Black-on-black, likely gang related, Obama’s Chicago, nothing to see here, move along…
Via Daily Mail:
Thirteen people, including a three-year-old child, were shot at a Chicago park on Thursday night.
The gunfire broke out around 10:15 p.m. and appeared to target a basketball court on the 51st Street side of Cornell Square Park in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, The Chicago Tribune reported.
Emergency crews rushed to the scene and 10 adults and the child were transported to nearby hospitals, according to the Chicago Fire Department’s media office. The 12th victim drove himself to Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, a source told the Tribune.
A 13th victim, a 33-year-old woman with a gunshot wound to the back near one shoulder, has also been identified.
Update:
Such irony. And such improvement since then, not.
PLAYBOY: What was your first organizational effort?
ALINSKY: My first solo effort was organizing the Back of the Yards area of Chicago, one of the most squalid slums in the country. I was helped a hell of a lot by the moonlighting I’d done as an organizer for the C.I.O., and I’d got to know John L. Lewis very well; I later mediated between him and F.D.R. when their political alliance grew shaky. We became close friends and I learned a lot from him. But I always felt that my own role lay outside the labor movement. What I wanted to try to do was apply the organizing techniques I’d mastered with the C.I.O. to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements in the country could take control of their own communities and their own destinies. Up till then, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never entire communities. This was the field I wanted to make my own — community organization for community power and for radical goals.
PLAYBOY: Why did you pick the Back of the Yards district as your first target?
ALINSKY: It appealed to me for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was the area behind the Chicago Stockyards that Upton Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle at the turn of the century, and nothing at all had been done to improve conditions since then. It was the nadir of all slums in America. People were crushed and demoralized, either jobless or getting starvation wages, diseased, living in filthy, rotting unheated shanties, with barely enough food and clothing to keep alive. And it was a cesspool of hate; the Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Negroes, Mexicans and Lithuanians all hated each other and all of them hated the Irish, who returned the sentiment in spades.