Statement on 2026 marquette park march
They Call Themselves a Nation:
Statement from the Jeff Fort Legal and Advocacy Team in Support of The Fierce Urgency of Now: A National March into Marquette Park on the First Day of Black August
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 31, 2026
The Jeff Fort Legal and Advocacy Team stands in support of The Fierce Urgency of Now: A National March into Marquette Park, and joins the call to honor the unfinished work of the Chicago Freedom Movement. On the first day of Black August, August 1, 2026, thousands are expected to gather in Chicago for a multi-faith, multicultural public witness commemorating the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Chicago Freedom Movement’s march into Marquette Park. The march begins at 63rd and Kedzie and proceeds to Marquette Park, linking the unfinished work of 1966 to present struggles over voting rights, criminalization, detention, economic inequality, immigrant rights, dignity, justice, and shared humanity.
Black August is a sacred period of remembrance, discipline, and recommitment to Black liberation. It calls us to remember Black freedom fighters, political prisoners, prisoners of war, and all those who have suffered, resisted, organized, and sacrificed in the struggle for freedom. To march into Marquette Park on August 1 is therefore not only to commemorate 1966. It is a symbolic beginning to Black August by remembering the long tradition of Black resistance, including those whose organizing was met with surveillance, imprisonment, exile, and death.
As we support this historic march, we also call for public awareness of Mr. Jeff Fort, also known as Imam Malik, and his place in the fuller history of Chicago’s Black freedom struggle. That history cannot be reduced to a simple division between respectable civil-rights leadership and criminalized street organizations. Professor Jeanne Theoharis’s 2026 article reminds us that Dr. King’s Chicago work included sustained engagement with young people whom politicians, police, media, and even some movement actors had written off. Theoharis writes that King “listened and worked to cultivate the leadership of young people, even the most criminalized,” and brought young people into the Black freedom struggle.
Mr. Fort’s role belongs in that history. Theoharis reports that Fort told her King saw “wealth” in the numbers of young people affiliated with street organizations and in how organized they were. According to Fort, King’s goals were to “change how the government was treating his black and poor people” and “to change the violence that black people were inflicting upon themselves.” Public campaign materials describe Mr. Fort as having worked with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to advocate for poverty eradication and equity in jobs in Chicago.
This is also part of the Marquette Park story. On August 5, 1966, Dr. King attempted to lead approximately 700 marchers through Marquette Park and Gage Park to a real estate office on 63rd Street, where marchers were confronted by several thousand white counter-protestors displaying Confederate flags and swastikas and attacking with bricks, bottles, and cherry bombs. During that march, Dr. King was struck in the head with a rock and later said he had never seen mobs as hostile and hate-filled, even in Mississippi and Alabama, as he saw in Chicago. Theoharis recounts that street organization members participated in the open-housing marches from the beginning, many serving as marshals, and that cross-street organization coordination helped produce a temporary truce in Chicago. After Dr. King was struck, Theoharis writes that Jeff Fort called a meeting of the Rangers’ Main 21 because they were tired of being targets of violence and had seen themselves as King’s guardians.
The role of so-called street organizations in political organizing remains little understood. This is especially true when we consider the next wave of political prisoners, including Mr. Fort, who followed Black liberation leaders, American Indian Movement leaders, and other liberation movements into the crosshairs of state surveillance, prosecution, and long-term imprisonment. These street organizers were not merely a social problem to be managed. In Chicago, they were part of a contested political landscape: young people responding to segregation, job exclusion, police violence, and organized racial terror while attempting to consolidate community power.
Theoharis describes the Turfmasters summit as an effort to build a political front to end violence among street-organizations and turn young people’s energy toward community needs and the civil-rights struggle. Theoharis further recounts that the summit produced committees on housing, health, education, employment, welfare, and recreation, with two members of every street organization on each committee.
Since the time of slavery, Black organization and collective power have been criminalized. The issue has never truly been violence versus nonviolence. Oppressive systems have resisted Black organization itself: the gathering of people, the development of leadership, the building of institutions, the creation of discipline, and the consolidation of economic, political, and spiritual power. Whether Black people organized through churches, civil-rights organizations, labor formations, liberation movements, mutual aid networks, street organizations, or other community structures, the response from systems of domination has too often been surveillance, disruption, prosecution, imprisonment, or assassination. The target was not merely a tactic. The target was power.
The Honorable Minister Farrakhan commented on Larry Hoover, Jeff Fort, political prisoner Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, and the U.S. Government’s fear of Black youth organizing for liberation. That conclusion helps illuminate why Dr. King’s work with young street organizers in Chicago was not incidental to the movement. It was part of the work.
Dr. King and Mr. Fort were two very different men. Theoharis reports that Fort emphasized King’s attentiveness as a listener, King’s commitment to stand up for “all those who were oppressed,” and King’s courage, calling him “A warrior without a gun.” Their methods, philosophies, and lives were different. But those differences should not obscure the shared lesson of their histories: civil-rights organizers and street organizers were targeted when their work threatened to consolidate Black power, build community discipline, and challenge the structures that kept Black communities poor, policed, segregated, and powerless.
Dr. King was targeted for challenging segregation, poverty, police violence, and the political economy of racial oppression. Mr. Fort and other street organizers were targeted when their organizing began building cross-organization peace, demanding jobs, and converting street influence into community leverage. Theoharis describes how, after street organization violence dropped in part because of politicization, Mayor Daley, police, and prosecutors declared a war on street organizations, with police arresting organization members, sabotaging alliances, feeding information to the press, and working with the FBI to undermine political work.
Mr. Fort is a political prisoner. To this very day, at nearly 80 years old and in ailing health, he remains confined at USP Florence ADMAX, the most restrictive prison in the United States, after decades of incarceration on a disproportionately long sentence. Public campaign materials state that Mr. Fort is 79 years old, worked with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to advocate for poverty eradication and equity in jobs in Chicago, has been incarcerated since 1981, and was transferred to ADX Florence in 2006. He has spent nearly two decades in extreme solitary confinement at ADX Florence, the federal Bureau of Prisons’ most restrictive facility, and suffers from multiple serious chronic conditions including sleep apnea, coronary artery disease, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia. On October 19, 2025, Mr. Fort was found unconscious on the floor of his cell for two minutes, with the cause remaining undiagnosed. Dr. Barbara C. Zeller stated that Mr. Fort’s conditions “pose a danger to his life” and that he requires medical transfer to a lower-altitude facility with enhanced medical care and monitoring.
His continued confinement must be understood in the context of this history: the criminalization of Black organizing, the surveillance of Black leadership, and the state’s fear of movements that consolidate power and resources for Black communities. At sentencing, Judge Charles Nogle stated that the purpose of Mr. Fort’s sentence was not to place him in federal prison for the rest of his life, but only until maturity, wisdom, and time rendered him harmless to himself and society. Despite nearly two decades in extreme solitary confinement, public campaign materials state that Mr. Fort has maintained a near spotless disciplinary record, completed over 100 educational courses, and remains a spiritual leader, father, mentor, and man the law itself intended to one day release.
As we honor the 2026 Marquette Park march and the fierce urgency of now, we must also honor the full, complicated truth of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Dr. King’s work in Chicago was not separate from the young street organizers who protected marchers, negotiated peace, and demanded economic justice. Mr. Fort’s role in that history must be acknowledged, not erased. These were two very different men, but both wound up targeted for efforts, in their respective ways, to uplift Black people and challenge the structures that kept Black communities oppressed.
The Jeff Fort Legal and Advocacy Team supports The Fierce Urgency of Now and calls on all who march, organize, teach, preach, litigate, and build to remember Mr. Fort, to study this history, and to join the growing demand that this nearly 80-year-old elder, political prisoner, father, grandfather, and historic Chicago figure be brought home.
More Information
For more information about Mr. Fort’s role in the Chicago Black Freedom struggle:
5 Lessons From the Real Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. | The Nation