Overview
The epic story of Chicago’s dynamic sixties-era freedom struggle, restoring the city, and the entire North, to their rightful place in civil rights history
On May 25, 1966, eleven years after the murder of Emmett Till, Jerome Huey, a seventeen-year-old coming back from a job interview, was attacked and killed by four young white men. For Chicago's Black community, Huey's lynching was a galvanizing event. White racial violence in the North had long been "minimized, denied," as Martin Luther King Jr. put it. There was no national attention to Huey's lynching—and no national memory of it.
In People Get Ready, historians Jeanne Theoharis and Erik Wallenberg offer an eye-opening account of Chicago’s relentless segregation—and the courageous direct-action movements that fought back against it. In one of the most robust Black freedom struggles in the country, activists fought to desegregate sundown neighborhoods, beaches, and public schools with rent strikes, school boycotts, and a broad rainbow coalition. Their tactics were creative: mothers lay down in front of bulldozers and cop cars to halt construction of apartheid schools, and the Blackstone Rangers street gang members performed an original musical to support the movement.
People Get Ready overturns the southernized narrative of the civil rights movement and highlights critical lessons for how we might carry on the struggle for racial justice today.
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