CHICAGO CHANGES THE AGENDA

...Day had worked in Chicago auto plants for many years before going on to Detroit to head up the union's job-development work...

...What's more, the voter registration efforts, the unprecedented participation of blacks and Hispanics, have the makings of a defeat for Reaganism next year...

...When the two arrived the street began to jump, a good part consisting of mothers and brothers and sisters bringing little children to be kissed by the political and boxing champions...

...It wasn't clairvoyance that explains such uncanny prevision (Canter had also guessed the primary outcome...

...Yet the harsh reality of both the primary and final election was that a victory for Washington would depend overwhelmingly on the black turnout...

...This was well understood by many of the militant blacks, veterans of the civil rights movement going back more than two decades...

...It was late in the evening when Washington ended the day at Mundelein College with a slashing attack against the racism that Epton's media expert John Deardourff had brought to Chicago— a special gift of the Republican National Committee to the local campaign...

...Still, it was in large part the black vote that had made it a close race...

...This is a striking figure when compared with the 53 percent who turned out for the presidential election of 1980...

...People came running from all directions...

...But registration of tens of thousands of new black voters was the rock on which the Washington victory was founded...

...The candidate recalled organized labor's traditional support for the public education system, noting in passing that he would be Chicago's first mayor in 60 or 70 years who had attended the city's public schools...

...New registration campaigns after the primary victory registered many tens of thousands of additional voters...

...During the Chicago campaign mention was made many times that it is the most segregated city in the country...

...Even more startling is the fact that in the nation's first city, where blacks and Hispanics comprise about half the population, not a single citywide elective office is held by a black or a Hispanic...

...Little support could be found in Chicago for third-party exercises...

...Nevertheless, there was an electoral majority that transcended racism and made the Chicago election a significant and promising harbinger of better things to come on the nation's political stage...

...A cogent reply to this reasoning came in a letter to the Times from Harvard political scientist Martin Kilson...

...There were even some who had anti-Semitic prejudices, but their dislike of blacks was greater, so they voted for Bernard Epton...

...More important, the rebuilding of an alliance between white working-class ethnics and blacks has a sound basis in the common and widespread rejection of Reaganomics...

...Raby was emphatic that it would be strengthened—but only if an old mistake was not repeated: taking the black vote for granted...

...And on the last registration day before the November 2 election, 135,000 more signed up...

...The campaign was paying off...

...In the end 79 percent of the Hispanic vote went for Washington, up from 19 percent...

...they had been frightened by threats of public-housing high-rises changing the character of their neighborhoods...

...The far-reaching impact of the Chicago mayoralty election became manifest in a New York Times headline just a week after the Chicago results came in: "KOCH TO FILL MORE CITY JOBS WITH BLACK AND HISPANIC WORKERS...

...He singled out two issues crime and jobs—advancing a detailed program for better police operations and improving the police department...

...David Canter's own predilection for coalition politics goes back to precinct work for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944...

...Of white ethnics the highest percentage voting for Washington were Chicago's Jews-33 percent...

...First of all, white votes were needed for a Washington victory...

...An irony of the campaign was that one Hyde Park liberal, a black, was facing another Hyde Park liberal—anyway, ex-liberal--a Jew, in this city whose political machine had been dominated by Irish and Slavic politicians for half a century...

...Later, at a regular meeting of more than 1,000 Teachers Union representatives (with a good mix of black and white), union president Robert Healey introduced Washington as a state and national legislator who had gone down the line for labor and its unions...

...The strong effort to unite blacks and Hispanics, to provide just shares and fair participation for both (and for all) groups was coming through...

...Not only were Hispanics pitted against blacks, but Mexicans were divided from Puerto Ricans...

...National political leaders would have done well to follow the unprecedented activities of groups such as POWER (a coalition of various groups, mainly black), Jesse Jackson's PUSH, the Chicago Black United Communities, the Woodlawn Organization, the Urban League, the Afro-American Patrol League, and black churches...

...He had maneuvered the nomination of a white schools chancellor who lacked the formal training and minimum educational qualifications for the post, while pointedly bypassing a black and a Hispanic, both of whom were eminently qualified...

...In the matter of jobs Washington had a two-pronged message—to help improve and develop all the neighborhoods...

...When Republican Bernard Epton appealed to white voters to defeat Washington, "before it's too late," no one was in doubt about the direct racist pitch...

...He assailed "the irrational divisions" in the city and described his campaign as speaking to all the neighborhoods of Chicago...

...But it was politics that tends to "advance democracy with a small d and not just the capital D," as Washington put it several times that day...

...His straightforward liberal-Democratic message was loudly cheered...

...For the 'nth time he evoked the need for peaceful coexistence in a multiethnic city...

...Nevertheless, many ordinary people asked, why is it more racist for whites to appeal in behalf of a white candidate than blacks for a black...

...Early that morning Washington had held a press conference at a small plant far out on West Lake Street...

...The Chicago Tribune editorialized about "the astonishing success of a voter registration drive among black and poor Chicagoans...

...Voting on the basis of race is racist...

...The polarization of black and white was far from total...

...After all, blacks are more than 40 percent of Chicago's population, making them by far the largest of the many ethnic groups...

...As the slow and painfully achieved results of affirmative action are being demolished by the Reagan administration, the message from Chicago is that American blacks (along with Hispanics and women, too) will be voting on this matter in 1984...

...Old-hat politicking...

...Not only Washington, but Muhammad Ali too was due shortly...

...Too often there was good ground for such sentiments...

...Reagan in 1984," and he lambasted his Republican opponent as a statewide practitioner of the Reagan philosophy of cutting government aid for higher education...

...He described his campaign as "a movement to deal with Mr...

...What difference will it make...

...The New York Board of Education finally chose Anthony J. Alvarado, an educator of Puerto Rican origin...

...Politicos around the country rubbed their eyes in amazement after last year's November elections when the Republican governor of Illinois, James Thompson, was nearly unseated by Adlai Stevenson...

...Class divisions were poor indicators of voting patterns in this election...

...He decried block-busting rumormongers...

...According to the Chicago Sun-Times 70 percent were estimated to be blacks...

...Still, simple arithmetic showed that not only would they have to win most of the Hispanic votes but also a fair percentage of white support...

...When her appointments made it apparent that black participation in government would be reduced, not advanced, the resentment became overwhelming...

...A truck was blaring the recording of a wellknown voice, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" oration...

...Whereas the cry till now has been that the electoral process was withering away for lack of voter participation, 82 percent of Chicago's registered voters went to the polls...

...it had the strong backing of the national AFL-CIO...

...When I asked him about the relatively low Hispanic vote for Washington in the primary (mainly Mexican but with a growing number of Puerto Ricans in Chicago), Day described the traditional perfidy of discrimination that causes different minorities to scramble for a share of the pie—while that pie is being reduced by Reaganism...

...On the other hand, he concludes, "ethnic-bloc voting for the purpose of excluding groups from parity of political and social status is what racism is all about...

...He said, of course builders and architects would consider the character of a neighborhood in designing public housing, so necessary for so many without adequate homes...

...Together with the 16 percent of white votes that went for Washington you have the April 12 victory...

...FOR VICTORY in the final election, there had to be a decided change in the Hispanic vote...

...Washington got 668,176 votes...

...A huge black vote had brought Jane Byrne to City Hall in the first place...

...Safire wrote: "If it is laudatory for black voters to vote as a bloc for the black candidate, then logic dictates that it should bother nobody that white voters are likely to vote as a bloc for the white candidate...

...The coalition known as POWER 283 (People Organized for Welfare and Employment Rights), co-chaired by Slim Coleman and Nancy Jefferson, won agreement of the Board of Elections to register voters at public-aid and unemployment offices...

...He was driving me from the Center—in the inner city—to the lovely Northeastern campus in the white Northwest section of the city and he said: "There's a deep fear among the white people...

...He foresaw a less than idyllic future—"but we'll have to get along together...

...Canter had told the press on the eve of last year's November election that a draft was under way to persuade Harold Washington to run for mayor...

...The latter had run a lackluster campaign...

...AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland had sent a letter to 150,000 Chicago union members recalling Washington's political record and urging them to vote for him, and he had spoken for the candidate...

...Would the Democratic party be weakened by the demolition of the Chicago machine...

...It reflected a new spirit in the AFL-CIO, of strong alliance with the organized black civil rights movement, with the women's movement, too, and with all who were ready to make- election day a new solidarity day—all in preparation for 1984...

...the figures were improving...

...Talk with any black in the city and you hear the same story—"Come to my neighborhood and you'll see why we're voting for Washington...

...Huge crowds formed and walked with Washington and Ali while traffic had to be detoured elsewhere...

...How did it happen...

...The Democratic party was clearly seen as the vehicle for political advancement...

...At the Cabrini-Green housing project (where Jane Byrne had lived, symbolically, for a week) the whole neighborhood churned with motion...

...They feared for their neighborhoods, for the little homes they had lived in so long...

...Talking with Al Raby, who had marched and organized with Martin Luther King 20 years ago and now was the manager of the Washington campaign, it became clear that this was the new stage of the civil rights struggle...

...Just five days before the election, Canter was sitting with a pocket calculator and he asked me if I wanted to know how the voting would go...

...it was a combination of knowing the arithmetic of the city population and knowing the sentiments, activities, and organizations in all 50 wards of the city...

...So the windy mayor of New York was only reading the Chicago election returns when he suddenly gave public recognition to this situation...

...First and foremost was the peaceful uprising of blacks, which left the vaunted Chicago machine in ruins and many of its ward heelers gasping for breath...

...Alas, there was a lot of that in Chicago...

...I can understand it...

...By that time Washington needed little persuasion—he had witnessed a black political explosion in his native city...

...and to end the fiefdom system whereby the ward heelers exact forced political service as payment for more than 40,000 appointive jobs...

...He showed how ethnic voting has historically been a means by which ethnic groups achieve a full measure of citizenship and participation in the political process...

...The actual votes cast in all were 1,291,858...

...Many hundreds of volunteers and contributions from a lot of poor people, as well as from others, helped achieve the record registration— later translated into a record turnout at the polls...

...only 19 percent had gone for Washington in the primary...

...Traveling with Harold Washington in the final week of his campaign around the city and around the clock provided part of the answer...

...Washington took both a common-sense and a firmly principled position in the face of these fears...

...He said the total vote would be about 1,275,000 (larger than most predictions...

...Though to a large extent the Chicago mayoralty campaign was conducted "as though" there were the traditional New Deal coalition, it showed that the idea was a vibrant force in politics...

...A not-so-ordinary person, a Republican ideologue and erstwhile speech-writer for that Aristotle of American political life, Spiro Agnew, and syndicated New York Times columnist, William Safire, took up that same cudgel...

...But it takes only a quick visit to the Windy City to learn that New York lags far behind Chicago in the matter of integrated office-holding...

...THE IDEA OF A COALITION that included the traditional liberal, labor, Hispanic, and black voters found explicit support among militant blacks, liberal whites, and half the Chicago labor movement...

...THERE WAS MOVEMENT APLENTY but there was also no blinking the fears and prejudice and polarization that had been aroused in the city...

...This, in a city where more than 70 percent of the public-school pupils are black or Hispanic...

...Without exception they slowed down as they approached and the motormen (blacks) would lean out of the window, wave and shout greetings...

...David Canter, chairman of the Hyde ParkKenwood Independent Voters of Illinois and the state IVI (affiliated with Americans for Democratic Action) had done some arithmetic for Harold Washington in the fall of 1982...

...Her neglect of decaying black neighborhoods caused disillusionment among blacks...

...When I laughed, he added that there's no basis for the fear...

...But he reasserted his support for the principle of scatter-site housing, which has been upheld by the courts as well as by considerations of fairness...

...This, after years of argument that qualifications, not race, should determine appointment to high office...

...And Washington will win with 664,000 votes," Canter said...

...He had not drawn on the deep resentment of both blacks and working-class whites against Reagan and Reaganism...

...The fears, especially among working-class whites—Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, Irish, German, Italian, and many others—were more complex and direct in origin...

...The fears caused working people, who traditionally felt that their hands would wither if they pulled down a Republican lever, to follow Democratic ward leaders in Chicago's Northwest and Southwest sides who were openly or covertly campaigning for Epton...

...There were some Democratic leaders who paid little attention to the seething resentment and deepseated grievances among blacks (and Hispanics) at the bottom of all this...

...It was "the political empowerment of Irish–Americans that dictated Irish ethnicbloc voting for that city's first Irish mayor," Kilson points out...

...Nothing detracts from the single major factor in the election...

...They think we're going to treat them the way they've treated us...

...Some 102,000 new voters had been signed up before precinct registration day in October...

...It had been scheduled for closing and Washington had negotiated an agreement for the workers to continue operations for 60 more days while discussing conditions that might persuade the company to stay open...

...I saw how that change was being fashioned at the East Van Buren Street Washington headquarters, which handled the precinct work under the capable direction of Dorsey Day, loaned to the campaign by the international headquarters of the United Auto Workers...

...DUE CREDIT, too, must be given to those often scorned white Lakefront liberals...

...ETHNIC VOTING in this country is as old as its politics...

...What disfigured the Chicago election 281 campaign was racism...

...Some of Chicago's politicians who had broken ranks in April have been chastened by the electoral outcome...

...It was all reminiscent of Solidarity Day, Septem284 ber 19, 1981, when some 300,000 marchers and demonstrators had taken over the streets of downtown Washington...

...Washington's speech strongly upheld collective bargaining, with stress on defending that right for public employees...

...Five years in office had not been enough to move Mayor Koch toward recognizing that city government, too, requires not just consent, but representation...

...That afternoon Washington spoke at a student rally on the campus of Northeastern Illinois University to a crowd of black and white students, with more of the former though the latter are a majority in the school...

...Some may read prophecy into the fact that Chicago's former mayor, Jane Byrne, had helped spark a black political uprising when she appointed first one, then two additional members of the public housing commission, all white, even though 90 percent of its tenants are black...

...Overlooking the plant and the Washington campaign truck, elevated trains rumbled by...

...Who hasn't heard the refrain, "Why should I vote...

...Black participation in all aspects of American governance and the continuing problem of equal rights landed in the center of the American political scene...

...the greatest activity had been in the 17 predominantly black wards...

...This has been especially so for the poorest, most insulted and injured who often didn't bother to register...

...All this was balanced by appearances at the elite City Club and 282 Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry, where Washington assured the city's business and professional groups that he sought to improve the climate for business...

...Chicago's blacks had taken the electoral path to empowerment...

...Kilson recalls the almost total exclusion of Boston Irish from social and political status, and a time when Boston had only a single Irish cop...

...Veteran liberal and left political activists have many dispiriting memories of indifference among potential black voters...

...The key to the victory of Mayor Harold Washington was an outpouring of blacks, first in an unprecedented voter registration campaign, then for victory in the primary—a three-way race made that possible and on to the final triumph when a majority of voters gave the Second City its first black mayor...

...While I was in the headquarters, national representatives of the Democratic party's Hispanic department were examining the latest canvassing results...

...Political leaders might have discovered a new factor in politics if they glanced at Chicago's papers in October 1982...

...The word "movement" for people conducting political tasks acquired vivid meaning on Washington's campaign trail...

...Professor Donn Bailey, director of the Center for Inner City Studies of Northeastern Illinois University, which is almost all black, put it bluntly...

...Koch discovered the underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics in the city administration shortly after his own action in the matter of a schools chancellor had sharply aggravated the problem...

...That union had recognized very early how important the Chicago voting would be for national politics...