Fire on the Prairie: Harold Washington, Chicago Politics, and the Roots of the Obama Presidency

Note on Sources

Note on Sources I need to acknowledge the contradiction of a writer who criticizes the press within these pages yet relied on the city’s two daily newspapers as invaluable sources. Quotes culled from articles appearing in the Tribune and the Sun-Times are sprinkled throughout the book, as are quotes found in the pages of the Chicago Reader, Chicago, the Chicago Reporter, the Defender, and the Metro News. Several books deserve special mention, for they helped shape more than a single chapter : Professor Paul Kleppner’s excellent Chicago Divided: The Making of a Black Mayor (Northern Illinois University Press, 1985); Mike Royko’s classic, Boss (E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971); Dempsey Travis’s two books about Chicago politics, An Autobiography of Black Politics (Urban Research Press, 1987) and Harold: The People’s Mayor (Urban Research Press, 1989); Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers by Milton Rakove; and Alton Miller’s Harold Washington: The Mayor, The Man (Bonus Books, 1989), an insider’s account of his tenure as Washington’s second press secretary. Statistics and stray facts were culled from Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline (Temple University Press, 1987), by Larry Bennett, Kathleen McCourt, Philip Nyden, and Gregory Squires, and David Fremon’s Chicago Politics Ward by Ward (Indian University Press, 1988). My thanks to several people for their generosity during the research phase of the book: John Conroy, who lent me his notes from interviews with Ed Vrdolyak conducted in the mid-1970s; Larry Bennett, who loaned me notes and interviews from his research on SON-SOCC; and Joe Feinglass and Rod Such, whose interviews shortly after the 1983 mayor’s race were a valued resource. I’d like to thank Nate Clay at the Metro News for allowing me to sit in their offices, poring over back issues of their weekly, and Dolph Touhy, for packing up more than five years of the Chicago Reader so I could read them at my leisure. Ditto, Ann Grimes and her staff at the Chicago Reporter. I want to thank Kari Moe, a top Washington staffer, for allowing me to sift through the boxes and file drawers of memos and reports she had saved from her time in City Hall, and also filmmaker Bill Stamets, for giving me access to a treasure trove of tapes along with boxes of clippings, 264 Note on Sources press releases, and other priceless ephemera he had gathered over the years. I also want to thank the always helpful, always friendly staff at Chicago Municipal Reference Library, for their invaluable assistance. The bulk of this book is based on the many hundreds of hours of interviews I did with hundreds of sources. In a sense, I was at work on this project long before I understood that setting a book in Chicago during the Washington years would provide a national audience insights into racial politics at work in urban centers around the country. My journalistic relationship with many of the people quoted within these pages dates back to 1983, when I began writing about local politics for the Chicago Reader. My gratitude especially to those whom I imposed on for several hours of interviews and then called again asking to impose on them for yet another session. With that said, I sprinkled throughout my story the occasional quote borrowed from other sources. To help the book’s narrative flow, I typically did not give full credit to a secondary source deserving credit, in the hopes that the listing below would suffice: Book I: I borrowed from many accounts when putting together chapter 1. Boss was especially helpful, as was an entertaining essay about Chicago by Tom Geoghegan appearing in The New Republic, and also the Lords of the Last Machine (Random House, 1987), by Bill and Lori Granger. Steve Bogira’s terrific Reader piece about the Airport Homes fight served as my main source for that part of the chapter. Many journalists wrote retrospective pieces about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Chicago battles; I borrowed most heavily from articles written by Brent Staples and Ben Joravsky. Salim Muwakkil’s Q&A with Lu Palmer, which appeared in the Reader, provided a valuable snapshot of Palmer’s thinking in the early 1980s. Another Reader piece, written by David Jackson (“Just One Black”), provided valuable information about Palmer’s 1982 plebiscite. I’m indebted in chapter 3 to both those who knew Washington earlier in his life and the numerous profiles of Washington...