June 21st 2023.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, the newly elected mayor of Chicago, has ambitious plans for the city. He recently secured a $6.8 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to build eight new monuments, including a memorial honoring the more than 100 Black men who were tortured by Chicago police officers.
This monument is part of a broader package of reparations that was established in 2015. The city agreed to pay out a total of $5.5 million to over 118 people who were subjected to brutal attacks orchestrated by disgraced police chief Jon Burge and many of the officers who trained under him. It also includes a commitment to include this dark piece of Chicago Police Department history in the curriculum for 8th through 10th graders.
Mayor Johnson believes the monument, called The Chicago Torture Justice Memorial, will serve as an important reminder of the “tremendous harm” done to generations of people by the “brutality of police.” He also believes it can help to heal the wounds many city residents carry from the attacks.
“It is important that we capture that history in a physical way,” Johnson said. “The impact that it is going to have—it is not only educating a generation of how these systems fail and harm people, but we also have the ability to tell our stories with our art. Oppressors look to dominate people by going after their history, their art and their culture. We’re not going to do that in Chicago.”
The other seven monuments planned by the Mayor include honors for Mahalia Jackson, a commemoration of the Chicago Race Riots of 1919, a memorial for missing and murdered Black girls, and a series of monuments that explore the settling of Chicago by Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable and the Native Americans who welcomed him to their land. These monuments will serve as an important reminder of the history and culture of the city of Chicago and its people.
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