Around 25 people huddled under the overhang of the Blue Line station at Kimball and Belmont on a rainy, sticky Saturday afternoon, waiting for the 77 bus. A short white woman loaded down with plastic shopping bags shoved her way into the crowd and asked two Hispanic men how long they’d been waiting.
An elderly woman rocked back and forth on her cane, mumbling. The bus arrived 15 minutes later, tailed closely by another 77.
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Piles of cheap pastries and vats of coffee awaited the approximately 150 people who straggled in between 8:30 and 9 AM. As if they were still at the bus stop, they started commiserating with strangers the minute they walked in the door. Some apologized to the people working the registration table, joking that the CTA had made them late. (I’d been held up for a good 15 minutes because the Red Line train stalled.) They were of all generations, ethnicities, and levels of dishevelment, which attracted stares from the scrubbed university candidates who were being shown around the campus.
The crowd began to cheer. A chubby blond woman seated near the back, who’d emitted a little whoop at Morris’s every other word, got to her feet and clapped.
Vanessa Beasley ran the workshop on “neighborhood organization.” She told the group that no matter how angry they were with the system, they should try to come up with positive ideas about how the problems could be solved. But she started by encouraging the participants to stand up and yell out their grievances about service in their area. “Represent! Represent!” she said, waving her arms and nodding as she jotted their complaints in a notebook. One man said his biggest beef with the CTA was that it underserved people of color. Beasley cut him off. “The north side, where all these rich white people are,” she said, “they are as pissed as we are!”
Not all of the complaints were about bus or train service. When David Smathers, who sits on the board of the Rogers Park Community Action Network and helped organize the event, heard that someone had seen a poster for the congress on a Red Line train he raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting,” he said, “because it was supposed to run on the Blue Line and then on the Brown Line. There was this whole fiasco where it didn’t show up for several weeks when it was supposed to. It was supposed to show up on the fourth but didn’t till a couple weeks later.” He didn’t look particularly surprised.
