This site is part of a project Dr. Tariq Khan’s undergraduate students in the course HIST 386: Public History: Policing in the United States took part in at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Spring 2022 semester. The course was a critical examination of the development of policing in the United States from its violent origins in slave patrols, “frontier” ethnic cleansing, border control, and industrial labor control to the present. Students explored this topic through global, national, and local lenses, learning to recognize how U.S. policing, as well as “publics” and “communities” emerged from a combination of local, national and global histories. This course utilized a community-based research and teaching model as part of the Humanities Research Lab, with funding and support from the Humanities Research Institute, The Department of History, and the Office of Undergraduate Research. This means that in addition to standard classroom learning, students engaged in “hands on” historical research and learning in connection with local communities off campus, toward contributing solutions to build healthier communities.
Over the semester, the classroom (both the physical classroom and the virtual classroom, as COVID precautions were in force) was visited by community organizers experienced in building “power from below” and other experts in community-based research from near and far. As part of their community-based learning, students were fortunate to be able to collaborate on a project with the Champaign-based organization First Followers. First Followers is a reentry program founded and run by formerly-incarcerated people. They provide services and guidance to those impacted by the criminal justice system. Their advocacy and outreach initiatives aim to build healthy relationships that positively impact communities. First Followers also works to find non-carceral solutions to social problems. They suggested that the students work on a project to help illuminate some of the historical, structural, and social causes underlying the recent surge in community violence.
In response to incidences of gun violence, some local leaders have fallen prey to fear-based, knee-jerk reactions such as calling for increased surveillance and policing in poor and Black neighborhoods. Through historical study in the classroom and through listening to members of impacted communities, students learned about how the recent gun violence is a product of historical/systemic inequality and systemic racism. They learned about the relationship between the violence and the city’s economic neglect of certain neighborhoods, and the histories of economic and racial injustice that are the context for that neglect. In researching these kinds of connections, students in collaboration with members of First Followers began to explore the root causes of the violence with the aim of humbly aiding the community in making historically-informed decisions about how to best approach the problem of gun violence.
There were 18 students, and one Undergraduate Assistant, involved in the project. They split into five groups, with each group taking on a different aspect of the project. This site encapsulates some of the important work these engaged, sincere, diligent students undertook during the semester.
Below: video of James Kilgore of First Followers introducing the project at its launch celebration on May 5, 2022.