"If I had just kept walking...."

March 7, 2012 12:57 PM

The Chicago Reader's current cover story, "The Color of His Skin," (parts 1 and 2,) revisits the murder of a black man on Chicago's South Side in 1970 by a gang of white teens. Last September, a similar article by the same author, "The Price of Intolerance," (parts 1 and 2,) examined an incident from 1971, in which a twelve year old boy and thirteen year old girl were killed.
posted by zarq (3 comments total)

This article hasn't been posted at Longreads yet, (I found the first part of the story on the Huffington Post a few days ago and have been waiting impatiently for the second part to be posted,) but it will probably wind up there sooner or later. The author of both articles, Steve Bogira, mentions that the Reader still features "genuinely long, long-form journalism" in his most recent blog post,:

We used to have a simpler name for long-form stories: we just called them features. True, not all features were long, but "long" is subjective; today, any piece with a beginning, middle, and end seems to qualify. We still run genuinely long "long-form" stories here at the Reader, I'm happy to say, although sometimes with a long-form intermission for those who need a few days' sleep before tackling part 2.

...

I've got the second part of a two-part feature in the Reader this week, about a 1970 racial killing on the south side. Whichever of my colleagues posted a link to part 1 on the Reader's Facebook page kindly included a warning: "Be advised, this part alone is just shy of 6,000 words." Which I'm sure brought readers flooding in.

posted by zarq at 1:04 PM on March 7, 2012

Thanks for posting this -- because it's a great piece and because now I don't have to keep looking at the cover on my coffee table and wondering if I should post it or not.

The Reader may not be the paper it once was, but it is still a fucking treasure.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 1:15 PM on March 7, 2012 [1 favorite]

Says the son of a murdered man:

"It's probably something they want to put behind them," he continues. "If they still feel that way about blacks, then there's nothing nobody can do about it. If they don't still feel that way, they probably regret it, but they can't take it back."

This comment breaks my heart and at the same time makes so, so proud of the man that said it. There's something amazing about having that level of empathy for people who hurt you and your family. To understand that hate hurts everyone, those that hate and those that are hated, well, that's pretty amazing to me.

Thanks for posting this. It was one good read.
posted by teleri025 at 2:10 PM on March 7, 2012 [3 favorites]