Hustle of Kim Foxx, The

After the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a white police officer, Chicagoans demanded change. Can a new state’s attorney, the first black woman to hold the position, bring real reform to a broken system?

With a brick on her desk from the Cabrini-Green housing project where she spent her childhood, Kim Foxx must adapt her hard-won ideals to the realities of criminal justice in Chicago. In this intimate narrative by award-winning author Steve Bogira, Foxx reveals: “My mother taught me how to be a hustler. Hustle in the sense of work hard, grind—find a way out of no way.”

Steve Bogira’s The Hustle of Kim Foxx is part of Southside, a collection of five true stories about racism and reform, crime and corruption, justice and injustice in Chicago—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning team at The Marshall Project. With original photography by Carlos Javier Ortiz and Joshua Lott. Each story can be read—or listened to—in a single sitting.