Well, there were a number of really interesting things. It was tremendously racialized. I mean, when we won—and the reason that the voting system got changed is we won the primary by the skin of our teeth. At that point, certainly Harold Washington’s finance committee had no idea that you only needed 33 percent to win. That it was a plurality, not a majority. So we went into that—we only got 12 percent of the vote, and that did not improve in the reelection campaign. There was like 13 or 14 percent of the white community that voted... 

Peter Cunningham: When you say 12 percent of the vote—12 percent of the white vote? Is that what you meant? I’m sorry; I just want to be clear. 

Marilyn Katz: Yeah, I’m sorry. In that election, only 12 percent of the white vote went to Harold Washington, and it didn’t really change much in the 1987 campaign, which actually in some ways had as much racial tension as the ’83 campaign, which is surprising. I mean, things did not particularly improve. 

David Axelrod, campaign consultant to Richard M. Daley. [Axelrod, 00.09.41 to 00.13.10] 

I think that there was a feeling that that race would be decided by where the African American community would go. Byrne had betrayed the community in many ways, having gotten a lot of Black votes in winning the mayoralty. And so, Black voters were poised to vote against Jane Byrne, but... 

Peter Cunningham: Once they had Harold to vote for... 

David Axelrod: Once they had Harold Washington, it became clear where those voters were going to go.  

Peter Cunningham: So, Harold gets elected. And I wanted you to talk briefly about the context of Chicago, the racial politics of Chicago, between ’83 and ’89. 

David Axelrod: Well, that race itself became bitterly racial as Byrne’s supporters really played the race card and warned people who were poised to vote for Daley that if you vote for Daley, you're really voting... 

Peter Cunningham: It’s a vote for Washington. 

David Axelrod: ...for the Black guy. And in fact, Daley himself shortly after the election got into a confrontation with someone in his neighborhood in Bridgeport at a toy store. He was with his son. 

Peter Cunningham: A physical fight. Yeah. 

David Axelrod: The guy called him—I don’t know exactly what it was, but it was—the “n” word was involved, and there was a physical confrontation. A fight.   

0:11:11 

Peter Cunningham: My understanding is he endorsed Harold the next day. Is that your memory? The day after the primary, or maybe two days after? 

David Axelrod: It was quick. I don’t remember the exact timing of it. And then we had several years of sort of open racial strife. Really six years of open racial strife. The city council majority organized against Harold. Primarily white alderman led by Alderman Vrdolyak and Alderman Burke. And it’s a little reminiscent of what we see in Washington today. There was sort of gridlock. And it was finally broken when Washington won a couple of special elections in 1986, and then in 1987, Byrne came back—Washington defeated Byrne, and... 

0:12:07 

Peter Cunningham: Daley didn’t run. Chose not to run.  

David Axelrod: He didn’t run. His friend Tom Hynes ran as an independent. Daley sort of kept a distance from all of it. And Harold won, and he won both those races, and Ed Vrdolyak turned out to be his principal opponent in the general action. And there was a feeling—now I’m working for him.  

Peter Cunningham: You're a political consultant. 

David Axelrod: I’ve left the newspaper business. Yes. I worked for Harold in that race. And the feeling I think after the election was, now we can—Harold Washington is mayor. Everyone can accept it. Because he won the primary in 1983 in kind of a fluky way. 

Peter Cunningham: In a three-way—yeah. 

David Axelrod: Now, he had won a primary and a general by healthy margins, and the city council was firmly in his corner. He had a majority there.  

0:13:02 

So there was this sense that things could settle down. And then seven months later, Harold died 

Helen Shiller, supporter of Harold Washington and former alderman. [Shiller, 00.17.49 to 00.18.28]

And at the core of all this is a very historic—it’s not just that the city has been segregated physically in terms of where people live.

0:18:00

It has been acceptable that people are treated differently in different places. Some of that is economic, but a lot of that really—but even where it’s economic, it comes out of, I think, a history, not just here but through our whole country, of the way in which the color line really has affected everything, and the way in which largely the white skin privilege is something that too many of us are not really willing to give up.

Avis LaVelle, former reporter and press secretary to Mayor Richard M. Daley. [LaVelle, 00.02.23 to 00.05.43]

I had been a very close observer of all of the dynamic between the Vrdolyak/Washington 21, 25 mess that went on at city hall.
Peter Cunningham:The Vrdolyak 29—yeah, yeah, yeah.
Avis LaVelle:Mmhmm.
Peter Cunningham:So you're talking about the racialized politics in the 1980s when Harold Washington was elected mayor.
Avis LaVelle:Exactly. And there was a faction of people in city council that were controlled by the Daleys. Everybody knew they were Bridgeport aldermen. They could have gone in one direction or the other, and they consistently voted with Vrdolyak.

0:03:01

And I felt like, you know, “You had the ability to fix this, and you had the ability to mediate, at the very least.” And I wanted to know why you didn’t. “Why didn’t you fix this? You saw how dysfunctional the city was. You saw how much stress and strife it created, constantly, and how we were in a state of not getting anything done for a long period of time in the city council.” So I wanted to talk to him about, “Who are you, really, and where was your head when all of this was going on?” and “Why didn’t you do something about this? And I don’t have such a high opinion of your dad as a mayor, so I need to have an understanding of...”
Peter Cunningham:Why was that now? You grew up when his father was the mayor, right?
Avis LaVelle:I grew up when his father was the mayor, but I felt like because Bridgeport was such a hotbed—you didn’t go to Bridgeport.

0:04:08

Really, you didn’t. It’s like if you're—in my neighborhood, they’d say, “If you've got a flat tire in Bridgeport, just roll on the rim and keep going.” Until you get out of Bridgeport. You just don’t get out your car. So working for somebody from Bridgeport just seemed to me like working for somebody who didn’t—wouldn't have any affinity for somebody like me. So I just didn’t think—and here’s the other thing about Richard J. Daley. Richard J. Daley was a man of the era in which he lived. And we talked about that. That was one of the things that we had to talk about, because I’m like, “If you're just like him, I can’t do this.” Because there were situations that I observed from a distance, because I was a younger person—I wasn’t an adult during a large portion of the Richard J. Daley years, but it was a racially charged time.

0:05:09

It was a period of time when they didn’t want...
Peter Cunningham:The Civil Rights Movement.
Avis LaVelle:...Martin Luther King to come here and march. You had the Marquette Park stuff going on which I didn’t feel like was put down in the way that it should have been put down. The neighborhoods were incredibly segregated, and I didn’t feel like there was any effort to do anything. There was a very obviously disproportionate division of resources—public resources. Our neighborhoods didn’t look like their neighborhoods. Our parks didn’t look like their parks. Everything