According to activists in Washington, President Donald Trump’s efforts to militarize Chicago will produce unconstitutional and illegal checkpoints and stop-and-frisk policing, along with increased surveillance on Black and brown communities designed to deliver mass deportations and televised arrests for petty crime.
It is not a coincidence that Trump is focusing on cities run by Black mayors — D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York — leading New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie to call him a “deranged racist.” These efforts to target Black and Latino neighborhoods hark back to a dark era of unconstitutional policing that we have only begun to emerge from. Trump and even a number of aldermen in the Chicago City Council want to take us back there.
Recently, Mayor Brandon Johnson delivered the tie-breaking vote to deny the Chicago Police Department the power to call snap curfews in order to apprehend Black youths gathering in the Loop. Our city has a sordid past of torturing Black men into false confessions, racially disparate traffic stops and zero tolerance policies in schools that disproportionately criminalized and targeted Black youth. It was a reminder that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.”
Historian Steven Hahn’s book “Illiberal America” argues that the path to a white supremacist Trump regime was paved in the nation’s long history of settler colonialism, nationalism, xenophobia, right-wing populism and anti-Blackness. Chicago figures prominently in the story.
More Top Picks Best Blue Light Glasses For Office Workers
After the Great Black Migration in the 1920s, our city was one of the centers of the Ku Klux Klan’s revival as the strongest populist movement of the decade, claiming 5 million adherents, with 50,000 in Chicago alone. Similarly, Hahn highlights the struggle for racial justice during the Civil Rights Movement. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. worked with local activists in the Chicago Freedom Movement to launch an open housing campaign in 1966 and remarked that he had “never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hateful as I’ve seen here in Chicago.”
The City of Big Shoulders has erected and endured a legacy of racial violence and segregation that would make any good liberal shudder in embarrassment.
And the policies were supported by successive Democratic Party administrations. MAGA’s brand of right-wing populism can be discerned in the aftermath of the 1968 riots that erupted in response to King’s assassination. During that conflagration, Mayor Richard J. Daley famously gave the order “shoot to kill” anyone looting or committing arson — a chilling directive of violence against a community reeling from the loss of a once-in-a-generation transformational leader.
Months later, during the Democratic National Convention, the nation witnessed a “police riot” on live television with the Chicago Police Department beating and maiming press and Vietnam War protesters. As Daley attempted to silence dissent and scrutiny over his gestapo tactics within the convention hall, party leaders refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s delegates who were challenging the state’s all-white delegation.
It was no accident that during the same period, then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who ran competitive presidential campaigns on a segregationist platform, became an avatar for white resistance to the use of busing for school integration that rocked the urban North and produced electoral majorities in favor of “local control” opposed to federal civil rights efforts.
These populist revolts, rooted in white supremacy, fueled the shift in federal policy away from a war on poverty to funding law-and-order legislation that militarized police forces and set the stage for the exponential growth in the U.S. prison population.
It was not a coincidence that this was the same period when police Cmdr. Jon Burge ran amok. His police district was emboldened by Daley and the national turn to law and order. This led to over 100 false confessions by Black men because of police torture over a nearly 20-year period. These atrocities occurred alongside the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing that gave the U.S. the greatest number of prisoners in the world.
It is a shameful era that still haunts Chicago, and taxpayers have paid dearly — hundreds of millions in police misconduct settlements since 2019. A recent study by the Truth Hope and Justice Initiative calls the city “the wrongful conviction capitol of America” and shows that the city has spent three-quarters of a billion dollars litigating these egregious cases of police abuse.
Ultimately, none of the steps the city has taken so far will address the tremendous trauma and harm visited on countless Black and brown families that have been subjected to racially disparate treatment by the police. Only a vision that goes beyond the status quo and moves closer to Johnson’s commitment to “invest in people” could come close to repairing the historic wrongs that persist today.
With a benevolent billionaire in the governor’s office, a Democratic supermajority in the statehouse and a willing partner in City Hall, there has never been a better opportunity to right the past wrongs of racial discrimination. We can do that by rejecting Trump’s assault on our better angels and resist the efforts to revive the racist policing of the past. More Top Picks Best Self Propelled Lawn Mowers Jackson Potter is vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].