A Conversation With Robert Emmons, Jr.
On his quest to end everyday gun violence, running against a legendary incumbent, and on being a member of a demographic currently unrepresented in Congress
Robert Emmons, Jr. is taking on Rep. Bobby Rush, who is famously the only person to have ever defeated Barack Obama in an election—and who has been a member of Congress as long as Emmons has been alive. Rush has grown complacent since trouncing Obama in 2000; today, he makes headlines for weak fundraising, controversial statements, and ethical lapses, rather than for his decades as a titan of Chicago’s South Side. Nick spoke with Emmons about his campaign, his policy goals, and more.
NICK: How’s the campaign been going so far?
EMMONS: You know—the campaign has been—there’s ups and downs in life, and that’s definitely true in campaigns. You have really good days and really bad days, and some days they’re on the exact same day. But nonetheless, we’ve been able to make a real difference in the lives of the people of the 1st Congressional District. What we’ve been talking about in the campaign, gun violence prevention and the everyday type of gun violence that we experience in communities like parts of the 1st District that oftentimes goes overlooked on the national level—we’ve been able to ensure that people are talking about everyday gun violence, and more importantly, how to solve everyday gun violence. From a field standpoint, watching folks...get inspired, motivated to advocate for peace has been awe-inspiring, [we’ve] been able to galvanize a district that’s extremely diverse and changing every ten years around a common issue, and more importantly a common solution.
NICK: How has the reception been from local politicians, from Democratic Party officials? One common thing I’ve heard from a lot of primary challengers is that there’s a lot of backlash to the idea of having to actually fight for the seats they’ve held forever?
EMMONS: I was endorsed by Brand New Congress, so I’ve been fortunate enough to learn [from] candidates around the country and kind of get a front-row seat to how the DCCC has played a pretty substantial role in their races. In our race, on the other hand, we haven’t really received too much pushback, and I think it has a lot to do with the incumbent we’re facing. He’s someone who’s been in politics in Illinois for the last forty years. He was an alderman before he was a congressman, and even before that a Black Panther, so he’s been around for a long time. There are three groups of people—and this includes local officials—there’s a group of people who seriously dislike Bobby Rush for any which reason. There’s a group of people who are neutral to Bobby Rush—he hasn’t directly touched their lives or inspired them or hurt them in any way, that gives him that B grade he gets on the progressive scale. And there’s also a group of people that’s actually the largest group of people in the district, and these are the people who just know we can do better in Illinois’s 1st congressional district. They’re ready for invigoration, they believe in our spirit, and they believe that Bobby Rush can no longer be the voice for this diverse group of people, and he’s shown that pretty consistently. That group of people is the same group for officials and it’s the same group for the constituents—all of them can be broken up in those same groups of people.
NICK: Continuing on the subject of the representation the district has had—obviously, since you’re running against him, you take issue with how he’s represented the district—
EMMONS: Absolutely.
NICK: He’s been in Congress, and he’s been returned to Congress [by voters] for decades now. He’s actually the only person who’s ever defeated Barack Obama in an election—
EMMONS [laughing]: I hear that quite frequently, thanks for reminding me.
NICK: So obviously you think there’s something wrong with his approach. How, exactly, do you think he’s fallen out of touch with the district?
EMMONS: That’s a good question, and, as you can imagine, we receive it a lot. I’ll start with why I decided to run for Congress. The number one issue we’re focused on is everyday gun violence. And I’ll always acknowledge the fact that Bobby Rush—I truly believe he also wants to end everyday gun violence. How we get there—that’s where we differ. Bobby Rush has proven pretty consistently that he believes we need to criminalize and militarize our way out of it. He has gotten better this year, but historically speaking—he’s someone who voted for the 1994 crime bill, supported local officials who also have “tough-on-crime” standpoints, and even more recently, when he has come over to the side of making sure that we’re advocating for gun violence prevention as a public health epidemic, he had a public hearing here in Chicago on gun violence prevention. On the panel—magnificent panelists!—but not one of those people on the panel represented the group that’s most disproportionately impacted by gun violence. As a social innovator, I’m someone who’s always looking to make sure that users are involved in any problem-solving...and there was not a single user involved in that. That just shows the lack of proximity to the community. If your average age of a panelist on gun violence prevention is 45, you’re missing the mark. You need that user, the group of people that are disproportionately impacted, and you need to make sure that we’re not furthering the harm that, very viciously, [these] policies—good intent, terrible impact—have had on communities of color, not just in the 1st district, but in communities that look just like the 1st district all around the country. That’s one mark [against Rush]. A second mark, that’s...more long-term devastating, is his stance on the Green New Deal. Bobby Rush sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, [and] he called the Green New Deal a “smash and grab.” Bobby Rush sits on a very pivotal committee. He has the opportunity to create sustainable, world-changing—change. Instead, he’s using that seat to further his own political career rather than saving the planet. I’m someone who believes that as a representative, we need to make sure we’re representing the people, and not these big corporations.
We can talk about his voting [attendance] record, how he has one of the worst [attendance] records of any member of Congress. We can talk about how he’s not available to our community, has one of the worst constituent offices in the state of Illinois, and I would argue the country. But the very last point that I’ll make, why he truly doesn’t fit this district, is because in this moment, this district, and this country, we need unification. Bobby Rush benefits from division. We can no longer afford to have representatives who benefit from division. That’s Trump-like. Bobby Rush—in our last mayoral election, which was historic in every sense of the word—he said that anybody who supports our now-mayor [has] the blood of unarmed black kids shot by cops...on their hands. This doesn’t bring our community together, and right after she won, he had to go on an apology tour. Bobby Rush benefits from division, that’s the way he campaigns. You talked a little bit about Barack Obama, back in 2000—Bobby Rush won...because of the division he spurred across the district. Him and his campaign said Barack Obama wasn’t black enough. [Note: reportsdisagree on whether Rush actually said this; what is clear is that Rush’s campaign attacked Obama for living in an upscale white neighborhood and having an Ivy League degree.] That’s not a message that galvanizes communities. That’s not a message that inspires and motivates communities. It divided us up, and...it makes us less powerful as a people. Those are some of the reasons Bobby Rush has been out of touch for quite a long time.
NICK: You’ve mentioned [on the campaign trail] that there are no young black men in Congress. If you win, you will be one of the youngest members of Congress, and the youngest black member. You would bring a perspective that is just not in Congress. [The only members of Congress of color under the age of 35] would be you, [possibly] Jessica Cisneros, AOC, and Lauren Underwood, and you would be the only young black man in that group. How do you think that will impact the kind of representative you’ll be?
EMMONS: A couple weeks ago, I attended a conference in DC, and a gentleman by the name of Ted said something that really stuck out to me. He was saying that as progressives, as movement fighters, we can be both truth-tellers and bridge-builders. In this moment, it’s important to do both—tell the truth, which is saying that a lot of the issues we face are steeped in oppression and racism in our country, but it’s also important that we have members of Congress who can build those bridges. It’s not enough for me just to talk about solving gun violence on a campaign [if I can’t] do it in Congress. The only way I can do it in Congress, especially if we have a Senate that looks similar to the Senate that we currently have, is for someone to be able to build those bridges. Nothing unites us better than stories do. We need stories from lived experiences to be able to say, I’m not coming to take all of your guns, I’m saying that we need to make sure that we aren’t producing guns that can mow down 40 people in 30 seconds. At the same time, we’re talking about everyday gun violence, so—the gun’s an issue, but what we’re also talking about is we need to make sure everybody’s making a living wage, we gotta make sure everybody has healthcare, we gotta talk about universal pre-K, we gotta talk about all of these things to end everyday gun violence. We can meet in the middle somewhere, and our interests are actually somewhat of the same thing, but the majority of members of Congress are [...] speaking for communities that they’re not necessarily from. They can’t bring in the same stories that they would’ve been able to if they were from that community that has been disproportionately impacted by these challenges. That’s what I’ll be able to bring in as a young person, and also as a young black man, who’s liv[ed] experience is somewhat different than—no, not somewhat, it’s very different from a majority of members of Congress.
NICK: That’s the same tone that—I spoke with Mckayla Wilkes [running in MD-05] about a month ago, and she brought up the same thing, that people like you, like Mckayla, and like AOC and Ilhan Omar, are the kinds of people who are not normally represented in Congress—and have not been for our entire country’s history.
EMMONS: Exactly. Think about the bridge that Mckayla was able to build by just being honest in her introduction video about her lived experiences. There have been so many people, even when I’m going around to campaign, that talk about poverty as if it’s a crime. And Mckayla talked about it as her lived experience, and talked about how interconnected all those issues were, and it bridged gaps all across the country. I think Mckayla has 20,000—26,000 Twitter followers. [At the time of publishing, it’s up to 29,000.] I’m sure not everyone shares the same views as her, and may have even disagreed with how she became who she currently is, but now who are supporting her. And that’s that bridge component we really need in Congress if we’re going to actually do anything.
NICK: Your campaign is framed around ending everyday gun violence. You indicated that you see the problem not as an either/or solution but both/and. Both addressing America’s gun laws, which are vastly different from almost anywhere else in the world, and also dealing with the root causes [of gun violence], which include things like poverty, like a lack of mental health services, like underfunded schools. Can you expand on that—especially with regards to the specific situation in your district?
EMMONS: I’ve talked pretty openly—and it’s made the campaign kinda difficult, talking about this pretty openly, but I think it’s benefited our district by [talking about it]—but I lost a friend and college roommate to gun violence, and I also had an up-front [view of] some of the barriers that he experienced that led to his eventual murder. And that’s drastically reoriented the way I have approached criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention. A lot of what I was doing before 2015 [as an activist] was fighting for background checks, and expansions of red flag laws, and assault weapons bans—all of those things are extremely critical, but after 2015, my language changed pretty dramatically. Now a lot of what I talk about is systemic poverty, healthcare, how the environment plays into human behavior. If we’re truly gonna ensure that in the next ten years, a million people aren’t shot, and 40% of that million people murdered, we need to address this issue, this epidemic, holistically, and we have to address it as a public health epidemic. When we first started our campaign, it wasn’t being seen as a public health epidemic on the federal level. Now, with officials like [Rep.] Lucy McBath [a Democrat from Georgia who defeated Republican Rep. Karen Handel, and who entered politics as a gun control activist after her son was shot and killed in 2012] advocating for addressing gun violence as a public health epidemic, now we have $25 million to go directly to studying gun violence as a public health epidemic—even though I think we needed $50 million to truly dig deeper—$25 million is still a significant change, and it’s largely due to the activism of Lucy McBath and all of the activists behind her. Then it’s Phase 2—basically just putting facts to what activists have been saying for decades. Now that we have facts, we can use them [to convince] members of Congress. The members of Congress who say “guns make us safer”—we can now have some facts from the federal government that say, actually, we have as many guns as we do people, and if that were the case, America would be the safest country in the world, yet it’s the exact opposite. Now we can talk about how gun violence is contagious, especially in communities like mine, [where] you can actually map out violent gun deaths like you would map out a disease, because it spreads. We can actually begin to better understand how gun violence spreads in communities like mine. Phase 2 is allocating funding to intervene, so that way we’re not just [repeating] facts, now we can say, “this is how we actually solve it.” We need to allocate funding to the federal government [for] intervention programs, and also some money goes directly to community-based organizations that are already doing the work on the ground. Community-based organizations here in Chicago like RAGE, like Imagine Englewood If, like BRAVE Youth, like March For Our Lives—one of their first stops [on their tour of the country advocating for gun control] was in Chicago. My church, St. Sabina, worked with the young organizers to show how these two issues of gun violence [mass shootings and everyday gun violence] are interconnected. So we’re not reducing gun violence on one street, we’re reducing, and ending, everyday gun violence in the entire community. That takes funding, that takes research, that takes additional support. Lastly, like we said, addressing gun violence holistically [requires] progressive policies being advocated for—not just voted for, we need champions of these causes. Bobby Rush has voted for things like Medicare for All , but we also need someone who’s gonna champion it. [Note: Medicare for All has not actually come up for a vote, but Rush is a cosponsor of the legislation.] It’s not enough just to say “I support it.” What are you doing to galvanize your community? Right now, there’s a lot of money being invested in communities like mine to basically propagandize, and say that Medicare for All is bad, even though this is the community that will benefit from it the most. We need to make sure that we’re championing it and educating our people, so that way it’s not just me in Congress, it’s hundreds of thousands of people in my district [who] support these progressive values that benefit the lives of everyday people and not corporations who brutalize our communities for the sake of profit.
NICK: One of those progressive policies that Congressman Rush doesn’t support—and you mentioned this earlier—is the Green New Deal. You’ve been endorsed by the Sunrise Movement, and that makes you one of only four primary challengers they’ve endorsed so far. (The other three are Marie Newman in IL-03, Jessica Cisneros in TX-28, and Morgan Harper in OH-03.) There’s a big difference between you and Congressman Rush, who’s described the Green New Deal as a “smash and grab.” What does the Green New Deal look like for your district specifically, and why do you think it’s so important?
EMMONS: Multiple reasons. The most obvious one is...it begins to save our planet from destruction that’s irreversible. Moving past that, more locally, is the infrastructure piece of that. The infrastructure component of the Green New Deal means that we can reinvest in our pipes. Right now, in communities across the country, we have young people who are quite literally being lead poisoned. There are numerous studies that show that lead, when we’re consuming it, it underdevelops the mind of our young people, especially from that age of 0-3. That makes it more difficult to do well in school, and it also affects the brain in a way that makes it more difficult to make rational decisions—whether or not to pull the trigger could have been determined by what you consumed when you were 2 years old. That’s one way I’m looking at the Green New Deal, the infrastructure component. Another way I’m looking at it is health. Right now, in disinvested communities all across the country, [homes]—including the house I just bought—are situated right next to either toxic zones, or expressways, you name it, just bad areas. We’re breathing in these toxins and fumes, and it’s leading to health issues, and that has an economic component to it, because almost 650,000 Americans are going bankrupt every year due to healthcare bills. [Note: a recent study put that figure at 530,000, which is still 530,000 too many.] A large portion of that are people of color, who don’t have the means [to pay for] healthcare they desperately need. And it’s also the jobs portion of the Green New Deal. Creating that new economy looks like putting people to work in good-paying jobs that aren’t leading to their inevitable demise, like the fossil fuel industry has done—there are jobs [in the fossil fuel industry], and some of them are unionized, but they’re jobs that lead to eventual sickness. This green economy gives good jobs, jobs that can be unionized, jobs that are gonna prepare them to obtain upward mobility. As we’re putting more and more people back to work [in green industries], [we’re] also advocating for policies like universal pre-K and reforming the way our schools are funded. Now you’re created a care economy, now you’re putting more people in jobs that aren’t even necessarily green, but as you invest in our people, it’s a spiral effect if you invest in the people and the communities benefit, communities benefit, districts, states, the whole country begins to benefit from investing in the people who have been so harmed for decades and...even centuries. So Bobby Rush calling it a “smash and grab”...I can’t fathom—I know why he called it a “smash and grab” but I can’t fathom why someone would sell out their community. I’m sure he’s fully aware of how beneficial the Green New Deal—resolution at the time...but now we even have Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s plans as to how we do it, and he still doesn’t support it. He sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, so his voice really matters.
I was also endorsed by Sunrise Chicago first, so I was really proud of that.
NICK: Earlier you spoke about your belief in criminal justice reform, and your issue with the congressman’s long, long history of supporting tough-on-crime policies. You’ve spoken about the need to transition to a restorative justice system. How do you envision that restorative system looking in Chicago and in the other communities in your district? For example, what do you think the prison system looks like, or policing looks like, after transitioning to a restorative system?
EMMONS: It starts, on the macro end of it, making sure that we as a country are no longer profiting from the incarceration of individuals. That means that we end the privatization of prisons. No one should profit from it. No one should benefit from filling up beds in jails. That’s an outlook that...took off after tough-on-crime policies in the 90s and the 2000s. Once we do that—all of this can be done at the same time, but I’m saying once we do that on a macro level—now we can think of the individual components of how we can be more rehabilitative in our criminal justice system. It means making sure that while folks are incarcerated and paying their dues, they’re also having opportunities to finish up high school with a GED, to earn degrees that...position them that when they get out of jail, they don’t have to go back to the same things they were getting into, like my friend did when he got in trouble, got out, paid his dues—he had to go back to that same lifestyle, because prison made it worse. That’s why our recidivism rate is so high. It’s not focused on being rehabilitative while you’re there, it’s about punishing you and making you suffer, even once you’ve paid your dues and gotten out of prison. When you apply for that job in some states, you have to fill out that box that says, “Were you ever incarcerated?” And if you say yes, your likelihood of getting that job drastically decreases. If you want that community college degree or that degree from a university, you also have to select that box that you’ve been incarcerated, and you’re not getting FAFSA. Now you can’t go to school, you cannot become a better contributing member of society, because of the way our criminal justice system is currently set up. And it’s extremely racist, [because] you can point out poverty as one of the major metrics for why people are in jail. It’s racist because when you look at the people that are in jail, more than 60% of the population is people of color. Yet people of color don’t make up the majority of this country. That disproportionality proves that fact pretty consistently, and there’s a lot we can do to reform that. It starts with no longer profiting, because whenever there’s profit at stake, the side with power is usually the side that’s gonna be the dominant voice. That’s why we’re supporting things like criminal justice reform, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, because those things aren’t about profit. The Green New Deal does contribute to the economy, but that’s not the end goal. The end goal isn’t about profiting from it. The end goal is making sure that actual lives are being saved, in a way that’s sustainable, [so] that our grandkids no longer have to fight for the same things that our grandparents fought for. That’s what our campaign has been about. It’s been about solidifying the legacy of the progressives that have come before us, and no longer being okay with incrementalism.
NICK: You spoke specifically about private prisons and the profit motive. However, public prisons—state-run prisons, and county and federal prisons—
EMMONS: —make up the majority.
NICK: Yes. And in fact, Congressman Rush’s son, Jeffrey, was a prison supervisor last decade until he raped two inmates. That’s...the kind of thing that unfortunately happens all the time in our prison system, both public and private. With conditions in places like Rikers Island in New York becoming a target of public scrutiny, people have become more aware of the atrocities that happen in our prisons. Despite this, and despite the congressman’s son’s case getting a lot of publicity, the congressman has continued to employ his son—as recently as a few months ago, his son was on the campaign payroll. His son may still be on the campaign payroll, we just don’t know until he releases his fourth quarter report. (Rush’s fourth quarter report is now in, and his son is still on the payroll.) What do you think the continued employment of his son—who likely was able to plead down to a lesser offense only because his father was Congressman Bobby Rush—what do you think this says about the congressman?
EMMONS: I think it says a lot about the congressman, and I think it says a lot about the country. I agree with your point that because he is the congressman’s son, he had an easier route to his freedom. The honest truth is that’s the case all across the country as it pertains to women being courageous and opening up and talking about the atrocity that they experienced, and the justice system and our society either not believing them or publicly shaming them for the harm that they’ve experienced. That in and of itself is something we need to reform both culturally, and also in policy and in process, making sure that we have independent accountability boards that are investigating these horrific situations, in a way that we can hold folks accountable and speak more tangibly about the question that you just asked. We put out a quick statement talking about how under no circumstances would I allow anybody even accused of rape or sexual harassment to be anywhere near, or affiliated with, my campaign. It does not send a good message. It does not reform culture. In an era in which we are beginning to switch, due to movements like the MeToo movement and other feminist groups, we are in a moment in which we need to, especially as men, hold each other accountable. That’s whether or not you’re my son, you’re my dad, you’re my brother, you’re my best friend, we have to hold each other accountable. In our campaign, I would’ve immediately terminated that person’s position on my campaign, and in his situation, I wouldn’t have put him on my campaign no matter what. If somebody already made an allegation, and you were convicted—that’s the way I feel about that situation. My heart goes out to the women who relive the situation every time it comes back up. Again, we as men...have to make sure that we’re holding one another accountable. And we need independent accountability boards to make sure that…[the accused’s] friends aren’t the judge and jury at the same time.
NICK: One last question and then if there’s anything you feel like we left out, please say so. The primaries are coming soon, Illinois is one of the first states to vote in its congressional and state legislative primaries. You only have 11 weeks left [at the time of this interview], so what are you going to be doing for the next 11 weeks?
EMMONS: Field. Field and, in order to get field to continue going, it’s fundraising. Making calls, galvanizing all of the supporters we’ve gained over the entire year we’ve been in this campaign to actually mobilize and win this election. This is an extremely big district, we can’t walk it in the same way that AOC was able to walk her district, but we can still employ some of those same strategies in connecting with people where they are in a way that speaks volumes to our community. It’s also making sure that in this campaign we’re doing as much good as we can with the resources that we have available to us. It’s making sure that the message of ending everyday gun violence is widely spread all across the country. That way, no matter what happens in this election, we’ve still made some of the change that we saw in the first place. And also just doing things for the community that are...more solid. Doing things that are gonna benefit people, like coat drives and things like that, with the resources that we have available. It’s continuing to build support across the district. We’ve gotten the most endorsements, I think, in the Illinois 1st congressional district so far, both national and local endorsements. And those aren’t just stamps of approval, these are organizations that believe in progressive values, and are advocating for them in a way that’s truly changing our country. We have the most in the race, and that’s not gonna change. I think we’re gonna continue to build that support up until March 17th [the date of the primary]. We’ll probably still have more and more endorsements rolling in. [In fact, Our Revolution endorsed the campaign in between the recording of this interview and its release.] We’ve been in this campaign unofficially for a year and a half, officially for a year in March, and we’re proud of what we’ve been able to do. I’m proud of the team we were able to build, and proud of the way we’ve been able to campaign. We didn’t have to go negative, not once. We’ve still got 11 weeks left, but we haven’t had to go negative, we’ve been able to keep this extremely focused. I think Bobby Rush has respected the fact that I truly respect him. I think it’s time for him to go, but I definitely respect him. And that has allowed us to campaign the way we’ve been campaigning.
NICK: Is there anything else you think we missed, or you wanna mention again—
EMMONS: Yeah, the one growth area that I’ve had in terms of policy throughout the campaign is reparations. I’ve always been pro-reparations, but at the beginning of our campaign not as pro-reparations as I currently am. As a means to end systemic poverty, systemic poverty caused by racism and oppression of a people for hundreds of years. We’ve been advocating for reparations, and doing so in a way that’s not just an adoption of what’s currently being proposed, but also thinking about ways in which we can cancel debt in three key areas, for American descendants of slaves and for indigenous people. That’s one thing I wanna make sure that members—especially from communities that look like mine—members of Congress are actively advocating and seeking out ways like reparations to end systemic poverty, so that Black people, specifically, are no longer at the bottom of every single bad statistic there is in our country. We need to make sure we are truly changing this country, so that, again, our kids, our grandkids aren’t fighting for the same things we’re fighting for. That’s something that I would love to push Bobby Rush on, in his last year in Congress, to begin advocating for. That would make me proud as a constituent, and proud as someone who does believe that Bobby Rush does have good intentions—his impact just doesn’t match it.
NICK: Alright. Well, thank you so much, and I’m looking forward to seeing what your campaign can do over these next 11 weeks and potentially beyond.