Chicago has had another weekend of record violence. This time, 17 people were fatally shot in the city between Friday and early Monday morning. The victims included an eighth-grade honor student and 17-year-old twin boys.
That brings the murder tally so far this year to 638, 217 more than were killed during the same period last year but so common, they no longer are considered front-page news.
As bad as it is, as hard as the news hits him, Dr. LeRoy Graham says his old haunt, the place where he grew up, has gotten old and tired, but it's hardly the hopeless place news pundits have made it out to be since the long summer of violence erupted there.
“It doesn’t tell the stories of strong families, the people who worked hard to buy homes, build schools and places of worship,” the 62-year-old Graham lamented in the wake of the latest spate of violence this past weekend.
That’s as much an indictment against public officials as it is against the media, those of us who show up with our notebooks only to get the facts and leave.
For as long as he can remember, the Calumet Heights neighborhood that helped shape Graham has been a prosperous South Side neighborhood, a way station to something better.
That was certainly his parents’ hopes when they moved there in the late ‘60s. Both were blue-collar workers at the time. His mother, Marie, who started at the telephone company at age 17, worked her way up from a mail girl to a commercial office manger. And his stepfather, who died in 1979, worked for the city water filtration plant.
There was nothing all that special about their family. There were plenty of African-American families who purchased homes in the neighborhood in 1967 just as whites were moving out to suburbia and who didn't hesitate to chastise him if he stepped out of line.
“If I was doing wrong, someone called my house before I got down the street,” Graham said. “It made all the difference in the world.”
The Sandy Springs physician would go on to graduate in 1979 from Georgetown University School of Medicine, marry and raise two successful children of his own. Last month, after nearly four decades in private practice, he opened the Bridge Atlanta Medical Center, a charitable clinic, in Norcross.
If news of the constant violence ever made you wonder if anything good could ever come from the South Side of Chicago, here’s your answer.
Even so, Graham will admit Calumet Heights had trouble of its own.
"There was violence when I was growing up," Graham said. "There were street gangs. The so-called Gangster Disciples and Blackstone Rangers were both prominent."
The difference is that the violence, fueled almost entirely by the drug trade, is much worse. And it's true even in our neck of the woods.
Graham believes the high unemployment rate, about 30 percent for African-American males, is to blame.
“Young men, I think, get drawn into the trade because they have limited choices that lead into the drug trade and violence,” he said. “I don’t think they start out as menacing predators. They go to substandard schools, maybe get someone pregnant and they don’t see any other way out.”
But hold on. That doesn’t mean Graham condones the violence. He doesn’t.
“I just think we need to look at what are some of the root causes,” he said. “Unemployment and hopelessness leads to poor choices.”
To this day, when he returns to the two-bedroom Cape Cod bungalow that his parents purchased for $16,000 in 1967, where his 84-year-old mother still lives, Graham walks the 2.5 miles to Lake Michigan and back on his visits to Calumet.
"I've never been alone," he said. "There are other residents out there, too, refusing to live in fear."
And progress. Even now, developers are putting up multimillion-dollar live, work, play complex along Lake Michigan. There is a new art museum at 65th Street and Stony Island and lots of businesses.
Graham maintains that there are thousands like him who came out of that neighborhood, and that there are still families there striving to eke out a decent living, to make positive contributions to society.
He is saddened every time news breaks that there has been yet another murder in his old stomping ground. A thousand more people — 3,475 compared to 2,441 — have been shot this year in Chicago than at the same time last year.
"It breaks my heart, it really does and I get a little mad," he said. "Yes, it's terrible what's happening there, but you can't demonize a whole community."
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