A Tour of Chicago's Southside: From the Deep South to Mass Incarceration

Event this Saturday for my Chicago and Chicago Area Friends/Readers/ Followers...Please Join Us!

A Tour of Chicago's Southside:
From the Deep South to Mass Incarceration
Paul Street will be our tour guide.
Saturday, June 29, 2 pm

Meet at the Dearborn Station, Dearborn and Polk St., Chicago
Your donation will support Revolution Summer 2024

This two-hour tour will take you to sites of hope and despair, resistance and repression. Chicago during and after World War One and for decades afterward was indeed a "Land of Hope" for Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. What they found was a new landscape, and a different form of exploitation, still under the vicious rule of white supremacy.

You'll hear about the industries that welcomed Black men, women and children, usually into the lowest paid, most dangerous positions, ensuring they stayed there by affixing a special mark to their time cards. Meanwhile, real estate and financial forces joined with white neighborhood associations and gangs to segregate Black Chicagoans in impoverished and overcrowded ghetto neighborhoods on the city’s South Side and, after World War II, the West Side. Giant vertical public housing projects were constructed to keep the city’s rising Black population ghettoized. White rage and pogroms were constant threats, and they were met by Black resistance.

You will visit sites that are testament to much of this, and hear the history of Chicago that is systematically ignored, denied and covered up in the rush to celebrate the superficial glitter of Chicago, now a "post-industrial global corporate and financial center" that has no future but jail or prison for generations of Black youth.

This tour will give you the sweep of a century of capitalist economic forces transforming lives, enriching capital, breaking promises in its never-ending search for greater exploitation, and the people's relentless struggle to be free. As Bob Avakian has written, one of three things that has “to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better: People have to fully confront the actual history of this country and its role in the world up to today, and the terrible consequences of this." This tour will pose sharply the question of just what will it take to get free? Revolution, Nothing Less!

Paul Street brings deep engagement with the history of Chicago and the larger political forces in the U.S. to the telling of this history. He is a journalist whose work has been published in CounterPunch, Black Agenda Report, Revolution, TeleSur English and others. He has taught Chicago history at DePaul University and is a former VP for Research at the Chicago Urban League. His books include: Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis, A Living Black Chicago History; Hollow Resistance: Obama Trump and the Politics of Appeasement; and This Happened Here, Amerikkkaners, Neoliberals and The Trumping of America, among others. Leo Pargo, a leading member of The Revcom Corps for the Emancipation of Humanity Chicago, will join Paul on this tour.

Your donation of $75 (Supporter) or $100 (Backbone) will fund the urgent work to put revolution in the air this Revolution Summer 2024, including funding volunteers from around the country coming to Chicago to protest the DNC with the Revcom Corps.

Reserve your spot soon!
Use @RevComCorpsChi on Venmo or $RevComCorpsChi on CashApp.
Please let us know you'll be joining us by an email to RevcomCorps.Chi@gmail.com

We will travel from Dearborn Station to various locations on the Southside by car, where we will stop for Paul's commentary and Q&A. We also suggest that participants share vehicles as much as possible, so please be prepared to wear a mask in that case. And we'll return to Dearborn Station at the end.

Questions? Contact the RevCom Corps Chicago at RevcomCorps.Chi@gmail.com or 312 804 9121.