Messages against police brutality dangle from trees
Grant Park vigil follows two-hour march downtown
Fourteen-year-old Natalya was quiet as she scribbled onto the paper dangling from the crabapple tree.
She was standing with about 100 others Saturday afternoon in Grant Park to hold a vigil for victims of police brutality by penning messages onto cards and hanging them from the canopy of tree branches with white flowers.
As she gripped a blue pen in one hand and used the other to hold her water bottle as a writing surface, the words spilled out: “Dear future children, I’m sorry.” She signed her name with a small heart.
“I’m really just tired of seeing people that look like me be killed for no reason,” Natalya said. “I wrote that because we haven’t created the change that they need, so I’m apologizing on behalf of everybody that hasn’t done their part.”
The vigil capped off a two-hour rally and march downtown to protest the fatal Chicago police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo on March 29 in Little Village, among other high-profile killings by law enforcement in the U.S., and to call for reforms within Chicago police.
Though the crowd was roused during much of the action, with protesters on the street chanting, “No justice, no peace,” the conclusion had an atmosphere of calm reflection at South President’s Court off Ida B. Wells Drive.
Within 15 minutes, the group had finished writing their messages, some of them embracing before dispersing. The result was a grid of about a hundred white cards tied to silver and gold ribbons blowing gently under the tree branches. Messages ranged from “Your voices won’t go unheard” to “You just need to keep fighting, keep believing. Don’t stop.”
Blake Ashby, a 23-yearold from the Lakeview neighborhood who wrote the latter message, said he came up with the words while thinking of the progress that has yet to be made almost one year after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a former Minneapolis cop and the mass social justice movement that followed. Ashby added that he felt both a sense of relief and sharp remorse while participating in the vigil, which provided him a channel for his pain over the events.
“I just kind of decided to put down what first came to mind just because I feel like whatever comes first is what’s mainly in there inside of you,” Ashby said.
The vigil was organized by the activist group Activate:chi and included demands such passing an Illinois bill to end law enforcement qualified immunity, which is protection from lawsuits for officers who commit misconduct; reallocating money from Chicago police’s $1.7 billion budget; the resignation of John Catanzara, the president of Chicago police’s largest union; and passing a city ordinance tightening rules on Chicago police search warrants following the botched raid of Anjanette Young’s home.
Speakers at the rally often referenced Toledo’s death, which led to protests earlier this month after the body camera footage was released and showed the 13-year-old, who was Latino, apparently dropping a handgun and raising his hands less than a second before a Chicago police officer shoots and kills him.
“I’m here to make everybody know that Adam’s voice will live through us. All those voices, we can’t let them die,” Renaldo Hudson, the education director at the Illinois Prison Project whose life sentence was commuted last year, said during the rally.
“We have to let the world know that everyone who is unjustly shot down (has) family with us, that we’re going to fight for them, that we’re not just going to march, but we’re going to act.”