Local Chicago community activist Ja’Mal Green has consistently made noise by speaking out against the discrimination of Black Chicago residents. Now he’s claiming that Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot banned him from attending a recent event in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood.
Lightfoot attended an April 7 event at the Altgeld Branch of the Chicago Public Library to celebrate the opening of the new branch and announce expanded hours at 10 more branches, the City of Chicago website reported.
Altgeld Gardens was a poverty-stricken “place without gardens, a low-rise housing estate that stands near the southern edge of Chicago,” a 2008 Abagond blog reported. It was built in the 1940s for Black soldiers returning from war. Over the years, the area was plagued by violence. Former President Barack Obama worked in Altgeld Gardens as a community organizer from 1985 to 1988.
Green tweeted that he was invited the library opening. “Mayor Lori Lightfoot banned me from coming to an event I was invited to today in Altgeld Gardens. The same Altgeld with no grocery store for miles, she was there to talk about a 30 million dollar library. The community came out and wanted answers, she ran out the back door! WOW”
Many sided with Green on Twitter.
“Black faces in high places don’t mean anything if they’re not going to help us,” @nchambers2 tweeted.
@PrinceT7419 responded, “Love your comment queen you nailed it! I just wonder how black people have all these people of color in power all these people of color representing these black communities all these people of color fighting for blk equality but we still losing our communities losing our kids…”
Green has clashed with Lightfoot before. He urged her to divert funds from the Chicago Police Department and invest in Black communities. Instead, Lightfoot allotted $281.5 million of federal covid relief money to the CPD.
Green called on Lightfoot to address the root causes of violence at a news conference in front of the CPD headquarters on June 23, 2020. He asked her to cancel the $33 million contract between the CPD and Chicago Public Schools and reallocate $500 million from the police budget to better social services, The Chicago Sun-Times reported.
“You don’t get peace when you starve people,” said Green. “You don’t get peace when you leave folks without a home. You don’t get peace when you leave folks without an economy, without being able to create generational wealth, not being able to create opportunities and jobs.”
Green also spoke out in the summer of 2020 against JPMorgan Chase Bank’s poor lending practices in Chicago’s Black communities. This led to Green being dropped as a Chase customer and barred by the bank from all Chase properties.
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A WBEZ and City Bureau investigation revealed that the bank had invested nearly 80 percent of its home loan dollars in Chicago’s white communities and just 1.9 percent in the city’s Black neighborhoods between 2012 and 2018, WBEZ reported.
Green ran for office in 2018 in the Chicago mayoral race against Lightfoot but dropped out. He was the youngest candidate to run for mayor.
