He died suddenly of a heart attack which wasn’t much of a surprise when my roommate Paul (native of the South Side) said Washington weighed as much as him but was well under six feet tall; Paul’s six foot four and built like an NFL player. It still doesn’t stop the conspiracy theorists and members of the Harold Washington Party from claiming he was poisoned.
Washington remains a controversial figure even after dying but I think his election signified the city of Chicago finally hitting a watershed many other cities had already experienced. To the annoyance of his critics, the city didn’t burn to the ground or fall apart. If anything didn’t get done, it was really more the gridlock caused by the Council and Governor Thompson. To the disappointment of his fans, he couldn’t completely defeat the remnants of the Daley Machine any more than Byrne and he proved to be as corrupt with favors, spoils and payback; something NPR’s This American Life glossed over. In the end, it didn’t matter, Daley’s son got elected in 1989 and remains the mayor for the foreseeable future unless his tax increases and bid for the Olympics get him ousted. On the upside, Carolyn Mosley-Braun and Barack Obama were elected as Senators from Illinois, the latter rather easily, something unthinkable when I was a kid.
Personally, I never had a stake in the outcome of the mayoral race of Chicago unless it meant the towns I lived in downstate suffered for it; as they did under Byrne. The only benefit I ever got from the politics of the Windy City was preparation for the nastiness of the Texas Republican Party. The difference between them is this: in Chicago, the dead rise from the grave to vote (something which rarely happens now), in the South, they just find a way to disenfranchise the enemies of the status quo.
When interim Mayor Eugene Sawyer finished Washington’s term and an election was called, I always remembered Paul asking, “I wonder who Washington will vote for?” He liked my reply, “Probably the same guy Daley voted for.”