reclaim our minds: grassroots education

Site #8 description…

 The site marked on the google map above (900 W. Wilson Ave) is the location of Uplift Community High School, founded by long-time activists in Uptown with the aim of empowering young Uptowners from poor communities, and centering their needs.

Education as Liberation

For Uptown’s radical organizers, the issue was not just poor students’ access to an existing educational system; it was reforming the system itself. They saw mainstream public education as a means through which poor people were taught to see injustice and racism as normal, and have fought, through various movements, to reform education as a site where youth from marginalized backgrounds could gain the political awareness to advocate for change.

The Intercommunal Survival Committee, in the 1970s, set up the Uptown Community Learning Center. The ISC had been offering mentoring programs for non-traditional and working class students.

The ISC was also involved in various Chicago-wide movements to push against under-resourced and badly run public schools in poorer neighborhoods.

Education Beyond the Classroom

Even as employment is considered crucial, extracurricular activities tend to be considered as non-essential and reserved for the wealthy. Rita Simó’s People’s Music School in Uptown, founded in 1976 and active to this day, is a resounding refusal of this bias. A Dominican and a lapsed nun who migrated to the US to attend the prestigious Juilliard School, Rita Simó began her free music school for Uptown’s children in a small space that used to be a beauty parlor. True to Simó’s ideals (who passed away in 2020), the People’s Music School continues to offer high quality - and free - training in music. The school’s farewell message to her reads, “Rita, we imagine you have already run into your BFFs Bach, Beethoven and Brahms where you are. Give 'em all a dose of People's power.  We'll take care of things here, following in your revolutionary, relentless way.”

Organizations serving ethnic minority groups, such as the Chinese Mutual Aid Association, Kuumba Lynx, and the American Indian Center also played a major role in offering after-school programs for Uptown’s young people.

The Revolution Survives

Many of the young people who became youth activists under the ISC’s educational programs became teachers themselves, and stayed on in the community. In 2004, when a major rehaul of public education was proposed by Daley’s government, the Arai Middle School was among the schools that were slated to be replaced. John Yolich and Chor Ng, two Arai teachers who had been youth organizers in Uptown, joined hands with another teacher and long-time organizer, Karen Zaccor, to frame and pitch their own proposal for a community and student-centric school driven by ISC’s principles. After a contentious process that pitched them against more politically connected bidders, UPLIFT, backed by the community organizer and then-Alderwoman Helen Schiller, opened up in the Arai School building. Lessons and after-school recreational programs center low-income and students of color needs and experiences, imparting the political awareness necessary to resist the devaluation of their rights. The school continues its long and difficult efforts to retain enrollment amidst continued antagonism from the Chicago Public School system and those who oppose its social justice-oriented, pro-working class, antiracist values in a rapidly gentrifying Uptown.

The Chicago Grassroots Curriculum Taskforce similarly involved the efforts of Uptown’s youth educators who grew up to be public school teachers.

It brought together educators across Chicago to develop teaching toolkits and textbooks through which public schools in Chicago could practice locally grounded concerns that centered inner-city communities through antiracist, multicultural, and social justice-oriented approaches.

The Attack on Public Education

For every community movement like UPLIFT and CGCT that succeeded, there are many that didn’t. The public Stewart School was over a century old when it closed in 2013. It opened up as the Graeme Stewart Elementary school in 1905, when Chicago was a booming industrial hub. For decades, it struggled to manage massive growths in enrollment.

This remained the case even in the post-Depression era of general decline, when Uptown saw the immigration of large Appalachian families and other low-income groups.

But by the 1970s, Chicago was seeing the effects of multiple waves of deindustrialization, which continues even today. As Chicago’s population declined with out-migration, the Stewart School became one of the many public schools that were marked as being unsustainable and “under-utilized.” In 2013, the Chicago Public School Board decided to shut down 49 public schools, one of the biggest school shutdowns in the US’ recent history. Three of these public schools were in Uptown. Parents, teachers, and community organizations in Uptown rallied as part of a broader protest against public schools being shut down in order to make way for businesses and services catering to elites. For developers, Stewart School was clearly prime real estate. The protestors knew that the building would be bought by for-profit ventures such as charter schools or luxury condos, uprooting the education and employment of poorer families, already struggling against multiple displacement efforts.

Their fears would come true. Around 2016, the school building was designated a Chicago Landmark. This branding offered legal protection to the architectural features of the building, but ironically, not its status as an institution of public education. Landmark designations are in fact known to speed up the sale of old buildings to private developers in the name of preservation. Consequently, when it opened up as a luxury condo in 2017, the Stewart School Lofts retained features such as chalkboards in its apartments. While the renovation was hailed as a model of architectural preservation, these remnants of an age-old public school in a luxury condo serve as a perverse reminder to Uptown’s poor communities that their needs have no priority in “renewal” plans. Nevertheless, they continue to fight to decolonize and reclaim the public commons... and their minds.

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