Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates credited her predecessor, Karen Lewis, Thursday with three words: “I blame her.”
That message sent laughter across the room of CTU allies gathered to pay homage to Lewis, who passed away in 2021 from a cancerous brain tumor.
Davis Gates credited her predecessor for paving the way for the union’s most recent organizing efforts. She pointed to the tentative teachers contract deal reached a week ago as an example of the stability needed to respond to Trump’s latest threat to withhold federal funds from public schools.
“(Lewis) handled the complexity of segregation and racism and white supremacy in the city at a time where people didn’t even have language or the ability to hold how heavy it was,” Davis Gates said. “The legacy of Karen Lewis is our ability to stay together, unified in this moment. That’s her legacy.”
The panel discussion launched Lewis’ posthumous memoir “I Didn’t Come Here to Lie,” co-written by Elizabeth Todd-Breland, former school board vice president and University of Illinois Chicago professor. It was held at CTU headquarters near the United Center.
Under Lewis, the CTU transformed into a force in Chicago politics, sparking a more aggressive approach for unions in the city and elsewhere. She fought pushback from leaders, including former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Lewis witnessed school closures that critics said devastated the South and West Sides. She accelerated movements in those communities, providing people with the resources to fight back. She was a firm believer in political organizing backed by research and was planning to run for mayor until she received her cancer diagnosis in October of 2014.
Two leaders under one movement
Lewis’ self-confidence and faith in fair educational opportunities shine through her words, shaped by Todd-Breland, who described the “incredible honor and responsibility” of writing the book with her as she fought her sickness.
“She pulled back and I think was vulnerable in a way that she wanted to be in the book,” Todd-Breland said Thursday. “She said explicitly, I want people to feel closer to me by reading this, not further away.”
Both of Lewis’ parents were teachers. She was a trail-blazer — converting to Judaism late in life, living in Barbados for a year and receiving an MFA in film. She grew up in Hyde Park and graduated from Dartmouth College. Most of all, she fought the status quo.
“When you’re playing on someone else’s turf, you don’t have control. So the key is to change the rules of the game,” she wrote in the book.
Lewis wrote about the incredible pressure of being a Black, female leader of the third-largest teachers union in the country. She wrote that as union president, “in order for white people to accept me — white teachers and white parents — I had to be smart, I had to be articulate, I had to use the ‘Queen’s English’ correctly.”
When asked by the panel moderator, Chicago Reader columnist and podcast host Ben Joravsky if she ever felt “the presence” of Lewis telling her what to do, Davis Gates contrasted the former union president’s leadership choice with her own. But she didn’t shy away from acknowledging her more confrontational style.
“Hip-hop raised me,” she said. “Bougie raised Karen.”
Davis Gates said Lewis “was raised in a society to make white people okay with her, not the other way around.”
“There’s a powerlessness in that. There is a complicity to your oppression in that … and I reject that because Karen Lewis gave me the capacity to reject that,” Davis Gates said. “It is in her honor that I get to lead in this way.”
At every level of leadership, Black women are scrutinized in different ways than their white and male peers, Todd-Breland said in an interview with the Tribune.
“We see that amongst teachers, we see that amongst leaders, we see that amongst politicians in all spaces of public life,” she said.
Toward the end of the book, Lewis said she found strength in the organizers coming up in the wings behind her. She talked about working with Davis Gates, then CTU’s political and legislative director.
“I think she appreciated the leadership I’d shown and the way I handled difficult situations, especially with MAGA men. And I appreciate her,” Lewis said in the book.
Davis Gates wrote the afterward, where she acknowledged that Lewis helped make former teacher and union organizer Mayor Brandon Johnson’s rise possible. A week ago, under that friendly mayor, Davis Gates settled a contract without a strike for the first time in a decade.
“Karen is (a) completely inappropriate human being, but she is also the most brilliant woman that you would ever want to engage with in your life. There is nothing that she didn’t understand or know,” Davis Gates said Thursday. “She is the only person that I’ve wanted to talk to every day since taking this job.”
The discussion moderated by Joravsky — between Davis Gates, Todd-Breland and former CTU President Jesse Sharkey — celebrated Lewis’ strength, curiosity and humor. The speakers remembered her unparalleled leadership skills, heading the 2012 teachers strike.
And in the room of adorers, her absence was felt.
CTU Vice President Jackson Potter reminisced about the conversations that the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, or CORE, would have at her kitchen in Hyde Park. CORE, led by Lewis, gained control of CTU in 2010.
“Karen was that perfect mixture of the spiritual and the profane,” Potter said.
Sharkey, who led the union when Lewis retired, remembered a meeting with labor leaders that Lewis “crashed” at a lawyer’s office on Lower Wacker Drive in 2012.
“Lewis … walks into the room and says, ‘Hello, men. Or should I say white men? Isn’t it weird that four white men are here having a meeting to decide the future of all the Black children in the city of Chicago?’” Sharkey recalled.
Sharkey said Lewis had an ability to “take something which wasn’t funny and turn it into a joke by being gracious and ingratiating,” something she does often in her book, where she writes openly about her thoughts about race at different moments of her childhood.
Joravsky even went so far as to put Karen Lewis’ name on a list of four of Chicago’s “Mt. Rushmore” greats — with former Mayor Harold Washington, former Alderman Leon Despres and politician Ralph Metcalfe.
“You say you have four. I only have one,” Davis Gates playfully retorted. “Karen Lewis built everything from the ground up.”
Chicago Tribune’s Gregory Royal Pratt contributed.
