Ann Lightfoot wasn’t one to put on airs, but when her daughter, Lori Lightfoot, was elected mayor of Chicago in 2019, she allowed herself a phone call to the family’s longtime pastor, who’d followed the campaign.
“This is the mother of the newly elected mayor of Chicago,” she told him.
The proud mother of four died Tuesday. She was 95.
“It’s a tough time right now,” Lori Lightfoot said in a brief phone call with the Sun-Times Wednesday morning.
She later said in a statement: “Our entire family and my mother’s many friends and colleagues are mourning the loss of Ann Lightfoot, who modeled for us the value of hard work, perseverance and faith throughout her life. She will be deeply missed, but her legacy lives on in each and every one of us who loved her dearly. Our mother was a devout woman of faith, and we believe she has gone on to her greater glory. We appreciate all of the well wishes and messages of condolence.”
At Wednesday’s City Council meeting, Mayor Brandon Johnson asked for a moment of silence in recognition of her death.
Mrs. Lightfoot raised her family in Massillon, Ohio, a tough little steel town where high school football is king. She looked on as her daughter played trumpet, sang in the choir and became high school class president.
On the night her daughter was elected, Mrs. Lightfoot was not in the Hilton Chicago Grand Ballroom on South Michigan Avenue along with hundreds of her daughter’s political supporters awaiting election results. She was waiting by her telephone for a promised 8:30 p.m. call.
“Well, of course, I am eating everything that I can put my hand on when I get nervous. I have a tendency to do that,” she told the Sun-Times in an interview days after the April 2 election. “And now the phone hadn’t rang, and I kept thinking ‘My gosh, oh she lost.’ Finally, she called, very calm, and she said, ‘Mom. I won.’ Very, you know, as if this is something happens every day, and I thought, ‘I am a total nervous wreck.’”
It was a landslide victory for her daughter.
Mrs. Lightfoot was a longtime school board member in Massillon and chose to live in an area where her kids grew up with white neighbors.
“I wanted my children at a very early age to be exposed to other kids, to know there were other people, and to understand how to get along with them,” she told the Sun-Times.
Those were the years Lori Lightfoot would have been known as “Ann Lightfoot’s daughter.”
“I was raised by a mother who was [always saying], ‘Don’t forget you’re Ann Lightfoot’s daughter,’” the former mayor told the Sun-Times while campaigning in 2019.
“That was my mantra my entire growing-up years, into my 20s. What that meant, early on, was ‘Don’t go out there and act a fool and embarrass me.’ What it really meant was, ‘Remember you are Black and female and from this family, and you have to present yourself in a certain way when you’re out in public.’ So I show very little of my full personality.”
Born in Luverne, Alabama, Mrs. Lightfoot moved to Ohio as a young woman as part of the Great Migration. That’s where she met her husband, Elijah Lightfoot, with whom she had four children. He died in 2010.
Their working-class struggles — him working as a janitor and her as a nighttime nursing aide — were frequently cited by Lori Lightfoot as she campaigned for mayor. The family attended St. James AME Zion Church, the oldest of Massillon’s African American congregations. Mrs. Lightfoot remained a deaconess there and taught Sunday School into her 90s.
In addition to Lori Lightfoot, Mrs. Lightfoot is survived by her daughter Angela Holdren and her son Brian P. Lightfoot.
