Young Mr. Obama (4 page)

“The story of how the black migrants from the South gathered their strength to fulfill George White's prophecy is a story of machine politics—Chicago style,” wrote St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton in
Black Metropolis
, their study of the Black Belt.

So it took a shady politician from the Windy City to fulfill the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment. The beauty of a machine is that it offers a little something for everyone, even if it's only a free turkey for voting on Election Day.

DePriest liked to say, “I am a Negro before I am a Republican,” but that wasn't enough to save his career when the New Deal converted blacks to the Democratic faith. DePriest had been a Herbert Hoover congressman. In 1934, he was defeated by a Democrat, after a black committeeman reminded his constituents that “Abraham Lincoln is dead.”

The next boss of black Chicago was William Dawson, a ghetto grandee who strutted around Bronzeville on a wooden leg, which he stomped to give emphasis to his threats. Unlike his black power predecessor, Dawson didn't flaunt his race. If DePriest had been a Negro before he was a Republican, Dawson was a machine hack before he was a Negro.

Like most blacks who came of age before the New Deal, Dawson began his career a Republican. He changed parties only after seeing more opportunity on the other side of the ballot. After six years as alderman of the Second Ward, he lost his bid for reelection, so he accepted Mayor Edward Kelly's offer to become Democratic committeeman. Soon, he was a congressman, sitting in DePriest's old seat.

Dawson's most generous political donors were the policy kings, the South Side numbers runners who sold poor blacks a chance at winning the rent money, at just ten cents a spin. They were a major force in the Black Belt's economy: The most successful owned vacation homes in Paris and Mexico.

“Now, if I were to run for a political office, I would have to raise campaign expenses,” Dawson explained. “If I went to every professional man in the town, I would not be able to raise two hundred dollars. But if I went to the vice lords and policy kings, I would get two or three thousand from a couple of them.”

At Dawson's urging, Mayor Kelly protected the policy kings. As Dawson put it, “If anybody is going to make money out of the frailties of my people, it's going to be my people.”

But after Kelly went, so did the protection. As soon as Kelly was out of power, Chicago's organized crime mob, known as the Outfit, began knocking off policy wheel operators in a hostile takeover of the numbers game. Dawson appealed to Kelly's successor, Mayor Martin Kennelly, to defend his most important source of campaign funds. Kennelly, Chicago's postwar mayor, fancied himself a reformer (which made him completely out of place in city hall), and reformers don't stand up for gamblers. Dawson didn't forget the snub. When Kennelly tried to run for a third term in 1955, Dawson helped dump him in favor of Richard J. Daley. The Dawson-controlled black wards gave Daley over 70 percent of the vote.

Dawson was able to amass more power than DePriest because the Black Belt had changed since DePriest's day. In 1948, the Supreme Court outlawed restrictive housing covenants, and the well-to-do professionals who had provided the Black Belt with intellectual and political leadership immediately left for more prosperous neighborhoods. They were replaced by blacks of the Second Great Migration, many of them sharecroppers dispossessed from the Mississippi Delta by cotton-picking machines. Poor, barely literate, and country to the bone, these newcomers needed the jobs and welfare that only a machine could provide. Dawson could get you a nice apartment at one of the brand-new high-rise housing projects or a gig at the post office, sorting mail from midnight to eight.

Mayor Daley, who refused to allow anyone other than Mayor Daley to make decisions in Chicago, did not allow Dawson to choose his people's aldermen. Instead, he stocked the city council with a cast of docile South Side and West Side mediocrities known as the “Silent Six,” who could be counted on to vote with the Machine, even when the Machine was blocking an open housing law that would have allowed poorer blacks to escape the ghetto. Dawson resisted Daley's power play, but as it turned out, the Silent Six helped solve a thorny problem for Daley's Machine and Dawson's sub-Machine.

“The blacks wanted out of their ghetto,” wrote Bill and Lori Granger in
Lords of the Last Machine: The Story of Politics in Chicago
. “But how could the Machine encourage this without breaking up the old ethnic neighborhoods that gave it its strength? Nor did black Machine leaders have any interest in breaking up the tight black ghetto. Under Bill Dawson it was a powerful force as well as economically tied to the Dawson machine. Why let the chickens get out of the coop?”

DePriest, Dawson, and Powell all had one trait common to pioneering black politicians: light skin. Down unto Obama, mixed-race politicians have made advances that were later shared by the entire community. Virginia's Douglas Wilder, the first black governor since Reconstruction, was also light skinned. It's as though the color barrier can only be breached by someone whose ancestors have already lived on the other side.

“They were considered white,” Timuel Black says of Chicago's first black congressmen. “They had to be smarter because they had white ancestors. That's part of the culture of America. That's true even today. Nobody speaks about it, but they can see it.”

Black Chicago's fealty to the Machine began to fall apart during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The poor black wards, controlled by Dawson, had provided the votes to put Daley in office and keep him there. One West Side ward, which was run by white precinct captains and white mobsters, voted for Daley 20,300 to 800. City hall rewarded its most loyal supporters with slights. Overcrowded black schools held classes in trailers, while white schools across the color line sat half-empty. The Robert Taylor Homes, the city's largest housing project, was separated by a highway from Daley's all-white Bridgeport—a highway placed there to maintain the color line. When black students moved onto Daley's street, he did nothing to stop the demonstration that drove them out.

Those insults could be borne—things were still worse down South—but when Daley's police began killing blacks, the community revolted. Daley, who had been seen as an antiwar liberal in the mid-1960s, changed his political persona to match the country's call for law and order. First, he publicly ordered police officers to “shoot to kill” arsonists during the West Side riots following Martin Luther King's assassination. The next year, police gunned down Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, the leaders of the local Black Panther Party. The men were shot to death in their beds during an early morning raid that the police and newspapers portrayed as a “wild gun battle.” The killings galvanized Chicago's black political establishment. Ralph Metcalfe, the Olympic track star who had been a member of the Silent Six before succeeding Dawson in Congress, was transformed into a bitter critic of the mayor. Blacks couldn't take down Daley, but they did go after his hand-picked Cook County state attorney, Edward Hanrahan, who had plotted the Black Panther raid. Hanrahan was thrown out of office in 1972 by a coalition of inner-city blacks and suburban Republicans. It was the Machine's first big defeat, but a bigger one was coming. In the winter of 1979, Daley's successor, Michael Bilandic, dealt with the commuting woes created by a blizzard by ordering L trains to speed past stops in inner city neighborhoods. The snowfall was bad timing for Bilandic. The Democratic primary for mayor came around a few weeks later, too soon for the black community to forget the slight. Blacks voted overwhelmingly for Bilandic's opponent, Jane Byrne.

“Byrne's unprecedented showing accordingly provided black voters with a new sense of themselves, and the machine lost its aura of invincibility,” wrote William J. Grimshaw in his book
Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991
. “If black voters could elect a female mayor, why not a black mayor?”

Why not, especially when the female mayor turned out to be no better than the Machine mayor. Byrne dumped blacks from the school board, replacing them with whites. Desperate for a champion, black leaders pleaded with Harold Washington to run for mayor.

Washington had begun his political career as a minor operator in William Dawson's South Side Machine. In Chicago, every ambitious young politician needed a “Chinaman,” a powerful patron who would secure him a government job and promote him for office when a spot on the ballot opened up. Washington's Chinaman was Ralph Metcalfe. Washington inherited a precinct captaincy from his father, and Metcalfe quickly put him on the city hall payroll as a lawyer in the corporation counsel's office. After Washington got into a shouting match with a white colleague, threatening to throw the man out the window, he stopped showing up for work, except on payday. That was okay, because he was still doing the important part of his job: getting out the vote for his Chinaman. In 1964, Metcalfe sent Washington to Springfield as a state representative, where he embarrassed the Machine by sponsoring an anti–police brutality law. He turned out to be a liberal, in tune with the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, campaigning for affordable housing, consumer protection, women's liberation, and abused children. After Metcalfe died, Washington beat the Machine loyalist chosen to take his old patron's place. He was congressman for the historic First Congressional District. In Chicago, that was as high as a black politician could go.

At first, Washington refused the calls to run for mayor. He had tried it in 1977, lost badly, and was enjoying his new job as a congressman. Then he offered a condition: He would run if one hundred thousand new black voters registered. Registrars hit the streets, urging blacks to “send Reagan a message” and “get Jane Byrne.” They added 125,000 names to the rolls, expanding the black electorate by 30 percent.

Washington won the 1983 Democratic mayoral primary by defeating a pair of Irish politicians. Mayor Jane Byrne and Cook County state's attorney Richard M. Daley split the white vote, allowing Washington to squeak through with 36 percent. In a city that hadn't elected a Republican mayor since Big Bill Thompson, that should have been enough to ensure him victory. But Chicago had never elected a black mayor. The day after the primary, Irish, Poles, and Italians who had been baptized in the Democratic Party began flocking to the Republican nominee, a Jewish attorney named Bernard Epton.

The election was entirely about race. When Washington campaigned at a church on the white northwest side, he was greeted by a jeering mob and the graffito
DIE, NIGGER, DIE.
On the South Side, a bus driver half-jokingly told his passengers, “Anyone here who's not going to vote for Harold Washington, get off my bus.” In the black community, to be seen without a blue “Washington for Mayor” button was to be poorly dressed. Unfortunately, Washington's inattention to his personal and professional affairs had left him with a record of tax problems and attorney-client complaints, which allowed whites to insist their opposition had nothing to do with his blackness. He was so careless he'd neglected to file taxes for several years in the 1960s, which earned him a forty-day jail sentence. Epton ran an ad highlighting Washington's messy finances, ominously urging Chicagoans to stop him “before it's too late.”

The city was so polarized that the chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party, Alderman Edward Vrdolyak, secretly urged white precinct captains to work for the Republican. He thought, at least, that he was doing it secretly. Two newspaper reporters had slipped into a meeting where Vrdolyak declared that the contest was “a racial thing.” Their stories ran the weekend before the election. Washington won with 51 percent of the vote—all the blacks, most of the Latinos, and just enough white lakefront liberals who were reluctant to vote for a tax cheat but even more reluctant to support a candidate they thought was appealing to racism.

After Washington took office, Vrdolyak again tried to thwart him by forming “the Twenty-nine,” a bloc of white aldermen who stonewalled every mayoral appointment and initiative. A local comedian dubbed the deadlock “Council Wars.”
Time
magazine called Chicago “Beirut on the Lake.” The black community was so politicized, so united in its support of Washington, that street-corner idlers discussed his school board appointments as avidly as they did the Bulls' first-round draft pick, a shooting guard from North Carolina.

Washington's election gave blacks a new sense of political confidence. To
Ebony
magazine, published in Chicago, the victory was as much an assertion of black power as Joe Louis's knockout of Max Schmeling. Chicago's blacks had knocked down the Irish Machine, which had ruled the city for half a century. Who was next?

The national Democratic Party was next. Jesse Jackson was inspired to run for president during the 1983 mayoral primary, after seeing former vice president Walter Mondale and Senator Edward Kennedy snub Washington. (Mondale endorsed Byrne, while Kennedy backed Daley, a fellow Irishman whose father had helped elect John F. Kennedy.) Jackson started a national voter registration drive and declared that blacks would no longer be taken for granted by the Democratic Party.

“Washington's win,” he said, “is a particularly important victory, because it signifies to the world that a new inspiration is at work right here in Chicago.”

The publicity-loving Jackson may have been eager to snatch back the title of America's leading black politician (with Washington as mayor, Jackson was no longer even number one in Chicago). Whatever the motivation, Jackson's run for president made an impression on Obama, who was still a twenty-two-year-old newsletter editor in New York. To a young black man with an interest in politics, seeing Jesse Jackson on the same stage as Mondale, Gary Hart, and John Glenn was a very big deal.