Community Voice: Five Years Since Cicero Violence Post-George Floyd, Little Has Changed
Illustration by Jasmin Hernandez
By Ankur Singh
I watched the pandemic unfold from my bedroom window, which overlooked Cermak Road, throughout 2020. In between Zoom calls, I sat at my desk and watched the world pass by the busy street.
At first, ambulances were arriving nearly every hour, with Cicero being a major COVID hotspot. Days later, funerals and caskets were driving by. As we slowly adapted to the times, people in the neighborhood got creative. I watched birthday party caravans and high school graduations with balloons, music, and homemade posters taped to car windows.
On June 1, 2020, I turned 26. I’ve always been a little sad on my birthday, and that year was particularly difficult. A few days earlier on May 25, I, like many around the world, watched a video of a police officer murdering George Floyd in broad daylight.
I spent my birthday watching men with snipers on the roof of the dollar store across the street from my bedroom window. I watched militarized police and armored vehicles pass. I watched crowds of mostly Latino residents attack Black people who they thought were rioting, even if they were just trying to get home. They threw rocks at cars with Black drivers and assaulted others with bats. One man threw a spear at another man. Two Cicero residents were killed in retaliatory violence, one right next to my apartment. Similar scenes played out in neighborhoods like Little Village and Pilsen.
Since then whenever my birthday comes around, I can’t help but think about that day.
Five years later, Donald Trump and his brand of white supremacy is in the White House again. The tensions between immigrant and Black neighborhoods in Chicago are ongoing, most recently spurred by a crisis created by Texas Governor Greg Abbott after he bussed tens of thousands of mostly Venezuelan migrants to Chicago. The city quickly mobilized resources to support the new arrivals at a pace many Black and long-time Mexican residents felt they’ve never received. In the five years since June 1, 2020 the path to racial reconciliation seems increasingly obscure.
When I think about that day, I think about the series of culminating events that led to the violence in Cicero. The police murder of George Floyd isn’t even the start. Perhaps it started in the 90’s, when Mexican immigrants began moving into the neighborhood in huge numbers, kicking off a decade of white flight. Or perhaps it starts with Cicero’s past as a notorious sundown town, culminating when a civil rights march through Cicero in the 1960s was met with a violent mob. Perhaps it started nearly 100 years ago, when mobster Al Capone took over the local government to set up his homebase with impunity, a culture of corruption that still exists in Cicero’s local politics today. Or perhaps it started from the very origins of the United States when European settlers killed the indigenous people, enslaved Africans, and created a strict racial hierarchy throughout all of this country’s institutions with divide and conquer tactics pitting minorities against each other.
After George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, mass protests spread across the country. Five days later on May 30, tens of thousands of protestors gathered in downtown Chicago, prompting Mayor Lori Lightfoot to raise the bridges into the loop, enact a curfew, and shut down access to downtown for several days. Unable to go downtown, people went to the surrounding neighborhoods.
The first signs something was about to happen in Cicero was when we started noticing police putting barricades up around town. In the afternoon, local stores reported break-ins. A heavy police presence, including state police and national guard, was dispatched to the commercial center at the intersection of Cicero and Cermak. Along Cicero Avenue are most of the big box stores where the police were concentrated, leaving the smaller family owned businesses on Cermak exposed. As a result,crowds of residents took it upon themselves to protect them. But protection quickly turned into anti-Black violence with anybody Black being a target. I noticed that the police, in several cases, watched or actively cheered on the crowds.
I left my friends, who were on the streets trying to de-escalate the tension, and went home. My sibling cooked me dinner and, in the era of pandemic birthdays, we played a game on a Zoom call with the rest of our family.
It was hard to be present on that call. While my family laughed on Zoom, sirens and gunshots went off in the background. My parents asked me what was going on. My sibling and I looked at each other. I lied. I told my parents it was nothing. It was just the sound of ambulances taking people to the hospital, just as they’ve been doing since March.
In a rush to return to normal, it seems we failed to learn anything from the preventable deaths in 2020, whether it be from the pandemic, police brutality, or racial violence.
Five years later, the Trump administration is rapidly undoing what little progress toward racial justice we made. And yet, I don’t feel as powerless as I did that tragic day. There is still plenty left to do. However, I still feel a little sad on my birthday each year— a day no longer associated with another year of life but also of death.
Ankur Singh is a Cicero-based, Chicago adjacent freelance journalist and organizer. His work has been published in The Washington Post, In These Times, Chicago Reader, Prism Reports, Truthout and more. He is a co-founder of the hyperlocal, bilingual news outlet Cicero Independiente.
Our “Community Voice” section gives Cicero and Berwyn residents an opportunity to share their thoughts, experiences and opinions. Information is fact-checked for accuracy. To contribute a “Community Voice” article email info@ciceroindependiente.com.
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