People Get Ready

The epic story of Chicago’s dynamic sixties-era freedom struggle, restoring the city, and the entire North, to their rightful place in civil rights history

On May 25, 1966, eleven years after the murder of Emmett Till, Jerome Huey, a seventeen-year-old coming back from a job interview, was attacked and killed by four young white men. For Chicago's Black community, Huey's lynching was a galvanizing event. White racial violence in the North had long been "minimized, denied," as Martin Luther King Jr. put it. There was no national attention to Huey's lynching—and no national memory of it.

In People Get Ready, historians Jeanne Theoharis and Erik Wallenberg offer an eye-opening account of Chicago’s relentless segregation—and the courageous direct-action movements that fought back against it. In one of the most robust Black freedom struggles in the country, activists fought to desegregate sundown neighborhoods, beaches, and public schools with rent strikes, school boycotts, and a broad rainbow coalition. Their tactics were creative: mothers lay down in front of bulldozers and cop cars to halt construction of apartheid schools, and the Blackstone Rangers street gang members performed an original musical to support the movement.

People Get Ready overturns the southernized narrative of the civil rights movement and highlights critical lessons for how we might carry on the struggle for racial justice today.

Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and History at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and the author or coauthor of thirteen books and numerous articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the United States. Her latest book King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South. Her New York Times–bestselling biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks was adapted into a documentary of the same name. Her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History won the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction.

Erik Wallenberg is a historian at the Miami Center for Racial Justice and worker-owner at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago. He is a cohost at CounterPunch Radio, and was a founding editor and collective member at Science for the People. He has published work in outlets including the Journal of African American History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Chicago Tribune, Hammer & Hope, and Monthly Review. He is a contributor to 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History and Energy in American History: A Political, Social, and Environmental Encyclopedia.

ISBN: 9798888908648

Publication date: May 25, 2027

1. Introduction
2. City on the Make: The Modern Segregators (1958–1963)
3. “I Knew I Didn’t Belong in the Parking Lot”: A Movement Grows in the Windy City (1960–1964)
4. Moving Beyond “Paralysis of Analysis”: The Chicago Freedom Movement Expands (1965)
5. The Double-Down: The Kings Move to Chicago (1966)
6. Massive White Violence . . . but the Nation Fails to Address Northern Segregation (1966)
7. Raining Fury upon Tyrants: The Struggles Continue (1967–1973)