Filmmaker Chris Robinson, left, and Nanya El

Gary has been "looted" says filmmaker Chris Robinson

Contributed By:The 411 News

“I think the young people of the city have a misconception of what Gary used to be or what it can be. That’s why I did my documentary.” That is Chris Robinson speaking. Gary born and raised, the 23-year old premiered his film “Looted” before a standing room audience at the ArtHouse: A Social Kitchen, Sunday afternoon.

Gary has been “Looted,” the film’s subtitle says “By America, Lake County, and Its Own Citizens.”

Those young peoples' misconceptions are based on what they see and what they don’t know. Through their own eyes, they see abandoned schools, broken down neighborhoods filled with empty homes, storefronts, and churches. For this generation, they see this as their future.

“I plan to take “Looted” to other cities, sharing this common denominator that Black communities are facing. We’re all rooted together. We all have economic struggles. We all have educational struggles and we all suffer from inequalities. There is something we can do about it. We have to identify the issues, start the conversation, and fix it,” Robinson said.

“Looted” takes a view of the city from residents whose life stories can fill in the gaps for the young of the filmmaker’s generation.

Like 90-plus-year-old and former Calumet Township Trustee Dozier Allen, who remembered his dad opening a gas station in Gary, in the mid 1920’s. The city’s Black population grew and Black businesses swelled. “That’s when we lived between 11th and 25th Avenues,” Allen said. His community was thriving and self-supporting.

The film points to a 1956 Ebony Magazine poll, ranking Gary as the #1 place for Blacks to live.

“By the time I came to Gary in 1961, I planned to teach for one year in the Gary school system, then return to Philadelphia, my hometown,” said former Indiana State Representative and now Lake County Councilman Charlie Brown.

The film includes success stories of former Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, State Rep. Vernon Smith, Junifer Hall, Pastor Corey Jackson, and Roger Haywood.

Fissures began to appear in the fabric of Gary life, like cracks in a sidewalk that when left unrepaired will widen, disrupting and detouring the path forward.

Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter’s anecdote on his family’s move from “substandard housing in East Chicago to a beautiful home in Gary with hardwood floors” identified one of those cracks. It was 1968. He was just an elementary school kid and didn’t know anything about “white flight.”

Freeman-Wilson pointed to industrial flight. With that came the loss of jobs and small businesses, stripping away the city’s tax base. Black homeowners also fled.

By 1993, Carter said, Gary had become the murder capitol of the world. Crime and a drug culture had taken hold.

Following the documentary showing, Robinson attached a panel discussion and Q&A – his way of starting the conversation on ‘Fixing Gary, Indiana, Fixing Black America’ – which his audience embraced wholeheartedly for over an hour. Panelists were Freeman-Wilson, Brown, Carter, and 4th District City Councilwoman Tai Adkins. Included were two from his generation: Aaliyah Stewart, founder of IAMTHEM and Nanya El, 2021 Morehouse valedictorian and 2017 West Side High School valedictorian.

Robinson is a 2020 graduate of Atlanta’s Morehouse University where his studies in English and Journalism have built on a passion for storytelling that developed in his childhood. The documentary was filmed during the COVID pandemic in 2020 as the virus emptied campuses and cancelled graduation ceremonies. It wasn’t until June when he returned to campus for combined ceremonies for the classes of 2020 and 2021.

Robinson describes himself today as an ‘urban culture creator’ with a goal to tell stories of the underrepresented.


Panel members Karen Freeman-Wilson, l-r, Charlie Brown, Bernard Carter, and Tai Adkins

Story Posted:06/29/2021