Brandon Johnson may be new to voters, but he is well known among organizers and activists.
Lightfoot and Chicago police for their violent handling of activists and protesters. Lightfoot was singled out for authorizing the use of pepper spray. In 2021, it was discovered that Lightfoot had spent nearly three hundred million dollars in federal pandemic funds on Chicago police; Lightfoot condemned criticism of the move as “dumb.”
In 2011, Johnson, a former elementary-school teacher, was hired by the Chicago Teachers Union to be an organizer. By then, the newly energized union was gearing up to fight the effects of fifteen years of corporate-minded school reform. In 2012, it led a historic strike against the Emanuel Administration, inaugurating a new era of labor struggle and community organizing. The C.T.U.
Brandon Johnson advancing to the runoff election for mayor is the U.W.F.’s biggest accomplishment, and a credit to the depth of its organizing. When I spoke with Emma Tai, the executive director of the United Working Families, she described the local movement as “a lot of convergence around labor, austerity, police brutality—these things are obviously connected. And, increasingly, we’re connected.
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