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Becoming an activist got Dorothy Burge kicked out of school. In 1968, three years into desegregation at the predominantly white Lindblom Technical High School in West Englewood, school officials rejected a request by the Black student population to honor Malcolm X. The students walked out in protest, and the school suspended them. When Burge’s brother, a Vietnam veteran, came to pick her up, he walked straight into the counselor’s office and said: “You’re going to tell me that I got to fight for other people’s rights, and you don’t respect the rights of my sister?”
Now 71, Burge ultimately graduated from Lindblom, then earned degrees in industrial design and urban planning from the University of Illinois Chicago. But it wasn’t until 2012 that she began to translate her decades-long community activism into art. In response to Trayvon Martin’s killing, she quilted her first portrait, depicting her infant nephew wearing a hoodie, his eyes wide, his fist full of Skittles. She titled it Trayvon Could Be My Son. In 2023, the Smithsonian acquired it.
Her latest series, Freedom Fighters, begins a yearlong run at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the Veteran Art Triennial. Through six portraits of Black service members, Burge considers what it means for them to defend the liberties of their fellow Americans when their own were being compromised. Included in the collection are Harriet Tubman, posthumously made a brigadier general for freeing more than 700 enslaved people, and Joseph McNeil, who, before becoming an Air Force major general, helped lead the Greensboro sit-ins of 1960. “Not only were they fighting for the freedom of the United States,” Burge explains, “they were also fighting for the freedom of African Americans.”
For Burge, a fourth-generation quilter, her art addresses what she sees as the erasure of Black history — a concern that became personal in 2025 when Vice President JD Vance ordered the Smithsonian to take down her work. That only strengthened her resolve: Using a medium with deep roots in Black culture, Burge preserves both history and heritage.
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Freedom Fighters opens October 2 at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Kelley Engelbrecht is a freelance writer for Chicago magazine.
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