To paraphrase Fred Hampton, Karen Lewis dared us to struggle — and dared us to win.

The death of Lewis, the former president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) who helped spark the ongoing teachers’ strike wave throughout the country, was announced today at the age of sixty-seven. Lewis was a black chemistry teacher from the South Side of Chicago. She was elected CTU president in 2010 as part of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) leadership slate, after CORE stood with black-led community organizations like the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization to fight against school closings, mass layoffs, and gentrification. Lewis’s leadership and vision turned the Chicago Teachers Union into one of the nation’s most democratic and militant unions, remade the political fabric of our city and nation, and touched hundreds of thousands of lives in the process.

The 2012 strike put tens of thousands of people in the streets of Chicago. At a time of austerity and widespread demonization of teachers, both in Chicago and around the country, the CTU walked off the job insisting that we deserved, and could actually win, schools and a city that served Chicago’s working class. The strike put black, Latinx, and working-class people, and a workforce that is overwhelmingly women, in the streets by the tens of thousands against a neoliberal mayor, Rahm Emanuel, to say that the schools and city belonged to us. Astonishingly, they won.