In Chicago, a little art studio bridges divide
CHICAGO — The sixth-graders, from very opposite sides of the street, sat in pairs, a list of questions before them: "What do you dream about?" ''Do you think about dying?" ''Are you scared?"
Their task, at once easy and awkward, was to learn about one another — and differences surfaced quickly. One African-american boy from a public school pulled up a pant leg to reveal where a bullet had pierced his calf in a wrong-place, wrong-time shooting. His partner, a white boy who attends a private school and lives three blocks yet worlds away, was shocked, then saddened.
The 40 or so children who'd gathered found common ground, too: a love of family, sports, animals and video games, a wish to one day succeed.
"I dream about having a big dog and a big, giant house."
". that I'll get into college and get good grades."
". that I'll always have my friends."
Charlie Branda walked around quietly and listened. This is what she'd had in mind when she opened a small art studio on Chicago's Sedgwick Street, smack in the middle of a great divide. The stretch of asphalt in the Old Town neighborhood of one of America's most segregated cities starkly separates black and white, haves and havenots.
The area was settled by German, Irish and Sicilian immigrants until the 1950s and '60s, when white flight began. Then Old Town became an eclectic enclave of African-americans to the west and Puerto Ricans and hippies to the east. Massive public housing high-rises sprung up nearby, only to be gradually torn down as the neighborhood gentrified.
Today, on the west side of Sedgwick, stand blocks of subsidized housing where mostly African-american families live. On the east side are condominiums and luxury homes, filled mostly with white families. Both sides of the street are lined with metal fences and gates, often locked — sometimes to keep people out, sometimes to keep them in.
Branda is not an artist. The 53-year-old mom and former commercial banker simply wanted to get to know her neighbors better and connect the two sides of Sedgwick.
"The way it is now isn't the way it has to be," she remembers thinking.
But could something like art really help bring together one deeply divided neighborhood in a city, and a country, so desperately in need of unity?
Branda had lived for years in and around Old Town when she moved with her husband and two children to a redbrick, two-story house on the east side of Sedgwick in 2008.
Initially she joined with her neighbors to demand, with some success, that the city, police and absentee landlords do something about drug-dealing and occasional gunfire in the neighborhood. But she also spent a lot of time walking around, ignoring those who advised her to stay on "her side" of the street.
"Hello!" she'd chirp, smiling as she regularly greeted strangers from Marshall Field Garden Apartments, the place one white homeowner calls "the 800-pound gorilla in the neighborhood" because of the perceived influence its 3,000 residents — most of them African-american and two-thirds younger than 18 — have on life here.
Precious Murphy, a mother of four who lived in Marshall Field, was among those Branda frequently encountered. Murphy was more accustomed to watching white parents scoop up their kids and leave when she and her children arrived at neighborhood playgrounds. "But Charlie, for some reason, she just kept coming back," Murphy says.
Then in 2013, a young African-american father from the Marshall Field complex was fatally shot while on his way to get diapers at a convenience store, just steps from the Brandas' home. Some residents were ready to move, and at least one family on Branda's block eventually did. But she couldn't shake the idea that she didn't even know the family that had lost a loved one.
"She saw us as neighbors," says Adell Thomas, a longtime resident of Marshall Field and president of its tenants' association.
Branda had been reading a book — "Make the Impossible Possible" by William Strickland Jr., a community activist in Pittsburgh who credits a high school art teacher with helping him find his way in life. She kept thinking about an image Strickland described: a ball of clay and how "you can make a miracle with your hands," she recalls.