How Black Youth Helped Unseat Anita Alvarez and Transform the Face of Criminal Justice in Chicago

In the minutes after Chicago media outlets called the Cook County State’s Attorney’s race for Kim Foxx on Tuesday night, a young African-American man wearing a t-shirt reading “Adios Anita” took the stage at her victory party, beaming, chanting out to the exuberant crowd “two down, one to go!”—a reference to the firing of former police chief Garry McCarthy as well as Foxx’s ousting of Anita Alvarez, both coming in the wake of the video release of Laquan McDonald’s killing by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke.

And much of the crowd at Foxx's celebration joined in, chanting right along.

It was a fitting moment for a campaign that benefited enormously from the organizing work of African-American youth and racial justice groups in the city, who made removing Alvarez from office a key goal in the lead up to Tuesday’s Democratic primary, in which Foxx won 58 percent of the vote to Alvarez’s 29 percent. (A third candidate, Donna More, took 13 percent.) Foxx now looks ahead to an almost certain win in the fall general election against a Republican nominee.

Alvarez came under fire following the disclosure of the McDonald video, which the city held onto for over a year until a judge ordered it released to the public. It wasn’t until the court order that Alvarez chose to finally charge Van Dyke for McDonald’s murder—a full 13 months after he shot the unarmed 17-year-old African American 16 times.

The video, released last December, led to weeks of street protests, blocking traffic, disrupting commerce in some of the busiest commercial areas in the city and putting Chicago in the national spotlight in the growing debate over police violence and criminal justice.

One of the primary demands voiced at the protests was the removal from office of McCarthy, Alvarez and Mayor Rahm Emanuel—all accused of participating in a cover-up to conceal the McDonald video to avoid the kind of uproar that happened in places like Ferguson and Baltimore following similar police killings of unarmed African Americans.

Most of these protests were led by groups of young African-American activists and organizers, such as Black Youth Project 100, Assata’s Daughters and We Charge Genocide.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18982/chicago-black-youth-anita-alvarez-kim-foxx-cook-county