Chicago has boasted some of the most powerful mayors in the United States since the mid-twentieth century.
For more than 20 years, Richard J. Daley—known as the Boss—ruled with authority, overseeing grand downtown projects and urban renewal and blocking integration at every turn while playing national Democratic Party politics. He died in office in 1976.
Eldest son Richard M. Daley served a little bit longer, also overseeing grand downtown projects and urban renewal plus a mass of pretty flower beds planted around the city. He seized control of the public schools and public housing while shepherding in splashy lakefront projects. When Daley decided not to run for another term in 2011, former Chicago congressman and Washington, D.C., bigwig Rahm Emanuel took the city’s helm. His first term was marked by the controversial decision to shutter more than 50 public schools, but Emanuel has also used his influence to bring in new businesses, not just downtown but in struggling black neighborhoods.
Of course other mayors, including the first woman, have held office in between. At every turn, black Chicago voters have lent major support to these elected officials. But in the 1980s, this group of voters saw one of their own take the reins at City Hall: Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, was elected in 1983.
Washington’s legacy looms over the City of Big Shoulders, stronger than the odor of the infamous stockyards, deeper than our famed deep-dish pizza. His name continues to be invoked in political campaigns. Former low-level aides jot it on their resumes when they run for office. Other politicians trot out relatives who served in the Washington administration as validation of their own bona fides. Republicans recycle archival tape of the mayor disparaging particular Democrats during any given election season.
Today no one dares to utter a cross word about the man—as if everyone was always down with Washington, as if the “Council Wars” never occurred, as if outsiders hadn’t dubbed the city “Beirut by the Lake” for its notorious political brawls and as if racial politics didn’t color and polarize the city during his incumbency.
Washington is almost like a religious figure to black Chicago, and his speeches seemed like church revivals. “You want Harold? You got Harold!” the bigger-than-life man often bellowed to crowds. Washington, a burly, dark brown handsome man with a thick mustache and salt-and-pepper hair, grew up in the fabled Democratic machine but flipped it on its head. At the time of his win, the city was alive with politics. People flocked to the polls. A remarkable 82 percent of registered voters cast ballots in the 1983 race, compared to 32 percent in the 2015 mayoral race.1
Harold Washington was the unlikely candidate whom the media initially dismissed. Chicago, a place where “ethnic” means white and whiteness has an actual identity (Irish, Serbian, Polish, Czech, etc.), elected a black man who seized the ethnic (note: not racial) narrative by saying “It’s our turn.” Blacks wanted a better share of political power and jobs in the Democratic machine. In the 1983 primary, two white candidates split the vote, leaving Washington the winner. White Democrats couldn’t accept that fate and actually changed political parties. A white Republican contender—like a two-headed salamander in this Democratic stronghold—threw his hat in the ring, and he too lost. During the 1987 reelection campaign, white candidates jumped into the fray again. Rinse, cycle, repeat. Washington triumphed again.
During the Ronald Reagan years, urban centers experienced massive budget cuts. Amid the resulting chaos, Harold Washington was able to build a multiracial coalition, drawing support from white lakefront liberals from North Side luxury high-rises and black South Side high-rise public housing residents—a testament to his appeal across racial and class lines. Washington opened up the establishment to people who previously had been shut out and battled an obstinate group of white city council members who tried to stymie him every step of the way. The fighting looked eerily similar to President Barack Obama’s experience with Congress.
Washington lived in Hyde Park, an integrated South Side bastion of intellect and political independence. A former state legislator and congressman, he loved legitimate exchanges of ideas and words. His notion of fun involved eating alone at a Chinese restaurant while wading through a stack of history or philosophy books. Washington vacillated between salty language and SAT vocabulary words when he spoke. He married once as a young college man but divorced ten years later and never had children. It’s not a cliché to say he lived and breathed politics. Even friends and top aides admitted he didn’t reveal much about himself.
Washington, 65, died of a heart attack at his desk in City Hall the day before Thanksgiving in 1987. His weight had ballooned to 284 pounds while in office, and stress etched lines across his face. Washington smoked, ate too many cheeseburgers and slurped a lot of soda pop.
I was in sixth grade in library class when the school announced the mayor’s death over the intercom. I mourned. The city and weather were dreary. I wrote in my diary that I felt sad, as if a grandparent had died. My parents took our family to see the mayor’s body lying in state at City Hall. For several hours, we waited in line with other sorrowing Chicagoans. To this day, it’s common to hear some black folk whisper conspiracy theories—that his death was actually an assassination via poisoning.
Washington was an accessible, comfortable and familiar presence to black Chicago. He shook hands in soul food restaurants on Sundays after church, mingled at park events and effusively greeted people wherever he went. I have a couple of autographs from him. Even if you didn’t completely understand politics, you knew Harold did right by black folk. Chicago’s first black mayor is more beloved here than the country’s first black president.
Alas, the era is gone. Harold can’t be re-created, but his ghost haunts this city as we search for a coalition builder of his ilk. Sure, the city still elects blacks to political office. It’s no accident the South Side is the political home that put Barack Obama in the White House. This city has long churned out political and economic heavyweights. In 1928, Oscar De Priest was the first northern state black congressman elected in the twentieth century. He and other black politicians gained control from white politicians in the predominantly black Second Ward, in the Black Belt, to develop the nation’s most powerful black political organization. Decades later, in 1992, Illinoisans elected South Sider Carol Moseley Braun as the first black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Only five blacks have ever been elected to the U.S. Senate; two of them are from the South Side.
Chicago black political thought isn’t monolithic, but Harold Washington crystallized an opportunity for forces to come together under his progressive umbrella. When he died, black politics in Chicago fractured and died as well, and the fissure has yet to be repaired. The battle between two black city councilmen to replace him polarized the black voting bloc as each sought to be crowned Washington’s heir apparent. Lack of political unity, ego and hurt feelings allowed for a white political scion to win in the 1989 special election. Richard M. Daley ruled for the next two decades without any real competition. He neutralized the black vote while rewarding Hispanic and white loyalists. Chicago has not had an elected black mayor since Washington.
“Unfortunately, the state of black politics in Chicago is consistent with the state of black politics in the U.S.—disorganized, divided, weak and rudderless. In Chicago, it’s weaker than it has been in decades and is a long-term trend we can trace back to the demise of the Harold Washington coalition in the 1980s,” University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson told me.2
Black political players and thinkers of disparate stripes in Chicago agree: The bitterness in the fight to take control of City Hall post-Washington wrecked black politics. The lack of organizational capacity and leadership left wounds and scars, resulting in the lack of a tight black political agenda.
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“So I told Uncle Chester: Don’t worry, Harold Washington doesn’t want to marry your sister,” legendary columnist Mike Royko wrote after Washington won the 1983 mayor’s race. It was a strange thing to write since Royko himself noted that he never mentioned the race of previous mayors. “But you can’t write about Harold Washington’s victory without taking note of his skin color. Yes, he is black. And that fact is going to create a deep psychological depression in many of the white, ethnic, neighborhood people who read this paper in the morning.”3
The fear of a black mayor, of course, was rooted in racism, but those white, ethnic neighborhood people worried more about their lifeblood in the Democratic machine with jobs and clout. One of Washington’s campaign ads declared that the machine didn’t work anymore.
During his two-decade reign over Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley was regarded as the master of the machine. But the Chicago Democratic machine began in 1931 with Mayor Anton Cermak (a Bohemian immigrant who was shot and killed when a gunman aimed for President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt). It’s a political organization with ward committeemen and precinct workers. “The second integral part of the machine is the city and county government, which has been intimately tied into the machine in a relationship somewhat analogous to the one in Russia between the Communist party and the Soviet government. For many Chicagoans, the party is more important than the government itself,” political scientist and machine historian Milton Rakove wrote in 1984.4 The machine is about loyalty and job rewards. We Chicagoans refer to it as patronage.
Blacks participated in machine politics when they arrived after the Great Migration. Congressman William Dawson, of the First District, represented parts of the South Side. As a leader of the black wards, Dawson delivered mayoral votes to the machine. He also served as Democratic Second Ward committeeman.
Royko explains in his book Boss:
Politically, the Negro was even more exploitable. In the South he didn’t vote. In Chicago he could vote for the Democrat of his choice. The Machine’s precinct captains would go right into the voting booth with him to make sure he voted properly. The major weapon was the threat. Negroes were warned that they would lose their welfare check, their public housing apartment, their menial job, if they didn’t vote Democratic. Dawson ran everything on the South Side, but on the West Side, where most new arrivals from the south settled, they didn’t even have black politicians exploiting them. The white officeholders and ward bosses remained after the white constituents fled.5
Dawson’s great-nephew is revered University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson, cofounder of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race and principal investigator on many important studies on black politics, including one that created a data set on public opinion polls on the U.S. racial divide. The younger Dawson’s surname taught him what the power of backlash meant. “Black nationalists, black progressives, black radicals didn’t trust anyone with the name Dawson and I realize there were really good reasons for that,” he told me. When Dawson returned home from college during the summer in the 1960s, his father, a lifelong member of the machine, got him a patronage job. Michael Dawson was an activist and sought to be a community organizer. He opposed the war in Vietnam, and a Second Ward committeeman told him “every antiwar protester should be put up on a wall and shot. The second thing that convinced me not to stay as an organizer in the city was hearing from my father at the time not to get too close to the head of the African American Cultural Center. He was the captain of gang intelligence, and no one knew. My father told me I’d be under surveillance. It was clear to me that the black Dawson machine was to disrupt black radicals and work with police.”
Born in 1922 in the Black Belt, Harold Washington encountered the machine, which helped rear him. He knew when to enter and exit.
Washington’s father ran his own law firm and served as a Democratic precinct captain on the South Side. His mother flowed in and out of his life, and Washington considered his father his hero. Harold served four years in the army in World War II and upon his return received the G.I. Bill to attend Roosevelt College in Chicago. There he met a coterie of black men who became lifelong friends—Dempsey Travis, a future real estate magnate; Gus Savage, a future congressman; and Bennett Johnson, a book publisher. Washington graduated from Northwestern University School of Law in 1952 and afterward took over his father’s law practice. Like his father, Washington immersed himself in local politics and learned the workings of the machine under the tutelage of Third Ward alderman Ralph Metcalfe, the former Olympic track star. Washington also worked as assistant corporation counsel for the city.
In 1964, Metcalfe sponsored Washington for a seat in the state legislature. Several years later, the Cook County Democratic organization, led by chairman (and mayor) Richard J. Daley, decided that the independent Washington had to go. But the people in his district loved him. Washington stayed and then won a state senate seat in 1976, often bringing back money to his black district, which had many poor pockets. He supported women’s rights, helped organize the legislature’s first black caucus and introduced a bill that made Illinois the first state to give schools and state workers a day off for Martin Luther King’s birthday.
In the Harold Washington lore, few people bring up that he ran for mayor after Daley died in 1976 and that he captured only 11 percent of the vote. Although the Democratic machine alternately feared and loathed him, Washington continued to represent his district in the state capitol.
Metcalfe had become a congressman in the First District, and when he died suddenly in 1978, Washington won his seat despite not having the backing of the Democratic organization. The machine even ran two unknown candidates with the last name Washington as an attempt to thwart him.
Then the reign of the first Daley ended with his death in office.
World War II veteran Michael Bilandic, whose ethnic roots were Croatian, followed Daley as mayor. He had been Daley’s anointed mayor from their Bridgeport community, and he previously had served as alderman in the Eleventh Ward. In addition to the Irish, Italians and Poles, Croatians settled in Chicago. In the early twentieth century, their first enclave was just south of downtown.
Jane Byrne, an Irish Daley protégée, took on Bilandic in 1979 after he botched snow removal during a brutal blizzard. To recover, one of his commercials featured his blond socialite wife pleading with voters to “keep Chicago strong”; perhaps the aim was to win some women voters. The tactic didn’t work, and Byrne became the city’s first female mayor. Chicagoans may tolerate corruption and machine politics, but you can’t play around with plowing their snow. Byrne captured much of the black vote but once in office proved disappointing when she realigned herself with machine politics. She alienated black voters by replacing black members on the Chicago Housing Authority board with white ones. She even pulled a serious PR stunt in 1981 by moving into a Cabrini-Green public housing apartment to draw attention to poverty. The move flopped. Byrne critics—some later say unfairly—nicknamed her “Calamity Jane” for unpredictable and supposedly loopy behavior.
But Byrne was vulnerable and increasingly looked like a one-term mayor.
The path to Washington’s win didn’t start with the man himself. A group of black activists plotted in basement meetings to find the right candidate. Unabashed black nationalist Lu Palmer spearheaded the campaign to recruit Washington to City Hall in 1980. Palmer was an outspoken radio host, and my own parents were fond of quoting him: “You send your child to college black and they come back Greek.” “It’s enough to make a Negro turn black!” That year Palmer founded Chicago Black United Communities, an independent political group focused on electing blacks. He also organized a conference in 1981 in which the “We shall see in ’83” slogan, referring to the mayoral race, was born.
Jesse Jackson Sr. emerged as a contender, but he polled low and his personality was seen as difficult. Jackson had formed Operation Breadbasket, the economic arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Council in Chicago, in 1966. After the death of Martin Luther King in 1968, the council accused Jackson of using the organization for personal gain and suspended him. In 1971, he resigned and formed Operation PUSH. When Washington won the mayoral election in 1983, it was clear that Chicago wasn’t big enough for a black mayor and Jesse Jackson. In 1984, Jackson formed the National Rainbow Coalition, welcoming blacks, women and gays. Jackson ran for president and used the multiracial coalition playbook in his campaign.6
In 1982 Washington announced his candidacy after securing commitments on voter registration and fundraising. Ed Gardner, founder of the Chicago-based black hair care company Soft Sheen Products, was among the first in line and is credited with helping register more than 250,000 voters.
Washington’s base was black, but he needed a broader coalition to win. His downtown campaign office reflected a mix of people. On the South Side, black nationalists strategized for the campaign in a 47th Street storefront office. Conrad Worrill, director of the Jacob H. Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, set up shop there.
“‘We got to have Farrakhan,’ I told Harold,” Worrill recalled during an interview, referring to Chicago-based Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In the early 1980s, the minister set out to rebuild the Nation of Islam, which had splintered and weakened after the death of leader Elijah Muhammad in 1975. His movement was growing and tapped into black pride during the Reagan years. Worrill took Washington to Farrakhan’s home after the 1983 primary. “They had a nice chat talking and bullshitting,” Worrill said. Worrill handed Farrakhan a flyer and asked the minister if he could mass-produce it. Farrakhan agreed. The flyer spread like wildfire and upset some white folk. The flyer said: “We Discovered It, We Should Govern It.”7 Below were sketches of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, the Haitian fur trader who was the first modern settler of Chicago, and Harold Washington. The tagline: “On April 12 Vote for harold washington.”
The primary pitted Washington against two white ethnics of Irish descent: incumbent Byrne and Richard M. Daley, the Cook County state’s attorney and son of the Boss. Washington’s strategy to win was 80 percent black voter turnout and 80 percent of their vote. Though he didn’t quite hit those numbers, he won the Democratic primary anyway with 36 percent of the vote. Byrne received 33 percent and Daley finished with 30 percent. White Democrats scrambled at the outcome, and some even switched parties. Wealthy Republican lawyer Bernie Epton emerged to challenge Washington in the general election. Epton’s slogan? “Before It’s Too Late,” a not-so-subtle race ultimatum.
Washington won the general election with 51 percent of the vote.
The 1980s was late for Chicago to elect its first black mayor compared to some other major cities. In the 1960s and 1970s, Gary, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; and Los Angeles, California, had all elected black mayors. But the concept of black control of a central city is a “hollow prize” because of white flight and an exodus of resources.
* * *
“Council Wars,” a play on the movie Star Wars, kicked off right after Washington took the oath of office.
Chicago has one of the largest city councils in the country: 50 aldermen each running little fiefdoms with meandering boundaries. Alderman Ed “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak—a lawyer of Croatian descent with a penchant for expensive suits representing the white Southeast Side steel mill area—opposed Washington from the start. He orchestrated a split among council members; Vrdolyak had 29 white members on his side compared to 21 members for Washington. The split blocked Washington’s agenda at every turn. Various budgets and measures deadlocked. Appointments to city agencies got blocked. Elected officials acted sophomoric. One time Vrdolyak fluttered his arms and sang out “pretty please” in a falsetto voice to the mayor. Washington pointed a gavel at Vrdolyak and snapped, “You’re about to get a mouthful of something you don’t want, mister.” A couple of other aldermen jumped in and one threatened, “Sit the fuck down, or I’ll knock you down.”8
Technically, Chicago’s governing structure is “strong council” and “weak mayor.” In practice, that governing style has meant little. The city council had always been a rubber stamp for Boss Daley and the machine, but with the arrival of a black mayor, it suddenly “discovered” its independence. The 29 bloc looked like a bunch of white bigots determined to obstruct the mayor at every turn.
On live television in 1986, Washington and Vrdolyak sparred and scoffed at each other via minicam. The news reporter couldn’t get a word in as the two politicians talked over each other.
“Ed Vrdolyak systemically is discriminating against Hispanics in the city,” Washington barked.
“He just ain’t got it,” Vrdolyak interrupted. “You don’t have the slightest clue about what being mayor in Chicago is.”9
Washington accused the media of taking race sides. Predictably, the press recoiled at accusations of complicity in race-baiting. In a December 1983 editorial, the Tribune gave Washington credit for not giving in to the machine but noted: “The worst thing about him is that he keeps suggesting that racism has something to do with the frustrations of being an independent mayor. The only difference between his problems and those of anyone else is that he can blame it on the white media.”10
But one black columnist for the Tribune knew better. Leanita McClain wrote about the vicious racial environment after Washington’s win.
I have been unprepared for the silence with which my white colleagues greeted Washington’s nomination. I’ve been crushed by their inability to share the excitement of one of “us” making it into power. I’ve built walls against whites who I once thought of as my lunch and vacation friends. . . .
An evilness still possesses this town and it continues to weigh down my heart. During my morning ritual in the bathroom mirror, my radio turned to the news-talk station that is as much a part of my routine as shaping my eyebrows, I’ve heard the voice of this evil. In what would become a standard “bigot-on-the-street” interview, the voice was going on about “the blacks.” “The blacks” this, “the blacks” that, “the blacks, the blacks, the blacks.”11
What McClain heard also echoed in white neighborhoods on the Southwest and Northwest Sides. After Washington’s election, residents started Save-Our-Neighborhood/Save Our City, an umbrella organization to deal with race. Their solution came in the form of an insurance program for homeowners, ostensibly white ones, who feared property decline if “the blacks” moved in. All homeowners in a designated district paid a small tax, and the money went into a fund in an equity program. If the appraisal was less than the original purchase price when homeowners decided to sell, homeowners would receive a cash claim for the difference. Home values actually remained steady. Essentially, this was psychological insurance for white owners in the “bungalow belt,” referring to single-family homes of that style. The mayor backed the program until black city council members balked.
Meanwhile, Washington persevered against Vrdolyak’s maneuvering by using his executive power to cut the city’s payroll, fix the deficit and balance the budget. He ultimately emerged triumphant in the Council Wars. Council remapping, which reflected Latino and black population gains, gave him the edge he needed in votes. The Vrdolyak 29 no longer blocked his hostage department appointments.
The feud between the mayor and the council thus ended in 1986. Washington enjoyed his triumph before seeking reelection.
When the 1987 mayoral race rolled around, the same candidates and characters endeavored to unseat Washington. All were white. First up was Jane Byrne, who was more aggressive this time as she jumped in to seek the Democratic nomination. Washington beat her with 54 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary.
That didn’t deter white ethnics who still disliked Washington as chief executive. Some left the machine in name only.
Don Haider, an unknown Northwestern University professor and former Byrne budget director, entered the race as a Republican candidate and won the primary. Vrdolyak, the Cook County Democratic chairman who had long flirted with the Republican Party, declared his candidacy in the new Solidarity Party. He and Democrat Tom Hynes, the county assessor, played chicken about who would run. Hynes ran under the new Chicago First party banner. Ultimately, Hynes ran but dropped out two days before the election. Enter Vrdolyak.
In its endorsement of Washington, the Tribune acknowledged the fight the mayor had to present a balanced budget, put in a neighborhood repair program and distribute city services fairly. “For four years, Mr. Washington won most of his battles with Edward Vrdolyak over the size and distribution of the city’s work force, its tax structure and its capital programs, and Chicago is better off because he did.”12
Washington won again with 54 percent of the vote, a mandate. His platform always included better minority city hiring, and his workforce was more diverse than that of previous mayoral administrations.
According to political observers Melvin G. Holli and Paul Green:
Given Chicago’s changing demographics and the intensity of Washington’s black support, it would have taken a miracle for anyone to deny him renomination and re-election. In effect, any opponent would have had to achieve the nearly impossible—that is, win over almost all of the city’s nonblack voters. Washington had an iron grip on his core constituency, and no one could take that vote away from him. Add incumbency and a growing personal attraction to city Hispanics and liberal whites, and you have a simplified blueprint of the Washington victory coalition.13
The twice-elected mayor thought he’d won folks over and that eventually holdout whites would come to his side. But his tenure was ended by his November 1987 heart attack and death at the age of 65.
As Chicagoans mourned Harold Washington’s sudden death, and while his body was still on the hospital bed, political power games geared up. Columnist Mike Royko rightly predicted that the wildest wheeling, dealing, trading, extorting and hustling in Chicago’s memory were to come.14
Two days after Washington’s death, Jesse Jackson Sr. cut short his trip to the Middle East to fly back to Chicago to mediate the rupture in the name of black solidarity. A series of meetings with black and Hispanic leaders yielded no agreement on who Washington’s successor should be. By law, the city council had to elect an acting mayor from its ranks until a 1989 special election could be held. In the meantime, David Orr, a white North Side lakefront alderman and Washington ally, briefly served as interim mayor until an acting mayor could be chosen.
“Whatever was being deliberated or prayed over in secret did not translate into a name, it translated into a process,” Jackson said after the meeting.15
Two names of black politicians emerged: Eugene Sawyer of the Sixth Ward, a black middle-class stronghold that included Chatham, and Tim Evans of the independent, diverse Fourth Ward, which included Hyde Park.
As political maneuvering ramped up, activists organized a public tribute for Washington that could accommodate more people than the thousands who attended the funeral. Fifteen thousand people showed up at the University of Illinois–Chicago pavilion, and in the middle of the memorial, Tim Evans strolled down the aisle. The event mutated into a rally for the alderman.
“Some of the people for Gene had started peeling off that Tim Evans was more progressive or better than Gene Sawyer. This was the greatest tragedy in black history. Both came out regular Democratic Party. Tim Evans could speak better but everyone knew Gene had helped more black people,” Conrad Worrill told me.
The special session in council chambers to elect a new mayor, held December 2, 1987, looked crazy. Outside of City Hall, thousands of demonstrators allied in favor of Evans. Inside, arguing, wheeling, dealing and politicking rumbled.
At 4 a.m., to a surprisingly large television audience, the city council chose Eugene Sawyer as acting mayor in a 29–19 vote.16 Only six blacks on the council, including Sawyer himself, voted for him. Someone scrawled “No deals. You’re a traitor to Mayor Washington’s dreams” on the door of the Sixth Ward Democratic organization.17
Some blacks rejected Sawyer because white aldermen backed him. Two of those aldermen, Ed Burke and Richard Mell, thought they could control him. During this tumult, Democratic analyst and fourth-generation Bronzeville resident Delmarie Cobb had a morning show on the black radio station WVON. She told me: “One of the things that I said often is who do we want to run the machinery? If you keep saying Gene is a machine politician, who do we want running the machine? Someone who looks like us or who doesn’t? He’s on the fifth floor, he’s got the seat. While we’re trying to replace him, which is a crapshoot, we have someone in that seat who lives in our community who you can knock on his door or pick up the phone and cuss out and will be accountable to the black community.”18
Sawyer’s council appointment lasted for 16 months. A 1989 special election would be the real test to determine who would fill out the rest of Washington’s term. Richard M. Daley, then 46, determined that now was the time to put his name on the fifth-floor door to the mayor’s office.
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L. Anton Seals Jr. often was dragged to community meetings and political events by his father, who worked for the Washington campaign and in City Hall. In 1989, Anton Sr. worked in the Eugene Sawyer camp and took his son, a high school freshman, to a meeting at a downtown hotel.
“Lu Palmer says if we don’t get our acts together we won’t see the fifth floor again until that boy is my age,” the younger Seals recalled to me. Palmer squarely looked at him. “I was the boy in the room. I’ll never forget that. Damn, he was right.”19
Conversely, the local media expressed exhaustion over the racial dynamics of the election. They thought a white person could save the city from racial scars.
“A Daley election would go a long way toward healing the breach in black politics created by the death of Washington,” a Tribune political reporter wrote in February. Daley embraced the role as racial healer.20
Although nice-guy Sawyer was the first alderman to endorse Washington, and his ward delivered strongly for the mayor, he lacked the Evans charisma. Sawyer was quieter and a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy.21 He knew government and showed Washington the municipal ropes once he took office. The photogenic Evans served as Washington’s floor leader. Despite his position, he wasn’t seen as one who did his homework. Lu Palmer backed Evans because Washington hadn’t backed Palmer when he ran for the First District congressional seat.
The 1989 election was even nastier than the 1987 council vote that selected the interim mayor. Evans supporters labeled Sawyer an Uncle Tom and a sellout. Evans decided to let Sawyer run in the Democratic primary alone but vowed to return in the general election.
Daley bested Sawyer with 56 percent of the vote. Next he faced Evans, who ran under the Harold Washington Party. Daley also faced Vrdolyak, finally a Republican. Daley won with 55 percent of the vote. Evans won the black vote but the turnout was nothing like the turnout for Washington. The alderman also couldn’t compete with Daley’s margins in white ethnic Northwest and Southwest Side wards. Other politicians read the tea leaves. Alderman Luis Gutierrez, a Washington soldier, endorsed Daley and began his role as a Hispanic spokesman in the city before moving on to a seat in Congress.
The Harold Washington movement officially died with the election of Daley.
“The fracturing of the black unity that we had, we’ve never been able to resurrect or hold on to. Tim got his ass kicked and Daley walked in,” Worrill told me.
The second Daley era began in 1989, and so did the slow dismantling of politics that allowed Harold Washington to be elected in the first place.
Daley never won or fully needed the black vote. Whites backed him. Hispanic clout grew under him, and the newly created Hispanic Democratic Organization became a player in the machine. Daley did get some black pastors to praise his name and notably sold them vacant lots for one dollar. His administration had some high-profile blacks, such as Valerie Jarrett, who held a number of positions such as deputy chief of staff. She hired Michelle Obama to work for him. Daley may have talked about being a racial healer, but he never created economic development for the postindustrial South and West Sides. Segregation remained under his watch, and he did little for black neighborhoods.
No one had the money, clout or troops to defeat him.
In the 1995 mayoral race, Daley crushed former Illinois attorney general Roland Burris, a politician who enjoyed statewide election in other posts. In 1999, Daley crushed South Side congressman Bobby Rush. Neither could raise the money necessary for a campaign despite their name recognition and popularity with blacks. Slowly, some of Daley’s most outspoken city council critics joined hands with him. In 2003, he received a majority in black wards, but the victory proved hollow. His opponents were so unknown that a write-in candidate might have fared better. No candidate ever came close to dismantling Daley’s monarchy. Over the years, the mayor effectively neutralized the black vote, further dismantling black political unity.
In 1995, Daley seized control of Chicago Public Schools from the state, with mixed results. Daley has never been indicted, but some of his employees were convicted of taking bribes over jobs. In 2008, Daley leased Chicago’s parking meter system to a private company for more than $1 billion, which voters are still pissed about because of the new outrageous rates. In an ultimate goon move, in 2003, Daley sent bulldozers escorted by Chicago police in the middle of the night to tear up Meigs Field, a tiny lakefront airport. The covert mission solidified Daley’s plans for a new park.
* * *
I’m loath to participate in conversations that start with “the problem with black people” or “if black people could just stick together” or “black people are like crabs in a barrel.” This trope isn’t new. Black Metropolis, the sweeping sociological study of the 1930s Black Belt, recorded Negroes uttering the same thing: “I know this much—we are divided against one another more than any race in the world.” “The Negroes might be able to do something if they would stick together.”22 My argument about the lack of a black political agenda shouldn’t be conflated with the idea that black people are more disorganized than other ethnic groups are.
The Evans–Sawyer rift is widely accepted as the demise of black politics in Chicago. Black Chicago voted for Harold Washington as a revolt against the machine politics that meant separate but unequal. His untimely death, and the splintering that followed, meant the end of that revolt and of black politics as it was then known.
Conrad Worrill’s office on the South Side Northeastern Illinois University campus fits that of an old-school black nationalist. Reparations posters and pictures of Fidel Castro are tacked to the wall. He’s run out of shelves for all of his black history books. Worrill has a stack of files on Harold Washington. He admits to being duped into the Evans camp initially but told me he realized greater forces were trying to manufacture a black split.
“I think we have lost our way. It appears the more elected officials we have in government the least influence we have,” Worrill, now 74, explained. “That ought to say something to us. Our fight—I come out of the black nationalist tradition, the Africanist tradition—inside of America has always been a fight for the greatest good for the greatest number. We broke down racial segregation under the law, we opened up American society. We went into the black power phase of our movement and black consciousness. What is it we are fighting for? What do black people need at this moment of history? Other periods it was clear: we wanted to dismantle racial segregation under the law.”
On the other end of the generational spectrum, Charlene Carruthers, now 30, was two years old when Harold Washington died. She’s national director at the Chicago-based Black Youth Project 100, an activist group, and the South Side native says the young people she encounters don’t invoke Washington’s name. Although she was too young to witness or remember the 1987 political fracturing, she senses something amiss locally.
“I’m not sure there is [such] a thing as black politics. I see much more middlemen, negotiators. There’s not been a single black candidate to me who has actually spoken to black community issues that are important,” Carruthers told me.23 Maybe someone’s good on schools but not public safety, for example.
Carruthers explained that black politics, of course, is needed in Chicago. She rattled off the problems: unemployment, intracommunity violence, schools, lack of quality of mental health care, foreclosures, access to healthy food. “It disproportionately impacts the black community. Not just because they are poor; it’s absolutely informed because they are black. Redlining didn’t disappear after Harold [Washington]. The effects didn’t disappear. There’s continued divestment. We don’t need more elected officials that are just black. We have city council. We need champions in the city.”
Policy wonk Will Burns is a black alderman representing integrated Hyde Park (the former ward of Tim Evans) and some parts of black neighborhoods. “What we don’t really have are tables or spaces within [the] black public sphere to connect with each other and establish consensus on a black political agenda. We don’t have an equivalent of a Latino Policy Forum. We have groups that purport to represent the interest but very little coordination or collaboration,” Burns told me.24
There’s arguably too much emphasis on electoral politics when assessing black politics. Voting isn’t the only form of engagement, and black Chicagoans do not vote at lower rates than the rest of the city. I must offer a caveat on the death of black politics because black folk are involved in civic engagement. Chicago boasts myriad grassroots organizations—some black, some multiracial—involved in issues affecting the black community. They want restorative justice, affordable housing and accountability in public housing. In 2014, young people of color in Chicago took their complaints of police brutality all the way to the United Nations.25 They are credited with forcing Mayor Rahm Emanuel to dump police superintendent Garry McCarthy just after Thanksgiving 2015. They shut down the Michigan Avenue shopping district on Black Friday after a police dashcam video went public. The video showed a white police officer pump 16 fatal bullets into 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. The aftermath of the McDonald case has made Chicago once again one of the center-stage cities in racial politics, #blacklivesmatter. Young people have found ways to consistently disrupt the flow of the city to demand political accountability.
Today these activists are conducting peace circles at transit stops, massaging dirt for community gardens, holding police accountable at community meetings, storming police board meetings for justice in cop shootings. There’s plenty to organize around for a black agenda: jobs, wages, good schools and better police relationships.
Some have even suggested this is the rebirth of black politics. But much of this activity operates outside of the electoral constructs. It’s hard to imagine voter turnout in any city topping 80 percent, as it did in Chicago in 1983. Avid voters don’t understand voter apathy; however, low turnout says something more about the crop of candidates than about the voters.
Former white Chicago police commander Jon Burge oversaw the torture of arrestees on the South Side in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Eventually, a federal court convicted Burge for lying about torture, but not for the torturing of black men. Richard M. Daley was the county prosecutor before he became mayor and fought claims of Burge’s abuse.26 For years, groups organized for reparations for police torture victims. Some men had already received settlements that totaled more than $100 million from the city, but that wasn’t enough. In a striking win—the first of its kind in the nation—the city in 2015 agreed to a reparations package that includes $5.5 million, and the nonfinancial benefits include victims and their family members: counseling, a public memorial and a social studies unit on torture survivors for all Chicago public school eighth-graders, and free tuition to any of the junior city colleges.
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Given the historic machine politics of Chicago and the tradition of long-ruling mayors, I’ve come to view the city as like Rome, a city-state that operates independently.
The transition from King Richard to Emperor Emanuel rattled and emboldened Chicago voters. Richard M. Daley may not have died in office like his father, but he lorded over the city for two decades, and no challenger came close to beating him.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s brusque style and some of his policies have peeved Chicagoans. Some of the critiques are from people who are tired of an iron-fisted, noncollaborative mayoral rule. The plebeians wanted change or at least to be heard.
Rahm Emanuel returned to Chicago with some White House orchestration. Daley retired in the fall of 2010, and Emanuel left his position as Obama’s chief of staff to return to Chicago and run for mayor. With the election slated for February 2011, a purposefully narrow campaign window allowed campaign-fund-rich Emanuel to prevail. Emanuel swooped in and won the black vote, mostly by default because of his Obama connection.
The black old guard tried to choose a consensus candidate the way they had done in supporting Harold Washington. Their result was pitiful. West Side congressman Danny Davis was the initial choice. He withdrew, knowing too many blacks couldn’t be in the race and one of them win. Former U.S. senator Carol Moseley Braun became the black candidate. Her performance was embarrassing: She won only one precinct—not ward—in the entire city. That’s one out of 2,570 precincts.
“I hate to use that word, but Harold was a consensus candidate. Harold had the ability to galvanize and mobilize the black poor, the black middle class and black elite. He had the ability to bring those folks together,” J. R. Fleming, a radical activist who works on affordable and public housing issues in Chicago with the Anti-Eviction Campaign, told me.27 The group has moved homeless people into abandoned foreclosed homes renegade style.
According to Fleming, Davis and Moseley Braun were consensus candidates among the black elite and black elected officials. This race is emblematic of the generational politics in which the old black guard doesn’t engage the next generation. There’s not enough passing of the baton in electoral politics. Congressmen hang on to their seats. When elected officials do get the boot, it’s often because a younger black demographic has moved in the area.
In 2015, Emanuel, the city’s first Jewish mayor, faced a tough reelection campaign and was forced into a runoff with Mexican American challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Cook County commissioner. Garcia was a third choice after black Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle and firebrand Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis, also black, didn’t run. Emanuel wore sweaters in his commercials to soften his image. Some voters viewed him as a get-things-done-guy who cleaned up Daley’s financial quagmire. Others saw him as a vindictive power player who closed schools and is beholden to the rich and to corporate interests. Emanuel won, and each time he ran he wouldn’t have emerged the victor without the black vote—he received more than 50 percent of the vote from black wards in both elections. The state of black politics doesn’t allow black voters to understand how powerful they could be. With no political unity or political ask, they don’t make demands of Emanuel as they could based on numbers.
Today Chicago is in a different era. New dynamics are at play politically. Income equality across all races is growing across the nation. Service industry jobs have replaced manufacturing jobs. Poor black communities suffer from double segregation. Cities like Chicago have moved toward neoliberalism, an approach that shifts the government from the public to private sector. The term shouldn’t be confused with what traditionally is considered liberal. Think liberal economics in the sense of free and open markets with no state interference. Neoliberalism in Chicago means privatization of city services, such as parking meters, expansion of charter schools, antagonism toward unions and corporations having more of an influence on city government than people. Given federal, state and local budget cuts, one could argue that neoliberalism allows cities to do more with less; it’s the pragmatic course to take. But the ideology aggravates class differences within the black community and exacerbates the inability of a black mayoral candidate to step forward and address the needs of the haves and have-nots. The University of Chicago’s Michael Dawson argues that poor blacks suffer under neoliberalism while elite blacks who align with it benefit. “The combination of the social, political, and labor-market isolation of America’s black inner cities with the increasing political salience of class in the black community has left the black poor with far less access to social, political, and economic capital, while at the same time leaving them in a state of relative political disengagement,” he writes. “America’s ghettos and barrios are the domestic equivalent of countries that are marked by international neoliberal regimes as immature, ungovernable, and the site of battles between Good and Evil.”28
What’s happening in Chicago isn’t unique. Nationally, Dawson says that the mainstream often dismisses black political ideals. To wit, there’s a huge gap in opinion polling on how blacks and whites viewed Hurricane Katrina.
“The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the continuing weak condition of black politics, and while the election of Barack Obama may serve to counter somewhat the debilitating nihilism of recent decades, it has not in and of itself contributed to an increase in political capacity.”29
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We don’t know what else Harold Washington could have accomplished had he lived. Or are we too stuck searching for that answer and using his legacy to comfort us? A nostalgia lives on. Black folk have been known to harbor a “messiah complex” in which we yearn for a leader to save us. Will there be another Harold Washington? Or at least another black mayor in Chicago?
“That’s not an unreasonable focus, but I’d prefer to see black communities emphasize what they think a politician should be. What’s their policy on policing, schools, economic development? It’s a better long-term strategy to think about programmatic strategies and find a [compatible] candidate,” Dawson told me, or “you could end up with Clarence Thomas.”
According to Dawson, blacks need to rebuild black politics, including its radical wing. Skin color doesn’t equate to pushing a policy agenda, which is sorely lacking. The War on Drugs, economic development and police brutality are among the issues that the right candidate could run on.
Coalition politics helped elect Obama. Chicago’s first deliberate coalition came together under Harold Washington.
Black voters viewed Jesse Jackson Jr. as the anointed one. The former South Side congressman, who served from 1995 to 2012, flirted with the idea of running for mayor. He always spoke in clear racial economic terms, including championing a third airport in the region to spur economic development and jobs for blacks. He distanced himself from his father, notably when the latter was caught on a hot microphone talking about cutting off Obama’s balls. But Junior’s mayoral hopes were dashed permanently by his prison time for spending $750,000 in campaign cash on luxury goods. There’s no doubt that Jackson could have built a coalition in a mayoral bid.
“Coalition politics work best when you’re strong. The black base has to be organized first. You have to have a base to enter coalition. If you can’t bring voters, what can you do for me?” Dawson told me.
According to Worrill: “We haven’t found the resolve as a political entity in the city to figure out what the black political agenda is. Therein is the problem. The Latinos/Hispanics seem to be more unified in their resolve around contracts services employment, etc., in their own communities even though they have differences.”
Harold Washington’s integrated coalition changed white and black politics in Chicago. To win today, candidates have to have the optics of a multiracial coalition even if their policies belie the actual ideology. Richard M. Daley boasted a multiracial cadre of supporters. Obama spoke directly to black voters while assuring whites he understood them. Yet the peril of coalition building is that black candidates have to go out of their way to appear to be the candidate “for everyone.”
Voters of all races expect that black elected officials will represent a wider set of interests than blacks alone, but if they do so, who’s looking out for black interests?
African American interests are wide, and there’s no one way to be black, but it seems black politicians can’t look too black. Today nonblack candidates often represent black politics—not because these candidates include an unapologetic black agenda but because they appeal to individual interests of people who are black.