Last Saturday found Virginia Miller, operations manager of the Midwest Workers Association (MWA), standing outside the door of a low-rise housing complex in Bronzeville accompanied by two college undergraduate members-in-training. A young woman, still in pajamas, comes to the door. After introducing herself and the two undergraduates, Miller begins to talk about the MWA:

“We’re an organizing drive of working people, people who are out of work, people on fixed incomes, joining together to gain the strength to determine our future. More and more of us are working twice as hard for half as much and more of us can’t get access to the things we need, like medical care. We know that there is strength in numbers, and we know that it takes organization to change our conditions.” Miller hands the young woman a pamphlet.

The concerns that Miller voices are just some of the many problems the Midwest Workers Association, an independent, member-based workers’ advocacy organization run out of Chicago’s South Side, was created to address. Read the rest of this entry »

The South Side is getting ambitious. A Kenwood resident sits in the Oval Office, a South Shore native daughter by his side. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was born and raised in Hyde Park, and Chief Advisor David Axelrod traces roots back to the University of Chicago. But even after the mass exodus of Chicago political power towards the Obama White House, there’s at least one South Sider still standing who is pursuing higher office without fleeing city limits.

One of Hyde Park’s own, 4th Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle first came to the neighborhood to pursue not election but education. A graduate of the University of Chicago’s College and master’s program, she hasn’t left the area since. Read the rest of this entry »

University of Chicago alum and progressive activist Heather Booth has taken on what she calls a “David and Goliath” fight for financial reform. She recently became executive director of Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a coalition of national and state organizations that have united to improve the regulations of the financial sector. Financial reform will be the next item in a long list of issues she has tackled during her career. Though she has relatively little background in the area, she agreed to take on the job because, she says. “Here we’re facing a crisis, and we need to do something about it.” Despite often being initially uncertain or intimidated, she has been plunging into crises of similar magnitude since her time at the University of Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Maoist writer Raymond Lotta’s lecture at the University of Chicago last Tuesday promised to hold potential for two possible kinds of entertainment: enjoyment of a genuinely thoughtful discussion on the merits of a Communist revolution in America, and a more malicious pleasure taken from watching the reaction of the libertarian members of the audience. But the talk failed on both counts. Read the rest of this entry »

At 4pm on Thursday, September 24, I was arrested and charged with a “failure to exercise due care.” I was not alone, and this wasn’t some prank gone awry. Over two hundred people took over a large section of Chicago Avenue in front of the Park Hyatt hotel, with some seven hundred more standing witness on the sidewalk. Since August 31, around six thousand hospitality employees have been working without a contract. Even in these tough economic times, they gathered with their union UNITE HERE Local 1 and many community allies to make a statement: We’re here, and we’re not afraid (as signs pinned to our back said quite explicitly). Read the rest of this entry »

Of all Chicago’s neighborhoods, Bronzeville boasts some of the most hotly contested real estate in the city. Developers of the South Loop’s upscale condos threaten to build their way down State Street, gentrifying Bronzeville from the north. The University of Chicago campus extends in an ever-encompassing radius from the south. And now, with the possibility of a 2016 Olympics promising extensive redevelopment in the neighborhood, territory wars are set to escalate. Read the rest of this entry »

In his essay on civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau wrote of the government to which he refused to pay taxes, “I saw that the State was half-witted…and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.” Thoreau—followed by generations of non-violent protestors—argued that an essential part of civil disobedience was following one’s own ideals while accepting often hypocritical dictums imposed by the ruling order. The theory is that all punishment shows the problem with the system itself—which is why we cannot be quite sure of what we are watching when we see a video of students who claim to operate by “democratic consensus” milling around a cafeteria full of security guards, shouting vague phrases at one another, and refusing to hand over their identification in favor of reaching a communal decision about whether or not they are about to be arrested and disciplined (they are). Such actions make us question exactly what a protest is and what it can achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

In the library of Ida Noyes Hall, in front of an ornate fireplace and wood- paneled walls, underneath the carved ceilings and hanging chandeliers, Bill Ayers sat behind a table and spoke to an attentive crowd of fifty or so student activists: “The world is too fucked up to look at all at once. You can’t. If you do, you’ll kill yourself.” The educational theorist and former member of the militant revolutionary organization the Weather Underground spoke honestly about the life of social justice activism. Read the rest of this entry »