As US industrial unionism fell into crisis and the expansion of public sector unionism stagnated nationally in the 1970s, downstate Illinois teachers built a worker movement that only accelerated in the late 1970s and well into the 1980s, culminating in the passage of one of the strongest public sector collective bargaining laws in the United States in 1984. To understand the success of this campaign at such a dire moment, this article reexamines the geography of politics and class in Illinois in this era, centering the downstate industrial towns and cities that became the heart of the Illinois teachers' movement amid deindustrialization. Influenced by the civil rights movement, the New Left, and legacies of radical industrial unionism in downstate Illinois, Illinois teachers seized control of the Illinois Education Association (IEA), a top-down professional advocacy organization, and transformed it into a rank-and-file union. They then pursued an aggressive, class-conscious political agenda culminating in statewide labor rights for teachers. This teachers' movement emerged not as part of, but in opposition to, the declining liberal political institutions that scaffolded the labor establishment of the mid-twentieth century, which is why the IEA's 1984 labor rights law succeeded in the same moment that labor liberalism crumbled.