EDITOR’S NOTE: 

Time and again, I’ve been drawn back to Chicago. The first time I went, more than a decade ago, it was to report on gun violence as a generational curse. I wanted to show how gun violence spread from family to family, neighbor to neighbor. I’d come across some research that likened gun death to a communicable disease. The closer you are to a gun violence victim, the more likely you were to become a victim yourself.

Despite the troubling frequency of shootings in Chicago in particular, the violence was largely concentrated in a handful of blocks in just a couple of neighborhoods. Black folks had migrated here a century ago, and red lines and covenants were designed to keep them there.

In the years I’d be in and out of the city, I’d meet a wide cast of people from different walks of life, on both sides of the law, who carried their own stories of how gun violence had touched them and their families: The young brother paralyzed by a party-crashing gang member. The young sister left handicapped in an attempted hit on her boyfriend. The mother who’d lost one son to gun violence and another son to prison for a separate shooting, her mind racked by the emotional chaos of it all. The wheelchair-bound former drug dealer who turned his life around, but not before his own son was shot and left paralyzed. The mother whose daughter was shot and killed in a robbery, whose grief settled so deeply inside of her that to this day she carries the girl’s ashes around in a gold urn. The white police sergeant who was so blinded by his blue loyalty that he struggled to separate Black perpetrators from Black victims and Black innocents. The mother who watched a stray bullet crash into the windshield of her parked car and strike her 10-year-old daughter in the head, killing her instantly. The pediatric emergency room chief who’s had to stitch the little limbs of preschoolers back together after they’d been torn to pieces by bullets. The teachers who’ve resigned themselves to the fact that any number of classroom seats will be vacant come the school year because surviving summer is a privilege that too many Black boys and girls in the city aren’t afforded.

Threaded between all the heartbreaking stories of life, death, and survival in Chicago are many stories of surprising resilience even by Black American standards of indomitable survival. Here are people who find the will to keep on keeping on in the face of extraordinary hurt.

It’s a beautiful city, rich in history and culture and a kind of Blackness that feels essential to understanding a broader sense of American Blackness. The migrants who poured into the city from the South during the migration brought with them many of their cultural and political sensibilities, which were eventually shaped and molded to their new realities up North.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Chicago’s Black community began to organize politically. The first African American politician elected to Congress in the post-Reconstruction era was a Chicagoan named Oscar Stanton De Priest, who took office in 1929 and represented Illinois’s first congressional district. Around the same time, after years of struggle and organizing, the city’s majority-Black plant workers formed the interracial United Packinghouse Workers of America, one of the first and most powerful unions of its kind, representing a rare cross-racial power play. The organization worked to address issues such as discrimination in housing and employment and helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chicago was home to a vibrant Black Power movement. The Black Panthers advocated self-defense against a white political and police system that they saw as an enemy of Black people.

As Chicago—like other major American cities—was being remade by deindustrialization, homegrown gangs were growing in size, influence, and power. The systematic marginalization of the city’s Black population, pressed into increasingly poorer and increasingly overcrowded neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides, created an ecosystem of deprivation and disinvestment that—coupled with the white power structure’s sheer brutality—made poor Black communities ripe soil for street gangs to thrive. No longer would the racist Chicago police regime be the sole enemy of a particular class of Black youth. Black gangs would emerge as a source of belonging and protection, but also of bloodshed and destruction. Disillusioned Black youth, disenchanted with a society that had time and again cast them aside, found solace within the ranks of these highly organized neighborhood gang networks. With their allure of power, protection, and economic opportunity, gangs became a rallying point for a whole generation of young people scraping to survive.

As the gangs grew in strength and influence, their presence cast an ever-darkening shadow over Chicago’s proud but marginalized communities. Largely disconnected from the city’s political and economic engines, these young people became trapped in a cycle of violence that haunts the city to this day.

Meanwhile, the gun industry was growing more lucrative and influential.

After the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the signing of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, the National Rifle Association shifted its focus from hunting and sport shooting to promoting the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own firearms for self-defense. This message resonated with many white Americans who feared the loss of their white privilege and white power as Black Americans gained access to a fuller kind of American citizenship.

At the same time, in the urban North, on the heels of a decades-long influx of Black Southerners and declining investment, the social and economic conditions of redlined slums were growing increasingly volatile. Into the 1970s, poverty, crime, and deteriorating infrastructure were hallmarks of many of the communities where large poor Black populations lived. The lack of investment in these communities by the local, state, and federal governments fueled a cycle of poverty and marginalization that persisted throughout the decade. To make matters even more volatile, widespread police abuses and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sparked fiery riots and rebellions that would tear through some of America’s largest cities, east to west. Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, and New Orleans would all glow in the embers of America’s seething war with itself and the never-ending so-called Negro Problem.

After the 1967 riots in Detroit, gun sales skyrocketed. The city issued four times as many handgun permits in 1968 as it did in 1965. The city’s white suburbs issued five times as many permits. White paramilitary neighborhood protective associations began to spring up along with more explicitly white supremacist militia groups. They began stockpiling weapons.

In the first half of the 20th century, an average of about 10 million firearms were manufactured for the civilian market in each decade. But between 1958 and 1968, the height of the civil rights movement, nearly 30 million guns were added to the civilian stockpile. In 1969, a congressional commission on gun violence found that the steepest increase in privately owned guns took place between 1963 and 1968, “a period of urban riots and sharply rising crime rates,” in which annual rifle and shotguns sales doubled and handgun sales quadrupled. The commission’s conclusion was that fear of violence was pushing people to buy more guns. What they didn’t say was who were the feared and who were the fearful.

By 1972, the Republican platform supported gun control measures that aimed to limit the availability of “cheap handguns.” But it wasn’t the first time the GOP supported gun control measures. In 1967, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act, which banned people from carrying loaded firearms in public without a permit. The act was signed in an effort to disarm the Black Panther Party. That same year, dozens of Black Panthers took to the steps of the California statehouse to protest, armed with pistols and shotguns in hand. “The time has come for Black people to arm themselves,” they said.

However, just three years later, in 1975, Reagan, who was preparing to challenge Gerald R. Ford for the Republican nomination, wrote in Guns & Ammo magazine that the Second Amendment was clear and left little room for gun control advocates. By 1980, the GOP platform stated that the right of citizens to own guns must be protected, and federal registration of firearms should be opposed. As a result, the NRA endorsed Reagan for president in 1980, marking the first time it had ever endorsed a presidential candidate.

Over the coming decades, record numbers of firearms poured into America’s streets, a seemingly endless supply of which would be siphoned from the pipeline between gun factories and gun shops all across the US and into the hands of illegal gunrunners and shooters.

For years, Chicago has been a kind of North Star for me, a guiding light that has allowed me to shine attention down into some of the darkest places. In hundreds of hours of reporting, I managed to stitch together a portrait of America that most at best willfully refuse to acknowledge, or at worst exploit to disparage Black people. Certainly, much of my work reveals the kind of Black pain all too common inside the community. But I also want to believe that these stories speak to the humanity of Black folks and the inhumanity of the system.

But there’s one story I have never been able to get my arms around—perhaps the most important story I have never told. This particular story takes place in one of the city’s most important, traditionally well-heeled Black communities: Chatham. It’s also a story so thick with pain and emotion that I’ve had to piece it together without the participation of those closest to it. It’s a story that sadly illustrates the brief yet violent timeline of a single gun in America: a matte-silver .45-caliber Smith & Wesson 457s, serial number VJH755. Born out of forged steel in Massachusetts, it crossed to the dark side in Mississippi, and fulfilled its fate on the streets of Chicago.

Awriter once called Chatham “Mayberry of the South Side.” It was the kind of place that Black families flocked to in droves post–World War II. They filled sturdy, well-kept houses on tree-lined streets, joined social clubs and neighborhood organizations. And built community on a foundation of upward mobility, Black pride, and socioeconomic stability. Chatham was the opposite of the Chicago slums that many other Black Chicagoans were pushed into.

In a prior lifetime, the neighborhood was a suburb of mostly ethnic white immigrants—Protestants and Catholics from Hungary and Ireland and Jews from Eastern Europe and Germany. But as Black migrants began streaming north to Chicago, communities like Chatham began to transition. Between 1950 and 1960, Chatham’s Black population went from 1 percent to nearly 64 percent.

These new Chatham residents were a blend of professionals and working- and middle-class folks, who’d work in union-protected industries, government jobs, and small businesses they built from scratch. Their efforts would bear fruit. There was the Johnson Products Company (of Ultra Sheen fame), and financial institutions like Independence Bank and Seaway National Bank, which, at their respective peaks, were the largest Black-owned banks in the country. Churches, schools, and social organizations nurtured generations of residents proud to call Chatham home—among them, luminaries like the writer Gwendolyn Brooks, baseball great Ernie Banks, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.

Chatham’s prominence, its brick bungalows, and strong economic footing made it an island of the Black middle class in a sea of stubborn economic strife and violence. As Chicago’s industrial luster dulled, huge swaths of the city started to decline. Already poor and underserved Black neighborhoods fell further into crime and dilapidation. By the end of the 1990s, Chatham started to feel its once-sturdy foundation trembling as its population grew older and fewer, falling from a high of 47,287 in 1970 to 37,275 in 2000. Just as Chatham’s protective buffer against the world beyond began to erode, it was hit with one of its greatest challenges—the Great Recession of 2007–09.

The economic collapse hit Black Americans especially hard, widening the racial wealth gap. Black families lost 53 percent of their net worth, destroying decades of progress. By the end of the recession, nearly 35 percent of Black families had either zero or negative net worth.

The recession plunged Chatham into a free fall from which it has struggled to recover.

Chatham’s foreclosure rate was 14th highest out of 80 Chicago neighborhoods. Local businesses that had thrived for decades were struggling, and some longtime residents, facing unemployment and shrinking retirement funds, were forced to leave. The sense of safety and pride in homeownership that had defined Chatham waned, replaced by a creeping sense of loss. In the shadow of these economic woes came violence.

While trying to wrap my mind around the connection between violent crime and the economic woes of post-recession Chatham, I stumbled across a name in the Chicago Tribune—Thomas Wortham IV. Tommy, as family and friends called him, was a son of Chatham, featured in an article about violence closing in on the neighborhood. Much of it was happening around a popular public park, Cole Park. Tommy was the president of the Cole Park Advisory Council.

A spate of shootings around the park had sent fear coursing through the neighborhood. Tommy was determined to do something about it. “It’s starting to feel like it’s expected in this community. When people think of the South Side of Chicago, they think violence,” said Tommy, then 30. “In Chatham, that’s not what we see. We’re going to fix it, so it doesn’t happen again.”

Wortham’s family is one of those longtime anchor families in the community. His grandfather built the family’s home right across the street from the park a half century ago, brick by brick, with his own hands. And for most of Wortham’s life, he had a front-row seat to the theater that was Cole Park. On any given night, when the weather was right, the place would come alive with neighborhood residents, lining the basketball courts to watch the ballers ball. Relatives gathered for reunions and barbecues there. Families pooled beneath the summer sun, and young lovers, hand in hand, stole not-so-private moments in the park of whose namesake, the singer and Chicago native Nat King Cole, would be proud.