With Bill de Blasio’s triumphant 2013 “tale of two cities” campaign in New York’s last mayoral election lingering in the air, Chicago seemed once again poised for some real change. In the weeks leading up to the runoff, García’s campaign sought to script the “two cities” story for Chicago as well, referring to Emanuel by his oft-heard nickname: “Mayor 1%.”16 Emanuel countered by reminding working-class voters that he had created jobs, raised the city’s minimum wage, extended the availability of preschool and full-day kindergarten, and renovated playgrounds throughout the city. The New York Times called the race “a test of liberalism” for the whole country.17 When the results of the runoff election were tallied some six weeks later, few but the most naively optimistic expected any real change in the years to come. Emanuel captured just under 56 percent of the vote in an election that had—in comparison to recent mayoral elections in Chicago and other big cities—witnessed a somewhat respectable 40 percent rate of voter participation. The mayor would head into this second term with a moderately more unruly city council, but there was no doubt that the status quo had been convincingly defended.
In addition to his bloated war chest and his endorsements from President Barack Obama, legendary Chicago congressmen Luis Gutiérrez and Bobby Rush, the Chicago Defender, and the vast majority of black ministers and business leaders, all of whom lined up with the Democratic Party establishment, no small amount of good fortune had contributed to Emanuel’s victory. Karen Lewis was, in fact, supposed to have been his challenger, and early polls had showed her running strongly. But after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, Lewis was forced to withdraw, and her heartfelt endorsement of García was no compensation. Even with endorsements from Lewis, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, and the leading black mayoral candidate Willie Wilson, García struggled to win the support of black Chicagoans. Despite the school closings and budget cuts and despite the autocratic way the mayor had imposed them on black communities, Emanuel garnered nearly 58 percent of the black vote and carried every single black-majority ward. Turnout in black wards was especially low. The four wards that recorded turnouts under 30 percent—the Sixteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Eighth—were all between 69 and 86 percent African American.
García, who came with cred in the black community for having played an active role in Harold Washington’s multiracial coalition, was simply unable to get out the vote in the black wards, as many had hoped. García’s detractors pointed to a number of reasons why he had failed to inspire African Americans. The candidate had spoken vaguely about favoring “the neighborhoods versus downtown” but had never given black communities any tangible sense of what would change for them under his leadership. And in the aftermath of the August rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri, when the Black Lives Matter movement against racist police violence was spreading across the nation, García had been reluctant to address police-community issues. Unbeknownst to García was the fact that just days before he had announced his candidacy, a Chicago police officer had been filmed by a dash cam shooting a seventeen-year-old black youth name Laquan McDonald sixteen times as he was walking away. News of the incident would not leak until after the election—another “stroke of fortune” for Emanuel, who denied being aware of the matter until much later.
But Chicago provided no shortage of issues in the run-up to the election that García could have seized upon to prove his mettle to African Americans. His campaign was lethargic in its support for reparations for survivors of police torture at the Area 2 headquarters, and he remained largely silent about allegations of illegal detentions and physical abuse against black suspects at the Chicago Police Department’s secret facility in the abandoned Sears and Roebuck complex in Homan Square. García was clearly out of step and out of touch with the new spirit of activism that was emerging in black Chicago around the time he launched his campaign. The grand jury decision not to indict the officer who had shot Michael Brown in Ferguson unleashed widespread anger in black Chicago about decades of rampant police misconduct. The underlying conditions of such anger were dramatically revealed in the fall of 2015, when the Invisible Institute, a group of journalists and lawyers, released a vast database of police misconduct complaint records. The findings were stark to say the least: the CPD had taken some form of disciplinary action in just 2 percent of the nearly 29,000 allegations of misconduct between 2011 and 2015. While blacks filed most of the complaints, those filed by whites were more likely to be upheld.18
In the weeks after the Ferguson verdict, a number of black political organizations began channeling frustrations about the situation in Chicago. Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), an organization of young students and activists that had come together with the help of University of Chicago political science professor Cathy Cohen and a grant from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, rallied hundreds of protesters against police violence against African Americans for marches and a half-day sit-in at City Hall. Then, in February 2015, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression launched a series of protests at the Chicago Police Department facility in Homan Square. Meanwhile, a coalition of South Side organizations, including Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY), Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), and Students for Health Equity (SHE) stepped up a campaign to force the University of Chicago to add a level-1 trauma center to the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC)—a struggle that had begun in 2010, after an eighteen-year old Woodlawn resident and activist, Damian Turner, had been hit by a stray bullet during a drive-by shooting and died ninety minutes later, following a long ambulance ride to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in the North Loop.19
Yet regardless of García’s miscues in appealing to black voters, the fact that his two-cities campaign failed revealed the limits of the multiracial coalition-building strategy that seemed so promising after the CTU strike of 2012. Chicago continued to be an ethnoracially balkanized city with an autocratic mayor, a powerless legislature, and a political culture that was, in the final analysis, stubbornly resistant to the kinds of appeals to social injustice that activists were betting the future on. Ordinary blacks and Mexicans remained as separated in the political sphere as they were in the city’s social geography, and appeals to shared injustices visited upon the working class by an alliance of political leaders and business elites were failing to close the gap.
Just as importantly, middle-class and wealthy whites in the city remained as unmoved as ever about the social and economic injustices they read about in the papers. In an election that had clearly pushed such issues to the center of the debate, Emanuel crushed García in the twelve majority white wards with the highest median income, amassing a 51,492-vote margin, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of his citywide margin of 64,722 votes. In other words, most whites seemed convinced that privatization, austerity, and brutal police tactics were the best remedies for the black and brown working-class communities of the other Chicago. In view of Chuy García’s rather measured challenge to the economic order—his reluctance to criticize Emanuel’s austerity measures, his support of further public sector cuts, and his lukewarm support for a financial transaction tax (FTT)—the extent of his weakness among middle-class whites was remarkable, a sign that many whites still invested in cultural explanations of poverty in the other Chicago.
By the fall of 2015, when a range of local black organizations identifying with the Black Lives Matter movement rallied thousands to hit the streets in response to the revelations surrounding the Laquan McDonald shooting, the city’s racial fault lines widened even further. These protests seemed to usher in a new phase of racial mobilization that moved away from the multiracial coalition-building approach that had crystallized around the CTU strike of 2012. As understandable as this shift was, in view of the unbearable state of police-community relations in black Chicago, it had the unfortunate consequence of dampening the kinds of anticapitalist mobilizations and critiques that had seemed to possess such transformative potential years earlie
r. Moreover, there were some strong signs that the movement against racist police violence had trouble attracting the support of both Latinos and whites. A Pew Research Center Survey conducted in early spring of 2016 found that only 15 percent of Hispanics and 14 percent of whites claimed to “strongly support” the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Perhaps even more suggestive, a mere 33 percent of Hispanics expressed any support at all for BLM, a total that lagged well behind the 40 percent recorded for whites.20
In Chicago, moreover, the rift between blacks and Latinos was further complicated by the fact that, after forcing the firing of police superintendent Garry McCarthy, black protesters began directing their demands for justice at Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez, a product of the Mexican community of Pilsen, who had become the first Latina to hold her position. The following March, Alvarez lost badly in a reelection bid to Kim Foxx, an African American who had grown up in the Cabrini-Green housing project. With Foxx backed by Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle, one of black Chicago’s most influential political leaders, and Alvarez backed by most of the city’s Hispanic establishment, the election emblematized the political uses of the ethnic patronage game that had been perfected by the Daley administration and handed down to Emanuel. Daley may not have fully understood back in 2008 how his slating of a Mexican American as the county’s top prosecutor, and thus the head of his own local war on drugs and gangs, would play out in the years to come. But the move was now paying dividends for his successor, who was grateful for the diversion. With criticism of the War on Drugs and the mass incarceration of African Americans mounting nationwide, it would be a Mexican American who would come to symbolize the punitive excesses of such policies in Chicago.
Foxx would have her work cut out for her, as would Chicago’s new police superintendent Eddie Johnson. Murders and shootings in Chicago surged by roughly 50 percent in the first six months of 2016 compared with the previous year. Such circumstances would only make matters worse for activists seeking to revive opposition to the neoliberal agenda. With working-class black communities backed against the wall in a desperate struggle for security on the streets and Mayor Emanuel embarking upon another four years of austerity and privatization, Chicago moved towards an uncertain future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chicago on the Make is the product of more than two decades of work on a city that has never ceased to amaze me, for better or for worse. I started that time as a resident of Chicago, a young graduate student from the University of Michigan embarking on a dissertation about race and housing, and ended it in Paris as a professor of American history and civilization at the Sorbonne. I lived between two continents and passed through several institutions, accumulating numerous debts of various kinds along the way.
In the early years in Ann Arbor and Chicago, a number of people supported me both intellectually and spiritually during some times when I doubted my capacity and resolve to move forward with my research. Terry McDonald, Earl Lewis, and George Sanchez served as excellent mentors, and a number of friends in and around the graduate program in history in Ann Arbor nurtured my thinking at the outset: Chris Schmidt-Nowara, who sadly and tragically left us in 2015, John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, Riyad Koya, Steve Soper, Susan Rosenbaum, and Greg Shaya, among others. Once in Chicago, the big city for a kid from the suburbs of Boston, I was fortunate enough to have fallen in with a tight group of generous, witty, fun, and exceptionally perceptive Chicagoans that showed me another side of the city and sparked my passion for telling its stories: Edward Koziboski, Kathy Flynn, Dan Kiss, Jayson Harsin, Kevin Carollo, Lyle Rowen, Meg Zimbeck, Roshen Hendrickson, and Friese Undine. As I was conducting the research for my first book, Mean Streets, parts of which have been incorporated in various ways into Chicago on the Make, a number of scholars shared their work, read my work, or just took the time to talk with me. In particular, I am indebted to Timothy Gilfoyle, James Grossman, George Chauncey, David Roediger, Gabriela Arredondo, Chad Heap, James Barrett, Sudhir Venkatesh, Gerald Suttles, William Sites, Dominic Pacyga, and Ramon Gutiérrez.
Many of the people mentioned above continued to accompany me during the next phase, when my life moved across the Atlantic and I began to approach Chicago’s history from the angle that led me to Chicago on the Make. In France, a number of colleagues at the Université Lille 3, the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris, and more recently at the Université Paris-Sorbonne contributed in a range of ways to my work and general well-being: Thomas Dutoit, Richard Davis, Mathieu Duplay, Alexandra Poulain, Philippe Vervaecke, Angeline Escafré-Dublet, Romain Bertrand, Hélène Combes, Denis Lacorne, Christian Lequesne, Nathalie Caron, Yves Figueiredo, Thibaut Clément, Olivier Frayssé, Marc Amfreville, Juliette Utard, Claire Charlot, Joana Etchart, and Elisabeth Angel-Perez.
As I was in the process of writing Chicago on the Make, I was fortunate to have had numerous opportunities to bounce my ideas off some brilliant scholars during seminars and conferences, or merely over dinner or coffee. Invited talks at the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC), DePaul University’s Department of History, the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the NYU Urban Seminar at New York University, and the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre provided me with new and timely insights. Special thanks are owed to Teresa Córdova, Director of UIC’s Great Cities Institute, for setting up the event that allowed me to exchange with Don Rose and Jesús “Chuy” García. I am also grateful to a number of scholars and others in the United States and France who shared their ideas with me as I was completing the manuscript: Mary Pattillo, Timothy Stewart-Winter, Donna Murch, N.D.B. Connolly, Kim Phillips-Fein, Thomas Jessen Adams, Sylvie Tissot, Adam Green, Michael Dawson, Pauline Lipman, Romain Huret, Emmanuel Blanchard, Sarah Leboime, Clément Petitjean, George Katito, Laurence Gervais, David Farber, Paul Schor, Jonathan Magidoff, Robert Self, Michael Foley, Sébastien Chauvin, François Weil, Nancy Green, Vincent Michelot, Julien Talpin, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Marie-Hélène Bacqué, Jean-Baptiste Velut, Jeff Chang, David Huyssen, Salah Amokrane, and Frédéric Callens. My work has also benefited enormously from the fresh perspectives that my students in my master’s seminars have brought to me over my past five years at the Sorbonne.
Four people, in particular, deserve my very deepest gratitude for having read most or much of the manuscript and for having offered suggestions that helped me to greatly improve it: Thomas Sugrue, Caroline Rolland-Diamond, Bryant Simon, and Elsa Devienne. While Bryant came in towards the tail end, Tom, Caroline, and Elsa helped to keep me believing in the project from its earliest days.
No small amount of institutional support helped make this book possible. I would like to thank the École Doctorale IV, the Commission de la recherche, and the research center Histoire et Dynamique des Espaces Anglophones (HDEA) of the Université Paris-Sorbonne, as well as the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris for their generous financial assistance. I would also like to extend a heartfelt thanks to the staffs at the Chicago History Museum and UIC Special Collections and University Archives, as well as to the administrative staffs of the UFR Études Anglophones and the École Doctorale IV at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. I am moreover very grateful to my editor, Niels Hooper, at the University of California Press for his unwavering support through the long years it took to bring Chicago on the Make to fruition.
Finally, this book would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of the people who have surrounded me closest of all over these past years—my dear friends from my neighborhood and my family. Alice, Fabrice, Julien, Charlotte, Joséphine, Marc, Johanna, Anouchka, and Guillaume, thanks for making a community out of my neighborhood. To Caroline, Clyde, and Théodore, my gratitude is endless.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. This kind of parody was popularized by the nationall
y televised comedy show Saturday Night Live in the 1980s.
2. On the Chicago School and its contextual approach, see Andrew Abbott, “Of Time and Space: The Contemporary Relevance of the Chicago School,” Social Forces 75 (June 1997), 1149–82.
3. For a scathing criticism of Park’s race relations paradigm for its manner of obfuscating the structures and dynamics of racial oppression, see Stephen Steinberg, Race Relations: A Critique (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis (1945; repr. with new foreword by Mary Pattillo, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); for an analysis of how Drake and Cayton’s book redefined the concept of the ghetto within the social sciences, see Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
4. The so-called concentric zone model (otherwise known as the Burgess model) was developed by Chicago School founders Ernest Burgess and Robert Park in their seminal study The City. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (1925; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
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