November 25, 1987

I remember it as a hot day in Los Angeles, that November 25, 1987, the day before Thanksgiving.  That morning, Lee and I packed, pushed, filled our Toyota station wagon with everything I thought I would need for my move to Chicago. Only stopping to say goodbyes to neighbors interrupted our frenzy – especially the family who lived below us.  Ah Ying, who was born in China, emigrated to New York where she gave birth to William and divorced her husband. When she moved to Chicago, her mother, Kwan Mo, came to live with them.  Ying was unwell and supported the family as a garment worker – she had an industrial strength sewing machine in her living room and took in piecework distributed to her by clothing manufacturers in Chinatown. Kwan suffered from ailments I was not given to know.  William was a thriving high school student who had just graduated and begun classes at CSULA.  We had a close bond.  At least Lee would maintain that bond when she returned without me.

We did not leave by 11 AM to avoid the Thanksgiving rush.  Noon went by, time slipped by, the hours fell away until after 3 PM I climbed into the driver’s seat, Lee into the passenger side, and Lee’s sister, Marie, nestled in among the belongings packed into the rear seat, in a space we didn’t believe existed.  We merged onto the freeway leading out of down town Los Angeles, just east of “the interchange,” and across three lanes into the track leading to the San Bernardino Freeway, “the 10.”  As we settled into being stuck in the massive Thanksgiving traffic jam of everyone wanting to get out of Los Angeles for anyplace east of there, Lee turned on some music to soothe our nerves.  And then the news, KFWB, “Give us 23 minutes and we’ll give you the world.”  It turned out we didn’t want to know the world.  It turned out that KFWB blared that Harold Washington, mayor of Chicago, had died approximately 7 hours earlier.

The commotion on the freeway subsided into a shocked silence inside the bubble that was our car.  Lee kept switching stations to see if there was more news.  Meanwhile I entertained a crazy hope that by turning on music we could deny the reality of Washington’s death.  The news might morph into a delusion, a nightmare that would dissolve. 

Both Lee and I had followed carefully Washington’s victory against the Chicago machine four years earlier. A majority of right wing members of the city council spent his entire first term blocking his working class program in what became known as the “council wars.”  He’d been re-elected, and his working class constituents had claimed a new majority on the council. The prospect of being part of an experiment in social transformation made the move to Chicago an exciting opportunity.  The heart attack that crushed Harold signaled all the closet reactionaries to come out of the woodwork and sabotage the movement.  But we didn’t know that yet, as the traffic let up going through Banning into the pass between Mt. San Gorgonio and Mt. San Jacinto, both snow covered peaks shrouded in the darkness. Passing Palm Springs, we pulled into the parking lot of a coffee shop in Indio.  We ate hamburgers in silence, and reached our destination at Lee’s parents’ house in Phoenix four hours later, before sunrise. 

At lunch Lee’s father Frank sat at the kitchen table, under a portrait of Ronald Reagan.  An immigrant from China in the 1920s, he defended the Kuomintang and had no use for the revolutionaries.  We had little to talk about. More than a decade after I’d married Lee, he still didn’t know my last name. He asked if I was related to those Rosenbergs (pronounced as an accusation) who were executed.  Other parts of the family who imported Chinese consumer products from Hongkong and Taiwan had made their peace with the mainland to get part of the nascent import trade. Another one of Lee’s brothers worked for the city, was a member of the public workers’ union, and part of the Phoenix Democratic Party apparatus.  His first question when he saw us was: what did we think would happen to Chicago now that Harold was dead. We didn’t know.

We all feasted heavily on Thanksgiving day. The next morning Lee and I left Phoenix.  Marie stayed to spend a few more days with her family. Then headed back to the West Coast. Our trek took us through Edmond, Oklahoma, where we stayed with one of Lee’s college friends and I scratched my cornea. Lee took over driving while I recovered. She drove from Edmond to stop at a motel in Rolla, Missouri.  The next day we got a late start and reached Chicago as daylight ended, a nasty, drizzly day. As we settled into our temporary lodging in Humboldt Park, thousands paid their respects to Harold in a mass meeting that many hoped would revive the movement’s spirit.

After a few days Lee returned to Los Angeles, as we had planned.  We expected that her move to Chicago would come within the next few years when she could retire with a full pension, but that never happened.  I settled in at Guild Books for the next phase of my life, not fully prepared to watch the betrayal of the dreams of the movement.  Harold had always told the voters, it’s not the man – it’s the plan.  It’s the movement.  We had front row seats to watch as the powerful movement which had brought Harold Washington to office was derailed by his “friends.” 

I think about that week from the day before Thanksgiving to my first few days in Chicago often.  The hope of that journey parallels the hope of a couple of years ago when Brandon Johnson was elected mayor in an election that wasn’t supposed to happen.  No one expected Harold to win – especially when the Democratic Party turned against him and worked for Bernie Epton, the Republican candidate.  No one expected  Johnson to win, when all the big guns in the Democratic Party supported his opponent (the mayor’s race had become “non-partisan in the intervening years; Johnson’s opponent was a member of the Democratic Party, but in all other respects similar to Washington’s opponent forty years earlier). 

But a movement swept Brandon Johnson into victory.  The Chicago Teachers Union is given a lot of the credit; but Johnson’s support was much broader and more grass roots.  People who had fought successfully for reparations for victims of police torture; people who marched and protested and petitioned after police committed wanton murder when they killed LaQuan McDonald; these inspired community activists worked the precincts for Johnson.  A solid core of young people had brought the cause of justice for prisoners tortured by police Sargent John Burge to the United Nations, delivering a petition charging genocide. Parents and students throughout the Chicago area had been galvanized into action because of massive disinvestment in schools and actual school closings.  Even so, as broad as the movement was, as much as Johnson’s victory was historic, it was dwarfed by the percentage of people who came out to vote for Harold in 1983.  88% of the electorate voted in 1983; not even 40% voted in 2023. 

In another year we will be at the beginning of another mayoral and aldermanic election campaign. The vultures attacked Johnson from day one of his administration, now they are circling to challenge Johnson in 2027. The electoral question is whether the movement that put Johnson in office is strong enough to mobilize forces many times greater than put Johnson in office.  Even deeper, the question is how well have the forces that put Johnson in office consolidated and organized, how have they used the last three years to develop their strength beyond the ballot box. I hope the resistance to ICE shows we haven’t squandered the opportunity we created.