Chicago Officials To Dedicate $6.8M To Build Monuments, Including One To Honor Police Torture Victims

Newly elected Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson plans to use a $6.8 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to build eight new monuments, including one intended to honor the more than 100 Black men who were tortured by Chicago police officers.

The city agreed to build a memorial to the victims of brutal attacks orchestrated by disgraced chief of police Jon Burge and many officers who trained under him in 2015.

The monument is part of a broader package of “reparations” that includes payouts totaling $5.5 million to over 118 people, mostly innocent, who were beaten, electrocuted, or suffocated with plastic bags. The city also made a commitment to include this dark piece of the Chicago Police Department’s history in the curriculum for 8th through 10th graders, according to WTTW News.

Johnson believesthe monument, aptly named The Chicago Torture Justice Memorial, will act as a reminder of the “tremendous harm” done not just not to “a generation but generations of people” by the “brutality of police” and help heal the wounds many city residents carry from the attacks.

“It is important that we capture that history in a physical way,” Johnson said. “The impact that it is going to have—it is not only educating a generation of how these systems fail and harm people, but we also have the ability to tell our stories with our art. See, when oppressors look to dominate people, they go after their history, their art and their culture. We’re not going to do that in Chicago.”

The other planned monuments include an honor for Mahalia Jackson, a commemoration of the Chicago Race Riots of 1919, a memorial for missing and murdered Black girls as well as a series of monuments that explore the settling of Chicago by Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable and the Native Americans who welcomed him to their land, according to ABC 7 Chicago.