MITCHELL: 30 years after Harold Washington’s death, some still in pain

Thirty years after Mayor Harold Washington died from a heart attack, a lot of black people are still in mourning.

It is not the sort of heaviness that overwhelmed so many on that awful day in 1987.

Then, tearful strangers comforted each other on the city’s streets.

Today, a quiet sadness persists for many who were politically astute during Washington’s short-lived tenure at City Hall.

“It’s hurtful because that was a time when black people had come together in unity around a common purpose,” noted Conrad Worrill, director emeritus of the Jacob Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University.

GalleryWorrill was a leading grass-roots organizer of Washington’s astounding 1983 mayoral campaign.

“That propelled the spirit of the black community at every level. We had an emotional and spiritual tie because we had made history by electing Chicago’s first black mayor,” he said.

“And the personality of Harold Washington and his ability to communicate the desires of not only his own community, but the city as a whole, is the reason why his untimely death impacted the spirit of the black community.”

Anyone who was coming of age in 1987 likely remembers the chaos that followed Washington’s death.

But how the mayor’s death impacted someone not only depended on their level of political activism, but on the realities of life in the city at that time.

I remember the day — Nov. 25, 1987 — was typical for November. Gray and rainy.

I was a legal secretary at a major law firm, and I was frantically trying to finish up my day and hurry home. As the terrible news spread, I was worried about what would happen — when a woman, whose duties around the office included collecting dirty dishes and coffee mugs, passed by.

She was practically wailing.

“I was teaching a class that day. The secretary called me across the hall to her office and I saw the ambulance on the TV,” Worrill recalled.

“All the news channels had been interrupted. All I could think about was getting some people down to the hospital to observe what was going on because in my mind I knew a battle was getting ready to unfold,” he said.

The newly formed political power structure had survived the shenanigans of a hostile City Council that was led by white aldermen determined to hold onto the fruits gained under machine politics.

But it could not survive the fight between two black aldermen willing to tear each other down for the right to sit in Washington’s seat.

In the end, neither Ald. Eugene Sawyer (6th) nor Ald. Tim Evans (4th) ever won the affection of the masses that Washington enjoyed. And the fragile political coalition birthed under Washington suffered a blow from which it has yet to recover.

“I think many people in hindsight have finally come to the realization of what happened after Harold’s death, and how different wings of the black community turned on each other in an internecine struggle over succession that tore us apart,” noted Worrill.

“We have not recovered from it yet, politically. It took us off our trajectory of having a unified purpose in politics. It set us back,” he said.

“But before a people can heal, they have to admit that they made an error. I don’t know if everyone in the leadership who participated during that time have come to grips with admitting that we made an error,” he said.

During Washington’s final campaign push on the day he was re-elected 1987, his caravan wound its way through neighborhoods and businesses along 51^st and 47^th Streets. The late U.S. Rep. Charles Hayes urged voters to do their “civic responsibility.”

“Can’t nobody beat us, but us,” Hayes told the crowds.

Washington believed that and that belief pushed him to greatness.