THE ORGANIZERS: Malcolm London, Charlene Carruthers and Tasha Viets-VanLear
On the night of July 13, 2013, when George Zimmerman was found not guilty in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Charlene Carruthers was at the first meeting of Black Youth Project 100, a gathering of 100 black millennials — area students, musicians and poets among them — aiming to train and mobilize other young black activists across the country. “We held hands, and some people screamed, some people cried, some people were silent,” recalls Carruthers, 31. She is now national director of BYP100, which has chapters in seven states; high-profile police shootings of young black Chicagoans like Rekia Boyd (in 2012) and Laquan McDonald (in 2014) lend urgency to its mission. “Chicago has a deep tradition of the arts and activism,” says Carruthers. “So it’s no surprise that many of us are grounded in communities that overlap.” Malcolm London and Tasha Viets-VanLear, both 23, came to BYP100 through Young Chicago Authors, an arts organization for local youth that reaches more than 10,000 students each year. “It was writing and performing that allowed me to appreciate and love my blackness,” says Viets-VanLear, a singer, poet and dancer. “I can’t be a good organizer if I’m not a poet, and I can’t be a good poet if I’m not organizing,” says London, who released his first album, the deeply personal Opia, in October. As he sees it, the members of BYP100 help Chicago shine even during a dark national moment. “It’s a city of hurt and turmoil,” he says, “but also of so much hope, hustle and grind.”
Crossing the Divide: Riding the No. 66 bus to his North Side charter school, “once I passed a certain viaduct, the grass got greener, the buildings got taller, the homicide rate vanished,” recalls London. “Chicago is a segregated city. You don’t know the condition of your neighborhood until you leave it.”
Beyond Statistics: “People who see the homicide numbers out of Chicago don’t see how they stem from widespread poverty on the South and West Sides,” says Viets-VanLear. Echoes Carruthers: “The narrative of black-on-black crime absolves [Mayor] Rahm Emanuel or anyone not in a black neighborhood. It’s just crime.”
Art Awakens: Music has helped London process what’s going on around him — like his arrest at a protest in 2015 following McDonald's shooting. “The magic of spoken word, of hip-hop,” he says, “is that it allows you to get into these areas of your heart in a fresh way.”
— Ben Austen