Foreshadowed
by his roots and bottle-rocket-like rise, Barack Obama’s legacy is
one of betrayal and what might have been,… From the outset, he
courted and was courted by the pillars of counter-revolution, his
very blackness a cloak for his Manchurian mission.
by
Jon Jeter
Part
2 - Harold Washington and his Chicago mini-revolution
With his
Motown baritone, the soaring cadence of a Baptist preacher — and a
striking resemblance to Ossie Davis — a congressman representing
Chicago’s 1st District, Harold Washington, had them at hello. As
part of the Daley machine, Washington had dutifully complied with
orders to shun Martin Luther King Jr’s 1966 visit to Chicago, but
that experience — combined with the 1969 police assassination of
the charismatic 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter of the
Black Panthers, Fred Hampton — had caused Washington to defect.
Still,
Washington was a pragmatist and a mayoral bid struck him as a tad
quixotic; he agreed to the campaign but only if the group registered
at least 100,000 new voters and raised $200,000 by the fall of 1982.
Palmer,
and his wife, Jorja, accepted the challenge, and began teaching
political education classes — modeled on the Black Panthers’
efforts — at the nonprofit organization the couple had founded and
funded, Chicago Black United Communities, on the city’s South Side.
As
Palmer recalled in a 1992 interview: “After every four-week
period we would have a graduation, and every graduation speaker was
Harold Washington. He’d come by, make a nice little speech, give
out the citations. The first graduation we had was on the coldest day
in Chicago history when the wind-chill factor went down to 80
something below zero. We were so poor we had no heat in the building
and so the people kept their scarves on, and I mean you could see the
breath coming out of their mouths. But nobody left. I turned to Jorja
and said ‘these brothas and sistas are ready’ because you know
how our people are about the cold.”
By the
fall of 1982 — as Chicago’s black radio station, WVON, crackled
with Palmer’s clever taunt, “We shall see in 83” — the CBUC
had unleashed 2,000 trained grassroots organizers on the streets, who
not only met Washington’s initial demands but eclipsed them, adding
180,000 new voters to the city’s registration rolls, and delivering
a war chest of nearly half-a-million dollars.
With the
incumbent Jane Byrne and the late Mayor Richard J. Daley’s son
Richard M. dividing white Democrats, Washington won a bitter primary,
then squeezed just enough white votes from his Rainbow Coalition to
win the general election against a bipartisan white electorate that
was unified in its contempt for him. For black Chicago, said Robert
Starks, a political science professor at Northeastern University and
a key political strategist for Washington, the campaign “took on
almost a religious or gospel character . . It became almost a civic
religion.”
Despite
stiff opposition from white aldermen and state lawmakers,
Washington’s administration began to deliver the spoils to his
constituents almost immediately, as he worked assiduously to cut
everyone in on a sweet deal that had previously been reserved for a
privileged few. He rescinded a municipal ordinance prohibiting street
musicians from putting out a hat, issued an executive order
forbidding municipal employees from enforcing immigration laws,
computerized city departments, and extended collective bargaining
rights for public trade unions whose rank-and-file members were often
kept in the dark about the labor contracts struck between their
corrupt leadership and the Daley machine.
He
opened up the city’s budget process by holding public hearings
around the city, increased the number of women and Blacks at City
Hall, capped campaign contributions for contractors doing business
with the city at $1,500, and professionalized the city’s workforce
by banning patronage hiring and firing — all of which would’ve
been unimaginable under the old machine. He even mothballed the
city’s limousine, for an Oldsmobile 98.
“We
had built Chicago to a peak of Black solidarity by the time it came
to elect Harold,” Palmer said in 1992. “You’d better not
even think about not voting for Harold Washington. I mean it better
not even come in your mind, or somebody would go upside your head.”
Short-lived
as it was, Harold Washington’s City Hall was the crowning
achievement of a nationwide revolution that had begun 50-years
earlier at the height of the Great Depression, when organized labor
integrated its ranks and its leadership, and workers of all races
banded together to transform bad jobs into good ones. The essential
actors in that rebellion were the descendants of chattel slaves, who
not only helped imbue the economy with unprecedented buying power,
but articulated a coherent, shimmering vision of what a racial
democracy — a Beloved Community — might look like in practice.
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