Harold Washington

• Born: April 15, 1922
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: November 25, 1987
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Politician and lawyer

Washington mobilized the overwhelming support of African American voters to defy Chicago’s long-entrenched Democratic political machine and become the city’s first black mayor.

Areas of achievement: Government and politics; Law

Early Life

Harold Lee Washington was one of four sons born to Roy and Bertha Washington. Roy, a lawyer, was one of the first Democratic precinct captains in Chicago, and he worked to solicit votes in the Third Ward, a predominantly African American area on the city’s South Side. Harold Washington learned about politics at an early age, helping his father campaign for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and meeting some of Chicago’s mayors and aldermen (city council members). Washington was a member of the first graduating class of segregated Du Sable High School. In 1942, he was drafted into the armed forces and sent to the Philippines, where he was assigned to a segregated engineering unit of the Army Air Force.

In 1946, Washington enrolled at Roosevelt College (now Roosevelt University), one of the few Chicago-area universities to accept black students. He was an active member of the student council and eventually was elected student body president. After graduating in 1949, Washington attended Northwestern University Law School, where he was the only black student in his class. He earned his law degree in 1952 and went to work the next year in his father’s law practice.

Life’s Work

Washington never enjoyed practicing law. His first love was politics, and he launched his political career by working as a precinct captain for Ralph Metcalfe, an alderman representing Chicago’s Third Ward. Metcalfe became Washington’s mentor, and he assigned Washington to organize and advise the Young Democrats group in his ward.

It is impossible to appreciate Washington’s achievements without understanding Chicago’s peculiar political culture. When Washington was embarking upon a political career, the most powerful organization in the city was the Cook County Democratic Committee, whose fifty members doled out patronage, granted contracts and other favors, and worked to elect committee-endorsed candidates. The Democratic machine reached the height of its power during the administration of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was in office from 1955 until his death in December, 1976. Under Daley’s leadership, the machine severely restricted the aspirations of African American politicians, limiting its support only to candidates who ran for office in a few predominantly black districts.

Washington resented the machine’s stranglehold on politics and believed it was an obstacle to civil rights, but he initially worked with it in order to establish his political career. In 1964, with the machine’s backing, he successfully ran for a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, in which he served from 1965 through 1976. Washington similarly obtained machine support in his 1975 bid for the Illinois Senate, in which he served from 1976 through 1980. As a state lawmaker he walked a tightrope, voting with the machine on some issues while defying it on others, particularly in his staunch advocacy of civil rights. His accomplishments include organizing a black legislative caucus and sponsoring fair housing legislation, a human rights act, and a measure declaring Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a state holiday.

In the early 1970’s, however, Washington suffered two blows to his career. In 1970, the Chicago Bar Association suspended his law license for one year after it received complaints that Washington had cheated clients out of $205. The next year, the Internal Revenue Service charged him with failing to file income tax returns for four years; although he paid his taxes in these years, he owed the government $508. Washington was sentenced to forty days in jail, three years’ probation, and a $1,000 fine; to fulfill his sentence, he spent thirty-six days in the Cook County Jail.

After Daley’s death, Washington broke with the machine and ran as an independent candidate in the 1977 special mayoral election. His entered the race too late, ran a poorly organized campaign, and obtained only 11 percent of the vote. He had better luck in 1979, when he ran as an independent candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, in which he served from 1980 until he became mayor. He was one of the Democratic congressional leaders who worked to extend the Voting Rights Act.

While Washington was in Congress, Chicago’s African American community was engaged in its own efforts to extend voting power. In June, 1982, a coalition of community organizations, African American churches, and African American businesses organized a voter registration drive that added more than 127,000 African Americans to the voting rolls.

The success of this campaign was one of the reasons that Washington announced his intention to run as an independent candidate in the February, 1983, Democratic mayoral primary. His opponents in this race were Mayor Jane Byrne, who was backed by the machine, and Richard M. Daley, the Illinois attorney general and son of the former mayor. The election galvanized the city’s African Americans, who saw Washington’s candidacy as a crusade for political liberation; one commentator remarked that his campaign rallies were more like religious revivals than political gatherings. Washington won the primary with 37 percent of the vote, compared with 33 percent for Byrne and 30 percent for Daley; more than 90 percent of Washington’s votes came from African Americans, who turned out in unprecedented numbers and formed a solid bloc of support.

Normally, the winner in the Democratic primary was backed by the party’s machine and easily defeated the Republican opponent in the general election. Washington, however, did not receive the machine’s endorsement, and only a few of its members supported him; many more either publically opposed him or privately supported his Republican opponent, Bernard Epton. While the primary generally was free of racism, the general election was an ugly brawl in which Epton and his supporters stoked white voters’ fears of an African American mayor who would allow African Americans to move into their neighborhoods and would control the public schools and police department. Epton also attacked Washington for, among other things, failing to pay his income taxes.

The election on April 12, 1983, was the closest Chicago mayoral race since 1919, with the majority of voters selecting candidates solely on the basis of their race. Washington won with 52 percent of the vote, compared with 48 percent for Epton; once again, Washington received solid support from African Americans and also polled well among Latinos, while the majority of whites voted for Epton. On April 29, 1983, Washington became Chicago’s forty-second mayor—and its first African American mayor.

Despite his victory, Washington continued to encounter machine opposition during his early years in office. Twenty-nine of the city’s fifty aldermen were machine supporters who refused to adopt his proposed legislation. During these so-called Council Wars, Washington typically would introduce a bill, which would be defeated by a vote of twenty-nine to twenty-one aldermen; the machine majority would then revise his proposal and adopt its own bill; Washington, in turn, would veto the revised bill, knowing the machine lacked sufficient support to overturn his veto.

The battle continued until early 1986, when a federal judge ruled that Chicago’s wards violated the federal Voting Rights Act by denying adequate representation to African Americans and Latinos; the judge ordered that special elections be held in seven wards concurrently with the March, 1986, primary. As a result of these elections, Washington obtained the support of twenty-five alderman, and as chairman of the city council he could break a tie vote to enact his proposals, including a tenant’s bill of rights and a political ethics ordinance.

By the time Washington was reelected in 1987, some of the city’s white voters had softened their opposition to him, and the primary and general elections lacked the fervent racism of the 1983 race. However, Washington’s victory was short-lived. On November 25, 1987, he suffered a massive heart attack while in his office, and he died at the age of sixty-five.

Significance

Washington’s election in 1983 reversed the trend of declining African American participation in electoral politics; Chicago’s African American community mobilized and asserted their rights as citizens to vote and take control of the city’s institutions. This political empowerment would have been significant in any city, but it was particularly important in Chicago, where an all-powerful Democratic machine had a political stranglehold. Washington’s victory dealt a serious blow to the machine and in so doing created opportunities for other independents, including African Americans and Latinos, to play a greater role in Chicago politics.

Bibliography

Kleppner, Paul. Chicago Divided: The Making of a Black Mayor. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985. A history of Chicago’s politics and changing demographics from 1870 until the 1983 mayoral election.

Levinsohn, Florence Hamlish. Harold Washington: A Political Biography. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1983. Levinsohn, a Chicagoan and friend of Washington, brings her knowledge of the city to her coverage of his political career, culminating in the 1983 election.

Muwakkil, Salim. Harold! Photographs from the Harold Washington Years. Photographs by Antonio Dickey and Marc PoKempner. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Collection of photographs documenting Washington’s mayoral campaign and tenure.

Rivlin, Gary. Fire on the Prairie: Chicago’s Harold Washington and the Politics of Race. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. The best coverage of Washington’s career, describing the people and sociopolitical developments that led to his mayoral victory.