Building up and reclaiming the Black community

TO BEAUTIFY BLACK neighborhoods abandoned buildings need to be renovated

By Billie House, House of David

The Black neighborhoods have been the stomping ground for removing imperative elements that are crucial to the nurturing, economic growth, survival, and financial well-being of their residents. Whenever there is a need to come up with funding, that usually doesn’t include the Black neighborhoods; it is always the Black neighborhoods that suffer.

This often comes in the form of school closings, lack of funding to school programs and upgrades to the school structures, including providing the state-of-the-art equipment, removal of trade and job training programs, no funding for youth recreational centers, lack of presence of police patrol and response to emergency calls, etc.

In order for the Black neighborhoods to be able to become communities again and built up, the following demands must be put into effect: 

• We demand the reparations that we were promised and never received for the suffering and oppression of the civil rights of our ancestors.
• We demand monetary assistance under all and any available programs, including that COVID-19 funding be strictly for the Black communities to be used toward but not limited to:

– Restore Job Training programs (this will help to curb some of the violence in the Black communities).

– Restore Trade School programs (this will help to curb some of the violence in the Black communities).

– Beautifying and opening the schools that were closed in the Black neighborhoods, as well as ensuring they receive the state-of-the-art equipment, including computers, laptops, iPads, art and language programs, a variety of sports programs, a variety of clubs, after-school programs, tutoring programs, gifted programs, etc. We want Black Americans to benefit from these opportunities and programs and not be bundled with the other folks that have become known as the Black and brown people. They have their own programs and have benefited from programs that should have been exclusively for Black Americans.

– Beautify the Black neighborhood with such things as nice landscaping, smooth streets that have been repaired; renovating abandoned buildings and turning them into recreational centers or some non-for-profit organization that would be beneficial to Black Americans; cleaning up the vacant lots and making them into something useful such as a neighborhood garden; cleaning up the graffiti; providing snow removal services on a regular basis and ensuring the city is monitoring the litter in the alleys, pest control, and management. We also want more cameras to be put in the neighborhoods.

– Restore community youth centers (this will help to curb some of the violence in the Black communities).

– Restore mental illness and drug/alcohol rehabilitation centers with programs to help Black Americans (this will help to curb some of the violence in the Black communities).

• We demand to form our own Black organization to receive the COVID-19 funds/monies that the Mayor of Chicago promised to give to organizations of her choice. She didn’t specify which organizations those would be but stated, that for the Black Americans, she would meet with them as though she would be their representative. This is not what we want and would like to have an unbiased presence and leadership for the distribution of our funds.

Enough is enough! Tired of being sick and tired! Time for a new movement and new leadership! Watch Out! We will make the right choices come next election!

Concerned Black Chicagoans.