Witnessed: Heartbreak, but also scenes of moral courage amid looting of supermarket

The looting was over days ago, and on Thursday, the boards were up, covering the windows of the Jewel at 75th and Stony Island Avenue.

The store had been looted. You want to play politics with this? Go ahead. Everyone else is playing politics now. Astonish your friends with some of your magnificent social media virtue signaling.

But those are just words. And on 75th and Stony Island, words are not enough.

Many in this African American neighborhood had worked desperately hard, for years, to bring full-service supermarkets to the food deserts of the South Side.

All they wanted was what the people who make their livings at home on laptops want:

A store with fresh meat, and baby formula that wasn't out of date. A store with a pharmacy, and fresh vegetables, a safe place for the young and the old to shop. A store as symbol of better times ahead.

But now that it's been looted, where will the mothers get the diapers and the baby food? Where will the seniors get medicine? An old woman who can no longer drive will just have to take a bus or two.

I asked a man I met on 75th Street, Avery Hardy.

"I don't know where they'll go, take a bus maybe, far if they can," said Hardy, a kind, elderly gentleman. "We'll have to help them somehow."

I asked him: How? How do you find the mothers? How do you find the seniors who need insulin?

"I don't know," Mr. Hardy said and began to weep. "I just don't know. I'm a good person. I raised my children to be good. They didn't do this. They have their own homes, their own children. I look at this and I'm tired of this. I'm so tired of this."

We were standing across the street from the store. The plywood boards were bright enough in the sun, but they didn't gleam like those plate glass windows once did.

"I never thought I'd see this again," he said, shaking his head. "All that looting."

Police were in the store parking lot on Thursday, working on a case. But police weren't there when the store was looted days ago, as protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd erupted into chaos all over Chicago.

Chicago's mayor and Illinois' governor were caught unprepared, and dispatched police to protect downtown. But police couldn't protect it, violent factions hijacked the protests, and the destruction and looting began.

"They shouldn't have done it," said Mr. Hardy. "They did it because George Floyd got killed, because police put the knee in his neck and killed him. That's not right. But this is really sickening.

"The one side is marching against the police, the other side was perpetrating looting, stealing stuff, then giving it away. I've seen this before years ago. I never wanted to see it again. I'm tired."

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Downtown Chicago will come back. There's enough money and politics to drive a return to at least a version of itself, and we journalists will talk gushingly about renewal, and some of us will avoid mentioning all those moving out.

But what of 75th and Stony, the people who can't run off to their lake house? What of people who don't benefit from downtown glitz and media leverage?

I asked a young woman where her friends without cars will go to get the diapers and the baby food.

"They're pretty much buying the diapers and the formula from the looters that sell the products and the merchandise," she told me. "Some looters gave it away. But a lot are selling it back to people who need it."

How do the black marketeers advertise their products?

"On social media," she said. "Social media is what people do."

The other day, a reader forwarded a Facebook video taken by a man named Robert Koko Walker. I unsuccessfully tried to reach him.

Walker took his video as the looting was tearing the store apart, crowds running in and pushing carts out, taking what they could, pushing boxes on the sidewalk when there were no carts, rolling display tubs and bins through the doors.

But there was also great moral courage.

Because in Walker's video, as the looters ripped the store apart, other neighbors were trying to sweep broken glass from the parking lot.

A woman admonished the looters to stop. You could hear her voice from the parking lot, confronting the others. She was just a woman alone facing the mob.

She displayed more courage than any tough-talking politician with bodyguards, more courage than a columnist on a laptop.

"Stop!" she shouted at the looters. "We won't have a grocery store! They're not going to put it back in the community! We are not about this!"

Walker made his way around the parking lot and into the store. He was no fan of the looting.

"Look, half of them cleaning up, half of them taking (stuff). And police can't do nothing," he says. "Man, it looks like a war zone around here. For real. A war zone. And still, there's good people cleaning up.

"I don't even know what to say anymore. This makes no sense. And here's the bad part. This time next week, where are they going to eat? They killed the stores … I'm a loss for words."

But think of the good. Of all those good people cleaning up and of that brave woman alone, telling the looters to stop, and of Mr. Hardy saying he wanted to help.

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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.