Remembering a beloved racial justice organizer, educator, and former City Bureau board member, through a tribute by Co-Founder Andrea Hart celebrating her life, legacy, and lasting impact.
Michelle Morales speaking at a Chicago Board of Education meeting held in June 2024.
Last Thursday, Michelle Morales, a beloved leader, educator, and organizer for racial justice who previously served on City Bureau’s board of directors, passed away at 51 after a long battle with breast cancer.
The next night at City Bureau's 10th birthday party, co-founder Andrea Hart, who now runs Build Coffee, shared a tribute to Michelle. We’re sharing a very lightly edited version here to celebrate Michelle’s life, and memorialize her impact on our work and the many communities she helped strengthen.
A fundraiser supporting Michelle’s family is here.
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Remarks by Andrea Hart, City Bureau Co-Founder
“Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.” Grace Lee Boggs
Yesterday, Chicago and the world lost one of its fiercest warriors for justice: Michelle Morales. Michelle passed after a courageous and honest fight with cancer.
I met Michelle in 2014/2015, when she was leading Mikva Challenge and I was still at Free Spirit Media. That year we took hundreds of young people from Chicago to the Iowa Caucus. It feels like a different world now, given what the world thought was going to happen then.
Michelle was a force: fierce, fabulously fashionable, and unafraid to do the brave thing, not just say the brave thing. She spent her life organizing, fighting for Puerto Rican independence and to free political prisoners, including Oscar López Rivera, whose sentence was commuted in 2017. She believed in young people and wove them into everything she did, learning from her time at Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School, the Alternative School Network and Mikva Challenge, something I so deeply admired.
When it came time to expand City Bureau’s board in 2017, I knew Michelle had to be part of it. She was a rigorous board member who challenged us not to mission creep and instead to deepen our commitment to Chicago, all while humbly sharing her own lessons in leadership and in the struggle. Everywhere she went, she pushed people—with compassion—to become sharper and stronger and to show up. Michelle reminded me and so many others to keep my eye on the prize, to do the seemingly crazy thing in service of a greater good.
Here's to critical connections. Here's to Michelle, who showed us that, as Gwendolyn Brooks described, “we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”