Search Results

The final chapter documents the wide range of Black-led activist efforts to reform the police at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. The launching point is the assassination of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, in a 1969 killing orchestrated by the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County State’s Attorney, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the aftermath of his killing, a wave of community organizations mobilized or expanded their protests about Chicago’s police. This included groups like the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, comprised of Black CPD officers seeking to end police brutality and ensure better police services for Black Chicago. It included U.S. Congressman Ralph Metcalfe using the power of his office to expose police violence and harassment, and the fight for community control of the police led by the Black Panthers. Some activists who advocated for police reform sought more responsive police services to better community safety from escalating gun violence; others, such as those involved in the push for community control, pursued visions of semi-abolition of the police as currently constituted. Binding them together was a common understanding that the CPD was not working for Black Chicago.

This chapter illustrates how Fr. George Clements creatively combined Black Power with the methods of early-twentieth-century missionaries with great success in his pastorate at Holy Angels parish. It examines the relationships Clements forged with other Black Power organizations and explores the life of Holy Angels Catholic school. It expands the scope of the story from the previous chapter and discusses the establishment of national Black Catholic institutions and organizations. Ultimately, it argues that, faced with opposition from fellow Black Catholics who resisted the influence of Black Power, activists became missionaries of a sort as they worked to convert their coreligionists to a particular understanding of what it meant to be Black and Catholic. They brought to life a distinctively Black Catholicism in the process. It devotes attention to what activists meant by “authentic Blackness” and whether it was compatible with Catholic religious practice.

This chapter examines the importance of black and Latino coalitions in the political campaigns of Chicago mayor Harold Washington in 1983 and Jesse Jackson in 1984. Starting with the Progressive anti-machine coalitions in Chicago in the 1970s, voter-registration drives led to the movement to unseat Mayor Jane Byrne and elect Harold Washington as mayor in 1983. Jessie Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign employed the same political strategy used to defeat the Chicago Democratic machine: a long and sustained voter-registration drive, which created a multiethnic Rainbow Coalition and established a Progressive stump speech that addressed issues facing working-class Americans and immigrants from Latin America. In the process, blacks and Latino activists who supported Jackson in New York and other parts of the country developed Progressive political organizations like the Rainbow Coalition, which registered and mobilized voters.

In 1968, José “Cha Cha” Jiménez sat in solitary confinement wrestling with his record of recidivism. He was the leader of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican and Mexican gang, which he’d joined to survive Chicago’s mean streets. But his life was about to change. Like other Puerto Rican, Mexican and black American youth, Cha Cha’s people were recent migrants to the city who’d been displaced by urban renewal— structural racism in the form federal housing policy —which forced them to settle in densely populated blocks on the edges of white ethnic neighborhoods. Outnumber, they faced hostility, reaction, and even terror from white resident who resented their presence in Chicago. But with the new confidence produced by the civil rights movement, street organizations like the Young Lords desegregated public spaces with brawn and asserted the rights of racialized people to the city. The social movements also opened up possibilities for self-transformation. Like Malcolm X, Cha Cha was politicized in prison. He transformed the gang into the Black Panthers’ Puerto Rican counterpart—a herculean feat made possible by a series of unforeseen circumstances and conscious interventions, including that of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and his Rainbow Coalition.

Issues of race dominated the semester as black anger was on prominent display and white activists scrambled to provide support. Chicago Black Panthers visited the campus to speak, but a misunderstanding regarding a stipend caused white angst. The Vietnam War was not forgotten, as star footballer Mickey Hogan quit the sport and joined the activists, and the issue of violence became central to the student movement. The BSA made accusations of institutional racism against the university and white activists debated how to back them. With no appetite for sit-ins at this point, a march on the president’s house made do.

SDS split in two: the SDS/RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement)--led by Jeff Jones, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd, soon to become Weathermen—and the SDS/PL (Progressive Labor), led by old-school Marxists. The Weathermen visited campus, recruiting for a revolutionary action in Chicago, a failed effort—few Illini followed their lead—and the local SDS withdrew from the national organization, as antiwar feelings were now mainstream on campus but violent revolution was not. The Radical Union (RU) formed, supporting a national march on Washington; the FBI arrested three on campus for harboring a deserter; Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre.