South Side Youth Plan March For Murdered, Missing Black Women

CHICAGO — Hundreds of Chicagoans are expected to take to the streets Tuesday demanding action in the unsolved deaths and disappearances of Black, mostly young women and girls in Chicago.

Organizers of the We Walk For Her March will gather at 5 p.m. at 35th Street and King Drive, in front of the Chase bank branch. The youth march will head south on King Drive to 51st Street.

March organizing groups include Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Good Kids Mad City, H.E.R. Chicago, Mothers Opposed to Violence Everywhere, Protect Black Girls and Long Walk Home.

Youth groups are calling for police changes and action from the Chicago Police Department, Illinois State Police and Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to prioritize unsolved cases of missing and murdered Black girls and women, and to prevent future murders.

An earlier victory came when youth leaders forced the state police to make changes in their procedures, reducing a 700-case DNA-testing backlog by using new technology, according to a march news release.

“I was angry that Black girls and women around the city going missing, being harmed, abducted, and even murdered and not much was being said or done about it,” said Kenwood Oakland Community Organization youth leader Azivah Roberts, who was 13 when she initiated the first march in 2018. “I went to my grandmother and to KOCO. I told them we should do a march.”

Before the march, Roberts and fellow KOKO youth leader Esi Koomson, along with youth leader Kejuana Hopkins, of MOVE, and Chicago Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), will make remarks before the march.

Sun-Times columnist John Fountain has cited at least 51 mostly Black women who have been slain in Chicago since 2001, whose murders remain mostly unsolved.

“What if it were 51 women mostly white instead of 51 women mostly Black?” he wrote in a March 12 column. “What if they were mostly middle class instead of mostly poor and working-class? “What if they lived and died in a posh Near North Side neighborhood or along the Magnificent Mile, rather than on the South and West Sides on poverty’s isle? Would these murders still be largely unsolved? Might this city then care?”

For more information, go to www.kocoonline.org.