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11 A City Divided L eanita McClain walked into the Tribune the morning after Washington’s primary victory expecting a noisy newsroom alive with talk. She looked forward to teasing the colleagues with whom she had been jousting for weeks—colleagues who couldn’t imagine that Washington might win. If nothing else, McClain, the first black to sit on the paper’s editorial board, expected congratulations. The one thing she didn’t figure on was the silence that would begin seven of the more agonizing weeks of her life. The cliché about Chicago was true: Its citizens follow local politics with the same fervor they do the Cubs and Bears. Yet the mood in the newsroom that morning was sullen and downcast. “Like attending a wake,” said Trib reporter Monroe Anderson. No white, McClain claimed, could look her in the eye. She overheard cracks about declining property values and white flight, jokes she found “unforgivably insensitive.” Even “the more open-minded of my fellow journalists” failed me, McClain wrote. McClain had grown up in the Ida B. Wells projects, named for a crusading black journalist, but lived in a lakefront high-rise in a trendy north side neighborhood . She dressed in silk blouses and vacationed in Europe with friends black and white. Occasionally, she bumped into an aunt who worked as a cleaning lady for a white couple who lived nearby. A girl she had shared her dolls with was trapped on welfare with five children; a boy she had been sweet on way back when was in prison for murder. Black militants occasionally accused her of forgetting her roots; she was constantly getting hustled by old acquaintances . “A foot in each world,” McClain once described it in an essay for Newsweek . “I am a member of the black middle class who has had it with being 118 Chapter 11 patted on the head by white hands and slapped in the face by black hands for my success.” McClain shook her head at liberal acquaintances who sought her out as a friend, as if she were some sort of personal affirmative action statistic. She mocked those who believed the world was racially enlightened “because they were the first on their block to discuss crabgrass with the new black family.” Yet she was never the type for getting into someone’s face. Monroe Anderson , a Trib confidant, invariably gave the same feedback on one of her columns whenever McClain asked for it. “You’re equivocating, Lee,” he would tell her. “Choose one side or the other.” But it was as if her unique perspective as someone who understood both sides of urban life prevented her from slighting one world for the other. “Whites must stop thinking that every black teenager . . . ​ is a thug,” McClain had written during the primary, “and blacks might accept that more than a few whites genuinely understand and sympathize with them. Whites might think deeper about the historic and socioeconomic reasons—not excuses—for black shortcomings and not brush aside a race of people as hopeless and hopelessly all the same, with the exception of a few mutant achievers.” The primary had been difficult for McClain. As one of seven people sitting on the Trib’s editorial board, the day the paper endorsed Daley was particularly grim. “When death finally took the mayor’s office away from one Richard Daley in 1976 after 21 years,” the editorial began, “it was impossible to imagine a set of circumstances under which this newspaper would recommend that the people give it back to a second Richard Daley.” Another sore point was the paper’s coverage of Ed Vrdolyak’s “it’s a racial thing” speech. The paper buried the story on page 18, in the last three paragraphs of an article about the Daley campaign (“the scoop of the election,” wrote journalism professor Ralph Whitehead Jr. in the Columbia Journalism Review, “and there is no reference to it in the headline”). Those who knew her said McClain used humor as a shield, but, if so, in February 1983 her armaments were wearing thin. “My transformation began the morning after Washington’s primary victory ,” McClain would write. Suddenly, Chicago seemed a “sick, twisted” place, oppressive and harsh. She was especially angry at herself for only now realizing how far she had strayed: “I’d be a liar if I did not admit to my own hellish confusion . How has a purebred moderate like me—the first black editorial writer for the...

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