This is the third and final story in a series titled, “Caravan of Faith” about a trip to a Sept. 25 anti-gun violence rally in Washington, D.C. The group returned to Chicago the next morning.
The wheels on the bus go round and round, like the cyclone of gun violence that leaves our children’s blood splattered and a city’s soul stained with the murder of the innocent and young.
Chicago’s skyscraper-kissed horizon comes into full view, a stunning portrait beneath blue morning skies as the caravan of faith arrives worn but their souls not weary. Bus No. 1 snakes into our beloved city, having ventured to the nation’s capital and back home again.
Back to gun violence. Back to murder. Back to the seemingly inescapable pall that hangs over our city like an ominous storm cloud, even on sunny days.
Gun violence and murder accompanied us on our journey. The Rev. Michael L. Pfleger and the Faith Community of St. Sabina carried memories and pictures of the slain young, like precious cargo, as the bus rumbled over hundreds of miles.
I was among them with 13 of my journalism students from Roosevelt University — embedded as reporters.
Headlines of the latest local toll of shootings found their way aboard, even as we rolled toward Washington, D.C.
“Harvey girl shot in the head the night before 12th birthday”
“16 shot — four fatally — Tuesday in Chicago”
“…DNA links alleged gunman to Tyshawn Lee killing”
The caravan carrying its faithful continued on, undeterred in their sojourn for help. To raise awareness, insisting that gun violence in Chicago or any other place in America impacts us all, from sea to shining sea.
To urge Congress to adopt common sense gun legislation that helps diminish the free flow of guns to urban, suburban or rural streets across America, where murderous gunmen transform tree-lined neighborhoods and even small-town Main Street into killing fields, where piles of shell casings are evidence of the trail of human carnage and premature autopsies.
Tirelessly committed to ending this scourge is the St. Sabina faithful. Hope. Light in darkness. Good in the maniacal face of evil. Unbridled in their faith. Perseverant. Long-suffering — their hearts broken and mended and broken again by incalculable human loss:
Innocent sons fatally shot and discarded like trash. Daughters felled by a bullet while jumping rope. A good boy ushered to his death by adult assassins.
That was Tyshawn’s fate on Nov. 2, 2015. Tyshawn was 9, a handsome black boy with baby teeth.
Two of Tyshawn’s killers were recently convicted of first-degree murder for luring him from a playground with a basketball to an alley. The gunman shot Tyshawn seven times with a .40 caliber handgun, according to prosecutors, left his body in an alley. Apparent revenge exacted upon a child for a father’s alleged sins.
Senseless is this trail of gun violence. I have followed it for 30 years now as a journalist born and raised here in the Chi. And I stand mesmerized that, after all this time, too many of us still bury our heads in the sand, no tears in our eyes. Still remain immune or deaf to black and brown cries.
And I stand in amazement of Father Michael Pfleger and this caravan of faith — determined to never let their cause to end gun violence die. Unwavering in a mission that is just, humane, necessary, right.
Still determined, after all these years — and miles — even as we climb off the caravan of faith, into the morning light.
“I got to come home and pick my life up exactly where I left off,” Mohammad Samra, 20, one of my journalism students wrote, reflecting after the trip. So many others “went home to the reality that their loved ones lay in caskets with bullet holes tainting their once delicate body, like graffiti on a million-dollar painting.”
Email John Fountain at: Email@Johnwfountain.com
Send letters to: letters@suntimes.com.
