On December 2, 1988, 32 Chicago Housing Authority guards and Chicago police raided the high rise at 2822 S. Calumet as part of the agency’s Operation Clean Sweep against drugs and gangs in the housing projects. CHA chief Vincent Lane stood outside the 13-story building and commented, “This will be an ongoing operation until we have made public housing safe for our residents.” But making public housing safe at 2822 S. Calumet has come to mean evicting residents who don’t agree with all the security policies resulting from the sweep. Sylvester and Lenie Richmond and their three children, Beverly Herring and her daughter, Sheila Fason and her son, and Darnella Powell and her two children are not drug dealers, gang members, or illegal tenants. They are tenants who have dared to express, in some cases in relatively minor ways, dissenting views of the much-lauded sweeps. Within the last six months, they have all received eviction notices, and the attempted evictions seem clearly to be measures of retaliation against the tenants for what CHA authorities perceive as protest or simply outspokenness about the security measures.
On the morning of the sweep at 2822 S. Calumet, a high rise also known as the Prairie Courts extension of the Harold Ickes Homes, Sylvester Richmond had just returned home from taking his three children to school and gone up to the ninth floor to talk to his friend Bob. Bob’s cousin, who had spent the night, was looking out a bedroom window when he shouted to the two other men, “There’s a lot of police around. What’s going on?”
For its part, the CHA claims in its response to a case filed on Beverly Herring’s behalf that on the day of the raid–which it prefers to call an “emergency inspection”–“no searches were conducted.” The CHA describes the event as “an attempt . . . to identify any persons who were living in the building who were not on leases.”
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The building was put under seal for 48 hours, during which time tenants were allowed no visitors while CHA staff began the process of issuing photo ID cards. The Richmonds say tenants were not given advance notice of this procedure, yet tenants who had left the building were required to have all members of their families photographed before they could return to their apartments–meaning long waits for some. Recalls Sylvester, “People had groceries, and they weren’t allowed to go upstairs. One woman’s ice cream melted all over.”
The trouble went beyond name-calling. On Christmas Eve of 1988, Sylvester was jumped by a group of teenage boys from his building in a nearby park and badly beaten; the left side of his face is still scarred from the attack. The boys accused Sylvester of reporting them to police for involvement in drug dealing, something Sylvester denied doing. The Richmonds suspect the incident was tied to their protest activity.
The weeks immediately following the protest were fraught with tension for the Richmonds. They suspect their apartment was searched while they were away and that their phone was tapped. On Mother’s Day, about eight Chicago policemen and CHA guards burst into the apartment when only Lenie was home to investigate charges that the Richmonds had dynamite there. The dynamite turned out to be three boxes of firecrackers that Richmond had bought for his own children and a church youth group. The Richmonds say the officers searched the apartment without a warrant, discovered and confiscated the firecrackers, and told Lenie she was lucky they didn’t arrest her. Sylvester later went voluntarily to the police station, where he received a ticket for possession of the fireworks.
