| This dissertation examines the rise and fall of Illinois' postwar black insurgency. It details how a generation of Black Chicagoans and their allies approached the administration of criminal justice as a key site of political radicalization and grassroots mobilization. In particular, I focus on the ways in which militant activists and their insurgent organizations contested the policies and practices of policing and incarceration during a brief, but crucial, period, between the War on Gangs and the War on Drugs. In response to an epidemic of police violence, the Afro-American Patrolmen's League sought to undermine prevailing notions of racial subordination and urban governance through community-oriented programs and broad coalitions like the Concerned Citizens for Police Reform. Over several decades, Black prisoners, first as converts to the Nation of Islam and then as cadre members of the New Afrikan Prisoner Organization, pushed the boundaries of pro se litigation and collective action. Operating in opposition to distinct, but interconnected, aspects of the administration of criminal justice, these two poles of insurgent black politics prompted substantive changes in the letter and application of the law.;By tracking the broad arc of Illinois' black insurgency, this dissertation finds that by the 1980s this militant politics declined as these two poles increasingly diverged during a period of changing worldviews, economic structures, and political possibilities. I argue that the criminalization of Black youth played an important role in spurring this divergence. Although identified as a key constituency of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements, young, Black Chicagoans, particularly those assumed to members of a gang-involved, lumpenproletariat, would become increasingly marginal to the coalition-building efforts of an insurgent political class. The consequences of this divergence are particularly evident during the administration of Harold Washington, Chicago's first Black Mayor, as these youth became more prominent, both discursively and practically, in the targeted application of police violence and the further elaboration of mass incarceration that mark the emergence of the carceral state. |
