Here are two news items from the Chicago Defender after the Boycott –
October 24, 1963
Here’s a significant piece from October 28, 1963 – the school desegregation movement in Chicago, including the 1963 Boycott, was cited by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as one of his primary reasons for moving to Chicago in 1965. In the article below, we see that he had already taken an interest in Chicago Public Schools:
We’ve compiled all of our live Tweets from the DuSable Museum event below. They mostly focus on our post-screening panel, which included Boycott participants Rosie Simpson, Dr. Fannie Rushing and Dr. Timuel Black; historian Elizabeth Todd-Breland; and contemporary education activists Jitu Brown of KOCO and Jasson Perez of Black Youth Project. The panel was moderated by University of Chicago professor and ’63 Boycott Co-Producer Tracye Matthews. Enjoy!
Here are some more updates from Facebook that were not on the Twitter Feed:
To see the whole program, click here.
Thanks to everyone who came to Lessons from the ’63 Boycott at the DuSable Museum! What an incredible turnout. We’ll be posting footage of our panel later this week. In the meantime, enjoy these photos.
’63 Boycott and the anniversary of Freedom Day received quite a bit of media attention yesterday. Below are some of the highlights:
’63 Boycott parent organizer Rosie Simpson and one of the film’s producers Rachel Dickson on WBEZ’s The Morning Shift:
“The parents were sick of what was going on … Many of those parents came to meetings and that’s how the school boycott was first decided.” – Rosie Simpson
Freedom Day has passed, and soon negotiations between Civil Rights and the City of Chicago beings. Those negotiations will eventually fall apart, producing Freedom Day II in February 1964, another massive boycott. Look for more reportage here. Below, see the Chicago Defender’s headline from October 23rd, 1963:
At 4:00 pm, up to 20,000 protestors converged on downtown. The protest was one of the largest demonstrations of the Northern Civil Rights movement. It went off without a hitch – using nonviolent means, the community made their voices heard. Here’s more unseen footage of the protest:
At about 3:30 pm on October 22, 1963, march captains from all corners of the city would have been leading thousands of people to the protest downtown. Many of the protestors would have been students, protesting the conditions at their school.
Although the police were ready for a riot, the Boycott was by most accounts completely peaceful and, as Boycott organizer and former CPS teacher Sylvia Fischer told us in 2013, “we just felt the children of Chicago had shown the very best of themselves.”
The clip below also features never-before-seen footage of the Boycott:
Here are some photos of the day published in the Defender:
Here are a few photos published in the more conservative Tribune, which as you might guess took a dimmer view of the Boycott:
Here is never-before-seen footage of the Boycott organizing headquarters, pulled from our 16 mm footage from Oct 22, 1963. At this point in the afternoon, the numbers would have been pouring in, with activists tallying the number of students absent from school and talking to Freedom Day captains all over the city in preparation for the massive march on downtown scheduled for 4 pm.
Here is a school-by-school tally of absenteeism on Freedom Day, from the Chicago Defender the following day:
