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16 The Chicago Experiment N ate Clay read with bemusement the many articles picking apart Jesse Jackson’s motives in running for president in 1984. None got it right, at least in the eyes of this man who had worked with Jackson on and off for years. What made Jesse run? First you need to understand Alexander the Great, according to Clay. Alexander, it was said, “after conquering the world sat down and cried because there was nothing else to conquer.” “With Harold’s election, Jesse was no longer the black community’s top figure ,” Clay said. He had no mayor to rail against; he had no local movement to organize. Complicating Jackson’s life, Clay said, was that “Jesse and the mayor he had helped elect were at arm’s length.” Where else was there to move but up? Black leaders from around the country gathered in the second half of 1983 to talk with a sense of foreboding about 1984. One of the two factors giving rise to these meetings, reported the Institute of Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank, was “the widespread defection of white Democratic party leaders and voters from Chicago mayoral nominee Harold Washington.” Liberalism’s two most prominent stalwarts, Walter Mondale and Ted Kennedy, had endorsed more conservative candidates over Washington in the city’s primary, and several national Democratic leaders refused to stand up for Washington even after he won the party’s nomination. Members of the Congressional black caucus, civil rights leaders, and others who were part of what might be called the black leadership family wanted to know what these choices augured for the future. The Chicago Experiment 189 Some argued that defeating Ronald Reagan was the priority. Nothing should impede that goal, they said. Others said it was time to put their weight behind a black candidate for president. Those putting forward this second argument kept returning to Chicago. Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, still angered that Mondale had rebuffed Washington in the 1983 primary, warned of “a mass defection of blacks from the Democratic party that might cost the Democrats the presidential election.” Washington won despite—and in many cases, in direct opposition to—the white liberals. For many, that was the lesson of Chicago: Power is not given through liberal goodwill but taken. In June 1983, a group of black leaders met in Chicago, where they endorsed the idea of a black presidential candidate. They didn’t state a preference for any particular candidate, but one member of their group, Jesse Jackson, had already declared his interest in running. Jackson said Chicago hit him like a vision. He witnessed the crusade-like spirit of the Washington campaign; he saw hopelessness, frustration, and anger harnessed into a spirited voter registration drive. There in Chicago liberalism had also revealed itself to him. “If it had been left to them,” Jackson said of Kennedy and Mondale, “the rise of the black political movement would have been stopped, stillborn.” Chicago, Jackson said in the standard stump speech he started giving early in 1983, was nothing short of a “renegotiation” between the Democratic Party and black America. Chicago, he said, pointed the way to better days if the electorate is suitably invigorated to believe in change. That was another way the Washington campaign aided the Jackson effort. Asked to lay low during the mayoral election and in the months following, he occupied his time crisscrossing the country hailing the potential for replicating Chicago on a national scale. Jackson was not the only one projecting higher possibilities on Washington’s 1983 win. “The agenda for the 1984 presidential election has changed suddenly and drastically. What happened was Chicago,” began an essay in the magazine Dissent in the summer of 1983. So often did the magazine The Black Scholar write about Chicago as a model to be studied that its index then classified articles on local politics as falling into one of two categories—those about Chicago and those not. It was no wonder: For black activists and others on the left studying Chicago politics was akin to looking at Jerry Falwell’s rise in Lynchburg, Virginia, to understand the rise of the New Right. The Nation, In These Times, and other magazines to the left of mainstream also pointed to Chicago as a beacon of hope for all those disheartened by the Democratic Party’s rightward shift. There was no denying the national significance of Chicago. On the liberal end of the spectrum was...

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