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Ellie Kim
Ellie Kim

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Nov 2, 2021

37 Chicago

People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters. As I watched and listened form my seat, I began to hear all the notes from the past three years swirl about me. The courage…

2 min read

37 Chicago
37 Chicago

Oct 18, 2021

36 Chicago

As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one…

1 min read

36 Chicago
36 Chicago

Oct 13, 2021

35 Chicago

When I opened the door, I found a big man standing there with his hands in his pockets, an even-toothed grin breaking across his body face. In the pictures I had of Roy, he was slender, dressed in African print, with an Afro, a goatee, a mustache. The man who…

1 min read

35 Chicago
35 Chicago

Oct 12, 2021

34 Chicago

That’s what was new: the arrival of a new equilibrium between hope and fear; the sense, shared by adults and youth alike, that some, if not most, of our boys, were slipping beyond rescue. Even lifelong South Siders like Johnnie noticed the change. “I ain’t never seen it like this…

2 min read

34 Chicago
34 Chicago

Oct 11, 2021

33 Chicago

I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that’s important not because it alters your concert circumstances in some ways but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond…

2 min read

33 Chicago
33 Chicago

Oct 8, 2021

32 Chicago

Sometimes, listening to such innocent dreams, I would find myself fighting off the urge to gather up these girls and their babies in my arms, to hold them all tight and never let go. The girls would sense that impulse, I think, and Linda, with her dark, striking beauty, would…

2 min read

32 Chicago
32 Chicago

Oct 7, 2021

31 Chicago

Almost a year had passed since my arrival in Chicago, and our labor had finally begun to bear fruit. Will’s and Mary’s street corner group had grown to fifty strong; they organized neighborhood cleanups, sponsored career days for area youth, won agreements from the alderman to improve sanitation services. Farther…

2 min read

31 Chicago
31 Chicago

Oct 6, 2021

30 Chicago

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader-my father had been all those things, All…

2 min read

30 Chicago
30 Chicago

Oct 4, 2021

29 Chicago

29 Chicago Barack met his younger sister, Auma. She came to meet her brother in Chicago. she was wondering about all his life from the beginning. so Barack told her about Chicago and New York, his work as an organizer, his mother and grandparents, and Maya. Auma called their father…

2 min read

29 Chicago
29 Chicago

Sep 30, 2021

28 Chicago

For the rest of the day and into the next, I thought about Ruby’s eyes. I had handled the moment badly, I told myself, made her feel ashamed for a small vanity in a life that could afford few vanities. I realized that a part of me expected her and…

2 min read

28 Chicago
28 Chicago
Ellie Kim

Ellie Kim

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