An open letter to Paul Vallas:
I understand how you must feel right now. The possibility of being the mayor of Chicago, this massive, shiny, and troubled metropolis, is likely intoxicating. I know my father, Bernie Epton, felt that way in 1983. Forty years after his campaign against Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago, popular history characterizes him as a candidate who had an undistinguished political career until racism made him a viable candidate against a Black man. But that is not who he was in the years leading up to that election.
In 1950, he ran for congress in the Republican primary against Dick Vail, then a former congressman and always a red-baiting, race-baiting echo of the notorious Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy. Among Bernie’s supporters in that race were leading south side Black ministers, like Archibald Carey, Sr. and Major Taylor. Dad also received the endorsement of the Chicago Defender, perhaps the country’s most prominent Black newspaper at the time. But he lost that race.
In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, rioting in Chicago’s south and west sides caused extensive damage that still scars the city’s neighborhoods 55 years later. At the time, Dad was again a candidate for office. This time for an open Republican seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. During that campaign, he took the time to go to Memphis to join the memorial march for King, organized and led by the Memphis sanitation workers’ union. After the march, he returned to Chicago, resumed his campaign, and won--the beginning of 14 years of service as a Republican representative from Hyde Park. Twice during those 14 years, the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI) named him the state’s “Best Legislator.”
By late fall in 1982, when Bernie decided to run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Chicago, his reputation, earned over 40 years of political activism, as a supporter of open housing, an opponent of redlining, and an ally of the Black community and of anti-machine Chicago voters, was well established. But in the ’83 campaign against Harold Washington Dad became the champion of white supremacists citywide. Though the campaign was characterized by recurring racist incidents, two facts stand out.
First, of course, was the historic Washington victory, due largely to a strategically mobilized Black community. But the second most striking feature of the campaign was Dad’s slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late.”
Dad claimed, often and always, that the slogan meant that the city was teetering on bankruptcy and he was the guy to rescue it before collapsed. Some family members and lifelong political supporters took him at his word. That was the position that he maintained throughout the campaign. But everyone else in Chicago who gave a damn about such things knew the slogan for what it effectively was, a dog whistle, beckoning white voters to the ramparts. And many of those white voters would have shrugged away any concern about dog whistles. To them, it didn’t really matter what it meant; Bernie was their guy. He was the white hope.
Imagine what that meant. The Bernie Epton who had been a colleague of Timuel Black and Harold Washington in the creation of a Chicago-focused Henry Wallace for President Committee in 1948, who had walked in the Memphis memorial march for Martin Luther King in 1968, who continued sending his children to public schools long after many neighborhood families had fled to whiter communities, had somehow transformed 25 years later into the George Wallace of Chicago. And he had brought it on himself.
One legacy of his campaign would be an empowered white majority on city council that opposed every Washington reform initiative for the next four years. Chicago’s bitter power struggles would earn the city a reputation as “Beirut by the lake.” Dad’s election defeat sidelined him forever. But the divisiveness that characterized city politics for years began with the racial warfare of the ’83 campaign.
So, consider now, before this campaign goes any further, your “let’s take Chicago back” message. That message is landing as a dog whistle only slightly less shrill than “Epton, before it’s too late.” Stop saying that it means something else. The senders of messages don’t get to determine their meaning, which lies inescapably in what the audience hears.
Do what my Dad did not do; pivot to a different message. One that unites. That envisions a single city, unified in its pursuit of equity and justice. Hit that message hard, even if it costs you a victory. Because no victory is worth the price of your reputation. And no victory is worth the price Chicago would pay if a Vallas victory depended on an appeal to white supremacists.
I understand how you must feel right now. The possibility of being the mayor of Chicago, this massive, shiny, and troubled metropolis, is likely intoxicating. I know my father, Bernie Epton, felt that way in 1983. Forty years after his campaign against Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago, popular history characterizes him as a candidate who had an undistinguished political career until racism made him a viable candidate against a Black man. But that is not who he was in the years leading up to that election.
In 1950, he ran for congress in the Republican primary against Dick Vail, then a former congressman and always a red-baiting, race-baiting echo of the notorious Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy. Among Bernie’s supporters in that race were leading south side Black ministers, like Archibald Carey, Sr. and Major Taylor. Dad also received the endorsement of the Chicago Defender, perhaps the country’s most prominent Black newspaper at the time. But he lost that race.
In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, rioting in Chicago’s south and west sides caused extensive damage that still scars the city’s neighborhoods 55 years later. At the time, Dad was again a candidate for office. This time for an open Republican seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. During that campaign, he took the time to go to Memphis to join the memorial march for King, organized and led by the Memphis sanitation workers’ union. After the march, he returned to Chicago, resumed his campaign, and won--the beginning of 14 years of service as a Republican representative from Hyde Park. Twice during those 14 years, the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI) named him the state’s “Best Legislator.”
By late fall in 1982, when Bernie decided to run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Chicago, his reputation, earned over 40 years of political activism, as a supporter of open housing, an opponent of redlining, and an ally of the Black community and of anti-machine Chicago voters, was well established. But in the ’83 campaign against Harold Washington Dad became the champion of white supremacists citywide. Though the campaign was characterized by recurring racist incidents, two facts stand out.
First, of course, was the historic Washington victory, due largely to a strategically mobilized Black community. But the second most striking feature of the campaign was Dad’s slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late.”
Dad claimed, often and always, that the slogan meant that the city was teetering on bankruptcy and he was the guy to rescue it before collapsed. Some family members and lifelong political supporters took him at his word. That was the position that he maintained throughout the campaign. But everyone else in Chicago who gave a damn about such things knew the slogan for what it effectively was, a dog whistle, beckoning white voters to the ramparts. And many of those white voters would have shrugged away any concern about dog whistles. To them, it didn’t really matter what it meant; Bernie was their guy. He was the white hope.
Imagine what that meant. The Bernie Epton who had been a colleague of Timuel Black and Harold Washington in the creation of a Chicago-focused Henry Wallace for President Committee in 1948, who had walked in the Memphis memorial march for Martin Luther King in 1968, who continued sending his children to public schools long after many neighborhood families had fled to whiter communities, had somehow transformed 25 years later into the George Wallace of Chicago. And he had brought it on himself.
One legacy of his campaign would be an empowered white majority on city council that opposed every Washington reform initiative for the next four years. Chicago’s bitter power struggles would earn the city a reputation as “Beirut by the lake.” Dad’s election defeat sidelined him forever. But the divisiveness that characterized city politics for years began with the racial warfare of the ’83 campaign.
So, consider now, before this campaign goes any further, your “let’s take Chicago back” message. That message is landing as a dog whistle only slightly less shrill than “Epton, before it’s too late.” Stop saying that it means something else. The senders of messages don’t get to determine their meaning, which lies inescapably in what the audience hears.
Do what my Dad did not do; pivot to a different message. One that unites. That envisions a single city, unified in its pursuit of equity and justice. Hit that message hard, even if it costs you a victory. Because no victory is worth the price of your reputation. And no victory is worth the price Chicago would pay if a Vallas victory depended on an appeal to white supremacists.
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