I misjudged the weather. I didn’t dress appropriately. It’s cold and gray. Perhaps this is fitting.

Standing outside the Daley Center & across from City Hall, on Friday, about three hundred people chant: “What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now.”

Over one hundred people (118 to be exact) hold black banners/flags on wood sticks with the names of Jon Burge and his police officers’ torture victims. They called themselves the “midnight crew.” For over 20 years, they tortured an estimated 118 people, all of them black. 118 black bodies tortured in plain sight. The names are written in white on the black flags. Perhaps this is fitting too.

photo by Alice Kim (4/4/14)

Most of the people who carry the banners are attending the Amnesty International 2014 Conference. They are mostly young and white. When the names are read out loud from the stage, they move over to stand in formation, silently acknowledging the sins of white supremacy. I wonder if they think of it this way; as atoning for a legacy of white terrorism. It strikes me again that the past is not past.

photo by Toussaint Losier (4/4/14)

Nineteen men who were tortured by Burge still languish behind bars — their confessions extracted through electrocution, suffocation, and vicious beatings. I wonder if people know about this Guantanamo in Illinois or more accurately our Illinois in Guantanamo.

One mother of a torture survivor who is still incarcerated over 23 years later speaks from the podium and vows to keep fighting for her son’s release. Her name is Jeanette Plummer and she’s wearing a t-shirt with his face and name emblazoned across her chest: Free Johnny Plummer. She’s an older woman but her son’s tribulations seem to have made her elderly. She stands with the help of a cane. Johnny Plummer was only 15 when he was tortured. He’s still caged. The past is not past.

Jeanette Plummer & Joey Mogul (photo by Bronte Price, 4/4/14)

I look around and there are so few of us here; black people, I mean. And maybe that’s as it should be because this is not our crime even though we were its victims. We already know that our lives matter, that black lives matter. It’s the rest of the world that needs to understand and internalize this truth. The past is not past.

So I stand off to the side, watching and listening. A couple of torture survivors speak from the stage: Anthony Holmes & Darryl Cannon. Two black men, older now, hurt but unbroken. Anthony speaks about the years of being called liars; the years of stubborn disbelief. Darryl exhorts the mostly white crowd to stand with them so that they can secure reparations for the harms that they endured; so that they can get some justice. The past is not past.

Anthony Holmes & Darryl Cannon (photo by Bronte Price, 4/4/14)

But I hear the words as a call to the young & white people holding black flags in the bitter cold to stand “in the shoes” of their legacies of violence. I don’t know if they understand that this is in fact their charge. Make this right, the torture survivors are saying. James Baldwin who understood love and struggle better than most once said:

“It doesn’t matter any longer what you do to me; you can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you’d done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?”

What a gift it is to offer your oppressor a chance to save themselves. It’s a recognition of humanity’s interconnection and the idea that my liberation is bound to yours. If you are not free, neither am I. We’re in prison together. My friends who have organized this action are mostly traitors to their race who are asking other white people: “how are we going to save ourselves?” It’s solidarity in action, in deed. But it must be seen too as self-preservation and perhaps redemption. The past is not past.

There’s a moment of silence for the 118 torture survivors. I take the time to think of why I’m here. I am standing here, in part, because my friends organized this action. And I want them to know that I support it. I’m also here to stand in for those black bodies who are still unjustly caged. I am here because while it is not our crime, we were the victims and as such we must remember. Not all of us can bear the memories. I know this. But those who can, must remember. Because the past is not past…

photo by Bronte Price (4/4/14)

Please take a moment to sign this petition calling on the Chicago City Council to pass the Reparations Ordinance here.