Beyond the Usual Beating

The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago

Andrew S. Baer

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226700472
• eBook ISBN: 9780226700502
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The malign and long-lasting influence of Chicago police commander Jon Burge cannot be overestimated, particularly as fresh examples of local and national criminal-justice abuse continue to surface with dismaying frequency. Burge's decades-long tenure on the Chicago police force was marked by racist and barbaric interrogation methods, including psychological torture, burnings, and mock executions—techniques that went far "beyond the usual beating." After being exposed in 1989, he became a symbol of police brutality and the unequal treatment of nonwhite people, and the persistent outcry against him led to reforms such as the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois.

But Burge hardly developed or operated in a vacuum, as Andrew S. Baer explores to stark effect here. He identifies the darkness of the Burge era as a product of local social forces, arising from a specific milieu beyond the nationwide racialized reactionary fever of the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, the popular resistance movements that rallied in his wake actually predated Burge's exposure but cohered with unexpected power due to the galvanizing focus on his crimes and abuses. For more than thirty years, a shifting coalition including torture survivors, their families, civil rights attorneys, and journalists helped to corroborate allegations of violence, free the wrongfully convicted, have Burge fired and incarcerated, and win passage of a municipal reparations package, among other victories. Beyond the Usual Beating reveals that though the Burge scandal underscores the relationship between personal bigotry and structural racism in the criminal justice system, it also shows how ordinary people held perpetrators accountable in the face of intransigent local power.
 

PART I

1

A Southeast Side Story

In the tiny neighborhood of Burnside on Chicago’s Far South Side, twenty-four-year-old Jon Burge worked his first shift as a robbery detective in May 1972. Three years earlier, serving as a military policeman in Vietnam, he told friends of plans to join the Chicago Police Department (CPD), bragging that it would take him no more than five years to make detective.1 He did it in a little over two. Entering the old brick building at 9059 S. Cottage Grove Avenue, Burge settled into a drab office space. Makeshift partitions cordoned the second story into separate offices. Desks and cabinets held files of closed and ongoing investigations. Beyond windows protected by wire-mesh grating, the real workplace spread out in all directions.2 The Detective Division consisted of six geographic areas, each encompassing four or five districts reporting to a central area headquarters.3 The Burnside Area—known as Area 2—was the city’s largest, containing some sixty-two square miles of the Far South and Southeast Sides.4 Long a region of bustling industry, Area 2 was in decline by the early 1970s. Deindustrialization, disinvestment, rising crime, and concentrated poverty diminished quality of life for many local residents. Others relocated. For Burge, the new assignment represented something of a homecoming. Like many of his coworkers, Burge had grown up in Area 2. His promotion offered an opportunity to serve his hometown, bring criminals to justice, and fight urban decay. Yet much had changed since Burge last lived on the Southeast Side. If the streets and parks looked familiar, it was hardly the same community.

Examining the early life of Jon Burge, this chapter demonstrates how personal bigotry and structural racism facilitated the continuity of racist police violence in Chicago after 1970. Many members of Burge’s age, class, and racial cohort grew up in a lily-white world. From an early age, they watched their parents’ generation fight a series of losing battles against deindustrialization, racial transition, and crime. Wanting to keep their communities lucrative, white, and safe, they spent decades fending off a series of perceived crises. Inheriting this tradition, Burge joined the CPD after most whites had abandoned much of Area 2. During his tenure, factory doors closed, murder rates skyrocketed, and life chances dimmed in Area 2 neighborhoods. For twenty years Burge participated in scores of interrogations tarnished by allegations of coercion, abuse, and torture. Most of his accusers were African American men linked to horrific crimes. From Burge’s perspective, putting these suspects behind bars not only helped protect the community but also offered an opportunity to perform racial domination and punish racial subordinates. Meanwhile, the local criminal justice system incentivized coerced confessions and protected perpetrators. To explain the prevalence of torture allegations at Area 2 in the 1970s, this chapter explores the intersecting biographies of individual actors and local institutions. From a white working-class community resisting racial transition, to a school system confronting desegregation, to a losing war in a distant jungle, and back to a police department polishing an ugly image—by the time Detective Jon Burge arrived for his first shift at Burnside in 1972, he carried the weight of a young lifetime with him.

Staving Off Crisis in Postwar Chicago

Spanning several Far South Side neighborhoods, Area 2 included the furthest reaches of Chicago’s Black Belt and the isolated white ethnic communities abutting Lake Michigan to the southeast. As children, Jon Burge and many of his coworkers called this place home.5 In addition to rows of single-family houses and occasional apartments, the area contained the heart of industrial Chicago, with its sprawling rail yards and towering steel mills. If commercial bustle and civil tranquility dominated memories of the landscape, the region also bore witness to some of the city’s most notorious acts of violence. University of Chicago undergraduates Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb stashed the body of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks near the secluded shore of Wolf Lake in 1924.6 Police officers opened fire on union members in front of Republic Steel on Memorial Day in 1937.7 White mobs attacked black families at Trumbull Park Homes in South Deering throughout the 1950s.8 Richard Speck slaughtered eight student nurses in a Jefferey Manor dormitory in 1966.9 While sensational events added local flavor, though, most residents worried more about the mundane challenges of everyday life.

Throughout America’s industrial heartland, a generation born at the close of World War II spent decades fending off threats to familiar patterns of living and working. On Chicago’s Southeast Side, three primary crises gripped the white working-class imagination after 1945—industrial decline, “racial succession” of neighborhoods,10 and rising crime. Emerging from economic depression and global war, families hoped for a return to economic growth and social stability. While the postwar boom brought new opportunities, however, some challenges remained beyond residents’ control. Determined to secure dreams for a better future, local whites responded to perceived threats in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with a variety of methods, including organized protest and collective violence.11 Despite the effort, Chicago’s southeastern fringe proved incapable of withstanding deindustrialization and related phenomena. By the 1980s, the physical appearance, racial demographics, and economic fortunes of the area had transformed forever, at least in the eyes of those who grew up there.

In retrospect, the Southeast Side reached its economic peak in the period immediately after World War II. To local residents yearning for prosperity, the very physicality of industrial structures evoked comfort and security. Hulking factories and sprawling warehouses, however, offered only the illusion of permanence. Indeed, the Far South Side’s industrial health had always been fragile. When European and American settlers began populating the Chicago periphery in the mid-nineteenth century, Lake Calumet and Lake Michigan promised to induce commercial activity among the villages southeast of downtown. Yet it took the ambitious expenditures of outside forces to truly open the South Side to modern industry. In the 1870s, Congress allocated federal funds to improve Calumet Harbor and construct a complicated series of canals and channels connecting the various natural and man-made rivers striding the local swampland. In the 1880s, many of the new railroads carrying material from the American West through Chicago wound their way across the Southeast Side, further establishing the infrastructure necessary to the later success of the steel industry. The twentieth century witnessed an explosion of industrial activity and accompanying population growth.12

With the outbreak of World War II, American industry entered a golden age. In the three decades after 1940, the Southeast Side of Chicago and northwest Indiana developed into what historians have called “the largest steel-making region in the world.”13 While employment rates and wages trended relatively high throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, ordinary people remained wary of the future.14 The social contract established between organized labor and corporate management in the 1930s continued to deliver stability and growth, but beginning in the 1950s, rising anti-unionism and global restructuring tempered working-class optimism.15 Citing high wages, exorbitant taxes, and foreign aid to international competitors, for example, one Chicago resident lamented as early as 1959, “The high costs of doing business in the United States is [sic] bankrupting American industries, is closing American plants, and is putting Americans out of jobs.”16 If most residents failed to anticipate the depth of the coming decline, few escaped economic anxiety altogether.

The postwar wave finally broke in the 1970s, a decade some observers likened to the Depression years of the 1930s.17 Punctuating the steady decline of Chicago’s meatpacking industry, the Union Stock Yards closed for good in August 1971 after more than a century of operation.18 That same year, Amtrak’s consolidation of downtown rail lines marked a crisis in the railroad industry, as shrinking passenger and freight traffic triggered plummeting demand for the manufacture of railcars and related equipment.19 Finally, in an abrupt realization of local fears, the steel mills of the Southeast Side began laying off workers in droves. International Harvester sold Wisconsin Steel in 1977. By 1980, workers were locked out for good. Over the next three years, U.S. Steel’s famous South Works plant fired nine thousand of its remaining ten thousand workers. From 1979 to 1982, the steel industry suffered more than any other sector of the ailing economy, purging over 150,000 jobs across the nation.20 The U.S. Bureau of Labor estimated that southeast Chicago and northwest Indiana bled 187,000 steel-related jobs between 1950 and 1980.21 Noting that “economic catastrophe” and “massive unemployment” threatened to turn a thriving “industrial center” into a placid “bird sanctuary,” researchers poring over census data in the early 1980s spurned the “industrial future” of Chicago’s Southeast Side.22

Before the decline, however, many of the economic features that bolstered industry also attracted new groups of people to the Southeast Side. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, immigrants from across Europe and Latin America made their way to the polyglot urban capital of the Midwest in pursuit of economic opportunity.23 Domestic migrations also fueled the city’s growth. Particularly during World War II, the demands of delivering machines of war to Allied armies combined with manpower shortages, helping escalate the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. New arrivals to Chicago often joined friends and family who came before, swelling the confines of the Black Belt and straining the already-tight housing supply to its breaking point. Desperate for comfortable homes, black families ventured across the informal boundaries of segregated neighborhoods throughout the 1940s and 1950s.24 Streets of row houses once containing only white families rapidly became all black—sometimes within the course of a few months or even weeks—through processes contemporaries called blockbusting, white flight, and racial succession.25 If industrial vigor brought some semblance of stability to the Southeast Side, it also attracted outsiders to the doorsteps of a notoriously race-conscious group of working-class white ethnics.

Within white neighborhoods of the Southeast Side, postwar anxiety over industrial decline mixed with fears of being overrun by African American “invaders.”26 With the wartime boom came an influx of black workers eager to relocate near jobs along the lakefront. Beginning in the 1940s, residential patterns that would characterize the region for the rest of the century began to take shape. Starting in the area’s northwestern corner, outgoing whites moved to the suburbs or south and east into ever-exclusive communities like East Side, a “virtual island” accessed only by drawbridge from the rest of Chicago,27 and Hegewisch, “Chicago’s most isolated neighborhood.”28 Tucked into the northwestern section of South Deering, Jon Burge’s boyhood neighborhood of Jeffery Manor illustrated this trend.29 Considered lily-white at the time of his birth in 1947, the neighborhood was “almost entirely black and Latino” by the 1980s.30 In 1982, police officers referred to Hegewisch as the “last stand for whites” within Area 2’s 4th District.31 Decades of resistance to black migration fostered such “defensive” posturing, even if it was whites who often “flared into overt aggression” wherever people of different races met.32

White residents worried about deindustrialization and racial succession in part because they feared that both would lead to higher crime. Before the appearance of large numbers of African Americans, South Deering residents conflated public housing, unemployment, and government aid with crime, prostitution, and gang violence, even among poor whites.33 When the first black families arrived in the 1950s, local whites sensationalized an alleged “recent wave of negro rapes of white girls” to rally a communal defense.3...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Map
• Introduction
• PART I
• 1   A Southeast Side Story
• 2   “They Wanted to Be Choirboys”
• 3   “They Believed They Were at War”
• PART II
• 4   “Before Our Communities Become Virtual Armed Camps”
• 5   Third-World Torture—Chicago Style
• 6   The Chicago Torture Justice Movement
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index