Courtroom 302

Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain extensive discussion of mass incarceration, systemic racism, and substance use disorders. They also touch on topics of sexual assault, domestic and child abuse, and hate crimes. This guide obscures the n-word when reproduced in quotes.

De facto segregation is distinct from the Jim Crow segregation of the early 20th-century American South in that it does not have an explicit basis in law. Instead, a network of largely extralegal policies including restrictive housing covenants and the practice of “redlining,” in which banks and other mortgage lenders refused to authorize mortgage loans in predominantly Black neighborhoods, leads to a system in which Black residents are forced to live apart from the rest of the city, often in conditions of economic precarity created by the same segregationist policies. For example, the scarcity of mortgage loans leaves Black families unable to build generational wealth by investing in property. As businesses pull out of Black communities, jobs become scarce. The resulting concentration of economically struggling families leads to underfunded schools. 

All the African American people convicted of crimes in Courtroom 302 were products of Chicago’s West and South Sides—sections of the city that have been affected by de facto segregation, resulting in a lack of job opportunities not in the drug trade.