TCR Investigative Reporting Practicum alum Sara Cooper covers “A Day of Remembrance,” a community healing event hosted by Community Renewal Society, TCR’s parent organization.
October 14th holds many meanings.
It has marked triumph, the day on which Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. It has also been marred by tragedy. October 14th, 2023 was the day Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was violently murdered in an act of hate. The date is George Floyd’s birthday, now commemorating five years of life lost.
These individuals and their stories capture the splintered picture of contemporary America–the ever-present threat of racial violence and institutional abuses of power, contrasted by the resolute advocates fighting against such injustices.
Yet these are not the lives that Congress has elected to uplift. Last week resolutions passed in the House and Senate to declare October 14th “National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk,” honoring someone who did more to stoke hatred than healing in our country.
In response, the Community Renewal Society partnered with other faith-based organizations on Tuesday to host “A Day of Remembrance,” a special event to honor those who have lost their lives to street and state violence.
“This country has a history of choosing who it forgets and who it remembers,” said Malcolm London, who goes by Xay, Manager of Organizing and Policy at the Community Renewal Society. “I wanted to make a day where we chose to remember, during all the chaos, all the people that we’ve lost that Congress will never name.”
“A Day of Remembrance” offered musical performances, a prayer space and a public altar to honor those who’ve died through violence. The night also featured a panel discussion with faith leaders and activists that reflected on the importance of people power and solidarity at this moment in time.
Since 2010, nearly 8,000 people have died by gun violence in Chicago, 78% of whom were Black. Now, as ICE agents descend on the Chicago area as part of the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” the threat of violence against brown and Black people is being felt across the city.
“This is not the first time we’ve been in this situation,” said panelist Frank Chapman, commenting on our current political reality. A lifelong activist who grew up in the Jim Crow South, Chapman noted the racial and politically motivated violence he has seen over his life, from the murder of Emmett Till to those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. “What I’m here to say here is, ain’t no way in hell we’re going back to yesterday. Too many people have died, too many people have fought.”
At “A Day of Remembrance,” that message resonated across generations.
“The violence that we’re seeing in the city right now at the hands of the national government is not new in any stretch, but we’re seeing it at a scale that’s never been seen before,” said Isabelle Butera, a 22-year-old attendee. “In order to harness that anger and resistance as communities we also need to hold space for the grief of the very real lives we’re losing in our communities.”
A centerpiece of the event was a public altar devoted to George Floyd and others whose lives were taken too early. Upon stacks of tables, dozens of portraits – mostly of young Black men – memorialized those whose deaths never got a headline.
Many of these portraits were provided by members of The Mother’s Healing Circle, a grief group for women who have lost family to violence. Several of these mothers had more than one person to place on the altar.
“There’s no drug on the planet that can actually cure grief,” said Sonja Henderson, founder of The Mother’s Healing Circle and the artist who constructed the altar. “But there is one cure for it and it is community care. It is love through community, through sharing of grief and through coming together as we’re doing tonight.”
According to Xay, this practice is one way of reclaiming dignity for his community. The most important people to remember, in his words, are each other.
“We deserve to be remembered, and we don’t have to be remembered by the institutions or by Congress to be validated. We get to do it ourselves.”