It’s that time of year. When I hear the voices.
They are not the shouts of summertime glee. For me, the playful, sultry sounds of the season are drowned out by voices of grief that flow on and on, beyond the Junes and Julys, beyond the summers, beyond the years.
They are the moans, cries and tears of loved ones who have lost their women and girls. Black women and girls who have been slain, brutalized and disappeared.
Black women and girls who leave home and never return. Some of their bodies are found, others are not.
As a journalist, I have covered too many of these stories. In July 1998, I reported on the brutal slaying of Ryan Harris.
I can still hear the inconceivable anguish of Sabrina Harris for her firstborn child.
Ryan, 11, was spending the summer at her godmother’s home in Englewood, where she loved to ride her bike.
On July 27, she went out for a ride. She never came back. Family members called the police. Give it time, they were told.
Ryan’s battered body was found in an overgrown yard near the railroad tracks. Her skull was fractured. She had been raped.
The police — incredibly and wrongly — arrested two young boys, and they were charged with the crime. It took years to bring the real perpetrator to justice. Sabrina Harris got a sliver of justice. Others were not so “lucky.”
I hear the agony of Tracey Bradley, mother of Tionda and Diamond. On July 6, 2001, the two little girls vanished from their Bronzeville apartment. They have never been seen again. Tionda was 10, Diamond, 3.
Last week, their mother, as she does every July, held a vigil at Robert Taylor Park on West 47th Street. For 21 years, she has been pleading for information and begging for their return.
“I have so many memories of them,” Tracey Bradley told Block Club Chicago. “It’s been tough not knowing where they are, not being able to touch them, but I pray every day.”
I hear the demands of dozens of activists and bereft family members, such as those who marched last month in Bronzeville.
On June 14, the fifth annual We Walk for Her March was hosted by GoodKids MadCity and the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization “to demand the city and state do more to solve the backlog of death and disappearance cases in Chicago involving victims who are Black, mostly young women and girls.”
At a news conference, Myrna Walker held up a photo of her sister, Nancie, whose dismembered body was found in trash bags on the side of a South Side road in 2003. The case was never solved.
“This is her, who I walk for,” Myrna Walker said. Nancie Walker was a 55-year-old businesswoman.
“She’s my sister. She’s been missing for 20 years,” Myrna Walker said. “And my question today is how long is it going to take before something is done, some justice is done for her? And when is it going to be an urgency to the city of Chicago to find her killer?”
In Chicago and nationwide, Black women and girls are statistically overrepresented among the cases of missing women. The march organizers cited data from the National Crime Information Center database: 89,020 (36%) were Black, and 73,395 (28.5%) were Black women age 20 or younger.
Shamari Woulard also cries for her sister, Sandy Woulard, a 28-year-old transgender Black woman. Sandy was shot to death on the South Side in 2010.
“I’ve heard and seen so many (transgender people) murdered, and there’s no justice,” she told the Tribune.
The killings of transgender women of color in Chicago often go unsolved, a Tribune analysis shows. Only about 23% of the violent deaths of transgender women in recent years have been solved by Chicago police, compared with 38% of homicides solved overall, the Tribune found.
While he is not happy with the 23% solve rate, each case is different, and some are more difficult to solve, Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan said.
“The detectives go out and put the effort in — the best of which they’re capable — to solve every single case, regardless of any sort of race, creed, et cetera,” Deenihan told the Tribune. “Every single case gets treated the same by the detective division.”
Tell that to the voices that cry on, year after year, decade after decade. Who wait for loved ones who never return. Who pray for the arrests and convictions that never come.
And who ask a simple question: “Why?”
They are not white.
Gabby Petito was. When the 22-year-old cross-country traveler went missing in Wyoming in the late summer 2021, a massive, weekslong search ensued and the case received a deluge of media attention.
Weeks later, Petito’s body was found in a remote area of a national park. A coroner ruled that she was strangled.
Her fiance, Brian Laundrie, later committed suicide and allegedly confessed to killing her, according to investigators.
For missing and slain Black women, there is no urgency. We don’t matter. We are probably hookers, some say, or irresponsible, others think.
We are invisible, and our loved ones unheard.
The voices will always haunt me. They should haunt all of us, and press us to join in their demands for justice.
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Monday. Write to her at LauraLauraWashington@gmail.com.
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