It was just five years ago that Vincent Lane, the nationally acclaimed Chicago Housing Authority chief, was an ascending star in the city’s firmament of black leadership, promoted as a potential African-American standard-bearer for a challenge to first-term Mayor Richard Daley.
Daley himself was mindful of millionaire real-estate developer Lane’s frequently burnished media image and his solid reputation in the community at large. Daley hailed Lane for improvements he had undertaken at the chronically crisis-stricken CHA and extolled him as “a role model for everyone in the city.”
But Lane, recruited by Democrats and Republicans alike with the same zeal as for a starting quarterback during fraternity rush, professed to have no interest in using the CHA as a springboard to political office.
“When I took this job,” Lane said in 1990, “I was just hoping that I’d get out of here with my reputation. . . . I have high hopes for (the) CHA.”
Those hopes, for himself and the housing authority that he headed for seven years, were dashed by the recent federal takeover of the CHA. Another prominent African-American figure, a role model, was relegated to the sidelines, deemed to have failed in a mismanaged agency that houses the city’s poorest minorities.
Coincidentally, perhaps, the Chicago Board of Education was legislated out of existence by the General Assembly with Daley’s consent, and members such as former board President Clinton Bristow, a black academic who does have political aspirations, were summarily shown the door in the name of education reform.
Coming as they did within a month of Daley’s May 1 inauguration for a new term, the two events have given rise to political accusations that Daley is stripping the institutions that disproportionately serve the African-American community of their black leadership.
And, in a city with a 40 percent black population, where African-American politicians ran City Hall as recently as six years ago and where every campaign is imbued with the politics of race, these changes fueled the perpetual debate on how the leadership void can be filled.
“It doesn’t bode well for public confidence in the African-American community,” Bristow said last week. He added that he feared “political isolationism” for blacks if they are excluded from prominent roles in policymaking, management and daily operation of major institutions such as the schools and the CHA.
Board President D. Sharon Grant, a black businesswoman and one of Bristow’s successors in the revolving door at the Pershing Road headquarters, will be supplanted by Daley’s former chief of staff, Hispanic lawyer Gery Chico.
At the CHA, Lane will be temporarily replaced by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Joseph Shuldiner, who is white.
Similar changes have been made at other agencies since Daley took office in 1989.
Another former Daley chief of staff, Forrest Claypool, took over as Chicago Park District superintendent following a succession of blacks who held the job dating back to the late Mayor Harold Washington’s tenure.
But Daley made John Rogers, a black investment banker and campaign fundraiser, president of the park board, which had been operating under a federal decree to upgrade inner-city facilities.
Hispanic Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez succeeded LeRoy Martin, who is black and was a holdover from the Washington administration. Daley also sent one of his most accomplished troubleshooters, retired real estate executive Robert Belcaster, who is white, to overhaul the Chicago Transit Authority.
U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, a prospective mayoral challenger to Daley in 1999, denounced the changes that have taken place.
“It’s a steady and vicious encroachment on black leadership in this city,” Rush said last week. “The black community is alarmed by and incensed by it.”
A spokesman for Daley replied, “Cheap political shots aren’t going to solve any problems.” And a senior African-American officeholder, West Side Ald. Ed Smith (28th), said the issue of race in the institutional leadership posts was inconsequential as long as higher standards are met.
“I believe in affirmative action,” Smith said. “I want to make sure that blacks have their fair share of everything, and I want them to be participants in the system. But in the final analysis, I want some quality.”
Daley’s media consultant, David Axelrod, pointed to the changes and said: “Richard Daley has taken the best people in his own administration and he’s put them on the most difficult, intractable problems in the city. People are clamoring for better schools, better service on the CTA and better parks. That’s what he’s trying to provide.”
Daley has a cadre of black businessmen-contributors-advisers, such as Rogers, Dempsey Travis and Elzie Higginbottom. An African-American woman, Valerie Jarrett, is his chief adviser on urban planning and economic development.
Thomas Coffey, a white lawyer who was part of Washington’s circle of advisers, conceded that “Daley has done a superb job of investing (minorities) in the system” with contracts and high-ranking appointments.
But the mayor has a small margin for error.
If Daley’s personnel moves yield few tangible improvements in the city’s quality of life, the exodus of middle-class whites and blacks-his political base-will continue, and his self-styled reputation as a manager will be tarnished.
Moreover, if critics can convince voters that, in the words of Rush, “there is a systematic attack on the black community,” it could help to galvanize the kind of progressive movement that led to Washington’s 1983 election as Chicago’s first black mayor.
Rush and Bristow maintained that the major black-oriented institutions have been underfunded and ignored by the white power structure. And University of Illinois-Chicago urban planning expert Wim Wiewel called the leadership of those organizations “a hollow prize.”
“It’s the city as sandbox phenomenon,” said Wiewel. “You let minorities run the cities, but you don’t give the cities the resources to do the job. They’re set up for failure.”
Daley and his white Republican counterparts in Los Angeles and New York inherited the phenomenon. New GOP majorities in Congress and the General Assembly, with their constituents concentrated in the suburbs, haven’t shown much empathy or to spend additional funds.
William Grimshaw, an Illinois Institute of Technology political scientist who chronicled Washington’s ascendancy, dismissed the CHA takeover by HUD as Daley’s price for a re-election endorsement of President Clinton next year and a way of cleaning up the West Side around the United Center before next summer’s Democratic National Convention.
Grimshaw saw the CHA and school board moves as a policy of containment, of both race and pinstripe patronage.
Wiewel predicted that Latinos, with whom Daley is in a stronger political position, will have greater say in the future of the schools, where their enrollment is increasing the fastest. The schools, he said, are a more urgent concern with a broader impact for Daley and the city.
Still, while the school board and the CHA were among the visible signs of black empowerment over the last dozen years, they have never been a steppingstone to political office.
Lane and Bristow will join the “where-are-they-now?” roster of high-profile figures chewed up by the CHA (remember Renault Robinson?), the Park District (Ed Kelly and Jesse Madison) and the school board (too many to list).
And Chicago’s African-American political leadership will come from the same source as it does for every racial or ethnic group, its growing number of elected officials.
Although Daley has vanquished six black mayoral foes in as many years, helped by low voter turnout and a 15-point disparity in white voter interest over black voter interest, there are more African-American officeholders now than when Washington was elected.
