For Us, By Us: Self-determination and School Segregation on Chicago’s West Side.

Is desegregation the solution for inequity in schools? How does segregation impact public education on Chicago’s West Side today?

Join Jane Addams Hull-House Museum for a book talk and public discussion exploring education and the fight for self-determination and equitable public schools on the West Side of Chicago. Barbara Sizemore was a powerful black educator and former principal in North Lawndale in the 1960s. She championed excellence in black schools and all-black spaces, and received backlash from Civil Rights activists and desegregationists. Learn more about her legacy and its present-day relevance on Chicago’s West Side.

Speakers include Elizabeth Todd-Breland, author of A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s, who will share her research on Barbara Sizemore’s fight for black-led education during school integration; and Prexy Nesbitt, a native West Sider, activist and educator, who comes from a strong family of West Side public educators who knew and worked with Sizemore.

About the book: In 2012, Chicago teachers began the school year with the city’s first teachers strike in 25 years and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. A Political Education recovers this hidden history, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy. Books available for purchase from Seminary Co-op Bookstore 

Making the West Side is a Jane Addams Hull-House Museum initiative that brings together scholars, activists, neighborhood residents, and other stakeholders to investigate the history of neighborhood change on Chicago’s West Side.