Where Black lives matter less than libraries

THE BARACK Obama Foundation, which is charged with selecting the site for the Obama presidential library, has approved the University of Chicago's bid for the South Side of Chicago to house the library.

Following the press release, University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer sent an e-mail to faculty, staff and students at the university asserting, "We believe opening the presidential center will mark a watershed moment for the South Side and the city, serving as a catalyst for economic and cultural opportunities as well as community programming."

The project will cost an estimated $500 million to build, with the cost met largely through massive fundraising efforts that are already underway. The Foundation, as well as the university, which carried out an aggressive campaign to host the library in the face of competing bids from Columbia University, the University of Hawaii and the University of Illinois at Chicago, argue that the library will provide a much-needed boost to the South Side community.

Soon after President Zimmer's announcement, however, a large crowd of activists from the Black Lives Matter movement and the Trauma Care Coalition--made up of South Side community groups like Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY), Students for Health Equity and We Charge Genocide--marched through campus to call attention to the twisted priorities of the university's decision to pursue the presidential library while it still has not considered establishing a trauma center.

Veronica Morris-Moore, a leader of the Trauma Care Coalition, explained to Progress Illinois:

Rob Zimmer and Mayor Rahm Emanuel moved mountains to have this Obama presidential library be secured for Chicago. We are saying that Rob Zimmer and Mayor Rahm Emanuel need to move mountains to place a trauma center on the South Side so that lives--so that Black lives--can, and will, be saved.

THE ACTIONS by the Trauma Care Coalition effectively dismantled the Foundation's claim that the Obama presidential library represents a "community-oriented effort." The university closed its adult trauma center, the only one serving the area, in 1988. Since then, U of C has dismissed multiple efforts by activist groups pressing for it to provide the South Side community with an adult trauma center to care for the many Black and Brown victims of gun violence.

In May 2014, university police forcibly dragged away protesters from the construction site of a new university parking garage. The university claims that a Level 1 Trauma Center for adults, the most comprehensive and well-equipped type of trauma center, would be too expensive--despite a state report that the University of Chicago Medical Center is best equipped to create such a facility, both financially and geographically.

Last year, Kenneth Polonsky, dean of the Pritzker School of Medicine, was reported to have said that the university "cannot address every need of the community." Meanwhile, the university threw all its efforts into a bid to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for a presidential library, with substantial financial backing from the city.

This episode illustrates the contempt that the university, the Obama administration and Mayor Emanuel have for the community they claim to serve, and it has exposed the hypocrisy of the university's historic policy of disinvestment from the South Side community and its gross negligence of systemic violence in the area.

South Side residents like Damian Turner--who in 2010 was shot four blocks from the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC), one of the best hospitals in the world--pay the price for this callous disregard. Damian, an 18-year old activist, had to be transported to the nearest Level 1 adult trauma center nine miles away, and he succumbed to his wounds en route. Like so many others, Damian died because of a lack of access to care.

A trauma center dedicated to South Side victims of endemic gun violence would drastically improve the mortality rate. But as it stands, trauma care at the UCMC is only open to those aged 16 and under. It seems clear that the university covets the prestige that comes with a project such as the Obama presidential library far more than building a trauma center that would provide fundamental lifesaving care to a community in need. On the other hand, a significantly higher mortality rate for South Side residents because of a lack of proximity to a trauma center seems like something the university can live with.

This lack of access to health care is at the core of fundamental disparities in mortality and wellness for Black and white patients, which reinforces the inequality facing already impoverished communities. Chicago's South Side, like many other urban centers in the 1990s, saw the shuttering of many trauma centers and has substantially higher ambulance run times and little to no access to trauma care.

THE TRAUMA Care Coalition is redoubling its efforts with marches and other actions to connect the university's callous disregard for the lives of South Siders with broader national policies of economic inequality, injustice and racist police violence.

Using the hashtag of #BlackLivesMatter and slogans such as "Obamacares, U of C doesn't; No trauma center, no library!" the coalition is drawing on the growing consciousness among activists, from Ferguson to Baltimore, of the deep complicity of moneyed institutions like the University of Chicago in perpetuating these inequalities and cycles of violence, as well as in prioritizing mechanisms of gentrification like the library to attract wealthy crowds and tourists at the expense of direct benefits to the community.

Emanuel's resolute backing for more than 20 acres of public parkland to be allocated to the presidential library--combined with massive fundraising efforts on a scale comparable to those for Obama's campaign--reflect skewed priorities and an institutional, systemic failure to address the real needs of working-class communities.

After the Chicago Park District board voted in February transfer the vast tract of public parkland to the city if the University of Chicago won the bid for the presidential library, Emanuel said that he was "committed to moving heaven and earth" to make sure the library was built in Chicago.

For South Side residents, this only gives the lie to the argument that a trauma center would be prohibitively expensive. Clearly, the elites in control of such decisions are uninterested in "moving heaven and earth" to prevent the loss of Black lives.

Meanwhile, the Barack Obama Foundation and the University of Chicago continue to collect undisclosed private donations as well as a great deal of public cash to build and maintain the presidential library. In April, an Illinois House Committee endorsed a plan to earmark $100 million from state funds for the library. And while the fundraising has started in earnest, activists from the Trauma Care Coalition are powering ahead with a campaign to shame the University of Chicago into building the trauma center they should have built a decade ago.