Harold Washington, Chicago's first Black mayor, serves as a model for grassroots forces in electoral politics. Despite facing opposition, he made significant strides in dismantling the city machine. This article explores his historic impact and untimely death.
Four decades ago, at the start of 1984, Harold Washington was finishing his historic opening year in office as Chicago ’s first Black mayor. An outsider candidate who had been persuaded to run by the city’s social movements, Washington represented a major break from the past, and his 1983 victory served as an important milestone in the efforts of civil rights activists to gain footholds in electoral politics .
Today, as social movements increasingly take interest in running insurgent candidates for office, Washington provides a vital model for how grassroots forces can bring new constituencies into the electoral realm and upend the established practices of insider politics. Once in office, the mayor—widely known in the city simply as “Harold”—faced entrenched opposition. And yet he was able to take significant strides in dismantling the city machine. Run for decades by Richard J. Daley, this machine long maintained a racist and inequitable system of distributing municipal resources. Tragically, Washington died of a heart attack just months into his second term, in 198
Harold Washington Chicago Mayor Grassroots Electoral Politics Civil Rights City Machine
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