Picking Up the Pieces

After a bitter campaign, Harold Washington tries to heal a divided city

Even as they chanted and cheered into the night, the 15,000 excited supporters who crammed into cavernous Donnelley Hall on Chicago's South Side seemed to hold back their full emotions. There was a tentative chorus: "We want Harold!" Then a note of caution from someone in the crowd: "Let's get some damn figures. We may be partying too soon." An aide appeared at the podium around midnight to say the race was too close to call. Some wards were still missing. "If the man don't win, I'm going to hate white folks forever," growled a partisan. Finally the result began to sink in. Chicago, that bastion of segregated neighborhoods and brawling Democratic machinery, had elected a black as mayor. The chants began to mock the racially charged campaign slogan of the white Republican opponent. "We want Harold—before it's too late!"

When Harold Washington finally appeared to a thunderous ovation in the early hours of the morning, he knew that the task ahead was as daunting as the one just completed. He had beaten the incumbent. He had beaten the heir apparent to the legendary Daley machine. And now he had triumphed in one of the bitterest and most racially divisive political fights in recent American history. But his election had swung a wrecking ball into the political foundation of The City That Works, the patronage-fueled Democratic machine. So with soothing and inspiring words befitting the son of a preacher, he tried to bandage the wounds. "I want to reach out my hand in friendship and fellowship to every living soul in this city," he said. "I charge each and every one of you to rededicate your efforts to heal the divisions that have plagued us . . . Chicago is one city."

The city seemed to drop its broad shoulders in a sigh of relief as the racial tensions of the past seven weeks began to subside. A black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, had run a front-page warning the day before the vote that police were planning to make mass arrests of Washington supporters on the day of the election. But the balloting was remarkably free of chicanery, proceeding without significant fraud or intimidation. "Be cool, be cool, don't blow it," black radio stations urged their listeners as the results came in.

The day after the election, Washington was host at a unity luncheon. He was flanked by the two rivals he had defeated in the Democratic primary last February: Jane Byrne, the departing mayor, and Richard Daley, son of the legendary boss. Bernard Epton, last Tuesday's Republican loser, skulked off to Florida, leaving his brother to fill in at the lunch. Epton's lack of grace seemed to diminish rather than heighten the tensions: at that moment, it was hard to argue that the better man had lost.