In the years leading up to the 1983 election of Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago, no one did more to stir the mobilization of African-American voters than the city’s most prominent black nationalist, Lutrelle “Lu” Palmer.
The partnership was touch and go. Washington understood the sway that Palmer, a hugely popular newspaper columnist turned radio host, held in the African-American community. But Washington was a product of the Democratic machine and its emphasis on coalition politics. He didn’t see much future in Palmer’s trademark distrust of white people. Whites, after all, outnumbered blacks in Chicago. Alienating them wasn’t good politics.
In his book “Fire on the Prairie,” a chronicle of Washington and his era of racial politics in Chicago, author Gary Rivlin described Palmer this way: “He was a stone-faced man on whose countenance a smile seemed out of place. `Uncompromising,’ friend and foe alike said, ideologically rigid and personally abrasive. The relationship between Palmer and Washington was especially stormy. Those who knew them both understood they couldn’t get along because they were both so hardheaded.” That was never more evident than after Washington won the mayoralty, and Palmer ran for the congressional seat Washington vacated. Washington backed another candidate over Palmer, who had worked so hard to put him in office.
Washington died in 1987 at 65; if alive today, he would be 82. Palmer died Sunday at age 82. His passing follows the death in May of Vernon Jarrett, another prominent African-American who, like Palmer, straddled the realms of journalism and activism in Chicago. Jarrett, too, was 82.
In commenting on Palmer’s death, the Chicago Defender called him “the godfather of Chicago’s black politics.” Palmer joined the Defender as a reporter in 1950 and later said the newspaper fired him three times. In the early 1970s, he quit his job as a columnist at the Chicago Daily News, complaining that white editors had too often meddled with his provocative writings.
The best measure of Harold Washington’s generation is the uniqueness of what men like Palmer and Jarrett helped accomplish. They were arguably the best-known of the many political activists who pulled together the African-American community, reminding its voters that their potential power went well beyond their traditional lockstep support for the machine. Black voters could, with a little help from open-minded whites and Latinos, elect one of their own.
More than 20 years after Washington’s triumph, the movement that Lu Palmer helped engineer has yet to be replicated. With the inexorable passage of Harold Washington’s generation, Chicago is losing crusaders who accomplished one of the most remarkable feats in this city’s political history.
