Mary Pattillo, the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and chair of the Department of African American Studies, will be awarded the Commitment to Justice Award by the Collaboration for Justice of Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and the Chicago Council of Lawyers. She will be presented the award during their annual meeting this year.
Since 1997, the Collaboration for Justice of Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and the Chicago Council of Lawyers has worked to interrupt cycles of poverty, mass incarceration, and racial injustice perpetrated by all aspects of the legal system. Their annual meeting this year will also be celebrating Chicago Appleseed’s 25th anniversary.
Mary Pattillo’s areas of interest include race and ethnicity, urban sociology, inequality, housing, education, criminal legal studies, Black communities, and qualitative methods. The city of Chicago offers an abundance of opportunities for research and activism and Pattillo strives to be an expert in Chicago history, politics, and social life. In her first book, Black Picket Fences (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Pattillo investigates the economic, spatial, and cultural forces that affect child-rearing and youth socialization in a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. In her second book, Black on the Block (University of Chicago Press 2007) focused on gentrification and public housing transformation in North Kenwood – Oakland on Chicago’s South Side. The book develops the concept of “middlemen” and “middlewomen,” the roles that black professionals play in working alternatively to mediate or exacerbate racial and class inequality. Other projects in Chicago and Illinois include a study of how Black parents negotiate school choice and how families make housing choices, and research on the system of monetary sanctions—fines, fees, and other financial penalties—in the criminal legal system. Outside of Chicago, Pattillo co-edited Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration (Russell Sage, 2004) and has studied the Black middle class in Latin America, and is working on a new research paradigm called “Black Advantage Vision.”
Pattillo is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political & Social Science. She sits on the Board of Trustees of the W.T. Grant Foundation and Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, and was a founding board member of Urban Prep Charter Academies in Chicago.