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4 The Catalyst E arly in her tenure as mayor, Jane Byrne would regularly invite Renault Robinson to her office to talk politics. Shortly after taking office, Byrne named Robinson to the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) board, a selection so controversial that, though Byrne appointed her brother’s brotherin -law to another post that same day, it was Robinson who made headlines. The machine regulars were nearly apoplectic at the thought of lending support to this rapscallion whose racial discrimination suit against the city established hiring and promotion quotas inside the police department. Robinson’s role as a trusted Byrne adviser would last perhaps a year. Later events no doubt clouded his assessment of Byrne, but even then he said he was not impressed. Securing the black community’s support, he told her during their short-lived relationship, should be easy given the machine’s past abuses. Choose respected figures for top positions, he advised, and don’t think you’re fooling anyone by empowering a black lackey more loyal to you than the community. Robinson could have offered no better example than his own appointment. That was when Byrne was still trying to woo the black community. In July 1982, a few days after the plebiscite where Lu Palmer had hoped to crown Washington as the movement’s candidate, Byrne named three people to the CHA board, all of them white. At the start of her tenure, when she named Robinson and another well-respected black figure to the CHA board, she was hailed inside the black community for tipping the board’s racial balance from white to black. Now, just seven months before election day, she was reinstalling a white majority on a board that oversaw a public housing system that was 85 percent black. 42 Chapter 4 Publicly, Robinson voiced his indignation. The mayor had again shown a callous disregard for black Chicago, he said. Privately, though, he chuckled. Ain’t that just like Janie, he thought. The woman inadvertently provides the kindling just when we’re trying to start a fire. Jane Byrne had been elected mayor in 1979 in a stunning upset. Byrne had no money and next to no field organization. Still, her election was no more improbable than the rest of her political career. She was the second of six children born to a well-off Irish couple living on the city’s northwest side. Years later she would admit that she was “a very spoiled girl” who “never had to worry about anything.” As a student at Barat College of the Sacred Heart, a small woman’s school north of Chicago, she thought she might want to become a doctor, but she gave up on that dream, she said, after meeting a Notre Dame man named William Byrne. She secured a job teaching fourth graders at a local parochial school but gave up on the job within the year. She married and set about having a family. Tragedy hit in 1959, when she learned her husband was killed in a plane crash. At the time she was a twenty-seven-year-old new mother with a five-month-old baby. She moved back home and went about figuring out what to do with the rest of her life. Salvation came in the form of politics. To shake her out of her grief, Byrne’s family had cajoled her into joining the presidential campaign of a young Irish Catholic politician named John F. Kennedy. She had no political experience, but family connections secured her a good spot in the campaign. For Byrne politics was proving a social thing more than anything else. She hailed from a community of judges, city commissioners, and other Irish Americans with heavy clout at City Hall, which is how she met Richard J. Daley, then in his third term as mayor. Daley took an immediate liking to Byrne, not yet thirty years old and dressed in ruffles and short skirts and with ribbons in her hair. During that first meeting , according to Byrne, Daley lectured her about keeping company with those who pooh-poohed the regular organization as something crude and beneath them. If you had worked with us during the Kennedy campaign, Daley told her, you might have gotten something out of it—a job, maybe. In Byrne’s telling, she shot back that she got out of the election just what she wanted: Kennedy had won. Six months later, Byrne had a job in City Hall...

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