Ralph Metcalfe, a silver medalist in the hundred-meter dash at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and a boss of the Third Ward, was a prime example. Metcalfe was Dawson's protege and his successor in Congress--a loyal member of the machine. When King came to Chicago, Metcalfe was among those black leaders who said that he wasn't wanted: "We have adequate leadership here." In 1972, police pulled over a black dentist, a friend of Metcalfe's, and handcuffed and bullied him for no reason. Not long afterward, another black dentist who was driving had a stroke and hit a parked car; the police held him in jail for five hours and he went into a coma. Metcalfe asked Daley to come to his office, but Daley refused; after these outrages, Metcalfe broke with Daley and the machine, saying, "The Mayor doesn't understand what happens to black men on the streets of Chicago and probably never will."
Richard J. Daley died, in 1976, after twenty-one years in office. Even his most loyal aides could not say that he had succeeded in holding off racial change in Chicago. "What Daley did was smother King," his press secretary, Earl Bush, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1986. "What Daley couldn't smother was the civil-rights movement."
Daley was succeeded by Michael Bilandic, another machine politician from Bridgeport, who served ineptly until 1979, and then by Jane Byrne, who ran as a reformer in the city's first post-Daley election but, once elected, ignored her minority allies from the campaign and governed with an assemblage of machine hacks. When it was time for her re-election campaign in 1983, she faced two opponents, the scion, Richard M. Daley, and Harold Washington, a congressman from the South Side.
Harold Washington started out as a cog in the machine--his father was a precinct captain in Bronzeville; his mentor was Ralph Metcalfe--but both as a state senator in Springfield and as a member of Congress, he became a favorite of liberal whites along the Lakefront and South Side blacks looking for an effective new generation of leadership. Despite the shadow cast by Daley, there was a progressive tradition in Chicago politics: Ida Wells, Jane Addams, Saul Alinsky, Adlai Stevenson, Paul Douglas, the Independent Voters of Illinois, the various streams of black integrationists and more radical activists on the South Side. Washington, who was far more intellectual than he usually let on, was a student of his city's progressives, and he set out to win the mayoralty by drawing on those traditions and on his own deep experience in the maelstrom of Chicago politics.
In the Democratic primary, Washington's supporters hoped that Byrne and Daley would split the white ethnic vote and that Washington could succeed with a combination of blacks and just enough white liberals to win. In majority-black cities like Gary, Cleveland, and Detroit, a new generation of black mayors had already come to office. In Chicago, where African-Americans made up just forty per cent of the population, the demographics were less stark. Washington, using rhetoric that was echoed (if less bluntly) by Barack Obama a generation later, refused to assume the mantle of a racial candidate.
"I'm sick and tired of being called 'the black candidate,'" he said at the opening of a campaign office. "They don't talk about Jane Byrne as the white candidate. I don't even want to be called 'intelligent.' That's a put-down. It's manifestly obvious I am intelligent. Nor is it necessary to constantly refer to me as 'articulate.' Why don't they just come out and say I know what I'm talking about? Richard M. Daley believes he should be mayor simply because his father was. We don't have the divine right of kings in this country, I don't think."
Washington did not start out with a great deal of national help. Former Vice-President Walter Mondale, who was hoping to upset President Reagan the following year, supported Daley; Edward Kennedy, an important figure for Illinois Democrats, supported Byrne. The only newspaper to endorse Washington was the Defender. His fund-raising was limited and much of his grassroots support came from local churches.
Among the ministers who worked hard for Washington was the charismatic leader of the Trinity United Church of Christ on Ninety-fifth Street, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright and some of his colleagues collected names for a pro-Washington advertisement in the Defender. The ad said that the black church "which stands firmly in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," and "stands on the shoulders of those African slaves who sang 'Before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave,'" could only support Harold Washington. To describe their point of view, the writers of the advertisement called themselves "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian"--a phrase that Wright eventually adopted as the motto of his church.
Washington crushed Daley and Byrne in the debates, and his strategy paid off with a narrow win in the primary. "You don't have to be blessed with a great imagination to see the parallels between Harold Washington in 1983 and Barack Obama in 2008," Clarence Page, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune columnist who covered both races, said. "In 1983, you had the strong female incumbent, Byrne; the populist of the bungalow belt, Richie Daley; and the black spoiler. The breakthrough quality for Harold Washington was his oratory. The morning after that first debate, after Harold won so decisively, you saw Washington buttons all around town. And then, of course, the moment he won the Democratic primary a miracle occurred--half of Chicago went Republican overnight. And you had the black base asking if Harold was 'black enough' and whites thinking he was 'too black.' Sounds a little familiar, doesn't it?"
Chicago had long been a bastion of Democratic Party rule, but now, whites all over the city were newborn Republicans, and it barely mattered who the Republican nominee was. Racial animosities were so intense that nearly any sentient white Republican stood at least some chance of beating an African-American Democrat. The Republicans also had a point of attack: they were able to bring up, repeatedly, the fact that Washington had failed to file his income-tax forms for many years (although he paid the actual tax revenue); in 1972, a federal judge handed down a two-year sentence, then suspended all but five weeks of it.
Washington's Republican opponent, Bernard Epton, was from Hyde Park and had a reputation as a principled man. He was an early opponent of McCarthyism. He had marched with the sanitation workers in Memphis after Martin Luther King was there. As a state representative, he'd fought against racist real-estate practices. Epton ran for the Republican nomination with the expectation that (a) he would be running against Daley or Byrne and (b) that he would probably lose.
When Washington won the nomination, Epton said the right thing: "I don't want to be elected because I am white." But he rapidly betrayed himself. As his ambition intensified, he began to give himself over to Washington, D.C.-based Republican consultants who came up with a campaign slogan that appealed to racist instincts: "Epton for Mayor. Before It's Too Late." Some of Epton's supporters distributed leaflets saying they refused to vote for a "baboon"; others wore buttons that were just white. On the streets of white ethnic neighborhoods there were leaflets describing Washington's "campaign promises": "Raise Whitey's Taxes!" was one. "Replace CTA buses with Eldorados!" was another. The leaflets had Washington moving City Hall to Martin Luther King Drive and relocating a city bureaucracy to Leon's Rib Basket. Another flyer implied that Washington was guilty of child molestation.
Leanita McClain, a black member of the Tribune's editorial board, described in a column the vicious racial atmosphere during the campaign:
The Chicago Tribune endorsed Harold Washington in a long and eloquent Sunday editorial. It was intended to persuade the bigots. It would have caused any sensible person at least to think. It failed. The mail and calls besieged the staff. The middle range of letters had the words "LIES" and "NIGGER LOVERS" scratched across the editorial.
Hoping to shame these people, make them look at themselves, the newspaper printed a full page of these rantings. But when the mirror was presented to them, the bigots reveled before it. The page only gave them aid and comfort in knowing their numbers. That is what is wrong with this town; being a racist is as respectable and expected as going to church.
Filthy literature littered the city streets like the propaganda air blitzes of World War II.
The subway would be renamed "Soul Train." ... In the police stations, reports were whispered about fights between longtime black and white squad-car partners. Flyers proclaiming the new city of "Chicongo," with crossed drumsticks as the city seal, were tacked to police station bulletin boards. The schools actually formulated plans to deal with racial violence, just in case.
Haskel Levy, an aide to Bernard Epton, told him that he was becoming the unwitting tool of a racist campaign. But, instead of repudiating racism, Epton repudiated Haskel Levy. He threw Levy's coat into the hall and told him, "Get the fuck out!"
The erstwhile man of principle doubled down as he smelled victory. "I am not ashamed of being white!" Epton now declared. He told a crowd of Republicans in the Forty-seventh Ward, "Some of my great liberal friends feel they have to prove they are liberal by voting for a black who was sentenced to jail and who's supposed to run a city budget of two billion dollars plus. They call that liberalism. I call it sheer idiocy." Epton now seemed to relish his ability to rev up white crowds and their resentments. A young reporter for the Tribune, David Axelrod, described Epton as "volatile and capricious, prone to inexplicable outbursts and fits."
Naturally, Harold Washington was furious. He accused Epton, who had once been a friendly colleague in Springfield, of unleashing "the dogs of racism."
There was no doubt that Epton had done the unleashing, but Washington used wit rather than anger to deflect the worst of it. When asked on a radio call-in show if, as mayor, he would replace all the city's elevators with jungle vines, Washington cracked, "I don't think we have three million Tarzans in this city."
The racist fury was never more in evidence than on March 27, 1983, Palm Sunday. Accompanied by Vice-President Mondale, Washington went to St. Pascal's, a Catholic church in the northwest of the city. He was greeted by a racist mob shouting, "Nigger die" and "Carpetbagger!" and "Epton!" Someone had scrawled the graffito "Nigger die!" on the church. During the service, the demonstrators outside were so disruptive that Mondale and Washington had to leave. Soon afterward, the campaign became a national story with Newsweek publishing a cover feature on "Chicago's Ugly Election." David Axelrod covered the event for the Tribune. "It was one of the worst things I have ever seen," he recalled. "The racism was unguarded, full-throated. I thought people were going to get hurt, or worse."
In Chicago, Democrats routinely beat Republicans for mayor and just about every other local office, by landslides. But, despite that history, and the huge difference in party registration, Washington beat Epton by just over three per cent of the vote. Washington's campaign had united integrationists, black nationalists, Lakefront liberals, business people, community activists, church people, college students, and sixties-era leftists. That was just enough. An alarming number of whites, traditional Democrats, loyal to the old and hobbled machine, crossed over and voted for Epton--or, rather, against Washington. In the end, Washington's victory was due mainly to a record turnout among African-Americans.
When Washington's team organized a "unity breakfast" after the election and invited Epton to come, Epton refused, preferring to escape to Florida instead. But nothing could deflate the elation of the winner's supporters. "For blacks, Washington's victory was like the coming of the messiah," Don Rose, one of his campaign aides, said. "The feeling was: the veil of oppression was lifted by one of us, and we did it. It was the original 'Yes We Can.'"
As a young organizer, Obama absorbed these momentous events. He read up on them, asked about them, sought out conversations with people who remembered not just Daley and King but Dawson and De Priest. In Dreams from My Father, he captures the adulation of Harold Washington in his Hyde Park barbershop, describes the sense of hope the new city administration brought to the slums of the West Side and the housing projects of the South Side. It was part of the talk Obama, as a young community organizer, was hearing every day.
In office, Washington set out to be the mayor of all the city's neighborhoods and people. He also wanted to create a governing coalition capable of resisting the anti-New Deal ideology, racial indifference, and draconian cutbacks of Ronald Reagan, who had come to power two years before.
Harold Washington had worked as a teenager for the Civilian Conservation Corps, served in an engineering battalion in the Pacific theater during the Second World War, and worked his way up through the political ranks in Chicago's Third Ward. His sympathies were with the thousands of steelworkers who had been laid off and then denied benefits when the mills closed. In Washington's eyes, his victory was not solely an African-American victory, but a victory--no matter what the polls suggested--for a "multiethnic, multiracial, multilanguage city," as he said in his first inaugural address. At his victory celebration the band played "Take the 'A' Train" but also "Hava Nagila," "Besame Mucho," "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," "Auf Wiedersehen," "O Sole Mio," and "Fanfare for the Common Man." Washington's desire to extend a hand even to his enemies, rather than concentrate his efforts on the people who had elected him, alienated some of the nationalist activists in his electoral coalition--important voices like the journalist Lutrelle Palmer. "He never became what I would consider the black Mayor," Palmer once said. "Black people wanted something that was so simple: fairness.... Harold was too fair."
Obama was too young to have memories of the Kennedys and King. Harold Washington was the first elected politician in his lifetime who inspired him. For Obama, Washington's career suggested the value of a life on the inside, in politics. Mike Kruglik believed almost from the start that Obama was considering running for office one day--for mayor, perhaps. "Barack admired Harold Washington, he was inspired by him," Kruglik said, "and when he thought about the path to power himself he thought of becoming a lawyer, then a state legislator, then a congressman, then mayor--like Harold. Even before Harvard Law School, he thought about that. He would say, 'If you really want to get something done, maybe being mayor will help.' It was a matter of power integrated with purpose."
Obama's admiration was not absolute. Washington ran a disorganized office and was faced with constant opposition from the old machine aldermen on the City Council. "We were cynical about Harold, even though you couldn't help but like him," Jerry Kellman said. "Harold was interested in Harold. Barack was frustrated sometimes with the lack of responsiveness of Washington to the community and saw him as complex and flawed." The problem, Kellman said, "was that if Barack was going to get to a position of political power in Illinois his only option was Washington's path--from the state legislature, to Congress, to mayor. Racial politics precluded anything else. This was true as far as any of us could see at the time. But Barack did not see himself as another Harold Washington. He saw himself as having skills and a perspective from organizing that Harold did not have, and Barack hoped to find a way to put them to use."
For the time being, though, Obama could not afford to linger over the ramifications of political forces beyond his control. His daily work was in church basements, high-school gymnasiums, the waiting rooms of broken bureaucracies. These were the scenes of his political education. He was interviewing people: priests, ministers, activists, local officials, police officers, teachers, principals, workers, hustlers, shopkeepers. An organizer interviews people incessantly, asking them about their lives, their tragedies and frustrations, their desires and aspirations. Obama and his colleagues counted themselves failures if they were seen as visitors. The more they made themselves fixtures in the community, the better their chances of success.
"Narrative is the most powerful thing we have," Kellman said. "From a spiritual point of view, much of what is important about us can't be seen. If we don't know people's stories we don't know who they are. If you want to understand them or try to help them, you have to find out their story."
While Obama formed friendships in Hyde Park, the greater South Side was his community, the focus of his work and life. The closer he became to people on the South Side, the more he was able to get them to trust in the possibility of change. "Barack enjoys peo
ple and forms strong attachments," Kellman said. "He had the opportunity to do that here, unlike in New York City. There was an opportunity for intimacy. He wanted to get to know the black community and he felt very much at home. He wanted to be effective. And people would ask him questions: 'What church do you belong to?' 'Are you just here for a few months or are you really going to stay in Chicago?' 'Who are your mom and dad?' These questions, which seemed pretty innocent for most people, were very complicated for Barack. But he gradually became a Chicagoan and really fell in love with the city. He was in his element on the South Side. He comes to a community that is thought to be homogeneous but it really is diverse in income and many other ways. Give Barack diversity and he is king of the room. The diversity of the black community was a real plus. He could move in different worlds here, more so than anywhere else. There are so many communities in Chicago. Al Sharpton could never have risen to the kind of prominence he has in New York in Chicago. With time, even Jesse Jackson began to seem not sophisticated enough for this community."
Community organizing has a miserable success rate. For every triumph like Alinsky's in Woodlawn, there are dozens of failures, projects begun with high hopes that fizzle out in a splutter of indifference and frustration. To the local residents, young organizers can seem a vaguely comical, if well-meaning, nuisance. "We were always asking each other, 'Why do this work that busts your balls so bad all the time?'" Mike Kruglik recalled.
One winter morning, soon after he started working as an organizer, Obama was waiting outside a school to deliver some leaflets. An administrative aide from the school who had got to know him said, "Listen, Obama. You're a bright young man, Obama. You went to college, didn't you?"
Obama nodded.
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 21