Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  Washington had once again garnered his strongest white support in the Lakefront wards, where roughly one in four whites voted for him. The main difference, however, was that Latinos had moved into his camp in decisive fashion. While Washington had captured a small percentage of Puerto Rican and Mexican votes in the primary, he had outrun Epton among Latinos at a rate of roughly 4 to 1.66 A major reason for this shift was the fact that since few Latinos believed in Washington’s chances in the primary, many found it prudent to go with their best bet for patronage down the line. But there is also good reason to believe that Latinos were responding, at least in part, to both the vitriolic racism that exploded onto the political scene as well as Washington’s promises to make Chicago a fairer city. Nonetheless, the black-Latino alliance that crystallized during the general election had not sprung up overnight but was the product of a somewhat long process of negotiation and cooperation that grew out of the civil rights challenges of the 1960s. Glimpses of it had been seen in 1966, when black civil rights activists tried reaching out to Puerto Ricans after the Division Street barrio riot of that year; in 1968, when black and Latino high school students mobilized to change their schools to better suit their needs; and in 1969, when the Young Lords and Black Panthers joined forces to try to bring about a “rainbow coalition.” Although these efforts had not been enough to overcome the legacies of intergroup conflict and divisive politics by the end of the 1960s, veterans from these struggles continued to carry forward the project of a multiracial struggle for justice and equality during the 1970s and early 1980s.

  Black and Latino activists were thus joining forces on the grassroots level to tackle a range of issues related to high unemployment, diminishing welfare entitlements, poor housing, and low voter registration into the early 1980s, when the tide turned quickly against minority interests on both the federal and local levels. Nationally, the Reagan Revolution’s antiwelfare crusade provoked a new wave of grassroots activism in black and Latino communities feeling targeted by its coded cultural racism. But even more important was the local situation, where Jane Byrne’s apparent antimachine challenge had quickly turned into a big disappointment for minority groups. Byrne had snuck into the mayor’s office by promising to root out the “cabal of evil men” she claimed had betrayed Daley’s legacy and by having the extremely good fortune of delivering her message of machine inefficiency during a massive snowstorm that crippled the city’s infrastructure for weeks in January 1979. In one instance, Mayor Bilandic closed several CTA stations in order to improve service without realizing that all of these stations served black communities, a situation that paid dividends for Byrne on election day, when her 45,000-vote edge among blacks allowed her to prevail in a tight race.

  Once in office, however, relations between the mayor and Chicago’s black leadership became strained. It did not help her case that she publicly supported President Reagan’s policies when blacks across the nation were voicing sharp criticism of them. But even more destructive to her support in the black community was her replacement of several high-level black officials in the Chicago Housing Authority and on the Chicago Board of Education with whites. Then, as she was fending off charges of perpetuating the old “plantation politics” of the past, Byrne poured fuel on the fire by using her political funds to make cash contributions to black churches and to distribute small Christmas trees and hams in low-income black communities—gestures that vocal black community activist Lu Palmer criticized as “patronizing.” Finally, with her support among blacks dwindling and talk of a mayoral run by Richard M. Daley increasing, Byrne made yet another political miscue when she and her husband enlisted a brigade of bodyguards and moved into the notoriously crime-ridden Cabrini-Green Housing Project. The stunt was intended to publicize Byrne’s commitment to fighting gang violence and crime in black communities, but once again the mayor looked insensitive and out of touch with African American concerns—a point that was hammered home during an Easter celebration in front of Cabrini-Green, when a group of protesters led by fiery community activist Marion Nzinga Stamps confronted the mayor with shouts of “We need jobs, not eggs,” and bodyguards wrestled one protester to the ground amidst shouts of “Assassin!”67

  The new movement for black empowerment that would sweep Harold Washington into office the following year first took form within this context. Looking for a way to strike back at Byrne, Jesse Jackson and other black community leaders came up with the idea of organizing a boycott of the city’s annual summer musical festival, ChicagoFest, an event Byrne used to showcase her role in promoting a vibrant social life for the entire city. After taking office, Byrne had renamed the event “Mayor Jane M. Byrne’s ChicagoFest” to make sure everyone got the message, and her name was prominently displayed on the seemingly countless posters for the event throughout the city. In 1982, Byrne had authorized big money to bring in the popular black performer Stevie Wonder, who, upon hearing about the boycott, promptly agreed to cancel and forfeit his pay. Attendance and revenues dropped dramatically as a result, but, more importantly, blacks had won a symbolic victory.

  A new sense of energy and purpose began to circulate within black Chicago, and from there it spilled over into Puerto Rican and Mexican communities. Quick to capitalize on this new movement spirit, for example, was People Organized for Welfare and Employment Rights (POWER), a coalition of sixteen black and Latino community organizations that had just launched a massive voter registration campaign. While Chicago’s Latinos felt some resentment about all of the attention being paid to black injustices—Latinos, it must remembered, had even more reason than blacks to protest their second-class status in city government—a group of activists in both Puerto Rican and Mexican Chicago began to take inspiration from the new sense of militancy that was emerging on the South and West Sides. Thus, by the time Harold Washington was beginning to look like a credible candidate, veteran community organizers like Cha-Cha Jimenez and Rudy Lozano were eager to sign on to his campaign and begin convincing reluctant Puerto Rican and Mexican voters that a Washington victory would mean expanded opportunities for Latinos as well. It was Jimenez who introduced Harold Washington in front of a crowd of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans in the first event of the city’s new program of “neighborhood festivals,” put together to demonstrate Mayor Washington’s commitment to including all ethnoracial groups within his administration, when the new mayor assured the appreciative crowd of Puerto Ricans that they would finally get their rightful share of power and resources.

  But not even three months later, Washington was under fire for not keeping his promises to Latinos. The first attacks came from Mexican members of Washington’s transition team, after the mayor passed over a qualified Mexican American candidate, Matt Rodriguez, for the position of police superintendent. Some of the criticism seemed to develop out of a sense that Mexicans were being given a back seat to the city’s somewhat smaller Puerto Rican population—a feeling that had the president of the Mexican-American Organization of the Democratic Party of Cook County, Arturo Velasquez, reminding Washington that the “Hispanic community” is a generic term for numerous Spanish-speaking groups.68 Before long, Puerto Ricans as well were complaining about unfulfilled promises. In October 1983, Reverend Jorge Morales, a leading activist in the Humboldt Park barrio area and the spokesman for a group known as the Commission on Latino Affairs, complained about the lack of Latinos appointed to key positions.69 This was merely the latest in a series of problems between Puerto Ricans and the mayor. Even more troubling for Washington was the decision by Miguel Santiago, the newly elected alderman of the heavily Puerto Rican Thirty-First Ward, to side with “the Eddies”—Edward Vrdolyak and Edward Burke—and twenty-six other white alderman in the “council wars,” which saw a unified bloc of white city councilmen (with the exception of Santiago) opposing the mayor’s every move over the next three years. Santiago justified his decision by claiming that Washington was interested in helping only the “right minorities” and by arguing th
at he had failed to give Latino businesses their fair share of the contracts associated with the new project to expand O’Hare. But this was more politics than truth; in actuality, Latino businesses had obtained nearly 10 percent of the contracts at O’Hare compared with just under 14 percent for the much larger black population. Yet, Santiago’s ability to play this game revealed how fragile Washington’s rainbow coalition actually was.70

  While the notorious council wars would come to characterize the Washington era, earning the city the nickname Beirut on the Lake, too much attention to the legislative battles of these years gives the misleading impression that the factionalism that reigned during Washington’s term was merely a matter of whites versus blacks.71 The fact was that the politics of identity that had emerged out of the progressive challenges of the 1960s still cast a large shadow over the city’s political culture. If Washington was not reaching out enough to Latinos, it was in part because he was somewhat beholden to a vocal group of black nationalists who opposed any gesture of cooperation with whites and who saw no reason why, with Washington in the mayor’s office, blacks should not behave precisely as the Irish had for much of the city’s history. Upon arriving in Chicago in 1985 to take a job as a community organizer, Barack Obama was immediately awestruck by what Washington had accomplished, but he was also deeply dismayed by what he viewed as the destructive black nationalist sensibilities that produced “a Hobbesian world where distrust was a given and loyalties extended from family to mosque to the black race.”72 Even Jesse Jackson, the man who would market the idea of a rainbow coalition on the national political stage during his Democratic presidential primary runs in 1984 and 1988, had never had particularly good relations with either liberal whites or Latinos in Chicago. He had made a point of provoking Jews by calling Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin a “terrorist”; his organization Operation PUSH had never reached out meaningfully to Latinos; and in the late 1970s he had been publicly attacked by Latino leaders for entering into negotiations over a school desegregation plan without inviting Latinos to the table. Jackson may have fought beside Martin Luther King for racial integration and thus was certainly no separatist, but his actions were symptomatic of a widespread reluctance among Chicago’s black political leadership to leave behind the cultural nationalism of the civil rights era.

  Yet such inclinations were hardly restricted to the black community. A similar situation was also unfolding in Puerto Rican Chicago in the early 1980s, when a number of activists turned away from organizing working-class Puerto Ricans to fight against the injustices they faced in their everyday lives and towards the project of an independent Puerto Rican homeland. The Young Lords had already begun mobilizing behind Puerto Rican independence in the 1970s, but by the early 1980s a radical organization called the Fuerzas Armadas para la Liberacion Nacional (FALN) was leading this struggle. When, in the mid-1980s, thirteen residents of the Humboldt Park barrio were sentenced to long prison terms for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, it was clear that the independence movement was opening up cleavages in Puerto Rican Chicago between those invested in such nationalist dreams and those looking to carve out a decent living in the barrio.73 This nationalist project, moreover, reinforced cultural nationalist tendencies that drove a wedge into potential alliances between Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, who, themselves, began to imbue their communities with a strong racialized sense of Mexican cultural identity beginning in the early 1970s. Despite some significant cooperation between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans based on appeals to “Latinismo”—the mixed-Latino-majority Fourth Congressional District, for example, elected the first Latino congressman from the Midwest in 1992—the trend was towards separation. The situation had degenerated so much by 1995 that both Puerto Rican and Mexican activists began calling for the breakup of the shared congressional district their predecessors had struggled to create on the grounds that they were racially distinct groups with only a language in common.74

  All this explains why the so-called rainbow coalition of blacks, Latinos, and progressive whites that had so spectacularly vanquished the old guard in 1983 seemed to vanish after November 1987, when Harold Washington died tragically of a heart attack while sitting at his desk in City Hall. While news of the mayor’s sudden death shocked the black community, nobody who knew him well was very surprised. The sixty-five-year-old Washington had been a longtime heavy smoker before quitting the habit during his campaign, and after giving up cigarettes he began quickly gaining weight with his steady diet of greasy food. According to staffers, the mayor would eat a healthy lunch and then wolf down a triple cheeseburger and French fries for an afternoon snack. According to the Cook County medical examiner, he was one hundred pounds overweight when he died. Moreover, Washington’s constant wrangling with Vrdolyak and the “Vrdolyak 29” bloc no doubt raised his blood pressure. The conflict between the two had gotten so rancorous at times that it had even led to physical threats made on the city council floor.

  Regardless of the mayor’s combativeness, the Vrdolyak 29 bloc had the upper hand for the first three years of his term, voting down most of his attempts to reduce the city’s deficit and controlling the key committees, like Zoning and Finance, through which much of the city’s power and resources flowed. While the twenty-eight white and one Puerto Rican aldermen that made up this bloc were largely fighting to keep the old patronage system intact, they did not hesitate to mobilize their constituents with racial appeals—as, for example, when they argued that white middle-income communities should get their fair share of federal Community Development block grant funds, which were legally designated to go to low-income neighborhoods.75 Bosses in Chicago had always dominated their city councils, but now the shoe was on the other foot. Despite such difficulties, however, Mayor Washington could claim some accomplishments. He officially outlawed patronage hiring and firing, created a freedom of information act that opened city government up to public scrutiny, promoted the economic development and infrastructural improvement of all of the city’s fifty wards, and, the complaints of some disgruntled Latinos aside, had managed to hire far more Latinos, blacks, and women than any mayor before him. He also became the first mayor in Chicago’s history to embrace the issue of gay rights by creating the Mayor’s Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues (COGLI), which selected its members through a community-based process.76 And yet all this was not nearly enough to build the kind of movement culture that it would have taken to overcome the legacy of intergroup conflict and install a durable “rainbow” coalition capable of moving the goal of a fair and open city forward after Washington’s death. A reform revolution of this kind would have required a deeper cultural transformation.

  There is reason to believe that such a transformation was in the works when Washington slumped over his desk on the day before Thanksgiving in 1987. By the start of 1986, the city had seemed to be turning the corner on its racial troubles. The first sign came from its vaunted football team, the Bears, which possessed a broad base of support that extended across racial lines. The Chicago Bears of 1985 were arguably one of the greatest football teams of all time, and as they coasted towards a victory in the Super Bowl in late January 1986, some of the team’s black and white stars recorded a facetious rap video called the “Super Bowl Shuffle”—a symbolic expression of racial harmony that was not lost on the team’s massive following. Soon after that came the break the city needed to free itself from its legislative straitjacket. A federal judge ruled that Mayor Byrne’s redrawing of the Chicago ward map had violated the voting rights of blacks and Latinos and ordered that the boundaries of seven wards then controlled by the Vrdolyak 29 be redrawn and new elections be held to elect aldermen for them. Four pro-Washington candidates—two blacks and two Latinos—prevailed in these elections, creating a 25–25 split in the city council with the mayor casting the tie-breaking vote. One of the Latino aldermen joining Washington’s bloc, moreover, was the talented Luis Gutiérrez, a future United States congressman who was outspoken about his a
lliance with black reformers, shunning the idea of forming a “Latino bloc” with two pro-Vrdolyak aldermen.77 And the other pro-Washington Latino alderman, Jesús “Chuy” García, who represented the heavily Mexican ward surrounding Pilsen, was voicing similar support for the reform revolution. Washington’s momentum carried into the 1987 mayoral election, when he gained an indisputable multiracial mandate by soundly defeating Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary and Vrdolyak in the general election, each time with over 53 percent of the vote.78 Even better still, the election also saw Miguel Santiago losing his aldermanic seat to a pro-Washington lawyer named Raymond Figueroa. Meanwhile, Washington’s endorsement of gay rights was strengthening his support in North Side lakefront neighborhoods, bringing new white voters into his base. “It’s Harold’s Council Now,” the front-page headline in the Chicago Sun-Times read. Black alderman Timothy Evans promptly replaced Edward Burke as floor leader, and the new city council quickly passed an ethics ordinance and a tenant’s bill of rights. The future seemed wide open. Washington had always joked that he planned to occupy the mayor’s office for twenty years, and now that idea did not seem so far-fetched.

  But just several months later, the “Washington bloc” and its progressive brand of politics was finished for good. Somewhat ironically, the fatal fault line lay not between black and Latino aldermen but rather between reform-minded black aldermen and the black machine loyalists who had supported Washington out of necessity rather than choice. In fact, in the city council vote to determine which of the two black candidates—the Washington bloc’s choice, Timothy Evans, or the opposition bloc’s choice, Eugene Sawyer—would finish out Washington’s term, the four Latino aldermen (including the independent, Juan Soliz) backed Evans as the rightful successor to Washington’s reform project. Yet it was not enough. Although some of the old, compromised councilmen from the plantation politics days had been ousted and a new generation of committed reformers like former Black Panther Bobby Rush and civil rights activist Dorothy Tillman had arrived, the mayor had never thought it necessary to try to clean out the remaining handful of old Daley loyalists from the middling black wards—Eugene Sawyer, Wilson Frost, and John Stroger. Now they cut a deal with three wavering black alderman and most of what remained of the Vrdolyak 29 to pull together enough votes to make Sawyer the next mayor.