Lawndale is not supposed to be Alan Keyes Country. According to a recent Tribune/WGN TV poll, Keyes is getting just 3 percent of Illinois’ African-American vote in his Senate race against Barack Obama. But last Friday afternoon a crowd milled around the mother-and-child statue at the corner of Kedzie and Douglas, waving Keyes placards and getting ready to board a charter bus with the candidate’s name on the side.
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To V.O.T.E.’s 31-year-old spokesman, Mark Carter, Obama is a tool of Mayor Daley and the rest of the City Hall fat cats who’ve ignored Lawndale. “Barack Obama is so much entrenched in the status quo in the city of Chicago that he does not support the issues of the black community, especially our generation,” said Carter, who did time in the 90s. “Joblessness, homelessness, police brutality. We don’t have to vote the same way our grandmothers did. When you look at the numbers supporting the Democrats, it’s the civil rights generation. The younger generation, the hip-hop generation, we’re more open.”
Many of the Keyes supporters were incensed about Lawndale Restoration, which operates 1,200 units of federally subsidized housing, including Lawndale Manor. One of the buildings collapsed when a car backed into it last month. After that incident city inspectors swept through, declaring more than 100 of the units uninhabitable. Cecil Butler, the project’s general partner, was given a $51 million state-backed loan to refurbish low-income housing in Lawndale. Since 1997 he has taken in $84 million in rent, mostly through federal subsidies. Over the past four years the city has sued Butler and his various entities 50 times for not keeping Lawndale Restoration properties up to code. Butler has, however, given $4,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the past five years. Some of the crowd wondered if that puts Obama in Butler’s pocket. “It’s like being paid under the table,” said neighborhood resident Lawona Fitzpatrick, who held a Keyes sign.
The bus filled up for a short trip to Lawndale Plaza, the neighborhood’s new shopping center, which has a Dominick’s, a ten-screen movie theater, and a bank, where Keyes planned to hold a press conference denouncing slum housing. Keyes sat in the front row, next to the Reverend M.G. Hunter of New Jerusalem 133rd Psalm Missionary Baptist Church, a well-fed preacher in a purple suit. Carter followed the bus, standing next to a sound system on the bed of a truck. The bus arrived first. Hunter, who’s been handing out CDs of a Keyes interview at his church’s restaurant, Bethlehem-Judea Soul Food, climbed down into the parking lot.
Hunter led the flock, including the candidate, back onto the bus. Ten minutes later everyone was in the lobby of the 11th District police station at Kedzie and Harrison, demanding Carter’s release. On the other side of the desk, the police looked bemused and bewildered. Hunter spoke quietly with the shift commander, while Keyes stood beside his press secretary, Connie Hair, who was taping the confrontation with a video camera.
“It was definitely politically motivated,” he said. “We were getting ready to have a rally in the lot when we pulled up in the truck. The male police officer stopped the truck. He asked to see the driver’s CDL license. The female police officer was makin’ all kinds of accusations that Barack Obama was going to beat Alan Keyes. She said, ‘Obama gonna whip Keyes’s ass anyway. He ain’t nothin’ but a gay basher.’ I basically said to her that ‘OK, you support Barack Obama and I support Alan Keyes.’ After that she just exploded. She told the male officer to lock me up.”
