Last month, after the shooting at Santa Fe High School, in Texas, the activists of Parkland, Florida, decided that it was better not to comment. “The MFOL team will not be speaking on today’s tragedy in Santa Fe,” one student whom I texted for an interview in the immediate aftermath of the event responded, referring to the group that organized the March for Our Lives gun-control demonstration this spring. “We would like for them to tell their story.” Another student was more terse: “If you wanna talk to someone, please go to Texas.”
I didn’t go to Texas, but I did go to Chicago, where the student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School began their twenty-state tour through America on June 15th, attending the annual Peace March and Rally at Saint Sabina Church, the city’s largest African-American Catholic congregation, located in the South Side neighborhood of Auburn Gresham. On “The Road to Change,” as the tour is called, Parkland students will educate young voters about the March for Our Lives platform and visit politicians who oppose their agenda. The students will also, according to their Web site, “meet fellow survivors and use our voices to amplify theirs.” The Parkland students were leaders, but uncomfortable ones. The kind of attack they experienced, although far too common, is still a rare and extraordinary thing—two-thirds of the firearm deaths in the United States are suicides, and most others are homicides, with only a fraction of those being mass shootings. The students understood that they are examples of America’s gun problem but also outliers. As such, their intention to let other activists speak to their own circumstances was both honest and good. On the other hand, a movement needs leaders. In advertising for the first march of the summer, the former Parkland student Emma González was listed as a headliner, alongside Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Hudson, Gabby Giffords, and will.i.am.
The Parkland students had first met with student activists from the South and West Sides of Chicago back in early March, less than three weeks after the shooting in Florida. The meeting, which was held at González’s parents’ house, had been closed to the media, but the next day González posted some photos, showing the now familiar and mostly white student activists from Stoneman Douglas with some other young people, all of them African-American, sitting around her parents’ screened-in swimming pool.
“I’ve never seen someone so excited to meet strangers before,” D’Angelo McDade, an eighteen-year-old who went on the trip to Florida, recently recalled of González. “She’s like, ‘Can I hug you guys?’ ” The meeting had been proposed by Arne Duncan, the former Secretary of Education under Barack Obama, and was paid for by the Emerson Collective, the philanthropic organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, where Duncan is a managing partner.
The young people went out to the pool behind González’s house while their older chaperones stayed inside. They played get-to-know-you games because, McDade said, “the amount of trauma that Parkland students and some of our Chicago students had gone through just that week and that month alone is too dramatic to constantly talk about it.”
Then they started talking. The students from Chicago talked about living with the constant fear that they or a loved one would be killed, and shared their philosophy of nonviolence. The Parkland students discussed their then-nascent platform of demands for lawmakers—universal background checks, a high-capacity-magazine ban, funding for gun-violence research, and other policy prescriptions. “We learned more from the Parkland kids about the politics side, whereas they learned more from our point of view about the everyday reality of living in Chicago,” a student from Chicago named Audrey Wright told me.
A couple of weeks later, McDade got a call from González, in which she asked him to speak at the March for Our Lives rally. When I asked whether it bothered him that the media had paid so much attention to Parkland, McDade showed no resentment. “To walk out on that stage, and you’re giving this speech, and you actually feel as if someone is actually listening? It was a new experience,” McDade said. “We, especially us from the city of Chicago, especially attending schools in North Lawndale, West Humboldt Park, and Garfield, we feel as if no one is listening.”
I talked to McDade and Wright the day before the Road to Change rally, at their high school, North Lawndale College Prep, a public charter school on the West Side. The North Lawndale campus, on South Christiana Avenue, is in a mid-twentieth-century building, with shiny wooden floors, high ceilings, and mustard-yellow lockers. The décor was motivational: a mural showed Gandhi and Che Guevara. On the walls hung pennants and college flags from universities across the country, many of which charge tuition that is significantly higher than the median household income in North Lawndale, which is around $22,500. Classes had ended early, in late May, and on the day of my visit desks and chairs had been stacked for cleaning and the scent of ammonia filled the air.
Audrey Wright led me carefully down the creaking floorboards of the second floor so as not to interrupt a documentary about youth activism that was being shot for the A&E Network. When McDade emerged, he was dressed formally, in a summery pink button-down shirt, black trousers, and velvet loafers. At the March for Our Lives rally this spring, he and another North Lawndale student, Alex King, had walked onstage wearing matching blue sweatshirts and with their fists raised. They wore tape over their mouths, which they then removed to talk about the six hundred and fifty people who died from gun violence in Chicago last year, the seven hundred and seventy-one who died in 2016, and their own experiences of fear and death. It may not have been obvious from their speeches, but McDade and King come from a different tradition of activism than that of the Parkland students, who cleverly troll the National Rifle Association on social media, rattle off statistics, and seek out discussion with politicians. McDade, King, Wright, and their classmates are more likely to quote the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., than a SpongeBob meme or a study from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Their policy priorities reflect their immediate circumstances—they speak less of gun control than the need for more youth-employment opportunities, mental-health resources, and funding for the public schools they attend. Their experience of gun violence is not of a single traumatic emergency but of a chronic problem that is only one instance of the social inequality around them. McDade told me that, during a school town-hall meeting on violence, when the audience was asked who knew at least thirty people who had been shot, eighty-five per cent of the people in the room had raised their hands. Although they have more reasons to be angry than most people their age, they radiate peace and compassion. As this movement begins to form a national coalition, they are its philosophers, its bodhisattvas.
McDade, Wright, and King’s activism began in a program at North Lawndale called the Peace Warriors. Tiffany Childress Price, a chemistry teacher at North Lawndale, started the program in 2009, in an attempt to reduce the number of violent confrontations in the halls. The program trains peer mediators in the six principles of nonviolence, which veterans of the civil-rights movement drew from the work of Dr. King. (“Principle One: Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.”) Since its inception, the program has grown to include a hundred and twenty-six students, and the number of fights at school has dropped from ninety in 2009 to thirteen or fourteen during the past school year. At a school with around sixteen hundred and fifty students and only two counsellors, the Peace Warriors monitor social media to intervene in conflicts, hold mediation sessions known as “peace circles,” and occasionally break up fights—which they call “interrupting nonsense.” They are also “interjectors of love and kindness.” They post birthday cards on lockers, and when a student has experienced a loss or trauma they do a “condolence run” to his or her classroom, where they give the student a bag of candy, a card, and a hug. This school year, they performed a hundred and seventy such runs.
Students join the Peace Warriors for different reasons. Wright lost both of her parents and an older brother in her first year of high school. After moving between the homes of siblings in Chicago and Atlanta, joining the Peace Warriors helped her, as she put it, “get back on my square.” Another student, a fifteen-year-old named Kobey Lofton, told me that he joined because he liked the T-shirt. Alex King had joined to support fellow-students, but then ended up needing their support himself after his sixteen-year-old nephew was shot and killed in 2017.
McDade did his training in the second semester of his sophomore year, giving in to what he nicely terms “harassment” by the faculty coördinator of the program, a staff member named Gerald Smith, who had a way of encouraging students whom he thought had leadership potential. By fall of his junior year, in 2016, McDade was vice-president of the group, and had started grant-writing and marketing departments. He was already deep into his exploration of nonviolent philosophies when he was himself shot, on August 1, 2017; he was sitting outside on the porch with his family when it was sprayed with bullets meant for someone else. Four people were hit: McDade, his grandfather, a cousin, and a close family friend. All of them survived.
Each year, the peace marches of Saint Sabina begin on the last day of school and continue every Friday until September, as a show of opposition to the violence that plagues summer weekends in Chicago. On the weekend of June 15th, when the Parkland students visited the city, fifty-four people were shot and nine were killed in Chicago—on the high side of normal for a summer weekend. There are many theories as to why the homicide rate in this city has increased, unlike in New York or Los Angeles: the weak gun laws in neighboring states like Indiana, the extreme economic and racial segregation, and the intense competition over the drug economy in neighborhoods with few employment opportunities. And yet there was a sense among the young activists I met that they had to solve the problem themselves, that members of their local government did not care.
Later that afternoon, I went to Saint Sabina Church, where the rally would be held the next day. Outside the church, an L.E.D. sign was programmed with a litany of exhortations: “America, divorce from your love affair with guns”; “Title guns like we title cars;” “Black Lives Matter”; “Peace starts here.” On the door of the rectory was another sign: “Guns ONLY allowed in this building if you are turning them in!” (The church is a designated gun drop-off point.)
One local effect of the March for Our Lives movement has been the banding together of youth activists from all over Chicago. A newly formed coalition, Chicago Strong, has brought together student leaders from the predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods of Brighton Park and Hermosa, the North Lawndale students from the West Side, and a group of South Side activists based out of Saint Sabina—a rare degree of geographical convergence in a city where people from different neighborhoods often live separate lives. The students had gathered in the church basement, where there was pizza, Capri Suns, and sign-making equipment. Here, some of the students were less circumspect, and spoke freely about their sense of being ignored. “Democrats can’t listen to the Parkland students supporting the prevention of gun violence but not listen to these children,” a student from the North Side named Juan Reyes told me. “Why does the country only listen when white bodies drop?” one sign read.
I caught up with McDade again later, at his home in the neighborhood of West Humboldt Park. It was around seven in the evening and the mood was peaceful. He was sitting on the front porch with three generations of his family—his mother, two sisters, a cousin, a toddler, and his fellow Peace Warrior Audrey Wright. McDade asked them to tell me their thoughts on gun violence. His twin sister, D’Angela, who sat with the baby in her lap, looked pensive.
“I had ended up accepting it, you know? Some people don’t care about their life or other people’s lives, and I just let it go,” she said. “Until it really hit home.”
Their mother, Natasha Shaw, recalled the night of the shooting. “Instead of us sitting on the porch, being happy-go-lucky, here we are with the ambulance in our house, and the fire department in our house, and we got people shot and bleeding out in our house,” she said. “It was surreal, that’s what it was.” There is still a bullet lodged in a window upstairs.
McDade and Wright took me for a walk around the neighborhood, which, McDade said, was “not dangerous, but then again it has its issues, just like any others.” West Humboldt Park has wide, tree-lined streets and a mix of two-story brick houses and three- and four-story apartment buildings. Birds were singing, the weather was balmy, and families sat and chatted on their porches.
At Hamlin Avenue, a powder-blue Chevrolet with modified suspension and oversized wheels rolled past, taking the landscaped roundabout at a slow cruise. McDade and Wright chuckled.
“He gotta be from the country,” McDade said.
“He gotta be,” Wright said. (The plates were from Tennessee.)
We reached Chicago Avenue, a main thoroughfare. Two police officers had pulled over an S.U.V. and stood waiting while the driver seemed to be looking for her documents. We chatted through several light changes, until a couple in a car at the stoplight started waving to McDade. “Oh,” he laughed. “That’s my Uncle Junior and his fiancée.” He waved. “My aunts and uncles, if they see me on the corner, they’re liable to just get out and snatch me up.”
We continued south down Hamlin, doing a loop to avoid a block that McDade said can be violent. He stopped to chat with relatives, including Uncle Junior and his fiancée, who now sat on a front porch eating French fries. Wright hummed along as a red motorcycle drove by playing Michael Jackson’s “I Can’t Help It.” A small woman approached with a large pit bull on a leash, and McDade gallantly positioned himself between me and Wright and the dog.
Down the street, another squad car pulled over another driver.
“See?” McDade said. “That’s all they’re doing today.”
“That’s all they ever do,” Wright said.
Then we were back on McDade’s block, and little kids thronged to him. “Not right now, not right now,” he told them. We walked around the house to the garage, where McDade’s sixty-six-year-old grandfather runs a car-repair shop. Wearing Dickies and work boots, he was lying on an old piece of carpet, the top half of his body hidden by a jacked-up Dodge Ram. He paused to change drill bits and wave. A younger man, who was working on a different car, said hello, too. “That was the other gentleman that was shot on the porch,” McDade said. It wasn’t that McDade wanted me to meet his grandfather; he wanted me to understand what he has to do, a man nearing retirement age, to make ends meet.
The sun was going down, and McDade and Wright returned to the porch, where McDade’s sister Natasia was finishing an ice-cream sundae.
Later that night, in West Garfield Park, one neighborhood south, a twelve-year-old from Covert, Michigan, named She’Nyah O’Flynn, who was in Chicago visiting her family for the summer, was shot and killed by a stray bullet while walking home from an eighth-grade graduation party.
By 7 P.M. on Friday, at Saint Sabina Church, the crowd had been amassing for hours in a blocked-off street outside the church where the rally was being held. The different factions of the movement were indicated by their T-shirts: white women wore green Sandy Hook Promise and red Moms Demand Action T-shirts, and a group of Latinx teen-agers wore blue T-shirts from a church called Immaculate Conception. Several young African-American men wore shirts commemorating slain friends; two older women wore shirts that read “Never Forget Deontae Smith” and “Never Forget Christopher Reeves.” The Saint Sabina security detail exuded authority, wearing formal suits. Shortly before the rally, the Parkland students emerged from inside the church dressed in gleaming white March for Our Lives baseball caps and blue March for Our Lives T-shirts. A phalanx of boom mikes followed, from local television stations but also from CNN and MTV, as they greeted the church’s pastor, Michael Pfleger, and went to watch Manuel Oliver, whose son, Joaquin, was killed in the Parkland shooting, as he painted a memorial mural outside of the church.
If the Parkland students rejected “thoughts and prayers” as empty comfort, the phrase being taken on by the Chicago students was “the wrong place at the wrong time.” A South Side student named Trevon Bosley gave a long list of examples of people who had been killed at home getting ready for school, on a bus coming home from school, in a park after school, playing basketball, celebrating the Fourth of July outside, and, in the case of his own brother, standing on church grounds. “The next time someone else asks you what makes you a possible victim of gun violence in Chicago, you tell them ‘living,’ ” he concluded. Maria Hernandez, an organizer with Chicago Black Lives Matter, criticized local politicians. “These people say they represent us—they don’t talk to us!” she said. Further actions were announced, including a shutdown of the Dan Ryan Expressway, on July 7th, and a hunger strike called Starve for Change.
In interviews leading up to the Peace Rally, Parkland students had insisted on speaking to the media only in tandem with a kid from Chicago. They claimed that the press was biased toward the privileged children of Parkland, paying too much attention to them and to school shootings, instead of focussing on the coalition they were trying to build, in which every gun death was equal in its tragedy and emergency, no matter the cause or context. They were right about the press focus; a local CBS report I watched emphasized the presence of the Parkland students instead of the home-town base, neglecting to mention Saint Sabina, North Lawndale, the local organizers of March for Our Lives, and their respective messages. The Archbishop of Chicago, several local politicians, and candidates for the city’s 2019 mayoral election were present, but the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, did not attend, and posted pictures of himself at a craft-beer festival at Wrigley Field on Twitter.
Despite the Parkland students’ insistence on taking a back seat, I was still surprised when Emma González did not speak at the event. Instead, the other Parkland students came out arm in arm, led by a Stoneman Douglas student named Kyrah Simon, and gave an expression of support that rivalled the speeches by will.i.am and Chance the Rapper in its lack of substance. “Everyone from Parkland is so grateful to be here with you tonight,” Simon said. “Our voices and your voices united are stronger than anything else!” When this short speech ended, the audience seemed confused—that was all? Father Pfleger had to hype the crowd as the Parkland visitors left the stage. This was either a magnanimous gesture or a cop-out. What example did it set if the Parkland students, with all of their radical empathy, treated Chicago’s violence as unknowable? The night had been a moving testament by young people trying to overcome a long history of inertia, and the visitors had chosen not to specify their commonalities. These thoughts, however, seemed ungenerous. Maybe González was simply overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem.
Then there was a memorial. It took more than ten minutes to read out the names and ages of the hundred and forty-seven people age twenty-one and younger who had died from gun violence in Chicago during the past calendar year. I counted the names of four children who did not reach their first birthdays.
The next day, the Chicago and Parkland students met for a joint breakfast that soon became a dance party, with music piped from one student’s phone into a microphone. Pulled from a circle of students dancing to T-Pain’s “Buy U a Drank” and asked why she didn’t speak as advertised the previous night, González responded, “I don’t have a comment.” I asked David Hogg, of Parkland, and Alex King, of Chicago, who were continuing their policy of joint interviews, about the Stoneman Douglas students’ muted presence the previous evening.
“Part of the reason we didn’t speak last night was because we can’t,” Hogg said. “We don’t know what it’s like to go to school and have to worry about being shot at. We have to worry about bullets coming from inside of our school, not outside of it. But across America we have to deal with both issues and reconcile that there’s inner-city gun violence, there’s Native American gun violence in the form of suicides, and there’s suburban gun violence in the form of mass shootings. We have to work together to solve these issues as an American community.” This was a good point, and one that I thought might have been more effective if it had been made in front of national reporters and a large crowd of people from different walks of life. I asked if white people in the suburbs could be trusted to listen to the experiences of black people in the cities, to see them as part of a shared national problem.
“I know they will,” Hogg said. “I have faith that they will.”
“Exactly,” King said. “No matter the color of skin, no matter where you’re from, pain is pain, so I feel like they will listen.”
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