Changing Chatham: Next generation fights for the future
By MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times columnist / mmitchell@suntimes.com June 28, 2011 2:08AM
Lifelong Chatham resident Duron Wise-Armour is the subject of a Mary Mitchell story, photographed in the 8000 block of South Indiana Avenue on Saturday, April 2, 2011 in Chicago. | Richard A. Chapman~Sun-Times
This series
DAY 1: The Changing
Chatham – a look back
at 20 years of a
neighborhood in
transition
DAY 2: A Class Divide — Chatham isn’t the exclusive community with high property values and picky landlords that it used to be
TODAY: The Next Generation Fights for the Future
- Part I: A look back at a neighborhood in transition
- Part II: Neighborhood struggles with class divide
Article Extras
Updated: October 1, 2011 12:37AM
The crowd gathered at Cole Park in Chatham wasn’t much larger than the group of young men who were shooting hoops.
Named after Nat King Cole, the park at 85th and King Drive is surrounded by many of the eye-catching homes built by black people in Chatham in the late ’50s. On this chilly and wet Sunday afternoon, people had come together there for a peace rally prompted by a gang shooting nearby, on 79th Street.
“It was like ‘New Jack City,’ ” the Rev. Marc Robertson told the crowd.
Once, Cole Park was symbolic of the pride Chathamites took in their neighborhood. Now, as Robertson tried to stir the crowd to action, a group of teenage girls hung out on benches defaced with obscene graffiti.
The park is where Thomas Wortham IV played as a child. It’s where he worked as a volunteer until the day last summer he was gunned down by attackers who wanted his motorcycle.
“He understood there were challenges, but he wanted the community — the park, in particular — to be a safe place to play, the way it was when he was younger,” says his mother, Carolyn Wortham, who joined in the prayer vigil.
I listened in awe. Having endured the worst catastrophe a mother can face, Wortham is still working to save Chatham for a future generation. Nobody would have faulted her and her husband if they had packed up and left Chatham behind. But there they were. In the crowd. Standing shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors. Just like their son would have been.
“Before his death, Tommy was looking for a home in the area,” Carolyn Wortham says.
Now, her daughter, Sandra, also plans to live in Chatham.
“You can’t run from situations,” Wortham says.
She doesn’t blame the community for her son’s death. She blames individuals who made bad choices.
“The community did not kill my son. Poor choices killed my son. We’ve got to make sure, as we raise our children, we make them understand how to make responsible choices.”
★★★★
Times are definitely tough for Chatham. And they’re not likely to improve any time soon, says William A. Sampson, a DePaul University sociologist who has spent most of his career studying the black middle class. He offers this dire prediction about Chatham’s future:
“You are going to have a lot of boarded-up places. I mean, the value is just not increasing. And then the question is: Who is going to move there? The folks that can maintain Chatham are the sons, the young folks who would buy in Chatham from the older folks.”
If not for the sons and daughters coming back, Sampson asks, “Which young, upwardly mobile black folks in Chicago do you know who are going to buy in Chatham?”
★★★★
Duron Wise-Armour, 38, is a black man with long dreadlocks and surprising blue eyes. He looks like the kind of brother you might bump into in the South Loop or on the North Side. But Wise-Armour lives on the second floor of a two-flat in the 8000 block of South Indiana, a block from where he grew up. He took the property off his father’s hands.
“My father bought it by foreclosure,” Wise-Armour says. “He rehabbed the place, gutted it and put in all new everything. He kept it for about five years or so, then he began to step back from his business because of his age. I rent out the first floor.
“My purchase of this home was kind of like saying that I am not going anywhere, I am going to stay here, and I’m going to be a positive light in the community.”
The previous generation in Chatham pushed their kids to get a good education, to go to college. Between 1990 and 2009, the number of college-educated people in Chatham increased by nearly four percentage points, from 16 percent to just under 20 percent. Like a lot of the young men who grew up there, Wise-Armour went to private schools and got his bachelor’s degree — in accounting.
Wise-Armour had a solid, middle-class foundation; his grandfather, Elijah Armour, started one of city’s first black-owned certified grocery stores and lived in Chatham. His father, Julius Armour, owns Anointed Air, a heating and air-conditioning company that does a lot of business in Chatham.
Even with his college degree, Wise-Armour, who’s single, works at a variety of jobs. He teaches high school math at an alternative school. He occasionally works in his father’s business. And he’s a massage therapist.
He sees Chatham these days as a “melting pot” in which the mix of people causes friction.
“Now, you have more a mixture of individuals who are just living check-to-check [and from] government check-to-government check,” he says. “That melting pot has created a lot of controversy.”
But he says he thinks his community will get through this.
“It is just a matter of being able to pass along those values that we learned when we were younger,” he says.
★★★★
At 26, William Hall is a first-time home owner. He inherited his two-bedroom Georgian in the 8400 block of South Wabash when his grandfather, Leroy A. Morgan, died in January at 88.
And he isn’t planning on leaving, even though homes in the neighborhood have been dropping in value. In 1990, the median price paid for a single-family home in the area was $99,794, according to the Chicago Association of Realtors. In 2009, it was $182,727. Now, it’s just $69,750.
Hall started redecorating the home while he was caring for his ailing grandfather. He’s added a “Green Tea” accent wall and new furniture in the living room and hired craftsmen to turn the dated bathroom into a luxury spa. Then, there’s the kitchen, which — well, let’s just say it gave me a bad case of kitchen envy.
Hall’s new home is two doors from the one his parents bought when they moved to Chatham in 1984 from a high-rise in Hyde Park. He looks down the street as he bounds down his steps and points out a bit of history.
“Mamie Till Mobley lived on that block,” he says — the mother of Emmett Till, whose murder at age 14 while visiting family in Mississippi and open-casket funeral helped ignite the civil rights movement. “They used to have an old Mercedes like the one in the movie ‘Coming to America.’ They used to pull over all the time. Every week, her husband was cutting my hair. I grew up in that kind of history. It was rich in all this history. And, in, like, a blink of an eye, everything changed.”
Many of those who have left Chatham over the past two decades have been, as Sampson says, “middle- and working-class black people who said, ‘I am going to the suburbs.’ ”
On Hall’s block, though, many of the homeowners simply passed away.
“This was a block of mostly elderly historians,” he says. “Most of the people here are on the verge of dying.”
And that’s opened the block to a different kind of neighbor.
“They didn’t understand the laws and rules of Chatham,” Hall says. “Loud music. Late-night parties. They were not reared in this neighborhood.”
Hall remembers how his grandfather had a big chair at the front windown where he’d sit and watch the street.
“He would say, ‘Come here,’ ” says Hall. “He used to sit right there, and they would pull up in front of his house, and one person would get out of the car, and another person would get out of a car, and they would sell drugs. It had gotten just that bold. About a year ago, a guy was sitting in the kitchen, and somebody broke in their door while they were in there in the middle of daylight. This was not the Chatham I knew when I was growing up.”
Hall’s father is the longtime president of the block club on South Wabash, even though he moved away for a time.
“I’m going to tell my dad, ‘You’ve done your thing,’ ” Hall says.
And then he plans to take his father’s place. He isn’t giving up on his block or on the rest of Chatham.
“I am crazy enough to believe that Chatham will never go sour,” Hall says, “because we still have a lot of influential people that live in this neighborhood. If I raise a family, I want to be able to say to them that on this block was Emmett Till’s mother.”
★★★★
One day, I was waiting at the stoplight at 87th and Cottage Grove and noticed a young man who looked to be the same age as my 10-year-old grandson. He was carrying a gray backpack. I watched as he stooped to pick up a piece of trash. He walked to a garbage can and threw it in.
It was a small step — and also a sign.
There are still things that the good Lord and good black folks don’t allow in Chatham.
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