Former Washington running back Ken Jenkins, 60, and his wife Amy Lewis on Friday delivered 50,000 petitions demanding equal treatment for Black players to Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia, who is overseeing the massive settlement.

PHILADELPHIA — Thousands of retired Black professional football players, their families and supporters are demanding an end to the controversial use of “race-norming” to determine which players are eligible for payouts in the NFL’s $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims, a system experts say is discriminatory.

Former Washington running back Ken Jenkins, 60, and his wife Amy Lewis on Friday delivered 50,000 petitions demanding equal treatment for Black players to Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia, who is overseeing the massive settlement. Former players who suffer dementia or other diagnoses can be eligible for a payout.

Under the settlement, however, the NFL has insisted on using a scoring algorithm on the dementia testing that assumes Black men start with lower cognitive skills. They must therefore score much lower than whites to show enough mental decline to win an award. The practice, which went unnoticed until 2018, has made it harder for Black former players to get awards.

“My reaction was, ‘Well, here we go again,’” said Jenkins, a former running back. “It’s the same old nonsense for Black folks, to have to deal with some insidious, convoluted deals that are being made.” Jenkins is now an insurance executive and is not experiencing any cognitive problems, but has plenty of NFL friends who are less fortunate.

In March, Brody threw out a civil rights lawsuit that claimed the practice is discriminatory. But she later said in a filing that the practice raised “a very important issue” and asked a magistrate judge to compile a report on the problem. She told The Associated Press she did not know when it would be completed.

The majority of the league’s 20,000 retirees are Black. And only a quarter of the more than 2,000 men who sought awards for early to moderate dementia have qualified under the testing program. Lawyers for Black players have asked for details on how the $800 million in settlement payouts so far have broken along racial lines, but have yet to receive them.

Race norming is sometimes used in medicine as a rough proxy for socioeconomic factors that can affect someone’s health. Experts in neurology said the way it’s used in the NFL settlement is too simplistic and restrictive, and has the effect of systematically discriminating against Black players.

“Because every Black retired NFL player has to perform lower on the test to qualify for an award than every white player. And that’s essentially systematic racism in determining these payouts,” said Katherine Possin, a neurology professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

In other major settlements, including those tied to the the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing, all claimants were treated the same.

“We concluded, fairly quickly, that we would take the top compensation for the white male and everyone would get the same, the top dollar,” said lawyer Ken Feinberg, who has overseen many of the largest settlement funds. “We would cure this compensatory discrimination by having a rising tide raise all ships.”

The first lawsuits accusing the NFL of hiding what it knew about the link between concussions and brain damage were filed in 2011. A trickle soon became a deluge, and the NFL, rather than risk a trial, agreed in 2013 to pay $765 million over 65 years for certain diagnoses, including Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. But as the claims poured in, Brody feared the fund would run out early and ordered the cap removed.

The NFL, which foots the bill, began challenging claims by the hundreds, according to the claims website.

In appealing one filed by Najeh Davenport, the NFL complained that his doctor had not used “full demographic norms” in the cognitive scoring. That meant factoring in age, education, gender — and race.

“I remain unsure what you are talking about. He was done using standard norms like everyone else. Using different racial standards is indeed discriminatory and illegal. We stand by our scores,” the physician said in response, according to court records.

Ultimately, the appeal was reviewed by a pair of University of Pennsylvania legal scholars serving as special masters for Brody. They rejected the original reviewer’s finding that race norms were mandatory under the settlement. Still, they concluded that Davenport’s doctor had to explain whether he typically uses them or only waived them so Davenport would get an award.

“Using race-specific norms can be enormously consequential, and the adjustments may often make the difference in a clinician’s determination of cognitive impairment and a determination of normal functioning for retired NFL players seeking benefits,” special masters David A. Hoffman and Wendell E. Pritchett wrote in the Aug. 20 decision.

Days later, Davenport and another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Kevin Henry, filed the civil rights lawsuit, calling public attention to the issue for the first time. Their lawyers hoped to learn through the litigation how often Black players are denied payouts.

Instead, Brody dismissed the suit, saying they were bound by the settlement because they had not opted out years ago. But as concerns about race-norming grew — and with the racial unrest of 2020 still simmering — Brody in April opened the door to changing the practice when she ordered lawyers for the league and the players back to the table to work out an agreement.

Jennifer Manley, a Columbia University neuropsychologist hired by Davenport’s lawyers, called race norms in medicine ill-conceived and outdated in a court filing.

Race-based adjustments for neurology — known as “Heaton norms” — were designed in the early 1990s by Dr. Robert Heaton to estimate how socioeconomic factors affect someone’s health. They are widely used, but in recent years, scientists in the field have begun to recognize the limitations of the normative comparison groups they have used for years.

The small sample group of Blacks Heaton chose to create his adjustment protocol came entirely from San Diego, a military town where the Black population hardly reflected the diversity of Blacks across the U.S. The racial classifications are also binary — Black or white — even though hundreds of NFL retirees, and millions of Americans, identify as mixed race.

‘White and Black retired NFL players may be more similar to each other than they are to the reference populations … used to develop Heaton or (other) race-specific norms,” Manley wrote in her brief in the Davenport lawsuit. Several neurology experts have said the NFL’s assessment program is flawed. Possin said UCSF had considered participating in the assessments but decided against it.

“We declined to participate in these evaluations because it just didn’t feel like good clinical practice to us,” Possin said. “There’s probably a number of these players who, the neurologists who evaluated them were pretty sure they had a neurodegenerative disease and they had dementia. But maybe they didn’t score quite low enough. They didn’t pass the threshold, so they didn’t meet the NFL settlement criteria for a payout. And that’s really, I think, unfortunate.”

Dr. Francis X. Conidi, a neurologist and former president of the Florida Neurologic Society, who has treated hundreds of former NFL players, wrote a critique of the settlement’s assessment program in 2018, saying it had developed a system where players would be classified with “fictional diagnostic categories” of level 1, level 1.5 and level 2 neurocognitive impairments. Only those classified as levels 1.5 or 2 would qualify for a settlement.

Conidi said these categories could leave the patient confused about the cause of his symptoms and recommended that they adopt a protocol that includes a standard workup for dementia, including neuroimaging and other testing that is not currently done under the assessments.

The NFL’s dementia testing evaluates a person’s function in two dozen skills that fall under five sections: complex attention/processing speed; executive functioning; language; learning and memory; and visual perception. A player must show a marked decline in at least two of them to get an award.

In an example shared with The Associated Press, one player’s raw score of 19 for “letter-number sequencing” in the processing section was adjusted using “race-norming” and became 42 for whites and 46 for Blacks.

The raw score of 15 for naming animals in the language section became a 35 for whites and 41 for Blacks. And the raw score of 51 for “block design” in the visual perception section became a 53 for whites but 60 for Blacks.

Taking the 24 scores together, either a white or Black player would have scored low enough to reach the settlement’s 1.5-level of early dementia in “processing speed.” However, in the language section, the scores would have qualified a white man for a 2.0-level, or moderate, dementia finding — but shown no impairment for Blacks.

Overall, the scores would result in a 1.5-level dementia award for whites — but nothing for Blacks. Those awards average more than $400,000 but can reach $1.5 million for men under 45, while 2.0-level dementia yields an average payout of more than $600,000 but can reach $3 million.

Breton Asken, a neuropsychology fellow at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, helped administer several assessments around 2016, when he was a student at the University of Florida. The assessments he was involved in took 4 to 6 hours, and produced a score, which would then be adjusted based on the Heaton norms.

“So the male Black athletes that we saw would be compared essentially to a group of otherwise healthy Black individuals with a similar number of years of education and of the same age,” Asken said.

Even at the time, he said he and his colleagues worried the assessments and adjustments were not appropriate.

“I think we were always hesitant to be robotic about this,” Asken said. “We understood from a legal standpoint why there’s a push and a need for making something a little more algorithmic and robotic, that it can be standardized and so forth. But I think there’s also a lot of challenges when you take expert clinical decision-making out of things.”

They would report the person’s level of impairment by the “letter of the law” and would also provide comments conveying “anything else we thought was relevant to the patient’s brain health, physical health, mental health and so forth that we thought would be important for us to include in something like a standard neuropsychological report.”

The test battery also included questionnaires about mood and personality. But those scores were not included in the algorithm to determine compensation, he said.

“They’re getting full neurologic exams from these neurologists who are able to pick up on other aspects of the nervous system that might be having problems and so forth. Feels very odd for us to put this comprehensive neuropsychological report together and just ignore those pieces of data,” Asken recalled.

“Norming by race is not the stance that the NFL ought to take,” said Dr. Art Caplan, a New York University medical ethicist. “It continues to look as if it’s trying to exclude people rather than trying to do what’s right, which is to help people that, clinically, have obvious and severe disability.” He noted that the long history of racial bias in medicine includes the long-held myth that Black people feel less pain.

“There’s always been this race-norming in medicine,” he said, “that has been problematic because it’s tied in too closely to racism.”

Jenkins, the former Washington player, believes it all comes down to money.

“Race-norming may have had a benign origin, but it quickly morphed into a tool that can be used to help the folks in power save money,” he said.

Yet Caplan is not alone in thinking there may be even more at play here: the future of the NFL.

“These may be fights to escape the conclusion that football’s too dangerous. That’s always looming in the background,” Caplan said. “That opens the door to a lot of moms saying ‘I’m not sure that’s the right sport for my kid.’”

In March, the same month Brody dismissed the civil rights lawsuit, the league announced an 11-year deal with TV partners worth $113 billion.

___

Smith reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

___

Follow Maryclaire Dale on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Maryclairedale and Michelle R. Smith at https://twitter.com/MRSmithAP.

Contact AP’s global investigative team at [email protected] or https://www.ap.org/tips/

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Wyoming Republican is a reminder of Sarah Palin, another conservative woman who stood her ground

Bamboozle me not!

Mr. Trump.

Mr. Mayhem.

Mr. Former fibber-in-chief.

The perpetrator of “The Big Lie,” his stolen election.

The big question?

Has this Goliath of vanity finally met his slingshot?

Will U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, actually have a shot at stopping Donald Trump from “unraveling our country’s democracy?”

“The truth will come out,” she claims.

Well, it’s hard not to admire Cheney’s courage to trammel Trump on the basis of truth —even if the conservative Cheney is so far right of the Constitution she’s practically in a country of her own.

Can the eldest daughter of her fighter father, former GOP Vice President Dick Cheney, successfully erase Trump’s Republican party power?

So before getting overly enthusiastic, let’s not forget the explosive entrance 13 years ago of another defiant female Republican with Wyoming grit … Alaskan-style.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had taken the political stage by storm when Republican presidential contender John McCain chose her as his running mate in 2008.

Palin also liked to call things out.

And, in the beginning, it was impressive.

Back on Sept. 16, 2008, this columnist, a die hard Hillary Clinton supporter, reported being impressed by Palin’s acceptance speech as McCain’s veep mate. She climbed to the podium in red high heels.

Yikes!

Thus, I wrote:

AP file photo

“I’m tired of women working hard for a hammer that never breaks the glass ceiling; disgusted when Hillary Clinton, an incredibly capable, brilliant woman, lost the fight of her life.

“And then along came Palin, a woman of the tundra who could be America’s next best frontier story — and I was pleasantly surprised.

“Hell, I was delighted.

“So what if she’s a Republican?

“So what if she didn’t know the definition of the Bush Doctrine? Her performance was a Western draw. Bravery intact. But no one shot.

“So I asked myself — what fault is there in admiring a woman who is against abortion — even though I believe in freedom of choice?

“What’s wrong with huge respect for a woman who chose to give birth to a Down Syndrome child knowing full well what was in store for her and her family?

“She is real. She is rural. She may not be a brilliant tactician, but she’s got street sense.

“Thus, it now appears Palin has emerged as ‘everywoman’ to a huge portion of our female population; a woman never really identified with what we thought was our quintessential role model — a highly educated woman who wears tailored suits, whose voice is never shrill and who has a husband who makes more than she does.

“I don’t know what perfume Palin wears, but to me she smells of the soil.”

It didn’t take long to pull the plug on my Palin admiration, especially since she didn’t know where Russia was actually located in reference to Alaska and cribbed answers to questions on her hand when being interviewed on TV.

In the meanwhile, I will continue to admire Cheney’s grit, formidable style, critical thinking and resolve.

And pray for Palin’s recovery from COVID-19.

Scary Harry . . .

Prince Harry is now a man of words.

In a recent Armchair Expert podcast, a once merry Harry claimed life amid the royal Brit monarchy was a mix he eventually wanted to nix.

Unhappy Harry now describes his royal life as a “mix between being in a zoo and ‘The Truman Show,’” a film about a guy unaware his life exists on a TV set. He cites the tragedy of the life of his mother, Princess Diana, ending in a paparazzi hunt.

• Upshot or buckshot? Is the escapism Harry sought with American wife, Meghan nee Markle, among the security surrounding their Montecito mansion in California and amid time spent on TV queen Oprah Winfrey’s film sets?

Ya think?

A meow moment . . .

Checking it out!

Here’s a rare report: The press actually used mathematical calculators last week when covering the amazing fire escape of a black cat, which jumped from the fifth floor of a burning apartment in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood last Thursday afternoon.

• To wit: Some newsies actually fact checked the terminal velocity of the cat pitching itself out of a window before miraculously surviving the fall.

Kay’s way . . .

Veteran Chicago political reporter Dick Kay, who “doogied” out last week at 84, was a film noir character in a starring role on his remarkable TV news career.

Kay was a “meet;” an unforgettable WMAQ reporter, storyteller, scoopster, and guy with a baritone chuckle accompanied by a query. He loved the angles.

Once you met him, you never forgot him.

Condolences to his beloved family and goodbye to the newsman with the wry smile, deep laugh, and unforgettable voice.

Sneedlings . . .

Saturday’s birthdays: Ray Lewis, 46; Emmitt Smith, 52; and Andy Murray, 34. . . . Sunday birthdays: Megan Fox, 35; Janet Jackson, 55; and Danny Trejo, 77.

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He was walking about 2:17 p.m. in the 7900 block of South Paulina Street when someone drove up in a vehicle and opened fire, striking him in the back, Chicago police said.

A man was killed in a shooting Friday in Gresham on the South Side.

He was walking about 2:17 p.m. in the 7900 block of South Paulina Street when someone drove up in a vehicle and opened fire, striking him in the back, Chicago police said.

The 19-year-old was taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he was pronounced dead, police said.

The Cook County medical examiner’s office hasn’t released details.

Area Two detectives are investigating.

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At Casa Al-Fatiha in Logan Square, two local musicians built a sanctuary for LGBTQ asylum seekers.

This story was originally published by City Bureau on May 11, 2021, and is part of the How a Community Heals series.…Read More

Some of us don’t give the police the credit they deserve. So I apologize for this lapse and say: ‘Thank you, Chicago police officers, for doing your job under extraordinary circumstances,’

When a Chicago police officer screws up, we don’t spare any ink letting you know.

But some of us don’t give the Chicago Police Department enough credit for catching the bad guys. I’m as guilty of this oversight as some of you.

So I apologize for this lapse and say: ”Thank you, Chicago police officers, for doing your job under extraordinary circumstances,”

Given the anti-police climate we are in, I imagine it would be easier to ignore a “shots fired” call than to rush headlong into a situation where there is a likelihood that things could go awry. Frankly, I don’t know who would want to be on the police force right now, with children as young as 15 and 16 running around with powerful firearms that they aren’t afraid to use. No, thank you.

As the ex-wife of a Chicago police officer reminded me, police officers are human beings. They want to come home at the end of their shifts in one piece. I’m grateful that, despite the distrust and disrespect police officers encounter daily, many police officers are still putting on their uniforms and actively patrolling our streets.

It gives me hope that the police were able to quickly track down and arrest two of the men suspected of being involved in the fatal shooting of 7-year-old Jaslyn Adams while she sat with her father in the drive-thru lane of a McDonald’s on the West Side. Marion Lewis, 18, and Demond Goudy, 21, are now behind bars, accused of murder. A third man, identified as Devontay Anderson, is still on the run.

The fact that police identified Jaslyn’s father as a “known gang member” didn’t stop the department from aggressively pursuing the case. Make no mistake, these are some dangerous guys. Goudy was out on bail, charged with four felonies, at the time of his arrest. Police had to engage in a car chase onto the Eisenhower Expressway and shoot Lewis after they say he tried to carjack a driver before they could bring him in to face the charges.

Meanwhile, police Supt. David Brown has been quietly taking care of business.

The city’s year-to-date homicide clearance rate right now is 58.45% compared to 51.88% year-to-date in 2019. Four years ago, the city’s murder clearance rate was just 29%.

The police department sends out daily alerts notifying the news media of people who were arrested and charged with serious crimes, including homicides.

Here’s a sampling:

• May 13 — Male juvenile, 18, two felony counts of murder and one felony count of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon;
• May 12 — Deandre Watson, 27, one felony count murder, first-degree.
• May 11 — Anthony Moody, 55, one felony count murder, first-degree;
• May 11 — Deangelo Watson, 20, one felony count murder, first-degree.

Despite all of the challenges, the Chicago Police Department seems to be upping its game when it comes to getting murderers off our streets.

They have accomplished this goal while facing the perils of foot pursuits and car chases involving some who aren’t about to go peacefully. On Thursday, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that 66 percent of Chicago police car chases in 2019 ended in crashes. Eight of those crashes were fatal.

The troubling stats, leaked in a trove of hacked City Hall emails, is sure to spark calls for greater oversight and policy changes. But just as we insist that the city hold rogue police officers accountable for their actions, we need to salute those who do the right thing.

While police officers are honored for acts of bravery at interdepartmental ceremonies, the public has a role to play. There’s nothing wrong with giving your beat cop a wave, a smile or a nod of appreciation when a patrol car cruises down your block.

These men and women have demanding jobs.

We shouldn’t be stingy with our compliments when it’s a job well done.

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The former Sox third baseman and manager is back in touch with his college self. If there’s someplace he’d rather be than Stillwater, Okla., he doesn’t know where it is.

It’s not as if big-league baseball has forgotten all about Robin Ventura. Opportunity still knocks on occasion for the former White Sox third baseman and manager, whose last season with the club was in 2016. It’s just that he isn’t listening.

Ventura, 53, is too busy going nowhere — and loving it.

“Things are really good,” he said.

One of the great college hitters of all time, Ventura — a three-time All-American, two-time RBI champ, national player of the year and owner of an incredible 58-game hitting streak — is back at Oklahoma State, his alma mater, as a student assistant with the baseball team.

You caught the “student” part, didn’t you?

It was January of 2020 when Ventura returned to his Cowboys roots, intending to pursue the undergraduate degree he’d never completed. Going through a divorce at the time, and his children grown, Ventura felt in his gut that it was the right move. What he didn’t anticipate was a pandemic that would cut short the college season, keep him out of the classroom — “e-learning,” seriously? — and eventually pound him for two weeks with the worst flu-like symptoms he’d ever felt.

COVID-19 caught up with Ventura — since fully vaccinated — during winter break of this school year. He got through it, quarantining at his home in Stillwater, and last week took the last final exams of what essentially was his junior year. He still has two semesters and 24 credits to go before he’ll earn his bachelor’s degree in business management.

And then what?

“Not sure,” he said. “I don’t really have a grand plan. Maybe it’ll lead to something else.”

Meantime, Ventura has a new house that he really digs. He has a favorite golf course. The hunting and fly fishing — in a nice spot right by the Arkansas state line — are to his liking.

And he’s back in touch with his college self — in a baseball sense, too — which is special. Head coach Josh Holliday is an old friend whose father, Tom, was on the OSU staff (he later moved up to the head job) when Ventura was a player. Josh’s younger brother, Matt — the former seven-time big-league All-Star — is a volunteer assistant. Pitching coach Rob Walton is one of Ventura’s old Cowboys teammates.

Ventura helps the corner infielders with their defense and everybody with their bats, and what kid wouldn’t be smart enough to listen to a guy who won six Gold Gloves (five with the Sox), belted nearly 300 big-league homers and knocked in nearly 1,200 runs?

That goes even for those Cowboys players — there are a few of them — who have classes with a certain student assistant or, like senior outfielder Cade Cabbiness, are further along in the business school.

“Guys will tease him about having a test or homework, which is pretty funny to watch,” Cabbiness said. “But I think it’s pretty cool what he’s doing. That guy could be doing a lot of things. Instead, he’s here coaching and getting his college degree. And he’s relatable, personable, patient and easygoing. I’m just glad I get to see that guy every day.”

If there’s someplace Ventura would rather be, he can’t think of it.

“It’s just a fun group to be around,” he said. “It’s very comfortable. The kids are great. The age group is very fun. I love it.”

As much as managing in the majors, though? Even if, in Ventura’s case, that meant replacing a World Series winner in Ozzie Guillen.

“I enjoy them both,” he said. “I enjoyed managing the Sox. And this was an opportunity that came up that I thought was exciting and fun and different, and I just felt like doing it. Why not? If the baseball is good, it’s good — no matter where it is.”

The truth is, it isn’t the baseball piece that’s ever a problem. Staying organized and on time with all things school — e-learning, seriously? — presents less-familiar challenges. Countless students, or parents of students, out there can relate to that.

When Ventura arrived on campus, he imagined himself sitting in a classroom and noticing young eyes on him.

“What the heck is this old guy doing in here?” they’d wonder.

What’s he doing? Living his life. And managing better than OK.

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Today’s update is a 5-minute read that will brief you on the day’s biggest stories.

Good afternoon. Here’s the latest news you need to know in Chicago. It’s about a 5-minute read that will brief you on today’s biggest stories.

This afternoon will be partly sunny with a high near 70 degrees. Tonight’s low will be around 51 degrees. Tomorrow will be mostly cloudy with a high near 65.

Top story

Exporting abusive priests: Catholic religious order based near Northbrook reveals abusers

In his four decades as a Catholic missionary in Ghana, the Rev. Ronald Lange has been credibly accused of sexually abusing children over “multiple years.”

That’s according to his order’s Chicago hub. Facing scrutiny over its predator priests, including one who’s now on trial in East Timor, Society of the Divine Word has for the first time revealed the names and past postings of clergy who’ve been part of the Chicago province and been deemed by its leaders to have been credibly accused of child sex abuse anywhere in the world.

Lange, 79, is one of two priests on that list who formally remain part of the Chicago province of the Society of the Divine Word, an international religious order that “focuses on missionary work” and since 1875 has “entered lands where people are in need” and shared “God’s love.”

He’s also one of 26 current, former or deceased members the province now says have had substantiated accusations against them of having sexually abused children.

Read the full story from Robert Herguth here.

More news you need

1. Mayor Lori Lightfoot nominated Annette Nance-Holt today to be the Chicago Fire Department’s commissioner. She would be the first woman to lead CFD in its 162-year history.
2. Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich is apparently seeking an early end to his two-year supervised release, left intact when his prison sentence was commuted last year by then-President Trump. Prosecutors don’t oppose the move, which remains as a formality to bring an end to the corruption case from more than a decade ago.
3. A day after the CDC announced new mask recommendations, state and local officials have yet to issue an updated set of business guidelines regarding face coverings. “It’s just adding confusion to things for us,” one restaurant manager said today.
4. Having lost many loved ones to Huntington’s disease, Dave and Susie Hodgson are preparing for the Naperville Riverwalk Sunday. The couple started the walk in 2005 and have since raised $1.2 million for the cause.
5. Twin Chicago doctors Brittani James and Brandi Jackson are working to eliminate entrenched racism in the medical profession. “We’re teaching how to see it and how to undo it,” Jackson said.
6. There are fears over what could happen to a towering stained glass artwork at the financially troubled Chicago Loop Synagogue and a mosaic at River Grove’s old Guerin Catholic high school. The synagogue’s president and school’s former principal each say public support could help.
7. Riot Fest will return this year, with Nine Inch Nails, the Smashing Pumpkins and Vic Mensa among the headliners announced today. Three-day passes are available now, while single-day passes will go on sale next week.

A bright one

A music teacher at Bronzeville Classical Elementary School got the surprise of a lifetime yesterday morning when he thought he was walking into a union meeting but instead received a Golden Apple Award for excellence in teaching.

Reggie Spears has been teaching music for over a decade, including the last three years at the Bronzeville school, but said he didn’t ever expect to win this award.

“I was just doing what I thought was best. It never even crossed my mind that this would be a possibility for me,” Spears said.

Grace Asiegbu/Sun-Times

Annually, the Chicago-based Golden Apple Foundation honors educators from across the state for the positive and lasting effects they have on their students’ lives, and the impact they have on building stronger communities.

Spears is one of 10 teachers who received the award this year, which saw a record-breaking number — 700 — of nominations of pre-K through third grade teachers.

Golden Apple recipients each receive $5,000 and a spring sabbatical provided by Northwestern University.

Read Grace Asiegbu’s full story here.

From the press box

When the Sky open their season tomorrow afternoon against the Mystics, they’ll try to put into action their plan to put a greater emphasis on defense. Candace Parker, the 2020 Defensive Player of the Year, said there’s still a lot more to work on but establishing that identity is a step in the right direction.

Two weeks of Chicago celebrating him as the quarterback to save the Bears from their decades of offensive tedium is nothing to rookie Justin Fields, who’s been in the spotlight for years. “I’m made for this,” he said. “I’m built for this. It’s nothing new to me.”

And the Blackhawks wasted little time after the season ended this week, signing forward Henrik Borgstrom and goalie Arvid Soderblom to two-year deals. The two will add even more options to what should be a crowded competition for roster spots next season, Ben Pope writes.

Your daily question ☕

Which of Chicago’s summer festivals are you most excited to attend again?

Reply to this email (please include your first name and where you live) and we might feature your answer in the next Afternoon Edition.

Yesterday, we asked you: Where is your favorite place to see springtime flowers in the city? Here’s some of what you said…

“Magnificent Mile, with a stop at Billy Goat Tavern.” — Deborah Fuller Tobias

“Downtown, or the Conservatory.” — Jackie Waldhier

“Michigan Avenue.” — Erika Hoffmann

Thanks for reading the Chicago Afternoon Edition. Got a story you think we missed? Email us here.

Sign up here to get the Afternoon Edition in your inbox every day.

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White Sox first baseman collided with Dozier near first base line on pop-up

First baseman Jose Abreu is day-to-day after leaving the White Sox game against the Royals Friday after a hard collision with the Royals’ Hunter Dozier near the first base line in the second inning.

Abreu bruised his left knee and sustained a bruise and cut on his face. An initial assessment for a concussion was negative, the Sox said.

Abreu walked off but needed assistance after Dozier, who popped out to catcher Yasmani Grandal, ran to Grandal’s right but with his head down didn’t see Abreu running with his head up toward the play. Dozier and Abreu crashed into each other around the shoulder area and both were down for several moments, Abreu holding his head with both hands.

Grandal moved to first base and Zack Collins took over at catcher. Dozier left the game and was replaced by Hanser Alberto at third base.

Abreu hit a sacrifice fly in the first inning to give the Sox a 1-0 lead. On the first pitch from Sox right-hander Lucas Giolito after the injury delay, Michael Taylor homered to right field to give the Royals a 2-1 lead in the first game of a doubleheader. Both games are seven innings.

The Royals, who entered with an 11-game losing streak, led 5-1 on a Salvador Perez homer in the third inning. The Sox entered with a six-game winning streak.

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Leaked emails show offer a window into a critical period of the mayor’s first term in office.

As a downtown protest over the police killing of George Floyd devolved into chaos late last May and gave way to months of unrest, an adviser to Mayor Lori Lightfoot directed a staffer to swiftly prepare a formal response that could be introduced to the City Council.

“Could you help draft a resolution condemning the killing of George Floyd and calling for justice for his family/acknowledging the history of violence that has disproportionately harmed Black communities/recommitting to the need for reform?” consultant Joanna Klonsky asked in a May 30, 2020, email addressed to Macgregor Lebuhn, a mayoral policy advisor at the time.

Klonsky’s email — sent five days after Floyd’s killing and apparently sparked by an urgent request from the mayor — came as the demonstration downtown turned into a full-blown riot, leading to Lightfoot’s controversial decisions to announce a curfew, restrict access to the area and lift the bridges over the Chicago River. By the next morning, after wide-scale looting gripped the city, Lebuhn questioned the initial plan: “I don’t know if a resolution is going to meet the moment anymore — we need to put forward something substantive if we’re going to do anything on this.”

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

“I don’t know but she asked for this so I think we should still do it either way,” Klonsky shot back in an apparent reference to Lightfoot, prompting Lebuhn and other staffers to hash out a draft complete with policy commitments over a series of emails that stretched until at least June 2.

That night, Lightfoot delivered a televised speech aimed at quelling the unrest in which she promised to institute a series of overdue police reforms. Ultimately though, a resolution was never introduced and the protests and looting continued in cycles throughout the summer.

Caught between police, protesters

The email thread exemplifies the Lightfoot administration’s at times stumbling response during a critical period of her first term in office. The messages were among a trove of hacked city emails leaked online last month by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit whistleblower group likened to WikiLeaks.

City officials have declined to comment on the contents of the hacked emails. So did Klonsky and Patrick Mullane, a former mayoral staffer whose emails were exposed. Daniel Lurie, the mayor’s policy chief, and Michael Frisch, a former senior adviser to Lightfoot, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Caught between a police department under fire and a protest movement calling for its abolition, emails show that city officials labored over finding the right tone, expressing a commitment to reform and ultimately appeasing the groups leading the charge.

“We have to have something that says protest is a healthy expression of a functioning democracy,” Lurie wrote to fellow city employees drafting a statement shortly after police officers pepper-sprayed demonstrators who descended on Grant Park on July 17 and nearly toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus.

“We are so behind on this [it] is ridiculous,” Lurie added.

Alexander Gouletas/For the Sun-Times

A series of other flash points led to confusion and showed that officials were ill-prepared to weather the rising tide of allegations and criticisms lodged against the police department and its officers.

Kettling concerns

Police officials and mayoral staffers notably struggled to field questions about officers allegedly using a controversial tactic known as “kettling” during a downtown protest on Aug. 15 that led to violent clashes between demonstrators and police, resulting in 24 arrests and injuries to at least 17 cops.

Officers use the technique to herd demonstrators into a confined space to either make arrests or disperse a crowd. Asked about the incident on Aug. 17, Supt. David Brown said, “I haven’t heard those allegations that there was kettling going on.”

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times 

The following day, police spokesman Luis Agostini initially prepared a statement saying the police department “does not deploy or train in the crowd control tactic known as kettling.” Then, in a separate email a short time later, Don Terry, another police spokesman, made it clear that officers were trained on a technique that’s strikingly similar to “kettling.”

“In the Education & Training Bulletin of Sept. 2011, under Crowd Control Operations … you’ll find Column Movement to Encirclement. ‘The encirclement technique is used to contain a group of individuals and effect an orderly arrest,’” Terry wrote in the Aug. 18, 2020, email to Patrick Mullane, a mayoral spokesman at the time.

Minutes later, Agostini sent a group of city employees a revised statement stripped of the key claims that officers aren’t trained on kettling and didn’t use the tactic during the protest. Later in the day, Mullane emailed Susan Lee, the former deputy mayor for public safety, including a revised version of the new statement along with Terry’s note.

“We just found the below in the training bulletin for CPD so I don’t want to say that officers aren’t trained on kettling,” Mullane said.

Doxxing debate

A day after the demonstration turned violent, Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35^th) also raised concerns about the police department making public the home addresses of two protesters who were arrested in an email addressed to Lightfoot’s Intergovernmental Affairs staff.

“I have heard from many Chicagoans who are concerned that this is doxxing on the part of the CPD. The tweets contain the residential addresses of two young women alleged to have harmed a CPD officer or CPD property in yesterday’s protest. Given the current climate, I and many others fear that these tweets invite rightwing extremists to target and harass these young women,” Ramirez-Rosa wrote in the Aug. 16 email, copying Lightfoot and Alds. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) and Rossana Rodriquez Sanchez (33rd).

Sun-Times file

The following day, Lightfoot emailed staffers a directive: “You know my feelings about Carlos, but, there is no reason why the home address should be posted of any arrestee.

“We need the CPD to take down these posts, redact the street address and repost asap,” she added. “And going forward, they need to delete the street addresses.”

Ramirez-Rosa on Friday credited Lightfoot’s office for taking swift action and removing the posts, though he said it’s “unfortunate that CPD did it to begin with.” Overall, he claimed the administration’s answer to the unrest was “too heavy-handed,” namely the decisions to raise bridges downtown and temporarily cut off Chicago Public Schools’ food distribution program.

“There were a lot of things that harmed a lot of working Chicagoans, particularly those that were struggling to survive during the pandemic,” Ramirez-Rosa said.

Amid the intensifying protests, Klonsky also voiced her apparent frustration over the city’s response in an email to mayoral staffers.

“Now is the time to reset and be unifying,” Klonsky, who isn’t a city employee, wrote in the Aug. 16 email. “Enough of what divides us. Enough of the bridges being up and pepper spray and finger pointing. They need something to believe in and feel hopeful about.”

Two days later, city officials apparently sought to devise a plan to stop the bleeding.

Michael Frisch, then a senior advisor to the mayor, emailed Mullane an invitation to a meeting to “coordinate efforts on public engagement with the protesting groups and discuss a strategy for listening, de-escalation, demands, etc. and related communications.”

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Dick Gregory cracked the place up. Richard Pryor brought the house down. Ella Fitzgerald’s scats hit the ceiling. Sarah Vaughan’s succulent notes made you swoon.  

I never stepped foot in Mister Kelly’s. But many a day, my parents, aunts and uncle took me there as they related dewy-eyed tales.

Dick Gregory cracked the place up, they said. Richard Pryor brought the house down. Ella Fitzgerald’s scats hit the ceiling. Sassy Sarah Vaughan’s succulent notes made you swoon.

Most if all, it was a place “we” could go. It was always happening at Mr. Kelly’s on North Rush Street, and at the London House, at North Michigan and East Wacker Drive.

The brothers Oscar and George Marienthal presided over these nationally acclaimed entertainment venues from the 1950s to the 1970s. Mr. Kelly’s discovered a new brand of cutting-edge jazz and comedy, showcasing new voices for new times.

Their story comes in a new documentary, narrated by Chicago’s own Bill Kurtis. Mr. Kelly’s “nurtured talent, promoted diversity and forever changed the future of show business around the world,” Kurtis declares in the film.

In mid-century, segregated Chicago, Black entertainers and their kindred fans were shunned by most white-owned venues.

At Mr. Kelly’s, Black talent mattered. The Marienthal brothers went looking for it. Their stages cultivated and showcased a brilliant constellation of Black stars: Sarah Vaughn, Maya Angelou, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Herbie Hancock, Ramsey Lewis, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Godfrey Cambridge, Oscar Peterson, Dinah Washington, Della Reese, Dionne Warwick, Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne and even more boldface names than this space will allow.

At a time when racist policies and practices were de rigueur, Mr. Kelly’s “was one of the safe places we could go,” the comedian Dick Gregory recalled in the documentary. Gregory passed away in 2017.

The 1960 Ebony Magazine Annual Vacation Guide for Black travelers recommended only two entertainment venues between California and New York State: Mr. Kelly’s and London House.

“I guess, just from a personal point of view, you know, my father just you know, he had very simple ethics, you know, the golden rule,” David Marienthal told me. “And, you know, you should be fair and open to all people.”

David Marienthal, whose father George co-owned Mr. Kelly’s, spent six years researching “Live at Mr. Kelly’s,” which premieres May 27 on WTTW-TV.

“Obviously,” he said, “it made business sense as well.”

His film is packed with interviews from the club’s stars, employees and customers, and includes live footage, photos and music. Marienthal is working on plans for national distribution.

Mr. Kelly’s opened in 1953, just as the civil rights movement was burgeoning. There was much more activism, civil unrest and an anti-war movement to come.

The club’s comedians were kicking off a “new wave” of irreverent and political comedy.

Old chestnuts like “Take my wife — please!” were passe, replaced by the piercing satire of Gregory and Pryor.

In 1968, Pryor was booked to headline at Mr. Kelly’s, just hours after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He later roamed the turbulent streets of Chicago, smoked weed and cried. The next day he was booked to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. He refused to show.

In the early days, the club had no dressing room, so the great Sarah Vaughn sat on a potato sack as she prepared for her show.

The laughter and song of Mr. Kelly’s diverse talent and audience opened hearts and minds.

“And really, you know, when you’re making jokes about the civil rights movement at that point, it is, you know, it’s bringing new ideas in,” Marienthal said. “Even though people can laugh. When they laugh, they open up. And of course, when they see a great performer like Sarah Vaughan, their hearts open up.”

For more information, go to: www.misterkellyschicago.com

Send letters to [email protected].

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