Harold Washington

Harold Lee Washington was born on the fifteenth of April 1922 at the Bronzeville district of Chicago, the fourth of eleven children of Roy Washington Sr. — a methodist minister and lawyer who served as a precinct captain of the Chicago Democratic machine — and Bertha Jones Washington. He was raised in straitened circumstances on the South Side of Chicago after his parents separated when he was twelve. He served in the United States Army Air Force Engineers in the Pacific theatre from 1942 to 1946 and rose to the rank of first sergeant.

He completed the bachelor's at Roosevelt University in 1949 — the only Black student in his graduating class — and the LL.B. at Northwestern University Law School in 1952. He joined the Cook County government as an assistant city prosecutor in 1954 and as an attorney in the Industrial Commission of Illinois from 1960 to 1964. He was elected to the Illinois State House of Representatives in 1964 from the South Side and served seven terms.

He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in November 1980 from the Illinois First Congressional District — the seat covering the historic Bronzeville Black-belt district. He served the Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth Congresses from January 1981 to April 1983.

He stood for mayor of Chicago in 1983 against the incumbent Jane Byrne and Richard M. Daley in the Democratic primary, winning the primary by a thirty-six percent plurality. The April 1983 general election against Republican Bernard Epton — the closest mayoral election in modern Chicago history — produced a thirty-five-thousand-vote Washington victory. He took office on the twenty-fifth of April 1983.

His four-and-a-half-year mayoralty was conducted under the conditions of the Council Wars — the systematic obstruction of the mayor's legislative agenda by twenty-nine White-machine aldermen out of fifty. He nevertheless directed across the period the principal racial-redistricting of city government employment, the implementation of the Shakman Decree against political patronage, and the first major Chicago neighbourhood-investment programmes of the post-war period.

He was re-elected by an expanded majority in April 1987. He died of a heart attack at his City Hall desk on the twenty-fifth of November 1987 — twenty-seven weeks into the second term. He was sixty-five.

He is honored here as the first African American mayor of Chicago.