It looks, as most construction sites do, especially in winter, a depressing mess, this plot of land in Jackson Park on the South Side that will eventually sprout the Obama Presidential Center.
You can look into the future by ogling architectural renderings and know that the future seems on track, with the drilling of caissons and other work well underway. It is scheduled to open in 2025 and part of it will be, as was announced in late January, an area called the Hadiya Pendleton Winter Garden.
It is good, if melancholy, that Hadiya Pendleton will be so honored. As her mother, Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, told the Tribune, “For her name to keep being spoken, she continues to live on and she continues to be a beacon of light.”
As my colleague Alice Yin wrote, the Obama Presidential Center will have “a public space dedicated to Hadiya so that future generations will remember her story. The naming of the ‘Hadiya Pendleton Winter Garden’ came one day before the nine-year anniversary of her death.”
Perhaps you remember. Perhaps you don’t. Tragically, kids are killed all the time in Chicago, and elsewhere, most of them innocent victims and most of their names thrown into the wind and forgotten by all but those people who knew and loved the kids.
What elevated Pendleton into a wide public consciousness and a durable symbol of gun violence was her honor roll accomplishments and her connection to two of Chicago’s most notable citizens, Michelle and Barack Obama. The week before her death, on Jan. 29, 2013, in a small park in the Kenwood neighborhood, she had performed as a drum majorette with her King College Preparatory School marching band in Washington, D.C. at the second inauguration of President Obama. She came home and was killed while sitting under a shelter in the park with some her friends when they came under fire by gang members who had mistaken them as rivals.
A few days later, when Obama delivered his State of the Union address on Feb. 12, he acknowledged Hadiya’s parents, Cleopatra and Nathaniel, who were sitting in a house chamber box as guests of the first lady. He said, “(Hadiya) was shot and killed in a Chicago park, just a mile away from my house. (Her parents) are in the chamber tonight, along with more than two dozen Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence.”
The place where Pendleton was shot and died was, for many years, known as Beach Park. In 2005 it was renamed for a woman named Vivian Gordon Harsh and it is tucked into a quiet corner of the city at 4458-70 S. Oakenwald Ave.
Harsh was the first Black librarian in the Chicago Public Library system and was appointed head librarian of the George Cleveland Hall branch at 4801 S. Michigan Ave. In the 1920s this area was near the hub of the vibrant enclave called Bronzeville, full of shops and clubs and hopes. One thing it lacked — which every Black neighborhood in Chicago lacked then — was a library. A prominent black physician, George Cleveland Hall, convinced philanthropist Julius Rosenwald of the need for a library in the community. Rosenwald, who headed Sears, Roebuck and Co., bought the land and gave it to the city.
The attendant publicity forced the library board to fund construction of a library. Built of Indiana limestone in the Italian renaissance style, it has an octagonal rotunda with terrazzo tile, brass ornaments and dark English oak. It opened in 1932 and has been used by such great writers as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. They did their research and writing there, spoke and lectured.
Harsh came there when it opened, and began a special collection of Black publications which included books, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, photos and whatever else she could get her hands on.
It is a sad sign of those times that Andrew J. Kolar, then president of the City Library Board of Directors, argued that this collection was “likely to cause a race riot.”
It did not. Harsh died in 1960, but she lives on in the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, at the Carter G. Woodson regional library on South Halsted Street. With tens of thousands of items, it is the largest Black history collection in the Midwest.
We name libraries and streets and parks for people all the time and many of the names affixed to these spots mean nothing to most of us, the names and achievements buried under history’s dust. Of the 500-some parks in the city, some are named for Robert Abbott, Daniel Hale Williams, John Peter Altgeld, Helen Zatterberg, George and Adele Adams and on and on. Know them?
So, while you await the opening of the Obama Center and its Pendleton Garden, you should know that there is a Hadiya Pendleton Park. It is a 2.14-acre space with a jungle gym and some other items on which kids can play. There is a water fountain. It was renamed in the teenager’s honor in 2015. Later that year it was the scene of a shooting. A 17-year-old named Vonzell Banks and a 19-year-old cousin were playing basketball in the park when bullets flew from a passing SUV. Banks was fatally struck in the back.
It is a savage world in which we live. On the same day that this newspaper announced the coming of the Pendleton Winter Garden, its front page carried another story with this headline “2 held without bond in death of 8-year-old.”
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The name of that little girl was Melissa Ortega. Do you remember?