I never was Harold Washington's press secretary. I could have been. I was asked to be. But I turned down the job. Grayson Mitchell, then Alton Miller, were the two men to hold that position. I later would become the mayor's press secretary, after Harold died, when Eugene Sawyer succeeded him.
What I did, for which mayor, has not seemed to matter most of these 20 years since Chicago's first black chief executive died on November 25 at his fifth floor desk. As many times as not, over the two decades, I've been referenced in casual conversations, as well as formal introductions, as Mayor Washington's press secretary.
I always correct the mistake right after it's made. But I understand how it happens. I know that I am intrinsically and inextricably identified with Harold Washington and his march to city hall. Although Lou Palmer and Vernon Jarrett, two older, prominent black journalists, were early and often champions for Washington's historical journey, I was the first to predict the next mayor of Chicago would be black--without being an advocate. Instead, I analyzed, then presented the numbers. At the time, my theory was considered political pundit heresy.
If you'd like to see a newspaper clip of my Chicago Tribune Perspective piece, click here to View this photo. If you're not interested in seeing the original, here's the November 8, 1982,Trib article re-typed.
Black may redo mayor script
By Monroe Anderson
The latest crop of bumper stickers riding around town carry a simple message: "Hello, Richie! Goodbye, Jane!"
There is one gleaming flaw in this. It assumes that State's Atty. Richard M. Daley is the only person who could displace Jane Byrne in the February mayoral primary. But there is another possibility, one that ought to be given serious consideration: There may soon be a black boss in Chicago.
Here is the way the conventional wisdom--reflected in the bumper sticker--goes: Forget the fact that there are only 105,430 Chicagoans who are, like Daley and Byrne, of Irish-American descent. Dismiss the fact that there are 1.2 Chicagoans of African-American descent. Ignore the fact that the second largest ethnic group in Chicago is Mexican-American with a population of 254,656 or that Polish-Americans are third with 206,208.
Rather than evaluate the numbers, both bumper sticker authors and political pundits prefer to stick with the traditional Chicago political wisdom that the Irish will run the city as they have for more than a half a century.
Any candidate other than Daley or Byrne, according to conventional Chicago political wisdom, is an also-ran. A black candidate, despite the fact that the black population is nearly five times greater than the next largest ethnic group in the city, can best work as a spoiler, pundits say.
As their scenario goes, a black candidate such as U.S. Rep. Harold Washington [D., Ill.] or State Comptroller Roland Burris would only serve to keep Mayor Byrne in office. Their theory is that Mayor Byrne and the Chicago Democratic machine have a steady and given number of votes among all ethnic groups.
The political theorists note that the black community, like other ethnic groups in the city, is not a monolith. They point to the last time Washington ran for mayor, during the special election in April 1977, to fill the post after Richard J. Daley's death. He received about 74,000 votes, which was 11 percent of the total cast. Machine candidate Michael A. Bilandic received more than 342,000 and the Polish-American candidate, Ald. Roman Pucinski, got more than 217,000 votes.
That is not to say that blacks don't or won't vote as a bloc against a machine candidate. In November, 1972, thousands of machine-dependable blacks split their tickets to vote for Republican Bernard Carey over incumbent State's Atty. Edward V. Hanrahan, the Chicago Democrat who had led the 1989 police raid that resulted in the deaths of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Republican Carey took 9 of the then 14 black wards and the election.
The black disenchantment with Byrne may not go as deep as it did against Hanrahan, but it is no secret that the mayor has dashed almost all the dreams her campaign promises inspired among the thousands of blacks who voted her into office.
Theorists are predicting that the almost guaranteed huge black anti-Byrne vote will go to Daley. However, if a credible black candidate were to enter, making it a three-way race, conventional wisdom has it that Byrne would get her guaranteed votes while Daley and the black candidate would split the black protest vote.
Conversely, the theory goes, with no major black candidate in the race, the anti-Byrne black vote combined with the perennial antimachine vote, fulfills the bumper sticker prophecy: "Hello Richie. Goodbye Jane."
But the real behavior of blacks could upset these mathematical predictions. And one of the magic numbers is the record 70,000 black votes who joined the voting rolls just this year.
There are now more than a half-million black registered voters in Chicago. When Byrne beat out incumbent Mayor Bilandic by 16,775 votes during the heated primary race in February, 1979, some 412,909 voters pulled her lever. If 69 percent of those blacks who have registered cast their votes for a black mayoral candidate, he or she would have that hypothetical winning number.
And if this seems like a long shot, just consider the black voter turnout last week. Although neither Gov. Jim Thompson nor Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson ignited any passions in the black community, about 75 percent of black registered voters actually voted.
The February race, which will be closer to home and may seem to offer the real possibility of jobs in a community with depression-level unemployment rather than just the venting of frustrations against Reaganomics, will demand much greater attention and be decidedly more heated.
So, here is another scenario, quite different from that of the observers whose eyes are glued on the Byrne-Daley race: In a heated race including Byrne, Daley and an attractive black candidate such as a Washington or a Burris, racial identity could easily become a polarizing force as it has in a number of other cities where a black mayor was elected.
Blacks now comprise about 40 per cent of the 1,510,000 registered voters in Chicago. In a black-white polarized primary race, which is already germinating thanks to Mayor Byrne's political appointments over the last four years, both sides could easily end up voting color in the 90-plus percentile range. Thus, the numbers can tell the story better than reliance on past machine performances.
If in an intensely heated campaign atmosphere, an overwhelming proportion of blacks voted for a single black candidate and whites split between the two or more white candidates, then Chicago could have its first black mayor.
Of course, this assumes a unity in black voting that would be really quite remarkable in a Democratic primary--rather than in a Democratic-Republican contest. And it assumes that no more than one credible black candidate enters the race. But depending upon the degree to which the election became racially polarized, it is hypothetically possible.
Naturally, the political pundits, the pollsters and the bumper sticker sloganeers consider all this a mission implausible. Those are the same people, incidentally, who didn't give an unknown Jane Byrne a snowball's chance in hell of defeating the incumbent machine candidate, Mayor Bilandic, just four years ago.
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