Karen Lewis, the woman credited with resurrecting the Chicago Teachers Union and helping to revive teacher unions across the country, has died.
“Karen did not just lead our movement. Karen was our movement,” the union said in a statement. “She bowed to no one, and gave strength to tens of thousands of Chicago Teachers Union educators who followed her lead, and who live by her principles to this day.”
Lewis rose to prominence in 2012, when she led the first teachers strike in Chicago in 25 years — a walkout many say inspired a wave of teacher activism and the beginning of the Red for Ed, the national movement in which teachers went on strike to demand better pay and working conditions.
The 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike showed teachers they could take on the powerful and win.
Lewis served as president of the CTU from 2010 to 2018, when she resigned due to health issues. She was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2014. She was 67 years old. Her death was confirmed by the union.
Lewis was born on July 26, 1953. A proud daughter of Chicago Public School teachers, she went to Kenwood Academy in Hyde Park on the South Side. She left her junior year to go to Mount Holyoke College and then transferred to Dartmouth College. She said she was the only African American woman in Dartmouth’s graduating class of 1974.
Before becoming president of the teachers union, she was a chemistry teacher in Chicago Public Schools for more than 20 years.
Lewis is remembered as being passionate and outspoken, but also highly intelligent, wildly funny and warm, and someone who always recalled details about people’s lives and asked about them.
“She had a boisterous love of life and she made people feel seen,” said Jackson Potter, a friend and one of the founders of Lewis’ union caucus, called CORE. “Though she was childless, she felt like all the babies in the world were her children.” CONTINUE READING: Karen Lewis, Chicago Union Leader Who Set Off A Wave Of Teacher Activism, Dies | WBEZ Chicago
