It has been 30 years since Chicago bid farewell to the mayor who broke the Democratic machine and became a beacon of hope for thousands. In remembering the man and the moment, those close to him reveal how keenly his loss is still felt.
He wasn’t part of the insider crowd. He wasn’t somebody who the establishment immediately embraced. But he understood that, ultimately, power comes from people.”
With those words, spoken by Barack Obama in 2008 at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., the soon-to-be president could have been describing himself, but in fact he was talking about Harold Washington, whom Obama credited as an inspiration for his moving to Chicago in 1985, two years after Washington had taken office. Obama went on: “If you are working at a grassroots [level]—and people trust you are fighting for them—then there’s nothing you can’t accomplish.”
Revisiting those remarks on the 30th anniversary of Washington’s death, you can’t help wondering what the city’s first black mayor, who was just a few months into his second term, would have gone on to accomplish had his heart not stopped on November 25, 1987.
The Chicago Tribune’s coverage of that day depicted a city convulsed in grief: “Women sank, sobbing, onto plaza benches. A man sat and buried his head in his hands.” A memorable photo showed a police officer standing guard outside the mayor’s City Hall office—where Washington had collapsed just hours earlier—wiping tears from his face.
Washington, a former U.S. congressman, was 65 years old, overweight, an ex-smoker, and a notorious workaholic in a stressful job, yet his death hit Chicagoans—especially African Americans, 98 percent of whom had voted for Washington in the first election—like a gut punch. To many black residents, the loss of their charismatic, Bronzeville-born mayor threatened to extinguish four and a half years’ worth of progress in a city that had long been ruled by machine politics and marred by racial injustice.
During that period, having overcome fierce opposition from an obstructionist group of mostly white aldermen known as the Vrdolyak 29, Washington increased the number of minorities in local government, awarded a record number of contracts to minority-owned businesses, improved governmental transparency by granting the public access to official records, and formed an ethics commission to root out corruption. The mayor envisioned those and other moves as merely a start, quipping after his April reelection that he was going to be “mayor for life” and die at his desk. His prediction proved uncannily true, and all too soon.
Two days after Washington’s death, his body lay in state in the City Hall rotunda, drawing thousands of mourners. He was buried four days later at Oak Woods Cemetery, not far from his Hyde Park apartment. Early on December 2, over the vociferous objections of protesters who supported Washington’s widely acknowledged heir apparent, Timothy Evans, a majority of the City Council selected Eugene Sawyer, an African American alderman favored by the late mayor’s foes, to succeed Washington. In the eyes of many Chicagoans, the machine had regained power, and a momentous era was over.
But for a great number of those who knew and worked with the man, their impressions of Washington have faded little in three decades, and the things he fought for feel more urgent than ever. For a handful of people who lived through that November day in 1987, the memories are indelible.
Shaking hands with a future constituent, just after winning the Democratic primary. Washington “was irrepressible in his personal relationships,” says his former press secretary Alton Miller.
Timothy Evans
4th Ward alderman
Harold was dedicating some housing in my ward that morning. He was in good spirits. He could be a very serious guy but also a jokester: When they gave us the shovels and the construction hats to put on our heads, I looked down and he was putting dirt from his shovel into mine. We were four or five blocks from my house, and so when we were getting ready to leave, I said I had to go home to pick up my briefcase. As he was getting into his limousine, he said, “Well, I’ll see you downtown.” And by the time I got home and got my briefcase and everything together, the phone was ringing. And I thought, Whoever it is, I can get it later. But it kept ringing, so I decided to answer it.
Even now, I miss the guy every day. I think about something that he said, one way or the other, almost every day of the year. I can remember once when we were in Beijing and we saw Chairman Mao’s mausoleum. He looked over and said, “I wonder how I’ll be remembered.” He wasn’t expecting an answer, and none of us gave him one, because we weren’t thinking about him leaving.
Alton Miller
Press secretary
The mayor once said, “I don’t know what it is, but the old ladies, they like me.” And wherever he went, that was true. You’d go out into neighborhoods where he’d be lucky to pick up five votes, and the babushkas would come out with their grandchildren to see the mayor and wave and pose for a photograph and get a hug. He was irrepressible in his personal relationships. At political rallies, whenever there was a huge audience of his own supporters, instead of coming in the back door, he would walk in the front door and through the crowd, all the way up to the podium. It would be like an imaginary spotlight was on him: You could see the sea of heads and the waves as he was making his way up. You’d have these ladies holding up their lottery tickets so he could touch them for mojo. It was like the king’s touch.
That morning, the mayor had some kind of congestion in the car coming back from the groundbreaking. We got back to City Hall and he asked one [member] of the security detail to bring him some cough drops. We were sitting in his office, and I was going through my Day-Timer and we were talking about what was happening that day, and I suddenly heard this thump. I looked up and he was slumped over on his desk. I thought he was trying to pick up a pen or something that he had dropped. Almost in the same motion, his chair flipped out from under him. I called for the detail—they were right next door—and told his secretary to call 911. The EMTs were up there in seconds, because a team was based on the first floor of City Hall. They started CPR and took his pulse. They had a pulse for a moment and then they lost it. They did telemetry [to allow remote monitoring of his vital signs] and had him hooked up via telephone to Northwestern Hospital [until the ambulance arrived].
Ernest Barefield
Chief of staff
I was in the office, and I got the message that he had been taken to the hospital. There was total quiet and disbelief. Many of us in the administration went to the hospital. We were there on the scene, prayerful and hopeful. Some said there was a chance that he might recover. We didn’t even know it was a heart attack at the time. But we had great hope that things would go on, that the journey wouldn’t end.
Patrick Keen
Project director for West Side Habitat for Humanity
I was always amazed by his mind, his abilities, his vision for the development of the parks and the boulevards and the neighborhoods that were connected to them. His vision for Chicago was so intriguing, and I bought into it immediately because I knew it was right for the city.
I remember being in my office that day, listening to NPR, and they announced that the mayor had had a heart attack. First I called City Hall and told them I wanted to set up a prayer vigil for Harold in Daley Plaza, which they accommodated. And I notified WBEZ that we were going to do that so they could announce it over the air. The crowd grew hour by hour as the word was going out. He had been to a breakfast, and there were rumors that he had been poisoned. [That speculation was later debunked.]
Full article: The Day Harold Washington Died
A police officer outside the mayor’s office wipes away a tear hours after Washington’s death.
He wasn’t part of the insider crowd. He wasn’t somebody who the establishment immediately embraced. But he understood that, ultimately, power comes from people.”
With those words, spoken by Barack Obama in 2008 at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., the soon-to-be president could have been describing himself, but in fact he was talking about Harold Washington, whom Obama credited as an inspiration for his moving to Chicago in 1985, two years after Washington had taken office. Obama went on: “If you are working at a grassroots [level]—and people trust you are fighting for them—then there’s nothing you can’t accomplish.”
Revisiting those remarks on the 30th anniversary of Washington’s death, you can’t help wondering what the city’s first black mayor, who was just a few months into his second term, would have gone on to accomplish had his heart not stopped on November 25, 1987.
The Chicago Tribune’s coverage of that day depicted a city convulsed in grief: “Women sank, sobbing, onto plaza benches. A man sat and buried his head in his hands.” A memorable photo showed a police officer standing guard outside the mayor’s City Hall office—where Washington had collapsed just hours earlier—wiping tears from his face.
Washington, a former U.S. congressman, was 65 years old, overweight, an ex-smoker, and a notorious workaholic in a stressful job, yet his death hit Chicagoans—especially African Americans, 98 percent of whom had voted for Washington in the first election—like a gut punch. To many black residents, the loss of their charismatic, Bronzeville-born mayor threatened to extinguish four and a half years’ worth of progress in a city that had long been ruled by machine politics and marred by racial injustice.
During that period, having overcome fierce opposition from an obstructionist group of mostly white aldermen known as the Vrdolyak 29, Washington increased the number of minorities in local government, awarded a record number of contracts to minority-owned businesses, improved governmental transparency by granting the public access to official records, and formed an ethics commission to root out corruption. The mayor envisioned those and other moves as merely a start, quipping after his April reelection that he was going to be “mayor for life” and die at his desk. His prediction proved uncannily true, and all too soon.
Campaigning with Muhammad Ali in 1983
Two days after Washington’s death, his body lay in state in the City Hall rotunda, drawing thousands of mourners. He was buried four days later at Oak Woods Cemetery, not far from his Hyde Park apartment. Early on December 2, over the vociferous objections of protesters who supported Washington’s widely acknowledged heir apparent, Timothy Evans, a majority of the City Council selected Eugene Sawyer, an African American alderman favored by the late mayor’s foes, to succeed Washington. In the eyes of many Chicagoans, the machine had regained power, and a momentous era was over.
But for a great number of those who knew and worked with the man, their impressions of Washington have faded little in three decades, and the things he fought for feel more urgent than ever. For a handful of people who lived through that November day in 1987, the memories are indelible.
Shaking hands with a future constituent, just after winning the Democratic primary. Washington “was irrepressible in his personal relationships,” says his former press secretary Alton Miller.
4th Ward alderman
Harold was dedicating some housing in my ward that morning. He was in good spirits. He could be a very serious guy but also a jokester: When they gave us the shovels and the construction hats to put on our heads, I looked down and he was putting dirt from his shovel into mine. We were four or five blocks from my house, and so when we were getting ready to leave, I said I had to go home to pick up my briefcase. As he was getting into his limousine, he said, “Well, I’ll see you downtown.” And by the time I got home and got my briefcase and everything together, the phone was ringing. And I thought, Whoever it is, I can get it later. But it kept ringing, so I decided to answer it.
Even now, I miss the guy every day. I think about something that he said, one way or the other, almost every day of the year. I can remember once when we were in Beijing and we saw Chairman Mao’s mausoleum. He looked over and said, “I wonder how I’ll be remembered.” He wasn’t expecting an answer, and none of us gave him one, because we weren’t thinking about him leaving.
Alton Miller
Press secretary
The mayor once said, “I don’t know what it is, but the old ladies, they like me.” And wherever he went, that was true. You’d go out into neighborhoods where he’d be lucky to pick up five votes, and the babushkas would come out with their grandchildren to see the mayor and wave and pose for a photograph and get a hug. He was irrepressible in his personal relationships. At political rallies, whenever there was a huge audience of his own supporters, instead of coming in the back door, he would walk in the front door and through the crowd, all the way up to the podium. It would be like an imaginary spotlight was on him: You could see the sea of heads and the waves as he was making his way up. You’d have these ladies holding up their lottery tickets so he could touch them for mojo. It was like the king’s touch.
That morning, the mayor had some kind of congestion in the car coming back from the groundbreaking. We got back to City Hall and he asked one [member] of the security detail to bring him some cough drops. We were sitting in his office, and I was going through my Day-Timer and we were talking about what was happening that day, and I suddenly heard this thump. I looked up and he was slumped over on his desk. I thought he was trying to pick up a pen or something that he had dropped. Almost in the same motion, his chair flipped out from under him. I called for the detail—they were right next door—and told his secretary to call 911. The EMTs were up there in seconds, because a team was based on the first floor of City Hall. They started CPR and took his pulse. They had a pulse for a moment and then they lost it. They did telemetry [to allow remote monitoring of his vital signs] and had him hooked up via telephone to Northwestern Hospital [until the ambulance arrived].
Ernest Barefield
Chief of staff
I was in the office, and I got the message that he had been taken to the hospital. There was total quiet and disbelief. Many of us in the administration went to the hospital. We were there on the scene, prayerful and hopeful. Some said there was a chance that he might recover. We didn’t even know it was a heart attack at the time. But we had great hope that things would go on, that the journey wouldn’t end.
Patrick Keen
Project director for West Side Habitat for Humanity
I was always amazed by his mind, his abilities, his vision for the development of the parks and the boulevards and the neighborhoods that were connected to them. His vision for Chicago was so intriguing, and I bought into it immediately because I knew it was right for the city.
I remember being in my office that day, listening to NPR, and they announced that the mayor had had a heart attack. First I called City Hall and told them I wanted to set up a prayer vigil for Harold in Daley Plaza, which they accommodated. And I notified WBEZ that we were going to do that so they could announce it over the air. The crowd grew hour by hour as the word was going out. He had been to a breakfast, and there were rumors that he had been poisoned. [That speculation was later debunked.]
Full article: The Day Harold Washington Died
