CHICAGO – In a storefront office on Chicago’s violence-plagued South Side, young activists meet in pursuit of a single goal: pressuring the University of Chicago Medical Center to reopen a trauma department it closed 25 years ago.

The trauma facility was shut down long before most of these college students were even born. But they and others believe restoring it will help save people wounded in the city’s maelstrom of gun violence, many of them poor and black.

“This fight is very important to us,” said one of the group’s organizers, Veronica Morris-Moore. “If the issue were affecting white students at the university as much as people of color in the community, the university would put more effort into this.”