This 'African American lady' would much rather Trump and the National Guard stay away from Chicago
Tourists and Chicagoans may have forgotten about the time the National Guard was at the Taste of Chicago
The following post is part of my former Substack publication “One Black Woman’s Vote” that is now in “I Do See Color.” To see more OBWV posts from 2025, click here. To see OBWV posts from 2021-2024, click here. For OBWV posts from 2026, click here. In 2026, new OBWV posts will be published on the second Saturday of each month.
Al Green. Angie Stone. Anthony Hamilton. Big Daddy Kane. Biz Markie. Doug E. Fresh. Fantasia. Immature. Jay Z. LeToya Luckett. Nas. R. Kelly. Salt-N-Pepa. Slick Rick. Slim from 112. Stevie Wonder. The Roots. Trey Songz. Yasiin Bey (Mos Def).
Those are just a few artists I can think of off the top of my head who I’ve seen live in concert. I saw some perform while I was a member of the newspaper press. I paid to see other artists at college events or at the Taste of Chicago. And these live concerts have been on my mind recently because I keep trying to answer one question: Who was at the Taste of Chicago when the National Guard showed up?
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I distinctly recall getting ready to leave the Taste of Chicago, and seeing these camouflaged and serious-looking men lined up near the exit. They weren’t talking. They were just quietly watching a massive crowd leave. My memory is fuzzy about whether it was the Illinois National Guard or the federal National Guard, but it was definitely one of the two. The National Guard came to Chicago during a particularly rough time in Chicago’s history when people were getting hurt in the downtown area. And Chicago politicians did not want this worldwide festival to be known for violence, especially for tourists.
I’ve looked online to try to narrow down the year and have yet to find it. It was long before Twitter, Bluesky and Threads were founded. It may very well have happened when College Club was around in 1995, but I’m not totally confident it was after Facebook’s founding in 2004.
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At first this missing timeline was annoying me because I can’t prove that I’m not making up this real-life experience. The group I was with can also confirm this happened. Then, it hit me. The fact that people (locals and tourists) aren’t bringing this up on social media more is good news. That meant that the National Guard being at the Taste of Chicago was not memorable — and clearly not absolute chaos.
Donald Trump keeps threatening to send the National Guard to Chicago
Whenever tourists bring up the Trump Tower to me, it takes me a minute to recall it’s there at all. Even with his name in startlingly tacky and ginormous lettering, I’m convinced most Chicagoans ignore the building altogether.
I worked at Border’s Books, Music & Cafe on the Magnificent Mile as a seasonal employee a few years before the Trump Tower was finished being built in 2009. And even when I used to work for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Defender in the early 2000s, I walked past Trump’s building on the Magnificent Mile almost daily and still paid it no attention.
I miss those days. Trump was easy to dismiss as a noisy reality show host — before he was a drink-bleach president from 2016 to 2020 or a raging racist who has a bone to pick with every city that had the audacity of voting for a Black mayor.
And it’s impossible to ignore his grudge against Black mayors like Mayor Brandon Johnson or Washington D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser. He even singled out the Chicago mayor as “incompetent.”
Although he’s called Pritzker a “slob of a governor,” he still seems to have more of an issue with melanin-rich politicians. Meanwhile, Pritzker is definitely in the front row of the Democrats who won’t bow down to Trump. In addition to finding temporary housing for the Texas Democrats who left the state due to the redistricting scandal, the Chicago governor spoke in support of former Vice President Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention.
This year, he was also described as “arrogant” and “smug” by GOP members of the House Oversight Committee after refusing to be intimidated by their questions. None of the criticism from the GOP is making Pritzker shake in his boots, and I am both relieved and proud of Chicago even more because of it.
And as far as Trump claiming “African-American ladies are begging” for him to come to Chicago, I can only think of seven lost causes in the 757K Black people (2.7 million Chicagoans total) living in Chicago who would do this — and I personally wish the founder of that group would return to Atlanta!