Should the next mayor of Chicago let the Bears go? – Chicago Tribune newstrendslive

Good morning, Chicago.

Fifty-seven years ago this month, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. moved to Chicago with plans to target public and private institutions that “have created infamous slum conditions directly responsible for the involuntary enslavement of millions of Black men, women and children.”

Yet for generations of Chicagoans born after King’s murder in 1968, the civil rights leader may be more recognizable for the national holiday named in his honor than for his leadership of what he called the first significant freedom movement in the North.

Local author Jonathan Eig — who has profiled Muhammad Ali, Al Capone, Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig and the birth control pill — took on King’s story for his next book, “King: A Life,” which will be released May 16. Signed copies can be purchased through Unabridged Books.

“We forget that King really did challenge us to rethink the whole structure of American society and was pushing us to really go farther,” Eig said. “He was a lot more radical and a lot more courageous than we give him credit for.”

Read the full story by Kori Rumore.

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For some of the challengers for Chicago mayor, the departure of the Bears is a foregone conclusion. Some want to keep the team but have offered few specifics. Some have given an emphatic “no” to the use of city tax dollars. And then there’s the problem of what to do with a Bear-less Soldier Field.

At a forum in December, three candidates — Paul Vallas, Ja’Mal Green and Ald. Roderick Sawyer — quipped that the city should just let its NFL team go. Green elaborated that the next mayor should focus on revitalizing Soldier Field by “maybe a couple of $100 million” so it can be leased for college sports or to another NFL team.

Chicago is a sanctuary city, a welcoming place for migrants.

That’s what Cesar Pino Marcano, 28, heard when he arrived at the southern border of the United States seeking asylum — fleeing hunger and chasing a promised dream of a job that could pay enough to ensure the well-being of his family in Venezuela.

But when he arrived on a bus full of other people on the same path as him, it was only the cold wind of a January night that welcomed them at Union Station downtown. The group of more than 20 got off the bus and parted ways, he said, each without direction but searching for a warm place to stay.

In his closing remarks before a vote on a sweeping firearms ban, Illinois Senate President Don Harmon pushed back at critics who contended the prohibitions would violate the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The Oak Park Democrat concluded with a message for Republican lawmakers and other opponents of the measure, which was passed in response to the deadly mass shooting at Highland Park’s Fourth of July parade: “We’ll see you in court.”

Paul Sullivan writes that if it isn’t obvious by now that Tom Ricketts wants no part of a Sammy Sosa reunion, he doesn’t know what else the Chicago Cubs chairman can say to end the discussion.

Except perhaps by shouting: “No Sammy now. No Sammy ever.”

Chicago has been a hotbed of craft brewing for more than a decade, but a funny thing has happened along the way: the suburbs.