Sankofa Chicago

Closed captioning and audio description funded by Part-Time Faculty Development Grant at Columbia College, Chicago.

[low music playing] - A skin doctor.

- I want to be a veterinarian.

- Um, I want to be a paleontologist.

- A, um, clinic, like for pets.

- Do you guys know what you wanna be when you grow up?

- No.

- No.

- Uh, I wanna be a, um, a professional soccer player when I grow up.

- I grow up I want to be a chemical scientist.

- I want to be a software engineer because me and my brother tried it out and we really liked it.

- I want to be a superhero.

- Why?

- Because I have super powers.

I have super speeds.

And I have Black Panther sense.

- I used to want to be a police officer, but since all this protesting and they're not being as nice to the black people, they've been hurting black people.

And they just need to stop so the black people are more safe and they want what equal for black people, just like womens want it equal for boys.

- This is Chicago, where I now call home.

Its population is 2.7 million, and it's known for its history, food, jazz, and unfortunately, its shootings.

And I have 2 black boys, and I don't want them or other black or brown boys or girls to be a statistic.

Not here or anywhere in the United States.

So I decided to conduct some research on the future of our Black children, starting here in Chicago.

But to know one's future, you must know your past.

[funky music] - Sankofo, it means, it's not a taboo when you forget something, and you go back for it.

[jazz music] - No.

[red buzzer sound] - No.

[red buzzer sound] [red buzzer sound] - Did you know?

- Miss Wells started the first black kindergarten in Chicago.

- She was a journalist, a activist who led a anti-lynching crusade.

She also lived in Bronzeville.

- I think it's really important that we have black history in school curriculum.

I feel that there was definitely a lack of that growing up in this country.

As a kid, I didn't have that education and having had to learn it myself is a disservice to everyone, especially since black history really impacts all the other minority stories that happened in this country as well.

And so the fact that it still isn't incorporated today in many curriculums is really disheartening to me.

- Growing up in Texas, my understanding of black history and just history in general, is very skewed.

And I think that that has caused a lot of the problems in our country today.

And so I think it's so important to learn about history from everybody's perspective.

And black history, I mean, our whole country being built on slavery is so important to understand and how that impacts everybody.

- In Washington, DC, a lot of those paved streets, slaves paved those streets down on their hands and knees.

They did that.

And they helped build the railroad.

They did a lot of work around here in America.

And it's important because we are part of the fabric of America becoming what it is today.

- I think the teacher, the non-black teacher, I should say all teacher, I think they're afraid to incorporate black history, especially those who aren't black because they're afraid they'll do it wrong.

So, or offend somebody.

So I am the parent who stands up and says, "Hey, it's February.

I want to come in and talk about black history."

There may be some other parents who feel like it's not their job.

Why is it our job to teach and not something that the school takes on, school administration takes on, and it puts it into the curriculum besides I have a dream and Rosa Parks.

That seems to be the 2 things that schools like to teach.

- One of the first person to discover Chicago was a Black man, although he found the Native Americans here, was by the name of Jeanne du Sable or John du Sable.

When we're studying Black history here, we also, we often learn about the traditional things like Martin Luther King.

We learn about Malcolm X.

We learn about Madam C.J.

Walker.

We learn about the Harriet Tubmans.

But black history credates way, way, way, way, way, way back to that.

When we're talking about Black history, we need to start talking about our Black kings and queens, our scientists, our philosophers, our mathematicians, the ones who, our Timbuktu college and university.

The people who basically taught all the Romans and all of the Europeans their knowledge.

But see, we don't know these things because at school we only taught a small factor of Black history, like the late 1800s or early 1900s.

Well, Black history predates slavery.

- It wasn't really a part of the history, but I taught it in my classroom.

From the time I started, in 1962, each year I would have my children work on Black history programs.

We would, when I went into the library, all of my children were given a, I guess, you would call it, assignment to do black history scrapbooks.

- I was brought up in a home where my father really enjoyed talking about black history.

I went to a high school where the principal taught us about black history, things we didn't know.

And my dad told us about it from a personal viewpoint as far as his father was born a slave in 1848, June the10th.

And his father's mother, his grandmother, on his paternal grandmother, came from Africa.

And my sister, Kate, had gone to Africa to find out where the ship that brought her to America came from, and she went to the Washington, D.C. Archives and looked up, and I think she found the ship that she supposedly had come on, in on, and they changed her name to Sally.

And we talked about it in our home.

We were brought up talking about how dad would tell us about we came from kings and queens and that we were very important people.

And how some of us became slave of my ancestors was that the tribes would fight with each other and they would, you know, capture the queens and they would bring them over as slaves.

So a lot of information I got from my dad, but I really loved it.

And I've always thought about how I came to be in America and how it's important that my kids know that their great-grandfather was a slave, and I am the granddaughter of a slave.

- Black History started in schools in 1915 with Dr. Carter G. Woodson and his colleagues here in Chicago.

In 1967, Illinois passed a law that history books would include Negroes and other ethnic groups.

In 1981, every public school in the state was mandated to teach black history.

In March 2020, amendment to the bill HB4954 would require that all schools in Illinois teach Black History beyond slavery.

But this has not been passed.

- No, no, there were no black history, nothing, nothing like that.

- I was in a improv show and they called me and asked me what's an influential black female that they could act out?

And I said Ida B.

Wells, you know, with the whole just using the name of Congress Parkway and just a whole entire stage, what had no idea who she was or what it was.

And yeah, and we're naming streets after these people, and yet nobody knows who they are and what influence they had.

And that's very, very sad.

And there's a huge disconnect in things like naming streets versus actually knowing what happened.

- Black history, black lives, it is extremely important.

It's, you know, it's part of our culture.

It's what's going on in this world.

I feel like our kids need to know.

By educating them, it helps our world and have a little less hate and a little more understanding for everybody.

- We had little segments of history that were taught to us.

When slavery was introduced to me, it was introduced to me from a white high school teacher.

He immediately began to discredit the idea that slaves had even been mistreated and created analogies of slaves to farm equipment and a show of like just having grown up with it being so segregated even in my curriculum and discrediting, I would really like to see that more integrated and more natural and more of a continuing conversation so there's not that disruption for my children of trying to make sense of the world.

Ultimately, from just an old white perspective.

- Kids need to know them, their own history.

I feel like that's why it's constantly repeating itself because it's the wrong history that's taught in the school.

And they need to rewrite history books with the honest truth because there's a lot of untruthful things that are out there.

- A people that do not know their history, are doomed to repeat it.

Was it W.E.B.

Du Bois are doomed to repeat it.

Was it W.E.B.

Du Bois are doomed to repeat it.

Was it W.E.B.

Du Bois but yeah, we have to keep our history in mind and know that slavery existed and know what our parents went through and our grandparents.

And that those were some horrible times that we don't ever want to see repeated again.

[funky music] - I recognize Martin Luther King Jr. And he's number 1.

- Number 1 is Martin Luther King Jr. - Martin Luther King Jr. - Yeah.

- Did you know?

- Dr. King lived in Chicago in 1966 to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement to protest against segregation.

[funky music] - I think I know number 2, Kanye West.

Wasn't he a singer?

[red buzzer sound] - I know Kanye West.

He's a famous singer.

And he's number 2.

- Did you know?

- He is a rapper, singer, producer, and a entrepreneur.

Raised in Chicago on the South Side.

- He has140 million records sold.

And 21 Grammy Awards.

- I bounced around from school to school and some schools would have really strong black history programs, and others wouldn't.

We should have a program that's in all of our schools.

There should be 1 either written, created, where it's an actual course that you have to take.

Like when I went to an HBCU, when I got to Morehouse, it was mandatory that you received 400 years of good, solid, truthful black history, so that you would know exactly where you come from and things that went down before.

- I enrolled in my graduate program for my doctoral degree.

I'm now a doctoral candidate.

And 1 of the things that I had to do, I had to resign from my full-time position and work part-time.

I started subbing at different schools.

1 of the things that I realized with going to different schools on the south side of Chicago, which I have been to more than 25 schools, the issue is there are no full-time social workers.

The guidance counselors are shared between schools.

We do not have nursing.

We do not have libraries.

We do not even have gym teachers.

A lot of our schools were filled with substitute teachers.

A lot of our reading schools for students that are reading program or science programs were filled with long-term service because we were substitute teachers because we do not have the funding to hire qualified and appropriate teachers on the South Side of Chicago.

- You can go into this school system and you'll see a lack of resources.

Like my first day at 1 of these schools, there were ants all over the floor.

And I'm talking about a fourth grade class.

There were ants all over the floor and they had no air conditioning.

And it was super hot outside.

The computers were outdated.

I mean, it's just so much.

And then you go to other areas where it's not us and they have state of the art everything.

So a lot of us were isolated and then the resources are taken out.

- And in Chicago, I just feel like there's whole swaths of the city that get neglected.

Like it's like cutting off blood supply to certain parts of, you know, our body and, you know, without having grocery stores, without having good education.

Like our education system I don't think is great here.

The funding going from neighborhood to neighborhood rather than sharing Chicago public education as 1 district, I think that that could help a lot.

- I think we should put faith in the public schools, fund them appropriately, and not assume they're going to fail.

And we would see a lot more across the board positive numbers.

I think it oftentimes comes down to money.

- I think the thing that's kind of pervasive in Chicago because of the segregated nature of the city, there'll still be discriminatory practices there.

Not as much gang violence, but still with the schooling system, it's all about testing.

So if you can't get into a certain school or you don't test high enough, you can't get into the schools that have the best resources.

So whether it's South Side, North Side, you still, West Side, you still have facing an uphill battle.

- Like in this area, there's so many programs that, that were started in this area to address the systemic issue.

But then these are grant-funded programs.

So now you need private funders or you need the government or the city to feed into these programs.

So that's another issue because when I was a therapist, our grant was, we didn't get the grant.

So I'm going into homes, I'm providing mental health services, I'm helping family, I'm doing family counseling, I'm meeting with children, I'm meeting with parents.

And then our grant was pulled.

So guess what happened?

They pulled us out.

- Spending some time in the suburbs and growing up there.

We're a minority in the country, but you're much more of a minority in the suburbs.

And the thoughts when it comes to education and what you're going to do as you get older in some of these areas that are more affluent or maybe less African Americans, less black and brown, more white, is there's an expectation that you will have a profession, that you will go beyond your schooling and continue your education and grow to be a leader or an entrepreneur.

I think that in African-American community, there is, we don't have that.

And I do think that expectations should not be set so low by society for our groups.

We should be lifting ourselves higher.

We should be supporting each other, watching out for each other, and helping others in our community grow.

[jazz music] - Number 4, I'm pretty sure has her name.

It start with or ends with Marshal.

[buzzer sound] [buzzer sound] - She was a... - She was a pilot.

...pilot.

[green buzzer sound] - Did you know?

- Ms. Coleman was the first black woman licensed to fly a plane.

She lived in Bronzeville and was buried here.

- From this area into the predominantly white schools, the history they talked about, they start off with slavery.

So I'm in fourth grade and surrounded by all white kids.

And I see a video, big screen of us being attacked by dogs and us being beat by police.

And then the white kids around me were laughing.

- Most of them came from Africa and Ghana is where they have the history.

When you go to Ghana we have places like Cape Coast, Elmina where they have the slave castles where they brought most of the African Americans to the Americans.

And so the experiences is like chasing your route, going back to your route.

So last year, the president of Ghana had what is called the Year of Return, where a lot of African-Americans travel to Ghana to trace their roots and experience how home was before they came here.

So I think it's very important because if I can say that still the black is not that recognized here, but when you go back home, when you go back to Africa, precisely Ghana, which is, like I say, is basically the home of the African Americans, there, you will really feel part of the people.

You are warmly welcomed.

You are received.

A lot of them are given their Guinean names and they trade their roots, and they become affiliated to certain towns and chieftaincy and royal [inaudible].

- Migration, I like to situate it in the context of the broader things that have happened during the historical period.

Reconstruction has ended.

You have issues associated with, essentially what the government betrays its citizens by no longer enforcing the relevance of those amendments.

And so in the context of that, a range of things sort of occur.

And part of that is very real restrictions on people's ability to move around.

That was so significant.

And, so it was situated around race and the economics of sharecropping planted, no question.

Well, that's the reason why you wanna keep people immobile.

So to hold people and keep them from moving was a thing.

So the idea of migration, which, you know, it had some spurts, I should say, you know?

It didn't just start with the beginning of the 20th century.

If you think about people like Pap Singleton going back to the 1870s, there were people already moving around.

There was already a conversation that had been going on prior to the Civil War, as a matter of fact around just mobility.

I like to situate migration in the context of that because really even by the 20th century what you have is a lot of mobility.

- History has an important factor in what we've been through and you can't deny the history of what we came from and how we got here.

We didn't just migrate willingly for a better life or to start our own business and to raise our family in a good country.

We were forced, violently, taken from our tribes.

I did my genealogy, and I'm 80% Congo.

And a lot of us came from kings and queens.

- History and part of what makes the transatlantic system of slavery on the American side unique, is that they will bind slavery and race together in a way that makes them inextricable.

So that when you talk about Africanness or blackness or slavery or race, they become synonymous in very real ways.

The history of our ability to survive and thrive, to come up with our own technology, our own sciences, it's very real stuff.

A guy that's at Michigan that did this study of ethno-computing just by the braiding of hair told people how they were doing sequences of math and other things to remember how and where to plant crops.

I mean, that's significant.

I mean, everything from the goldsmithing and all these things tells us, and the histories.

They're so powerful.

They're just, you know, dying to be sort of shaped.

- One of the most important starting places, I think, is to understand how this vicious system of white supremacy and slavery has impacted us as a people.

But it should not start our story through this lens of slavery, but also to look beyond, you know, back to Africa, back to the many, many years prior to slavery and current day that tells us about our rich history as a people.

- I didn't know no better then.

I didn't know nothing about segregated.

I just knew that we were all, I was in the little grade to like second grade, I think I was before they transferred me.

- That was back in the '30s.

- I'm 95 years old.

- I grew up sitting, going down to Mississippi, and I didn't know there was a dining car on the train because my mother fixed me box lunch and I sat there and ate it.

And I didn't know there was a dining car, but we were forbidden to eat there.

And so these are the heroes we must never forget.

And I think we're failing to forget that, of where we come from.

And Jews taught never to forget the Holocaust.

We must never forget where we come from.

- See, I was brought up in, I didn't know nothing about the South, because mama, mama was born in Alabama and dad in Mississippi, but when my dad asked her to marry him, she said, "Get me out of here and I'll marry you."

That was Alabama.

She didn't want to be down there then.

And she never went back and never took us back.

I knew nothing about this.

- So she brought you to, they brought you to Chicago so you could [crosstalk] life?

- Yeah.

They brought us right here to Chicago.

I was brought up in Chicago and I didn't know nothing else but Chicago.

- I came to the city basically for employment.

And coming here was the first time I had ever actually been confronted by whites throwing rocks at me at Rainbow Beach, I was shocked.

But they chased us away.

I was new in Chicago, so I wanted to go.

It was hot summer.

And I didn't know that blacks were not supposed to go to Rainbow Beach.

- About 70-something in South Shore area.

- We get used what they call the Jitney service, which was a black-owned cab, privately owned, and they ran up and down King Drive.

But at that time, it was known as South Parkway, before Martin Luther King, the assassination, and they renamed South Park to King Drive in honor of Martin Luther King.

And the Jitneys were a very convenient service for blacks at that time, because we could ride for 50 cent.

Sometimes for a kid, it was only a quarter.

And they had jump seats.

It would sit 7 people inside the back of the cab.

And you could ride all the way from 87th Street on the south to 31st Street on the north, up and down King Drive.

- Well, a lot of times what we do, we'll get books from the library about black history or about important African-American figures and we'll read to them, discuss and have topics about it, as well as church activities.

We try to involve them into, in diverse church activity as much as possible.

So yeah, just so they have a community.

- The message is not reaching to our children like the message was given to me, where something about the way our communities are being separated apart.

We don't band together as a community like we used to.

You know, I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody's mother, father, parents, the teachers.

Everybody knew everybody and we were like a little village.

And if you were doing something, you didn't have any business, any adult would be able to tap you and say, "Hey, let's get it together."

Now, it seems like we're just all out for 1.

Everybody's on their own.

And even though I'm in an environment where I get to reach kids, I can tell that it's not the same as it used to be.

And somewhere I think we're losing the battle because the respect for adults, and the way children view their elders now is a little different.

It's not that level of respect that they used to have.

You gotta kind of earn it.

You gotta overwork to get it.

With my generation, if you were older, if you were an elder, you got the utmost respect.

And I was ready to listen to any type of advice or knowledge you had to drop you know.

Didn't have to fight for it.

- I think for me, I experienced growing up in the inner city in the housing project, you know, and I experienced the impact that that had.

Like I chose, you know, to give my life to Christ as an escape.

And 1 of my brothers was shot and killed on the streets, in the streets of Chicago.

And that's the lifestyle that he got involved in.

So me experiencing personally, the death of my brother, I've experienced personally the effect of what happens in these type of communities.

So that's caused me to have passion.

So when I'm working with kids or when I'm working with a client, I see myself and I see my story in a lot of these people.

- Our communities generally have, until they died, we have these large family reunions.

You know, the family reunion.

You went because Madea wanted you to go.

Grandma said you have to go.

Everybody went.

And when grandma died, the numbers weren't there anymore.

The family reunion may not even be there anymore because hers was that agrarian base, "Keep the family together.

Come and celebrate periodically.

Meet your family so you don't marry them."

So, [chuckles] you know, just we can watch you interact with others so we can guide you, because they were always watching.

And they were telling the stories.

They wanted you to know your history, because it's your history that will guide you, and they have the stories.

So the ones of us who sat and listened to them, it's our job now to pass on those stories.

- The Black Church, for us in the diaspora, became synonymous to us as the synagogue became to the Jews.

The synagogue and the Jewish diaspora, since they could no longer go to the temple for worship, you had the creation of the synagogue.

The synagogue was more than just a place of worship, but it was the institution of learning and where the scriptures were taught and they would gather and have discussions.

So the black church, in many respects, became our repository of our emerging culture of who we were as black people in America.

And it gave birth to many things.

Gospel music gave birth to even the blues and gave birth to our style of preaching.

So it was also the black church was community.

There was a community, there was family, and there was a black church.

And they all kind of run simultaneously.

It's ironic that slaves would be taken to the white churches and made to sit in the balcony.

But on their own, they began to have what's called brush arbor meetings or they would go off somewhere, have their own type of worship, which was different from the slave masters' worship.

And of course, for them, the Bible took on a different meaning as they read it, as opposed to what they heard in the white churches.

So Moses, instead of freeing his life, Moses became an emancipator.

for, and so when we hear songs, "Go down Moses, tell old Phraoh to let my people go," you know.

So we were able to extrapolate from the scriptures that they heard in the white churches, but then apply it to our situation as blacks and as slaves, our ancestors were able to do that and pass it on.

- My church, ever since I've been going to the church, my pastor always, during the month of February, he always, every Sunday, we have some person from our history, African American history, and we make a presentation about it.

In fact, one Sunday he had a surprise guest, which was when a Tuskegeen Airman came and talked about being a Tuskegee Airman.

That was so interesting to me.

I really, really enjoyed that.

- A group of us allowed parents to teach the children on Saturdays.

We supervised.

We were able to have those scores come up and the Board of Education rented those buildings from us.

We didn't have to pay, but they rented them and closed them down so we couldn't use them.

We were boycotted so that black teachers could become certified.

And we managed to do that.

[suspenseful music] [red buzzer sound] [suspenseful music] [red buzzer sound] - I know, um, Jesse Owens.

He's the fastest [green buzzer sound] fastest runner in the United States.

- Did you know?

- He won 4 gold medals and broke 2 world records in the Olympics in 1934.

- In Track and Field.

- After attending The Ohio State University, he moved to Chicago.

He was buried in the same cemetery as Ida B.

Wells.

- When I first came to Chicago, and I was working part-time, the gang bangers, as they would call it at the time, were nice to me.

I would get off work at eleven or twelve o'clock at night and come home.

And the guys used to walk me from Stony Island, I was living at 69th and Cornell.

They would walk me home to ensure I got home safely.

And they would say, "Yes ma'am and no ma'am."

These were gang bangers.

If I had a package or a bag, they would help me carry it.

This was the experience I had with the gang bangers when I first came to Chicago.

Now, I don't know any of them, and I wouldn't know whether or not they were gang banger or not, you know.

- My kids, I kept them close to home basically.

Now my son went to Mount Carmel High School in St. Felicitas.

We took him out of the public school because there was fights everyday.

And I guess part of it was they wanted him to join the gang.

And when he was in third grade, my husband took him out of the Chicago public school system and put him into Catholic school.

And he went to St. Felicitas Elementary School until he graduated.

Then he went to Mount Carmel.

So therefore he was not exposed.

My daughter, Whitney, went to Kenwood Academy, and she was an honor student.

All of my kids were merit scholars and we did a lot of reading and doing games at home and they just were not in the street.

That was not the atmosphere that I had them in.

That was not the way I was brought up and that was not the way I wanted my kids to grow up to be.

And none of them became a statistic.

They didn't get involved in the gang.

They didn't have to.

They had a gang here.

It was so many in my family.

We were a gang.

- First, I grew up in a house that was really heavy on education.

So there was no such thing as, "What are you doing after high school?"

It was you go to college, just like after junior high or middle school was high school, so I didn't really have the option and couldn't consider anything else.

And I'm teaching my daughters the same way that you are expected to go to college.

As far as other things that are based on morals, such as teen pregnancy or crime, I hope I am a good example.

I know friends at some point will have a bigger influence on her life, but I hope that she sees the path that I took and that she'll want to follow in behind that.

- The main thing I think we can do for our children to make sure they don't become a statistic in the city is to understand who they are, understand the history of our people and the positive things that we've contributed to society.

Be mindful of people's opinions of us and some of the negativity that people associate with black males.

One of the main things I try and stress with my sons though is to be patient and understanding and thoughtful.

We don't have the privilege of responding quickly out of anger or rage, especially not in the city.

So we have to be mindful of every interaction we have with anyone.

- You know, it's not like anybody did anything wrong to become a statistic in the first place.

Like all those parents love their kids just as much as we love our kids.

I think there's a lot to do with the government and who we elect.

I think that it starts with that.

- And, you know, with statistics on African-American men, I was at the Million Man March in 1995 when we all went to Washington to discuss amongst ourselves and talk about what changes we can make in our communities because of the statistics out in Black and brown men.

One thing is I want them to take responsibility for what their actions are.

I want them to take the opportunities to vote and set high goals.

I don't want the community to set the goals for the kids.

So I think that is very important.

And then also just be aware of their environment and be a part of the environment and choosing how they can be an asset or how they can make things better.

[funky music] - I know President-President Obama.

Number 1, Barack - Barrack Obama.

- Yeah.

- Number 5, Barack Obama.

- Did you know?

He was also a community organizer on the south side of Chicago, in Pazzee House in Hyde Park?

- You know, the debate about within the Chicago Public Schools, the police officers in schools.

So do you believe that police officers should be in schools?

And what about counselors and what about nurses?

- When I started, and that was 25 years ago, you had everything.

You had maybe, depending on the number of children per school, you know, if you had 1000, 1500 children, you may have had 3 or 4 police officers that had an office and they patrolled the halls along with security.

And then you also had an office full of counselors, like a counselor per grade level, you know, and maybe 2 or 3 nurses.

A few decades later, we're down to 1 counselor for 1000 kids.

And then we may have a nurse that may be part-time at that school.

They may only do 2 or 3 days at this school and go to another school.

And we're talking about for 1000, 1500 children.

- There is no way schools will function in this climate without police.

The police will go, they acted within their role.

And the role is not for people to like or dislike.

It's not to be pretty or ugly.

It's to be what's necessary and proportional to the situation.

And sometimes it's going to look ugly.

It may look very ugly.

If you've got 1 kid, say they've got a knife, say they've got a gun.

You can only do... You have a limited window to deescalate that situation.

- But then you're arguing about the police and they've shrunken that budget down too.

You might have 1 or 2 police officers that show up and they might not be there every day.

You know, we might have to call them.

So for me, the importance should be put on the nurses, the counselors, the social workers.

The support staff is what you need more so than the police.

Because the teachers and the staff, once you get to know your kids and you reach out to the parents and we come together as a community, we can control our own kids without the need for police in the building.

- Can you imagine being a high schooler and just dealing with, or even younger than that, and dealing with everything that you were dealing with growing up and finding yourself and kind of understand yourself.

And maybe you have like a bad day or like you have, you have stuff go out at home and you act out a lot?

And the way in which that is handled is a police officer comes in and forces you out, or even just like the optics of that and like how police are looked at in society, especially, right now.

And you are, you know, you're technically, technically your first arrest is like in your 13 or 14, and you're having a bad day in school.

The trauma, it just can't be overstated.

how much trauma that... - Counselors cannot do police work.

Counselors can counsel.

Counselors are citizens.

Counselors don't come to work to have to potentially fight.

They give advice, they assess, they make a recommendation, but they still need help.

- There should be no cops in schools because, still need help.

- There should be no cops in schools because, you know, now what students have seen cops do to family members of them.

There's so many, I mean, there's just so many stories of, I just don't see how people can think of cops as just safe.

They're not safe individuals.

- Are black people treated the same in the system?

- It's not even close.

- Why?

- Why?

Because there is a code of racism that's-that's seeded within the court system.

That's seeded within law enforcement in itself.

So the same sentence that you would give a white inmate, that's not the same sentence that you would give someone that's black or Hispanic.

- And why is this?

Why?

- Because the whole system is founded in racism.

And this is not just as far as the way that the judge would deem, "Okay, how many years or how many months you're going to get."

The whole system is corrupt as such, as well as this goes on with the inmates being beaten up by law enforcement, not just Cook County Sheriff's Department, but Chicago Police, Illinois State Police, and things like that.

I know this for a fact because whenever you get arrested and you go to Chicago Police, the Chicago Police Department has to give us, the person that's arrested, so they can stand court.

So when I see some of these inmates or detainees, they have been abused, beaten up, broken, you know, their eyes have been blackened and things like that.

And I had to tell them the sheriff department will not accept them.

They need to go to the hospital.

And I need to get a release from the hospital saying that they can stay in court.

And I turned them right around and they have to take them.

Legally, by law, they have to take them to the hospital because the Chicago Police refuse to take care of them.

To take care of their medical, you know, to take care of them medically.

- [Indistinct chatter] - Ooh.

- [Indistinct chatter] - Ooh.

- [Indistinct chatter] - Ooh.

Look what [silence] this boy.

- Ooh.

[background sirens] - Ooh.

- Clapped his head on.

- He picking his phone up.

Make put the man phone down.

[siren sounds] For nothing.

- Let me go... - In 2020 in Chicago, a person is shot every 2 hours and 3 minutes.

A person is murdered every 10 hours and 58 minutes.

Between 2010 and July 2020, Black homicide victims accounted for 4,374 of the city's murders.

- It's so much that affects how you see yourself mentally and emotionally.

And then because of that trauma, how do you respond to that pain that's not being treated?

Most of the time it's anger.

Most of the time it's you imploding or exploding.

You going into depression and suicide or risky behaviors, or you exploding and hurting someone because you're hurting.

I think the solution is treatment.

The solution is treatment and having resources to address the issue.

It's not the what, it's the why.

So we look at, we look at all what they're doing, "Oh, look at that kid.

He's so bad.

Look at it, look at..." But what, why is he doing it?

What is that?

"Oh, his father's not in the home.

His father's in prison.

And his mother has a mental health issue and they don't have any."

So it's not the what, it's the why.

- You know, I think that in modern day psychology and social work has its roots in a Eurocentric model of healing, right?

And so there's part of that is that the system itself, like many other systems, the criminal justice system and the educational system, all of it has its roots in an inherently Eurocentric white supremacist model.

And so I think our field as a field of mental health, we're grappling with that and we're trying to adjust and change and integrate more a broader sense of what it means to heal from, not only a Eurocentric perspective but an Afrocentric perspective, indigenous, you know, model of healing as well.

How do we integrate that into our way of healing.

So I think that's part of it.

I also think that there's a really real history around the health care system being very discriminatory.

And the research field about being very discriminatory around black populations in the Americas.

And so there's-there's, again, there's that-that adaptive response.

You know, this is not a safe situation for me.

But of course, that current way of being doesn't always serve people well, and if they do need help for depression or anxiety.

We're also seeing the field of mental health still being very, in terms of the providers, a range of providers available.

You know, there's still a huge disparity in terms of the numbers of Black psychologists or psychologists of color, for instance.

And so that can also impact one's hesitant to seek services and help.

- Only 1 in 3 Black Americans who need mental health care receive it.

Black Americans are 20% more likely to experience mental health problems than the general population.

- There's a study called the ACE study, the Adverse Childhood Experiences.

And basically, it's a questionnaire about how much trauma have you experienced in your life?

And they project basically based on that study, they've shown that kids who grew up with like absentee fathers, they grew up in, with drug addiction, they grew up in hostile communities, they're more likely when they grow up to drop out of school, teen pregnancy is high.

They're more likely to get incarcerated.

So there's a study that-that's shown the more you have different traumatic experiences in your life, then the less likely you are to succeed as an adult.

- When our body encounters stress, our adrenal glands, which are by our kidneys actually, they release stress hormones called [inaudible] cortisol.

Those stress hormones actually go to our brain and impact our brains messaging to the rest of our bodies.

And so really what it gets doing is it's gearing our bodies up for more survival oriented functioning, right?

So we're gearing our muscles up for maybe fighting a threat or being more sort of hyper-sensitive to potential stressors or threats in our environment.

Again, In the actual moment of stress, that can be very helpful for us.

But the problem with multigenerational trauma and chronic stress is that, that never gets turned off, right?

So we're constantly, you know, those people that are living in systemic oppression, we all are living in systemic oppression as people of color and black people, that never gets turned off.

We're in a constant state of survival and stress management.

- I went to high school in Chicago at Harlem, which was a very very great experience.

Up until the time Martin Luther King was assassinated and we decided to protest, and we protested loud and we protested fiercely.

The police department set up a skirmish line at 99th and Michigan.

When I was a junior, we decided to go to Roseland, which was all white at the time, and protest at Roseland.

But the police set up a skirmish line and wouldn't let us march any further south of that 99th and Michigan.

At which time they gave us an order to disperse.

That order was for 15 minutes, you had to disperse, but they waited 2 minutes and then they started coming in with their batons and their billy clubs.

And I was a juvenile, but I was arrested.

And I was hit on the head with a billy club by a police officer that I felt it was undue because I didn't do anything wrong.

I was all public right away.

And I can empathize with the movement that is going on here today with Black Lives Matter, especially after the killing of George Floyd.

Because we need voices in the community to stand up to the systemic racism that's been going on for years.

The redlining for real estate, the discrimination with the banks, the discrimination in housing, discrimination in employment.

And a lot of these companies now, after the riots and after the George Floyd killing, they want to come in and say, "Well, we're going to give positions to blacks."

So, why didn't this happen 10, 15, 20 years ago when it really would have made a difference and could have avoided a lot of the issues that we're facing now?

- They do.

- Who's they?

- These kids.

These kids are going to shape the future.

I think they are shaping the future.

As you can see, like with these protests, who are on the front lines, these kids are.

So they're going to be the change.

They're going to be the change.

- There's 3 aspects that I feel, and one is the churches, the school system, and the parent.

- I would advise them to stay in school.

Stay in school, get that bachelor's degree, get the master's degree, get the doctorate degree, and be active in your community.

And of all, most importantly, go out and vote.

- It's encumbered upon those of us who are in positions of leadership to do the best we can to pass on or to remind our children, "This is who you are, this is who you are, this is what you are."

In the church, we were taught to behave.

We were taught certain cultural traditions.

And when that no longer takes place, we're living in a vacuum.

- Know each other, number 1.

They need to know their history.

So many of them, I don't know if they are ashamed of the history, but they need to know from where they came, so that they can know where they're going.

- And how they do that?

- By coming together, by voting, by doing whatever to make Black Lives Matter more.

[music playing] [Outro Music playing] [ End Credits] - Supported in part by grants from... Closed captioning and audio description funded by Part-Time Faculty Development Grant at Columbia College, Chicago.

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