UN delegates to visit Chicago to investigate city's race relations

CHICAGO (FOX 32 News) - A group from the United Nations will be in Chicago next week to investigate the current state of the city's race relations.

On Monday, civil rights leaders gathered on the Southside to discuss the UN visit and to urge investigators to examine social and economic disparity within the city, as well as to examine violence against blacks at the hands of police officers.

“I have a dream that one day in the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood,” Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. had said.

On that day in 1963, Martin Luther King imagined an integrated south. But could he have imagined five years later that Chicago’s West Side would be on fire as the result of growing racial tensions?

Now, nearly fifty years later, the United Nations is coming to Chicago to investigate issues impacting people of African descent.

One of many civil rights leaders says it has to begin with the police force.

“We got people on the police force that don't care about us. They don't care about us,” founder of Women’s All Point Bulletin Crista Noel said while crying.

A small UN delegation is scheduled to meet next week with Cook County officials, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration, and citizens in an open forum at Chicago State University, where educational disparity is likely to be an emotional topic.

“What will the UN find when they come and they do their fact finding mission? They're going to find schools that are decidedly segregated and inferior in the black community,” said Phillip Jackson, who’s the Executive Director of Black Star Project.

Leaders are imploring the UN to examine a staggeringly high local unemployment rate among young black men, a lack affordable housing, and a lack of local laws designed to protect black children.

However, at the end of the day, it’s violence against blacks that continues to outrage Chicago’s African American community.

“They cry for peace and yet they ignore the wounds of my people,” said Rev. Dr. Iva Carruthers.

So you may be asking yourself, what will the UN do with their findings? The answer is they're going to report back to the government.

As for what happens after that, that remains to be seen.