The heat wave of 1995
Commentary by Chitown Kev
During the summer of 1995, I lived in an alcohol/drug rehab house in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, roughly a ½ mile from the lakefront, close to Loyola University.
That summer was hot.
The recovery house had no air conditioner so the house managers decided to keep several noisy fans running in the house around the clock for a few days.
One day (Wikipedia informs me that it must have been July 13, two days after my birthday) it was too hot inside and outside.
(I also must have been on vacation because the calendar reminds me that July 13 was a Thursday. The office where I worked was air conditioned.)
I went down to Lunt Avenue Beach dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. As shy as I was about people seeing my body, I took off my t-shirt and wished that I could have taken off everything else; it was soooooo hot.
I took off my shoes and looked into the always rather murky and suspicious looking waters of Lake Michigan. I had never stuck more than a foot, maybe, into Lake Michigan but that day...I stepped right into the water up to my stomach. Frankly, I found it to be a little gross. The water was a little warmer than it was all the times that I dipped a toe or a foot in the lake but I stood in that water for about ½ hour before getting out, drying off, and going to the coffeehouse on the corner of Lunt and Sheridan Road.
Because I was young and lived close to the lakefront (as I still do), I was a lucky one that summer of 1995.
739 Chicago residents died during the five-day heat wave, the worst weather-related disaster in Chicago history; so memorable that Chicago’s WGN pulled its legendary meteorologist Tom Skilling out of retirement for his commentary on the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago heat wave of 1995.
Keerti Gopal/Inside Climate News
The 1995 heat wave was starkly unequal, disproportionately killing Black residents in poorer neighborhoods, especially elders, many of whom lived alone without air conditioning in brick buildings that trapped heat and baked like ovens.
Since the heat wave, researchers have dug into the social conditions that caused the devastation, finding that government mismanagement alongside racial segregation, chronic disinvestment and persistent social isolation all contributed to the excessive and unequal effects.
The disaster exposed “systemic neglect,” said Angela Tovar, Chicago’s chief sustainability officer, at a city event on Tuesday.
“It is a tragedy that revealed just how deadly the intersections of heat, housing insecurity, racial inequity and social isolation can be,” she said.
And here it is, 30 years later and Chicago might still not be adequately prepared should such a heat wave happen again (as it probably will due to climate change).
Over the past three decades, Chicago has beefed up its response to heat risks, creating an Office of Emergency Management and Communications to warn residents about the dangers of extreme weather including heat, opening cooling centers during hot weather, planting thousands of trees to help lower neighborhood temperatures, putting out public service announcements about the dangers of heat and passing legislation to boost interventions like air conditioning in residential buildings.
But some residents and advocates say these initiatives still barely scratch the surface of ongoing need and fail to address the systemic racism that caused so many Black Chicagoans to die.
Chicago faces enduring segregation and environmental racism that puts the communities hit hardest by the 1995 heat wave at continued risk of premature death. The city has one of the largest neighborhood and race-based life expectancy gaps in the nation. Climate change now brings an increased likelihood of future 1995-level heat events, while even routine summer nights are increasingly dangerous to at-risk residents’ health.
Today, only 30 percent of single-family buildings in Chicago have a central cooling system—a crucial intervention for preventable heat deaths. Nationwide, that figure is 76 percent.
Here it is, 30 years later, and I now live in a Chicago suburb five floors up in a building with central air that’s close to the lakefront.
However, I do have a few acquaintances who live in these high-rise “ovens” (not all of them are on the South Side, either).
Yes, Chicago’s ability to handle intense, excessive, and prolonged heat waves has gotten considerably better over the past 30 years.
It must continue to get better before it is, again, too late.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Studies show that Black men who have experienced incarceration have higher rates of PTSD, depression and psychological distress compared with Black men who have never been incarcerated. NewsOne: The Lingering Mental Health Impact Of Prison On Black Men
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“I just couldn’t stop crying … I don’t know. It was the anxiety. It was just a lot,” he said. “I was under a lot of pressure and it just came crashing down.”
Mike, who was in his late 40s when we spoke, told me about his childhood filled with abuse, his first arrest at age 14, and the over 20 years of his life that he spent behind bars.
As a registered nurse and nurse scientist who studies how incarceration affects mental health, I know Mike’s experience after release from prison is not uncommon. Studies show that Black men who have experienced incarceration have higher rates of PTSD, depression and psychological distress compared with Black men who have never been incarcerated.
Working in psychiatric hospitals in Philadelphia, I met many patients in crisis who had been incarcerated at some point in their lives. As a part of my doctoral research, funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research, I interviewed 29 formerly incarcerated Black men to understand how incarceration has affected their mental health.
My peer-reviewed findings were published in the journal Social Science & Medicine. All quotes shared here use pseudonyms to protect the men’s privacy.
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For Black youth and teens growing up in the mid-1980s, “The Cosby Show” offered something rarely seen on television up until that time: a sitcom that placed characters who looked like them in a positive light.
And Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s Theo Huxtable was the character Generation X most related to. Fans took quickly to social media on Monday as news of Warner’s accidental drowning in Costa Rica spread.
“It’s like losing one of us,” said Harriet Cammock, a 58-year-old Detroit author and speaker. “This is the thing with television. When you’re watching people every week on television, you think you know them and you’re related to them.”
Warner was swimming Sunday afternoon at Playa Cocles in Costa Rica’s Limon province when a current pulled him deeper into the Caribbean, according to that country’s Judicial Investigation Department.
First responders found him without vital signs.
Cori Murray, executive vice president of content at Ebony Magazine, was saddened upon hearing about Warner’s death. She said his Theo character mirrored the everyday Black teenager, which was rare to see on TV at the time.
While so many portrayals of young Black teenagers leaned negative, “The Cosby Show,” especially Theo, showed warmth, joy and relatability.
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When you envision icons from the Harlem Renaissance, a vision of famous poets, jazz musicians, and bodacious actresses in banana skirts may dance across your mind.
But journalist A’Lelia Bundles wants you to make room for the ‘Joy Goddess’ of Harlem—a woman who could make a VIP party come together at the drop of a hat with a few phone calls.
Her name was A’Lelia Walker, and she was the only child of the first Black American woman millionaire and hair care inventor, Madam C.J. Walker, given the nickname “Joy Goddess” by her friend Langston Hughes.
“One of the society columnists at the time said that people were drawn to her like bees to honey,” Bundles said in an interview with TheGrio. “If she was having a party, she’d get on the phone and she’d say ‘Darling I’m having a party tonight and it wouldn’t be the same without you, absolutely not.’ People would just come, and of course it wasn’t just a plus one. It was a plus two, three, and four because everybody wanted to be there.”
The life of A’Lelia Walker, heiress to a Black beauty empire, has been explored in history books previously—but none as intimately and thoughtfully as the new book Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance.
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The government of the tiny African kingdom of Lesotho has declared a two-year state of disaster, as its once-thriving garment industry unravels in the wake of Trump's tariffs threats. NPR: "We are on our knees”: U.S. tariffs devastate Lesotho’s garment workers
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Crowds of women, bundled up in wooly hats and mittens against the sharp winter chill, wait every morning at the gates of a garment factory in Lesotho’s capital, hoping that a few among them will be called in to work a shift.
But no-one comes out and the factory gates – which bear the name of the Taiwanese company that runs it in red Chinese lettering – remain firmly shut.
It’s one of the few factories in what used to be called “the Denim Capital of Africa” that’s still operating after U.S. President Donald Trump announced in April he was slapping the impoverished nation with the highest tariffs in the world.
Many others have been forced to close down, with buyers spooked by the 50 percent tariff announcement even though they’ve been paused, for now.
With the economy quickly unravelling the government declared a two-year national state of disaster in early July hoping to unlock funding to create jobs. But the challenge is immense and many people are already desperate.
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How to tell a genuine protester from a hired goon? The answer matters in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. On June 25th young Kenyans took to the streets to mark the first anniversary of what have become known as the “Gen-Z protests”. Initially, they peacefully expressed their anger at William Ruto, the country’s president. But by the end of the day much of downtown Nairobi was ablaze. Shop fronts were torn down and windows smashed. At least ten buildings were torched. Peter Ndengwa Mutula, a local tire trader, says he suffered property damage worth 200,000 shillings ($1,546). Though he cannot be sure who was responsible, he believes the government deliberately “inserted itself inside the protests” in order to incite violence. The resulting chaos, he adds, was “a prophetic sign of the end times”.
Not all Kenyans would agree with Mr Mutula’s millenarian gloom. But a majority share his deep distrust of Mr Ruto’s government. According to a recent survey by TIFA Research, a pollster, just 14% of Kenyans believe the country is heading in the right direction, down from 37% in early 2023. Half say they have no confidence at all in the integrity of elections scheduled for 2027. Young Kenyans, many of whom voted for Mr Ruto in 2022, are particularly disillusioned. Like their peers elsewhere in Africa, they are fed up with squeezed living standards overseen by self-dealing rulers. Tens of thousands of people protested in at least 27 of Kenya’s 47 counties last week, some of the biggest anti-government mobilizations since multiparty democracy was restored in the 1990s.
Mr Ruto was elected by a thin margin three years ago promising to champion Kenya’s poor and take on its traditional elite. Instead, faced with a ballooning national debt, the wealthy businessman, who had spent the previous nine years as deputy president, moved to raise taxes. A return to fiscal sanity was probably inevitable following the profligacy of Uhuru Kenyatta, Mr Ruto’s predecessor and former boss. But set against a backdrop of high prices, deteriorating public services and the administration’s often blatant corruption, voters revolted. “We want to know how so much money can disappear,” says a local businessman. “If the government says it is spending a billion shillings, I believe a billion shillings has been wasted or stolen.”
The state’s violent response to the unrest has made things worse. When protesters approached the office of the presidency on June 25th, the government ordered all television and radio stations to halt live coverage, forcing at least two off the air. After that, the goons—local thugs paid to smash up demonstrations—moved in, says Gacheke Gachihi of the Mathare Social Justice Centre, a community group. Nationwide at least 19 people were killed. Hundreds more were injured.
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Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need.
A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000. The contraceptives are primarily long-acting, such as IUDs and birth control implants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives. It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was set to occur by the end of July.
“It is unacceptable that the State Department would move forward with the destruction of more than $9m in taxpayer-funded family planning commodities purchased to support women in crisis settings, including war zones and refugee camps,” Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, said in a statement. Shaheen and Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, have introduced legislation to stop the destruction.
“This is a waste of US taxpayer dollars and an abdication of US global leadership in preventing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths,” added Shaheen, who in June sent a letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, about the matter.
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