Before the marches, before the sirens, before the smoke turned the sky brown—she was just another runner.
By the time the city started burning, she was already building something out of the ashes.
They say Chicago in ’68 wasn’t a city—it was a setup.
Cops ran numbers, politicians ran cops, and the bodies hit the pavement on schedule.
Somewhere in that mess, a woman named Carla “Red” Banks started rewriting the order of things.
She wasn’t supposed to matter.
Then her boss caught a bullet, and a black ledger hit the pavement.
Inside it: city contracts, bribes, and names that never made the news.
That night, Red vanished and re-emerged as a reckoning in high heels.
Her advisers were opposites—
a washed-up Negro-Leagues mastermind who believed loyalty was an investment,
and a war-scarred soldier who believed fear was faster.
Between them, Red learned the oldest rule in the game:
power isn’t taken—it’s collected, one debt at a time.
Ask ten people who she was, you’ll get ten different stories.
Some say she was a ghost.
Some say she owned half the city, but history would never give a colored woman her due.
All anybody agrees on is this: after she came through, nothing in Chicago ran the same again.
No monument. No headline.
Just a trail of paid debts and quiet funerals.
Chicago remembers its thieves.
It just doesn’t say their names out loud.