before to get the city’s attention. When he came in, things really began to move.”
The center stayed open only a few years, but that day on Michigan Avenue was historic nonetheless. It was the only time Barack Obama came face-to-face with Harold Washington. And if Harold Washington had never been mayor of Chicago, Barack Obama would not have become president of the United States.
Chapter 2
HAROLD
I N T H E S O U T H S I D E precincts where he’d received a near-unanimous share of the vote in the last mayoral election, Harold Washington was simply “Harold,” a beloved character whose official portrait grinned from the walls of beauty shops and four A.M. taverns, occupying the same position of reverence as St. Anthony of Padua in the homes of Italian Catholics. The black community was his family, because he had no family of his own. Long divorced, childless, he lived alone in a Hyde Park high-rise, his one-bedroom apartment barren except for piles of books and newspapers. He was not so much ascetic as indifferent to anything except politics. His ties were stained. His home-cooked meals were cans of Campbell’s soup boiled in the can, because that didn’t dirty a pot. As a young man, he had been a track star at DuSable High School, but as mayor, he ate so many deep-dish pizzas and Wendy’s cheeseburgers that he snorted, “I can’t run around a dime.” A friend bought Washington an exercise bike, but it sat unpedaled in his living room. The mayor’s idea of recreation was to leave city hall early on Thursday so he could spend the afternoon on political work.
Washington had begun his political career during the reign of Richard J. Daley, when most Chicagoans would have found a black mayor as horrifying as a black next-door neighbor or a black son-in-law. (A lot of them still felt that way even after he won. On the morning after Washington’s victory in the Democratic primary, Chicago Sun-Times wiseass Mike Royko began his column, “So I told Uncle Chester—‘don’t worry. Harold Washington doesn’t want to marry your sister.’ ”)
Had it not been for Washington, Barack Obama might never have left New York. Obama wanted to live in a city with a strong African-American community, a community that controlled its own destiny. In the mid-1980s, that was Chicago.
“I originally moved to Chicago in part because of the inspiration of Mayor Washington’s campaign,” Obama would tell the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in 2008 as he received its Harold Washington Award. “For those of you who recall that era, and recall Chicago at that time, it’s hard to forget the sense of possibility that he sparked in people. I’ll never forget how he reached out to everyone—black, brown, and white—to build a coalition for change.”
Had it not been for Washington, who ruled for four and a half years without setting off a white-flight panic to the suburbs, black politicians would not have gained the confidence to run for the U.S. Senate, and whites wouldn’t have had the confidence to vote for them. Blacks already had a long history of wielding political power in Chicago, but Washington was the linchpin figure who inspired them to expand their influence throughout the state of Illinois, and finally, across the nation.
“Everybody owes something to Harold Washington, because [his election] was something they never thought could happen,” says Lou Ransom, editor of the Chicago Defender, the city’s African-American newspaper. “If Harold can be mayor, what can’t we do? Obama talks about the audacity of hope. That audacity grew into the notion that a black man can be president of the United States.”
The black political culture that lifted Washington to city hall—and Obama to the White House—began developing even before Washington was born, in 1922. It had its roots in the First Great Migration from the South, which occurred during World War I, when blacks were needed in war industries to replace whites who had been drafted or gone home to Europe to fight for their native countries. Between 1916 and 1920, fifty thousand blacks moved to Chicago, riding north on the Illinois Central Railroad’s “Fried Chicken Special,” which traveled from the Mississippi Delta to the terminal at Twelfth and Michigan in fifteen hours, fast enough to get by on one box lunch. Many were lured by the promises of jobs and freedom in the Defender, which was left in train stations all over the South by Pullman porters.
“Have they stopped their Jim Crow cars?” the Defender