Housing
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Housing Then and Now – From 1947-2025
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series In the roughly 80 years since the Hickman case, not much has changed. We read the descriptions of housing conditions in the poor, Black neighborhoods of Chicago in the 1940s – from caving ceilings to pests. Through our tenant organizing, our canvassing and…
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Ohio Street Trial
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series The inquest into the ten deaths on Ohio Street would involve five public hearings, only two of which would take place before the murder trial of James Hickman, but the horrendous conditions, neglect by public authorities, and personal stories of tragic loss would…
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Courts are not Instruments of Justice
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series Banks and real estate & insurance companies had so influenced the political power in the city of Chicago (as elsewhere) that David Coleman, despite merely being a small landlord with no connections to the big bourgeoise, benefited from the system set up to…
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Paper was Made to Burn, Coal and Rags, Not People
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series Property owner Mary Adams and landlord David Coleman avoided court till the last hearing, then tried passing blame on “irrational” tenants. But the surviving Hickmans and several other tenants all testified that Coleman had threatened to burn the residents out of the building.…
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Under Capitalism, Renting is a Death Sentence
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series The first three chapters of People Wasn’t Made to Burn set the stage for the housing conditions that were killing tenants in Chicago in 1947 — the conditions that killed James Hickman’s four children. The eight-person Hickman family lived in an overcrowded one-room…
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People Wasn’t Made to Burn
28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series “At 11:30 p.m. on January 16, 1947, a fire began in the center room of the attic at 1733 West Washburne Avenue, a turn-of-the-century four story-brick building on Chicago’s Near West Side. The attic was divided into three separate rooms with a long…
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Housing
Housing is a core need that determines how people are able to show up in the world, how autonomously we can move, live, and exist, what sort of support we’re able to give others, and the amount of agency we can express or impose over space. We recognize housing as…
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Instead of housing our neighbors, the City of Lansing uses vacant homes for SWAT training
On March 12 in Lansing, Michigan, local police departments turned two vacant houses on South Hayford Avenue into a SWAT training playground. They did this with no advanced notice to residents and instead went lazily knocking on a few surrounding doors on the day of the training. Neighbors were subjected…
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Community BBQs at Empty Lot, Landlord Calls Cops
Since the eviction at Growing Hope Marketplace Hall on Wednesday August 23, 2023, Shelter Now has grown from an impromptu coalition of community members and organizations to a force to be reckoned with. Over the past two months, the group has organized a Week of Action targeting Ypsilanti government entities,…
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We Make the Community by Defending It
Neighborhood resists eviction of homeless people by local nonprofit board and business owners Growing Hope, Growing Fences Wednesday, August 23, 2023 the board of the local nonprofit Growing Hope called the cops and evicted all people staying underneath their downtown Marketplace Hall — without notice — and attempted to install…