Black Politics and Educational Organizing in Post-Civil Rights Chicago

This paper is part of a larger project investigating Black political organizing in Chicago around inequities in public education between 1968 and 1995. During the 1970s, groups of Black Chicagoans organized locally around issues of integration, Black independent educational institution building, and community control, respectively. In the 1980s and 1990s groups adhering to these distinctive ideological and programmatic approaches formed unlikely coalitions in attempts to improve education for Black students. This paper explores how groups with distinct programmatic and ideological perspectives in the 1970s—including groups like the Chicago Urban League, the Institute of Positive Education, and reformers within Chicago Public Schools—coalesced around, or staked claim to, Harold Washington, his political structure, and the Chicago School Reform Movement in the 1980s. This social history utilizes archival research and oral histories to analyze the ways that African Americans mobilized politically to address the unequal education of Black children in Chicago's public schools. By analyzing the ways that African Americans in Chicago organized around education within their communities, we gain a better understanding of Black civic life and the range of political possibilities in urban America during in the Post-Civil Rights era.