When the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) reform caucus, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), started out in 2008, we were like an exhibition team entering a league where one powerhouse team dominated the landscape for over half a century. We were serious underdogs, a ragtag team of teacher activists running against a deeply entrenched union leadership that had refused to wage a real fight against the forces of free-market education reformers that were ravaging our public schools. Jesse Sharkey, the CTU’s current president and then delegate of Senn High School, began to strike up conversations with Karen Lewis, a delegate from King College Prep High School. Jesse recruited Karen to CORE — who proceeded to change the course of history for the CTU, the city, and the country.

Karen, whose death was announced on Monday at age sixty-seven, added the gravitas of a Chicago Public Schools (CPS) veteran to team CORE. She graduated from Kenwood Academy High School, a famous CPS school, grew up in the black middle class on the South Side, daughter of two CPS teachers. As a result, she knew the system and the city better than any of us. Karen and her husband, John Lewis, met at Lane Tech College Prep High School as black teachers sent to integrate a school with a predominantly white staff under a desegregation decree from the district. At Lane, she cut her teeth as a union delegate, breaking ranks with the union’s incumbent leadership and joining the Executive Board after Debby Lynch unexpectedly won the union presidency in 2001 as the head of a dissident caucus, Proactive Teachers, for the first time in the union’s seventy-year history.

Karen was by all accounts a renaissance woman: a thespian, comedian, scientist, close reader of the Talmud, former doctor-in-training, chemistry teacher, pianist, linguist, a lover, and a fighter. On more than one occasion, Karen told the story of taking off her earrings and lathering on some vaseline to brawl with our class enemies. Subtle, she was not. Inspiring, without a doubt.