Building a Social Work for Social Movements
What Movement Lawyering and the Chicago Reparations Case Can Teach Us
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18060/28873Keywords:
Community organizing, Social movements, Social change, Social work practice, Movement lawyering, SolidarityAbstract
On May 6, 2015, Chicago became the first city in the United States to make formal reparations to the victims of racist law enforcement (Hayes & Kaba, 2023). The Chicago Reparations Ordinance sought to systematically address the unspeakable violence perpetrated by Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and his crew of fellow white detectives who, from 1972 to 1991, tortured more than 120 predominantly Black men and women while in custody. The reparations ordinance was a legal and cultural win, achieved through a collaborative, creative, solidarity-based relationship between torture survivors, community members, and movement lawyers. As longtime organizers and social workers, we find the approach of movement lawyering to be a particularly useful framework for thinking through how social workers can better contribute to progressive social movements. In this paper, we: (1) define movement lawyering, clarify how it differs from traditional legal practice, and describe its ethos and tactics as demonstrated during the Chicago Reparations Ordinance case; (2) reveal how the political and social realities that stimulated “movement lawyering” are the same realities calling for “movement social-working”; and (3) offer a conceptual structure for “movement social-working” based on our analysis of the social-change levers of movement lawyering.
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