The Badge and the Stage: Chicago Police Torture and a Theater That Shut Out Black Washington

Institutions in Plain Sight

Racial injustice did not happen only in back roads and lynching trees. It happened inside respected institutions: police headquarters, theaters, universities. Two cases from the Equal Justice Initiative's November calendar show how.

Jon Burge and the Chicago Police, 1972–1991

From the early 1970s to the early 1990s, Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and detectives under his command tortured well over 100 Black men and women to force confessions. Victims described electric shock, suffocation with plastic bags, mock executions and beatings. Many confessions led to long prison terms; some to death row.

Burge was fired in 1993, but statutes of limitations shielded him from prosecution for the torture itself. In 2010 a federal jury convicted him of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about it, and he was sentenced to four and a half years. In 2015, Chicago became the first U.S. city to pass a reparations ordinance for police torture survivors, creating a $5.5 million fund, a public memorial commitment and a requirement that the history be taught in Chicago public schools. Survivors and organizers, led by groups such as Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, won that victory after decades of pressure.

Read HistorianSpeaks free, every week. Subscribe free for new history and analysis in your inbox, or become one of our first 50 founding members at $9.99 a month for life. Join the founders

The National Theatre, Washington, D.C.

In the nation's capital, the National Theatre, a few blocks from the White House, refused to admit Black patrons. Performers and civil-rights groups protested for years; actors' unions and playwrights began refusing to appear there. Rather than integrate, the theater stopped presenting live stage shows in 1948 and operated as a movie house. It reopened to live theater, desegregated, in 1952. Black Washington had been barred from its own national stage.

What Connects Them

Both stories involve institutions that claimed to serve the whole public. Both were changed only when Black communities and their allies refused to accept the abuse as normal. Chicago's reparations ordinance is now studied nationwide as a model for accountability.