Image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons
By Maggie Micklo ’21
Contributing Writer
Karen Jennings Lewis ’74 told the Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Association in 2012 that her education at Mount Holyoke “taught me you can do anything.” Later that year, Lewis went on to lead the Chicago Teachers Union through their first strike in over 25 years. During her tenure as president of the CTU, Lewis advocated on behalf of 30,000 teachers across nearly 650 public schools that serve over 350,000 students. As a result, she revolutionized union organizing and cultivated an environment that promoted activism over corporate interests.
Lewis died on Sunday, Feb. 7, leaving a legacy to be celebrated.
Lewis transferred from Mount Holyoke College to Dartmouth College when it began admitting women in 1972. Still, she kept Mount Holyoke close to her heart, receiving an honorary degree at the 2014 Commencement ceremony and solidifying her as a member of the class of 1974.
Labor scholars Steven K. Ashby and Robert Bruno wrote in their book “A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike” that Lewis hated her time at Dartmouth because the male students strongly opposed the decision to open the school to women. Lewis was the only African American woman to graduate from Dartmouth in 1974.
“I was the only black woman in my class, and it was clear that women weren’t wanted. That did teach me that top-down decisions usually take a while for people to buy into,” she told Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. She would take this mindset with her back home to Chicago, especially in her eventual role as president of the CTU. She cut salaries for union leadership in order to invest more money in training and organizing rank-and-file teachers, ensuring that decisions were made with a collective voice instead of imposed by an unresponsive, top-down leadership style.
Lewis was nominated to run for president of the CTU in 2010 by a newly formed group of public school teachers. As a high school chemistry teacher for almost 20 years and the child of two Chicago public school teachers, Lewis represented the perfect candidate to change the union’s direction. She could also speak to her students’ needs as a Black woman with roots in the city and a commitment to activism, social justice and public schools.
“I’ve measured my success as a teacher by the hugs at the end of the year, by the conversations with kids who say, ‘I never thought of it that way,’” Lewis told Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in June 2011. Lewis kept that commitment to students and the teaching profession at the forefront of her decision making throughout her career.
In Chicago, Lewis became a household name, often appearing on local news stations for her success in drawing thousands of teachers and community members to rallies to support her vision for a more just and equitable public education system. After being elected president of the CTU, Lewis began contract negotiations and eventually led her membership through a historic strike in 2012, when political leadership threatened to cut funding for public schools by millions of dollars.
“Karen Lewis was just an absolutely mesmerizing star. She was joyful. She was tough. She was full of smiles and attracted people by and large, so there was this explosion of joyful warriors around her,” Dr. Robert Bruno, a labor scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said.
After decades of union leadership that favored close relationships with business and political interests, Lewis expanded what was acceptable to demand in contract negotiations, defying strict labor laws and asking for more than living wages and decent working conditions. She understood the systematic barriers to student achievement and fought to reduce poverty, violence and neoliberal policies across the city. She refused to bow to pressures from the city’s powerful Democratic Party to accept anything less than true progress for her students. The union gained political power under her direction, building long-term relationships with community organizations and other labor unions across the city.
This kind of grassroots, activist-based strategy is called social movement unionism, and it’s a strategy that Lewis and her leadership team revitalized for the city and the country. Following the CTU’s 2012 strike, teachers unions from Wisconsin to Oklahoma took to the streets, demanding more for their students and their public school systems.
In 2014, Lewis shocked the city when she announced that she had been diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor. Until that point, Lewis had been portrayed as the only person with enough citywide respect and support to defeat then-incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the upcoming mayoral elections. While her health concerns halted any political aspirations, Lewis remained committed to students and serving the public sphere until her retirement in 2018.
“Given my health challenges, it is unlikely that I will return to my beloved classroom. In light of that, and after much consideration, I [will be] ending my tenure as an educator with Chicago Public Schools,” Lewis said in her statement of resignation. Despite years outside the classroom leading the union, Lewis’ statement showed that she identified first and foremost as an educator, seeing her role as president not as an elite bureaucratic position but as a continuation of her role as a teacher. Her commitment to elevating students and teachers remained her driving force.
Lewis brought her love of teaching into every choice she made as president of the CTU. Supporters and close friends alike memorialized her this week by describing her strength in leadership and her joyful love for students and the teaching profession.
“She spoke three languages, loved her opera and her show tunes, and dazzled you with her smile, yet could stare down the most powerful enemies of public education and defend our institution with a force rarely seen in organized labor,” CTU officials wrote in a statement this week.
“You have received the best education possible. It is what you should wish for every person on the planet,” Lewis said in a 2014 baccalaureate address to graduating Mount Holyoke students. “As I watched you place the Laurel Chain around [Mary Lyon’s] grave, I saw your joy. Carry that and the courage Mary Lyon exhibited throughout your lives. If you ever find yourself in a position in which you, with all the best of intentions[,] are doing harm, you must speak up. Loudly with conviction, never let expediency, fear or complicity stand in the way of joy, truth, and justice.”