Is ‘Chi-Raq’ Based On True Story? As Spike Lee Movie Opens, Chicago Violence Impact On Black Children Gets Another Turn In Spotlight

The first time Ja’Mal Green witnessed what he believed was a murder, he was 10 years old. He looked out the window of his South Side Chicago bedroom and saw a man emptying a semiautomatic weapon in the direction of a car parked down his street.

From then on, gun violence that sometimes claimed the lives of classmates and neighbors was a mainstay in Green’s daily life. Green, who is black, said he remembers vividly the times he and other kids playing in the neighborhood had to scramble home to avoid shootouts between warring gangs along a dividing line on South Halsted Street. Home burglaries, assaults and other crimes in the area gave some the impression that they’d been doomed to live in a war zone — with few avenues out.

“We should not be deemed failures or people who don’t want to go anywhere [in life],” Green, a 20-year-old musician and community activist, said this week in an phone interview from Chicago. “There’s a lot of people here who are really motivated to go further. They just have so many barriers.”

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