Sinking into a leather chair in the ornate Speaker’s Lobby just off the House floor last month, Rep. Mel Reynolds (D-Ill.) quietly tipped off a reporter that he was going on a cable television network that night.
He was to debate Jay Stephens, the former federal prosecutor in the investigation of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), and while Reynolds was flattered and glad for the exposure, he also was pensive and worried.
He had a right to be. The appearance was a minefield for the 41-year-old freshman representative and new member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which Rostenkowski heads. There was a chance Reynolds might be perceived as in the chairman’s pocket, not a good place to be if Rostenkowski is indicted; he risked being seen as a blind defender of the House, a less-than-revered institution; or Stephens might trip him up.
But the lure of a high-profile television appearance, unusual for a freshman, and the chance to take on a prosecutor who he thought had strayed was irresistible.
Reynolds not only held his own with Stephens but even rendered the former prosecutor speechless at one point by accusing him of improprieties by discussing Rostenkowski’s case, which is before a grand jury. No charges have been filed.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), the fourth-ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, who also appeared on the show, said he was impressed; Rostenkowski said he was grateful; and Reynolds drew the notice of other senior House members.
Reynolds says his attack on Stephens was not a calculated move to curry favor with the House leadership. “What you feel, that’s what you do,” he said.
But his ability to move so smoothly after just seven months in the House, where seniority and tradition reign, iswhat sometimes gives him problems at home.
Conrad Worrill, a professor at Northeastern Illinois University and self-described black nationalist, says Reynolds is “an opportunist” who never paid his dues in the black community of Chicago before running for Congress.
Whether or not Reynolds paid his dues, he was elected with 69 percent of the vote in the overwhelmingly black district, and his supporters say he has been visible and hard-working in the city-suburban district since his election.
In a certain way, these two sides of his character have been the struggle of Melvin J. Reynolds’ life-a tug of war between a record of achievement and a nagging suspicion that he is at least as concerned with his image as with the substance of what he has done.
There’s no doubt that Reynolds has come a long way. He was born poor in Mound Bayou, Miss., where dirt streets and outhouses were the norm. His father was an itinerant Baptist preacher who held tent revivals three Sundays a month and was away a lot.
When Reynolds was 8 years old, his family moved to Chicago’s West Side because “they just decided the streets were paved with gold,” Reynolds said with a smile, remembering the back-door tenement he lived in. “You can easily mistake asphalt and concrete for gold when you live on streets that aren’t paved at all.”
His father continued to preach, and, Reynolds remembered, to take him and his twin brother, Marvin, and some of his three other siblings, to White Sox games, sitting in the bleachers in a suit, white shirt and tie. His father died of a heart attack when Reynolds was 13.
His mother remarried, and Essie Mae Thompson and Allen Thompson raised the Reynolds kids and two of Thompson’s.
Corean Prather’s influence
Reynolds’ church roots allow him to fit smoothly into the service at churches in the district, several of which he visits every Sunday when home. At the First Church of Love and Faith, 2149 W. 79th St., he began a recent short speech like any preacher would: “Giving all praises to God because he is my savior and my light. . . .”
During his childhood, the person overseeing all the kids was Reynolds’ grandmother, Corean Prather. A big influence in his life, she died at age 69 in 1976 while Reynolds was studying in Oxford, England, on a Rhodes Scholarship, and he returned for her funeral.
As Reynolds tells the story, Prather had a heart attack just after having come home from work scrubbing tables at Goldblatt’s. Recalling an ambulance’s arrival, and subsequent path, in detail, he claims that she got to Cook County Hospital “28 minutes after she could have been” at a closer hospital.
“It wasn’t the Fire Department’s fault. It was society’s fault because they knew, `You take poor people to the county (hospital).’ And that’s it. And that’s wrong.”
Race looms large in Reynolds’ world view. He cites racism as a reason for several critical articles that have questioned his academic record and financial matters.
“For reasons of expediency, members of the media take the easy way out,” he said. “I want to be recognized for my work. Very few African-Americans are recognized for the work ethic. It’s a little like an African-American basketball player getting described as having `natural talent.’ No one ever described them making 200 jump shots before they left the gym that day.”
Sensitivity issue
Are all the questions racially based?
“I’ve been asked 21 times since 1987 by reporters, `Are you really a Rhodes scholar?’ ” Reynolds said, citing a statistic that is revealing only in that he has kept score. Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) “have never been asked that question. What conclusion am I to draw from that?” he asked. (Feingold acknowledged that to be true; Cooper couldn’t be reached.)
Asked about Reynolds’ possibly thin-skinned reaction to criticism, Rangel, the highest-ranking black member in the House, counsels: “I just don’t think we can be too sensitive about criticism.”
One of the most critical articles about Reynolds appeared in the March issue of the satirical magazine Spy and compared him unfavorably to Eddie Murphy’s congressman character in the movie “The Distinguished Gentleman.” It questioned his academic record and his campaign and personal debts, labeling him a “great black hope.” Most mainstream journalists ignored it, but Reynolds’ political foes cite it.
Reynolds insists that the article was written because he is a black who has ties to the Jewish community. Reynolds maintains that the reporter who wrote the Spy story, Nina Burleigh, “is Farsi, which means Iranian heritage, and she was (angry) at me because of my relationship with the Jewish community. It was written because I’m black and I’m an easy target and blacks don’t have a lot of power. But the real motivation for the story was to get back at me for my relationship with the Jewish community. For what other reason would she write the story? Why single me out?”
Reynolds said he heard about Burleigh’s heritage from Mike McKeon of Joliet, Ill., his pollster. However, Burleigh said she is not Farsi and has no ties to the Iranian community.
The Jewish community
There’s no doubt that Reynolds’ relationship with the Jewish community has a good news-bad news aspect. Many Jewish contributors backed Reynolds as antidote to former Rep. Gus Savage (D-Ill.), whom Reynolds defeated in the March primary last year and who frequently used anti-Semitic rhetoric. Savage made no bones about linking Reynolds to campaign contributions from Jewish supporters and pointing out that people such as J.B. Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt fortune, were campaigning for Reynolds. Today, critics such as Worrill still say that because Reynolds has Jewish contributors, he does not truly represent the African-American community.
Pritzker said he offered to “stay away. He (Reynolds) said, `That’s ridiculous.’ He believes the black community is not anti-Semitic. Mel is not perfect, but he has a decent heart and he genuinely believes in coalition-building.”
Reynolds didn’t always rub shoulders with the likes of Pritzker. He attended Chicago’sGladstone and Delano elementary schools, Marshall and Mather High Schools and Cosmopolitan Prep. He graduated from Truman Junior College with an associate of arts degree. He then went to Yale University, but left after one semester because of family difficulties involving his stepfather.
He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1974, gaining the attention of a professor, David Sweater, who urged him to apply for a Rhodes.
“I said, `What the hell is that?’ But then I remembered that I saw Bill Bradley on the cover of a magazine in 1965.” Bradley, with basketball and in cap and gown, was a Rhodes scholar from Princeton.
Reynolds needed eight recommendations for the Rhodes, and four of them came from Yale professors. He also attended Harvard Law School, Yale Law School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and insists he still plans to finish his Kennedy School thesis. He received a degree from the Honor School of Jurisprudence at Oxford but is not a lawyer.
It was at Yale where he met a kid “with long, straggly hair, a fringed jacket and no socks on.” That was Bobby Shriver, member of the Kennedy clan and son of Sargent Shriver, George McGovern’s 1972 running mate. At a campaign rally, he got to go backstage, past Secret Service agents, and heard Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) introduce the presidential ticket.
Kennedy’s campaign
“I thought to myself, `This is it, I’m in this,’ ” Reynolds said.
That association led him to work in the 1980 Kennedy campaign and the 1988 Jesse Jackson campaign. According to Kennedy, Reynolds “is extraordinarily gifted intellectually. He brings insight from his passions and is a practical idealist.”
Perhaps more idealist than practical. He doesn’t have much money for a congressman, lives in a nice but spare apartment on the South Shore with an extraordinary view of Lake Michigan but not much else. His prize possession is a travel van, into which he sometimes piles his wife, Marisol, his 2-year-old daughter, Cori, and his newborn twins, Melvin J. Jr., known as Jay, and Marisol Elizabeth, called Lizzie.
Critics say Reynolds has never held a regular job-especially in the private sector-for any length of time, between his work on other people’s campaigns, and his own-he ran unsuccessfully against Savage in 1988 and 1990 before finally beating him in 1992. Reynolds counters that he has taught at Roosevelt University, was host of a talk show on radio station WLS, organized a trip of students to Africa for famine relief and did community work.
“The bottom line is, had I graduated from junior college, gotten myself a job, 9 to 5, didn’t have a criminal record, supported any children that I had . . . I would have been a complete success in my community,” Reynolds said. “If you go to work in the community, somehow that’s not as much credibility as saying, `I worked for IBM for six years.’ What’s so great about that?”
Perhaps if he had worked for IBM, he wouldn’t have had an outstanding campaign debt of $40,000 and some other debts that led to a published report in July chronicling some of his financial troubles. While his campaign debt is not extraordinary-95 of the 110 new members of Congress had debts, ranging from $952,297 by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) to $1,115 owed by Rep. Walter Tucker (D-Calif.)-it was noted that creditors had sued him.
Paying off debts
Reynolds is making headway in paying off the debt. His most recent Federal Election Commission filing listed the debt at $10,606. “I would classify him as a very poor politician, financially,” said Jim Mattz, of the Homewood, Ill., financial firm Ryan Bernstein, who says Reynolds is quickly getting his debts under control. But some creditors are still unhappy.
Pat Martin, publisher of the South Suburban Standard and the Chicago Standard, is suing Reynolds for $1,200 she says he owes her for a campaign ad she published. Reynolds says the ad never ran in the papers and says further that Martin is a crony of Savage’s, who doesn’t like him anyway and who once spit on him at a political rally.
“There’s some people who hate me like you wouldn’t believe,” Reynolds said. “The haters are always the most vocal. If they were a majority in the community, I would have lost.”
Reynolds has worked hard to build a name for himself in Congress, concentrating on his work in the Ways and Means Committee, fashioning legislation that would tax gun manufacturers and put the money toward health care, appearing on numerous radio and television shows, and generally making his presence felt. He also has taken a controversial role in the Congressional Black Caucus, moving passionately at one point to oust its lone Republican member, Rep. Gary Franks of Connecticut. He lost, but his effort was noted by others in the caucus.
Ways and Means Committee members praise him. But what appears to be a plus is being viewed by a potential opponent as a minus.
State Sen. William Shaw (D-Chicago), who may run against Reynolds next year, says being on the committee doesn’t do a thing for the 2nd Congressional District. But Reynolds’ presence helped result in increased tax breaks for the working poor, like many of the district’s constituents, in the just-passed budget bill.
Despite the criticism, Reynolds says he loves his job, even though he keeps mentioning how hard he works.
“I can’t think of anything I’d rather do unless it’s getting paid for playing hoop somewhere.”
