STACY DAVIS GATES WON’T BACK DOWN
It was the final day of Black History Month and Stacy Davis Gates needed to be in three places at once.
The Chicago Teachers Union’s monthly executive board meeting was scheduled at the same time as its Jammin’ for PEACE celebration, which overlapped with a group of Nicholson STEM Academy teachers gathering virtually with their union delegate to talk pedagogy, burnout, and whatever else needed airing — a discussion Gates had promised to attend.
A few minutes past 6 p.m., with the board meeting streaming on her iPhone, Gates walked through the refurbished warehouse in West Town that serves as the union’s headquarters and into the Jacqueline B. Vaughn Hall, named for first African American woman to lead the CTU. Tara Stamps, a CTU administrator and daughter of the late community activist Marion Nzinga Stamps, was onstage introducing the Jammin’ for PEACE speakers and performers. The crowd of 50 or so strong stood for “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Stamps turned her attention to Gates. “Whenever I see our sister, you know who I see?” Stamps called out. “I see 10, 20, 30, 45, 100 little brown girls that look just like her. So we got next. We got next because there’s a Stacy Gates.”
The air crackled with applause. Gates took the stage.
IN GATES’S OFFICE AT CTU HEADQUARters, a “Notorious SDG” print with her likeness hangs above her desk — a riff on those “Notorious RBG” prints that were ubiquitous for a while. A union member made it for her.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m living my life as a spectator,” says Gates, the union’s vice president and heir apparent. “I’m not the caricature in the letters to the editor.” But caricatures are easier to digest — and dismiss — than the deficits and disinvestments plaguing public schools. “The problems are complex. They’re embedded in our American history. And I think because of that, it’s easier for people to extract characters and focus on them. Because focusing on the actual context and the thing? It depresses you. It makes you angry. And it also is paralyzing, because you’re trying to make sense out of nonsense.”
The public face of Chicago’s teachers, who stand squarely at the center of the country’s labor movement and culture wars, Gates, 45, is an unflinching critic of Mayor Lori Lightfoot and a fierce opponent of attempts to privatize public education. And now, after CTU president Jesse Sharkey announced in February that he wouldn’t seek re-election, she is primed to take over the top slot at what is arguably the nation’s most powerful teachers’ union.
Unless, that is, she is somehow beaten out in the May 20 election by a dissenting caucus of Chicago Public Schools employees called Members First. When the group first challenged the union’s current administration three years ago, Sharkey won reelection handily, with two-thirds of the vote. “I don’t intend to lose,” Gates tells me.
Gates is revered and resented in equal parts — or at least at
