In 2006, more than 1,000 teenagers in Aurora walked out of their classrooms, protesting legislation aimed at tightening the United States’ borders and punishing undocumented immigrants and those who help them.
Then, just shy of two decades later, Aurora high school students took to the streets again — several times.
The stories of these protests and others across Illinois are currently being featured in an online display from the Aurora Public Library, called “Campus Protests in the Land of Lincoln,” which features newspaper clippings dating back as far as 1936 looking at the history of student activism in Aurora, and Illinois generally.
And the library exhibit, which was on display in the fall, has recently been updated online to incorporate these recent additions to Aurora’s history of student protests.
This past month, Aurora-area students have staged several walkouts in protest of President Donald Trump’s administration’s continued mass deportation campaign, part of a string of similar actions across Chicago and its suburbs.
The federal immigration crackdown in Chicago and the suburbs, which led to the detention of thousands, prompted resistance and solidarity by residents from all walks of life in recent months — from documenting detentions and the actions of federal agents to delivering candy on Halloween to those who didn’t feel safe enough to go door to door amid the immigration crackdown.
But lately, student walkouts have been taking hold in a number of communities in and around Chicago after ICE involvement in Minneapolis has garnered national attention, especially following the recent deaths of two American citizens who were shot and killed by federal immigration officers. Students have walked out in Chicago, in Aurora, in Naperville and Waukegan.
In Aurora, the walkouts began on Feb. 3, when dozens of East Aurora High School students left their classes and walked through downtown Aurora.
Aurora students walked out again on Feb. 9, and then again later that week as part of a coordinated national student action.
These walkouts, however, follow a tradition of similar student actions in the city and across the state, the Aurora Public Library display shows. The display looks at student actions as far back as a 1936 protest, when dozens of North Central College students protested the firing of a student secretary.
It also looks at more recent history, like the 2006 protest by Aurora students of a federal immigration bill that prompted protests across the country, and a 2018 anti-gun violence protest by West Aurora students in the wake of the Parkland shooting in Florida that left 17 people dead.
Connection to national actions and to national issues is a common theme of the local protests, said Ethan Mikolay, the Aurora Public Library librarian who put together the display.
“When things go on in our community, a lot of times it’s a direct response to, or it’s a direct reaction to, stuff that’s happening around the country,” Mikolay said. “It wasn’t just students in Aurora protesting, it was students around the country protesting, and Aurora was just a part of that broader movement.”
Mikolay said his work at the library includes helping community members sort through yearbooks, city directories, the library’s genealogy collection and local newspaper microfilm — for which he helps individuals locate obituaries, birth announcements and articles.
“Because of that, I’m always coming across headlines and stories, from anywhere from the 1850s to the 1960s, that sound like they could have been ripped straight out of today’s headlines,” Mikolay said.
He said the library is always looking for ways to showcase its collection and provide the community with “historical context about things they’re reading about in the news.”
So, last year, Mikolay found himself reading about student protests in the news, and said he wanted to find a way to tie it into the library’s collection.
That ultimately led to the display, which went up at the library in September.
Mikolay said that the library typically mirrors its in-person displays with a digital version, and it just so happened that the digital display on the student protests was still up when the February walkouts sprang up.
“I was like, ‘OK, this might be a good opportunity, then, to just kind of add a little update,’” he recalled.
So the library added a portion to the existing online display reflecting the recent anti-ICE student walkouts, in hopes of encouraging people to look at it and learn more about the history behind the local protests.
Another common theme Mikolay noted was that student organizing isn’t limited to college protests, although university activism perhaps gets more national attention.
The protests described in the display include several actions from high school students — including the recent walkouts in Aurora.
“I was noticing examples of professors protesting and high school students protesting, so that (the display) just kind of naturally developed and naturally changed to be more about that idea of it being not exclusive to college students,” Mikolay said. “It’s a phenomenon that’s been going on in the whole country since … the creation of the country. And, also in Illinois, it’s been a thing for a long time.”
As for Aurora’s place in this wider set of actions, Mayor John Laesch noted that he himself was part of past activism long before he was leading the city.
Laesch said his “first steps into the political arena” included participating in an immigration march in 2005, shortly before the student protest described in the library display.
But, in many ways, the issue has remained, according to Laesch. He said most politicians “don’t want to deal with divisive issues or take a stand,” which has led to the U.S. having “a broken immigration system.”
“If you think about it … things haven’t changed at the federal level at all,” Laesch said.
Now, with the recent protests going on, Laesch said his focus is on ensuring that local residents are able to speak out about the issues they’re concerned about, while making sure demonstrations remain peaceful.
“We’re living through contentious times,” Laesch said on Wednesday. “And those people who oppose what’s happening at (the) federal, state or local level are exercising their First Amendment rights to speak out, walk out, peaceably assemble.”
For now, the display will remain on the library’s website, but Mikolay noted that it will eventually get replaced by its next display, though he plans to keep the file around and potentially continue adding to it as more developments occur.
And he hopes that efforts like these on the part of the library can continue to help people learn more about what they read in the news every day.
“People don’t always turn to the library for breaking news or even to … fact-check stuff, because there are plenty of other resources out there that people can turn to,” Mikolay said. “But I feel like it’s our role as librarians to help people contextualize what they’re reading.”
And the way to do that, he thinks, is to “look backwards and look into the past.”
Still, it can be challenging to convince people that “you can’t find everything online,” he added.
“As much as it feels like all of the world’s information is easily accessible, a lot of it is still locked behind microfilm, for example,” Mikolay said, pointing to local newspaper archives the library has that aren’t digitized.
But he emphasized that the library wants to help the community access historical documents and contextualize what’s going on around them.
“If you do need to find anything that requires more than a Google search,” Mikolay said, “we’re here, we have all those resources available.”
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com
