Above Photo: From PopularResistance.org.
Chicago, IL – The Chicago protesters who stormed the streets Wednesday calling for a city government overhaul were triggered by an unlikely source: A New York University freshman who made a fake Facebook page from her dorm.
“I really didn’t think I’d have anything to do with this,” Rachel Brown, an 18-year-old film student, told the Daily News Thursday.
“I’ve literally been in my dorm doing my homework this whole time.”
Brown said she was battling laryngitis and stressing over finals earlier this week when she created a seemingly incendiary Facebook event.
“CITYWIDE WALKOUT! rahm emanuel and anita alvarez’s resignation party!” the page said.
“The protesters refuse to accept Mayor Emanuel’s attempts to placate the public in the aftermath of disclosures about the Mayor’s Office’s suppression of public release of information of the police murdering Laquan McDonald.”
The page seemed dead serious. Brown herself? Sort of.
Having grown up in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, Brown said her beef with Emanuel is very real. She said she’s resented the mayor ever since he oversaw, in 2013, the largest school closure in the city’s history.
Her real rage came, though, after watching the long-delayed video last month of Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times.
“It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen,” she told the News.
“It was sad that people in Chicago didn’t even understand what was happening in Chicago until then.”
FACEBOOKNearly 3,000 people accepted the invite to the event page Rachel Brown made in her dorm.
Plenty of Chicagoans agreed, with hundreds immediately protesting on the day the video came out. So too did the Justice Department, which announced a federal probe into the city’s police department.
Brown said she hasn’t been back home for more than two months — but could still relate to the rising rage. So she made her Facebook page —while “in bed, like usual,” she said —telling people to meet Wednesday at noon outside the city’s central civic center.
She invited “tons of people” and expected it to bounce around the web as a viral “joke,” she said.
But the thousands who accepted the Facebook invite translated to furious masses in the streets. Several well-connected Chicagoans, including musician David Beltran, asked Brown to help administer the page and promote the protest, the Chicago Reader reported.
Rachel Brown’s fake Facebook page calling for the resignation of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez led to real-world action.
It lead to rallies for Emanuel’s recall Wednesday that earned national attention. Few were appeased by the mayor’s 40-minute apology and vow for change.
The same day, Illinois State Rep. La Shawn Ford filed a bill to create a recall election.
As all of this happened, Brown was in her dorm —sleeping.
“I caught up on everything afterward,” she said.
After her unwitting upheaval, she’s hoping to see serious shakeups in her city the next time she’s home.
“I felt great,” she said about the real-world rally.
“I was surprised, but I’m happy there could be some real change. I might live in New York, but Chicago’s still my home.”
But she won’t be back there for another two weeks, she said. First, she has to finish her finals.