Alan Mills, The People’s Lawyer – The People Issue 2024

Alan Mills, 68, came to Chicago to pursue a law degree at Northwestern and subsequently became involved with Uptown People’s Law Center (UPLC). This year he plans to step down from the executive director role of the organization, a position he has held for a decade following over 20 years as UPLC’s legal director.  

My mom had been active in the civil rights movement in Baltimore, where I grew up. One of the first [times when] people had thrown blood onto draft records in order to protest the Vietnam War happened in Baltimore, led by Philip Berrigan, who was one of my mom’s friends. He was defended by a lawyer who was also active in the civil rights movement, so my mom knew him as well. She thought that what was happening at trial was actually more important than what was happening in school, so she pulled me out of school so I could go to the trial. 

About the same time, I was reading a slightly fictionalized biography of Clarence Darrow, a famous defense lawyer from Chicago in the early 1900s. So, I’m like, I want to do some sort of civil rights thing. I didn’t really know what that meant, but from then on, I really wanted to be a lawyer.

I ended up in Chicago—and in Uptown—sort of by accident. My wife and I got married at the end of college. We both really wanted to go to Ithaca. I wanted to be in Cornell’s law school and she wanted to do environmental science, but I was only waitlisted at Cornell. So we said, “All right, well, we’re into Northwestern, so I’m going to come here.” 

We knew one person in Chicago, and she lived in Uptown. So we stayed with her and found an apartment a couple blocks away. My wife got involved in a political campaign on behalf of who subsequently became Alderman Helen Shiller. [Shiller] was an activist here in the neighborhood. 

One of the pieces of that larger pie that Helen was involved in was the Uptown People’s Law Center. By the end of my first year of law school, my wife said I should go knock on the door and see if they need any help. And they did. And I’m still here 45 years later. 

UPLC started out as a survival program modeled after the Black Panther Party. Back when we moved to Uptown, there was a food co-op, there was an after school program, there was a printing press, there was a college, [and there] was a legal center. When I started volunteering here [at UPLC], there weren’t lawyers on staff. It was mostly run by two people: the executive director and the receptionist, both from the community, both who’d gotten some informal legal training but who were by no means lawyers. So, it was very much part of the organizing arm. They would advise tenants as to what their rights were and then find volunteer lawyers to take on stuff they couldn’t resolve informally. Over the decades, those other programs dissolved or ended or whatever happened. We’re the last people standing, really, of that original organization.

The kinds of social connections that there were when I first moved here just don’t exist anymore.

Walter Tunis ran our welfare defense program for many years. He was himself a welfare recipient, and, even though he was largely illiterate, had learned enough about the regulations to go and argue with people. But when he’d lose a case, he wouldn’t go to court. He would organize 100 people to picket in front of the welfare office. It’s a different way of approaching a legal problem—from a very community-based, community organizing perspective. 

When we moved Uptown, it was a majority-poor community, and most of those poor people lived in privately owned housing. Today, neither of those things are true. It’s not a majority-poor community, and most of the poor people left live in some form of subsidized housing. I think, in many ways, it’s made the neighborhood worse. The kinds of social connections that there were when I first moved here just don’t exist anymore. You just don’t see as many people on the street hanging out together, playing with their kids, socializing on their front porches. It just doesn’t happen in this neighborhood anymore. I think the neighborhood character has really deteriorated significantly.

Our prison work in particular was started by the founders of UPLC, who firmly believed that when a person went to jail or to prison from the neighborhood, they were still part of the neighborhood and should be treated as a neighbor, rather than some other alien out there who’s in prison. And that’s how we started doing these cases—people from the neighborhood who went to prison. It’s since expanded so that we’re doing everything statewide.

The first big case we did was about access to the courts by people in solitary. That case went on for literally 18 years. We lost, and, in some ways, it’s like 18 years right down the drain. On the other hand, it turns out, if you want to do prison litigation, doing access to court cases is a great way to get your name known in the prison system. I met hundreds of people during those 18 years that were trying to get into court, and my name spread throughout the prison system, and we met a bunch of really wonderful people. That, I think, is really the basis for all the work we’ve done.

We’ve always had a case about solitary. It’s a long-term project to say the least, which, unfortunately, is necessary. As somebody smarter than me said, “This system took 50-plus years to build. We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s gonna take a while to dismantle.”

On the one hand, it’s hard. You know you’re gonna lose a lot. You’re gonna see a lot of suffering. You’re gonna see a lot of trauma. On the other hand, it’s some of the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. I have no clients who are more grateful to our work than prisoners, because they have so few people who support them.

I was representing a prisoner who got beat the crap out of in prison. We went through a week-long trial, and the jury came back within a half an hour and ruled against us. I thought we had a really strong case, and I was really upset. And he’s like, “You know, I’m not. I got to go on the stand and tell my story. That never happens in prison. Then the guards got on the stand, and you got to ask them questions they had to answer. We as prisoners never get to ask questions of guards. So the very fact that we went through this process was empowering.” That also helps you keep going. When you lose, you still win.

I think our biggest victory was closing the supermax prison [Tamms Correctional Center, open until 2013 in southern Illinois]. I don’t want to say that it was [because of] the lawsuit alone. In fact, it probably wasn’t even the largest part of it. There was also a lot of community organizing going on—some very creative organizing. Parents ended up being one of the main forces, at least in the early days—people whose kids were at Tamms. They formed what was called the Tamms Committee. It had some internal problems, but it really did highlight the issue and build solidarity among prisoners and their family members. And then it was also taken up by some of the anti-prison activists. It became a real movement in Chicago.

They organized a group of photographers, and they wrote prisoners at Tamms, saying, “Tell us what you want a picture of, and we’ll send somebody out to take it and send it to you.” It was just a way to humanize people inside the prison. They also used mud to put stencils down all over Chicago. “Tamms is torture,” or something along those lines. That made some of the art bulletins and newsletters and magazines. Then there were things like takeovers of trains, which got good publicity. It was a really good, creative organizing effort, which we had nothing to do with directly. But we worked in tandem with those people. Our advantage is we had a lot of contact with people inside. Their advantage is they had a lot of energy and organizing experience.

I’m planning on stepping down as executive director. My hope is to go back to being a part-time staff attorney so I can continue to do some litigation—particularly against the prison system—but not be responsible for this place anymore. Forty-five years is a nice round number. 

I took over the executive director job ten years ago, not exactly voluntarily. Our longtime former executive director died unexpectedly, and the board sort of said, “You’re the only one who can step in and do this.” And at that point, I’d done litigation for about 30 years, and I’m like, “Well, it’d be interesting to learn a new skill. That’s something that’ll be a new challenge.” 

I now feel like I’ve done that. I won’t say I’m perfect at it by any means, and I’m sure if I stuck around another ten years I’d continue to learn. I certainly don’t want to take personal responsibility for the whole thing. The board had a lot to do with it. And the people who work here have a lot to do with it. And, obviously, our clients, who are willing to trust us with their lives, had a lot to do with it. But this organization is now, I think, in a stable place where somebody can make some mistakes and it won’t be disastrous.

This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.