On June 10, Dexter Leggin died at the age of 71, leaving behind a legacy of helping parents and children across the West Side.
Leggin was a foster parent to multiple children, worked as an internationally renowned fashion designer and tailor, and, for over a decade, volunteered with Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI) to train West Side parents on how to advocate for their children locally and rally around policies that supports low-income and immigrant families.
Tracy Occomy Crowder, deputy director of policy and external affairs of COFI, said the organization will miss the care and support Leggin gave to West Side families, and she’ll miss his humor.
“He always had something funny to say, always lifted your spirits and figured out a way to make it fun,” Occomy Crowder told Austin Weekly News.
Ellen Schumer, executive director of COFI, said, “He kept us entertained and there’s some really hard things the organization and families go through… it’s the care connected to the humor.”
Schumer recalls first meeting Leggin at Delano Elementary School in West Garfield Park, where some of his foster children were enrolled. He worked in the school part-time for Family Focus Lawndale, which provides parental support and resources for children in West Side neighborhoods and, in 2011, he was a part of a community-school partnership between Delano and COFI to engage parents in a leadership program.
“He had been working so deeply in Garfield Park that he moved there so that he could really understand where people were coming from,” Occomy Crowder said.
When the City of Chicago shut down 50 public schools in 2013, including Delano, Melody Elementary in West Garfield Park was relocated to the Delano Elementary building and became Melody STEM Elementary. Leggin played an instrumental role in rebuilding the school after it was shuttered.
“There was a lot of tension between the two school communities that were coming together,” Schumer said. “There were gang boundaries. There were safety issues, distrust, and really, it was Dexter as much as anybody who worked with us, Principal [Tiffany] Tillman [of Melody STEM] and with parents in the community to do healing circles or peace circles to get people to hear each other and acknowledge the pain and the trauma that was caused by the shutdown of the school.”
Leggin helped Melody STEM launch a Peace Center on its campus — one of the only parent-led Peace Centers in Chicago Public Schools — to provide students with conflict resolution skills.
When Leggin started working with COFI in 2011, he volunteered as a parent leader for Parents Organized to Win, Educate and Renew Policy Action Council (POWER-PAC IL), a membership organization of COFI.
As a part of POWER-PAC’s West Side branch, Leggin co-chaired an elementary justice campaign, which advocated for implementing restorative justice practices in all Chicago schools and led to the whole school safety campaign, which successfully removed police from schools.
Also within POWER-PAC’s West Side branch, Leggin trained other local parents in leadership development, many who spoke at his funeral and shared their appreciation for him.
Schumer said she heard from many parents Leggin trained, “‘How much he meant to me, how he changed my life, how I found my voice. I became empowered.’”
After over a decade of volunteering to train parents in local leadership, Leggin became a staff member at COFI, first as a team builder then, last fall, as a community organizer for the West Side POWER-PAC branch.
“It entails supporting the voices and work of the parents, versus being a leader himself,” Occomy Crowder said of Leggin’s community organizer role. “He had to listen and hear what parents are talking about and really bring them together around the work.”
Leggin helped parents organize outreach and town halls for initiatives like whole school safety – which was implemented in 2024 and, among ways of prioritizing students’ physical and emotional safety, removed police officers from schools.
“We’re still trying to figure out ways to actually implement [whole school safety] in a citywide and district-wide effort, but that was what they really focused on,” Occomy Crowder said.
Around the time he became a community organizer for COFI, Leggin collaborated with other POWER-PAC branches to protect those targeted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement when they came to Chicago last year. And he testified in front of POWER-PAC parents about how he unlearned his biases against immigrants.
“When he first came into COFI and POWER-PAC, he believed the message that these people were taking our jobs and that they were a threat to the Black community,” Schumer said. But because of the relationships he created through COFI, “He now feels a brotherhood and sisterhood with the Latino community.”
Foster parenting
Leggin’s work with COFI and POWER-PAC IL was almost certainly inspired by his role as a single foster parent to several children.
“When he first got us, he didn’t know how to deal with all of the emotional trauma and things that come with caring for children that have been abused and neglected and who’ve been in the system,” said Yemisi Anderson, one of Leggin’s foster children from the time she was 11 to 18. “He didn’t necessarily have the tools, but from his experience of raising us, he was able to be this advocate. He was able to take that and share with these families. … The stuff that he experienced with us was kind of a pivotal point for him to be able to even speak on behalf of these types of issues.”
Anderson said she lost touch with Leggin when she moved out but reconnected with him in her adult life.
“He could be mean. I ran away from that,” Anderson said. “I had to learn how to advocate for myself, and he was one of the people who taught me how to stand up for myself.”
When she spoke with Leggin years after she left his home, “he was a totally different person,” Anderson said. “We were able to have hard conversations about the life that we lived while we were there. He would often say, ‘Y’all really saved my life,’” Anderson said, wiping away tears. “‘Y’all kept me from going further into what I was dealing with.’”
“Even though he had his issues,” Anderson added, “He was one of the best parents I ever had because, despite his struggles, we never went hungry, we always had a roof over our head. … Where you are in life does not dictate how your life ends, and Dexter is a prime example of that.”
During Leggin’s funeral earlier this summer, Anderson said it was clear to see the way he used his struggles for good in the community.
“I love that he didn’t allow his struggle to just be. He used it to do something positive, to encourage these families who are going through whatever struggles,” Anderson said.
Anderson said what she’ll miss most about Leggin is his honesty.
“I could not stand it at times, but [he had] that bluntness about him. He would let anything fly out of his mouth, but he would say it in such a way that was so encouraging,” Anderson said. “‘He taught me that I could say hard things and wouldn’t get in trouble for them,” she added. “He was the first parent I was able to tell something was going on, and he defended me. He stood up for me.”
Fashion designing
Leggin started sewing from an early age and broke into fashion as a teenager by sewing clothes for drag queens.
His work was shown at the Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling fashion show that toured for 50 years.
Anderson said Leggin was still doing some sewing and tailoring when she lived with him and often sewed clothes for his foster children for special events.
“He was always so proud of that, and you could see that when he talked about it,” Anderson said of Leggin’s career in fashion. “He very much enjoyed doing it, and he made a name for himself in that.”
Schumer said, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Leggin sewed face masks for POWER-PAC participants.
“He made a mask for every single mom on the West Side, and probably citywide. He asked the colors that they wanted and made them special,” Schumer said. “He had a style and a pizzaz about him.”