He was a fat man who loved to eat and laugh. He loved this city and he loved people. I mean he really loved them. He had fun with them, believed in them, trusted them.
He wasn’t afraid of them. Following him, as he walked through the crowds, you could see it.
Unlike some current political leaders, when he finished shaking hands in the crowds, he didn’t use alcohol wipes to erase their touch.
And once he became mayor of Chicago, he didn’t forget where he came from. He didn’t abandon the neighborhoods for a tuxedo and society parties with Republican CEOs. He didn’t see Chicago as a Disney theme park to be cleansed of bacteria. He was who he was.
Mayor Harold Washington.
Striding into some white-ethnic neighborhood hall, with the red eagle or shamrocks or Frank Sinatra on the wall behind the bar, he’d survey the faces pinched with hatred for the new black mayor.
Sometimes he’d stride into a ballroom with a polka band in back and the N-word forming quietly on the lips of the people at the bar. Putting his arms around a plump lady in a loud print dress, he’d drag her out onto the dance floor and polka his guts out.
Remember?
He danced with his mouth open, belly heaving, sweat pouring off his face, laughing and hopping to the accordion music. He knew it was ridiculous. He didn’t care. He was having fun.
But he was no fool (“Politics ain’t beanbag,” he used to say). He was playing serious politics as the cameras watched him dancing with the nice Polish ladies. That small smirk played on the corners of his mouth. It was a signal so that black folks on the South and West Sides watching TV understood that he knew what he was doing.
The neighborhood whites understood too. Here was a black man, their mayor, dancing with their wives, telling them he wasn’t going anywhere. Their women were laughing, he was laughing and despite themselves, the men laughed too.
As a child of the political machine, he learned his politics from his 3rd Ward Democratic committeeman, the old-time carnivore Mike Sneed; from the South Side political boss, U.S. Rep. William Dawson; and from the late Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Or do you really think he learned his politics from the goo-goos? And do you think the old 1st Ward boys didn’t continue to prosper?
This wasn’t some lakefront liberal’s limp vision of reform. It was cover–brilliantly executed–for the methodical shifting of real power into his hands?
Or were you just watching the theater called Council Wars?
He knew what he wanted for Chicago and used the weapons he had. When the white aldermen played racial politics, he played it better. He got away with it, intimidating much of Chicago’s media while threatening critics with the race card.
If he left the 1st Ward alone, it was because he needed time to make his moves. He kept corrupt weasels like the former pimp, Clarence McClain, around because he wanted to. And he waved a happy goodbye to Rev. Jesse Jackson, who left town.
When he put a thug into his old 1st Congressional District seat instead of Lu Palmer, the black journalist who actually started the Washington parade, it was to make sure there was only one independent voice in the independent movement: Washington’s own.
What would he say today about Jackson’s new alliance with Mayor Richard M. Daley? How would he react to U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun letting his former opponent, 19th Ward Democratic Committeeman Thomas Hynes, help pick the next U.S. attorney?
Probably this: Politics ain’t beanbag.
But he’d be angry if he walked the city today, the city where Maxwell Street Market doesn’t belong, a city that wants to be a suburb, a city that uses iron gates and concrete blockades to separate neighborhoods.
Is it cleaner? Most definitely. Smaller and more manageable? Yes, by City Hall’s design. Whiter and wealthier? Where it counts.
You can almost hear his voice:
“It’s positively the lowest of the low, dastardly actions by indubitable antediluvian dodo heads, and an insult to myself at this juncture, as it was I who proclaimed time and time and time again that the machine is dead and gone.”
Now, at the 10-year anniversary of his death, it would be easy to help the revisionists paint a two-dimensional icon.
But I can’t. Because I was there.
Washington was a great man. He was an inspiration to all the people of his city and his country.
But he wasn’t a great mayor.
He loved the political theater, but he wasn’t interested in the details and administration that are a great mayor’s true and lonely burden.
And he allowed thousands upon thousands of poor children to be undereducated by a corrupt public school system, so as to keep the political support of the administrators and the contractors and the teachers’ union.
But he was a great man, in part because he taught Chicago valuable lessons about tolerance and understanding.
He taught me some lessons too, some of them harsh because I wrote about McClain and questioned his political deals, so in his eyes, I became his enemy.
Still, I miss him.
I think we all do.
