Eli Jenkinson/Friends to Elect Robert Emmons Jr.
Robert Emmons Jr., center, speaks at a panel.
In October, Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL) held a hearing on the South Side of Chicago, inviting six panelists to testify to everyday gun violence as a public-health epidemic. One of the constituents in attendance was Rush’s primary challenger, Robert Emmons Jr.
“I went to that forum, 100 percent optimistically,” Emmons told me in an interview. “I didn’t have any campaign buttons, I didn’t go around saying I was Robert Emmons Jr. running for U.S. Congress, I went as a constituent.” But Emmons saw no one on the panel like him—no one younger than 35.
Emmons likes to say that he’s a 27-year-old challenging a 27-year incumbent. And the panelists Rush invited that day did not include the group of people who experience the problem they were trying to solve, an epidemic that “disproportionately impacts young people under the age of 35,” he says.
Emmons declared his candidacy for Congress on March 1, and he’s centering his campaign on gun violence prevention—particularly everyday gun violence. To him, that starts with holistically investing in communities. Emmons supports the Green New Deal and Medicare for All—not least because he directly relates those policies to stopping everyday gun violence.
“Right now, gun violence is the leading cause of death for black men under the age of 30 years old in the United States. Gun violence. Something that is 100 percent preventable,” Emmons says. In addition to gang violence or armed assault, guns are the most common tool of choice in suicides, and are frequently used in domestic violence as well.
Emmons first moved to Chicago from New Jersey when he was a teenager. Through the OneGoal program, an organization that helps students from disinvested communities get into college, Emmons attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. But then in 2015, Emmons’s college roommate—who was also his high school best friend—died from gun violence. “After I lost him … I felt inadequate,” he says. “I felt as if the problem was too big for myself to solve.”
Emmons subsequently dropped out of college and took a job that caused him to spend a lot of time in Columbia, South Carolina. There, he says he watched “how folks took to Donald Trump.” He says that “people were really supporting Trump because of fear … and they were using fear as their motivator to guide their decision-making.” The experience forced him to re-evaluate his own motivations. He was using fear to stay out of college, he says. So Emmons re-enrolled in college, and took a fellowship with NextGen Climate.
“It was really that year [back in college] that I started to see gun violence more holistically,” Emmons says. “Even though I knew the issues were interconnected, a lot of the organizing I did around gun violence prevention beforehand was about banning assault weapons, expanding background checks, closing the gun show loophole. I wasn’t doing a whole lot of talking about how the environment affects human behavior and leads to violence.”
His year with NextGen was foundational for his subsequent organizing career. After graduation, he took a job with OneGoal, the same organization that helped Emmons get into college. “I felt like the best way for me to work in the gun violence prevention space was to do work in an organization that could quite literally help change the trajectory of someone’s life, and make it less likely [for them] to be a perpetrator or a victim of violence,” Emmons says.
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One of the challenges Chicago and many other communities face, Emmons explains, is the reality of having progressive gun safety legislation on the books while neighboring states don’t. “A lot of the guns come from our neighboring states that have no gun laws,” like Indiana, he says. Attacking the issue on the federal level through licensing would help—and the issue is a big part of why Emmons decided to run for Congress.
Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Representative Bobby Rush, D-Ill questions Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as he testifies before a House Energy and Commerce hearing, April 2018.
Emmons sees everyday gun violence as a public-health epidemic. The solutions, he says, include policies such as environmental protections, better schools, and access to medical care. Every year, 100,000 Americans are wounded or killed by guns and, over ten years, that’s a million people. “We have an epidemic in this country,” he says. “Gun violence is contagious and you can actually track violence episodes in disinvested communities similar to how you would track the spread of a disease.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are prevented from studying gun violence in this way because of the Dickey Amendment, an NRA-promoted rider to a 1996 omnibus bill that prevents CDC funds being used to “advocate or promote gun control.” Emmons wants to repeal it, so advocates have evidence-based research to make the case for gun violence prevention. But he wants to go further.
“What we want to do is to allocate federal resources to go directly to community-based organizations who are already doing the work on the ground to reduce and end everyday gun violence,” Emmons says, even when they don’t have that specific goal in their mission statement. He named groups like Good Kids Mad City, the Sunrise Movement, March for Our Lives, and OneGoal.
He mentions how Medicare for All would make affordable mental-health care and counseling, and how the Green New Deal has a federal jobs guarantee, which would help alleviate cycles of poverty and violence. “When we talk about universal pre-K, that’s about gun violence prevention,” Emmons says simply. “The community knows how to solve their problems. What we need is resources.”
All of these strategies intersect with race, which to Emmons explains why these problems have gone unsolved for so long. He describes a complicit disregard in America for communities of color, and solutions that trend toward criminalization rather than protecting public health. “What we’ve proven pretty consistently in this country, when the issues impact people of color disproportionately, we’re kind of quiet about it. It only reaches prominence when white folks are faced with the issue,” Emmons says. “Similar to the opioid crisis, it was criminalized when it was people of color, but then it started to become an epidemic in more affluent areas and now it’s becoming—thankfully—becoming decriminalized and now it’s a public-health epidemic.”
His campaign has centered on trying to tackle this difference, and building bridges with communities that might look different.
Illinois’s First Congressional District has changed since Rush was first elected in 1992. Although the district is strongly Democratic, its composition has changed: The district was redrawn in 2010, and now has far fewer African American residents, though it is majority black. The district now covers Cook County, which includes much of the South Side of Chicago, but also includes the city’s southwest suburbs and even more rural Will County. “It’s important for me to go [to Will County] and as I’m talking about gun violence prevention, something that they may not be as familiar with, it’s important for me to tell them that, ‘Yes you may love your guns but what I’m asking you to do is to love people more,’” Emmons says. “‘And yes, I support your right to bear arms but I’m also asking you to arm yourself with problem-solving abilities and comprehension and loving your community and showing them that we have the same goals.’”
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Emmons told me he has joined the list of progressive Democrats who have pledged not to take corporate PAC donations. And the difference between him and Rush now is stark. As of the end of September, federal elections filings show that Emmons has raised just over $58,000 to Rush’s nearly $150,000. But Emmons raised every penny from small-dollar contributions, while just $7,778.83 of Rush’s funding comes from individual donors. Instead, Rush has consistently raised money from the fossil fuel industry and corporate PACs. Emmons told me that his campaign has attracted “contributions and volunteers from over 46 different states around the country” with his message of ending everyday gun violence.
Rush, the only politician to ever defeat Barack Obama in an election, hardly comes from moderate politics. Before taking office, he was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and co-founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers. He also served on Chicago’s city council. In Congress, Rush is a co-sponsor of the House’s Medicare for All bill, and supports other progressive initiatives. But he has not always taken the most liberal position: Rush backed the 1994 federal crime bill. Emmons says that he wouldn’t hold that vote against Rush, but for his continued backing of mayoral candidates and policies “that are the same thing.” For mayor, Rush backed Bill Daley, whose plan to solve crime was to spend $50 million on surveillance on the South Side and West Side of Chicago. Rush also endorsed Rahm Emanuel for mayor in 2015.
“So not $50 million on getting the lead out of our drinking water; not $50 million in ensuring our schools have nurses, social workers, and librarians; not $50 million on jobs and jobs training; but $50 million to further exacerbate the vicious cycle of poverty and violence and expanding on the fact that our communities are already militarized and criminalized,” Emmons says.
While he respects Rush, Emmons told me that their approaches are completely different. “Our plans are about repair and healing and targeting young people, from the age of zero, making sure that they are given the same chances that their more-affluent counterparts have in this world.”
