoring from the start with Jordan scoring 42 points and 12 of 13 at the free throw line and the Knicks basically never having a chance.

The Bulls then took out an overmatched Cavs team in six and Jordan opened the Finals with his famous shrug making six three pointers. It was also the message to Trailblazers star Clyde Drexler, whom many in Portland were insisting should be the league MVP. Jordan's Game 1 dominance made Drexler a mental wreck much of the series. Still, the Bulls were facing another seventh game back home with Portland leading by 15 entering the fourth quarter of Game 6. Reserve Bobby Hansen made the shot of his life to get the Bulls going on a run, pressure burst the fragile 'Blazers' ballhandlers and the Bulls pulled away for the back to back title.

It would be the first title win back in Chicago and such an intense and raucous celebration that it shut down North Michigan Avenue for hours after the game and caused enough destruction that city officials begged for civility the next year during the Finals when the Bulls at home had a 3-1 series lead over the Phoenix Suns.

It would be a lot more difficult in 1992-93 after Jordan and Pippen came back from the exalted Dream Team experience. Riley had ramped up those Knicks even more, and they got playoff home court advantage with a better regular season record. The Bulls won 57 games, three behind the Knicks, setting up the much anticipated hostilities.

The Bulls cruised through the first two rounds with sweeps, Jordan finally ending the Cavs' run with a game winning buzzer beater in the Game 4 sweep game. Then came the Knicks.

The Knicks won the first two, Starks punctuating the Game 2 win with a dunk over Jordan. The New York Times also became breathless and hysterical, reporting Jordan had gone to Atlantic City to gamble between Games 1 and 2, suggesting it cost the Bulls Game 2. Jordan was furious and engaged in a media boycott as the Knicks committed the ultimate mistake. They said they only needed to win one. They were talking like losers. Riley was furious. The Bulls swept the two games, and then it was back to New York for the infamous Game 5. It looked like the Knicks would close it, but Jordan, Pippen and Horace Grant denied Charles Smith at the rim of what could have been the game winner. The Bulls prevailed and went home and knocked the Knicks out easily in Game 6.

Then it was on to Phoenix, where Barkley's addition enabled the Suns to win a league best 62 games. But Jordan, freed from the evil physical East play, had one of the great Finals in history, averaging 41 points, 8.5 rebounds and 6.3 assists in 46 minutes per game and even shooting 40 percent on threes. The Bulls won the first two in Phoenix, lost a ridiculous triple overtime in Chicago, then made it 3-1. The Suns players, finally relaxing, joked they needed to save the city after all the public service announcement about not rioting after the win. The Suns won by 10 in what would be Jordan's final game in the Chicago Stadium.

But Jordan never doubted.

As he walked onto the bus for the trip to the airport and back to Phoenix, smoking a cigar he famously greeted his teammates, "Hello, World Champions."

Though it would take a Paxson three pointer for the win and Grant's saving block in the last seconds to preserve the 99-98 threepeat.

Then came the shock of the decade, first the murder of Jordan's father and then Jordan announcing in October that he would retire from basketball. Jordan would enhance the bombshell by further deciding to take up professional baseball and play for the Chicago White Sox double A minor league team in Alabama.

The Bulls would have a surprising and amazingly good season with Pippen at his best, first MVP of the All-Star game and a 55-win season without Jordan, just two fewer than the previous season. It was the most remarkable followup season to a star's departure.

But after-yet again-knocking out the Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs, the Bulls endured what many consider one of the greatest officiating gaffes ever as Pippen after the shot went was called for a foul on a Hubert Davis miss that should have ended Game 5 with a Bulls win and 3-2 series lead. The Bulls would return home to win Game 6, but lose down the stretch in Game 7 of the conference semifinals. The Knicks would go on to get to the Finals after defeating an Indiana team against whom the Bulls were 4-1 that season. It has long been argued that one call perhaps prevented the greatest ever followup to a franchise personnel departure.

But with Jordan still pursuing baseball, the 1994-95 season didn't go as well. Horace Grant left as a free agent for what many believed would be the next dynasty in Orlando with Shaquille O'Neal and Penny Hardaway.

The Bulls were bumping along barely above .500 when the baseball lockout/strike prevented Jordan from being involved with the major league team in spring training. He left and soon returned with the most famous two words in NBA history, "I'm back!"

Jordan's return to the NBA March 19 in Indiana was one of the biggest stories in the world. The Bulls would go on to close the season winning 13 of 17 with Jordan putting up his famous double nickel 55 points in Madison Square Garden.

After a first round series win over Charlotte, the Bulls fell in six to Orlando. Though not before Jordan went back to his old uniform No. 23 from No. 45 after Nick Anderson chided that 45 wasn't as good as 23.

The Bulls needed a power forward and Jordan needed a break.

They got it in historic fashion as Jordan made the Space Jam movie and played basketball every day on the movie lot and the Bulls signed the controversial Dennis Rodman, whose presence with Jordan, Pippen, Jackson and the Bulls produced the most famous, notorious and successful basketball team in history.

The 1995-96 Bulls were 72-10 with a domination virtually unheard of in pro sports. They won virtually every major award after a 41-3 start and even more so with Rodman's antics, changing hair colors and his band of misfits along for the ride that created one of the most unusual cultural oddities ever in sports.

The Bulls went on to streak through the playoffs 11-1 in the first three rounds, sweeping the Magic in the conference finals and breaking up the Magic and chasing O'Neal out of the conference and to the Lakers. The Bulls then won the first three games in the Finals for a 14-1 start before relaxing with two off days, losing two and then wrapping up the fourth title back in Chicago.

It became just get me to Grant Park in 1996-97 as the opposition melted away. Miami won 61 games and wasn't even considered a serious threat. Little discussed about that Bulls season was they simply got tired of dominating the regular season. They started out 12-0 and this time were 42-5 as the race was pretty much over by then. They easily had back to back 70s when they pulled up, losing three of the last four games to finish with 69 wins to tie for the second best season of all time.

Then it was mostly another romp through the playoffs, this time 11-2 going into the Finals and winning the first two, as Jordan began it by showing up the latest MVP contender, Karl Malone. Rodman insulted Mormons for a while and then Jordan willed himself through the flu/food poisoning in the famous Game 5 before the Bulls again closed it out back home.

Then Jackson labeled the 1997-98 season, "The Last Dance," as all good and even great things must come to an end. Jackson said he wouldn't agree to another contract whether the Bulls won a title or not. Jordan said he wouldn't play again for another coach and Pippen said he would sign elsewhere as a free agent even if Jackson and Jordan returned. Welcome to the good feelings for another threepeat.

Yet, they would impress in an uneven season that still netted 62 wins. Pippen missed the first half with injury and the Jazz had the tiebreaker for Finals home court, which only set the stage even better for Jordan's posed winner in Game 6, the ultimate farewell to the ultimate career before a shocked Salt Lake City home crowd. Those Eastern Conference finals against Larry Bird's Pacers with Reggie Miller went to a seventh game and to this day Bird still talks about a jump ball lost with five minutes to go he believes changed the outcome and prevented the Pacers from pulling the upset. So the Bulls had six titles in eight seasons and it was over.

The 1998-99 season would not begin until February after a labor dispute and the Bulls would not be back in the playoffs for seven years. Jordan did retire, though we know briefly again for a lamentable return in Washington. The Bulls had a new coach in Tim Floyd. They got through the 50-game season with 13 wins and several holdovers, headlined by Toni Kukoc, soon to be cashed in for yet more draft picks and free agent Brent Barry here and gone.

Things looked bright for the new millennium with the lottery balls coming up for the Bulls and the No. 1 pick in the 1999 draft. The decade of good feelings was done. It was a sweet memory and not soon to be repeated.

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1990s and the Chicago Bulls | Chicago Bulls

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The greatest decade in Bulls franchise history began with a headache. It came to an end perhaps with some head scratching. But if you give it some thought, it ranks as perhaps the second greatest era in NBA history behind the Boston Celtics nine titles in 11 seasons.

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Are the 1990s Chicago Bulls the greatest NBA dynasty of all time? | The Jump

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama presidency's impact on Trump's election

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Barack Obama at a campaign stop in 2007. AP Photo/Nati Harnik

The relationship between black presidential candidates and potential voters is more complex than it is for their white opponents. My research on historic "firsts" shows that white voters tend to ascribe characteristics to black candidates that place them at a disadvantage.

That's why Barack Obama's presidency became synonymous with an end goal of the civil rights movement and a source of pride for so many Americans. His campaign experience, like that of predecessors Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson, suggests something about the extent to which African-Americans have gained acceptance as legitimate political actors.

Obama more easily mobilized white voters because he was less interested in challenging "the system," and more ideologically liberal than his predecessors. He also adapted to the political environment, recognizing key voting constituencies. Obama pulled together the type of coalition that Chisholm and Jackson had aspired to lead, composed of college students, hard-core progressives, organized labor and independents.

His candidacy and victory continue to be celebrated as historic achievements to this day.

Undeniably black

Presidential campaigns launched by Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and Jesse Jackson in 1984 were aimed at forging interracial alliances. However, each of these candidates failed to build a coalition of historically marginalized groups. Instead, their rhetoric primarily appealed to African-American voters in locales where they comprised a majority, or near majority, of the population.

As a result, they drew limited support from white voters. For example, by large margins, white voters viewed Jackson as less knowledgeable, less fair, less likely to care about people like them and more prejudiced than his white opponents Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

Like Chisholm and Jackson, Obama's candidacy in 2008 aroused fears, resentments and prejudices.

He was falsely accused of being a Muslim. Stereotypes were reinvented and popular images reanimated and parodied in blogs, email, tweets and other social media outlets. T-shirts were printed with an image of Curious George, a monkey from a well-known children's book, inscribed with the words "Obama '08," comparing African-Americans to apes.

The Tea Party Movement, a conservative wing of the Republican Party, also orchestrated a number of attacks on Obama's patriotism, religious beliefs and citizenship status through protest rallies and social media. Obama's racial iden tity and other personal traits remained a matter of public debate long after the general election.

Like his predecessors, Obama was perceived as lacking leadership experience. He was viewed as less competent, less knowledgeable of foreign affairs and more concerned with racial issues like affirmative action and immigration reform.

Because he was undeniably black, he was seen as an "authentic" representative of the African-American electorate, not the entire American electorate. His campaign had to overcome this notion.

Overcoming race

Obama employed a race-neutral approach during his first presidential campaign. In his hallmark speech at the 2004 DNC he said:

"There's not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America, there is the United States of America."

His rhetoric aimed to satisfy diverse constituents across racial and ethnic groups. Obama used universal, color-blind language that appealed to most Americans.

He focused on quality-of-life issues, such as universal health care, equal educational opportunities and full employment for the lower and middle classes. Doing so increased the likelihood that more Americans would support his campaign. He was less interested in race-specific overtures that directly appealed to African-American voters. As I argue in my book, "Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics," Obama unified liberal white voters.

Still, pundits pondered whether a black man, elected by a white majority with support of African-American voters, represented a psychological, but not necessarily a substantive, triumph over race.

His predecessors Chisholm and Jackson had heavily relied on racial bloc voting and the stylistic influence of a Black Power tradition - "speaking truth to power," dramatic confrontation and public spectacle - for electoral success. Obama was a successful candidate because he was neither righteous nor indignant. He ran a campaign that was racially and culturally inclusive.

Today, there is little question as to whether a black male politician at the top of a major party's presidential ticket can transform beliefs about African-American men in politics. The outcome of the 2008 American presidential election shows that the majority of American voters are willing to vote for a black Democratic presidential candidate.

However, it is a certain type of black presidential candidate who will find it easier, and others more difficult, to gain white support.

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How Obama's presidential campaign changed how Americans view black candidates

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The relationship between black presidential candidates and potential voters is more complex than it is for their white opponents. My research on historic "firsts" shows that white voters tend to ascribe characteristics to black candidates that place them at a disadvantage.

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From the moment Barack Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, and every day thereafter, his team was always preparing for the 2012 campaign. Everyone said Obama's 2008 operation had rewritten the book on organizing. But that was just a beginning, a small first step toward what the team envisioned when it began planning the reelection campaign.

In one of their first conversations about 2012, campaign manager Jim Messina said he told the president that they could not rerun 2008. Obama seemed puzzled. "You know we won that one," Obama said. Messina said too much had changed. For one thing, Obama was now an incumbent with a record. But technology had also leapfrogged forward, with new devices, new platforms and vastly more opportunities to exploit social media. The whole campaign would have to be different.

The president sent the team off to Chicago, far away from the hothouse of Washington and Beltway chatter, to use 2011 to build the foundation and reassemble the army from 2008. As the Republican candidates were gearing up and then battling one another through the summer and fall of 2011, the Obama team was investing enormous amounts of time, money and creative energy in what resembled a high-tech political start-up whose main purpose was to put more people on the streets, armed with more information about the voters they were contacting, than any campaign had ever attempted.

The Obama team had to be better in 2012. The weak economy made the president vulnerable to defeat. His political advisers knew well that turning out the vote would be far more challenging in the reelection effort than it had been in 2008. Many of his early supporters were disappointed and some were outright frustrated with Obama's performance in office. The advisers recognized that Republicans were trying to block his agenda by questioning whether he had the leadership skills or the tenacity to get done what his first campaign had promised. Obama advisers also knew this campaign would have to be far more negative than the first - with few of the aspirational themes of 2008 - and they began preparing to attack Mitt Romney, the presumed challenger, long before the Republican primaries and caucuses began.

One of the hallmarks of Obama's 2012 campaign was its prodigious appetite for research. The trio at the top - Messina, senior strategist David Axelrod and White House senior adviser David Plouffe - were enthusiastic consumers of research. Though different in their approaches to politics - Axelrod operated intuitively, Plouffe's watchwords were "Prove it" and Messina wanted to be able to measure everything - they all pushed the campaign for more research, testing, analysis and innovation.

Message and media operated on one track. The other track focused on identifying, registering, mobilizing and ultimately turning out Obama voters. At the Chicago headquarters, these efforts were guided by Messina and Jen O'Malley Dillon, the deputy campaign manager, along with a sizable team of political organizers and tech-savvy newcomers.

"There's always been two campaigns since the Internet was invented, the campaign online and the campaign on the doors. What I wanted was, I didn't care where you organized, what time you organized, how you organized, as long as I could track it, I can measure it, and I can encourage you to do more of it."
Jim Messina, President Obama's 2012 campaign manager

The first steps toward building the reelection operation around a single target - maximizing turnout to reach 270 electoral votes - were taken in the months after Obama's 2008 victory. Campaign staffers compiled a series of after-action reports. "We did a very detailed postmortem where we looked at all kinds of numbers, looking at the general stuff like the number of door knocks we made, phone calls we made, number of voters that we registered," said Mitch Stewart, who would direct the campaign's 2012 effort in battleground states. "But then we broke it down by field organizer, we broke it down then by volunteer. We looked at the best way or the best examples in states of what their volunteer organization looked like."

The project produced a three-ring binder that contained nearly 500 pages and was filled with recommendations on how to strengthen what was already considered a state-of-the-art field operation. Another early step was the decision to massively expand the investment in technology, digital, cable, new media and particularly analytics.

The Obama campaign had the usual contingent of pollsters and ad makers and opposition researchers and, like all campaigns today, a digital director. But it also had a chief technology officer (who had never done politics before), a chief innovation officer and a director of analytics, which would become one of the most important additions and a likely fixture in campaigns of the future. The team hired software engineers and data experts and number-crunchers and digital designers and video producers by the score. They filled the back of a vast room resembling a brokerage house trading floor or tech start-up that occupied the sixth floor of One Prudential Plaza overlooking Millennium Park in Chicago.

No campaign had ever invested so heavily in technology and analytics, and no campaign had ever had such stated ambitions. "Technology was another big lesson learned from 2008, leap of faith and labor of love and angst-ridden entity and all the other things that you can imagine, because we were building things in-house mostly with people that had not done campaign work before," Dillon later told me. "The deadlines and breaking and testing - is it going to work, what do we do? . . . At the end of the day, it was certainly worth it, because you can't customize our stuff, and so we just couldn't buy off the shelf for anything and you know that, and fortunately we had enough time to kind of build the stuff. I don't know who else will ever have the luxury of doing that again."

Messina was as data driven as any presidential campaign manager in modern times, and Dillon had concentrated her efforts while at the Democratic National Committee in 2009 and 2010 on the programs that would make Obama's groundbreaking 2008 campaign look old-fashioned in comparison. They wanted all the data the campaign accumulated about voters to be integrated. The campaign had a voter list and a donor list and volunteer lists and other lists, but what it wanted was the ability to link all the contacts each person had with the operation into one database.

"There's always been two campaigns since the Internet was invented, the campaign online and the campaign on the doors," Messina told me. "What I wanted was, I didn't care where you organized, what time you organized, how you organized, as long as I could track it, I can measure it, and I can encourage you to do more of it." It took the technology team nearly a year, but it produced software that allowed all of the campaign's lists to talk to one another. The team named it Narwhal, after a whale of amazing strength that lives in the Arctic but is rarely seen. Harper Reed, the chief technology officer, described it as the software platform for everything else the campaign wanted to do and build.

The next goal was to create a program that would allow everyone - campaign staffers in Chicago, state directors and their staff in the battlegrounds, field organizers, volunteers going door to door and volunteers at home - to communicate simply and seamlessly. The Obama team wanted something that allowed the field organizers in the Des Moines or Columbus or Fairfax offices to have access to all the campaign's information about the voters for whom they were responsible. They wanted volunteer leaders to have online access as well. That brought about the creation of Dashboard, which Messina later said was the hardest thing the campaign did but which became the central online organizing vehicle. It was enormously complicated to develop, made all the more difficult because the engineers who were building it had never worked on a campaign and did not instinctively understand the work of field organizers. Some of them were sent out to the states briefly as organizers to better understand the needs of those on the front lines.

"Dashboard is what we needed to communicate," Dillon said. "It was all about the users, so if the users didn't have a good experience, there was no point in it. . . . That's why it was the Holy Grail."

Reed described it as a way to bring the field office to the Internet. "When you walk into a field office, you have many opportunities," he said. "We'll hand you a call sheet. You can make calls. You can knock on doors, and they'll have these stacks there for you. They'll say: 'Harper, you've knocked on 50 doors. That's great. Here's how you compare to the rest of them.' But it's all very offline. It's all very ad hoc, and it's not very modern. And so what we set out to do was create that offline field experience online."

Reed said that near the end of the campaign they received an e-mail from a wounded Afghanistan war veteran who was in a hospital. He was logging into Dashboard and participating in the organizing effort the way any other volunteer walking precincts was doing. Reed was astonished by the message. He said, "I could have quit that day, and I would have been satisfied with my role."

The Obama leaders not only wanted all the lists to be able to talk to one another, they also wanted people to be able to organize their friends and family members. This was taking a concept introduced in 2004 by George W. Bush's reelection team - the notion that voters are more likely to listen to people they know than to paid callers or strangers knocking on their door - and updating it to take advantage of new technology, namely the explosion of social media.

Early in 2011, some Obama operatives visited Facebook, where executives were encouraging them to spend some of the campaign's advertising money with the company. "We started saying, 'Okay, that's nice if we just advertise,' " Messina said. "But what if we could build a piece of software that tracked all this and allowed you to match your friends on Facebook with our lists, and we said to you, 'Okay, so-and-so is a friend of yours, we think he's unregistered, why don't you go get him to register?' Or 'So-and-so is a friend of yours, we think he's undecided. Why don't you get him to be decided?' And we only gave you a discrete number of friends. That turned out to be millions of dollars and a year of our lives. It was incredibly complex to do."

But this third piece of the puzzle provided the campaign with another treasure trove of information and an organizing tool unlike anything available in the past. It took months and months to solve, but it was a huge breakthrough. If a person signed on to Dashboard through his or her Facebook account, the campaign could, with permission, gain access to that person's Facebook friends. The Obama team called this "targeted sharing." It knew from other research that people who pay less attention to politics are more likely to listen to a message from a friend than from someone in the campaign. The team could supply people with information about their friends based on data it had independently gathered. The campaign knew who was and who wasn't registered to vote. It knew who had a low propensity to vote. It knew who was solid for Obama and who needed more persuasion - and a gentle or not-so-gentle nudge to vote. Instead of asking someone to send a message to all of his or her Facebook friends, the campaign could present a handpicked list of the three or four or five people it believed would most benefit from personal encouragement.

Digital director Teddy Goff told my colleague Aaron Blake, "For people who allowed us, we were able to say to them: 'All right, you just watched a video about registering to vote. Don't just share it with all your friends on Facebook. We've run a match, and here are your 10 friends on Facebook who we think may not be registered to vote and live in Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, Florida.' " This was especially helpful in trying to reach voters under age 30. On Obama's target lists, the voter file contained no good contact information for half of those young voters - they didn't have land lines, and no other information was available. But Goff said 85 percent of that group were on Facebook and could be reached by a friend of a friend. Reed described another example. Someone interested in health care might click on an ad on Facebook, and up would pop an infographic about health care. At the end of it would be a "share" button, and if the person clicked on it, names of friends the person could share the information with would appear. The campaign knew from its own database which of those friends were most likely to respond to information about health care. "We went through and we looked at all those friends and found the ones that were the best matches for that specific piece of content," Reed said.

Google's Eric Schmidt, who offered advice to the campaign, said: "If you don't know anything about campaigns you would assume it's national, but a successful campaign is highly, highly local, down to the Zip code. The revolution in technology is to understand where the undecideds are in this district and how you reach them." That was what the integration of technology and old-fashioned organizing was designed to do for Obama in 2012.

Dan Wagner had come to the DNC after the 2008 election to expand what was initially a tiny analytics operation. In early 2010, others on the Obama team had an epiphany about the value of analytics. It came just before the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy in Massachusetts. Many Democrats were still in denial about the direction of the race, incredulous that a little-known Republican state senator named Scott Brown could have enough momentum to defeat Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley. Wagner, who was operating with the analytics team out of the DNC, analyzed the numbers and surmised that Brown would win. He delivered his conclusions and the data to Messina. "He said, 'We're going to lose, and here's why we're going to lose,' and it happened almost exactly like that," Messina said. "That's when we first started saying this modeling can really be something."

Dillon and national field director Jeremy Bird brought Wagner to the reelection campaign. Eventually the team modeled practically everything - voters, states, volunteers, donors, anything it could think of to improve efficiency - to give it greater confidence in its decision making. It wanted to know who was most likely to serve as a volunteer, and it created a model to find out. The campaign established record numbers of offices in the states, and record numbers of staging areas for volunteers, based in part on analysis of how much more likely people were to volunteer if they were close to an office. "We built a model on volunteer likelihood," Stewart said. "We built a model on turnout, we built a model on support, we built a model on persuasion - who's most persuadable."

From modeling and testing, the campaign refined voter outreach. Virtually every e-mail it sent included a test of some sort - the subject line, the appeal, the message - designed to maximize contributions, volunteer hours and eventually turnout on Election Day. The campaign would break out 18 smaller groups from e-mail lists, create 18 versions of an e-mail, and then watch the response rate for an hour and go with the winner - or take a combination of subject line and message from different e-mails and turn them into the finished product. Big corporations had used such testing for years, but political campaigns had not.

The team's attention to detail rivaled that of the most successful corporations. One innovation was the recruitment of corporate trainers or coaches, who volunteered to help teach everyone how to manage. "We recruited a whole group of pro bono executive coaches," Bird said. "These are people that coach Fortune 100 companies." Obama's team recruited them as volunteers, but instead of having them knock on doors, they were asked to provide management training. "We had them partner up with our state leadership," Bird said. "They didn't need to know anything about campaigns, because we didn't want their advice on how to run a campaign. We wanted their advice on how to be a manager."

The campaign also sought advice from what the New York Times later called a "dream team" of academics who described themselves as a "consortium of behavioral scientists." The group included political scientists, psychologists and behavioral economists. The campaign was operating well outside the traditional network of political consultants.

Throughout 2011, Obama advisers were baffled by the slow start to the Republican presidential race. They knew from their experience in 2008 how long it took to build a field operation capable of winning a campaign. They were even more keenly aware of the lead times and money required to assemble the technological infrastructure to support a sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation for 2012. Republicans could see that the Obama campaign was spending tens of millions of dollars in 2011. They just weren't sure on what.

The gap between the Obama and Romney operations crystallized in the key battleground state of Ohio in the closing weeks of the general-election campaign. Members of Obama's team had been on the ground in Ohio for years. They knew the state intimately. Obama had at least 130 offices there, plus 500 or so staging areas for volunteers. He had almost 700 staffers on the Ohio payroll alone. Thousands of volunteers contacted voters.

Romney had to put together an organization in a matter of months. He had about 40 offices and 157 paid staff members, although most of them were on the Republican National Committee's payroll. Scott Jennings, Romney's Ohio state director, said after the election that there was no way the Republicans could conquer Obama's head start. "Our ground game was as good as it could have possibly been, given the time and resources we had to work with," he said. "There's just no substitute for time. Six months . . . wasn't enough to overcome six years of a constant campaign run by the other side. Truly it is remarkable to see what they did, in the rearview mirror."

Aaron Pickrell, Obama's chief Ohio strategist, told a story about himself that illustrated the disparity between the two campaigns' ground operations. An Obama volunteer knocked on his door during the summer, just to check in and see if he had any questions. The volunteer did not know who Pickrell was. He knew, based on campaign data, only that Pickrell should be a solid Obama voter, someone who needed to be contacted once at most.

Pickrell and his wife later ordered absentee ballots. When the ballots arrived, they set them aside on the kitchen table, where they sat for two weeks. "I got thrown back into the database of people who needed to be contacted," he said. Soon an Obama volunteer knocked on their door to remind them to turn in the ballots. Once they did, there was no more contact. That was the level of the campaign's efficiency. Meanwhile, Pickrell said he received a dozen direct-mail pieces from the Romney campaign, a waste of money and effort on the Republicans' part. He got no direct mail from the Obama campaign because the database said he didn't need persuading. Rich Beeson, Romney's political director, eventually learned the scope and sophistication of the Obama operation. "They took that to another level," he said.

Through modeling, voters were rated on a scale of 1 to 100 on their likelihood to support Obama. A similar scale was used to predict the likelihood that people would turn out. So if someone had a high support score and a low turnout score, meaning that person was very likely to support Obama but not so likely to vote, the campaign tried to make sure that person got registered and then cast a ballot, preferably during the period of early voting. Banking those sporadic voters became a top priority.

The Obama team had done support and turnout estimations in 2008 but more experimentally. This time, the campaign added a third measure, a persuasion score. This helped weed out people who said they were independent but really were not. In the final weeks of the campaign, the team focused on voters with persuasion scores of 40 to 60. Those with higher scores were likely to vote for Obama without much persuasion. The others probably weren't going to back the president no matter how open they said they were.

"In the old days you would say, 'Here's a list of people we think are independents, go to those houses,' " Messina said. "But you waste your volunteers' time all over the place because despite what someone says, there are a very small amount of undecided voters." By knowing the voters and modeling the electorate, the campaign wasted less time pounding the pavement.

No get-out-the-vote operation works precisely as planned - or as characterized in after-action reports by the winning campaign. It always sounds better than it is. On the streets, it never looks as smooth as described at headquarters. But the payoffs for Obama were real on Election Day.

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president obama; mitt romney; obama romney; election 2012; dan balz

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How the Obama campaign won the race for voter data

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From the moment Barack Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, and every day thereafter, his team was always preparing for the 2012 campaign. Everyone said Obama's 2008 operation had rewritten the book on organizing. But that was just a beginning, a small first step toward what the team envisioned when it began planning the reelection campaign.

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How the U.S. Government Segregated Chicago | [Inside Chicago, Part 1]

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Why Chicago's Public Schools Are Broken [Inside Chicago, Part 2]

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The second trend is the growing isolation of poor people. In an important paper this fall, Century Foundation scholar Richard Kahlenberg noted that both rich and poor families are more separated from families in other income brackets today than in 1970. Figures compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Kids Count project show that over the past decade, the share of kids living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty (defined as places where at least 30 percent of the residents are poor) has increased in most major cities-for example, from 25 to 34 percent in Los Angeles, 29 to 36 percent in Chicago, and 28 to 38 percent in Houston.

Because most students attend neighborhood schools, these intersecting trends have swelled the portion of kids in schools that also experience concentrated economic need. In 1999, only 28 percent of public school students attended schools where most of their classmates qualified as poor or low-income, meaning their families earned less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $45,000 for a family of four. (Schools track these figures to determine which students are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches.) The share of students attending majority low-income schools has rocketed to almost 51 percent, roughly 25 million kids in all, in the most recent federal figures, which covers the 2012-13 school year.

For students of color, the figures are even higher. Nationwide, about three-fourths of both African-American and Latino students attend majority-low income schools. By contrast, only about one-third of whites attend such economically strained schools.

In Chicago, in a school system where 85 percent of students are either black or Latino, the concentration of economic need is overwhelming. In 77 of the city's roughly 680 public schools, at least 99 percent of the students qualify as poor or low-income. The share tops 90 percent in another 388 schools. In only 50 schools do less than half of students qualify as low-income.

"You're a fourth-grade teacher and coming into that door is 30 students from poverty, broken homes, crime and you are supposed to just, on your own, turn that around," Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told me at a Next America forum I moderated here this week. "That's impossible."

Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Closing Remarks at 11/10 Next America Event in Chicago

Innovative and tenacious educators can make progress despite these trends. Chicago has developed a creative program of early intervention that has dramatically increased high school graduation rates from around 55 percent in 2009 to 70 percent now, with both African-American and Latino students demonstrating significant gains. Since 2003, the share of the city's 4th graders who score as "proficient" on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests has tripled in math and more than doubled in reading (though in each case to only around 30 percent). At the forum Gregory Jones, principal of Chicago's Kenwood Academy High School, a school where two-thirds of students are low-income, noted that just over half of their graduates now finish with some college credit.

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Why Poverty and Segregation Merge at Public Schools

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The second trend is the growing isolation of poor people. In an important paper this fall, Century Foundation scholar Richard Kahlenberg noted that both rich and poor families are more separated from families in other income brackets today than in 1970. Figures compiled by the Annie E.

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Living Through the AIDS Crisis and COVID-19

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Living Through the AIDS Crisis and COVID-19

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By Amanda Sangster - September 17, 2020

September 18 is National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day - a day to call attention to the growing number of people living long and full lives with HIV. It's a day of reflection for Moffitt nurse Louisa Rattini-Reich, who worked in the early 1980s at the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis. This year, the day has even more meaning, as she cares for elderly cancer patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Rattini-Reich began her nursing career in Baltimore 44 years ago, many young gay men were beginning to fall ill to rare forms of cancer and pneumonia. At the time, this was referred to as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Later, it would be identified as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.

At John Hopkins Hospital, Rattini-Reich worked on the floor reserved for patients suffering from AIDS. She says that the lines between health care professional and caregiver blurred, as nurses became extended family members to their patients. "Like today's pandemic with COVID-19, we had no experience with something like this, but we did the best we could to take care of our patients," she said.

Similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, early AIDS patients were placed in isolation due to the uncertainty of the disease. Although AIDS can't be spread via airborne droplets like coronavirus, Rattini-Reich says even family members were afraid to touch their loved ones.

"In the beginning, everyone died and so many died without their families," said Rattini-Reich. "When my first patient came to us, he wasn't diagnosed with HIV. No one knew what he had." She and her nursing colleagues brought their patients birthday cakes, celebrated their milestones and supported them as they drifted towards the late stages of the disease.

Rattini-Reich lost four very close friends to AIDS and their memories stay with her with every patient she encounters. "As friends, we rallied behind them because they didn't have any other support," she said.

When her good friend Mark exhausted his treatment options, he wanted to compose letters to his dearest friends in his final days. Too sick to write the letters himself, Mark dictated these letters to his partner, Jim, who then delivered them to their intended recipients following Mark's funeral.

Rattini-Reich was one of those recipients. In Mark's final days, she had visited him with her young son in her arms. Through his letters, he thanked her for giving him the opportunity share in her joy of having children and for the acceptance that her own parents had extended to him and his partner. "My parents accepted them when his own parents wouldn't," Rattini-Reich said.

Mark's partner also succumbed to the disease one year later. In 1996, their photo was added to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt which was put on full display on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. By 2019, the quilt honored over 94,000 people that had lost their lives to the disease.

Much like advancements happening now with research and COVID-19, attitudes changed as more information was discovered about the AIDS. Stigmas began to lighten as research gave way to universal precautions to protect others from catching the virus.

Beginning her career during this heightened time of uncertainty was formative for Rattini-Reich. When asked what advice she would give to nurses starting their careers today during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, "Listen to science and follow the guidelines. They will protect you. Brilliant minds have figured out a way to turn HIV from a death sentence into a chronic disease they can live with. Listen to these experts about COVID-19."

Working at Moffitt, a hospital recognized by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation as a leader in LGBTQ Healthcare Equality, means something special to Rattini-Reich. Her daughter Emily is openly gay and being a part of an inclusive work culture gives more meaning to her work. "Moffitt respects everyone and accepts that we're all different," she said. "Most importantly, no one is left behind. That's what it means to be inclusive."

After more than four decades of service, Rattini-Reich still has so much to give. "We can't save the world and we can't fix everybody. The HIV/AIDS epidemic taught us that," she said. "But we try hard every day to make a difference. That's why I still come to work. I like to think that I can make a difference in just one person's life. Whether it's a smile, a phone call or answering a question. I still have something to give. As long as I have that, I'll keep showing up."

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Living Through the AIDS Crisis and COVID19

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By Amanda Sangster - September 17, 2020 September 18 is National HIV/AIDS and Aging Awareness Day - a day to call attention to the growing number of people living long and full lives with HIV. It's a day of reflection for Moffitt nurse Louisa Rattini-Reich, who worked in the early 1980s at the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

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How The AIDS Crisis Changed The LGBT Movement | NBC News Now

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Reagan Administration's Chilling Response to the AIDS Crisis

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A lot has changed about HIV/AIDS in the last 30+ years. Learn about the history of HIV/AIDS in the U.S.

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This dataset is a list of individual Chicago Landmarks designated by City Council upon recommendation of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. It contains the name of each landmark property along with the date of its construction (if known), the name of its architect/designer (if known), and the date of Chicago Landmark designation. Additional information about each individual Chicago Landmark can be found on the Chicago Landmarks home page at http://j.mp/lRJVnh. Properties which have been proposed for landmark designation by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks and remain under consideration are not included. This information is for illustrative purposes only; the legal descriptions are as identified by the respective landmark designation ordinances. A dataset containing Chicago Landmark Districts is available separately. Data updated quarterly.

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Individual Landmarks - Map | City of Chicago | Data Portal

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This dataset is a list of individual Chicago Landmarks designated by City Council upon recommendation of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. It contains the name of each landmark property along with the date of its construction (if known), the name of its architect/designer (if known), and the date of Chicago Landmark designation.

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Chicago developed a reputation as a cauldron of specifically "racial" conflict and violence largely in the twentieth century. The determination of many whites to deny African Americans equal opportunities in employment, housing, and political representation has frequently resulted in sustained violent clashes, particularly during periods of economic crisis or postwar tension.
Chicago's most famous race riot of this type occurred between July 27 and August 3, 1919. The violence was precipitated by the drowning of an African American teenager who had crossed an invisible line at 29th Street separating customarily segregated "white" and "black" beaches. Soon, white and black Chicagoans, especially in the South Side residential areas surrounding the stockyards, engaged in a seven-day orgy of shootings, arsons, and beatings that resulted in the deaths of 15 whites and 23 blacks with an additional 537 injured (342 black, 195 white). The police force, owing both to understaffing and the open sympathy of many officers with the white rioters, was ineffective; only the long-delayed intervention of the state militia brought the violence to a halt, and heavenly intervention in the form of rain was probably an important factor as well. The passions of this outbreak were rooted in pent-up tensions surrounding the massive migration of southern blacks during World War I: sometimes hired as strikebreakers, their increased industrial presence was viewed by many white workers as a threat to their own livelihoods, fueling attempts to impose rigid physical boundaries beyond which blacks could not penetrate. The aftermath of World War II saw a revival of white attacks on black mobility, mostly on the city's South and Southwest Sides, but also in the western industrial suburb of Cicero. Aspiring African American professionals seeking to obtain improved housing beyond the increasingly overcrowded South Side ghetto, whether in private residences or in the new public housing developments constructed by the Chicago Housing Authority, were frequently greeted by attempted arsons, bombings, and angry white mobs often numbering into the thousands. The 1951 Cicero riot, in particular, lasting several nights and involving roughly two to five thousand white protesters, attracted worldwide condemnation. By the end of the 1950s, with black residential presence somewhat more firmly established, the battleground in many South Side neighborhoods shifted to clashes over black attempts to gain unimpeded access to neighborhood parks and beaches.
Since the mid-1960s, the nature of race riots in Chicago (as elsewhere) has significantly shifted. Although violent black/white clashes continued into the mid-1970s, the term's use shifted during the 1960s to refer to the uprisings of poorer blacks (or Latinos) protesting ghetto conditions, especially police brutality. Chicago has experienced several noteworthy outbreaks of this type, including the confrontation between police and the largely Puerto Rican communities of West Town and Humboldt Park during the summer of 1966, but most notably the massive 1968 West Side riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King. No clashes of this magnitude have occurred since (even following the 1992 Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles), but the continued salience of many of the protesters' expressed grievances-inferior housing, lack of meaningful employment, and inequitable law enforcement-suggests that the issues surrounding racial violence are by no means a finished chapter in Chicago history.

Steven Essig

Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. 1989.

Hirsch, Arnold R. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. 1983.

Tuttle, William M., Jr. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. 1970.

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Chicago developed a reputation as a cauldron of specifically "racial" conflict and violence largely in the twentieth century. The determination of many whites to deny African Americans equal opportunities in employment, housing, and political representation has frequently resulted in sustained violent clashes, particularly during periods of economic crisis or postwar tension.

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Chicago Fire Dept. - Chicago Westside Riots 1968

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This week marks the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Chicago riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Just two years earlier, King had been actively fighting segregation in Chicago when he moved into a run-down apartment in North Lawndale and led marches in the city to protest segregated housing, most notably the Marquette Park March in August 1966. That brought violence, when King was hit in the head by a rock. His death would bring anger and chaos.

King was shot at approximately 6 p.m. on April 4th 1968, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was pronounced dead an hour later. Riots broke out in major U.S. cities, including Chicago, after news of King's death spread.

Over the next several days, looters broke into stores and set buildings on fire, mostly on Chicago's West side. A two-mile stretch of Madison Street running through East and West Garfield Park was devastated, with more than 100 building destroyed by fires. Looting and fires also broke out in Lawndale and around 63rd Street on the South Side. Fires were dotted across the South Side and the Near North Side. Acting Illinois Gov. Samuel Shapiro activated nearly 7,000 Illinois National Guard troops the day after King's assassination to support police officers and firefighters in Chicago.

Churches and schools that didn't shut down held memorial services for King on April 5, remembering his nonviolent protests and called for unity in the city. On April 6, Mayor Richard Daley called President Lyndon Johnson seeking federal troops. "Mr. President, we're in trouble. We need some help," Daley told Johnson. "It's starting to break down in different places. ...We need help as soon as we can get it."

Late in the evening of April 7, 5,000 additional federal troops were ordered into Chicago to support the National Guard and local police. Daley placed Chicago under a citywide curfew for anyone under 21. The city's downtown neighborhood and nightclub district were totally deserted that Saturday night, according to newspaper reports. Hundreds were left homeless on the West side and thousands in the city were without electricity.

Daley told reporters after the riots that he had ordered police, "to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand... to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city." Police were originally ordered to use tear gas on looters and rioters instead of shooting, but by Saturday night Chicago police commanders called for "aggressive action" against rioters. Photos of the riots show buildings ablaze and the National Guard patrolling Chicago's streets with rifles.

By the end of the Chicago riots, at least 9 people were killed and 1,200 injured. Over 200 buildings were destroyed. The destruction had cost nearly $9 million in property damage across the city, according to the Chicago Tribune.

"The human fabric of the city still is being shredded and no one can see the end of it," wrote D.J.R. Bruckner, a Chicago-based staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, just a week after the riots.

King had warned about such a shredding of the urban fabric almost exactly a year before in his speech "The Other America" at Stanford University on April 14, 1967: "Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I'm still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. ...

"But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard."

Years later, AREA Chicago asked residents about the legacy of the riots as part of an oral history. "I remember waiting for help but help never came," Diane Gardner told them. "To this day, help never came."

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What Happened During the West Side Riots of April 1968

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This week marks the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Chicago riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Just two years earlier, King had been actively fighting segregation in Chicago when he moved into a run-down apartment in North Lawndale and led marches in the city to protest segregated housing, most notably the Marquette Park March in August 1966.

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CITY HALL - Critics of a city-crafted plan designed to prevent longtime residents from being pushed out of gentrifying parts of Woodlawn near the planned Obama Presidential Center blocked the main entrance to Mayor Lori Lightfoot's office Tuesday.

The protest was the latest effort by the Obama CBA Coalition, which comprises seven groups, to spur Lightfoot to take immediate action to protect low-income residents who fear the Obama Center will ratchet up housing prices and leave them homeless.

Holding signs shaped like the tents they fear they will be forced to live in once the center is built, several dozen protestors sat in front of the mayor's fifth floor office, with two Chicago Police officers blocking their access into Lightfoot's suite of offices.

The coalition has repeatedly urged the mayor to revamp her proposal - which officials are using to put together an ordinance to be considered by the City Council - to ensure that housing built on land now owned by the city is affordable to families earning $40,000 a year or less.

In addition, any new housing developments should be required to set aside 30 percent of their units for low- and moderate-income residents, according to the coalition's proposal.

The coalition also demanded that the current proposal be expanded to include not only Woodlawn but also South Shore, Grand Crossing, Hyde Park, Washington Park and Kenwood.

RELATED: Coalition blasts scaled-back plan for preserving affordable housing near Obama Presidential Center

A majority of aldermen have endorsed the coalition's proposal for a community benefits agreement.

The Obama Foundation and former Mayor Rahm Emanuel rebuffed the coalition's demand for a community benefits agreement, but Lightfoot promised during her campaign to back a legal measure.

Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), who has vowed to block Lightfoot's proposal from becoming law, did not participate in the sit-in but was greeted with a loud round of applause when she arrived at the protest.

During the sit-in, Taylor told reporters that the mayor's staff agreed to meet with the coalition.

"We don't trust the city," Taylor said. "We just don't."

The meeting has not yet been scheduled.

The mayor met Monday with Taylor and Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th), who have been leading the push on the City Council to pass a community benefit agreement, said Anel Ruiz, a spokesperson for the mayor.

Additional conversations are expected to take place before the mayor asks the City Council to approve her proposal, Ruiz said.

Aides to the mayor and several commissioners have held 15 separate formal meetings with Woodlawn residents about affordable housing concerns, Ruiz said.

"We are committed to ongoing discussions with these stakeholders to make sure the concerns of the community are reflected in any affordable housing or economic development solutions for Woodlawn, while ensuring that there are no unintended consequences for the community," Ruiz said.
RELATED: City's Scaled-Back Obama Center Housing Plan Doesn't Do Enough To Protect Woodlawn, Alderman Says
Alds. Maria Hadden (49th) and Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) addressed the crowd and vowed to support their efforts to protect affordable housing.

Taylor said the mayor's proposal would not protect Woodlawn residents from being pushed out of the area around the Obama Presidential Center, set to be built in Jackson Park. In addition, the freshman alderman accused Lightfoot and housing officials of disrespecting the largely Black and low-income community by crafting their own proposal, rather than endorsing the plan backed by a coalition of community groups.

The mayor's proposal would apply only to census tracts within three-fifths of a mile of the Obama Presidential Center. The proposed community benefits agreement backed by Taylor and the Obama CBA Coalition, which comprises seven groups, wants protections to apply to all properties within a two-mile radius of the center. While Woodlawn would be included in the mayor's plan, most of South Shore and Washington Park would not.

During a meeting of the City Council's Committee on Housing and Real Estate on Tuesday morning, Hadden asked Housing Department Managing Deputy Comm. Anthony Simpkins when the administration would back an ordinance with a "funding package for residents" of Woodlawn.

"Nothing is finailzed right now," Simpkins responded. "I think we're close, but we still have some more work to do with the elected representatives and people who live in that community."

RELATED: City unveils scaled-back plan for preserving affordable housing near Obama Center

The mayor's proposal is designed "to ensure that current residents are protected from displacement, while also setting the neighborhood up for the housing and other economic development needed for future growth," according to a statement from the mayor's office.

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Groups Pushing For Obama Center CBA Stage Sit-In At Mayor's Office

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CITY HALL - Critics of a city-crafted plan designed to prevent longtime residents from being pushed out of gentrifying parts of Woodlawn near the planned Obama Presidential Center blocked the main entrance to Mayor Lori Lightfoot's office Tuesday.

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SOUTH SHORE - In his debut novel, author Gabriel Bump brings the complexities of South Shore to the national stage while giving a voice to the quiet kids with a lot on their minds.

"Everywhere You Don't Belong" is fictional protagonist Claude McKay Love's coming-of-age story. After his parents abandon him at age five, he moves in with his grandmother and her friend Paul, who live in Jackson Park Highlands.

The first half of the story follows Claude as he attempts to "do normal kid things when society and family is pressuring him to be something else - to be extraordinary," Bump said.

"Claude isn't a person you hear from a lot in society - he's a quiet, anxious kid prone to depression," Bump said. "It was important to get in the mind of that person and see how these exceptional qualities can show themselves in non-traditional ways."

The back half of the book sees Claude leave the neighborhood behind to study journalism in Missouri. In college, he faces pressures likely to resonate with any person of color at a predominantly-white institution.

"He's expected to speak for his entire race; to be this voice and be this standard that he is not necessarily up for," Bump said.

The turning point of the story is a riot that engulfs South Shore after a neighbor boy is killed by police. It brings to the fore a central theme in the book: Claude's constant desire to belong.

"There's a traumatic experience that happens, and he just decides, 'Maybe this isn't the place for me; maybe I should go see if some place else can be,'" Bump said. "If that place actually exists - if there is any place - is kind of questioned in the book."

Bump said he finished writing the riot scene well before the fatal shooting of Harith Augustus in 2018 by Chicago Police officer Dillan Halley. The scene was inspired by the fatal shooting of Mike Brown in 2014 and the subsequent uprising in Ferguson.

Even so, Chicago writer Audrey Petty said she sees parallels between the events of the novel and Augustus' killing.

"It really did feel like [ the protests that followed] could be the moment ... there were clashes, there was violence against the protesters, and it felt like it could very well escalate," Petty said to Bump as they discussed the novel at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore last week. "Reading your novel and seeing what plays out, it felt eerie to me."

"That's one thing that's still strange to me, like why Chicago isn't up in flames," Bump responded. "You could probably say that about a lot of places in the country."

Writer Audrey Petty (left) hosted the "Everywhere You Don't Belong" book talk at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.
Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago

Filled with heavy topics like violence and family separation, Bump balances the book's seriousness with humor and tenderness.

"Everywhere You Don't Belong" "becomes absurd and fantastical in a lot of ways, which is how the South Shore in my mind looks," Bump said. "It's just this place I love and [was] my childhood and was really important to me."

The novel's focus on South Shore is a nod to Chicago writer Stuart Dybek, who "portrayed people as humans, just doing the best they can in somewhat-misunderstood sections of the city," Bump said.

In depicting the neighborhood as a "complex and fleshed-out place," Bump's novel aims to give a voice to its residents, much like Dybek's work does for Pilsen and Little Village.

"Everywhere You Don't Belong" comes as outsiders are beginning to change their perception of the South Side, Bump said. That's due in part to likeminded authors who are telling stories that break from tired narratives about the area.

Bump said his novel is "in conversation" with Carlo Rotella's deep dive into South Shore's social climate, " The World Is Always Coming to an End." There's a personal connection, too - the Bump family purchased their Jackson Park Highlands home from the Rotellas.

Rotella's book is "the first thing I've seen that laid out the disparities and the disconnects" between South Shore neighbors, while "Everywhere You Don't Belong" imagines those neighbors uniting despite their disconnects, Bump said.

The efforts to protect affordable housing in Woodlawn and South Shore are "a good example of something I imagined in the book - people across socio-economic divides coming together and fighting," Bump said.

Since moving away from the neighborhood, Bump said he hasn't kept a close eye on it. He's aware of big developments like the plans for the Obama Presidential Center, but plenty has flown under his radar since he left in 2014. He now lives in Buffalo, N.Y.

In fact, he told the Seminary Co-op crowd last week that the book was his "Chicago novel" - he's unlikely to write another set in the city.

"Everywhere You Don't Belong" "seemed natural to write when I started," Bump said. "Returning to the city and writing about it from a distance when things have changed so much - I'm not sure I could do it justice."

As his promotional tour winds down, Bump is editing his second novel; it's based in Massachusetts, where he went to grad school. A third novel, set in Buffalo, his current home, is on the way.

Bump's work traces the places he's lived, and he likes to give his characters his personality traits, but the real-life similarities end there - his day-to-day life of writing, reading and teaching "is kind of boring," he said.

"Fiction - one of the things that makes it exciting is you can imagine these events and people responding to these events," Bump said.

Yet "Everywhere You Don't Belong"is undeniably personal. At the novel's end, Claude has a vision where he talks to the people in South Shore he's left behind to attend college.

As Bump finished reading a passage from the final chapter, "Where We Belong," to the Seminary Co-op crowd, he started to tear up.

"Seeing high school friends and teachers come out, it's something I don't think I've necessarily processed yet," Bump said. "Being back home after being gone for so long, that's what made it particularly emotional."

Paul Horton, Bump's high school history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School, was at the book talk. Horton hasn't read the novel yet, but he isn't surprised at its sentimental subject matter - or Bump's success as an author.

"He's just really sensitive and empathetic and he's going to make a great novelist," Horton said. "He's translating his different experiences to a much broader audience. I'm extremely proud of him."

Gabriel Bump wipes away tears after reading an excerpt from the closing chapter of "Everywhere You Don't Belong." He said it was the first time he had cried while reading the book.
Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago

Bump is 28, with a positive review in the New York Times and attention from numerous local publications. A high point came as he left Phoenix after a speaking engagement this past weekend and bought a copy of People magazine.

He's not an avid People reader - actually, he's never bought the magazine before. But he said he had to get the most recent issue; his book was recommended in it.

It's just one of many new milestones that's come during the 28-year-old author's "strange and surreal" debut on the national scene.

"My life is still pretty young," Bump said. "I'm just starting off on this adventure."

"Everywhere You Don't Belong" is available now through Algonquin Books.
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Author Paints A 'Complex' Portrait Of South Shore In 'Everywhere You Don't Belong'

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SOUTH SHORE - In his debut novel, author Gabriel Bump brings the complexities of South Shore to the national stage while giving a voice to the quiet kids with a lot on their minds. "Everywhere You Don't Belong" is fictional protagonist Claude McKay Love's coming-of-age story.

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SOUTH SHORE - Through the quick release of edited footage showing Harith Augustus touching his holstered gun, the Chicago Police Department sought to calm a volatile city in the days following his July 2018 shooting death at the hands of Chicago Police Officer Dillan Halley.

A recently released investigation from Woodlawn-based journalists at Invisible Institute and London research agency Forensic Architecture challenges that decision - along with numerous others in the minutes, hours and days that followed the high-profile South Shore shooting.

The investigation models the events of the shooting through various timeframes, from the milliseconds in which Halley's muscles pulled the trigger to the following days in which the Chicago Police established its official narrative.

At 5:30 p.m. July 14, 2018, Augustus was running errands in the 2000 block of East 71st Street near his barber shop when he was shot and killed by Halley. Police said he was stopped because he appeared to have a gun and holster under his shirt.

In Augustus' death, as with many police shootings, a common rationale is that Halley only had a "split second" to decide how to react to his perceived threat, Invisible Institute founder Jamie Kalven said.

"The argument from the split-second perspective is, 'Look, [Augustus] had a gun, his hand is in proximity to the gun, the officer had to make a split-second decision,'" Kalven said.

Harith "Snoop" Augustus and the barber chair he used at Sideline Studio where he worked.
Lee Edwards/Block Club Chicago

The investigation argues against this idea. Instead, it claims a series of events - beginning when Officer Quincy Jones stopped Augustus - "manufactured" the split second in which Halley decided to fire.

Trina Reynolds-Tyler is a Black Youth Project 100 organizer who was canvassing the neighborhood the day of Augustus' death. She came across the scene about an hour after the shooting, when fellow organizers texted a BYP100 group chat about heavy police presence in the area.

Tensions likely wouldn't have risen - and shots likely wouldn't have been fired - had officers Halley and Megan Flemming not rushed Augustus as he initially cooperated, said Reynolds-Tyler, who narrates each video.

"Maybe they shouldn't have stopped him in the first place, but if they did, questions are fine," Reynolds-Tyler said. "You don't need to crowd an individual. ... This whole thing I believe was based out of assuming that he was a criminal from the jump."

From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Sandra Bland to Tamir Rice, police shootings of black individuals "begin with really minor, if not trivial occasions for the stop," Kalven said.

Placing Augustus' name into that company, Kalven said it's important that police leadership learns from his death and trains officers in such a way to avoid ever getting to the "split second."

"The police brought the disorder, brought the violence, brought the chaos and injected it into a situation that was completely peaceful," Kalven said. "Harith Augustus shouldn't be dead. It was improper and incompetent and inept police work that produced this result."

Jamie Kalven is the founder of the Invisible Institute.
Provided

'Mislabeled and lost' footage

Harith Augustus was killed on July 14, 2018.

On Aug. 16, 2018, in response to activist Will Calloway's lawsuit calling for "all audio and video" of the shooting, a city attorney said in court that the request would be honored that same day. Twenty-three pieces of evidence were released.

A year later, on Aug. 30, 2019, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) released previously unseen dash-cam footage of the incident, despite a requirement to release video of police shootings to the public within 60 days.

The recently released dash-cam footage.

On Sept. 27, surveillance footage from a nearby business was released after being mislabeled and lost, according to a COPA statement given to Kalven and published in The Intercept.

"Following a thorough internal review, COPA with the assistance of the Invisible Institute, has identified and released additional video related to the ongoing investigation into the officer-involved shooting death of Mr. Harith Augustus and has commenced a full review of its transparency release process," the statement reads. "We are reviewing oversight management protocols and processes to ensure nothing but full compliance is followed going forward."

COPA officials did not respond to Block Club's request for comment on the reason for the delays.

The new footage provides context that the originally released body camera footage does not, Kalven said: A third-person view of Halley's actions.

"The body camera is the police officer's perspective," Kalven said. "Somebody who is shown in the frame of a body camera is almost necessarily seen as an offender, a perpetrator, a criminal."

The edited video released by Police Supt. Eddie Johnson the day after the shooting.

The 13-month lapse could be due to suppression, or it could be due to "investigators' lack of care and rigor," Kalven said. "Both could potentially be true."

Even before COPA released its statement, Kalven said he was under the impression the agency had "lost track" of the unreleased footage.

If one accepts the explanation as truth, the lack of care is troubling, he said.

"Immediately [after the shooting] there were demonstrations, there was disorder," Kalven said. "If ever there was a case that you would expect great care and attention to be brought to, it would be this one. But in fact, they effectively lost evidence in the course of our investigation."

COPA's reasons for the delayed release are irrelevant, said Brian Ragsdale, membership chair of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression ( NAARPR).

NAARPR members organized a mass protest in South Shore days after Augustus' death, and the alliance has been a vocal proponent of replacing COPA with an elected Civilian Police Accountability Council.

Ragsdale said what matters is that COPA did not uphold one of its own stated values: Timeliness.

"It seems to me that the video should have been released right after we demanded it," Ragsdale said. "When there are shootings of folks, those videotapes need to be released immediately."

Reporters 'also need to talk to us'

Fraternal Order of Police spokesperson Martin Prieb said he was not familiar with the dash-cam footage, but he doubted it added any context to the situation.

He said it was "disturbing" that a report from the Invisible Institute, which he referred to as "biased," was being taken seriously.

"It's a very chilling sign of the wasteland Chicago media has become," Prieb said.

Frustration at the media's coverage of officer-involved shootings is perhaps the one common thread between Prieb and organizers like the NAARPR.

The perspectives of victims, survivors and their advocates are routinely ignored in favor of the police narrative, NAARPR co-chair Frank Chapman said.

"The first time [the media puts] out a report on any crime, it's always based on the police report. They never come into the community and ask us what happened," he said.

Exploring the police's construction of the "official" narrative the media so depends on was central to the Invisible Institute's investigation, Kalven said.

From placing handcuffs on Augustus' dying body to the selective and edited release of footage, "a whole set of moves" were made to establish a narrative almost instantly, Kalven said.

In response, he made it a point to take a wide view of Augustus' death, in part because he witnessed the intense but "redundant" media attention drawn by Laquan McDonald's murder.

During Jason Van Dyke's trial, "I kept thinking, there's so many other stories that are unfolding in this building at 26th and California, and nobody's covering them. They're all covering this high-profile trial," Kalven said.

If media coverage never steps beyond the police narrative or other "official" sources, accountability will remain hard to come by, Chapman said.

"I'm not saying don't talk to the police," he said. "But you also need to talk to us."

South Shore residents, community organizers, and more descended onto Sideline Studios to remember Harith Augustus and to determine what's next for 71st.
[Lee Edwards / Block Club Chicago]

'They disrupted the flow of life'

During his research for "Years," the final, yet-to-be-released part of the investigation, interviewees painted Augustus as a respected and reserved man, Kalven said.

Augustus was a barber at Sideline Studios, 1873 E. 71st St. He had left the barbershop to run some errands when he was stopped and killed.

Reynolds-Tyler, now a Bronzeville resident, lived her "young childhood" at 78th and Jeffery - seven blocks from the site of the shooting.

She said barbershops are a "community pillar" in black communities like South Shore, where barbers are entrusted with one's sense of style and can be depended on for emotional support.

A young Harith Augustus pictured in a school photo.
Provided by Sneed Deadrick

Augustus was "part of the life cycles of the people in the community," Kalven said. "One of the last - if not the last - haircut he gave was to a very young boy whose father and grandfather had brought him in for his first haircut. He gave a haircut to a friend of his who was going to be married that weekend."

The shooting was not only an act of violence against one man, said Kalven, whose 2015 Slate report revealed that officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 shots at Laquan McDonald. It was "experienced as an injury to the community as a whole."

During interviews for the project, multiple South Shore residents suggested community-focused policing efforts as a way to safeguard against future injury.

"One way of saying that is 'more black officers,' but it's more telling to say 'members of the community, whose job is to perform a function on behalf of the community,'" Kalven said, noting Augustus' initial response to Jones, "an African-American officer well-known in the community."

That's a point on which Reynolds-Tyler disagrees.

As chaos broke out along 71st Street in the hours following the shooting, she said a young black cop - someone who in appearance would belong on a South Shore beat - was the most aggressive with protesters.

"Black cops, I can't - I don't support that either," Reynolds-Tyler said. "If it was my way, the police wouldn't have been there in the first place."

Trina Reynolds-Tyler appears in the "Hours" video, discussing the aggressive policing protesters faced on 71st Street the night of the shooting.
Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago

Calling on COPA to consider 'the totality of the circumstances'

Kalven "hopes and trusts" that COPA will seriously consider the Invisible Institute's work as it continues its investigation.

"My strongest hope ... is there will be a serious assessment of the totality of the circumstances and not just the split second," he said. "There was a sequence of actions that were taken by the police that produced this outcome. If those aren't taken into account, it's really impossible to do justice in this case."

Kalven said his goal is to see the Invisible Institute investigation result in "changes in policy and practice," as did his work to uncover the facts of Laquan McDonald's murder.

Yet there are a few key differences between the two cases, he said.

In Augustus' case, Kalven "shared an expectation with law enforcement and Civil Rights lawyers that [Halley's decision to shoot] would almost surely be found to be within the law and within regulations."

That wasn't necessarily the case with McDonald. Van Dyke's decision to fire 16 times when no other officer did was "an egregious act of police violence" - a clear outlier when it comes to police shootings of black individuals, Kalven said.

Halley's action "feels more like the norm; this scenario happens a lot," he said. "The idea that the law would prove [the shooting] to be justified, it felt like a challenge. To understand a case of this nature, you have to understand the broader phenomena."

Halley remains on active duty and is assigned to the 1st District, according to a CPD spokesperson.

The project, based on publicly available footage of the shooting, debuted Sept. 19 as an exhibit for the Chicago Architecture Biennial and runs through Jan. 5, 2020. Out of concern for "presenting graphic scenes of police violence against a black man in the context of an exhibition," the visuals are not available at the Biennial's exhibition space, 78 E. Washington St. Downtown.

Instead, the investigation can be viewed in full online. The videos are also shown at the Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. in Woodlawn, from noon-5 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays.

"This was a draining project for everybody, just looking all day at images of this kind of violence," Kalven said. "It was also incredibly fruitful."
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5 Shots On 71st Street: New Investigation Challenges Police Narrative Of Harith Augustus' Death

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SOUTH SHORE - Through the quick release of edited footage showing Harith Augustus touching his holstered gun, the Chicago Police Department sought to calm a volatile city in the days following his July 2018 shooting death at the hands of Chicago Police Officer Dillan Halley.

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Fiction

Gabriel Bump Credit... Jeremy Handrup

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

EVERYWHERE YOU DON'T BELONG
By Gabriel Bump

It's an elusive and risky thing to attempt in a literary work: to be funny - especially if you're writing about sad things like trauma and loss. It's the rare book that can achieve an appropriate balance between heaviness and levity, and it's my favorite kind of novel. In his debut, "Everywhere You Don't Belong," Gabriel Bump pulls this off not just generously but seemingly without effort. This is a comically dark coming-of-age story about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, but it's also social commentary at its finest, woven seamlessly into the work, never self-righteous or preachy.

The book follows a young boy named Claude from South Shore as he copes with being abandoned by both parents, left to be raised by his grandmother and her friend Paul. Bump infuses these childhood sections with an aching, tender innocence, as when his dad gives 5-year-old Claude a beer, kicking off a Thanksgiving food fight, adults flinging mashed potatoes and howling with laughter. Just when the prose teeters on the edge of sentimentality, though, he pulls it back with humor. Following the revelation that Claude's mom and dad left him within one day of each other, that "neither left a note or kiss goodbye," Paul puts a cap on the pathos with the same dismissive quip Grandma used after witnessing a senseless fistfight between her son-in-law and another man: "That's enough culture for one day."

Propelling the emotional intensity is the novel's pace. Bump's short chapters draw us in quickly, urgently, like: Come hear this. Beginning with Claude's childhood, the time-skipping narrative carries us briskly through the years, until suddenly he's in high school, facing an attack that lands him in the hospital. Claude's best friend moves away. ("'All this craziness,' Jonah's mom said. 'This isn't good for raising kids.'") A gang called the Redbelters sells drugs and guns to neighborhood youth, and stages riots in which "we civilians" are caught in the crossfire between the equally bloody-handed gang members and the cops.

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Gabriel Bump Credit... Jeremy Handrup

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of February. See the full list. ]
Amid all this chaos is a love story, plain and simple. From Claude's first encounter with his pigtailed classmate Janice, we're expected to trust the everlasting strength of their bond, without much explanation. And the truth is we don't need it: Their intimacy is built in the silences, like the one that ensues the first time Janice calls him cute. "I choked on nothing, felt my heart trip a few times. ... I wanted to call her beautiful," Claude says. Instead, "I stammered into her face, spit some, choked on nothing, coughed, and spit some more." Claude never gets any smoother, and he's all the more charming for it.

If I had any problem with the book, it was logistical, related to certain plot points inserted seemingly for convenience, but without organic explanation, or even a simple acknowledgment from our narrator. This kind of quibble is both big and small. It bothers because it pushes the general suspension of disbelief too far, but thankfully the moment is brief. Despite this narrative not-so-sleight of hand, Bump's ending still manages to be unexpected and unromantic, while containing so much love and hope.

It would be a mistake to think of this book as a political one - one about the police, or gang violence, about being black in America. Such language is a legacy of the white male voice (his dominance ever diminishing, one hopes) who believes there is such a thing as an apolitical novel, a neutral position, in this country and climate. Above all this book is personal: Bump's meditation on belonging and not belonging, where or with whom, how love is a way home no matter where you are, is handled so beautifully that you don't know he's hypnotized you until he's done. Most funny things are funny because they're real, this book included. I mean real, here, as something distinct from realism; his characters feel true to their environment in ways only an author who has known people like this, has lived a life at least adjacent to this one, could write. Amid ambient contemporary questions about cultural appropriation, I believe in the power of imagination, that you aren't required to have lived everything you write about. That said, readers of color know a fake - on the page, in the language - when we see one. I don't know the life Gabriel Bump has lived, if it actually resembled Claude's. But the overwhelming impression of this novel - from the cheap weed smoked out of lunchroom apples to Claude's reluctant "diversity" assignment for his college paper, which ends up being "all about death and fixing injustice" - is that it's genuine.

There's something big (and yet stifled) happening in the publishing world now, a reckoning with who has the right to write what when it comes to fiction. My personal stance on writing fiction across racial divides is that you better have a pretty damn good reason to do it, and it better not sound even a little bit altruistic. I also believe we as readers have a responsibility to not only call out problematic examples, but also to honor those doing it right, those of any color who are writing about underrepresented or misrepresented communities, and doing the best of what fiction can do at the same time. Gabriel Bump is doing that, has done that. And "that's enough culture for one day."

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A Comic Coming-of-Age Novel Laced With Social Commentary

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Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. EVERYWHERE YOU DON'T BELONG By Gabriel Bump It's an elusive and risky thing to attempt in a literary work: to be funny - especially if you're writing about sad things like trauma and loss.

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Both are black. Both knew they wanted to write. Both grew up on Euclid Avenue in the heart of South Shore, a Chicago neighborhood known for its background music of gunshots and sirens.

But the similarities between Gabriel Bump and the antihero of his debut novel- Everywhere You Don't Belong, due out February 2020 from Algonquin-end there. Bump's nuclear family remains intact. Claude McKay Love's abandoned him when he was a bewildered five. "My daughter's not awful," his grandmother says. "She's just ridiculous." Grandma loves Claude and believes in him-"Claude's going to make a difference in this world," she says. But, as he's on the verge of escaping to college, she warns him: "The world is no place for a self-hating black boy."

"Why won't you let me leave?" Claude asks.

"I'll let you leave," she says. "And I'll let you come right back when everything goes wrong."

Anyone who grew up during the 1960s race riots has the names of certain places burned into their brains: Baltimore; Harlem; Newark; Watts; and, of course, Chicago. Claude is 14 when South Shore erupts. Bump wrote this chapter while in grad school, with the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in mind. Using the model of the Blackstone Rangers (a late-'60s/early-'70s Chicago street gang), Bump creates a gang called the Redbelters, led by a man named Big Columbus.

The race riot starts the way many do, with an unarmed person of color shot and killed by police. The boy was seen entering a home where he'd promised to feed a neighbor's cats; he's gunned down because he runs when the police arrive to investigate. Claude watches friends and neighbors, armed with frying pans and bats, get shot and trampled. Told in the first person, we see the riot through his innocent eyes. In sentences that are short and declarative-like bullets-Bump describes the action. He avoids the subjective, both here and throughout Everywhere, fueling his jackhammer prose.

Bump deploys stealth humor. The reader doesn't see it coming-then it hits like an uppercut. In one scene, Claude escapes the riot by running for his life past the Howards, whose daughter "had bad breath and said gum made her feel normal." The speaker at Claude's high school graduation thanks friends and family, saying that, without them, "she would've committed suicide by jumping off a medium-size apartment complex." And in a scene the reader hopes will turn sexy, he writes, "She held me closer. I put my chin in her belly button."

While studying at the University of Missouri in 2011, one of Bump's professors encouraged him to look for a program with a stronger writing department. He moved back to Chicago the next year, transferring to the School of the Art Institute, where Everywhere took root. (The book's second chapter, "Fog," was Bump's undergraduate thesis.) He went from there to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he got his MFA in 2017 and completed the book. One of his teachers, Jeff Parker, author of Ovenman, thought Bump's work was so extraordinary that he passed it along to his agent at Trident Media Group, Ellen Levine, who suspected it was a perfect fit for her colleague, Alexa Stark.

"I was completely blown away by the staccato prose and the tender, wry voice." Stark says. "It succeeded as a portrait of boyhood and racial politics."

Bump experimented with five different endings before he finished the final chapter, "Where We Belong," to say exactly what he wanted it to say. Stark rushed the manuscript off to 12 publishers. Kathy Pories, executive editor at Algonquin Press, was stunned. "It was unlike anything I'd ever read: funny, absurd and tragic all at the same time," she says. "The book is stylistically smart. Bump injects humor into scary situations. He jumps right into his character's lives and what it means to be a black man in America, how it is. That's important territory right now. All this told us this was a voice that was going somewhere."

Pories moved fast. She put together a preempt offer-a two-book deal for six figures. Stark set up a conversation between Pories and Bump, both of whom liked what they heard.

"I couldn't have dreamt of such a deal happening," Bump says.

Bump is currently teaching two courses, on short fiction and literature, at the University of Buffalo. Next semester, thanks to his advance, he'll be teaching one. A manuscript for his second novel, about two college professors in Massachusetts forming an underground society, is on his editor's desk. He's begun work on a third, about a young man moving to Buffalo. Everywhere You Don't Belong has a film agent on board. Marketing will include an eight-city tour, national TV and radio interviews, and national print and online campaigns. Bump is 28 years old.

"Every step of the way and even now," he says. "I wonder if I can do it."

He already has.

Patricia Volk is a novelist and short story writer and the author of two memoirs, Stuffed and Shocked.

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Both are black. Both knew they wanted to write. Both grew up on Euclid Avenue in the heart of South Shore, a Chicago neighborhood known for its background music of gunshots and sirens. But the similarities between Gabriel Bump and the antihero of his debut novel- Everywhere You Don't Belong, due out February 2020 from Algonquin-end there.

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Writer Gabriel Bump discusses his debut novel "Everywhere You Don't Belong" with Salon's D. Watkins. Bump's short chapters use humor to discuss the pressures his teenage protagonist Claude McKay Love faces growing up in Chicagoâ€"including inferio...

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Gabriel Bump on writing about the confusing parts of being a teenager today

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Writer Gabriel Bump discusses his debut novel "Everywhere You Don't Belong" with Salon's D. Watkins. Bump's short chapters use humor to discuss the pressures his teenage protagonist Claude McKay Love faces growing up in Chicagoâ€"including inferio...