A Chicago Press for the People
On September 24, 2009, sixteen-year-old student Derrion Albert was beaten to death outside of Christian Fenger Academy High School, on the South Side of Chicago, in broad daylight. Though there were many witnesses, one of whom captured the attack on cell-phone video, no one stepped in to help. The footage of the murder went viral, highlighting the severity of the city’s youth violence epidemic, as Albert was the third teenager killed in Chicago that month.
Miles Harvey, author of (Little, Brown, 2020), was teaching fiction, nonfiction, and oral history to writing students at DePaul University in Chicago when news of
