	Chatham by Mary Mitchell

Changing Chatham: Neighborhood struggles with class divide

By MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times columnist / mmitchell@suntimes.com June 27, 2011 2:02AM

Delores Bell at Chatham Coin Laundry, 724 E. 83rd Street, Friday, April 22, 2011. John H. White~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.

DAY 3: The next generation fights for the future.

Part I: A look back at a neighborhood in transition
Part III: Next generation fights for the future

It used to be that, to live in Chatham, you practically had to know someone. As a mother with no husband — despite having a 9-to-5 — my chances of finding a landlord who’d rent me an apartment in one of Chatham’s immaculate three-flats were slim.

The landlords there could afford to be picky. Few of them would rent to you just because you told them you were a mom desperate to move to a neighborhood where you didn’t have to worry about gangs and guns.

That’s another thing that’s different about Chatham these days.

Looking for the new Chatham, I stopped in at the Chatham Coin Laundry on 83rd near Cottage Grove. There were plenty of single, working-class women there who live in the neighborhood.

Delores Bell was one of them. She works for United Airlines, in ground services, and moved to Chatham about two years ago, from Logan Square. For her, it was just another place to live. Bell says she didn’t know much at all about Chatham at the time. She still doesn’t.

“I don’t mingle with the neighbors,” she says. “I keep everything to myself, and I go to work.”

Louzatie Adedehin moved to a small apartment building in Chatham after getting divorced.

“It seemed to be a very nice neighborhood, and the block I moved on, it was nice and quiet,” Adedehin says. “But at night, we hear a whole lot of other things going on. People are doing things that they shouldn’t when they think nobody can see what is going on.”

Back in the day, the higher rents and home prices pretty much kept the riff-raff out. But home values in Chatham have plummeted. In 1990, the median value of a home in Chatham was $99,794. During the housing boom — from 2000 to 2009 — that rose to $182,727. By this year, though, it had sunk to just $69,750, according to the Chicago Association of Realtors.

When that happens, “The land becomes affordable by a group of folks who couldn’t have afforded it 10 or 15 years earlier,” says William A. Sampson, a sociologist at DePaul University who’s an expert on the black middle class.

Thumbing through all the news stories about shootings, stabbings, babies getting killed and other crimes, I’m shocked that so many of the perpetrators, as well as the victims, have addresses in Chatham.

This is exactly what a previous generation feared.

Twenty-five years ago, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a series called “The Chatham Story.” In one of those stories, a retired factory worker talked about the future he saw then for Chatham.

“They are coming from the ghetto,” he said. “From down in the slums. And they are not the type of people I like to live with. They don’t care about the neighborhood.”

Today, longtime Chathamites seem more convinced than ever, from what I kept hearing, that poor people moving in from somewhere else are the ones causing most of the problems. Sampson understands that fear.

“Middle-income black folks don’t want poor black people living around them,” he says. “They say, ‘Look, I’ve worked my tail off for all these years to get away from that. Now, you are going to put them down the street.’ ”

According to a recent study by the Chicago Housing Authority, as of 2010, 117 families with housing vouchers had been relocated to Chatham after being displaced by the tearing down of the city’s public housing high-rises. That number represents less than 1 percent of the available housing in Chatham. But as anyone who has ever lived next door to a house where there was gang or drug activity going on knows, it only takes one bad house to ruin a block.

★★★★

Maryellen Drake’s parents moved to Chatham in 1957. She was born and raised there. For 20 years, she’s served as vice president of the Chatham Avalon Park Community Council, which has been tackling important community issues for 50 years.

Today, Drake looks around, and what she sees disgusts her.

“This is a class issue,” she says of Chatham’s troubles. “It’s not just about income. It’s about the standards that you are accustomed to . . . Barbecue grills on the front lawn. Ten and 12 people piled up on the front porch. Opening fire hydrants instead of going in the backyard and getting in the pool or under a hose.

“I can’t say they are Section 8. Can’t say they are from the projects. But I know that — by the way they behave — although they look like me, we are very different.”

Some longtime residents figure it’s up to them to teach the new arrivals the rules.

Chatham resident Berlean Burris, the wife of former U.S. Sen. Roland Burris, says she reached out to a family who, with the help of Section 8 housing aid, moved in to the house next door while the owner, an investor, tries to find a buyer for the place.

“When she first moved in, I went over there and talked to her and brought her a basket of things,” she says. “Another neighbor told me she did the same thing. She says a Section 8 resident was barbecuing in the front yard, and she went over there and said: ‘You know we don’t barbecue in the front lawn. You do it in the back.’ And they started barbecuing in the back.”

★★★★

I pulled in front of a brick bungalow at the corner of 78th and Eberhart, on the same block where the Burrises once lived. I tried, though it was hard, to imagine what it must have looked like 25 years ago. Now, I saw a Jim Beam liquor bottle someone had tossed on the curb. And there were fast-food containers and other trash. It was the kind of mess I’m used to seeing in poorer neighborhoods. On the corner, there’s also a “hot-spot” police camera.

But the entryway of the home had marble flooring and a built-in wooden bench over which hung an ornate mirror. It’s a grand home. But it’s stuck in what’s now a bad location.

The 7800 block of South Eberhart that Roland and Berlean Burris moved away from 40 years ago is just a stroll away from 79th and Cottage Grove, where gang shootings are becoming common.

Given the violence, it’s little wonder that vacancies are popping up on this block and elsewhere in Chatham. Between 2000 and 2009, the percentage of vacant homes nearly doubled in Chatham. And the percentage of owner-occupied housing dropped by 5 percent.

In 1990, 10 percent of the 17,234 housing units in the neighborhood were vacant, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2009, the number had grown to 13.5 perent of what were, by then, 18,017 housing units.

That’s a lot of vacancies, especially when you consider that most born-and-bred Chatham residents had never seen a boarded-up house on their block till not that long ago.

★★★★

Block club president Eric Andrews sees the police camera that went up in 2009 at 78th and Eberhart as a symbol.

“I was devastated when they put up that camera,” he says. “It let me know how bad things had gotten.”

Andrews was born in the big, brick bungalow at 78th and Eberhart, across from St. Dorothy’s Catholic Church. His father died when Andrews was just a year old. Andrews’ mother, Petra Andrews, worked for the federal government for 41 years and managed to send all of her six children to private school and to college. In 2008, two weeks after she retired, her car got hit by a car driven by a drunken driver, according to the police. Petra Andrews died three months later from her injuries. The family is still waiting for the case to go to trial in Indiana.

“She had made all of us promise that we would keep this house because she said my dad and her worked extremely hard to get this property,” Eric Andrews says.

But keeping that promise has been a struggle.

Andrews, 40, who graduated from Morris Brown College, a historically black college in Atlanta, is the divorced father of two girls. Like a lot of Americans, he’s looking for full-time work. For now, he’s working at Flowers First on 75th Street.

There are three empty houses in a row on Andrews’ block. On another block nearby, where a former classmate lives, Andrews says there are about nine or 10 vacant homes. Things like that have made the area less safe, according to Andrews.

“I can recall the time my brothers would be at a party somewhere across King Drive, and they would get into mischief, and someone would call my mother to let her know what was going on,” he says. “Everyone knew everyone.”

These days, it’s harder for someone to tell who belongs on the block and who doesn’t, says Andrews, who talks about how there have been shootings on the street right outside his door.

“We were out in the yard barbecuing,” he says “At about 12 [midnight], everyone had come in the house. I had gotten out the shower and heard about five or six gunshots. I looked out the back window to see three bodies lying in the street.

“I had grown up with these guys. Two of them stayed on the next block. Their parents still stay there.”

That was 2006 — the summer Andrews was elected block club president.

“I had to make a conscious effort to know my neighbors,” he says.

Now, when strangers take up posts on the porches of vacant homes like they live there, Andrews notices.

“I come out and ask: ‘Why are you sitting at this house?’ ”

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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

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.

Changing Chatham: A look back at a neighborhood in transition

BY MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times columnist / mmitchell@suntimes.com June 25, 2011 1:22AM

"There was a certain quality of life we had enjoyed all of my life. And we shouldn't give that up." ~ Carolyn Wortham on her resolve to live in the Chatham neighborhood

No barbecuing on the front lawn.

No hanging on corners.

No loud music.

No ball-playing after dark.

No penny-pitching on sidewalks or racket on the street at all hours of the night.

And definitely, definitely no trampling the grass.

The rules in Chatham were never painted on signs. Instead, they’ve long been etched in the hearts of homeowners who live in the neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago bounded roughly by the Dan Ryan Expressway to the west, Cottage Grove Avenue on the east, 87th Street on the south and 79th Street on the north.

But the way things have gotten, these days the rules might as well not even exist. Consider:

† A Chicago cop, Officer Thomas Wortham IV, got shot to death last year right in front of his parents’ house in Chatham. The police say he was attacked by robbers who wanted his new motorcycle. Three months later and a few blocks away, just outside of Chatham, another Chicago cop, Officer Michael Bailey, was killed in front of his own home.

† Security cameras now peer down on some Chatham streets just like they do in traditionally crime-ridden neighborhoods on the city’s South Side and West Side.

†Serious crime is down over the long-term in Chatham, as it is in most parts of Chicago. Still, the Chicago Police Department’s Beat No. 624, which includes a slice of Chatham, is now one of the highest-crime areas in the city. For the first three months of 2010, it was the worst. This year, over the same span, it was second-worst — by just four crimes.

† The number of Chathamites living in poverty is up — from 14.8 percent in 1990 to 22 percent as of 2009, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

† Unemployment in Chatham is up, too — from under 13 percent to nearly 18 percent in that time, with more than half of all households now headed by single women. †Faced with these problems, people are leaving. From

1990 to 2009, Chatham lost 5,751 people — 15.6 percent of its population, census data show.

Chatham today is a much different community than it was in 1986. Back then, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a series of stories called “The Chatham Story” about the “upwardly mobile blacks” who had settled in the neighborhood, building a “community of excellence” in which people kept up their homes and had a “ruthless” passion for making sure their kids got a good education.

But even then, things were beginning to change. Chatham was in transition as many of its residents, people who’d lived there much or all of their lives, got old.

Now, a quarter-century later, I went in search of the new Chatham. I wanted to see just how much, and how, Chatham has changed.

What I found reflects the impact of the city’s public housing high-rises having been torn down and also the meltdown in the housing market. It’s not just the crime. Mixed in among the well-kept homes with their manicured lawns, there are untended yards and houses left empty as a result of the tattered economy. Chatham is no longer the haven for the black middle class that it was not so long ago.

But I also found that the spirit that gave birth to Chatham — a belief that black people can successfully raise their families and maintain their community — has been passed along to a new generation of educated, hard-working people.

★★★★

Carolyn Wortham was raised in the 8400 block of King Drive in the house her father built. Twenty-six years ago, she and her husband, Thomas Wortham III, moved back to that same house to raise their own family. She was a teacher, and he a Chicago Police officer.

“When I moved back here, this was the type of area where people walked the neighborhood, and men would tip their hats to you and open doors for you,” Carolyn Wortham says. “I was able to show my children the neighborhood by walking around. One of my daughters’ very favorite spots was a cookie shop on 84th and Cottage Grove. It was the best-kept secret on the South Side.”

That cookie shop would be El Lars, where the proprietor, Ella B. Ward, has been for 25 years, still making by hand the pecan cookies that have made her famous on the South Side. “You don’t see a lot of people walking up and down the street,” says Ward. “Every once in a while.”

Wortham says she can’t put her finger on when things started to change. “A lot of people were saying it was because we have new neighbors,” Wortham says. ”But my feeling about that is you can get new neighbors. There was a certain quality of life we had enjoyed all of my life. And we shouldn’t give that up.”

★★★★

At one time, black people had no choice but to live together. Jim Crow didn’t care if you were a doctor or lawyer, teacher or bus driver. If you were black, you could live only in certain parts of the city.

When restrictive deed covenants fell, black people who had the money to buy their own homes moved out of the deteriorating neighborhoods along State Street known as the Black Belt and headed south.

“The South Side kept all those middle-income blacks partly because they couldn’t move to many of the south suburbs,” says William A. Sampson, a DePaul University sociologist who’s spent most of his career studying the black middle class. “They were just not accepted.“

Growing up in public housing, I didn’t know anything about Chatham’s reputation. All I knew was this: Chatham was out south, and out south was where most of us wanted to be.

I went to Chatham for the first time in the late 1960s to visit a friend. I can still see the chain rope that guarded her sparkling, emerald lawn. I remember how she

shushed us when we stepped in to the hallway of her building.

For those of us who grew up in the chaos that was public housing, Chatham was the example of how we should want to live.

I can admit now that I used to consider the people who lived in Chatham

bourgeois blacks. Maybe it was my own insecurity about being poor. But I thought they thought they were better than us because they had money.

Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th) laughs at hearing that.

“It wasn’t that everybody was well-to-do,” says. Sawyer. “That’s not the case. Never was the case. We always had people that were struggling who lived in Chatham. There is a certain air to Chatham. I am not going to lie and say there is not.”

But why wouldn’t Chathamites hold their heads just a little higher than the folks who lived in the ghetto? After all, Chatham was filled with people who’d overcome big obstacles and achieved success. When they left home, they didn’t have to worry about a neighbor who didn’t work a lick coming in and taking their stuff.

★★★★

Former U.S. Sen. Roland Burris has always lived in Chatham. He bought a bungalow on South Eberhardt when he graduated from Howard Law School in 1963. Twenty years later, he bought a red-brick cottage that once belonged to Mahalia Jackson. Tourists still drive by the house at 84th and Indiana and snap pictures. Burris works hard to keep up his property.

““I pick up pieces of paper every day,” he says. “They are still throwing those hamburger bags out the window [of cars]. I go out and pick up beer bottles, beer cans, pop cans and McDonald’s bags.”

The Burrises are the family Chathamites talk about to make the point that Chatham still has influential residents, though Burris recalls, “When we came here, people were asking, ‘Who are those young whippersnappers in that house?’ ”

“The change that I see is that many of the residents are dying out,” says his wife, Berlean Burris. “They are going in to nursing homes, and that is causing the change. A young lady down the street, she is in her mom’s house. Another young lady moved into her mom’s house. So the younger people are taking over the property from their parents. But sometimes the children aren’t prepared to take over properties that require a lot of upkeep.”

The house next door is empty.

“The Grants were here before Mahalia was here,” Burris says. “Mr. Grant would tell you how, in 1958, they shot out Mahalia’s front window.”

The couple had three boys, Burris says, but the house ended up in the hands of an investor.

“It went down,” Burris says. “The investor came in and gutted it and remodeled it, and now it’s for sale. But of course, the neighborhood vandals are coming by, taking a little piece here and a little piece there.

“There’s not much left in it unless they go get the hot water heater and the furnace. We are the policemen that watch over it.”

Response to “Changing Chatham” series: Touching and frustrating

BY MARY MITCHELL marym@suntimes.com June 29, 2011 6:22PM

The response to the “Changing Chatham” series was both touching and frustrating.

It is touching that many of you wanted to share your Chatham story.

For instance, although I’ve been knowing him for years, I didn’t know that Richard Steele, host of “848” on WBEZ 91.5, grew up in Chatham. That explains his passion for community reporting.

Steele sent me an email lamenting his childhood home.

“My father was a postal worker who retired in the late ’80s and died in 1990. Our home was a brick two flat. My mother, who is now in her 90s moved into a senior citizens residence about five years ago and my brother now owns the property and lives there. These days it always makes [my mother] sad to come to grips with how much things have changed . . . for the worst. I’m pretty sure my brother will stay. Maybe he’ll be one of the faithful who will try and keep the dream alive,” Steele wrote.

Michael Carter, who is currently living in Atlanta, painted this picture of Chatham’s business community during the early ’90s:

“I remember my mom getting our birthday cakes from a ‘A Piece of Cake’ on 83rd and Cottage Grove. Lou had the only Black Beauty Supply Store I knew of, ‘Solo’ on 82nd and Cottage Grove, Henry Jackson on 82nd & Cottage used to cut our hair, and when we did good on tests, our 8th grade teacher used to take us to Curt’s and Leon’s BBQ.”

However, I am frustrated by readers who equate “white flight” of the ’50s and ’60s with the “class divide” within the African-American community today.

Stephen Taylor of Austin, Texas, for instance, wrote in an email:

“I find it amusing that middle-class blacks are allowed to make comments and observations about poor blacks on Section 8 and the damage they do to established neighborhoods. But if I made those same comments I would be accused of racism as I am a white male. I would also like to see you draw some conclusions about just why Section 8 tenants are so toxic for established neighborhoods?”

Let me put this as delicately as I can. This is a family matter. But if you must know, ever since darker-skinned slaves were shipped to the fields to toil while light-skinned slaves were welcomed in the house, black people have been dealing with some kind of a divide. We will work it out.

Still, let me be real clear.

In my mind, the only toxic Section 8 tenants are those whose behavior makes a community less safe, i.e., loitering, drug-dealing, gang-banging and other illegal activities.

Unfortunately, some readers like David G. Whiteis of Humbodlt Park, who wrote a letter to the editor, walked away thinking that what’s really going on in Chatham is “virulent classism.”

I’m sorry he reached that conclusion because Chathamites I interviewed didn’t care about how much money someone was making. These residents simply want the same quality of life enjoyed by people living in other middle-class neighborhoods.

“We can only do so much with our neighborhood watch system — we need help,” said Chanel Bell in an email.

“I can’t say I have ever come across a patrol car in our area. If we want to save this community with so much history, we need help,” Bell said.

As with any series, I interviewed a lot of people who were not quoted in the articles. But the perspectives and stories these Chathamites shared were invaluable.

I am especially grateful to the following:

Melinda Kelly, Executive Director of Chatham Business Association; Dr. Felicia Blassingame, president of South Central Community Services; Ed Johnson; Keith Tate, president of Chatham-Avalon Community Council; W. Erskine Quicksey, owner of Flowers First; the Rev. Bob Miller of St. Dorothy’s Church; Herbert Skinner; and the Rev. Jon E. McCoy, pastor of St. Mark United Methodist Church.

Finally, where does Chatham go from here?

In order for Chatham to remain a desirable neighborhood, a lot more of these residents will have to get involved in an activity that promotes the values that Chatham represents.

There’s just no other way to hold the line against encroaching crime.

But there is real reason for hope.

After all, if one generation could overcome hardships and racial bias to build a community, then surely another generation can save it.

ChathamNOW

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Changin Chatham Series

Changing Chatham: Neighborhood struggles with class divide

Changing Chatham: Next generation fights for the future

Changing Chatham: A look back at a neighborhood in transition

Response to “Changing Chatham” series: Touching and frustrating

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