But Price wasn’t completely blaming himself, either. He wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, or the one who set events in motion by taunting him earlier that evening at 56th and Justine. “You could say it started when the first slave masters got the first slaves from Africa and brought them here,” he says. “You can dissect all this, but the whole thing was, a person died over nothing. Over the color of his skin, basically. Which boggles my mind.”

In a companion piece to his devastating two-part feature about the racially motivated murder of a little white girl in a Chicago neighborhood experiencing racial transition in the 1970s, the Chicago Reader’s Steve Bogira has an article about a black man in the same era who was murdered by white teens who seem to have never been brought to justice. It’s a tough reminder of a painful past. Judging by the comments it has inspired on the Reader website, it seems it’s also a necessary reminder.