Many had gray, short, but uncombed hair. Others wore �Sunday-church� wigs. The students, many suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes, had little by way of former education. They were grandparents sitting among the 30-somethings, high school drop outs, mostly women, with teenage children. Most all were Black.

The students came for basic literacy skills and GED preparation. Across the city the classrooms were filled to capacity. It was a new day, and a new mayor pushing for jobs and job training for the Black community.

Hope was more than a slogan - at least in Chicago.

Communities became urban areas where Black no longer lived but stayed, areas overlooked by the Old Daley - Richard J. Daley, areas where business owners, Black workers and residents receiving livable wages joined landlords in deserting urban apartment buildings for homes further south or further north. And whites fled even further to southern or northern suburban towns. Public schools deteriorated and remaining children, drifting and angered, fought to the death. These were areas where young drop outs dropped in abandoned buildings where they felt they belonged.

Then Harold said, Yes - and No to States� Attorney General Richard Daley Jr.

And Harold won!

Black alderman stood up straight and walked through the front doors of City Hall. Black residents called Harold to come and see the abandoned buildings and pot holes in the street. People looked up when they passed Harold�s Southside apartment, and grassroots public housing and neighborhood organizations visited with him in his office.

If you weren�t there, you don�t know. You don�t know how the days of Harold Washington, contentious, were nonetheless, for many, full of light. So, yes, adults filled these makeshift classrooms preparing for a second chance, until someone said Harold, ironically working on school board issues, put his head down on his desk and never rose up again. An indescribable pain was felt among a people, loved finally, but too briefly. Shocked? - It was the Daley�s again! The Daleys and the white democrats who voted for Harold�s republican opponent had never gone away. We turned out to see Harold one last time in 1987 as we had turned out in 1983 to see Harold at City Hall while the politicians at City Hall were jockeying to resume power.

In the post-Harold days and months, the adult students continued to come to newly created learning centers and newly formed accelerated �business colleges� now occupying floors in old buildings downtown. Placement personal handed them shiny brochures with photos of Black women happily typing at their office desks or a Black man smiling as he posed in a black business suit. At the end of 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 10 months, they�d see rainbows in the sky. But �job training� for poor and low-waged working Blacks attracted �entrepreneurs� eager to sign corporate contracts and receive local grant funding. Business colleges opened one day and closed the next. Black adults, many of whom hadn�t sat in a classroom for 20 or 30 years, became acquainted with the loan collector just weeks after their classroom doors closed.

Here�s a new formation of the old - the welcoming mat for the 2001 appearance of CEO/Public Schools, Arnie Duncan, and the militarization and privatization of the Chicago public schools - the restoration of old intentions, more immobile than ever before. But by then, it wasn�t just a matter of fly-by-night schools and programs.

�Structural racism�One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous �birdcage� metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape. (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.)

They say it began in 1972 when the first set of allegations surfaced against Chicago Police Detective Jon Burge and his men in Area Two. Predominantly Black, Area 2 is on the south side of Chicago. We are also told that Detective Burge received military training in torture during his tour in Vietnam. MP Burge knew the yellow people were guilty without question. Torture would have been a reasonable means of abstracting value information from the guilty.

Before encountering Vietnamese prisoners, Burge would have known about the guilty in America. Burge grew up in �an all-white postwar housing development on the southeast side� of Chicago (�Tools of Torture,� The Chicago Reader, February 2005). He would have known of Rev. Martin Luther King�s march through the southeast side and the greetings of rocks and bottles King and the marchers received courtesy of Burge�s neighbors. The first three allegations were followed by others charging Burge and his men with using electric shock to abstract valuable information.

Between 1973 and 1982 more Black men revealed they had been tortured. Detective Burge was promoted to Sergeant at Area 2 in 1977. More tortured Black men spoke up to judges, lawyers, and parole officers. But no one listened, and, in 1981, Burge was promoted to Lieutenant in the Violent Crime Unit, Area 2.

In 1981, Richard M. Daley becames States� Attorney of Cook County and serves in this position until 1988. The Chicago Police Superintendent is informed by the Director of the Office of Professional Standards about 11 cases of police abuse. It�s now 1984. Silence. In 1986, Burge is promoted to Commander of the Bomb and Arson Unit.

Torture continues under Burge�s supervision. One accuser testified on how Burge and his men operated:

Serving as a military policeman in the Mekong Delta, 1968-69, he �never heard of field phone interrogations� (�Tools of Torture�).

In his seven years as States� Attorney, Richard M. Daley refused to take action against Burge and his men and the allegations (55 now) kept coming, according to Human Rights at Home. But in 1989, roughly two years after the death of Harold Washington, Daley, campaigning on a �law and order� platform, becomes Mayor of Chicago.

In 1990, according to Human Rights at Home, the Office of Professional Standards files two separate reports after its investigation of the torture allegations. The Sander Report recommended to the Police Superintendent that Burge and his men be fired. The Goldston Report found the fifty cases of torture and abuse at Area 2 under Burge to be �systematic,� �methodical,� and �included psychological techniques and planned torture.� And while the Chicago City Council accepts testimony from �lawyers, experts, and community organizations� presenting evidence of �systematic torture� (Human Rights at Home), no action is taken against the torturers. But Daley Jr., Boss II, attacked the reports! Would Daley defend the right to torture if the victims were white citizens of Chicago?

The following year, Amnesty International issues a report and calls for an inquiry. This time, Daley, Boss II, opts to remain silent. In the meantime, it�s business as usual for Burge and his men. Burge presides over the torture of a 13-year old boy.

For Burge�s civilian company, there�s no fear of guilt in the practice of torture and abuse against African Americans just as there was no fear of recrimination for the use of torture, napalm, and outright massacre of village people in Vietnam.

Finally, in 1993, Burge is fired from the Chicago Police force - but, as Human Rights at Home reports, �the statute of limitations on the Burge torture cases precludes any prosecutions.�

Nonetheless, in January 2005, according to Human Rights at Home, �Federal Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood likened Area 2 torture to that of Abu Ghraib.� Judge Wood wrote:

In addition, Human Rights at Home reports that �Judge Wood�found that the practices of torture in Area 2 violated the U.N. Convention Against Torture.�

Behavior like that attributed to Burge imposes a huge cost on society: it creates distrust of the police generally, despite the fact that most police officers would abhor such tactics, and it creates a cloud over even the valid convictions in which the problem officer played a role. Indeed, the alleged conduct is so extreme that, if proven, it would fall within the prohibitions established by the United Nations Convention Against Torture (�CAT�), which defines torture as �any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession . . .,� thereby violating the fundamental human rights principles that the United States is committed to uphold.

In 2004, Burge and more than 30 Area 2 detectives and supervisors invoke �the constitutional right against self-incrimination on each and every allegation of torture when they are questioned at depositions.� (Burge and his men were not tortured).

In the same year, Black police officers came forward and testified about Burge�s �shock box.� Why did these Black men (possibly women too) withhold valuable information regarding the torture of their fellow citizens, brothers? Why did the supposedly �equal� and not separate Black officers remain silent almost 30 years? Why did they collaborate?

Burge received a 3, 400 a month pension in Florida. Heck of a job, Burge!

The Black victims and Black officers are speaking up, while looking over their shoulders because Commander Burge, charged with perjury for lying about torturing Black men and obstruction of justice, is defending himself in a trial that is expected to last 6 weeks. He could serve 45 years in prison, if found guilty. But who in the U.S. forgets that Burge and his gang are members of the fundamental special interest group in the U.S., the group most protected by the criminal justice system.

I think about that brief time when a people, as members of the majority, rose up, when a mayor challenged the structural facilitators of injustice in Chicago. I think of the odds against him, against the Black community, against those many who came to fill those classrooms with hopes of taking their rightful place as enlightened and productive citizens.

Instead, it�s not hard to recognize that the statute of limitations has yet to end the systemic betrayal and abuse of Black Americans. Years after the Civil Rights era, the public consensus on racial injustice in the U.S. is cased in terms that sound as if the speaker is addressing the issue. While privilege, acknowledged painlessly, is offered as the most valuable information for the tortured minority. Masters and minions! Yes, Sir! Yes, Master!

What are the intentions of privileged speakers in terms of seeking a more democratic representation of humanity if, in their acknowledgement of racial injustice, they also acknowledge a partial reality (white privilege) along with a wished-for reality (colored minorities)? The evidence of miseducation, persistent unemployment, high incarceration rates, and torture experienced in disproportionate numbers among Black Americans points to a systemic program designed to eliminate the victims of injustice rather than injustice.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.