People Get Ready (A History of the Chicago Freedom Struggle)

A history of the dynamic post-WWII freedom movement in Chicago that returns the city—and by extension the North—to its rightful place in the civil rights story

From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, Chicago was home to one of the largest, most robust Black freedom movements in the country. Battling segregated beaches and schools, overcrowded slum housing, police brutality, and the lynching of teenager Jerome Huey, their work was cut out for them. Martin Luther King called Chicago “as segregated as Birmingham” and urged the civil rights struggle primarily based in the South to join forces with this years-long movement.

The Chicago freedom struggle undertook creative and audacious actions, challenging the entrenched racism of policymakers and the media in the North, and built an early rainbow coalition. This original people’s history holds critical lessons for how we might carry on the struggle for solidarity and racial justice today.