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  • Introduction: Defiant Memory Work
  • Erica R. Meiners (bio) and Therese Quinn (bio)

On a hot Chicago summer day in 1919, a Black child, Eugene Williams, was murdered by a white man while they were swimming at Lake Michigan’s Twenty-Ninth Street beach. The child, floating in the cool water, drifted across an invisible line that separated white from Black swimmers and maintained the city’s racial apartheid in all leisure activities, as everywhere else. And over the five days of violence that followed, a short week of killings during the long “Red Summer,” in the words of James Weldon Johnson, a poet and activist, of attacks on Black people across the United States, in Chicago thirty-eight people died (twenty-three Black, fifteen white) and hundreds were injured.1

Nearly one hundred years later, these deaths are not officially registered anywhere on the city’s landscape. No authorized memorial stands to remind residents of a still starkly segregated city that this violence occurred; there is no plaque on the beach, no monument at City Hall, no acknowledgment of the scores who were killed and injured during 1919.

Chicagoans have a long history of what we are naming defiant memory work, or using cultural forms to foster liberation. Often, this recognition emerges slowly, and without sanction. For instance, Ida B. Wells-Barnett dedicated her adult life to critical journalism and organizing—as two cases among many, in 1895 she published a report, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, which documented the high numbers of Black people lynched by whites, and the trumped-up public rationales for these murders; in 1900 she challenged the Chicago Tribune’s stance in favor of segregated schools.2 Yet, only now, nearly eighty years after her death, is there talk of raising funds for a monument acknowledging her path-breaking work.3 Another example is the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument, which was paid for by the Pioneer Aid and Support Association with funds gathered through subscriptions and placed in a cemetery just beyond Chicago’s limits—the city refused to allow the executed anarchists and labor organizers to be buried within its boundaries—in 1893.4 This monument, while drawing visitors from across the globe and surrounded by the graves of labor and political activists, [End Page 353] still stands in relative isolation, highlighting the many histories and struggles that remain unmarked.

While for some the current US president’s relentless attacks on mainstream news sources—“fake news”—signal a dramatic shift in political discourse, we argue that this moment is neither an aberration nor an outlier. From high school textbooks to roadside monuments, from network sitcoms to Facebook feeds, mainstream knowledge-producing entities rarely register the struggles for liberation of oppressed people, or our histories. If anything, this moment places some of us in an awkward spot—is the antidote to “fake news” to defend the legitimacy of CNN or the New York Times? Yet we acknowledge that recent struggles about memory have moved to the front page, often with campuses as the flashpoint. Students at University of North Carolina rose up and tore down the Confederate statute of Silent Sam in 2018 (and the university’s response is to propose a taxpayer-funded museum for this statue, at the cost of $5.3 million, an idea rejected by the state’s board that oversees public universities).5 Also in 2018, Duke University changed Carr Hall to Classroom Hall, removing the name of a white supremacist.6 In 2017, Yale agreed to rename Calhoun College—John C. Calhoun was a nineteenth-century US politician, an advocate of slavery—after students mobilized.7 (The backdrop to these protests is the growing impossibility of access for those most marginalized to these postsecondary educational campuses.) While this political moment might feel different to some, the stakes of remembering are always high, and therefore contested. The Community Futurisms: Time and Memory in North Philly (Pennsylvania) project gathers and shares memories of neighborhood residents as a way to counter disappearances precipitated by eviction, home seizures through eminent domain, and other state technologies of dispossession. Remembering, the group describes, is urgent; it...

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