AUSTIN — Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein brought her campaign to Chicago's West Side Thursday, leading a gaggle of supporters and media through Austin to share her platform and hear from local residents.
Stein emphasized the neighborhood's "crisis of gun violence," criticized Mayor Rahm Emanuel and called for increased education funding in Austin, which she said "has been thrown under the bus perhaps more than any other community" in the country.
Born in Chicago and raised in suburban Highland Park, Stein is a medical doctor who took up the mantle of anti-coal activism starting in 1998. She has never held elected office outside the Representative Town Meeting of Lexington, Mass., but she ran as the Green Party's nominee for president in 2012, grabbing about 0.4 percent of the national vote.
Here's @DrJillStein talking to media about the "crisis of violence" here in #Austin #Chicago pic.twitter.com/MYxbpjgBf1
— Alex Nitkin (@AlexNitkin) September 8, 2016
Standing at the corner of Quincy Street and Central Avenue, down the block from where 16-year-old Elijah Sims was shot to death last week, Stein pointed to tougher federal gun laws as a way to curb endemic violence.
"We've got a crisis here in the streets," Stein told reporters at the intersection. "We need gun laws that actually provide the protection that our communities need, and these laws need to be at the national level so that communities alone are not faced with this problem of guns coming from across state borders."
Stein also called for universal background checks and tighter regulations for gun manufacturers, citing the more than 50 people killed in Austin so far this year.
Austin consistently tallies more homicides than any other neighborhood in the city. With nearly 100,000 residents, it's also the most populous of Chicago's 77 community areas.
Thursday's campaign event was coordinated by local Green Party organizer Zerlina Smith, who lives in Austin, as a way to show the city's black residents that "they can vote for someone other than the two candidates at the top of the ballot," she said.
Stein spent about an hour strolling through residential blocks, leading her entourage toward Madison Street as Smith stood beside her and called out "Y'all want to meet a candidate for president?" to residents they passed along the way.
Some onlookers craned their necks to check out the commotion, and others ignored the group outright. One woman ran behind the candidate and pumped her fist, yelling "Hillary!" before scampering away.
But a handful of others, like Wilma Logan, stopped for a conversation about what the community needs from its federal government.
"If you had a wish that we could bring to this community, would it be after-school programs? Funding for the schools?" Stein asked Logan, a custodial worker at Oscar DePriest Elementary School, 139 S. Parkside Ave.
"Funding for the schools," Logan agreed, "and that the police could walk the beat and be more out here than just giving parking tickets."
.@DrJillStein talking to Wilma Logan, a custodian at DePriest Elementary pic.twitter.com/QtnrhB9rxq
— Alex Nitkin (@AlexNitkin) September 8, 2016
Other residents, like Darius Johnson, stood silent and bewildered as the scrum of cameras fixed on Stein informing him of her intention to slash military spending and reform the country's campaign finance system.
After the crowd moved on, Johnson said the visit took him by surprise, but that he'd consider voting for Stein in November.
"I guess it's good that she's down here," he said. "And I don't like [Donald] Trump or Hillary [Clinton], so yeah."
Stein and her team even stopped inside MacArthur's Restaurant, 5412 W Madison St., to hash out local issues with diners over chicken and ribs.
The event ended in front of the shuttered windows of Emmett Elementary School, 5500 W. Madison St., one of the 50 Chicago Public Schools permanently closed in 2013. The closings mostly targeted schools on the city's South and West Side, including four in Austin alone.
"We have a public school system that has been disinvested from," Stein told reporters. "These children are not being served...they are being assigned to other schools they cannot get to.
"We need a school system that's focused on lifetime learning, and we need to be investing in education," she added.
Stein also took direct aim at Emanuel, saying he should resign for "heading a police department that sat on the real facts" in the 2014 police shooting of Laquan McDonald.
"Democrats are not going to fix this problem of corruption," Stein said. "They are an example of corruption."
Stein is scheduled to hold a rally at the Peoples Church of Chicago, 941 W Lawrence Ave., in Uptown at 7 p.m. Thursday evening.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:
