I ll Say It Again I Don t
A re-create of a reward flyer for information nigh Nancie Walker, a woman on Chicago'south South Side who was concluding seen on January. 28, 2003.
Scott Stewart/Dominicus-Times
I don't give a damn who's tired of hearing it. I'm not gonna stop proverb it: If 51 dogs were slain and discarded in trash cans, abandoned buildings and vacant lots beyond Chicago, attack burn and dismembered, this city would be up in arms.
Why not for at to the lowest degree 51 women slain here since 2001, and whose murders remain generally unsolved?
Why non for their families who seek solace and justice for these daughters whose innocent claret cries out from their cold graves?
Can y'all hear them?
Imagine their last gasps, amid the torture they suffered from their murderer who strangled or asphyxiated them, desecrated them?
Can you envision their final desperate struggle? Hear their cries for help before they at last succumbed to death — the calorie-free of life seeping from their frightened eyes? Visualize their final moments in the easily of someone who hated them rather than being embraced past someone who loved them?
I can. I must.
The cold. The pathos of their bodies dumped, one-half dressed, defiled. The pain. The shame. Crying out for help. And yet, no one came. No one answered.
Why shouldn't this city now have to answer?
The depravity. The inhumanity. This stark insanity of a city where they could effigy out how to build a skyscraper, reverse the river's flow and design a globe-grade skyline that shimmers. A city that cannot find — at least has not found — these women'south killers.
And why not?
What if it were 51 women mostly white instead of 51 women mostly Black? What if they were more often than not centre class instead of mostly poor and working class?
What if they lived and died in a posh Most North Side neighborhood or forth the Magnificent Mile, rather than on the South and West Sides on poverty's isle? Would these murders all the same be largely unsolved? Might this city and then care?
What if these women had not been all summarily — and falsely — characterized as "prostitutes" and "drug addicts"? Would we exist so hands dismissive of their fate? Would we still deem them every bit perhaps "less than," if non birthday "disposables," rather than as flesh and blood and heart and soul, created in the prototype of God?
What if "she" was your daughter, your mother, your sister, your aunt, your granddaughter, the girl next door? What if we could run across in the eyes of those amid these victims whom life may take pushed into the gutter, the soul of a broken woman, non just some "whore?" And so would this city practise more?
For Lollapalooza and an array of downtown amusement fests, resources menstruum. And when murder, rape or a string of robberies occur beyond the hood, no stone is left unturned. Those victims garner headlines and nightly news because they are of a different hue, or well to practice.
Remember Jussie Smollett and how rapidly police got to the bottom of the truth?
Just Black women and girls disappear, or are raped and murdered damn nigh every twenty-four hour period. And what does the metropolis exercise?
All the official hand wringing and explaining sounds like i big excuse. And the inability to solve the murders of the 51 simply show that this case is clearly not a priority for the mayor, or the police or for far too many.
Maybe I'thousand wrong. What I practise know is that some don't want to hear it anymore. In and then many words and with looks of dismay they say, "Shut up, John Fountain, yous've already said that. Write about something else, permit it become."
I tin't. I won't. And I don't requite a damn what "they" say. I said it once again. And I'm gonna say it some more.
E-mail: Author@johnwfountain.com
John Fountain led his form at Roosevelt University in a yearlong project on the 51 murdered Chicago women. To view the project, visit: www.unforgotten51.com
Ship letters to letters@suntimes.com .
Source: https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2021/3/12/22328323/chicago-unsolved-murders-black-women-unforgotten51-john-fountain
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