Remarks of AFT President Randi Weingarten at the Funeral of Karen Lewis
Karen Lewis was a force of nature. She embodied the values of public education and unionism and led fiercely, with courage, conviction, wit, humor, spice, smarts and love.
I am the one who is supposed to talk about her national impact, and I will. But I want to start with love.
Anyone who spent time with her knew she loved deeply. She loved John and he loved her. You saw it in how they looked at each other. She loved kids. If kids, particularly kids of people she knew, were in her line of sight, even at a rally or a march, she would stop and just start chatting.
I remember being at a school visit with her, and a colleague who had been her student started telling Karen stories. She roared. It struck me then how loved he felt by her. She loved Audrey. She loved Jesse and Stacy and so many of her colleagues and friends.
Frankly, you knew she thought you could handle her love if she gave you a nickname. Robert, I didn’t know your first name was Robert for a long time — I thought it was Block as she always called you Block. One of our colleagues, Mark Richard, was Mr. Wolf, the Harvey Keitel fixer figure in Pulp Fiction. I was mom, even though she was older.
And she loved our members. She understood how disrespected they were, not just by CPS [Chicago Public Schools], but by the greater powers that be. And they felt loved, and they trusted that love.
But it was more than love when it came to our members and to collective bargaining. Karen understood that to really transform children’s lives and fight for public education, educators needed the empowerment, respect and collective power of the union.
Karen built a movement that enabled agency and empowerment. Not alone — that is the point. The fight for dignity and respect, to be successful, had to become our collective fight for each other. During the 2012 strike and the lead up to it, the members knew Karen Lewis had their back, but more importantly they learned that collectively they could accomplish more than any of us could do alone. Solidarity and unity weren’t just words or slogans, they were lived values. The same with respect and dignity.
And that strike was riveting to every educator in America. It gave them hope and pride. And taught the lesson that you needed power, not individual power but collective power, to change things. Because the power elite would not yield power willingly. And the power elite had attacked public education mercilessly.
It was a time when public education was under attack by austerity hawks and privatizers, when the corporate Democrats and the privatizers seem to conspire to defund public education, subject it to competition instead of support, reduce kids to test scores and educators to algorithms. Like those who were foundational in forming the early industrial, textile and teacher unions, Karen understood change doesn’t happen without building a movement and bringing educators, families and communities together to fight together for public education, for educational and economic opportunity, for economic and racial justice.
Lots of people can articulate this theory of action. Few can catalyze the movement needed to translate theory into action, and into long-term transformation. Karen could. And in that work Karen and her colleagues at CTU [Chicago Teachers Union] were foundational to the teacher activism in America over this last decade. Red for Ed and Fund Our Future started on the streets of Chicago, and now we have a president who ran on tripling Title I.
Karen’s leadership built CTU into that powerhouse that secured the dignity and power educators need here in Chicago. That power was, yes, built through her leadership and style — her searing wit and desire to make change, her ability to strategize and organize, and her inability to suffer fools. Just ask Rahm Emanuel about that. And that power was built through CTU members and Karen’s unyielding belief in a deeply democratic union, and through Karen and her colleagues’ equally unyielding belief in community coalitions.
Like Jackie Vaughn before her, another iconic leader of the CTU whom Karen loved, Karen helped our members believe in themselves. Her courage gave them courage to stand up to the bullying and disrespect often heaped on educators.
She understood and taught that together we can do what is impossible to accomplish alone. And she practiced what she preached, which is why Local 1’s core strength remains its solidarity and its commitment to the democratic process.
To change public education in Chicago you had to first change Chicago. And we saw that with the historic 2012 strike. Chicago changed because of Karen. And the tributes this week show that Chicago has been changed.
For so many of us, Karen was more than a colleague, more than a science teacher, and more than a local president and an AFT vice president. She was a friend, a soulmate and a sister. I treasured Karen’s love, and I remember the first time I met with her and her leadership team. She invited me to Chicago, and Mark and I got on a plane. And rather than meet in an office or restaurant, she invited us to her home, to meet with her and her team over Chinese food. It was the first of countless conversations — at all times, day and night.
I don’t know when she started calling me mom. But I chuckled every time she did. Initially I thought, oh my God, am I the good mom or the bad mom?
But I soon realized it was about the deep respect we had for each other — even though we had very different styles — and we were joined at the soul through our values and the leaders who walked in our shoes before us. We had each other’s back. And I learned from her as much as she learned from me. She made me think, she made me laugh, she made me a better leader, a better listener, and her courage and compassion both before and during her long struggle with cancer was a profound inspiration for what it means to fight.
We would talk endlessly about Jackie Vaughn and Sandy Feldman and their friendship and fierceness in the fight for children and our members. And of course we would tease about Local 1 and Local 2. Chicago, of course, was Local 1 and New York City, my local, of course, was Local 2.
Before it was cool for our members to run for office, Karen seriously explored running for mayor. And it wasn’t simply the joy she felt about giving Rahm the run of his lifetime. In our conversations about it, it was clear how deeply she had thought about how to change Chicago, how the lived experience of Black and brown communities had been so brutalized — the food and hospital and school deserts in Black and brown communities, made worse by the closing of the 50 schools Rahm championed.
I watched the respect and pride our colleagues on the Executive Council had when I asked Karen to talk to them about her potential run and the need for seed funding. And for the first time ever, the AFT committed to a million dollars as seed money for our sister Karen, to take on the wealthy and powerful in Chicago. And but for a stroke and cancer, no doubt we would be here mourning Mayor Lewis.
Beyond the labor and political leader, there was also the woman who loved opera and tennis and books. The woman who had an amazing sense of humor. Karen Lewis was a true renaissance woman.
And finally there was Judaism. I am a Jew by birth; she was a Jew by choice. And she was comfortable with scripture and the complexities of our faith. It touched her soul. It spoke to her sense of justice, zedek, and of repairing the world, tikkun olam. I wanted to meet this rabbi of hers, Rabbi Gertel. And I wanted to see this sanctuary of hers, this shul of hers.
Then when I told her I was dating a rabbi, she was absolutely gleeful and teased me incessantly. I remember her laugh when I told her I went to Purim services. And as I spent more and more time with Sharon when I was in New York, I often wondered when Karen and I spoke at night whether she wanted to chat with me or Sharon. The completely confident Karen very much wanted Sharon’s thinking when it came to thinking about Torah and particularly her bat mitzvah parsha. And we were so glad when Sharon and I were able to celebrate her adult bat mitzvah with her. We only wished she and John could have celebrated our wedding.
On behalf of all the AFT’s members, I send Karen’s family and loved ones my deepest sympathies and join them in cherishing a life well lived. May her memory forever be a blessing.
