CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) – The Dan Ryan shutdown protest against police brutality didn’t go as planned but still stopped traffic on the South Side Saturday afternoon, as protesters marched for more than three hours.
The original plan was to march from Robert Taylor Park onto the Dan Ryan Expressway between 47th and 43rd street northbound and protest organizers had hoped to shut down traffic in the express lanes.
To call attention to police reform and the Black Lives Matter movement, community activist and protest organizer Rabbi Michael Ben Yosef had hoped thousands of demonstrators would join him for the shutdown march.
Ben Yosef said he thought a march along the expressway would stand out among all of the other recent demonstrations.
“This is a platform that is needed, to make the case that we are very irritated and disappointed that everyone seems to think that the stolen lives don’t matter and that they should be dispensable,” Ben Yosef said. “I disagree.”
Latoya Howell, whose son Justus Howell was gunned downed by police officers in Zion, Illinois and shot in the back twice in 2015, spoke at the rally before the crowd started marching.
“Let people know that every day is a struggle for me, every day I am fighting for justice,” Howell said. “We lost our case in 2018 and there is video evidence...
“If we don’t get it, we shut (the Dan Ryan) down,” she said. “That’s how we can move, we can move in numbers as long as the community is behind us.”
Meanwhile, a climate change protest at McKinley Park at 2 p.m. overlapped with the attempted shutdown march, calling to defund CPD and put more resources into minority communities facing environmental racism. Another protest was scheduled for 4 p.m. at the Bean and calls to defund CPD and abolish ICE.