A political lesson Bernie Epton's life can teach

An open letter to Paul Vallas: 

An edited version of this op-ed piece was published by the Chicago Tribune on March 12, 2023. 

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.

Washington-Epton, 1983

Harold, Bernie, Timuel, Chicago and me

I had lunch with Timuel Black last month.  Tim will be 99 years old in December. But it's a young ninety-nine. No, he doesn't hear very well. And he's got macular degeneration, so he reads slowly and definitely favors material with big print and big images. He doesn't lift his feet very far off the ground when he walks, but he walks. He doesn't use a cane, either, though it strikes me that he should. But Tim still has things to say, memories to share, an acute grasp of how far along the arc of human liberation we have travelled, and how much more ground there is to cross.

Author of Bridges of Memory: An oral history of Chicago's first wave of black migration, Tim claims that he's too old, at this point, to be limited to telling only true stories. Having made that point clear, he proceeds to tell me the story of his family's migration in 1919, part of the first wave of southern black folks headed north. In his family's case, the journey was from Birmingham, AL to Chicago. He was a baby at the time, so he doesn't remember much about the trip north. But he does remember that life in Birmingham had gotten intolerable for his family. Tim claims that he was the one who insisted that it was time to get out of town.

"I told my parents that I was done with the south. I'm headed for Chicago," he says. "My momma said, 'he's not even old enough to change his diapers, so I'm going with him.'" And, he says, his daddy had to come, too.

He finishes his story and looks at me, like, maybe, I'm going to argue with him. But I can't argue with the proposition that when you're an activist and a storyteller, there's a variety of ways to capture truth. Nor will I argue with Timuel Black, who is, for my money (and along with fellow Chicagoan Studs Terkel) one of the finest American oral historians of the last century.

Getting one-on-one time with Tim is a privilege that I may not have earned, but for which I qualify for a couple of good reasons.  Mr. Black, as I knew him at the time, was my U.S. history teacher when I was a Hyde Park High School junior. That was in 1963, back in the day when I didn't have anything but a faint idea about all that he could teach me. But it turns out that teachers, the dedicated ones, anyway, will always welcome us back whenever we show up. Some 50+ years later, I can confidently claim to have been schooled by him many times since I left his classroom behind me.

A better reason for the access Tim permits me may lie in the fact that he and my father, Bernie Epton, were old political comrades. Given the combination of Tim's lifelong record of speaking humanitarian and progressive truth to power and the memory of Bernie running against Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago ("Epton, before it's too late"), the thought of Bernie Epton and Timuel Black as political allies might sound like an alternative fact. But it's gospel according to Timuel.

During an earlier visit with Tim, 15 or so years ago, Tim told me that he and Bernie had started the Chicago-area Henry Wallace for President committee in 1948. In the early days of the Cold War, that was no small thing.

Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's vice-president from 1941 to 1944, was more deeply committed to the New Deal than Roosevelt himself. But for his 1944 reelection campaign, Roosevelt replaced Wallace on the ticket with the far more conservative Harry Truman, the choice of "the [Democratic] party's conservative, pro-business and segregationist wing."

During the 1948 campaign, Wallace took explicitly leftist positions, advocating for national health care, for protecting and extending New Deal programs, and for an end to segregation. Somewhat predictably, Wallace didn't fare well as a third party candidate, finishing fourth behind Truman, Republican Thomas Dewey and Dixiecrat and arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond.

For Tim and Bernie, the Wallace campaign was an early taste of politics for keeps. Tim said the first few years after World War II were heady days for activists, especially in the black community on the south side of the city. "During the war, I was a staff sergeant in a logistics unit supporting the American advance through Western Europe. In Germany, my unit saw one of the concentration camps at Buchenwald," Tim said.

It was both a horrifying and motivating experience for him. "Many of us returned to the U.S. believing that it was up to us to change the country and the world," he said.

Multi-racial and multi-ethnic activist groups formed in Woodlawn, Englewood, Hyde Park and South Shore after the war, Tim told me. "Your dad was one of us," he said. "In those years, we moved forward together."

In 1950, Bernie ran in the Republican primary in the Second Congressional District against Dick Vail, a former member of the House of Representatives, who had lost his seat two years earlier to Democrat Barratt O'Hara. Bernie ran as an advocate for open housing and as an opponent of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been established by Congress in 1930 for the explicit purpose of investigating communist influence across the country.

In the upshot, Bernie lost, though he continued to be active on the south side, working with community groups, serving on the board of directors of the Jane Dent Home for the Negro Aged and Infirm (a facility created to address the fact that sick and elderly people of color were barred from most private nursing and retirement homes). Once he passed the bar examination, Bernie also joined the Lawyers' Decalogue Society (the Jewish bar association) and the South Shore Chamber of Commerce.

Though he never discussed it with me (or anyone else, to my knowledge), I suspect that the witch hunts of the McCarthy era had, at least, a subtly transforming effect on Bernie. Long after Dad died, in the process of sorting through boxes of family memorabilia as we moved from Washington, DC back to Chicago, I discovered a piece of campaign lit from 1954 that Bernie had kept, but never shared with me.

It wasn't from any of Bernie's 10 campaigns for the Illinois state legislature or for Congress or for mayor of Chicago. It was a piece circulated by the Citizens for Vail Committee during Dick Vail's campaign for reelection to Congress. Remarkably, it doesn't focus very much at all on Vail's achievements as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and seems to focus on Thomas Lewis, Vail's actual opponent in the upcoming primary, only to assert that Lewis was really the second coming of Bernie Epton, the real target at which the piece aims. And does so in the extreme red-baiting and race-baiting style of the time, making this point, among others:

"The contents of this circular may seem at first glance to border on the indelicate. However, fire must be fought with fire. The venomous Sun-Times which supported EPTON in 1950, has endorsed LEWIS in the present campaign. The Daily News also preferred EPTON in 1950 and the News supports LEWIS in the present campaign. VAIL carried all Wards and the District despite the Left-Wing Press by an enormous majority. VAIL saved the District from Epton. You can now help him save it from Lewis. Watch the recommendation of the Chicago Defender, out this week. You can be certain that VAIL will not be the Defender choice."

Imagine that. In 1950, Dick Vail saved Illinois' Second Congressional District from left-winger Bernie Epton. And tagging Bernie as a leftie is not done lightly here. In fact, the details of Bernie's program and his associations with prominent, south-side Negro leaders are elaborated elsewhere in the circular:

"Epton ran on a 'Liberal' platform of Civil Liberties, FEPC [Fair Employment Practice Committee], Public Housing, abolition of the Committee on Un-American Activities, etc.; and an aroused and indignant Eighth Ward Republican electorate marched to the polls and buried him under an avalanche of votes cast for RICHARD B. VAIL, who had been the target of antagonistic blasts from the Chicago Defender for years."

A picture of Bernie flanked by Major Euclid Taylor and Archibald J. Carey, two influential black leaders of the time, pulled from the Defender, ran next to that text. It's worth noting that the Chicago Defender was, from the beginning of the 20th Century on, a successful Black-owned, journalistic enterprise, dedicated to advancing the status of African Americans in the city and the country. In The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America, author Ethan Michaeli wrote this about the years following Harold Washington's
victory in the 1983 election:

"It was long past the time when any one newspaper, television or radio station could claim to speak for an entire people and the Defender was struggling to hold on to its remaining readers, rather than expanding its audience. Nevertheless, the Defender continued to punch far above its weight, a resolute voice of conscience in a city rife with hatred, fear, and greed, and in a nation that was not nearly done expiating its original sin."

Plainly, it is a matter of record that early in his political career, Bernie Epton pursued political objectives and played a role in the affairs of the south side and of the city of Chicago that allied him with people like Timuel Black, Archibald Carey and Major Taylor, and won him the endorsement of the Chicago Defender and other publications, like the Chicago Daily News, literally a red-flag to witch hunters like Richard B. Vail. In that light, it is a great irony that Bernie's role as Harold Washington's opponent in the 1983 mayoral campaign was a significant contributor to creating a Chicago that, in Ethan Michaeli's words, had become "a city rife with hatred [and] fear."

**********

In returning to Chicago this past January, after 10 years in Washington, DC, I find that the city has a familiar feel. There is so much to love here. It's easy to talk to people on the street, on the bus and in stores. Of course, there's crankiness. After all, we are two and a half million strong and the odds are always good that one will run into someone who has woken up on the wrong side of the bed. But in random encounters with ordinary Chicagoans, there's an equally good chance of establishing a sudden intimacy that affects the heart and lingers afterward.

The city is sometimes stunningly beautiful, as well. The lakefront offers a variety of compelling looks in any weather, excluding those times when the wind blows so fierce and cold that one can't help worrying about freezing up and toppling over.

But some of Chicago's biggest problems are nearly as obvious as Lake Michigan's vast horizon and downtown's architectural grandeur. Except in a few neighborhoods, the city's racial divisions are damningly large and at the root of huge inequities in wealth, opportunity and life outcomes. The public school system and its teachers are overwhelmed by waves of social crisis. And too many human beings wander Chicago's streets with few places to go and nowhere to spend the night.

Of course, the dimensions of such problems ebb and flow with the passage of time, but since Harold Washington died in office in 1987, there has been little persistent optimism about fixing those problems, and a growing feeling that, collectively, we have no idea how to go about doing so.

All of those problems were manifest to various degrees in 1983 when Washington was elected mayor and Dad, having lost, sunk into a despair from which he never recovered. Much of his sadness in the years that followed the election lay in the knowledge that his reputation as a civic-minded, socially progressive politician had been destroyed in the rancor of the 1983 contest.

Bernie knew that he was widely, if not universally, perceived as a hater in the city that had been his home for all of his 60+ years. That he, himself, had played a major role in destroying that reputation might not have been a thought that he routinely entertained. But it seems to me that in the 1983 campaign, Dad took a hammer to the principles that had mattered to him most during his 40+ years as an activist and politician.

A recent event at the Beverly Arts Center included a showing of a documentary about Washington's life with an extended focus on the '83 campaign and his almost five years as mayor of Chicago. The documentary was followed by a panel of high-profile people who had been significantly involved in urging Washington to run in the first place, in the campaign that followed, and in his administration. The panel, including Jesse Jackson, Dr. Willie Wilson, and radio personality Cliff Kelley among others, was facilitated by Salim Muwakkil, an old-friend and former colleague at In These Times.

Salim's questions steered the panel toward a consideration of the factors that made Washington a uniquely qualified candidate, created a grassroots movement that would both persuade Washington to run in the first place, and win a difficult campaign that turned out more voters in Chicago than any other election, before or since. The question of why activists have not been able to build a progressive multi-racial campaign capable of again winning the mayor's office haunted the panel that night, as it routinely haunts many other gatherings of Chicago progressives.

Salim did me the great honor of inviting me onstage to participate as the seventh member of the panel. I don't have any direct experience of the campaign to bring to any such discussion--I was running for city council in Ann Arbor, MI at the time--but Salim's question to me had a different focus. Introducing me as a former colleague of his, a genuine progressive, and Bernie Epton's son, he asked for my perspective on the campaign and my father's role in it.

In response, I pointed out that Washington and I were both contributors to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and that, like Washington, I was a campaign that emphasized development in previously neglected neighborhoods, called for building a city workforce that reflected the diversity of the city's population, and outlined a more community-based approach to policy, including policing. In a 1983 radio interview with Alex Kotlowitz, then working for a Lansing, MI- based NPR affiliate, I had noted the similarity between Washington's political positions and my own.

I also told Alex that Dad loved the city of Chicago, would be a skilled administrator, and that serving as its mayor would fulfill his life-long ambition. When he asked who I would vote for if I were a Chicago resident, I told him that I guessed that would be an instance when I wouldn't know for certain until I was in the polling booth and making a final decision on that choice.

Dad heard that interview on the radio and was deeply shaken by it. The incident created a rift between us that endured for months.

I told the audience at the Arts Center that I didn't want to distract from the panel's focus on what strategy might build a Washington-style campaign that could take back City Hall, but that I could make some further brief comment on the '83 campaign and Bernie's role in it. Even from Ann Arbor, and focused on my own campaign, it was clear then that the Washington-Epton race was tearing the city apart. It was an adrenaline-soaked campaign that I have always believed had much to do with the fact that only a little more than four years later both Harold and Bernie were dead.

They had been allies in the Illinois State House before Washington moved on to Congress, and they died within three weeks of each other in November and December of 1987. They remain close together today, buried at the same south side cemetery. I could also add, from close observation, that the campaign, itself, and its aftermath, were devastating to Bernie's sense of himself as a principled politician. "Epton, before it's too late" became, and remains, a call to racial division.

Never mind that, as Bernie insisted in subsequent discussion with me, the slogan had been developed during the primary season, before Washington defeated Jane Byrne and Richie Daley, and was intended to highlight the fact that the city was in dire financial straits and that he was the fiscal manager to fix it. Whatever it was intended to mean, it didn't have that meaning when Chicago voters and election observers heard it. Instead, "Epton, before it's too late" took on a meaning Bernie never intended, a call to hold the line against a Black takeover of the city. Dad's real mistake in regard to the slogan was to resist acknowledging what was immediately obvious to everyone else, to resist acknowledging the only reasonable interpretation of the slogan and to immediately stop using it.

Why couldn't Bernie hear what happened, see that his campaign was going to enlarge the already existing racial rift in one of the country's most segregated cities? Certainly, Bernie's belief in the principles that had driven his political career forward and his sense that he had never been anything but a racial healer and uniter contributed to his tone deafness. But I've always believed that in the '83 campaign, a campaign that drove every single political participant forward with urgency and feverish anticipation, that kept people sleepless at night, eager for or dreading the next day's events, that Dad, closer to victory than he had ever imagined or hoped for, could persuade himself that he was still Bernie, and that his eventual triumph would be the best thing that could happen for the city of Chicago.

He was wrong, of course, and that's what I told the audience of some 1,200 or so Washington campaign veterans, that Bernie was wrong and in the aftermath, in his heart of hearts, he knew that he was wrong. That knowledge, I said, would be a major factor in his death shortly afterward.

When I was done speaking, Jesse Jackson spoke up. Don't be ashamed of your father, he said, adding, in what struck me as a rather awkward attempt at consolation, that there were Black folks who didn't support Harold and had caused even greater damage than Bernie had.

**********

I didn't get to respond to Jackson's comments that night, but it should be clear that I am not ashamed of Dad. I am proud of him. I am proud of the good he did in his life and of the forthright positions he took for racial justice and for equal rights.

I am proud that my father supported the public school system with great fervor, that he didn't move out of the neighborhood when my older sister and I graduated elementary school and moved on to Hyde Park High School, which at the time was more than 90 percent African American. Other families moved out of the district or sent their children to private schools. Of the 56 white children that graduated my all-white elementary school only 12 went on to Hyde Park.

Three years after I graduated high school, Martin Luther King was assassinated while in Memphis to support striking city sanitation workers, Bernie and my brother Mark travelled to Memphis to join the sanitation workers at a memorial march for King. The Bernie who went to Memphis in solidarity with the values King espoused was the Bernie I knew him to be. I am proud that he never sat back and left the duty to engage to others.

But I also believe that his legacy includes a lesson about how we can all miss what matters most when a decisive moment comes along in our lives. If Bernie had not been a candidate himself in the '83 election, I believe that he would have been an outspoken supporter of Washington's candidacy. But that wasn't how things played out for Dad.

Indeed, when he became the Republican nominee for mayor, his campaign strategy was focused on building a coalition of minority voters and liberals who could no longer abide the tyranny of the city's Democratic machine, or the way it appropriated the wealth of the city, and encouraged division and inequity. In that light, "Epton, before it's too late" makes sense. But Dad's failure to recognize and respond appropriately to the way Washington's victory changed the meaning of the slogan is a mistake for which he must bear responsibility.

There are still some folks out there, including some members of my own family, who contend that when Washington won the primary and it became clear across the country that a Republican could become mayor in a racially divided northern city that it was national Republican party types who conceived of the slogan and meant it to be a clarion call for white people. But Dad, himself, told me otherwise more than once, and though we didn't discuss his feelings about it at great length after the election, it seemed clear to me that he knew what he had done.

**********

Harold Washington spent the weekend before the vote in the kind of sleepless frenzied activity that typifies the schedules of committed candidates in close races. Bernie didn't follow suit.

"With a razor-thin lead in the polls, Washington today raced through a full schedule of appearances. Epton, who made only a few routine appearances, hopes to pull an upset in this heavily Democratic city, which hasn't elected a Republican as mayor in 52 years," wrote reporters Kevin Close and Bill Peterson in an April 12, 1983 article in the Washington Post.

So, what of the difference between how the two candidates spent the last days of what had been a divisive and hotly contested campaign? Washington's approach needs no explanation. He did what was required of him. But in those last days, Bernie was more absent from the public eye than one would have expected. He couldn't have thought that victory was assured. Every poll showed that the race was close.

Harold had trailed Bernie somewhat in the last month of the game, but in the last week he finally closed the gap, even pulled ahead in some polls. [Note: This piece, by Marilyn Katz and Bill Zimmerman ran in In These Times in May 2013. It tells the story of how two ads, "Pledge" and "Shame," produced by Katz and Zimmerman, were instrumental in turning the race for Washington in the last days of the campaign.]

Why did Bernie virtually stop campaigning before the campaign was over? Maybe he understood, somehow, that Harold had pulled ahead, that he would lose by almost 50,000 votes (about four percent out of a total of almost 1.3 million votes). Perhaps Bernie had also concluded not only that the election was lost, but that his political reputation was badly damaged, that the final vote count wasn't going to fix what had been broken.

It may not be possible to pick the point in time when Dad first realized that the campaign and decisions he made in the process would be decisive in how he would be perceived in the years to come. During the summer after the election, he did little other than contemplate his defeat and the way the world seemed to have collapsed around him. During my subsequent visits to Chicago, in occasional discussions about the campaign, he seemed mostly wistful and remorseful--talking about maybe running for mayor again in '87, the possibility of reconciling with Washington and even being appointed to some sort of city commission--but he was mostly lethargic and almost incapable of sustaining a discussion about his future.

Post-election, Bernie rarely ventured out to public events, even though he and my mom had spent nearly 40 years worth of weekday evenings campaigning, attending fundraisers, and showing up at civic and political events, sometimes as headliners. Years later, Tim Black told me about an encounter with Bernie at some sort of civic affair a couple of years after the election. There was time during the evening, Tim said, for Bernie and him to spend a few moments in private conversation.

"Your dad seemed very sad," Tim observed. "He came to me and said, 'Tim, all my friends abandoned me.'"

In a gesture of what I consider to be extraordinary tough love, Tim responded, he said, with "No, Bernie. You abandoned them."

The thought of these two old comrades whose paths had so unfortunately diverged spending that painful moment together nearly breaks my heart. But I much admire Tim for both loving my father and for responding to Bernie with the hard truth.

Like Jesse Jackson, Tim has told me that I must not be ashamed of Dad. "We accomplished so much together," Tim said. "The group we were part of, the work that we did, paved the way for the election of Carol Mosely Braun as a United States Senator, for Harold Washington to be elected Chicago's first black mayor, and for Barack to be elected president. One mistake doesn't change that."

Old as we may have suddenly become--Tim nearly 100, now, me about to turn 70--I know I'm not done learning from Tim Black. And I'm not done learning from the lessons Dad left behind, either. But one of those lessons was always to acknowledge the mistakes that we make and to move forward more wisely because we understand what went wrong.

Another lesson is to love this great city and make it better.

Life and memory, a continuing story

Today, Bernie lives

I will be 67 years old in a couple of months. I am not feeling particularly morbid at the moment, but it gets easier and easier to count the number of my days. It’s reasonable to assume that I could live another 20 years—unless something unexpected comes up—and also reasonable to assume that I will be in decent health most of those 20 years. Beyond that point, all bets are off, and both disability and death will loom much larger.

But it occurs to me, in this moment, that the true span of an individual life includes the years in which others will remember the otherwise departed. My father, Bernie Epton, died in 1987. But today he is alive in memory. Mine.

Today is not a special day. It’s not an anniversary of anything that happened to Dad. But I have been reflecting on my own life, and on my children, and how we have lived, separately and together. One thought triggered another, and Dad was suddenly present.

Today, Dad is a young boy in Chicago, living through the Depression and writing his father in Atlanta. Not to worry, Dad, he writes. Do what you have to do in Atlanta. I will take care of everything here.

Today, Dad will drop out of school at the University of Chicago and enlist in the Army Air Force. Today, Dad will leave for an Air Force base in England, where he will begin leading bombing runs over Germany and Eastern Europe.

Today, Dad will meet Audrey Issett, a private in the British army assigned as a plane spotter with an anti-aircraft unit on the coast of England. Today, Audrey is a combatant in the Battle of Britain. Today, Audrey and Bernie will fall in love.

Today, the war in Europe has come to an end and Dad will be rotated back to the states for the invasion of Japan, which will never happen. Today, Audrey, pregnant with Teri, will finally make it to the States and meet the maniac in-laws who will be her family for the next 65 years.

Today, Dad will pass the bar exam and become a lawyer. Today, Bernie Epton will lose his first race for Congress.

Today, Audrey and Bernie and their four children will stop at Rosenbloom’s after going to a movie together at the Hamilton on 71^st Street. We will order five hot fudge sundaes and one strawberry sundae to go. (“Teri, Jeffrey, Mark and Dale, they are simply full of schwale,” Dad will sing endlessly throughout our childhood, or at least until his oldest two become teenagers, and things stop being so much fun).

Today, Dad and I, divided by all the things that divide fathers and sons, will argue about the war in Vietnam. I will tell him that the war is evil and so are the war makers. I will not support the war or acquiesce to the domination of the war machine, I will tell him. And he will show me his multiple medals and insist that we owe service to our country.

Today, after being drafted, I will leave for Canada. Dad will be deeply grieved by my decision, but he will give me money to help me on my way. He will pretend the money was actually left to me by my grandfather, but I will know better.

Today, Dad and brother Mark will board a plane for Memphis, where they will join in solidarity with the Memphis sanitation workers marching in a memorial parade for Martin Luther King.

Today, on a visit home, I will knock on the door of my parent’s apartment. Home alone, Dad will shout “what’s the password?” the first phrase of a great Marx Brothers routine.

Today, Dad will pay for a naming ceremony at his synagogue for Nathan Nightrain Epton, my first child. Nate won’t be there. Neither will I. Nor will Nate’s mom be there. Dad will have Nate named Adam Nathan Epton because he doesn’t approve of the name I gave Nate, and Adam begins with A, the first letter of Dad’s father’s name. In the Jewish tradition, this is the way to name a child after an ancestor. Nate won’t care, at all. Over time, I will learn not to mind, either.

Today, Dad will retire from the Illinois State Legislature after 16 good years during which he only screamed in frustration at his legislative colleagues maybe a dozen times, okay, maybe a couple dozen. Today, Dad will stop saying he’s the smartest guy in the legislature. Today, Dad will stop saying he’s the richest guy in the legislature.

Today, Governor Thompson will call Dad and ask him to be the Republican candidate for mayor of Chicago, and run against whoever wins the Democratic primary, Jane Byrne, Richie Daley or Harold Washington, an old friend from the state legislature.

Today, Washington will win the Democratic primary and because racism will motivate many white Chicagoans to cross party lines in the general election, Dad will become the first truly competitive Republican candidate for mayor in decades. Today, Dad will try to explain to the media that his campaign slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late,” is not a coded racial message. Almost nobody will believe him, but he will insist that he’s right, they’re wrong and the slogan will remain in use.

Late tonight, after a long day of campaigning, Harold Washington will say to a campaign worker who has come to hate Bernie that the man they are campaigning against is “not the Bernie Epton I know.” She will be surprised by the depth of Harold’s compassion and his obvious affection for Bernie.

Today, finally, the race will end. Washington will win, becoming the first African American mayor in Chicago history. Dad will lose and begin lamenting the damage the campaign has done to his reputation.

Today, I will talk to Dad, who has woken up, as he does every day, feeling humiliated by his defeat and horrified by the belief that he is a pariah. I will try to tell him that the reality is not so awful as he imagines, but nothing I say will seem to help and the smiles seem few and far between.

Today, four and a half years after the 1983 election, and less than a month after Harold Washington died, Dad will die. Today, Dad will be buried in Oakwood Cemetery on the south side, where Washington is also buried, and where generations of Chicagoans, mostly African American and Jewish, are buried.

Today, more than 26 years after Dad died, I remember him. Today, Bernie Epton is alive.

Through Audrey's eyes

The 1983 Mayoral Campaign in Chicago

Audrey Epton wrote this piece, recalling the tumultuous 1983 mayoral campaign in Chicago. She wrote it while Bernie/Dad was still alive--in 1985 or '86, I'm guessing. She gave it to me sometime during the summer of 2010, I think, just months before she died. I put it in a to-read pile in my office and later buried it beneath other less important papers (my bad). But I unearthed it this week and decided to post it.

It is, after all, a first-person account of the 1983 campaign by someone who was there and who loved Bernie Epton. I wish it was longer and more detailed, but to my knowledge it is still the longest thing Mom ever wrote. I also wish it was more emotionally forthcoming, but Mom was an emotionally reticent person to the end--she does not, for instance, even try to describe how deeply depressed Dad was in the last four years of his life. Even so, it's clear that the '83 campaign and its ramifications for her family caused her a lot of anguish.

She certainly wasn't a neutral observer--she was all-in for Bernie, but her perspective matters, nevertheless. And she's right about a few important things. Dad wasn't a racist, she wrote, just really, really stubborn. But his refusal to retract the "Epton, before it's too late" campaign slogan conveyed that unfortunate impression to hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans, something Mom doesn't really acknowledge here.

But I find her summary statement here, about Black Pride, both awkward and somehow right on. The Washington campaign was an important moment for African-Americans and Chicago, itself. Had Dad not been Washington's opponent, he and Mom would have had no trouble recognizing how important Washington's victory would be.

I was there at the moment the phone rang on Thanksgiving Day, 1982. When I picked up the phone, it was Governor James Thompson on the other end. He had called to ask my husband to run for mayor of Chicago in the 1983 election.

After some discussion and a promise to get back to the governor, Bernie hung up the phone—and said to me, guess what, Jim Thompson just asked me to run for mayor.

I said, I know. I was listening on the other phone.

Bernie asked me what I thought about the idea and after talking back and forth for some time, I said to him I think you should go for it. You’ve been in politics in one way or another all your life and besides, you would make a great mayor.

Bernie was completely taken aback because he was sure I would say no. He was finishing his last term after 14 years as a state rep and he knew I was very happy about that.

I was tired of our separations. I could not always be in Springfield when the legislature was in session for varying reasons. And it seemed as though each year the sessions started earlier and ended later. Besides that, Bernie is a loner and if I wasn’t down there, he would tend to go from the floor of the House to his apartment after the day’s session, eat improperly and generally not be too happy.

He had a distinguished career as a state representative from his freshman term on. He was always chairman of a committee of one kind or another—he had many feathers in his cap, but never felt he had done enough and was rarely satisfied with his accomplishments.

I remember one bill that was a tremendous plus to the general public—the insurance bill that he initiated and passed... if your insurance company went broke and became insolvent for whatever reasons, the public never had to be the loser. If one had a claim, by law the other insurance companies had to pick up your claim. A tremendous factor, for instance if your house burned you would always have a place to turn.

Bernie was also in the leadership for many years before he retired in 1983. He has been a practicing lawyer from 1947 and also has been in big business and has been active in community affairs for the 42 years I have known him. That’s a lot of time spent away from home, but we also went to a lot of affairs together. You might say for a little girl born in England, Bernie made me a political animal. In our home, what was going on in the community was always of vital importance to us.

So that is first a very [short story] of Bernie’s life and some of the reasons I told him to go for it. I said at least you will be in the city, no further than City Hall, except on occasion.

Sometimes, looking back, I wonder if I should have said, “no, Bern, don’t do it.” There is no doubt about it that that campaign changed our lives. Whenever Bernie [had] entered a campaign [previously], he got extremely good press. He was always endorsed by all the newspapers, as was the case [early] in this campaign. All of the newspapers gave him glowing editorials, saying in part that Republicans were lucky to have such a fine candidate—one glowing description after another.

He also had never taken a dime politically for any of his previous campaigns, sending back any contributions that came in (not that he was so wealthy) but he did not want to be beholden to any one group. Once you take somebody’s money, they expect you to do their bidding, vote their way. Bernie always wanted to be free to vote his conscience.

On the floor of the House, he would declare if he had a conflict of interest—his colleagues respected him enough to [clear him to] vote. There were times he would not attend a party caucus because he would not want to be bound by them. A rebel perhaps—but we could do with more like him.

Going back to the campaign of ’83, it was such a larger scale that he had to accept contributions, but even these were different. They were smaller amounts from people on the street that just wanted to see him elected. One old man of 90 came to his [headquarters] with a $5.00 contribution and said when he gave it, I just want to see a Republican mayor of Chicago before I die.

When I say I think I did our family a disservice by encouraging Bernie to run, it is because of what happened after the primary when Harold Washington became the Democratic nominee.

Up until the primary we had a small staff and a small army of volunteers. We campaigned together, we went into the neighborhoods. Because the fight was on the Democratic side and Bernie had no opposition, the press sort of left us alone, which irritated me. I didn’t think it fair that Bernie got so little coverage.

A funny thing happened one night because of that. Bernie had two meetings to go to and I went with him. The meetings were in opposite directions and we were on a tight schedule. It was a cold, snowy night. We had made the first meeting okay, but got lost going to the second one. We were in an unfamiliar part of the city.

Frantically, as we drove, we looked for a policeman or a telephone or a person to tell us where we were, but it was such a miserable night, nobody was out. Finally Bernie said to me, I think we’re going in the wrong direction—there being no traffic, he made a u-turn, and, guess what, we found a policeman. All of a sudden a blue light appeared and pulled us over. We were delighted to see him. Bernie said, “Officer, I’m Bernard Epton. I’m running for mayor and we’re lost on our way to a meeting. Will you tell me where so and so is?”

“Certainly, sir, after I give you this ticket,” he said.

We finally got to the meeting a little chagrined and bedraggled.

Bernard Epton was a victim of the bias of the press. Before the primary, Bernie was treated with a measure of respect by the media. After the primary, when Harold Washington became the Democratic nominee, Bernie was portrayed as a racist immediately—if Bernie criticized Harold for anything, at all, it was because he was a racist.

The media, both print and electronic, could not have done a worse thing to a man who his whole life had worked for civil rights and racial equality. We are both still bruised and bleeding from that treatment.

Small comfort when I think it would have [happened to] anybody white once Harold was the nominee. Bernie and Harold had know each other and been on a friendly basis for years, but the press took exception to the fact that Bernie would refer to Washington by his first name, inferring that Bernie was treating Washington with no respect. Harold Washington immediately worked on that sore, always referring to Bernie as Mr. Epton. Nevertheless, when the campaign was over, it was back to “Bernie.”

How could the media be so blind? The media was manipulated and they in turn manipulated the voters, which of course is nothing new. I think, too, that one of the problems the press had with Bernard Epton was the fact that they were dealing with a totally honest man and they couldn’t cope with that. My husband, also being a rather stubborn man, would not change an ad that had been planned before the primary that [what] was needed [was] fiscal responsibility as Chicago was financially in bad shape. But the press decided that the slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late,” was racist.

Bernie refused to change it knowing in his heart that it was not racist. He was also blamed for an ugly incident at St. Pascal’s Church when Washington and Mondale visited there one Sunday afternoon. There were people picketing with racist slogans. The press indicated they were Epton supporters, which was a tremendous blow to Bernie. He immediately called Harold Washington to tell him how upset he was and that of course he condemned the incident.

Harold, of course, knowing Bernie, so well believed him. But the damage was done to the Epton campaign by that incident—it is hard to erase something like that from one’s mind. I like to think that in time more of the 1983 campaign will come out and it will be found that Bernard Epton is not a racist—but rather somebody that was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was steamrollered by black pride.

Telling Bernie's Story

Dad’s story aired this weekend on This American Life. Listening to the story was a roller-coaster ride in mainly dark places. I hate thinking about the campaign slogan “Epton Before It’s Too Late.” The discussion of the slogan during the program made me tearful.

Worse than that was the audio of the screaming white crowd gathered at St. Pascal’s Church on Chicago’s North side, the crowd that drove off Harold Washington and Walter Mondale before they could speak. If I could, it is that moment, that hateful rage at St. Pascal’s, that I would sever from his memory. But I can’t. St. Pascal’s is history and it can’t be evaded.

Dad couldn’t find a persuasive way to reject race-motivated support for his candidacy. Once the campaign began, it became almost impossible for him to want to do so. He had a chance to be elected mayor. He and everybody else knew that the vast majority of his votes would come from whites terrified by the prospect of a black mayor for the city of Chicago.

I am confident that at any other time of his life, he would have been repulsed by the notion that he would become a figurehead for a white reaction. I am almost as certain that he was repulsed at the time. But he was simultaneously beguiled by the prospect that he might be elected mayor of the city he loved. His revulsion would have been a private thing. It would not have been shared with anyone, not with his wife, not with me, or with any of my siblings.

But if it was there, it would have been a cancer, and unshared, it would have been a potent one. It would, I believe, be the cancer of conscience and remorse that would run its course and kill him four years later.

During the campaign, Harold Washington told at least one person I am aware of that the Bernie Epton they were running against “is not the Bernie I know.” It wasn’t the Bernie I knew, either. It wasn’t the Bernie who was a progressive Republican legislator from Hyde Park for 14 years. It wasn’t the Bernie who worked with Timuel Black and others organizing support for socialist Henry Wallace for president in 1948. It wasn’t the Bernie who was viciously red-baited by Republican candidate for Congress Dick Vail in 1952. It wasn’t the man who continued to send his children to majority-black schools on the Southside of Chicago while other white middle-class families fled the public schools and, even, the city itself. It wasn’t the Bernie who flew to Memphis with my brother Mark to join the memorial march organized by the sanitation workers after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

But it is the Bernie that history remembers. That history shouldn’t be erased. But it can be enlarged. Dad was a good man who deceived himself and fell into tragedy because he wanted something too much, something he was not destined to have, something that in 1983 belonged to Harold Washington and a movement for change.

Bernie’s story is one I intend to tell someday. And I will tell it because I personally need to tell it. But I will also tell it because of the lessons it can teach us all.

A Kiss To Comfort Him (revised)

When I consider how hard Dad worked
on perfection, and I know
with certainty, how clearly he understood all
his achievements fell short,

I think then about the passion
he put into handwriting—with a fountain pen—
and the delight he had in his strokes and curves,
immodestly admiring those graceful loops, those elegant spaces.

In my vision, he sits back,
gazes at his signature complete,
thinks to himself,
“Yes. Almost perfect this time.”

You really should have seen it. Really.
At the bottom of a page, how it soared and glided,
his clear message to the world.
“I am here. I am me.”

Letters precise and self-assured,
the work of a meticulous man.
Today—many years after he died—
I think how that signature began to ail,
that the passion and the pride was gone before he died.

His last few signatures,
quivering, shaky, imprecise,
not his, not grand. I wish I could have given him
some gift to restore his will.
A kiss. A kiss.



The 1983 mayoral campaign in Chicago,
a victory for so many, a triumph
for Southside and Westside,
for Harold Washington,
for African Americans
intolerably shut out,
for neighborhoods
neglected without
ceasing.

But for Bernie—for Bernard E. Epton—
it was defeat, It was dealings with devils,
It was the catastrophe of his life,
the end of celebration.

Angry, hiding the throbbing of wounds,
weepy, listless, brimming with bitterness,
he was fallen, he was doomed,
And it was there, in the way he signed his name.

He was so deadly disappointed by who we would remember.
I wish I could have given him something of mine, anything
to comfort him.
A kiss.

Would he be happy to hear my sometimes delight
in his gifts of love, reliably exciting, rich with our pain and our striving?
Or would he charge me with too much delight
that I am not him?

Oh, but I am here and, sometimes, him.
It’s as if some secret side
of him is awakening
in me. As if
he kissed
me.