Race and Uncertainty as Chicago’s Voters Head to the Polls

Vallas pulled most of his votes from white wards in the Northwest, Southwest and lakefront. Chicago remains a starkly segregated city where location can designate racial identity.

Brandon Johnson, the Black candidate, is a former middle school teacher and organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Progressive political and movement icons like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Martin Luther King III have come from afar to support Johnson, and he has churned up a lot of excitement in the city’s progressive haunts. But most political analysts say his white support, while impressive, is limited to self-described progressives, and that Johnson needs to attract a huge number of Black voters to have a real chance at victory.

Some might regard these cross-racial allegiances as anomalous, but quite the contrary. This ​“city of broad shoulders” has long had a muscular collusion between its renown political machine and a subaltern Black facsimile. It’s an arrangement forged to accommodate power disparities between the city’s reigning ethnic fiefdoms and Black communities maimed by slavery’s lengthening legacy.

The pattern was established early in the 1930s with the election of William Dawson as the second Black Republican alderman of Chicago’s 2^nd Ward, where he served for six years. (The first was the famed Oscar De Priest.) Dawson was later appointed committeeman of the ward by Democratic Mayor Edward J. Kelly, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal wave swept him into a new party. Once ensconced, Dawson effectively used patronage and precinct workers to consolidate political power and provide a reliable voting block for local and national Democrats.

Dawson’s net of relationships, knit from decades in the political trenches, helped him build a Black political organization that became an important cog in the legendary Chicago machine. It was a Black subsidiary, of sorts, and it regarded platforms pushing progressive policies (like equitable taxing, a rent commission and police reform) with suspicion.

Ironically, it was this cautious, traditionalist Black machine that helped produce Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black and most progressive mayor. But Washington had to oppose his nurturers to win the seat. Washington came in third during his initial mayoral campaign in 1977, after winner Michael Bilandic and Roman Pucinski, but won a congressional seat in 1980. There, he became a leading voice for progressive causes during Ronald Reagan’s bleak presidency.

Washington’s enhanced national stature convinced Black political activists in Chicago that he was their best choice to take on two white candidates and they drafted him to make another run for mayor. However, the Black machine still viewed his progressive alliances suspiciously. What’s more, pollsters found that Jane Byrne had quite a bit of Black support in a three-candidate race between Washington, Byrne and Richard M. Daley. It was only after Chicago’s Black electorate realized the Byrne-Daley split offered a unique opportunity for the eloquent Washington that the campaign caught fire and became a movement.

As a reporter keyed into Chicago politics, I discerned similar dynamics in the later campaigns of Chicago’s Jesse Jackson (during his 1984 and 1988 presidential runs) and Barack Obama (when he ran for Rush’s congressional seat and lost). Their progressive alliances hampered their reception by elements of the Black machine.

Johnson is of that same lineage and is regarded with similar skepticism by that same array of forces. His route to prominence came through the CTU and the progressive networks of which the Black machine is notoriously suspicious.

This is not to simply dismiss those suspicions — Black disadvantage has too often been used to justify progressive platforms without input from the putative victims, and those charges of arrogant saviorism sometimes hurled at white progressives are occasionally justified. However, the tribal insularity encouraged by this ossified stance has impeded the growth of effective coalitions between the descendants of slaves and other people of color — a potential relationship that has essentially been on hold since the Washington years.

The hope for a revival of that spirit is one of the primary reasons the Johnson campaign has sparked such interest. It marks the most serious attempt to craft a progressive coalition since the hallowed Washington years.

Johnson’s campaign also vigorously resists the cynical defeatism that seems to have demobilized many progressives during the Trump-MAGA era. This Vallas-Johnson battle has attracted national attention because it offers a path to national healing. 

Today will determine whether the wound will fester or mend.

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