Twenty years ago today, Harold Washington died of a heart attack, ending a life that made history and moved a city forward in ways the entire nation is feeling today. After the jump, this diary remembers Mayor Washington and why he is important.
CHICAGO BEFORE 1983
Harold Washington won election to the House of Representatives (IL-01) in 1980. He had reached the apex of a black politician's career in the state of Illinois. Illinois (and Chicago in particular) did not lack for black politicians, but you could not do better than representing the First District for the predominately African-American South Side. Notable representatives from the past included Oscar De Priest in the 1930s and William Dawson from World War II to his death in 1970. Illinois's African-American congressmen accomplished some important things (De Priest, for example, wrote an amendment that made certain the Civilian Conservation Corps would not discriminate based on race, and Dawson stymied the Winstead Amendment which would have allowed military personnel to opt out of serving in racially integrated units during World War II), but could not -- or would not -- challenge the white power structure that made racial discrimination a fact of life in Chicago, least of all the mayors -- the invariably white, usually Irish, always Democratic mayors.
Chicago's last Republican mayor, Big Bill Thompson, lost his re-election bid in 1931 in a virulently racist campaign. Democrats used inflammatory anti-African-American rhetoric (Thompson, it was alleged in pamphlets featuring racist caricatures, would give all patronage jobs to blacks and allow them to run rampant over the city just as he allowed Al Capone and his thugs free reign) to spur recent immigrant voter blocs to the polls and elect Anton Cermak. Thompson gave as good as he got, making it easier for Croats, Lithuanians, Hungarians, and Poles to vote Democratic by his mocking Cermak as "Pushcart Tony" who would take all the patronage jobs and put them in his "Bohunk" supporters' hands. It was an ugly time in Chicago, pitting recent European immigrants against African-Americans at the polls, just as employers, real estate agents, and landlords had pitted those factions against one another since the late nineteenth century.
Cermak began an unbroken line of Democratic mayors, mayors whose patronage powers grew from the funding provided during and after FDR's New Deal and could spread the wealthy sufficiently to end two-party politics in the city with promises of jobs and services. Though black Chicagoans became consistent Democratic voters during Ed Kelly's administration (Kelly succeeded Cermak after the mayor was shot by an assassin in 1933), there was always an uneasy tension between the white politicians who ran the town and the African-American citizens who grew in ranks between World War One and the 1960s, but often received brutal treatment at the hands of the police, police who often did not enforce industrial zoning laws or dumping laws on the South and West Sides. In the winters, snow would pile up south of Bridgeport and north of Hyde Park while white neighborhoods saw plows clear access to the main roads with regularity. These inequalities were rarely remarked upon outside of the pages of the Chicago Defender, except when tensions flared.
Under Mayor Richard J. Daley, those tensions rose during the 1960s, with commissions investigating police brutality, the effects of new highway and housing projects that physically isolated the "Black Belts" on the south and west sides, the 1966 standoff with Martin Luther King's SCLC (a failed attempt to challenge Chicago's residential segregation met with such hostility that Ralph Abernathy later remarked that the SCLC had received a worse reception in Chicago than they had in the South), and the violence of 1968 after King's assassination and during the Democratic National Convention. Chicago was clearly two cities: one white, controlled by the mayor who had vast authority on how federal, state, and municipal resources were used, and one black, featuring a large population feeling increasingly disenfranchised over time. African-American commentators, columnists, and leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Lu Palmer, and Vernon Jarrett grew increasingly disgusted with the state of affairs in Chicago. Daley's 1976 death changed little; he was succeeded in turn by Michael Bilandic and Jane Byrne, who did not change the racial status quo.
I grew up on the South Side, living in racially integrated neighborhoods in South Shore and Hyde Park between the 1960s and 1980s. We lived close to neighborhoods devastated by the 1968 riots, but our own houses, businesses, and schools were in good shape. Especially once we moved to Hyde Park, we saw intense levels of police protection supplied not only by the city, but also by the University of Chicago. Class segregation seemed more intense than racial segregation at school, in the neighborhood, and in the little league teams I'd play in every summer. I -- too young to remember the 1966 hostilities or the 1968 riots that leveled blocks near our house (and, had it not been for some nice strangers hiding her in the backseat of a car, may have killed my mother) -- grew up learning that skin color did not determine a person's character or worth, and assumed that most of my friends and neighbors felt the same way.
THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY OF 1983
Anyway, I was in Hyde Park in early 1983 when the Democratic mayoral primary drew near. Jane Byrne had made history four years earlier when she became the first woman to lead the city, though after four years her most notable accomplishments seemed to be throwing Chicagofest every summer, allowing John Landis free reign to shoot The Blues Brothers anywhere and everywhere he wished, and moving herself into the Cabrini-Green housing projects with a massive security detail in the summer of 1981. Chicagoans were not terribly impressed with her and were ready to assess their options. She was challenged by the young Richard M. Daley. Richard J. Daley, a man so beloved that long after his heart stopped beating in his doctor's office in late 1976, doctors furiously worked to revive him, had left his name and speaking style to his son, now Cook County State's Attorney. Though Byrne was the incumbent, Daley was a Daley. If you listened to WGN or read the Tribune, you would assume that the battle to be mayor would be decided between these two Irish-American pols.
But Byrne and Daley were not the only candidates. Rep. Washington, prompted by those like Lu Palmer and Vernon Jarrett who thought he could win, threw his hat into the ring as well. His campaign depended upon his supporters organizing a grassroots voter registration drive to bring over 100,000 disaffected Chicagoans into the political process. Chicago had been home to a large African-American population since World War One, but internal divisions and pessimism meant that many people did not participate in electoral politics. Washington reached out to the disaffected. Together, we can make a difference. The efforts, described in detail in William Grimshaw's book Bitter Fruit, didn't receive much attention outside of the African-American community. But they paid off.
The night of the primary, Washington and his supporters shocked the city. When the votes were counted, Byrne and Daley had split the white vote almost down the middle, and Washington had earned a four-point victory over the incumbent mayor. Chicago's Democrats had nominated an African-American man for mayor. In a city that had not elected a Republican mayor since Big Bill Thompson's 1927 election, Washington's election seemed assured.
THE GENERAL ELECTION
That would assume that the people of Chicago had shrugged off the racial animosities that had defined the city for most of the twentieth century. It would be an incorrect assumption. Overnight, attention turned to the winner of the Republican primary. Funnily enough, that person, like Harold Washington, was a resident of Hyde Park. His name was Bernard Epton, and he was white.
Epton was also Jewish in a city where election winners tended to be Catholic. He happened to be a member of my temple. If anti-Semitism had been at all an issue for Chicago's white voters in the past, it went out the window when those voters were faced with the choice of a Jew or a black man. Between the primaries and the general election, Chicago became home to the most racially charged political campaign of my life, and probably the most racist campaign since 1931. It opened my eyes.
Those neighbors and friends of mine who I assumed lacked racial animus drew up sides. Those who were black proudly supported Harold Washington. Sad to say, most who were white suddenly became Epton supporters. Epton's entire campaign revolved around his being white and his opponent black. The longtime Democrats suddenly in the Republican nominee's corner included aldermen like Ed Vrdolyak and rank and file Daley and Byrne supporters. They were motivated by fear, fear of what would happen if a black man took over the city. The button I remember most from the campaign read:
Epton for mayor. Before it's too late.
No one in the city needed to ask what it was. It's too late would be when blacks in power treated white residents the way whites in power had treated blacks for decades. Scared whites could not bear to be on the wrong end of that subjugation. Friendships in Hyde Park-Kenwood-Woodlawn were lost over those buttons, and the feelings behind them. I saw a lot from my peers in the weeks leading up to the general election, and I didn't like what I saw. Talk of Washington's unpaid taxes (he had neglected to file returns for several years yet had paid the penalties), diction (amusing, considering that many who criticized Washington's diction supported the notoriously inarticulate Richard J. Daley), and rumors of sexual indiscretions (a reflexive smear used to discredit prominent African-Americans) became -- not a nasty whispering campaign, but open and pervasive chatter on the streets, in workplaces, in schools, in church, and in temple. I learned a lot more about where these feelings came from, and began to understand better what W.E.B. Du Bois meant when he said that the defining aspect of American society in the twentieth century was the color line. Du Bois knew Chicago well. I was learning more about my hometown's ugly side.
For a time, it seemed Chicago's voters would break the Democratic Party's half-century grip on the mayor's office solely because of the color of the Democratic candidate's skin. But Washington's coalition, swelling in ranks with those recently registered voters, prevailed, despite having the support of fewer than 10% of the city's white voters. In April of 1983, Harold Washington was sworn in as Chicago's first African-American mayor. The father of one of my classmates administered the oath of office. That day, Harold Washington made history as a black man from Hyde Park taking the office once held by Anton Cermak, Ed Kelly, and Richard J. Daley.
As a fellow Hyde Park resident, I was so proud. Aside from the racist overtones of the campaign, Chicagoans often scorned Hyde Park as a neighborhood where eggheads out of touch with the real world lived in a bubble. Intellectually some (including Art Laffer, Antonin Scalia, and Allen Bloom) were guilty of this charge; physically, the constant police patrols around campus worked to seal off the neighborhood in ways that made the area a good deal more segregated -- especially by class -- than I had realized growing up. Yet much about Hyde Park was more real than the Bridgeport of Richard J. Daley. The fact that the mayor's race and all that racial animosity came down to two men living in the same neighborhood was unheard of in a city so heavily segregated. That the resident whose opposition was solely determined by his race prevailed made me even prouder. Harold Washington, a Hyde Parker and African-American who loved the monk parakeets he could see out of his window, was now Chicago's mayor. It was a hard, ugly fight, but a sweet victory.
HAROLD WASHINGTON, MAYOR OF CHICAGO
But that victory did not end the struggle. Chicago -- and Illinois -- remained segregated, with racial animosity spilling out on the streets and in the headlines of the papers. Perhaps the worst incident reported in 1983 was the firebombing that autumn of an African-American couple out of their new residence in Cicero. White power groups in the western suburbs and downstate met openly. It was like taking a page out of 1919.
Chicago's city council divided primarily along racial lines with a faction of 29 aldermen (led by "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak) intent on blocking every proposal Washington made in a stalemate that became known as Council Wars. Other that making Star Wars references a regular feature of City Hall news and providing a career for comic/commentator Aaron Freeman for a few years, Council Wars reminded us on a daily basis of how openly racist Chicago still was twenty years after Ralph Abernathy's comment that Chicago was worse than the South when it came to welcoming the Civil Rights movement. A few liberal whites (including Hyde Park's Larry Bloom) joined the black alderman on Washington's side, but the mayor could get few initiatives requiring a vote through council.
That did not stop Harold Washington from making Chicago a better place for all of its residents. Snow removal, which had been a rarity in black neighborhoods and a certainty in white neighborhoods (when removal efforts broke down in white neighborhoods in January of 1979, furious voters kicked Mayor Michael Bilandic out of office) now reached into Austin, Bronzeville, and the far South Side. But Washington did not take those trucks away from white neighborhoods; he made sure all residents, even those who feared and hated him, enjoyed city services. The same was true for street paving and garbage collection (though inequalities remained with police protection, school facilities, and siting of waste management facilities, a problem which, as David Pellow describes, has not been resolved). Washington's election did not ruin the city, as Epton's supporters had claimed, but brought a new, more equitable day to Chicagoans in which all city residents benefited.
1987
Washington's demonstrated competence as mayor despite gridlock in the city council won him grudging respect from many white Chicagoans. Few were on the council, however. Fast Eddie Vrdolyak decided to run for mayor against Washington in 1987. Realizing that a Democratic primary challenge would be difficult given Washington's coalition, Vrdolyak chose to leave the party and challenge him in the general.
The results were close to the 1983 Washington-Epton election; Washington won with huge African-American turnout, and a few whites. Actually, his share of the white vote doubled to just under 20%. (Some of that gain was from the Hyde Park residents who voted Epton in 1983. Neighborhood pride and recognition of good work done won over many too afraid to vote Washington four years earlier.) A reason to look to the future with optimism was the breaking of the city council deadlock, as Washington's allies gained a working majority. Finally we would see how Harold Washington, given the broad powers his white predecessors had, would run Chicago.
The second Washington term lasted half a year. Twenty years ago today, Harold Washington died of a massive heart attack. Channel 2's news archives show the local reaction. (Scroll down to see the video clips at the bottom of the story.) I was in the passenger seat of a car driving up 880 in California to meet family members for Thanksgiving when the radio reported the news. I slumped forward against the dashboard in shock. Harold Washington, the man who forced Chicago to come to terms with its racial attitudes, the man who showed a way forward from the hatred of the distant and recent past, the man who showed a better way forward, was now gone. You know how some people can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they learned that JFK was dead? How that moment changed things forever? That's what November 25, 1987 means to me.
I don't remember much about that Thanksgiving weekend after hearing the news.
LIFE AFTER WASHINGTON
The city plunged into chaos after the mayor's death, much as had happened when Richard J. Daley had died eleven years earlier. Like Daley, Washington had not groomed a protégé, someone who would have been the obvious successor. As with Daley's death, the aldermen fought over who would be the next mayor. You can read about the turmoil in detail in David K. Fremon's book Chicago Politics Ward By Ward. Feelings ran high, and it became very clear that, after Washington's decisive win over Vrdolyak and the city's reaction to the mayor's death, that the next mayor had to be African-American. Two possibilities emerged; Tim Evans (backed by most African-American aldermen) and Eugene Sawyer, who was backed by many of Washington's opponents because they felt he would be weaker than Evans. Sawyer won a hotly contested vote in the City Council, much to the disgust of Evans's supporters.
Eugene Sawyer proved his "supporters" right and was a mayor with a reduced stature. He served until a special election in 1989, when he ran for popular election for his office and was soundly thrashed. Chicagoans know who won that race, as Richard M. Daley has served as mayor ever since.
Funny thing about that young Cook County Attorney who had lost to Washington in 1983. In some ways, his career as mayor has been influenced by Harold Washington. Constituent services are more widely distributed throughout the city than they were under his father's reign, and the son has been very careful to avoid the divisive rhetoric his father used in his final decade in power. The new Daley machine attends to its African-American and Latino constituents more readily than the old Daley machine did. There are problems with Richard M.'s rule, but we now see nothing like the days of stoking racial animosity for political gain. Epton is dead, having passed away three weeks after Washington's heart attack. Vrdolyak lost clout after switching parties, became a radio personality for a while, and is now under indictment for some of his corrupt practices. Chicago remains resolutely Democratic, and has become a bit more democratic than it was before 1983.
Harold Washington's experience and example continues to shape my life. My work focuses on urban environmental issues and inequalities, inequalities that remain glaring 20 years after Washington's death and 40 years after King's. When I teach American history, I do so from the perspective of these enduring inequalities and how they shape our lives in ways we often do not realize. My political identity as a Democrat is in large part defined by the social justice Harold Washington sought and the fair use of power for the benefit of all that he wielded once in office. The Washington campaign's mobilization and registration efforts to turn disaffected, powerless individuals into a coalition that reshaped the political order of Chicago despite a strong reluctance to change the status quo, is what I feel the Democratic Party should be. The war against Harold Washington woke me up to the virulent reality of white privilege; Washington's accomplishments overcoming that opposition fueled my optimism about the promise of what (as yet unachieved) is possible.
Harold's influence does not end at the door of the mayor's office. Though Chicago's voters have not elected a black mayor since Washington, his victories and the fine service he provided set an example in the 1980s that the world would not end with blacks in power. In Chicago, and in Illinois, more African-Americans appeared on ballots and won elections. Almost five years to the day after Harold Washington died, another Hyde Park resident, Carol Moseley Braun, became the first African-American and the first woman to win a Senate seat in the state. A person with black skin did not have to limit political ambition to the First District House seat. Once the color line in City Hall was broken, the idea of what was possible was limited by imagination, preparation, talent, and hard work. What was possible was not limited by skin color.
Today the two most popular officeholders in the state of Illinois (as measured by both public opinion polls and margins of victory) are black: Secretary of State Jesse White and Senator Barack Obama. Both White and Obama rack up majorities in parts of Chicago where no one voted for Harold Washington. Both get votes in places like Cicero and Cairo where racial violence is part of the very recent past. Governor Rod Blagojevich, in his wildest fantasies, cannot dream of being as popular as either Jesse White or Barack Obama.
Barack Obama. It is inconceivable to me that Barack Obama as we know him today is possible without Harold Washington. Obama came to Chicago during the Washington administration, during a time when the African-American community on the South Side knew the very real benefits that voter registration drives and genuine inclusion in the political process could bring. Obama saw the racial animosity on the surface, but he also saw the hope, resolve, and joy among Washington's supporters. He saw what doing good work in office could accomplish, and how hard work could produce real change even in a racially divided society. He saw the void left when Harold Washington died, and how much a politician who cared about the people could mean to so many for so long.
When Barack Obama stood on the stage on November 10, 2007 in the mostly-white state of Iowa and said the following words to a crowd he was asking to support his presidential campaign:
I'm in this race for the same reason that I fought for jobs for the jobless and hope for the hopeless on the streets of Chicago; for the same reason I fought for justice and equality as a civil rights lawyer; for the same reason that I fought for Illinois families for over a decade.
Because I will never forget that the only reason that I'm standing here today is because somebody, somewhere stood up for me when it was risky. Stood up when it was hard. Stood up when it wasn't popular. And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world.
...his message was clear. He was talking about W.E.B. Du Bois, and Thurgood Marshall, and Linda Brown. He was talking about Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr., and Ralph Abernathy. He was talking about James Meredith, and Harvey Gantt, and Medgar Evers. He was talking about Carl Stokes, and Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson.
And make no mistake about it, he was talking about Harold Washington and the coalition that brought him to power.
A quarter century after Harold Washington changed the face of Chicago politics forever, Illinois has proven it will elect African-Americans even if racism has not disappeared from the Land of Lincoln. And one man representing the state of Illinois has a chance to change the face of American politics forever.
On the tenth anniversary of Harold Washington's death, This American Life ran a long story on how Chicagoans remembered their late mayor. This fall, TAL ran an updated edition of the piece. Listen to it. Listen to Harold Washington in his own words. Hear how those close to Mayor Washington, including Jackie Grimshaw (whose husband wrote Bitter Fruit), the late Vernon Jarrett (whose daughter-in-law Valerie is now one of Obama's closest confidantes), and Laura Washington (still a prominent journalist in Chicago), tell the story of his rise and reign. Hear how -- though racist thought is alive and well in Chicago -- Mayor Washington opened a lot of eyes and minds to how politics and race might work in that city. Before it's too late. Too late proved a wonderful alternative to what had gone on for too long.
Twenty years after Harold Washington's death, his example continues to serve to fight to make a city's -- and a state's, and a nation's -- politics more just. Today I thank Harold Washington for his service, and for setting the wheels in motion for many of the good things he did not live to see. I thank Harold Washington for showing us that what is possible is limited by imagination, preparation, talent, and hard work, and not by skin color, ignorance, or fear.