Banging at the Door:

Twenty Years of Activism that put Jon Burge Behind Bars

In my undergraduate work at DePaul University, I was passionate and active in my History concentration, completing two capstone research projects. For the second, I focused on the Chicago Police Department’s torture scandal of the 1970s and 1980s. By using newspaper articles, legal documents, and collecting oral histories, I documented the two decades long attempt by lawyers, citizen activists, and journalists to address police torture, showing the work of these lawyers and activists raised the specter of this torture and cover-up, eventually leading to a federal perjury conviction. “Banging at the Door: Twenty Years of Activism that Put Jon Burge Behind Bars,” won the award for best advanced undergraduate paper and was published in DePaul’s journal of undergraduate research, Creating Knowledge, in 2014. This is the first historical analysis of the subject.

The full paper is available here.