For the last few weeks, I have been talking with gardeners at an imperiled community garden on the South Side of Chicago.  My colleagues at the Invisible Institute and I are making a “live documentary” about the garden, daily posting short conversations with gardeners, speaking out of their 10’ x 10’ plots, while we work on a full-length narrative.  (You can taste our work at the end of this post.)  At this point, we don’t yet know how the story ends.

Located at 61st Street and Dorchester Avenue, the garden is on land owned by the University of Chicago.  Since 2000, the U of C has allowed the gardeners—I am among them—to use the site.  Last spring, it informed us it wants its land back The University has no immediate plans to build on the site, but rather intends to use it temporarily as a staging area for the construction of a building at the other end of the block. It has set October 30 as the deadline for the gardeners to vacate the land they have cultivated.

Over the past six months, various efforts have been made to engage the U of C in conversation about possible practical alternatives that would preserve the garden until the time comes to build on it.  (That process began with this essay.)  While we have had some fruitful, informal conversations with individual administrators, the institution’s position has remained unchanged: It’s our land. We want it back. You always knew your use of it was provisional.

Two years ago, Chicago newspapers and air waves were full of public discussion of patterns of police abuse, government secrecy, and institutional denial. As converging police scandals threatened to engulf his administration, Mayor Daley rebranded the agency that investigates abuse complaints, appointed a new police superintendent, and promised an era of reform.

Today public debate is muted. There are several reasons for this. Among them is the unresolved status of a key legal issue, arising from Bond v. Utreras, a federal civil rights alleging police abuse. In 2007, Judge Joan Lefkow of the U.S. District Court ruled in Bond that certain police documents—including the complaint files of the individual officer defendants and a list of 662 officers with the most citizen complaints in a five year period—are public information.

In a strong, eloquent opinion, Judge Lefkow went back to first principles. Such information must be available to the public, she wrote, so we as citizens can hold accountable the public officials we have entrusted with the powers to detain, arrest, and use force.

The City appealed Lefkow’s ruling to the Seventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. It has been pending there for more than two years. For much of this period, the public conversation has been frozen in a state of suspension.

In the meantime, the legal struggle over official secrecy has continued unabated. If anything, it has intensified. It is being waged on multiple fronts. The City has worked tirelessly to maintain its regime of secrecy. And civil rights attorneys have countered with strategies to force greater transparency.

Studs Terkel and caretaker JR Millares. January 11, 2008

The following is an excerpt from a speech I gave on the occasion of receiving an award from Rape Victim Advocates in 2005. Studs Terkel presented the award. That gave me an opening to talk about him a bit. I quoted an invocation by Rev. William Sloan Coffin that Studs, in recent years, frequently included in his remarks on public occasions. Many words have been uttered about Studs in the last few days; many more will be spoken. It seems fitting on this day to recall these words that, at the end of his long life, spoke so deeply to him. - Jamie Kalven

In order to give an account of Studs’ influence on me, I have to excavate down to bedrock. For there is a sense in which I grew up inside his voice. The radio station that was his original and longtime home—WFMT—was always on in my parents’ house. It was the medium through which my brothers, my sister and I moved growing up. And Studs was on the air a lot in those days—at 10:00 am on weekday mornings, and then again on Sunday evening. For me as a child, the sound of his voice conjured the richness of the wide world beyond the household and carried the promise of how much of that richness a single sensibility could absorb without bursting. He was my World Wide Web. Together with my father, Studs dramatized for me the joys and possibilities of conversation. They planted the seeds of the conviction, now central to my understanding of both the First Amendment and my literary vocation, that there is nothing that cannot be talked about.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera

My mission—with multimedia help from my colleagues David Eads, Patricia Evans, and Jason Reblando—is to place and ground the conversation that will unfold at this conference.

Let’s begin by locating the eight square blocks of the title. The coordinates are 35th and 39th, State and Federal: the footprint of the Stateway Gardens public housing development. Eight high-rise buildings—a total of 1,644 family apartments—on 33 acres. At full occupancy, the legal population was roughly 5,000. Others lived there off the lease. And then there were those who didn’t collect their mail or lay their heads on the pillow at Stateway, yet regarded it, in some sense, as home. I am one of them.

I first came to Stateway Gardens in the early 1990’s, following a set of moral intuitions where they led. As a citizen, I was moved to explore what it might mean to conduct oneself as a neighbor under conditions of urban apartheid. As a writer, I felt the need to earn the right to use certain words. I was, in short, deeply but actively confused. Over time and by degrees, the Stateway community embraced me with hospitality and kindness that changed the course of my life. Day after day, year after year, I kept coming back. I came back, because I found useful work to do. Because I formed sustaining friendships. Because I located a place to stand where I could resist the gravitational pull of the official narrative about inner city neighborhoods and see with my own eyes. That perspective, that view from the ground, became for me a personal necessity—a form of inquiry and intellectual accountability.

In mid-December, the parties in Bond v. Utreras, et al, the federal civil rights suit described in "Kicking the Pigeon," agreed to settle, subject to Chicago City Council approval.

Resolution of the Bond case brings to an end the legal confrontation precipitated by the City's effort to have Jamie Kalven held in contempt for refusing to comply with its subpoena seeking his notes. On June 27, 2006, Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys ruled in Kalven's favor. As of the time of the settlement, the City had appealed Judge Keys' ruling to Judge Joan Lefkow.

An article on the Bond settlement--"Alleged cop brutality case settled--but is it just one of many?"--appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. Another--"City drops lawsuit against local journalist"--appeared in the Hyde Park Herald.