Chicago’s Streets Still Moving to America’s Historic Rhythms

By Ben Jealous — 

I started out this year, 2025, in Chicago, honored to give the Martin Luther King Day address at Reverend Jesse Jackson’s big gathering.

The timing was unforgettable. As I stepped to the podium on the South Side, Donald Trump was taking the oath of office in Washington, D.C. His inaugural speech was a drumbeat for a new era of hostility toward immigrants and people of color. Mine, at that very moment, was a call for Chicago’s Black middle class to choose solidarity with recent immigrants in resisting such hatred and violence.

That juxtaposition has stayed with me, and it came back into focus when I returned to Chicago more recently. This city has always been a stage for America’s great struggles. From the marchers for labor rights at Haymarket in the 1880s, to the rallies for civil rights in the 1960s, to the immigration raids and protests of this year, Chicago has a way of putting our unfinished business right in front of our eyes.

Walking its streets in 2025, I was reminded of the 1920s. Then, too, Chicago was alive with both promise and peril. Jazz poured from clubs in Bronzeville, poetry from the pens of the Harlem Renaissance, and industrial might from the stockyards. But alongside all that creativity came the sting of exclusion — Prohibition raids, gangland violence, and the rise of a Ku Klux Klan that, for a time, had as many members in Indiana as in Mississippi.

A century later, the echoes are unmistakable. Today, Chicago is once again in the headlines as federal agents sweep through immigrant neighborhoods, as protests spill onto Lake Shore Drive, as tensions around race, belonging, and identity bubble to the surface. And just as in the 1920s, the people in the streets are not simply “angry mobs” as the headlines often portray them. They are families fighting to be seen, communities demanding dignity, and young people refusing to inherit a broken status quo.

This is part of a longer American rhythm. Our centuries often rhyme decade by decade. The 1820s, for example, saw Andrew Jackson’s populist movement rise to power. It promised more democracy for white men, but it also unleashed brutal racism. Jackson’s appeal rested on dispossessing Native Americans through forced removal and fanning hostility toward Mexicans and free Black people. That brand of populism was intoxicating for some, but devastating for others. A hundred years later, the 1920s played a similar tune: new cultural freedoms for some, paired with an immigration crackdown and a Klan resurgence. And here we are, in the 2020s, facing our own battles over who truly belongs.

It is tempting to despair — to think the cycle means we are trapped. But history shows something else. The “20s” are turbulent, but they force the country to face its contradictions. The “30s” bring reckonings, the “40s” wars of ideas and arms, the “50s” fresh anxieties, the “60s” bursts of reform. And the “70s”? Oddly enough, the “70s” tend to be the decades when the nation exhales and reimagines itself.

The 1770s gave us the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The 1970s saw the end of the Vietnam War, the fall of Jim Crow, and the rise of new movements for women’s rights, environmental protection, and inclusion. If the pattern holds, the 2070s could be the moment when our grandchildren inherit a democracy closer to the promise in our founding documents.

Each American century moves to a similar rhythm. The “20s” are always turbulent — testing our patience and our faith. But they also call forth courage, creativity, and the determination to build something better.

As I tell my son, all the rising generations must do is make sure American democracy survives to the 2070s. After all, in America, the “70s” tend to be much better than the “20s.”

Ben Jealous is professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former national president and CEO of the NAACP.