Berwyn and Surrounding Community Uphold Solidarity for Racial Equity
Local residents and many from surrounding suburbs show up outside Berwyn City Hall, on August 9th, 2022, to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and Black residents of Berwyn after the firing of a city employee who used a racial slur against a city contractor (Photo by Paul Goyette).
By Chelsea Zhao
Adults, youths, and kids raised signs of Berwyn Black Lives, Black Lives Matter, #InvestigateLovero, as activists, political organizers, and allies spoke against racism and campaigned for inclusion in Berwyn on a clear sunny afternoon in Lesak Park.
“So today we have people from Oak Park, we have people from Maywood, we have people from Cicero and Berwyn, all coming together to let the mayor know that racism in Berwyn – the historical, systemic, institutional racism – has got to stop,” said Benjamin Henning, the organizer of the rally.
The rally started at 6:30 p.m. in Lesak Park on Tuesday, Aug. 9th in the week of the two-year anniversary to the Berwyn Black Lives Matter rally on Aug. 11, 2020 at the Berwyn City Hall.
The rally was organized by Summer Butler, Melissa Mouritsen and Benjamin Henning. The Facebook event calls for a rainbow coalition of Berwyn and surrounding community allies to “make an emphatic stand against hate and racism.”
The rally started off with a land acknowledgment from Leticia Gutierrez, who honored Berwyn’s past as the ancestral homeland of Potawatomi, Ottawa and Ojibwa, People of the Three Fires.
The 12 speakers at the rally, amid a crowd of an attentive audience on the lawn, touched on the themes of police brutality, a sanctuary for young people and the history of racism in Berwyn and in the nation.
Speakers also called for the fight against bigotry in communities and greater involvement in the local political process.
Summer Butler (left), a Berwyn resident and one of the organizers of the rally, announces she will be running for the Berwyn Board of Education (Photo by Paul Goyette).
Summer Butler, co-organizer of the event, brought with her an enlarged old photo of “white only, colored in the rear” segregation signs outside a restaurant and a collage of her family moments.
Butler told the crowd about her mother’s part in Project 500, a 1968 recruitment program at UIC to increase enrollment of African Americans after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and her father’s part as “the military vet, father, CTA worker.”
Butler then pointed to the photo of segregation signs, the family photo collage, the people holding signs behind her and then asked:
“Why am I still fighting the same fight that my mom and my dad had to fight?”
Butler condemned the handling of the racial slur by the city elected officials and at the end, to a cheering crowd, announced her decision to run for school board.
Kina Collins, the former congressional candidate for Illinois’ 7th Congressional District, echoed Butler’s speech on Mayor Lovero’s handling of the racial slur incident. She applauded the youths holding the signs and called on the adults for their support for racial equity.
Fred Hampton Jr., deputy chair of Black Panthers Party’s Illinois chapter and the founder of Rainbow Coalition, speaks during the rally outside Berwyn City Hall on Tuesday, August 9th, 2022 (Photo by Paul Goyette).
Fred Hampton Jr., son of Fred Hampton – the deputy chair of Black Panthers Party’s Illinois chapter and the founder of Rainbow Coalition, a political solidarity movement that unites racial and social groups to fight for social equality – spoke on the need to recognize and confront racism.
“This is a microcosm of situations throughout the country, throughout the world, so let’s be upfront about this, let’s acknowledge it,” Hampton said.
Erica Rodriguez, a Berwyn resident for almost ten years, said residents need to “speak up” about the racism in the community.
“As a Black woman in Berwyn, you can tell when things are meant to be racial, or to make you uncomfortable,” Rodriguez said. “But for a situation like this, to make it to a news network, it finally brought light to what really is going on in Berwyn.”
“We have so many stories,” Molly Hamilton, a rally participant, said. “That was just a few that spoke today; so if we have more time, we would just have more and more stories of the racism and the hope that people have experienced.”
You can watch the live stream from the rally here.
Chelsea Zhao is a graduate journalism student at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and is a recent Berwyn resident. You can read more of Chelsea's work at https://chelseazhao7.wixsite.com/journalism .
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