A dissection of The New Yorker’s ‘Letter from Chicago: Father Mike’
There’s an ageless showman on Chicago’s South Side with “side-swept brown hair that has not changed much … since the Johnson Administration,” writes former Chicago Tribune city reporter, Evan Osnos.
The white man wears a black jacket with a priest’s white collar and preaches in a “pronounced Southern accent, rich in the black vernacular, bellowing and whispering like an old-time tent revivalist,” he continues.
Reverend Doctor Michael L. Pfleger began fighting for civil rights when he was in his twenties. Now, at 66, Pfleger is leading his parishioners and the black community through a perilous time when racial crises consume Chicago and the nation.
Published in the Feb. 29 issue of The New Yorker, Osnos chronicled Pfleger’s work from the pulpit of St. Sabina’s Catholic Church in Chicago against the backdrop of “the anger … around the issues of race, guns and power” and the anger’s roots, which stretch beyond the Civil Rights era.
I chose this piece because I will be spending my summer in Chicago, and this article is a prime example of how I’d like to blend history, race and current events into a complex and compelling longform article. In short, what I like about the piece and the reason why I chose this article overlap.
My other field of study is Southern Studies, which focuses heavily on the African-American experience. When racism is discussed in America’s past, the South is what comes to one’s mind. But Osnos is quick to expose Chicago’s dark past and its links to the present. He does this effortlessly by weaving in Pfleger story around the history.
Osnos writes that black men and women who left the rural South for the Northeast and Midwest faced a number of housing obstacles that fenced them into specific areas of their new cities. These included homogeneous public housing, greedy real estate agents who fanned racial panic to flip houses for larger profits, covenants that barred white homeowners from selling to blacks and the practice of “redlining” — the refusal by banks to provide home loans to blacks.
The Great Migration raised the Chicago’s black population from 2 percent to nearly 33 percent, and by 1940, it was more segregated than Richmond Virginia, Osnos writes.
Osnos also touches on the violent response white Chicagoans had when Martin Luther King came to Marquette Park to march against housing discrimination. King’s refusal to respond to the violence — along with his own mother’s role in the Church — motivated Pfleger to join the Church.
It was an enormous amount of hate that I’d never seen before,” he recalled. “And seeing King, who refused to respond to that hate, I rode my bike home that day saying, ‘Wow, this guy is either crazy or he has some power I don’t know about.’ ” Because of his mother’s role at the church, Pfleger had considered the priesthood, and his encounter with King’s union of activism and religion drove him to join a seminary. “Everything I could cut out from the papers about King I would, and paste up on my wall,” he said. “I became, and probably still am, obsessed with him.”
The nuanced portrayal of Pfleger by Osnos makes the priest a three-dimensional character and a more human subject. Because priests are still not angels.
“Some people in Chicago dismiss Pfleger as a huckster who is more interested in getting attention than in working to find solutions. A police-officer blog calls him Pfather Pfaker,” Osnos writes.
Radical members of the African-American community accuse him of using “negotiated protest” meaning that Pfleger won’t be critical of Mayor Rahm Emanuel if they have something in the works.
The moralistic priest is a shrewd political player.
The death of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager who was shot 16 times by police, provided Pfleger with the opportunity to push for change. Emanuel and City Hall’s reputation plummeted when the administration attempted through court proceedings to keep the dashcam video from going public. That reputation fell further when the video contradicted police reports. Osnos, along with many others, suggest there was a police cover-up.
Pfleger, instead of calling for Emanuel’s resignation, pressured the city to provide economic opportunities to African-American areas of Chicago. In turn, the priest would be key in getting black residents to support Emanuel. Much like he was during Obama’s Senate campaign, Pfleger would be a power broker.
David Axelrod, the President’s former chief strategist, told me, “When Obama was running for the Senate, we polled a bunch of leaders in the black community to see who would be the most credible testimonials for radio ads. I was stunned to see that Mike Pfleger was the most popular figure in the African-American community.”
In addition, Osnos also addresses the white savior narrative that rears its head when liberal white men work as activists. The debate began following the release of Spike Lee’s movie, “Chi-Raq.”
Vic Mensa, a Chicago hip-hop artist, said the white preacher character played by John Cusack was “hurtful to [their] power as dark-skinned people.”
Lee rebutted the claims.
“That might be true if Cusack’s character didn’t exist, and added, ‘He would not be there forty years if he’s not the real deal. He’s a living saint, and they’re lucky they got him,’” Osnos writes.
The article, however, does have its weak spots.
The lead — a scene setter that begins with a CNN town hall exchange between Pfleger and Obama— is clunky and unsavory. Osnos throws a lot of information in one paragraph, making it hard to digest. A paragraph like this might scare a reader away from diving into the article.
A more structured story that follows the parallel chronologies of Pfleger and the city of Chicago would be more readable. Perhaps the author should have begun with the McDonald shooting, introduced Pfleger and provided background about his previous work. Then, bring back the McDonald shooting and Pfleger’s current work. The piece would then explore opinions of Pfleger and end at the funeral.
The author also waits a fairly long time before talking to any of Pfleger’s parishioners or anyone in his neighborhood.
Osnos pulls statements from Obama during the CNN Town Hall and gets quotes from Pfleger; famous Chicago preacher Jeremiah Wright; Dennis Axelrod, Obama’s former chief strategist; Toni Preckwinkle, a high ranking black politician in Chicago’s Cook County; Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel; political commentator Maze Jackson; filmmaker and activist Spike Lee; biographer Robert McClory; WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore; activist Cornel West and Gerald Kellman, a Chicago community organizer, in the first 7 and a half pages of the story.
But Osnos only talks to people that Pfleger currently works with in Chicago on the final page. He gets quotes from Alfreida Cobb, the mother of Phillip ‘Toon’ Dupree, a troubled young man who was shot in Chicago.
Pfleger held the funeral inside St. Sabina’s, his church.
The manner in which Osnos blended the elements of this story, along with the layout of the magazine story, engages readers and sends them on a journey that places Pfleger and his work within its proper historic and cultural context.
Chicago, though not alone in its trouble, is the most pronounced example of racial strife and anti-government sentiment in America today.
The body count is rising, and the citizens don’t trust their leaders.
Nick Wooten is a Journalism and Southern Studies major at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. He currently serves as the Managing Editor of The Cluster, Mercer’s student-run newspaper. He is a former NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune arts and entertainment intern. This summer, he will be a features writer for the Chicago Tribune.
