The Chicago Spectator/Black Roots

...Israel declared its independence in April of 1948, on the same day as Britain relinquished its Mandate, and after the Arabs had rejected...

...The mayor was to walk from one end of the project to the middle of it, several blocks away, where he would hold an "impromptu rally" with Jesse Jackson, who throughout the primary campaign clung to the mayor like a bad smell...

...I'd get calls from her in the middle of the night, waking up my wife, my kids," said one businessman who served in her administration...

...Is it "occupied territory...

...the counterman sells a red hot, but it's on a croissant with Dijon...

...The woman gave a running commentary, as if she were noisily watching her grandson at a school pageant: "Oh look at this, the sun is shining and just look at him, so nicely dressed, isn't that the handsomest scarf you ever saw, he's the prettiest thing," and when Washington heard her and backtracked to give her a hug, I thought she'd swoon...

...Others remembered the rapid deterioration of the city's economy and schools, the bloated payrolls, the enormous deficits, and her own personal volatility...

...They limited the Jewish National Home to the 23% remaining west of the Jordan River...

...But Chicago holds problems that resist even reform...

...Her most frequently aired TV ad showed her seated before a bookcase, staring straight into the camera and saying in her soft, flat monotone: "Love...

...Several years ago, the balconies of the high-rises had been caged in, after reports circulated of untended children falling to their deaths...

...Look at her...

...Then she frowned...

...That entire area is about half the size of San Barnardino County in California...

...The Friday before election day, the Postal Service issued a stamp honoring Jean Baptiste de Sable, a black trader who in the 1790s was the first non-Indian to pitch camp at the mouth of the Chicago river...

...On the afternoon before primary day I went with the mayor on a walk through the Robert Taylor Homes, a vast high-rise complex in the heart of the South side, by acclamation the most desperate of the city's many public housing projects...

...Jews have been living in all parts of "Palestine" since Biblical times...

...Progressive is the key word...

...In its War of Independence, against overwhelming odds, the newly-formed Israel-Defense Forces in what must be considered almost a Biblical miracle, were able to defeat five combined Arab armies...

...Box 590381 ^ San Francisco, CA 94159-0381 CAMERA is a tax-deductible, non-profit educational organization, headquartered in Washington, DC...

...its purpose is to combat media inaccuracies, through public education and publicity...

...She steadied herself on her husband's elbow...

...Her campaign seemed stoutly oblivious to the dubious image many people had of her, and particularly of her tenure as mayor...

...Peace, and the ultimate resolution of the problem of the "West Bank" can only come about by negotiations...

...Forster was a man of tender sensibilities, to say the least, and the city is much changed since he passed through it, but dubiousness is still a good word to describe what goes on behind that lakefront facade...

...They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages...

...Man stretches his arm toward heaven, but keeps his eye on his wristwatch...

...Jewish holy places were profaned and destroyed...

...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work and for these messages...

...And if Forster sensed all types of dubiousness, who's going to argue...

...February was Black History month, coming fast on the heels of the first nationwide observance of Martin Luther King's birthday, and Washington rode the crest of this fortuitous wave, bobbing from one ex officio appearance to another...

...Transjordan, however, succeeded in pushing westward across the Jordan River and in occupying Judea and Samaria...

...The way she walks...

...She's been running her campaign for seventeen months...

...Jordan (77% of the British Mandate) is Arab Palestine, just as Israel is Jewish Palestine...

...Many even otherwise well-informed people believe that the turmoil in the Middle East is due to the Israeli "occupation" of Judea and Samaria, also known as the "West Bank'z—a territory less than half the size of Los Angeles County...

...Until Jewish immigration into "Palestine" began in earnest early in this century, the country was sparsely populated and underdeveloped (Mark Twain describes the desolation well in his book Innocents Abroad...

...I mean Mayor Washington...

...He seldom smiled, and the glint was gone from his eye, and when the young men in shower caps ran up to touch him and then fell in line behind, chanting his name, prancing from side to side in boundless excitement, he looked pained...

...Jane...

...In the Camp David Accords, Israel committed itself to autonomy for the Arab inhabitants of the area and to the determination of a permanent political status...

...this takes the political struggle beyond race into deeper levels where ideas count, and in Washington's administration the ideas are relentlessly progressive: affirmative action quotas in the awarding of city contracts and the hiring of city workers, police cutbacks when the budget starts to billow, socialization of more city services (parking meter collections, for example), elaborate redistribution schemes...

...Unity...

...When the Jews came into the country, they created commercial, agricultural, and industrial opportunities which acted as a magnet to the Arabs, most of them nomadic...

...They have such a country...

...Sharing...

...Young parents brought their babies out to be kissed...

...In the brief week before the election, the riders had become something of a Chicago institution, appearing on the nightly news in their trademark yellow sweatshirts and inveighing against Klansmen, Forsythe County, Ronald Reagan, and the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners...

...In a brief speech, he made a couple of references to the "irony" of the fact that it took so long to honor Chicago's first settler who, as the phrase has it, happens to be black...

...Hope...

...The Postal Service held a ceremony in the lobby of the county office building, which was crowded with displays put together by Chicago school- kids...

...Exciting...

...The theme of "black pride" subtends his administration and is the source of black Chicago's unshakeable devotion to him...

...One of the honorable-mention essays, by a third-grader, caught my eye: "Jean Baptiste de Sable was the first black man to make Chicago a great city by starting a trading post and then he fought in world war 2, he became a hero for his people and that is why he is a great man...

...I was puzzled for a minute, and then I remembered that Washington is a veteran of the war...

...Oh yeah...

...A stout old woman, wearing stretch pants and gripping a Byrne sign at chest level, walked several paces behind...

...In Chicago a school boy drops out, but carries a New Testament in his hip pocket...

...now it is mostly Puerto Rican...

...You deserve a factual look at...

...This ad has been published and paid for by Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America P.O...

...I guess this is Byrne country, I said...

...Before me and behind me people were swaying and clapping and singing "Sail On, Freedom," which I'd forgotten the words to...

...It's Jordan...

...Concerning Chicago politics, the method has dubious utility: Ever since Washington beat Byrne in the 1983 primary, she's been figuring out how to get back at him...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 51...

...In 1920, the League of Nations made Britain the mandatory power in Palestine, effective in 1922...

...system exhorting the residents to "Meet your Mayor...

...In her gayer moments she still makes Rosalynn Carter look like a drunken dancehall girl...

...What are the facts...

...Middle-aged couples leaned down to speak to her, as if in confidence: "We got six votes in this house for you, Jane...

...Our overhead is minimal...

...As the crowd swelled I followed the best I could, but I soon found myself pushed to the rear, next to an elderly black couple...

...Forster would have packed his bags...

...Byrne invites those kinds of jokes, at least in part because she seems impenetrable to them...

...I watched Byrne campaign one day outside an old church on the Northwest side, in a neighborhood founded by Swedes, which then turned German, then Polish...

...I assumed, correctly, that I was encountering the "Reverse Freedom Riders...

...In town for a week in February, to watch the recent mayoral primary between Harold Washington and Jane Byrne, I stopped at a ramshackle hot dog stand on Milwaukee Avenue and saw advertised—and paid for and ate part of—a- "red hot on a croissant, with aged swiss and Dijon...

...Israel has been ready for such negotiations for almost 20 years...

...A homeland for Arab Palestinians...

...Transjordan was given independence by Britain in 1946...

...Please make your check payable to CAMERA and mail to the above address...

...As he walked the wind picked up and dust swirled around him, and kids left their basketball games to join the procession, until by the time we reached Jackson's entourage the crowd was about a hundred strong...

...You know what I mean...

...Oh, him...

...Jackson grabbed a bullhorn and did a few "I am somebody's" and the mayor, still looking ill at ease, told the crowd—most of them were kids, too young to vote—that they should vote on Tuesday, for their own good...

...But the one that has risen in its place retains a vestigial restlessness, an unrelieved pragmatism and worldliness that can be unnerving...

...she asked...

...She has her constituency, bound to her by affection, old loyalties, and a kind of amorphous nostalgia for the way Chicago used to be, before the dubiousness got overwhelming...

...One brisk, sunny Saturday I followed her down to the 23rd ward on the city's Southwest side, a largely Slavic neighborhood hard up against the city line...

...they've cut some kind of deal with Hynes...

...She'd be blurting...

...she said, astonished...

...The church seems to be collapsing, but it still dominates the neighborhood, and looking at its towering steeple I was astonished to see, halfway up, an enormous clock, keeping perfect time...

...All the way with Jane...

...These are my kind of people...

...I don't have nothing against him...

...By now she's shaken every goddamn hand in town...

...I got there not long after the polls closed, and upon walking in the door found myself being shuffled along in a snake dance of enormous length...

...During its 19 years of occupation, Transjordan, now renamed "Jordan", systematically removed all Jews from the territory...

...But, under pressure and threats of the PLO and Arab rejections, they have so far refused to participate in any negotiations...

...King Hussein himself has said: "The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan:' In the almost 20 years of its administration, Israel has refrained from re-annexing its old provinces of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank...

...Byrne's old enemies, the Daley brothers—sons of the late mayor, RIP—still have some clout and they're endorsing her, but really they want her to lose, so they can support 1-lynes and beat Vrdolyak, who thinks that maybe the Daleys are really going to come out for him, which they won't because it looks like Andrew Ferguson is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...

...I want to make Chicago smile again...

...Israel has administered Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") since 1967...

...Pride...

...The city E. M. Forster visitedSandburg's City of the Big Shoulders, the one of which Kipling wrote, "I know thy cunning and thy greed/Thy hard high lust and willful deed/And all th' glory loves to tell/Of specious gifts material"—that city no longer exists...

...She'd say, `I can make your house a goddamn parking lot, and don't think I won't do it, too.' Talk to anybody in this town who had to deal with her, and before five minutes is up the word 'bitch' enters the conversation...

...All of these are contained in the portmanteau, "reform...

...Question: What do Jane Byrne and Harold Washington have in common...

...After World War I, Britain was in control of Palestine...

...He's just not—the truth of the matter is, if you're white you just do not exist in Harold Washington's mind...

...Over the i in Dijon there was an accent aigu...

...Nevertheless, on primary day Jane Byrne won 47 percent of the vote, and not all of these were simple anti-Washington ballots...

...When the mayor showed up to receive a special book of first issue stamps, the applause was tumultuous...

...But this was a different Washington from the reveling pol I had followed through the Loop a few days before...

...Tivo other white Democrats are running in the general election as independents, Ed Vrdolyak and Tom Hynes, and there's a Republican too, Don Haider...

...Answer: Black roots...

...Mine eyes have never seen such glory," she said, and her husband beamed...

...Blue and white balloons were clustered round the pillars, and blue and white 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 bunting draped everything else...

...Its civilization was that of the Middle Ages...

...in the kid's mind Washington and de Sable have probably been fused...

...Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome...

...Thrice...

...Approximately 60,000 Israelis have settled there The Arab population in the area enjoys local autonomy, civil liberties, free access to higher education, and the highest standard of living of any Arab population anywhere in the countries neighboring on Israel...

...The problem with "black empowerment" in Chicago is that black politics are nowadays invariably the politics of the left...

...Besides, one rider told me after I extricated her from the snake dance, they were sent by God...

...After his talk at the de Sable event, he made a brief walking tour through the Loop, shaking hands, laughing, telling jokes, kissing pretty girls, hugging children, posing for pictures—all of it pulled off with burly informality and obvious relish...

...He made Harold Washington mayor, and we have to see that he stays mayor...

...What have you got against the Mayor...

...Never in history has there been an Arab state in Judea and Samaria, and there certainly was never any mention of it during the 19 years of Transjordanian occupation...

...The nearest thing to a contemporary drawing of de Sable shows him as a wiry, fair-skinned West Indian, but the new stamp renders him a husky adventurer of glowing ebony—Fred Williamson in buckskin...

...a partition plan proposed by the United Nations, which Israel had accepted...

...Large pictures of Washington ascended in a vertical row from balcony to balcony...

...Israel has invited representatives of Jordan and of the Arab inhabitants of Judea-Samaria to participate in autonomy talks...

...The sound system blared and on each floor, high above us, apartment doors opened slowly, and people appeared inside the cages in bathrobes and housecoats, resting their arms against the screening or waving languidly, sometimes calling out the mayor's name...

...I read this," he said, and pulled a book from his hip pocket, a denim-bound edition of the New Testament...

...Vrdolyak says he's telling his people to vote for Byrne in the primary, but really he's telling them to vote in the Republican primary for a guy named Wardingly, because Wardingly calls himself Spanky the Clown—it's what he does for a living—and if he's nominated as a Republican, which in this town wouldn't take all that many votes, he'll be easier to beat than Haider, because who wants Spanky the Clown for mayor...

...It called for the establishment in Palestine of a "national home for the Jewish people", with the understanding that the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish community needed to be respected...

...Hynes says he's telling his people to vote against Washington no matter what, but privately he's saying he wants Washington to win the primary because then Vrdolyak will drop out of the race and he'll have a clean shot at Washington, because he thinks he'll be easier to beat than Byrne, which he won't be, but that's politics...

...What was I supposed to do...

...THE CHICAGO SPECTATOR BLACK ROOTS by Andrew Ferguson E. M. Forster visited Chicago in the late forties, and in a letter to a friend he quickly dismissed that big-shouldered town—that burly city of commerce and industry, that brawling workshop of the world—as if describing a vaguely unpleasant face he had seen in a crowd: "a facade of skyscrapers facing a lake," he wrote, "and behind the facade every type of dubiousness...

...When I got to town I embarked on the standard journalistic research, which is to say I immediately called up a colleague and had him tell me what the hell was going on...

...Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") Whom does it belong to...

...A caravan of buses had brought them from Selma to the city, where the mayor greeted them at a downtown church service, and immediately Jane Byrne and even some journalists branded them as interlopers and "an insult to Chicagoans...

...As we walked along the fire lane, with the buildings looming up on either side, the mayor's car cruised slowly in front of us, its p.a...

...Religious folk tell us that a steeple is Man's arm reaching for God...

...But he doesn't really need to...

...On top of this, however, there is no denying that he is an immensely appealing figure, and a poi of the first water, a man who loves his work...

...With the alderman and a ward committeeman in train, she went door to door, marching up the swept sidewalks in her clipped military pace, then across the neatly trimmed lawns, from one small, blond-brick bungalow to the next...

...Don't go to school," he said...

...All around us the lawns and playgrounds were stripped bare...

...She swept her arm in front of her...

...It was like- that song," she said, "you know, 'Summertime, and the livin' is easy.' " Likewise, her campaign literature sang, "While Jane Byrne was mayor, Chicago was Vibrant...

...Why not, I asked...

...Earlier, in 1917, it had issued the Balfour Declaration...

...On election night Mayor Washington's headquarters moved to the exhibition hall of the Hyatt Regency, a swanky hotel on north Michigan Avenue...

...I got nothing against her...

...At street level the buildings were covered in graffiti...

...They were the occupiers, and they stayed in that occupation until they attacked Israel in 1967 and were defeated in the Six-Day War...

...That gal's got spunk...

...They granted the area east of the Jordan River to the Hashemite tribes, thus excluding it from Jewish settlement...

...The British, in violation of the Balfour Declaration and of the Mandate, divided the country in two parts...

...The Mandate, in line with the Balfour Declaration, provided for the establishment of a Jewish national home in all or any part of Palestine...

...Today we have brought out a big black vote, a big Hispanic vote, and a pretty big white progressive vote...

...Deny Him...

...Then Jesse handed the bullhorn back to a cop, and he and the mayor ducked into their car and drove away, back to the Loop, and the kids went back to basketball...

...God spoke here in Chicago four years ago...

...The riders responded that they were just in town to help get out the vote—they did indeed do extensive work in the housing projects and on the West and South sides—and only meant to return the favor done them by all those nice Chicagoans who had come South to protest in Selma during the early sixties (this failed to resonate with Byrne supporters...

...As one of them dribbled away, I asked whether it wasn't a school day...

...Throughout the campaign he refused "to make race an issue," and as the black mayor of a city where more whites than blacks are registered to vote (about 48 percent to 44 percent), he knew there was no benefit, and probably a great deal of harm, in doing so...

...Of course, they deserve one...