Chicago’s ‘Ghetto Bus Tour’: Listening to the ‘Voices of the Voiceless’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 07.31.07 | 8:47 AM ET
Photo of the now-demolished Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago by ChicagoEye, via Flickr (Creative Commons)Rio. Lagos. Mumbai. Chicago? Indeed, “poverty tourism” has reached the shores of Lake Michigan. For $20, travelers can hop on a yellow school bus with Beauty Turner, a “magnetic 50-year-old with a preacher’s gift for turning a phrase,” according to a story in the Chicago Sun Times about her “Ghetto Bus Tour.” The AP, which also ran a piece on Turner and her tour, reports that it’s her “last gasp in her crusade to tell a different story about Chicago’s notorious housing projects, something other than well-known tales about gang violence so fierce that residents slept in their bathtubs to avoid bullets.”
The tours, like poverty tours elsewhere in the world, have stirred some controversy. Chicago city officials have taken issue with Turner’s criticism of the Chicago Housing Authority, but Turner presses on. In fact, the Sun-Times reports that the tours have become quite popular, drawing interest from a cross-section of people. Kate N. Grossman writes: “Filling seats on last week’s tour were college students, a rabbi, journalists, Field Museum staffers and academics.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
