Mike Schramm

As the rain falls in Daley Plaza, Tim King of Public Action for Change Today (PACT) recounts his plan. He tells the hundred or so youth in attendance at the rally that he and a few other organizers, including Stephen Smith, will go up to the fifth floor of City Hall and make one last try at meeting with the mayor about youth homelessness. Everyone else, he says, should march Jericho-style around the building. When they come out, if they've gotten their meeting, everyone will chant, "The walls came down." If not, it'll be "We'll be back."

They make their way across Clark. King and Smith head upstairs while the other youths march silently, carrying yellow signs beat up by the weather--"End Homelessness," says one. Another: "The average homeless youth in Chicago is nine years old, black, and female." After five laps around the building, someone gets a cell-phone call, and the crowd floods inside, intent on joining their leaders on the fifth floor. They try to cram onto the elevators before a security guard, who obviously doesn't want to deal with a crowd of kids at 5pm on a Friday afternoon, blocks the way. His supervisor explains that, while he has "respect for your cause," the building is closing in five minutes. No one's going anywhere, unless they want to get arrested.

The kids wait a little longer, signs in hand, and then Smith comes down from upstairs and explains what happened: the mayor has dodged. "We'll keep working," he says to the kids, a television camera, and the bewildered city workers trying to get home, "until this mayor realizes that young people are worth meeting with."

(2006-04-04)

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