Fifty years ago, 35,000 Chicago students walked out of their classrooms in protest. They changed CPS

[TexasTowelie]

Fifty years ago, 35,000 Chicago students walked out of their classrooms in protest. They changed CPS forever.


It's 1968 and 18-year-old Pemon Rami, a recent graduate of Wendell Phillips Academy High School, stands in front of the Umoja Black Student Center in Bronzeville. He stares off into the distance, quiet, determined. Behind him, a poster with an illustration of Malcolm X preaches unstinting devotion to radical change, challenging viewers: "He was ready! Are you?"

It's 2018, and 68-year-old Rami stands before a photo of his younger self. Plenty has changed in those intervening years. A half century has softened his features and grayed his short-cut hair, but his presence remains self-assured. Though his own revolutionary moment has long since passed, he still believes that revolution belongs in the hands of the young. It's why, after a long career as a playwright and producer and as the director of educational services and public programs at the DuSable Museum of African American History, he now consults with groups such as Peace Warriors of North Lawndale College Prep High School and Fearless Leading by the Youth, hoping to pass along hard-earned lessons to those young people fighting today.

"You get to that point where you're no longer capable of having the kind of battles that you had when you're younger," he explains. "I think it's important that young people understand that it is their responsibility to be involved. It's not something you can bargain with."

But the bonds of solidarity that inspired Rami and his friends to launch a series of student walkouts to protest Chicago Public School's racist policies—a protest movement that eventually included 35,000 students—live on in every student strike today.

Read more: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/student-protests-1968-chicago-public-schools/Content?oid=59097994