84: Harold (1997)
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Before our story begins, let's remember how it used to be. Jackie lived on the south side in a black neighborhood. City didn't enforce the housing code properly, didn't investigate our sins. There would be fires going on and wouldn't want daily, several times a day. And it was just fire engines all the time. And so my daughter started to believe that when buildings got old and died, like people got old and died, that you knew a building was old and was dying because it would burn up. Before our story begins, Chicago was run by the Democratic machine. And Black Alderman, with Danny Davis, we turned out the vote for the machine, election after election. But the machine didn't reward the black wards of those votes, the way it paid back the white wards on the north side. We street cleanings and sewers with newly paved roads and sidewalks, economic development money. Well, actually, you know, we had called the areas colonies, I mean, and just basically picking up the garbage in these wards, just trying to keep them clean is a real problem. A person who was elected, you know, there would be so much focus on garbage pickup that, you know, you'd almost have to just be the garbage Alderman. I mean, I recall telling people, time and time again, that I was tired of just being the garbage Alderman. Before our story begins, Chicago political machines squeezed black kids into mobile trailers behind public schools, rather than let them attend white schools, which is blocks away. Before our story begins, the Chicago machine built high-rise public housing to hold blacks on the south side and keep them from moving into white neighborhoods. Before our story begins, the Chicago political machine built a system of highways that coincidentally divided black neighborhoods from white and particularly insulated the mayors, all white neighborhoods, bridgeport, typical inequities, unemployment in the white 11th ward was zero percent, unemployment in the fourth ward where blacks lived was 25 percent. This is a story about one ethnic group doing with so many other ethnic groups that have done in this country, put its own candidate in City Hall, won the mayor's office. But because this ethnic group happened to be black, what happened was unlike anything that happened. When an Italian politician or an Irish politician or a Jewish politician takes City Hall, white voters deserted their own political party, white politicians tried to stage a public, slow-motion coup, and the mayor faced pressures that were different from those faced by any white mayor of any city in America. And this little parable of race and politics in America does not take place in some distant, pre-civil rights past that happened just 10 years ago here in Chicago. Good evening, Your Honor. Good evening, Mr. Washington. Could you clear up a point for me? I understand that once you move into City Hall, you're going to remove all the elevator boxes and replace them with fines. Is that true? What? Replace them with what? With fines. Vines, G.I.N.E.S. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you why. No, I don't think we have three million charges in this city. WBZ Chicago, the public radio international. It is this American life on our glass. November 25th is the 10th anniversary of the death of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington. He died early in his second term of office. Today, we remember his story
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