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#FIGHTFORDYETT

Fighting Back Against School Closings and the Journey for Justice

– Jitu Brown –
Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Chicago, Illinois, and the Journey for Justice Alliance

Jitu Brown discusses the mass closings of public schools in Chicago and other cities as a racist assault on black and brown communities. He tells the story of one community’s refusal to accept the closing of their school, Walter Dyett High School, on the south side of Chicago. Committed parents led a hunger strike for thirty-four days, winning widespread support across the country, and ultimately saved the school. Jitu talks about how the local Fight for Dyett was “nationalized” as it galvanized the nascent Journey for Justice network into a nationwide alliance dedicated to militant opposition to the privatization of public education. He shows how multiracial coalitions rooted in the leadership of black and brown communities can build a powerful educational justice movement.

I WAS BORN AND RAISED on the South Side of Chicago. As a young adult, I lived in an apartment complex in the Bronzeville community, a historic center of African American culture. Bronzeville gave the world Mahalia Jackson, Richard Wright, Ida B. Wells, Harold Washington, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Redd Foxx, and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, to name a few.

But there was a lot of poverty and violence in my neighborhood too. As a young adult, I wanted to help the community, but I had become a rap artist and my music career began to take off. I was signed to Polygram Records and went on tour. When I came home, I had a promotional appearance at the William Shakespeare School, around the corner from my house. In talking to the students there about why positive hip-hop is important, one young man slouched in his chair and said, “You cool, man, but you not coming back.” He was telling me that talk is cheap; we don’t have anybody who is going to commit to stay and build with us. That really hit me. There was truth in what he was saying.

Soon after this, I met a community organizer. I told him the music industry felt like one big plantation and I was the product. He took me to the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), where I began volunteering in their youth programs. There came a moment when I could have either signed a solo deal with MCA Records or become an organizer. I chose the latter, and it was the best decision of my life.

Organizing was like a breath of fresh air. I saw people organizing to demand better housing, fight hunger, improve schools, and address issues facing youth and seniors. As I ran programs for KOCO, I learned how to organize through building deep relationships with people and meeting their basic needs. KOCO felt like home to me.

I began to see the lack of care and concern that the system has for black children. In my first education campaign, we tried to get the windows cleaned at the Albert Einstein School, which served children living in the Ida B. Wells housing project. The windows were so filthy that the school was dark. We had to fight for two whole years just to get clean windows for those children.

I became a local school council (LSC) member and began to work with other members on what they wanted to improve in their schools. We developed the LSC Institute, in which we trained a cadre of parents to become LSC facilitators. We won resources to take young people on college trips and arranged for parent meeting rooms at some of the schools in our neighborhood. We were beginning to make change, but we ran up against the city’s plans for gentrification.

EDUCATION SABOTAGE

Bronzeville is ten minutes from downtown Chicago and right off the lakefront. It became a prime destination for gentrification. The district began to close schools in the Bronzeville community in the late 1990s. The closing of schools in Chicago coincided with the closing of many of the large public housing projects. As neighborhoods gentrified, the city eliminated traditional schools and opened alternatives that were attractive to the new gentrifiers.

In 2003 we obtained a copy of the Mid-South Plan, which called for the closure of twenty of the twenty-two schools in our neighborhood; they were going to be turned into contract schools, charter schools, or what they called “performance schools.” We leaked this information to the Chicago Tribune and went to war with the district over the plan to shut down our schools.

We worked with SEIU (Service Employees International Union) Local 1, the Chicago Teachers Union, and Illinois ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), and together we stopped the Mid-South Plan. About nine months later, they came back with the citywide Renaissance 2010 plan calling for more school closings. We were shocked because there was so little regard for the voices of the parents in these schools who had just fought to stop their closing. There was no acknowledgment of the failure of the system to educate our children. Instead, the blame for so-called failing schools was placed on the children, the teachers, the parents, and community residents. We said, “No, our schools are not failing; we’ve been failed.” Then we mobilized people to pressure elected officials to oppose the city’s plan.

We lost on the first round of fighting Renaissance 2010. We ended up losing Doolittle West, which is now Urban Prep Charter School, and a number of other schools. Right away we began to see the impact of school closings up close. Suddenly we had 250 children from the closed school dumped into another school without so much as an additional special education teacher and no after-school resources. Teachers are used to having a few new students join their classroom each year; what do they do when over two dozen join? It’s chaos.

We said, “This is not school reform; this is education sabotage. You’re putting our children in conditions that you would not put your own children.”

THE FIGHT FOR DYETT

I joined the local school council at Walter Dyett High School in 2003. There were no honors or Advanced Placement classes in the curriculum at the time. There were seven books in the library. We went to work at Dyett to introduce honors and AP classes and to create curriculum alignment between Dyett’s feeder elementary schools and the high school. We brought in a dynamic young principal.

In 2006, Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan closed Englewood High School and dumped about 125 of those children into Dyett with no resources. The school exploded. Fights broke out as young people from different gang neighborhoods were thrown together. It was a traumatic year, but we had to roll up our sleeves and figure it out. We believed in youth leadership, so we brought in Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, a youth organizing group that trained young people in how to organize their peers to improve their schools and communities. We did intense professional development, brought in mentorship programs, and implemented restorative justice.

We transformed an explosive school climate into a great school climate. Using student-led restorative justice and other innovative partnerships, Dyett doubled its graduation rate and increased its college-going rate by 41 percent in two years while decreasing discipline code violations by 85 percent.¹ In 2011 Dyett won the ESPN Rise Up Award, which came with a $4 million grant to upgrade our athletic facilities. We built a brand-new weight room and redid the gym floor. We had a state-of-the-art facility. Meanwhile, we had been working with parents at Dyett’s feeder schools to articulate a vision for a pre-K through 12 system of education in our neighborhood, offering high-quality education from elementary to secondary school. Parents and young people were excited for the future.

The next year, in February 2012, the board of education voted to close Dyett High School. They decided to gradually phase out the school, which meant existing Dyett students started to lose their programs. It got to the point where students had to take art and physical education as online classes. For us, that was just deplorable.

One day two students, Diamond McCullough and Kesaundra Neal, came into my office and demanded to know what we were doing about the state of their school. They wanted to help, so they called a meeting and students came out in droves, packing the hall. That’s how the Fight for Dyett began.

First we tried a federal civil rights complaint. Thirty-four Dyett students filed a Title VI complaint in 2013, arguing that since school closings were concentrated in black communities, the policy was racially discriminatory. After several years of pressure from the complaint and our ongoing organizing, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he would reopen Dyett as a charter school. But that wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted an open-enrollment neighborhood school for all students.

We wrote a proposal to establish the Walter Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School as the hub of a sustainable community schools village. Six feeder schools signed on. We developed this plan in the spirit of Ella Baker. It was an intentional grassroots democracy with all voices, including students, at the table. We enlisted national education experts to back our proposal. Despite our efforts, the district kept delaying the date for a decision about the fate of the school.

We escalated our organizing and raised the stakes. We chained ourselves to a statue outside of the mayor’s office. We led 750 people in a march to his house. Dyett became a major news story in the city, but that still wasn’t enough.

We decided to subject the mayor to national embarrassment. Twelve people, including myself, launched a hunger strike on August 17, 2015. That was the birthday of Marcus Garvey, one of the great leaders in black history. Garvey once said, “Look for me in the whirlwind, look for me in the storm. Look for me all around you, for my spirit will bring freedom to form.” There was a torrential rainstorm the day we launched the hunger strike. The wind was so strong that it uprooted the tents and we had to chase them as they went flying down the street. Spiritually, that meant a lot to me: the ancestors supported our effort.

The Dyett campaign clearly showed that there are two Chicagos. When white parents on the north side express dissatisfaction, they have a meeting or two and their issue is addressed. When black parents on the South Side speak loud and clear, we’re ignored or demonized.

On the twenty-fifth day of our hunger strike, Mayor Emanuel held a ribbon-cutting ceremony at predominantly white Lincoln Elementary School, near DePaul University on the north side. He gave them a $21 million annex while we starved in Washington Park. That told me all I needed to know.

The hunger strike raised a simple question for thousands of black people in this city: why can’t our community have a say in what kind of school we want for our children?

One of the hard lessons that I learned from the hunger strike is that black people are not valued. This is not just about education. This is about a belief system that hates black people. This belief system infects every institution we deal with. It infects policing. It denies us educational opportunity on purpose. It’s the same belief system that victimizes immigrant families. It’s Donald Trump’s belief system when he was a high-level slumlord who wouldn’t rent apartments to black people.

This belief system has never been confronted within the white community and within America in general. The evil of sabotaging a child’s education never comes up.

BREAKING THE MEDIA WHITEOUT

The Chicago media barely covered the first five or six days of the hunger strike. So we tapped our national networks for support: the Journey for Justice Alliance, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the Advancement Project. We flew in AFT president Randi Weingarten and featured high-profile elected officials like Chuy García in a press conference on the grounds of Dyett. That broke the media “whiteout,” and our strike was everywhere.

We landed on the front page of the New York Times and had several articles about us in the Washington Post. Newspapers from Istanbul to Johannesburg ran stories about the hunger strike. #FightForDyett and other supportive hashtags trended strongly for four days with nearly one hundred thousand tweets during the month.² People from all over the world fasted with us. They would make a video or take a picture of themselves with a sign that said #FightForDyett; their video messages often went viral. It was impossible to minimize our effort as the pressure mounted locally, nationally, and internationally.

Finally the district offered to keep Dyett open as an arts academy. So after thirty-four days, we decided to end the hunger strike. We didn’t win all that we wanted, but we succeeded in having Dyett reopen as a neighborhood school rather than a charter school. Although they made Dyett an art school instead of a school of global leadership and green technology, school officials assured us that they would implement a substantial portion of our curriculum. We believed that we had won and could work with the new plan to shape it the way we wanted.

Today Dyett is open and serving neighborhood children. There has been $16 million in new investments. Nearly all freshmen are on track to graduate. There’s a great environment in the school. Dyett is going to be a sustainable community school. We have our curriculum team doing professional development for the Dyett teachers so that next year we can add sustainability to the curriculum.

The hunger strike was powerful because it resonated with people all over the world who feel disenfranchised and disrespected as human beings. The sacrifice of people going on a hunger strike touched people’s hearts. When people heard that folks in a low-income black community wanted a school focused on global leadership and green technology, they were inspired. People identify Rahm Emanuel as part of the 1 percent, so this became the People Versus the 1 Percent. Black and brown folks understand that privatization feeds the 1 percent and is spreading like a plague everywhere in the world, from Chicago to Chile, and now other folks are starting to recognize this reactionary trend as well.

JOURNEY FOR JUSTICE

The Journey for Justice Alliance (J4J) played a critical role in nationalizing the Dyett hunger strike, by which I mean it helped bring national attention to a local fight in a way that catalyzes broader movements.

J4J operates in the spirit of Ella Baker and Septima Clark: we trust and believe in the brilliance of human beings, regardless of whether they’re a PhD or a no D. How do you deal with a city that is racially toxic, where your life can be snuffed out at any moment? How do you keep your spirits up? For answers, I look no further than Mrs. Irene Robinson, a spirited grandmother of seventeen who we could not keep off the hunger strike. I have learned so much from her strength and core beliefs.

The idea for J4J came when I got a call from Zakiyah Ansari, a community organizer from the Alliance for Quality Education in New York City. She talked about how she felt alone, and I replied that I felt the same. We reached out to other like-minded people, such as the folks in the Baltimore Algebra Project, Youth United for Change, the Philadelphia Student Union, and the Alliance for Educational Justice. We asked, “What can we do about the privatization of public education?”

We decided to take a journey to Washington, DC. We marched on the US Department of Labor, because young people were concerned about summer jobs, and marched to the Department of Education to protest school privatization. We ended up mobilizing about two thousand people. It was powerful. Riding the high after that experience, we organized a community hearing at the Department of Education to pressure Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to support sustainable community schools. We eventually won some funds for those schools in the school improvement grants, and that was the beginning of J4J.

Alone in our local groups, we can’t beat the highly organized infrastructure behind school privatization. That’s like throwing rocks at tanks. We have to organize strong membership-based grassroots community organizations and link them together to win education equity in our time. Stopping school closings became a necessary part of our work, but our main priority is advancing community voices in public education.

J4J has developed an education platform with seven pillars: (1) a moratorium on school privatization, (2) the building of ten thousand sustainable community schools across the country, (3) an end to zero-tolerance discipline policies, (4) a halt to the attack on black teachers, (5) an end to privatization schemes that take away our democratic voice, (6) a stop to the over-testing of our youth, and (7) the use of multiple assessments to gauge our students’ progress.

THE CANCER OF RACISM ON THE LEFT

The Left must deal with a cancer that exists within it: the deep seed of racism. There’s an arrogance that says, “Racism doesn’t apply to me; I’m progressive.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

When I spoke to a group of organizers in Buffalo, they pushed back on what I was saying about racism. I asked, “How many of my white brothers and sisters grew up with decent schools in your community?” Most of them raised their hands. I continued, “How many of you had to get arrested or do sit-ins to get them?” They just stared blankly at me. “That’s what the Left doesn’t see,” I told them.

The basic quality-of-life institutions that white Americans take for granted, such as schools and health clinics, are intentionally denied in black communities. You build a community by investing in those institutions; you destroy a community by denying those institutions. That is a reality of life for black people in cities all over this country. A trust has been betrayed. We want to be a part of the American Dream, but the hatred for us has never been reconciled.

The white Left is progressive until it comes to black and brown self-determination—that is, black and brown communities deciding for themselves what they need. Instead, too often in multiracial coalitions, black and brown people have to shrink in order to be accepted. We have to go along with the dominant majority and dilute our demands. As a result, we get reforms that are like a Band-Aid on a bullet wound; we don’t get transformative change.

At J4J we organize black and brown families who are up in arms. We say, “If you want to work in brother- and sisterhood, don’t ask me to shrink anymore. My child’s life is just as important as yours. My children are just as beautiful, just as brilliant. I have the right to a clean place to live, just like you do. I have the right to have a grocery store and to own the businesses in my community, like you do.”

The Fight for Dyett was a blueprint for building multiracial coalitions rooted in self-determination. The hunger strike was a militant, multiracial effort led by black people, who are the most impacted, and it was supported by a diverse coalition. We showed that unity rooted in self-determination builds a powerful movement that can win not only for black people but for everyone who is impacted by injustice.

We sometimes organize as if we’re just trying to fight the good fight. Well, I ain’t trying to fight the good fight. I’m trying to win.