"Comply or Goodbye": A Comparative Case Study Exploring How Two Different Communities in Chicago Mobilized Against General Iron

This paper conducts a sociological case study into the movements created in response to General Iron's relocation from the affluent, predominantly white neighborhood of Lincoln Park in Chicago's North Side to the low-income Black and Latinx neighborhood of the Southeast Side of Chicago. Through in-depth interviews conducted with residents and organizers from both of these communities, I find that while Lincoln Park used a NIMBY (Not-In-My-Back-Yard) framing to push General Iron out of their area, the Southeast Side created the Stop General Iron movement and used environmental justice (EJ) framing to successfully prevent the company from relocating into their community. While both of these movements succeeded in their goals, I find that Stop General Iron had to resort to more radical mobilization strategies, such as protests and a 30-day hunger strike, than Lincoln Parkers. I argue that this is due to the City of Chicago's discriminatory treatment of the South Side of Chicago, and because of historically racist zoning laws that have reproduced these environmental injustices in the Southeast Side and kept the area as an industrial dumping ground.