To understand the dynamics of BLMM/M4BL, we have to look beyond the national to the local. A commonly repeated truth is that “all politics are local,” meaning that national movements and campaigns are built upon the concrete work performed on the local level.1 While it is beyond the scope of this project to cover all the vibrant local struggles out there, I will take Chicago as a case study, even though it is by no means typical.
Chicago has been the site of intense resistance to racist state violence for decades. The 1969 police murder of twenty-one-year-old Illinois Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton is still remembered bitterly in the city’s African American community. Hampton was a youth leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and later joined the Illinois Black Panther Party, rising in the ranks to become its chair. A charismatic organizer, he built bridges between the party and Chicago’s Puerto Rican, Mexican, and poor white communities, in what he called a rainbow coalition. In an early-morning police raid on an apartment in Chicago’s West Side on December 4, 1969, Hampton was shot and killed while his pregnant girlfriend lay in the bed next to him. Mark Clark, Hampton’s comrade, was also killed in the infamous raid. Their murders were an outgrowth of the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program), which sought to subvert and destroy Black liberation organizations that the government deemed threatening. The FBI was willing to use almost any means to do so.2
Only a few years after Hampton’s assassination, Area 2 police commander Jon Burge began what would become a decades-long practice of torture in the back room of the Chicago police station that he oversaw. Many African American men in Burge’s custody on the city’s South Side were coerced into giving false confessions—some of them ended up languishing for years on death row. A subgroup of them, dubbed “the Death Row Ten,” refused to suffer in silence and began to organize from behind bars. They became strong and eloquent advocates for their own freedom. The men told their stories and pleaded for help, but for many years they were simply ignored.
It was only through a systematic campaign by activist groups and torture victims’ families that the truth finally came to light. It was exposed that some victims were burned with lit cigarettes, others had plastic bags put over their heads, and some suffered electric shock to their genitals. It took a determined and protracted campaign to finally extract some modicum of justice. The Illinois Campaign to End the Death Penalty eventually got on board and was instrumental in mobilizing support specifically for the Death Row Ten. Some of the torture victims received reduced sentences, monetary settlements, and exonerations from the governor.
Torture survivors like Ronnie Kitchen, Anthony Holmes, Mark Clements, and Darrell Cannon told compelling and gut-wrenching stories of their experiences and became effective voices for the movement upon their release. In 2000, Republican governor George Ryan was persuaded to declare a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois and commute the sentences of all 160 death row inmates, among them a number of Burge torture survivors.3 I remember meeting Ronnie Kitchen at a welcome home party thrown by anti–death penalty activist Alice Kim a few days after his release. I was struck by the gentle humility of this man after all he had suffered.
Alice Kim, the daughter of Korean immigrants and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, was a key organizer in the Illinois Campaign to End the Death Penalty when Ronnie reached out to the group in 1998 with a letter proclaiming his innocence. She met Ronnie in 1999, when he was still on death row, and she took his mother, Louva Bell, to the Pontiac Correctional Center to visit. Weekly phone calls for nearly ten years anchored their deepening political friendship. With Louva by her side and a range of political groups, ranging from the International Socialist Organization to Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Alice fought like hell to free Ronnie and the other Burge torture victims on Illinois’s death row—all of them Black and all of them poor. Most were eventually released.4
The relentless campaign to free Ronnie and his fellow torture survivors involved numerous Chicago organizers, radical lawyers like Joey Mogul and Flint Taylor at the People’s Law Offices, and members of the men’s own families. By the time Burge’s deeds were fully revealed, the statute of limitations had run out, which prevented his being prosecuted for his most heinous crimes. He was, however, ultimately convicted on the federal level on the secondary charge of perjury for lying to prosecutors about what he did. Phase 1 of the struggle was to expose the torture and free the survivors. Phase 2 was to hold those guilty of torture accountable. Phase 3 was to win some form of restitution for the survivors.
Finally, in May 2015, a broad-based community coalition was successful in getting the Chicago City Council to pass an unprecedented reparations ordinance on behalf of the torture survivors. Although this victory was limited, it was powerful in a number of respects. In addition to awarding a five-million dollar settlement to the remaining victims who had not been included in earlier lawsuits, it added the following forms of collective restitution: a unit in the Chicago Public Schools’ curriculum that would teach students about this ugly chapter in Chicago’s history; a public memorial to the victims of police torture; free tuition to Chicago’s public colleges for the victims, their children, and their grandchildren; a counseling center for torture victims and their families; and priority access to many city services. This creative and far-reaching settlement was an important landmark in the struggle to hold police and city officials accountable and to reimagine what reparations demands might look like.5 It also won changes that will have an impact beyond the torture victims and their families.
While as of this writing the reparations ordinance is perhaps the most high-profile victory of the struggle against police violence in Chicago, the story would be distorted were the decades of work by radical Black lawyer Standish Willis, who was suing the police and city for brutalizing its Black citizens as early as the 1980s, not mentioned. Through his work with the National Conference of Black Lawyers and his early affiliation with the People’s Law Offices, Willis was a fierce fighter for police accountability. He met with people at their kitchen tables and in church basements to bolster the courage of litigants at a time when many were afraid to stand up to the police. I remember soon after I moved to Chicago in 1991 accompanying Willis to meetings with community residents, where he gave people confidence that they could sue the police and actually win. Even when victims came out of custody with black eyes and bruises, many Black community residents were skeptical that they could obtain justice through the courts. Willis, working closely with the organization he cofounded, Black People against Police Torture, always insisted that a combination of community organizing and courtroom strategy would yield results. Many of his lawsuits were successful against the odds. His pioneering work elevated the consciousness and political will of the community, which contributed to the ultimate victory of the ordinance. These are some of the foundations of activism and resistance supporting the 2012–16 anti–police violence campaigns in Chicago.
Another case of police violence that captured the hearts and triggered the anger of Chicago activists is that of Dominique (Damo) Franklin Jr., who was Tased by police in May 2014 and died as a result. This case did not initially get much publicity. Damo, like many young Black men in Chicago, had experienced various run-ins with the police. On the night of his death, he had allegedly stolen some small items from a local store and was fleeing police, unarmed. Police Tased him twice while he was in motion. As he fell, he hit a pole, which caused a severe head injury, resulting in his death. Poets and community organizers Malcolm London and Ethan Viets-Vanlear were friends of Damo’s. Ethan visited him in the hospital just before he died. The police involved were never charged.6 His death was a catalyst for some of his friends to become more politically active.
Veteran organizer Mariame Kaba was the first to invite Damo’s friends and others to a meeting in June 2014, where she proposed forming a delegation of young people of color to make a case against the Chicago Police Department and highlight Damo’s death before the United Nation’s Committee against Torture (UNCAT). The delegates, most of whom were under twenty-five years old at the time, included Ethan, Malcolm, and seven other young Chicago activists: Todd St. Hill, Breanna Champion, Asha Ransby-Sporn, Ric Wilson, Page May, and Monica Trinidad. Together they formed the We Charge Genocide delegation, echoing the 1951 international campaign that included Paul Robeson and drew attention to the heinous practice of lynching Black people in the US South by taking their cases to the UN.7 After raising the needed funds, the young Chicagoans traveled to a UN meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, in November 2014 to render testimony on the pattern of police violence in Chicago’s Black communities. They returned to an enthusiastic welcome from Chicago activists. The delegates presented a report on their trip to Geneva to a crowd of five hundred people at Roosevelt University.
In an unprecedented gesture, when issuing its final report, UNCAT explicitly cited the Chicago Police Department for its reckless use of Tasers and referenced Damo’s death. Additionally, the report called on the City of Chicago to pass the reparations ordinance for Burge torture survivors. These were both victories for the We Charge Genocide delegation. In September 2017, the City of Chicago agreed to a two-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement with Damo’s family, tacitly acknowledging that the officers were in the wrong when they Tased him.8 We Charge Genocide, which turned into a sustained two-year effort, further galvanized the growing anti–police violence movement in the city, a movement deeply implicated in larger campaigns to expose economic injustice and other forms of state violence and to advocate for prison abolition and transformative justice practices. Importantly, the Chicago We Charge Genocide effort inspired Ferguson activists to raise money to send Michael Brown’s parents and lawyer Justin Hansford to the United Nations in Geneva to make a similar case about the killing of Michael Brown.
Black feminists like Kaba did much of the behind-the-scenes work, strategizing, and planning that facilitated the We Charge Genocide delegation: political education, research for a well-documented report that was produced by the WCG collective, testimony, and mentoring of a new crop of bold young organizers. Jasson Perez, one of the founding members of BYP100, recalls that Mariame “had a profund impact on many of us and how we see our work. . . . But bigger than that, she was essential in establishing a Black feminist programmatic political orientation in all our work. She was the best example of how to practically enact a Black queer feminist politic at the policy and campaign level.”9 Kaba also helped publicize and organize around the Tiawanda Moore case. Moore, aged twenty, was a young Black woman charged with but acquitted of a felony for audiotaping two Chicago police officers, who were trying to dissuade her from filing a sexual assault complaint against one of their fellow officers. She was also the target of sexist attacks from the media for having once worked as a stripper, a fact that had nothing to do with her case.10
The case that really galvanized Chicago’s BLMM/M4BL-affiliated organizations was that of Rekia Boyd, an unarmed twenty-two-year-old Black woman killed by off-duty detective Dante Servin in 2012 in the North Lawndale community of Chicago. When news of the killing broke, veteran organizer Crista Noel of the Women’s All Points Bulletin, who was also a member of the Chicago Alliance against Racist and Political Repression, immediately reached out to Boyd’s family. She worked with them to pressure the state’s attorney Anita Alvarez to indict Servin.11 Mariame Kaba was another person who got involved in the case early on, speaking on panels organized by Crista and mobilizing others.
Servin’s defense was that he supposedly thought one of Boyd’s friends had a gun, so he opened fire in fear for his life. The friend, whom Servin shot in the hand, was actually holding a cell phone. Boyd’s family was awarded $4.5 million in a wrongful death suit against the city—years before Servin was tried. Eventually, nearly two years after Boyd’s death, and after considerable protest and agitation, Servin was charged with involuntary manslaughter, making him the first Chicago police officer in more than fifteen years to face criminal charges in a fatal shooting. A judge ultimately acquitted Servin in a 2015 trial.12
After the acquittal of Dante Servin, Rekia’s case was taken up by BYP100, A Long Walk Home, Black youth activists like Veronica Morris-Moore (of Fearless Leading by the Youth), and others. Rather than dampening their spirits, Servin’s acquittal galvanized Chicago activists and organizers, who rallied behind the demand to “fire Dante Servin.” #FireDanteServin was an abolitionist campaign whose demands looked beyond the prison system for some measure of justice.13 Boyd’s brother, Martinez Sutton, and her mother were vigilant in keeping the memory of their family member alive. Over the past few years, BLM Chicago, BYP100, Assata’s Daughters, the Women’s All Points Bulletin, the Chicago Alliance against Racist and Political Repression, We Charge Genocide, and the Let Us Breathe Collective have all organized vigils, protests, and disruptions of Chicago Police Board meetings, demanding accountability in Boyd’s case and showing up in a sea of bright yellow T-shirts emblazoned with “Fire Dante Servin” on them. To preempt his likely firing, Servin resigned from the Chicago Police Department in May 2016 and was thus able to keep his lucrative pension.14 The campaign was nonetheless a powerful show of force and unity by Chicago’s anti–police violence movement.
The tactics throughout the #FireDanteServin and #RememberRekia campaign were bold and unrelenting. At more than one meeting of the Chicago Police Board, widely criticized for its pro-police bias and ineffectiveness, BYP100 literally shut the meeting down to expose the board as a public relations unit for the mayor. At one particularly heated board meeting, the barely five-foot-tall organizer Charlene Carruthers shouted down the board members, insisting they acknowledge that they had not indicted a single officer in the many cases that had come before them and were in essence a farce.15 In the same vein, BYP100 organizer Rachel Williams gave a tough and eloquent speech addressing the body as the “unelected board,” and activist Damon Williams confronted the group as “illegitimate,” putting them in the spotlight and on the defensive. These actions eventually forced the City of Chicago to rethink and revise its mechanisms of political accountability altogether. Throughout the “Justice for Rekia” campaign, the overwhelmingly Black Chicago State University was on the verge of closure, owing to lack of state funds. Activists linked that economic and education justice issue to the issue of police violence. In the words of BYP100 organizer Joan Fadayiro, “We see these struggles as intrinsically connected. The City of Chicago and the State of Illinois are proving that they do not value black lives. Police officers are enabled to kill black women with impunity while black community assets such as Chicago State University are divested from.”16
The spring 2015 formation of Assata’s Daughters, to cultivate the leadership of Black women and girls and uphold the legacy of radical women activists like Assata Shakur, was a significant development in Chicago’s political ecosystem. Page May, a Black Vermont native with a sharp tongue, a quick wit, and a fearless persona, spearheaded the group’s founding. The members immediately joined in the city’s ongoing protests, and were catalysts for others.
Assata’s Daughters was part of a coalition called The Collective, which also included Fearless Leading by the Youth, Black Lives Matter Chicago (BLM-CHI), and others. The group combined brazen direct-action tactics with a bit of political theater when, on April 30, 2016, they shut down Lakeshore Drive, one of Chicago’s main traffic arteries, to disrupt the NFL draft, which the city was proudly hosting. Borrowing from and reinterpreting imagery from Beyoncé’s Super Bowl “Black Power” performance and Lemonade video and album, protesters wore black outfits with red berets and chained themselves together with fists clenched in the air. They insisted they were protesting the lack of funding for public education and the refusal of the mayor to fire the police officer who gunned down unarmed Rekia Boyd. After a prolonged standoff, police cut the chains that bound the protesters together and arrested seventeen people.17
Anchoring the work of BLM-CHI since 2015 is a tight-knit core of organizers led by savvy activist Aislinn Pulley. Aislinn, who grew up in an activist family, moves and speaks slowly and methodically. She is never flippant. She brings this same care and attention to detail to BLM-CHI, which has spent a great deal of time reaching out to and cultivating relationships with the families of victims of police violence, and has also supported fundraising efforts to aid victims of intracommunal violence as well. Those families are almost always in need of emotional and financial support. BLM-CHI has made a point of raising burial funds for victims of police violence. The names are not abstract. Aislinn and her comrades have been committed to personalizing the stories of individual victims and their extended families. In their speeches and literature, they have also connected state violence and intracommunal (street) violence, pointing out that the lack of housing, jobs, and education are the factors fueling Chicago’s street-level gun violence.
From the struggle for education justice to the #RememberRekia campaign, women activists in Chicago, including queer women, have been central, visible, and vocal since 2013—so much so that a prominent local news magazine, the Chicago Reader, published a feature aptly entitled “Queer Women Are Shaping Chicago’s Black Lives Matter Movement.” In the words of Rachel Williams, as quoted in the article, “Let’s be real: Most of the work is being led by Black queer women. We’re not going to be put in a box or left out.”18
Still in her twenties in 2015, Veronica Morris-Moore is another Black queer activist who has been an important leader in Chicago politics. Although many groups and individuals were involved, Veronica was instrumental in the large, layered, and protracted campaign to force the University of Chicago, one of the most powerful and well-endowed universities in the country, to establish an adult trauma center on the South Side of the city. The backstory of the campaign is important, and the outcome was almost unprecedented. In 2010 a young activist, Damien Turner, then eighteen years old, was the victim of a random drive-by shooting in a neighborhood rife with gun violence. The ambulance had to drive him ten miles to reach the closest trauma center. He died. Turner was an organizer with a South Side group, STOP (Southsider Together Organizing for Power), and one of the cofounders of FLY (Fearless Leading by the Youth). His death hit the young Black activist community hard. Its members launched a five-year campaign that included direct-action tactics, the disruption of an alumni gala, and bold tactics to shame the university into creating a forty-million-dollar trauma center that will go a long way toward saving Black lives. Many victims of gun violence in Chicago are within a short drive of the University of Chicago. Morris-Moore drew large conclusions from a weighty local victory, concluding, “Liberation is completely possible when people come together and organize.”19 The trauma center victory was not tantamount to liberation, but the gist of Morris-Moore’s point was right, and others took it to heart. No progress would be made without determined and relentless organizing, and with that the seemingly unattainable was within reach.
The local work in Chicago has been important on its own terms; however, a number of Chicago activists have had an impact far beyond the city itself. Some are well-known, while others are not. Dara Cooper’s name may not be well-known beyond movement circles, but she has been a consistent and influential force within it. As an informal advisor to the emergent M4BL and a member of the policy table that drafted the “Vision for Black Lives” document, Dara has worked on food justice, educating many of us about the importance of our ability, or inability, to feed ourselves, and about our connection to land and food. She has made her home in Chicago; Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta; and Philadelphia over the past decade. Dara’s work with the National Black Food Justice Alliance and her research and activism on food hubs, food cooperatives, and the larger issue of food sovereignty have made sure that BLMM/M4BL activists are sensitized to these issues. All of this began in Chicago, where Dara was working to combat so-called food deserts, mostly in Black and Brown communities, through the innovative concept of a healthy-food bus that was a kind of mobile farmers’ market providing healthy produce in communities where it was otherwise unavailable. In Dara’s view, the absence of food sovereignty is a special kind of violence.
Chicago organizers have engaged in numerous protests over the years, but in November 2015, when the bone-chilling video of unarmed Black teenager Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was released, protests began anew. This time they targeted the mayor, the police chief, and the state’s attorney. Significantly, some of the BLMM/M4BL organizers were not explicitly calling for Van Dyke to be jailed—since many of them were prison abolitionists. More important, they called for his firing as they worked to expose the larger issue of institutional racism that often leads to such wrongdoing: the code of silence that allows for cover-ups; the city officials who suppressed details of McDonald’s killing; and the state’s attorney, who, they argued, was more interested in maintaining good relations with the police department than in realizing justice for a Black teen from a poor neighborhood.
The Laquan McDonald video was conveniently kept away from the public until after Chicago’s heated mayoral election and was released only after journalists like Brandon Smith filed a lawsuit to get the tape released, and Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute, acting on a tip, did some “guerilla research” and exposed the existence of the tape and the cover-up that followed.20 Another systemic problem that activists addressed was the ways in which police unions have negotiated labor contracts that protect police from full disclosure and swift accountability for misdeeds. After thousands of people took to the streets in protest, Van Dyke was eventually arrested and charged with first-degree murder. It was the first time in thirty-five years that a Chicago police officer had been charged with murder while on duty.21 Dante Servin’s shooting of Rekia Boyd was an off-duty incident.
The McDonald murder garnered national and international media attention, and many Chicago activist groups were propelled into action around the case. The chant “Sixteen shots and a cover-up” reverberated throughout the city as the mantra of a campaign that included groups that existed long before the emergence of BLMM/M4BL. Among them were Action Now, STOP, SOUL (Southsiders Organizing for Unity and Liberation), the Workers Center for Racial Justice, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, all filling the streets in sometimes uneasy alliance. One night a series of street protests shut down the South Loop area west of downtown; scuffles broke out with police, and there were several arrests. The street protests and disruptions of city meetings and mayoral speeches, as well as negative attention from local, national, and alternative media, continued, eventually forcing the city to do something. Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired the chief of police, Garry McCarthy, in December 2015 and, in a tearful press conference, apologized to city residents for not handling the Laquan McDonald case better. The timing was all too convenient. Emanuel had just survived an unprecedented run-off election against progressive Latinx challenger Jesus (Chuy) Garcia. Had the video been released before the election, the outcome might have been different.
After McCarthy’s departure, there was still the unapologetic state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, a conservative Latinx Democrat, who had been consistently insensitive and even hostile to community concerns. She was up for reelection three months after the video’s release and had been implicated in its suppression. Local groups, including BLMM/M4BL activists, launched one of the most creative electoral campaigns the city had seen: the #ByeAnita campaign. They followed Alvarez to fundraisers and demanded answers. They held vigils outside her offices. They even rented a propeller plane to fly over the city with a banner that read, “ByeAnita.” They unfurled large banners, handed out flyers all over the city (while chanting “Sixteen shots and a cover-up”), and created a firestorm on social media. They were creative and unrelenting in their campaign to expose her record and urge voters to oust her from office. One of the most active groups in this campaign was Assata’s Daughters.
The #ByeAnita campaign refrained from endorsing an opposition candidate but focused rather on the platform “Anita must go.” She suffered a rousing defeat to progressive African American attorney Kim Foxx in the Democratic primary, with a significant uptick in the number of young people who went to the polls. Foxx went on to win the March 2016 election.22
It is important to note that the work of BLMM/M4BL and other newer formations built upon preexisting organizing efforts, such as that of the Chicago Alliance against Racist and Political Repression, a multiracial leftist group that emerged in the early 1970s out of the campaign to free Angela Davis and currently leads campaigns against police violence and abuse. The alliance was the catalyst for the ongoing demand for a Civilian Police Accountability Council in Chicago, which has growing support. With seventy-plus-year-old veteran activist Frank Chapman, a large man with a baritone voice, a humble manner, and a lot of political savvy, at the helm, it has been a critical part of the Black Freedom Movement in Chicago.
One outcome of these important efforts has been the strengthened relationships between different sectors of Chicago’s activist community, including its Black and Latinx sectors. Notably, new ties were forged between Mijente, a national left-leaning Latinx group23 and a leading force in the immigrant rights movement, and BYP100. Organized Communities against Deportations, led by an amazing activist family, the Carasco-Unzuetas, is a local affiliate of Mijente. Mijente and BYP100 are wrestling with ways of building a movement against the criminalization of immigrant and Black working-class communities through the notion of “expanded sanctuary.” This work highlights the violent, coercive, and carceral solutions for a wide range of social and economic issues impacting poor communities of color in the United States—citizens, legal immigrants, and the undocumented. As Marisa Franco of Mijente points out, “There is no time for our ideas of sanctuaries to be exclusive. Sanctuaries must include not only undocumented people, but also non-immigrant Muslims, LGBTQIA people, Black and Indigenous folks and political dissidents.”24 In Chicago, the Expanded Sanctuary campaign has called for an end to the discriminatory “gang database,” as well as to immigration raids and deportations. The Expanded Sanctuary campaign experienced a small but significant victory in January 2018. After waging a campaign against his unfair incarceration by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Organized Communities against Deportations and its allies won the release of Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez, a young undocumented father, who had been unfairly detained because he was incorrectly listed in the city’s gang database.
Another group that has been a catalyst for building bridges between different organizing hubs is the Let Us Breathe Collective in Chicago, founded after brother and sister artists Kristiana Rae Colón and Damon Williams visited Ferguson during the uprising. They returned to Chicago; helped with a film about the Lost Voices group, which they befriended while they were in Ferguson; and then began to build the Let Us Breathe social justice arts collective, centered around Black and Latinx artist-activists. Damon had also been involved with BYP100.
The Let Us Breathe Collective’s biggest action was a forty-one-day encampment called Freedom Square that took place in summer 2016. The encampment, in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, was pitched on a vacant lot right across from the notorious Homan Square, a Chicago Police Department “black site” that was exposed by the Guardian newspaper as a place where African American arrestees were taken and were reportedly roughed up and sometimes tortured without any official record and without ever being charged. Freedom Square also became a space for experimenting with collective decision making, self-governance, dispute resolution, building a sharing economy, and incorporating art into protest. Dozens of activists and artists camped out in tents and built a makeshift kitchen, library, and free store. Many hard lessons were learned there too. For example, many of the complicated and intractable problems faced by poor Black communities in Chicago landed in that dusty little square—interpersonal violence, substance abuse, and other traumas that the committed core of artists simply did not have the capacity to fully meet. Freedom Square was still an inspiration to many. The encampment raised visibility of the nefarious practices of the police and provided a gathering space for Chicago activists to converge, to talk, to collaborate, and to serve the community by volunteering in a number of capacities. When the open-air encampment ended, Damon, Kristiana, and Let Us Breathe members Jennifer Pagan, Bella Bhah, Cherisse Jackson, and others helped to found the Breathing Room, an indoor social justice art space that welcomes and partners with an array of the city’s radical and progressive groups to host events and meetings and provide limited services and support. For a time, the Breathing Room was also home to BLM-CHI; Ujimma Medics, a group that trains community members to treat gunshot victims; and Brave Space Alliance, a group of transgender activists led by LaSaia Wade, a dynamic indigenous Afro–Puerto Rican trans woman.
Between 2012 and 2017, Chicago witnessed a steady growth in collaboration between different progressive organizations that are intergenerational and transcend racial and ethnic neighborhoods and boundaries. Campaigns, in addition to the campaigns already cited, included the 2012 Chicago Teachers’ Union strike, which garnered widespread community support; the Fight for 15 Chicago campaigns; and the Dyett High School hunger strike to defend public neighborhood schools, led by education activist Jitu Brown, members of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, and Teachers for Social Justice.
Finally, there is the “Resist. Reimagine. Rebuild.” coalition, which I work closely with. Formed after the 2016 November presidential election and involving over thirty grassroots and labor organizations, it is affiliated with M4BL’s newly formed people of color–led multiracial coalition The Majority, which promises to “build an anti-racist Left for radical democracy.” “Resist. Reimagine. Rebuild.” led a major, primarily people of color contingent in the city’s 2017 May Day march and has organized numerous teach-ins and community forums. The 2019 mayoral race will certainly be another pivotal moment for Chicago’s new and old coalitions. BLMM/M4BL organizers continue to be at the center of the work.