The Man Who Stayed

Sunni Powell returned to the place so many people are trying to leave: Englewood on Chicago’s South Side. As a barber, he doesn’t just care for his clients—he’s helping shape the future of his neighborhood.

63rd Street was once the backbone of Chicago’s South Side. Around its intersection with Halsted Street, one of the city’s largest shopping districts flourished in the late nineteenth century. Just a few blocks west, little remains of that past. Since the 1980s, abandoned buildings and headlines about shootings have come to define how outsiders see Englewood. “Englewood has a bad reputation,” says Sunni Powell. “But it has some of the most beautiful and caring people.” The 55-year-old is tall, wears a neatly trimmed beard and a black shirt embroidered with “Powell’s” in red lettering—the name of his barbershop. On this Tuesday morning, business is slow. Only Mercedes Lewis is busy, patiently combing out a young man’s dreadlocks before twisting his hair into a fresh style. “Being a barber is a blessing,” Powell says. “We get to make people look good – and feel good about themselves.”

Standing still isn’t in Powell’s nature. He takes us on a walk through the neighborhood. Every few steps, someone stops him. A pat on the shoulder here, a firm handshake there. “How you doing, my man?” He knows the shop owners, the elderly mechanic working on a car behind his garage, the teenagers hanging out on the corner, the woman waiting at the bus stop. Powell’s grandmother bought a house in Englewood in 1953, making her one of the neighborhood’s first Black homeowners. Above us, Chicago’s iconic elevated train tracks stretch across the street like a steel spine. “I used to catch the Green Line here to go to high school,” Powell says, pointing upward. No train has stopped at the Racine station since 1994. For residents, it felt as though the city had cut off one of the neighborhood’s main arteries. Powell and several community organizations have spent years fighting to reopen it. “That station is supposed to open every year. Every year we fill out the paperwork, and every year they postpone it.” Anyone who gets the chance to leave Englewood usually does, and Powell could have left too. After high school he lived in Los Angeles and Atlanta, working as a production assistant in film and television. But sixteen years ago he came back—not despite Englewood, but because of it. He points toward a mostly abandoned mall beside a gas station.

“My first barbershop was over there,” he says and then tells the story that made national headlines ten years ago. Another shooting in Englewood. A gunman burst into a barbershop and opened fire on two customers. One of them died at the scene. It happened in Powell’s shop. “That changed everything.” Even today, the memory visibly weighs on him. “A barbershop is a sacred space. Especially in a community like this, people have to feel safe here.” He looks over at the now-empty storefront, “That boundary was violated in the worst possible way.” Instead of closing his business—or leaving the neighborhood—Powell doubled down. “I started something called the Brotherhood of Barbers. Through my film connections I got generators and about twenty tents, and I asked the city’s barber schools to join us.” For five years, the festivalturned a neighborhood park into an open-air barbershop, bringing together barber schools from across Chicago while offering free haircuts to anyone who showed up.

Since 2023, Powell’s Barbershop has been located in a newly built space across the street from the old mall. The building is now home to an architectural firm, a coffee shop and several other Black-owned businesses. “That’s important,” Powell says. The neighborhood’s revival, he believes, has to come from within. The Go Green Community Market is another example of what that can look like. It stands where, residents hope, Green Line trains will soon stop again. While many neighborhood stores mainly stock canned goods  and other processed foods, the market offers fresh produce as well as healthy prepared meals. “Why should Grandma have to take three buses just to get a fresh grape?” asks the cook as she fills the refrigerated display with freshly made salads. Powell was one of the people who championed the project and pushed to bring the market to Englewood. Initiatives like these matter, he says, because they show residents that change is possible—and that it’s already happening.

Back at the barbershop, a friend from Powell’s motorcycle club is waiting for him. The man wants to keep his long hair, so Powell braids it into neat cornrows. A little later, Powell sends me a photo of the finished look. By then, we’re already on the bus heading back to the Red Line. “You took the bus?” he replies, genuinely alarmed. “You crazy Germans! That’s nasty. I would never get on that bus.”