On a Tuesday morning in early May, students from Juanita Douglas’s African-American-history course sat in the library at Lincoln Park High School, on the North Side of Chicago, waiting noiselessly for Ronald Kitchen to compose himself. “Sometimes I be at a loss for words when I see a lot of young people actually taking heed to the things that’s happening in our neighborhoods,” he told the class. “I am a survivor of police torture from Jon Burge.”

Kitchen was twenty-two years old in August, 1988, when he was arrested at gunpoint while walking home from buying cookie dough to bake with his young son. The officers who arrested him said something about a car being stolen and told him that he’d be back from the precinct in forty-five minutes. “That was the longest forty-five minutes of my life.” Kitchen told the students. “Twenty-one years. The auto theft turned into five murders in the blink of an eye.” Detectives wanted him to admit to the killing of two young mothers and their three children. Jon Burge, who was then a commander in the Chicago Police Department, and three other officers took turns torturing Kitchen for seventeen hours, kicking him, punching him, and assaulting him with flashlights and nightsticks. Finally, fearing for his life, Kitchen agreed to sign a false confession. “When you know that you’re an innocent person, but you’re being pictured as a monster on the news, and you’ve been forced to say that you did something that you know is not in you, that’s the hardest thing,” Kitchen said.

His eyes filled with tears as he recounted the toll of his lost years: estrangement from his sons, trauma, insomnia, the deaths of family members. The school bell sounded, but no one stirred. “I love y’all giving me so much attention,” he said. “I never had this much attention. I really do appreciate it. Thank you.” Afterward, the teens lined up for hugs, photos, and questions. The class had prepared for Kitchen’s visit by reading up on his case, writing poems, and crafting tributes; meeting him in person was a thrill, something like a celebrity sighting. “How can we, as young people, make a change in police systems?” one student asked. “What are your thoughts on today’s videotaped police-brutality actions?” another inquired. “Are you actually able to sleep better now?” a third asked. “Because I know that sleep is, like, a big thing.”

These classroom encounters are the latest turn in a saga nearly half a century in the making. Although many American cities find themselves confronting the legacy of police abuse, few revelations have compared with the Burge case, an organized and persistent torture operation directed by a high-ranking officer, abetted by a conspiracy of silence in the department, and covered up by generations of elected officials. Burge was a young detective when he abused his first known victim, in 1972. He went on to brutalize more than a hundred and twenty others, until finally being dismissed from the department, in 1993. Even after he was fired, he enjoyed the protection of city leaders, who paid his legal fees and allowed him to retain his pension. In 2010, he was convicted in federal court of perjury and obstructing justice, but he ended up serving less than four years, in a minimum-security prison. The entire scandal has cost Chicago taxpayers more than a hundred and thirty million dollars, disrupting families and communities in ways that are yet to be tallied.

On September 19th, Burge passed away at the age of seventy in Florida’s Hillsborough County, where he had been living in retirement. The news, which prompted relief, even celebration, among activists and survivors, also exposed the persistent divide between much of the city and its law-enforcement officers. Remarking on the death of a man whose name had become synonymous with police abuse, a former head of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, Dean Angelo, said that Burge had put “a lot of bad guys in prison” and had not “got a fair shake.”

In May, 2015, Chicago passed a sweeping reparations bill to address the fallout from Burge’s two-decade campaign of police torture. “We stand together as a city to try and right those wrongs and to bring this dark chapter of Chicago’s history to a close,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said at the time of the bill’s passage. Among other things, the legislation provided five and a half million dollars to be divided among Burge’s victims, who would also be given job training, free tuition at City Colleges of Chicago, and mental-health services for themselves and their immediate family. The bill also made provisions for a variety of public demonstrations of regret, including a formal apology from the city. The most far-reaching element of the legislation, though, may be a clause requiring that the history of police torture be taught in all eighth- and tenth-grade public-school social-studies classes. While other parts of the ordinance, such as the construction of a permanent monument to torture victims, are still in the planning stage, this educational mandate is now in effect. Following years of preparation, and some limited pilot runs, teachers began implementing the new curriculum citywide this past spring.

The result has been one of the most ambitious, and potentially fraught, educational initiatives anywhere in the country. “This is unprecedented, and not just in Chicago,” Elizabeth Todd-Breland, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago whose research is featured in the course materials distributed to teachers, told me. “The fact that part of what that reparations package included was to make sure that this history is never forgotten, and to make sure it is continuously taught and engaged with and remains alive in young people’s minds, is super powerful.”

At the curriculum’s unveiling, in the fall of 2017, members of law enforcement stressed that teachers should focus on history and not use Burge as an indictment of a department still reeling from scandals related to police violence against black communities. “I think this is a great thing to teach our children what happened, so we don’t repeat it,” Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson observed, adding, “I’ve said this to you all before, and I’ll say it to you again today: We’re done with all of this.”

But, once in the classroom, students quickly made connections between the torture cases of the nineteen-seventies and eighties and recent stories of police abuse, including their own firsthand encounters; marking a path forward, it turned out, would require a willingness to reckon with the present as well as the past. “Particularly in communities of color, where students have had their own experiences with police, and at the high-school level, where there are actual police officers in the schools, this is not just history,” Jen Johnson, the chief of staff at the Chicago Teachers Union, said. “Especially in the age of Laquan McDonald, there’s still a debate that’s happening.”

Laquan McDonald, a seventeen-year-old high-school student who was shot and killed by Chicago police in 2014, is not mentioned in the two-hundred-plus pages of curriculum produced by the Chicago Public Schools. Dash-cam video of his killing showed the officer Jason Van Dyke, who is currently on trial for first-degree murder, firing sixteen shots at McDonald, many of them after he lay motionless on the ground. The footage—which was only released a year later, setting off citywide demonstrations—led to Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s defeat in a 2016 Democratic primary, and contributed to Mayor Emanuel’s decision not to seek reëlection in 2019. McDonald’s murder, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, also made a deep impact on young people. Angelica Heaney, one of Juanita Douglas’s students at Lincoln Park High School, was at a dance-team practice on the day the video went public. Fearing that entire neighborhoods were about to be consumed in riots, the coaches sent everyone home early, urging them to get inside before sundown. “Whoa,” Heaney thought, “this is going on.”