“What Are We?”: Latino Politics, Identity, and Memory in the 1983 Chicago Mayoral Election

The 1983 Chicago mayoral election, which polarized Black and white voters, left the nascent Latino electorate in an uncertain position. A reevaluation of this election clarifies the impact of Black mayoral candidate Harold Washington, whose candidacy laid bare significant political divisions and anti-Black sentiment among Latinos as they grappled with their relationship to whiteness. Divisions aside, Washington's effort to court the Latino vote helped legitimate a monolithic, panethnic label in Chicago politics, as evidenced by organizational records, campaign advertising, electoral data, and bilingual media coverage. Reframing the 1983 election as a dual process of race making and panethnic labeling bridges scholarship on Black mayors, Latino politics, and urban history, and questions an enduring political memory of 1983 that has obscured both Latino anti-Blackness and the fragility of Latino unity.

Police Crimes and Power Abuses

Reflecting broader trends in cities that had elected black mayors in the 1970s, Tom Bradley’s politics rested on a belief that law enforcement could provide equitable police service by committing to pluralist policies that were responsive to all city residents. As this chapter shows, however, reforms, such as diversifying the department, enhancing human relations training, and adopting community-oriented policing, provided only a semblance of civilian control of the police. As the police continued to aggressively police communities of color, it produced a new phase of anti–police abuse organizing, led by the Coalition against Police Abuse (CAPA), calling for an end to police crimes and power abuses. Some of the most notable demands were for an end to the use of the chokehold and for a police civilian review board.

Introduction

On September 18, 1990, the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta, Georgia, as the host city for the XXVI Centennial Olympiad (1996). A product of the visionary leadership of black mayors Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr. and Andrew Jackson Young, this achievement signaled a Kairos moment for the southern city. Only twenty-five years before, Atlanta had reeled from urban rebellions as poor black citizens took to the streets to air their grievances over police brutality and poor living conditions. Just a few years later, Maynard Jackson had ascended to the mayor’s office, drawing from an unprecedented coalition of black Atlantans and the city’s white progressive voters. If a cross-racial grassroots coalition had been responsible for electing Jackson in 1973, the Olympic victory came thanks to a coalition of elites—cooperation between the black city government and the white business elite, especially Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, was instrumental to securing the Games. The city’s boosters, the Atlanta Convention Bureau, and different trade and tourist administrations could now claim that Atlanta had outgrown its status as regional capital of the South, transcending the region and history. After decades of reinvention, it was “Hotlanta,” the Deep South’s newest and most modern world-class and international city. Yet the fruits of this success were not, and have never been, shared equitably. As much as Atlanta had changed, the same poor blacks who had taken to the streets in the urban uprisings of the 1960s had benefited little during the decades that followed....

“The Public Does Not Believe the Police Can Police Themselves”: The Mayoral Administration of Harold Washington and the Problem of Police Impunity

The article examines the tenure of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and his relationship to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). It suggests that while police accountability had been a long-standing goal of Washington and his allies, he failed to sufficiently address the impunity of the CPD once elected. From the outset, the Washington administration exemplified this contradiction by appointing the police department’s first black superintendent, but one who would leave in place a failed structure of a police accountability that made it possible to cover up an ongoing pattern of police torture and coerced confessions. These cases of police torture throw into relief the obstacles faced by this first generation of black mayors who attempted to uproot the institutional underpinnings of police impunity amid the emergence of mass incarceration.

Toward a Multiracial Democracy

This chapter traces the evolution of Blacks from voters to candidates following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It argues that there were two waves of Black electoral success. Focusing on Black mayors, it contrasts the “insurgent strategy” with the later “deracialized strategy.” The “insurgent” strategy often resembles a social movement more than a political campaign and is directed at mobilizing the candidate's racial support base. The “deracialized” strategy attempts to downplay any racial issue as the candidate reaches out to form a broad coalition of supporters. The chapter also gives credit to Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson for their strategy of expanding the base of the Democratic Party rather than moving to the right to capture “Reagan Democrats.”

Black Mayors and Black Progress

This chapter assesses how African Americans fared under black political leadership during the 1970s. After first exploring the upsurge in the number of black elected officials from the mid-1960s onward, the chapter turns to developments in Los Angeles and Atlanta, cities that in 1973 both elected their first black mayor (Tom Bradley and Maynard Jackson, respectively). An in-depth analysis of Bradley and Jackson's campaigns and first two terms in office focuses on the various factors that shaped their respective political philosophies and mayoralties. Confronted by broader national economic problems, and with limited city resources at their disposal, both Bradley and Jackson deferred to white downtown business interests and pursued pro-growth policies that ultimately reinforced the disadvantages facing their poor and working-class black constituents. For the black middle class and elite in both cities, however, African American city leadership proved to be a wellspring of opportunity.