Black Leadership by Marable Manning

Author:Marable, Manning [Marable, Manning]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, Columbia University Press, General, African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Social Science
ISBN: 9780231107464
Google: 5GPYngEACAAJ
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 1998-01-15T14:41:42.899681+00:00

9

Harold Washington’s Chicago:

Race, Class Conflict, and Political Change In 1983 Chicago elected its first black mayor, Congressman Harold Washington, in a political contest highly charged with racism and social-class conflict. Breaking out of a two-generations-long pattern of electoral apathy and political repression, nearly three-fourths of all black voters turned out on April 12 of that year to give Washington more than 514,000

votes. The black Democrat combined that total with votes from other key constituencies—79 percent of the Puerto Rican vote, 68 percent of the Mexican American vote, and 38 percent of the Jewish vote—to defeat Bernard Epton, his previously obscure Republican opponent.1 During the next four years Washington tried to reform the city’s byzantine government while addressing the basic grievances and problems of blacks and other constituents in the areas of housing, health care, employment, police brutality, and social services.

The central political dilemma confronting Washington was the need to create a broad-based, progressive, radical-reformist, multiethnic, multiclass coalition that would, in theory, embrace African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, low-income working people, and the unemployed. Evidence provided by the mayoral campaign of 1987, when Mayor Washington sought and won reelection, suggests that the difficulties inherent in such a strategy—a “Rainbow Coalition”—may be underestimated by its proponents. Moreover, the coalition’s more progressive elements failed to develop independent structures outside of government to influence the mayor’s 127

128 | Harold Washington’s Chicago agenda, and that failure directly contributed to the difficulty of consolidating a Rainbow Coalition in Chicago.

I

Washington’s inability to dominate the city council for the first three years of his tenure undermined his efforts to transform Chicago’s political system. The boss of the Cook County Democratic Party machine, Alderman E. R. “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak, deprived the mayor of any real authority by controlling twenty-nine of the fifty aldermen. Vrdolyak’s majority bloc changed the city council’s rules to require a two-thirds vote to take bills away from committees that refused to act on them. “Regular” Democrats dominated by the machine held the powerful committee chairmanships, and independents aligned with Washington held nothing. Normal governmental processes were totally disrupted by these “council wars.”

Superficially, the conflicts between the Vrdolyak and Washington blocs seemed to be motivated solely by race. During the 1983 Democratic mayoral primary, Vrdolyak had mobilized white supporters by resorting to crude race-baiting: “It’s a racial thing. Don’t kid yourself. . . . We’re fighting to keep the city the way it is.”2 The fundamental factors motivating these political skirmishes, however, were patronage and power, not race. Vrdolyak and his allies were “concerned about loss of power and patronage and opportunities,” observed Edwin C. Berry, former director of the Chicago Urban League. “If Harold Washington were as white as the driven snow and he took away those privileges, they would be equally against him.”3

Despite the disruption caused by the council wars, Washington’s administration successfully addressed many social problems. In the area of public housing, the city built 9,596 new residential units in 1983–1985.

Washington’s housing staff was reduced by one-fourth, but it was able to rehabilitate more than twice the number of homes restored under the previous administration.

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