I drove southeast after leaving the Turtle Mountain Reservation, through Minnesota and then Wisconsin. The winding, two-lane highways through Amish communities and the small towns gave way to interstate highways. Towns became more frequent, then merged together into a nonstop grid of houses, malls, intersections, and gas stations. My GPS abruptly changed my route as I entered Chicago to avoid a traffic snarl as the evening rush hour began.
I felt daunted as I left behind the mountains and open prairies of the West and entered the congested city. I wondered where I would camp and how I would navigate the complex stories and relationships in these large cities. And how much hope could I expect to find? Many of those living in these cities have been beaten down for years by joblessness, disinvestment, poverty, and powerlessness.
My first stop in Chicago was at the Iron Street headquarters of Growing Power, an urban farm with five locations around the city, a food stand, and a training center for youth. At YES!, we had published articles about Growing Power and its founder, Will Allen, the former NBA athlete who set up an organic farm in Milwaukee in 1993. Growing Power Chicago is run by his daughter, Erika Allen. Both organizations hire and train young people, 300 a year in Chicago alone.
Growing Power was hosting a conference of food justice advocates from throughout the Midwest while I was in Chicago, so I attended “Growing Food and Justice for All.” Allen was in constant motion during the conference, one moment speaking to small groups of visitors, and the next, helping to grill up veggie kabobs and tofu. Like her father, she has a powerful physical presence, and when she speaks, things get done.
“We need to empower our young people who are being demonized and killed,” Erika Allen said to those gathered at her urban farm. “There are high levels of trauma from living in this culture.” The youth who work with Growing Power thrive in this environment, she said. “We don’t have the resources to support the healing, but the gardens do that.”
Erika Allen leads Growing Power Chicago, which hosted “Growing Food and Justice for All.”
Chicago is known for a violent crime rate that is well above average, although 20 U.S. cities have a higher murder rate, according to the Pew Research Center.1. More than a million city residents live in poverty, much of it concentrated in African American neighborhoods.2.
For a time, Chicago and other Midwest cities were places where working-class people could get a job, own a home, and even put their children through college. In an economy that divided winners from losers, Midwesterners once counted themselves among the winners. That was when a job in a steel mill or auto factory was a ticket to the middle class, with security that extended into retirement and down through generations.
From the early part of the twentieth century through the 1960s, these cities were beacons to immigrants and to African Americans escaping Jim Crow laws and the vigilante terror of the Ku Klux Klan. Redlining, job discrimination, predatory lending, and official neglect of predominantly African American neighborhoods meant that black families were less likely to make it into the middle class, even when a family member landed a coveted manufacturing job. Still, some did make it, and the access to college gave the next generation a shot at a higher standard of living than their parents’.
But achieving a middle-class standard of living got harder. Wages stagnated, and families needed a second full-time income to get by as good-paying jobs disappeared. Technology replaced jobs, and union strength eroded as industry moved to nonunion states and overseas. NAFTA and other trade agreements made it easy for companies to move production to low-wage countries with low environmental standards; with diminished import tariffs, companies could bring the products back to sell in the U.S. market.
A mural from Growing Power, Chicago.
Today’s cities and states compete against each other for jobs, using massive public subsidies to lure corporations, pitting one impoverished city against another. The locally rooted economies are taxed to pay these corporate players, who may, or may not, stick around.
Corporations became less and less connected to any place—or any country. Companies won the global competition by extracting wealth from nature; from people, in the form of low wages; and from government, in the form of subsidies.
In this region, I was looking for signs that a successor to this extraction economy might be emerging. Given the impending climate crisis, it would have to be an economy that can function without further damage to the natural world. And given the shattering history of racial exclusion, it would have to be inclusive.
