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This chapter analyzes the racial politics of Mayor Harold Washington’s election, his education summit, and the supporters and critics of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act. Harold Washington’s election as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983 was heralded by many as the ultimate attainment of Black Power and the success of the local Black Freedom Movement. His electoral victory was grounded in years of grassroots struggle by Black organizers fighting for integration, community control, and Black empowerment. While historians have largely considered the 1980s as a product of the political triumph of conservatism and the “Reagan revolution,” in Chicago a Black-led, urban, antimachine, progressive coalitional politics led to Washington’s electoral victory. The disparate programmatic and ideological camps detailed in previous chapters (desegregation activists, community control organizers, founders of independent Black institutions, Black educators) staked claims in Mayor Washington and his political organization. The politics of Washington’s education reform summits, however, exposed the fractures within this political coalition. The interracial and intraracial struggles over school reform in Chicago during the 1980s reveal the tensions between a politics of racial representation and a politics of progressive transformation and prefigure the increased privatization of public education in the decades that followed.

This chapter argues that the long tradition of neighborhood-based politics – and the race-conscious, pragmatic, liberal political culture black Chicagoans had created – had its best moment in the election of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor. His electoral insurgency bridged divides in black Chicago with appeals to shared racial interests in the overthrow of the white Democratic machine’s “plantation politics.” After the election, Washington pivoted from black nationalist politics to the politics of progressive reform, seeking to use interracial political alliances and government power to foster democratic political power and fair play and equal opportunity for individuals seeking housing and economic opportunity. In particular, the chapter highlights how people who appeared in previous chapters helped develop a hybrid political vision of “equity planning” that aimed to link economic development to bringing jobs, housing, recreational spaces, and municipal services to working-class communities.

Chapter 1 documents how Chicago elites welcomed and promoted Michael Jordan and the Bulls of the 1990s as saviors of the city's global reputation. This process supplemented larger efforts by Mayor Richard M. Daley to restructure Chicago's economy around entertainment and cultural attractions. While the new growth model appears to have boosted local economic expansion, this conclusion requires several caveats. First, any impact attributable to the Bulls was miniscule at best. Second, this impact resulted not from investment in the United Center, but from the serendipitous arrival of Michael Jordan. Third, the city distributed the fruits of new, tourism-centered growth very unequally. Officials concentrated the public investment that buttressed this model in Chicago's downtown, leaving many outlying neighborhoods (especially non-white ones) to fend for themselves. Moreover, the new leisure opportunities proved inaccessible to most residents, as businesses increasingly targeted the affluent with luxury goods/services. Efforts to tout the Bulls as a form of civic glue papered over this increasingly unequal growth by replacing definitions of community based on class with definitions rooted in fandom. They also ignored viable forms of more racially and economically equitable urban revitalization pursued with marked success during the early 1980s by Mayor Harold Washington.

This chapter examines the importance of black and Latino coalitions in the political campaigns of Chicago mayor Harold Washington in 1983 and Jesse Jackson in 1984. Starting with the Progressive anti-machine coalitions in Chicago in the 1970s, voter-registration drives led to the movement to unseat Mayor Jane Byrne and elect Harold Washington as mayor in 1983. Jessie Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign employed the same political strategy used to defeat the Chicago Democratic machine: a long and sustained voter-registration drive, which created a multiethnic Rainbow Coalition and established a Progressive stump speech that addressed issues facing working-class Americans and immigrants from Latin America. In the process, blacks and Latino activists who supported Jackson in New York and other parts of the country developed Progressive political organizations like the Rainbow Coalition, which registered and mobilized voters.

This chapter focuses on Richard Durham's pursuit of new creative challenges after writing The Greatest. Durham had long talked about writing a book about Aesop—the man whose morality tales known as fables carry his name. Another historical figure who had long drawn Durham's creative interest was a man named Hannibal Barca, also known as Hannibal the Great or Hannibal the Conqueror. However, neither the Aesop nor the Hannibal project materialized. By the late 1970s, Durham knew that the seeds of a growing black political movement were sprouting in his hometown. His longtime friend, Illinois congressman Harold Washington, eventually became the first black mayor in Chicago, one of the most segregated and politically contentious cities in America. On April 27, 1984, Durham was in New York City meeting with Rukmini Sukarno about business opportunities as well as the autobiography she wanted him to write. Not long after the meeting, Durham succumbed to an acute coronary thrombosis. He was sixty-six years old.

As rapid economic changes hit Chicago, black musicians continued to create new work and gain wider audiences throughout the 1970s. Deindustrialization harmed the neighborhoods that had been home to an earlier generation of musicians, but younger artists and music media took advantage of new opportunities, including FM radio frequency. Funk performers, like Daryl “Captain Sky” Cameron, drew on a mix of idioms. A few artists who developed their craft earlier in Chicago helped create bestselling albums in the 1970s, such as Earth, Wind and Fire and The Emotions. Others, like Linda Clifford, recorded disco. This chapter also looks at the racial overtones of the subsequent anti-disco backlash in Chicago and the development of another form of dance music, known as house. The chapter concludes with an account of how musicians worked for Harold Washington’s mayoral election in 1983.

This chapter examines the evolutionary forces within black politics in Chicago that set the stage for Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election. It begins by revisiting Harold Washington's successful campaign for mayor in 1983, and how his mostly black coalition in 1983 and in 1987 (when he was reelected) paved the way for the rise of more coalition-driven black politics that enabled Obama and Carol Moseley Braun to win seats in the U.S. Senate. It then considers the factors that account for Chicago's reputation as the center of black politics, including the blacks' complicated relationship to the city's powerful Democratic Party. The chapter also looks at the impact of Emil Jones, who became president of the Illinois Senate in 2002, on Obama's political ascendancy.

This chapter traces the evolution of Blacks from voters to candidates following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It argues that there were two waves of Black electoral success. Focusing on Black mayors, it contrasts the “insurgent strategy” with the later “deracialized strategy.” The “insurgent” strategy often resembles a social movement more than a political campaign and is directed at mobilizing the candidate's racial support base. The “deracialized” strategy attempts to downplay any racial issue as the candidate reaches out to form a broad coalition of supporters. The chapter also gives credit to Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson for their strategy of expanding the base of the Democratic Party rather than moving to the right to capture “Reagan Democrats.”

Chapter 2 describes the battles for political power that shaped Little Village’s violence prevention infrastructures in its west and east sides. While residential blocks compose a neighborhood, city and state political boundaries often intersect across neighborhoods, dividing them into spaces with varying levels of resources and institutional support. The west side was home to the 22^nd ward, where activists succeeded at ousting Democratic Party candidates from office and subsequently funneled violence prevention resources to the ward. In contrast, the east side has been consistently gerrymandered since 1975, thereby stunting the development of an organizational infrastructure for acquiring and distributing resources to eastside blocks. By describing Little Village’s political history, the chapter demonstrates how political turf wars over blocks’ ward designation can shape blocks’ ability to acquire state resources for preventing violence.

This chapter recounts Richard Durham's memorial service at Rayner's funeral home in his hometown Chicago. Durham died unexpectedly of a heart attack on April 27, 1984, during a business trip in New York City. Among those who paid tribute to the complicated family man, friend, and mentor—as well as the writer and dedicated freedom fighter—were Durham's thirty-four-year-old son, Mark; one of Mark's uncles, his mother's oldest brother, Robert Davis; Pulitzer Prize–winning author Louis Terkel; and Margaret Burroughs, the visual artist, writer, and co-founder of the South Side's Du Sable Museum of African American History. Others who spoke fondly of Durham were journalist Vernon Jarrett and activists Ishmael Flory and Edward “Buzz” Palmer; the singer, actor, and activist Oscar Brown Jr.; and Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor. The final speaker was Durham's brother Earl Durham.

As the 1970s reached its end, both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans had concentrated in four community areas: Pilsen, Little Village, West Town, and Humboldt Park. Despite their increasing numbers, they still lacked political power. To this end, most Latino activists implored their brethren to get their names listed in the census, so that the government could see their true numbers. This bore fruit in the 1983 elections, when Chicagoans elected Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor. This served as a breakthrough of the racial boundaries long built by local politics. In the mid-1980s, Latinos started to be elected in various key positions in the city at ward, aldermanic, and state level.