Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,074

This is the grave of Harold Washington.

Born in 1922 in Chicago, Washington grew up in a political family. His father was active in the Republican Party, a precinct captain, so reasonably well connected. This was the era when the national Republican Party was doing exactly nothing for Black voters but was still the Party of Lincoln and at least they weren’t the Dixiecrat dominated Democrats and there was some local patronage. Not much, but it was something. The family was decidedly middle class. His father was a lawyer as well. But his mother abandoned the family when Harold was 4 and so he grew up mostly with his grandparents.

Washington was a good student and excellent athlete. After high school, he worked briefly in a Civilian Conservation Corps camp and then in the meatpacking plants. His father was not going to let his boy stay in the packing plants however and he used his patronage connections to get the kid a job in the U.S. Treasury branch in Chicago. Then came World War II. Washington was drafted into the Army and was part of the 1887th Engineer Aviation Battalion, building landing strips on Pacific islands.

When Washington came back to the U.S. in 1946, he actually did not yet have his high school diploma. So he got that taken care of and enrolled in Roosevelt College, using his G.I. Bill benefits. This was a politically progressive institution that took in anyone and thus was about half Jewish and had a lot of Black students too in an unsegregated classroom setting. He immediately jumped into school politics, fighting racial covenants in the Chicago area, and being elected president of the student council. He proved pretty good at this whole politics thing. He found himself good at pleasing a lot of sides of a conflict, avoiding taking radical actions personally while supporting others to do so, and never ever losing his cool.

So Washington began to think about politics as a life avocation. He enrolled at the Northwestern School of Law after graduating from Roosevelt in 1949 and then went into private practice in 1952, working for his father. When his father died in 1953, Washington took over his job as precinct captain and he began to build his own power base in Chicago politics. For the next decade, Washington stayed largely under the radar, working to strengthen the 3rd Ward and Black voters generally, supporting the city’s growing civil rights movement without ever really being involved in it, and working with other local Black leaders to place internal pressure on the city to promote Black issues and give the city’s huge Black population more than just the crumbs they had received in the past.

Washington made a move for the statehouse in 1964. The state’s notoriously corrupt politics were a total mess and the entire state reapportionment in 1960 was thrown out by the courts. Everyone was up for reelection that year and after endless shenanigans, Washington was part of a winning ticket for the Democrats. But when he got to the legislature he was aggressively independent, getting attention from the state’s media for his independence. He refused to toe the party line, to the extent that the party, i.e., Richard Daley, wanted to dump him. But Washington had built up such a strong power base in his 3rd Ward that this wasn’t so easy. He fought off many attempts by Daley to get rid of him and he won every time. But because all the power bosses hated him, they would refuse to take up any of his bills and he did not in fact get a Democratic governor to sign a bill he had introduced until 1973.

Daley tried to bring him down in any number of ways, largely with politically timed accusations and investigations into his taxes. Now, Washington may well have been fudging his taxes. These allegations did stick around. But let’s also not pretend that the Daley administration was clean here. When Daley finally got the IRS to take up a case against him, the judge found the whole thing ridiculous and charged Washington $500.

Washington kept rising no matter what Daley tried to do. Then Daley was suddenly dead and the machine could not find much in the way of a replacement. Washington managed to push Illinois to pass non-discrimination legislation that reorganized state government and ensured basic equal rights. It stalled because of both right-wing hate for it and because there was an amendment in the state house to include a provision to allow women to have credit cards in their own name, which of course many men opposed. Washington saw it through though. That led him to run for Congress in 1980, where he became a major voice against Reagan’s cuts to social programs. Jane Byrne tried to follow Daley in destroying Washington, recruiting people to run against him in 1982. Instead, he not only easily won that year but turned his sights on Byrne and a mayoral run.

Washington winning the job of mayor of Chicago was groundbreaking not only in that he was a Black, but that he overthrew the Daley machine. It didn’t hurt that Richard Daley Jr. and Byrne were both running and splitting anti-Washington votes. But he won and then won again in 1987, beating Byrne again. In his first term, he was basically at war with the city council, who loathed him and what he looked like and everything he stood for. But he outlasted them too and his popularity rose as the term went along. He brought a much more grassroots aspect to governing. His Political Education Project became his arm of organizing at the neighborhood level to build his own power and that of more progressive Chicago. Among the people who rose in this organization was Chuy Garcia, who later would run a rather poor campaign for mayor himself. The goal here was to elect aldermen who actually cared about their constituents. They managed to defeat a lot of the old guard and lead Washington into having much more of a mandate in his second term.

Washington was really on his way to becoming a transformative figure. Historians have seen his performance as mayor in a very positive light. Alas, in 1987, while in a meeting with his press secretary, he had a massive heart attack and died. He was 65 years old. A moment of major change ended early.

Harold Washington is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other mayors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Carl Stokes is in Cleveland and Bertha Knight Landes is in Seattle. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.