CHICAGO — At a South Side diner one recent morning, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot served up a cautionary tale about what might happen if Black voters don’t unite behind her reelection bid.
She told the mostly Black crowd at Huddle House on Stony Island Avenue that the city’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington, spent years feuding with a “racist mob in City Council.” When he died in office in 1987, they voted to replace him with Ald. Eugene Sawyer, who they “thought they could control,” but two years later they “dropped him like a bad habit” and “went all in for (Richard M.) Daley,” she said.
The result? Daley’s long tenure at City Hall and “30 years of people struggling,” Lightfoot said.
