A mom’s legacy lives on through cleanup effort in community
More than 200 volunteers — clad in can’t-miss-us fluorescent yellow T-shirts and matching cloth masks — gathered Saturday morning in Englewood to tackle an ambitious project: beautifying 100 blocks of the South Side neighborhood.
A community cleanup effort with a block party vibe, the eighth annual Greater Englewood Unity Day was back after a year off due to the pandemic.
With shovels, spades, rakes, pitchforks, push brooms and trash-picking claws leaning at the ready, Michelle “Chellee” Rashad, executive director of Imagine Englewood, rallied the crew before they scattered to their work sites. Their turf: 55th Street to 75th Street, from the train tracks near Hamilton Avenue to the Dan Ryan Expressway.
“We have been through a year,” Rashad shouted. “But now, if you’re feelin’ good, let me hear, ‘Englewood!’ ”
“ENGLEWOOD!” came the mask-muffled reply.
The response wasn’t pro forma. The event, which was underwritten by PepsiCo, the Chicago Foundation for Women, the Feinberg Foundation and other groups, was for several volunteers the first time they’d seen some of their friends or co-workers in months, or maybe a year. The sun was shining, the music was thumping. First cautious, then enthusiastic hugs were exchanged.
You’d rarely see people so excited about picking up trash.
For two sisters, a helping homecoming
Standing back from Rashad’s stage, near the registration table, were Sheryl Lott and Debra
Coble, sisters whose late mother, Jean Carter-Hill, co-founded the Imagine Englewood organization. Unity Day, which claims the mantle of the largest South Side cleanup effort, was her brainchild.
So, the day before Mother’s Day, Lott and Coble spent the morning handing out matching fluorescent yellow face masks and wristbands to help volunteers with some of the pandemic awkwardness that’s emerged as life, slowly, sort of, starts to get back to normal.
Wear a green wristband, you’re open to hugs and handshakes. A yellow one? Maybe a first bump, but just be careful. Red? The person might have a health condition, please keep your social distance.
For the sisters, the cleanup is a homecoming of sorts. Lott lives in the south suburbs now, and Coble came north from her home in Memphis, Tennessee. But they wouldn’t miss it, they said.
“It might be a small thing, you know, but it makes a big impact on the community, Lott said. “And we still love Englewood, just like she did.”
A cop from the block
Kenneth Griffin is a Chicago cop and former Cook County sheriff’s deputy. The 29-year-old, an Englewood native and current resident, spent his Saturday morning reaching into the high grass of a vacant lot at 60th and Halsted streets, quickly filling a big black trash bag.
Griffin, a CAPS youth liaison officer with a TikTok following (he’s everybodysfavorite12), said the detritus that dots much of the area has a psychological effect on residents, especially kids
who grow up in it, as he did.
He often sees people in the area toss garbage out of car windows, and while he’s not much of a ticket writer, he’s pulled people over before, and forced them to go and pick up their litter. Right before he stopped to talk to the Tribune, he said he saw a passing car pitch something onto their cleanup turf.
“You have schools that look like jails. Just psychologically, it feels like nobody cares about the place,” Griffin said. “It’s depressing. People think, ‘Why am I going to care about it if nobody else does?’ It
does something to you to live in a neighborhood that looks like crap. So, we have to clean it up.”
The trash, it’s not the biggest issue. But it’s insidious, always in the periphery, if not right in your face. It wears on you, bit by bit.
The trash problem is worse this year, according to Griffin and his nearby cleanup partner Kiara Hardin, who both said it became clear a big effort was needed as soon as the winter snow melted. The pandemic somehow seemed to exacerbate the problem.
“Your community is
supposed to be an anchor for you, right? When you walk past an abandoned home, or trash, it makes you feel less safe, like you can’t do what you want to do,” Hardin said.
It was a tough year, everyone agreed. The high-tension protests that followed the death of George Floyd were especially hard on Griffin as a Black police officer from a neighborhood where the police are hardly beloved. Sometimes, he literally had to let out a scream. When things got bad, he took a few days off.
But it’s spring again, and there’s work to do.
Over on Ada Street
About a mile from the event’s staging ground outside Nicholson STEM Academy, Bernard Coble, Debra’s husband, raked out an empty lot in the 6100 block of South Ada Street, piling up trash, glass shards, a bike tire and some aluminum piping — about $60 bucks worth, he guessed.
Across the road is his mother-in-law’s old house, where his wife grew up. The block makes the list of cleaning sites
as a tribute to Carter-Hill even though the family no longer owns the place, hasn’t for several years. A community garden that bears the Englewood matriarch’s name also got some TLC from a volunteer crew.
Coble said his mother-inlaw used to head down I-57 to help him with food drives he was involved in, so this is his way of paying her back, paying it forward. Up the street, a few other yellow T-shirts scurried around a corner lot, grabbing pieces of trash that a gust of wind lifted from some open trash bags.
Coble said the cleanup effort is, of course, temporary, but each year it seems to get bigger as more and more volunteers realize how the little things can make a difference to the neighborhood’s state of mind.
Over time, he says, it will encourage others to keep the block cleaner. He had more to say, but Lott showed up to “rescue” anyone snared by her loquacious brotherin-law.
Coble turned his attention back to the lot and started hacking away with his rake, turning up bits of trash and filling the air with the smell of freshly cut grass.