Chicago Police Torture Survivors Break Ground On Monument: ‘More Work To Do’

WASHINGTON PARK — Mearon Diggins met his wife nearly four decades ago. He remains unable to share with her the full details of his experience being tortured by Chicago police officers in the 1980s.

“I haven’t been able to talk on this, because I get emotional,” said Diggins, who was tortured for two days by officers under Cmdr. Jon Burge. “The word, I think, is repressed. I had repressed my memories about what had happened.”

Therapy and a bond with his “brothers” — fellow survivors of Burge and his subordinates known as the “Midnight Crew” — have helped Diggins on his healing journey, he said. That journey reached a new, public milestone this week, as survivors gathered to celebrate the groundbreaking of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial that was promised to them more than a decade ago.

The memorial — a blend of public art, education, reflection and movement-building guaranteed within a 2015 reparations package — broke ground Wednesday at 5520 S. King Drive in Washington Park, with plans for its completion by early next year.

“This memorial is about more than remembering the past,” said Gregory Banks, a member of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Foundation and a survivor of beatings, suffocation and racial epithets inflicted on him by officers who extracted his confession in 1983.

“It’s about educating future generations, honoring those who survived and inspiring people to stand up against injustice wherever they see it.”

The memorial includes a monument with a timeline charting the history of racist police abuse as well as the advocacy, litigation, legislation and journalism that culminated in the city’s reparations to survivors.

Pathways will extend outward across the memorial site, which also includes a pollinator garden and quotes from survivors and their families. Community areas will be available for programs like hands-on lessons for Chicago Public Schools students — for whom learning the history of police torture is a requirement.

The monument’s spiral shape reflects survivor Stanley Howard‘s description of torture as a “vortex” that pulled him in and spat him back out, said Jen Ash, executive director of the memorials foundation. It also recalls the Zapatista caracoles of Chiapas, Mexico and inverts the concept of a panopticon, Ash said.

From 1972-1991, former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his subordinates used violent tactics including electric shock, suffocation, beatings and mock executions to extract confessions at the Area 2 and Area 3 police headquarters on the South Side.

Burge was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. While he spent more than four years in prison for obstruction of justice and perjury convictions, he was never charged for the torture itself. He died in 2018.

The torture was a form of “terrorism” that sought to “dehumanize [survivors], break their will and force them to confess,” said Joey Mogul, a civil rights attorney and co-founder of the memorials foundation.

“Those confessions were then used in their criminal cases against them to secure their convictions, lengthy prison sentences — and in the case of 11, the death penalty.”

City Council passed reparations legislation sponsored by former Alds. Proco Joe Moreno and Howard Brookins in May 2015.

The package passed by City Council included a $5.5 million reparations fund as well as assistance like free college tuition and counseling services for survivors, a requirement for CPS to teach the torture cases in middle and high school history classes and the development of the Chicago Torture Justice Center.

Eleven years later, the memorial remains the legislation’s final unfulfilled requirement. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration failed to allocate funding to the memorial for four years before he left office in 2019, while Mayor Lori Lightfoot did not follow her transition committee’s recommendation to fund the memorial during her first 100 days in office.

Johnson announced in 2023 that the city would commit $1 million to the memorial, complementing a $1.8 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. Other funds allotted to the $4.7 million project include $280,000 from the city’s planning department.

“With this memorial, the city of Chicago upholds its responsibility to tell the truth about Jon Burge, what he did and the lasting harm of his abuses that were inflicted on the entire city,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said at Wednesday’s groundbreaking.

“There is still more work to do,” including housing, education, health and economic policies that have harmed Black and Brown communities, the mayor said.

“The memorial is the visible result,” Ash said. “The movement is what built it.”

The Chicago Torture Justice Memorial’s groundbreaking and eventual opening offer joy to Diggins, but he must also navigate the pain they arouse.

“I never want to come back up,” he said, referring to the city that reminds him of his trauma. So aside from foundation events and activities, he spends as little time in Chicago as he can, he said.

However, following this week’s groundbreaking, Diggins does have at least one return trip planned. He’ll bring his loved ones together on the memorial site once its complete and, for the first time, try to find some release by sharing his full story with them.

The memorial “finally validates what I’ve been saying all along — what all of us brothers have been saying all along — that we were tortured by a racist police department,” Diggins said.