Police and prosecutorial misconduct: What we can see is just the tip of the iceberg

In the last month, I’ve discovered anew, notwithstanding my advanced and advancing age, that I really do still care about a lot of stuff. About, say, how the politics of our time could evolve. Or how much higher might grow the mountain of human suffering. Or how my garden might grow. And, here’s the thing, I could tend my garden, but I’m really not that good at it. Nor would that activity solve much of anything. I could water my garden until the water runs out--we might all run out of water eventually, or the power to pump it, or the resources to clean it--if we don’t do more to hold back climate change.

 

But I’m not a researcher. I’m not a manufacturer. I’m not a business owner. I can do my best to green up the block I live on, but who am I kidding? The climate fix we’re all going to need will take a movement.

 

But, much to my regret, to the point.

 

Some two weeks ago, I posted “Police and Prosecutorial Misconduct in Chicago, we are all implicated.” The event that provoked that piece was a hearing in the Will County Courthouse for Devon Daniels, who has been in prison for the last 27 years for a double murder he did not commit, but to which he confessed after being tortured by now retired Chicago police detective, Kriston Kato. Devon’s claim that his confession was coerced and that no other evidence exists that ties him to the murders has recently been investigated by the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC), which found that his claim was credible, and that he was entitled to full judicial review. Hence, the hearing, part of a slow and painful process of court appearances that hopefully may end with Devon’s conviction thrown out, and his release from prison. Ideally, soon. But maybe a year from now. Given the grindingly slow pursuit of justice in these parts and elsewhere, maybe two.

 

I wrote about Devon and his mother, Paula, more than 20 years ago, but fell out of touch afterward. Late last fall, I renewed contact with Paula, and was shocked to discover that Devon was still in prison, still trying to get his account of his arrest and torture heard.

 

What first happened to Devon and his mom and others in their family almost three decades ago, and has followed a continuously traumatizing path since then is horrifying. Still worse, it is not unique. The larger context with which to think about the injustices that Devon and Paula and their family are experiencing includes noting that Chicago is notorious (or ought to be) for the frequency with which scandals develop around groups of cops who are linked, or rumored to be linked, to dozens, if not hundreds of wrongful arrests and detentions, torture and coerced confessions, followed logically by wrongful, if not malicious, prosecutions, arbitrary judicial rulings, and ultimately by long sentences for individuals innocent of the crime for which they were convicted.

 

It follows that I personally need to work harder to develop a more complete grasp of how many individuals may be included in the sum of “dozens, if not hundreds…” of people battered and abused by a justice system which does not reliably pursue justice. Moreover, in framing that bigger picture, it should be clear that the still larger context within which to understand wrongful conviction, coerced confessions and innocence, is that the incidence of such things would be far less frequent if it were not for the fact that underlying such convictions is the endemic brutality of police misconduct on the streets of minority and poor neighborhoods, and a system of justice that encourages prosecutors to prioritize convictions, and judges, by and large, to ignore the constitutional rights of defendants who are routinely presumed guilty.

 

In other words, for every high-profile discovery of wrongful conviction and decades-long prison sentences for individuals later found to be innocent, there must necessarily be tens of thousands of wrongful stops, wrongful detentions and brutal beatings by police that never, ever, get to a hearing in court. Wrongful convictions do not come easy. A whole system must be in place and working relentlessly to make that happen.

 

I am not plowing new ground here. John Conroy, formerly an investigative reporter for the Chicago Reader and now senior investigator for the Chicago Justice Center, did incredible work throughout the 1990s, writing story after story about former Chicago police commander John Burge, and his “midnight crew,” whose investigative and interrogation techniques led to the convictions of more than 100 people who were tortured and, not infrequently, innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced. Many of those individuals, who were fortunate enough to get their convictions overturned, subsequently filed lawsuits against the Chicago police department, and the city, and won millions of dollars in damages. Conroy’s work and the multi-million-dollar payouts by the city were the principal impetus for establishing the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission.

 

According to the Innocence Network, “Since 1989, over 3,320 wrongful convictions have been revealed across the nation with individuals collectively losing 29,500 years serving time for crimes they did not commit. We cannot know exactly how many innocent people remain in prison today, but experts estimate that 2% to 5% of the nearly 2 million people in prison in the US were wrongfully convicted, meaning that anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 people are wrongfully incarcerated at this moment.”

 

The National Registry of Exonerations lists 12 people convicted of murder in Cook County since 1998 who were later exonerated. One was exonerated in 2003. Two others were exonerated in 2011. One in 2012, one in 2014, and two more in 2015. The pace of exoneration has picked up in recent years. So, also, has the cost risen to the city of Chicago for settling lawsuits with individuals tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit by the Chicago police. According to a Chicago Sun-Times story (“Taxpayers shell out $250M in police-related settlements; new report slams city efforts to learn from those mistakes,” Sept. 29, 2022), 19 cases of “reversed conviction” settled in 2018, 2019 and 2020, cost the city $72.2 million.

 

Last month (June 2023), the Chicago city council approved a $7.25 million settlement with Arthur Brown who was sentenced to life in prison for a double murder and arson in 1998. The three detectives implicated in Brown’s coerced confessions are now deceased. Whether or not they would feel any guilt for the fact that Brown served almost 20 years in prison if they were alive today is a question that will go forever unanswered. 

 

But the costs to cities everywhere don’t begin to approach the cost to communities from police misconduct beginning with simple harassment in all its many forms, and proceeding through false arrests, brutal interrogations and, eventually, coerced confessions and wrongful imprisonment. “Depending upon the size of the neighborhood and the method of counting, studies have estimated that up to 25 percent of adult male residents in particular neighborhoods are locked up on any given day, up to 13 percent of adult males enter prison or jail in a given year, and up to 2 percent of all residents enter prison in a given year,” writes Todd R. Clear in “The Problem with ‘Addition by Subtraction’: The Prison-Crime Relationship in Low-Income Communities” (from Invisible Punishment, The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, ed. By Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, pg. 184).

 

“The dynamics of growing concentrations of the residents of certain neighborhoods going to prison (and jail) are not insignificant for these locations,” Clear continues. “Imagine, for a moment, living in an area where one in eight parent-aged males is removed for confinement each year, and one in four is locked up at any given time. It is not difficult to see that this social process, over time, would be one of the truly important aspects of community life. The question is, how does this level of coerced mobility affect public safety through its impact on the building blocks of social order?”

 

Clear’s language is emotionally neutral, as befits an academic reporting the results of research and asking additional questions in follow up. But the facts about how we police in Chicago and across the country, how we prosecute, how we judge and how we sentence, are anything but neutral.

 

If we connect the dots, and listen to the stories of people whose lives are under relentless attack by a system that spreads injustice, and devastates families and communities, we have to conclude that the enormous sums we spend in the name of public safety makes everybody less safe, angry about the taxes we pay, and angry about how badly our government performs its essential role.

And if we continue to pay those taxes without also clamoring for a justice system that works for all, then we are siding with the system that devastates some communities more than others and, by design, protects those of us who live with privilege that we do not deserve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Police and prosecutorial misconduct in Chicago

We are all implicated

In 2002, working with the women of Sankofa Community Outreach and Restoration (SCOR), I produced a pamphlet that shared the stories of four women from the south and west sides of Chicago who all had sons who were imprisoned, some of them convicted on thin evidence for crimes they did not commit.

 

Paula Daniels was the force of nature who envisioned and organized SCOR and recruited me to work with her. Paula’s son Devon was first jailed in 1997. Paula and I expected the 36-page pamphlet, Silent No More: Chicago-area women talk about the criminal justice system, to build connections between SCOR and other Chicago-area families crushed by sustained involvement with the criminal justice system and to “broaden public awareness of the effect the…system has on families.” That may have happened on the margins, but it did little to further SCOR’s organizational development and even less to help Devon Daniels (and other wrongfully convicted people).

 

Though I moved on to other work, and even left Chicago between 2007 and 2017, Paula continued struggling with the system that sat like a gargantuan weight on her, on Devon, and on the rest of her family. Finally, late last year, Paula and I reconnected.

 

Paula has various chronic ailments now that she didn’t have 20 years ago. She has neuropathy and a vaguely diagnosed autoimmune disease, and significant mobility problems. And Devon is still in prison. If there’s one tiny piece of good news in all this, it is that the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC) has investigated Devon’s case and has concluded that he is entitled to a judicial hearing that will fully assess his claim that he was convicted solely on the basis of a coerced confession.

 

But special prosecutors assigned to “represent the people of Illinois” in these matters have consistently behaved as though their exclusive focus is on defending the original conviction, no matter how flawed it may be. As those prosecutors file motion after motion that result in long procedural delays, Devon, and others whom the commission has referred for full judicial review, find themselves enduring still another form of torture. 

 

Devon himself is one of an estimated 50 or more inmates who were tortured and brutally interrogated by a Chicago police team led by former Detective Kriston Kato. I will write more about Devon over the next few months. But here is some of what we wrote about his story in “Silent No More”: “Devon is serving a life term for two murders committed on the west side on February 7, 1996…Devon saw the murders. He was leaning up against a car, talking to the two men inside, when two gunmen got out of another car and came up the street shooting. Devon ran, but the whole thing was over quickly and it wasn’t long before Devon morphed from witness to accused. Paula says that even the basic facts of the case should have exonerated him. ‘It was physically impossible for him to do what they said he did, because the boys were shot with two different guns, yet they charged my son with both homicides. Two different guns from two different directions; this is what we get from the criminal justice system in America…His confession was coerced…[Kato] beat it out of him…he was a witness to the crime, but by the time they were done, Devon was the victim to go down for that particular crime.”

 

The  legislation that created TIRC was originally passed in 2009 to create a review process that would fully investigate the claims of torture, coerced confessions, and wrongful convictions that developed out of more than 100 arrests by “the Midnight Crew,” a team of police officers and detectives led by Chicago police commander Jon Burge during the 1980s. In still another series of egregious police misconduct, former Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevara has been accused of torturing arrestees, coercing confessions, and fabricating evidence in more than 50 instances where people served or are continuing to serve time in prison. Guevara has never been charged for his terrorism. Perhaps worst of all, Sgt. Ronald Watts and his crew have been implicated in coercing confessions and framing arrestees in more than 200 cases on the south side of Chicago in the 1990s and early 2000s. Watts, now retired, lives in Arizona.

 

After working with Paula, I moved on to other challenges, essentially taking a twenty-year break from worrying about what happened to Devon Daniels. People just like me have also had the luxury of not worrying about Devon or Kevin Murray or the thousands of others that have been harassed, wrongfully arrested, brutalized, tortured or worse by a system that routinely works to create injustice in Chicago. That is the kind of privilege that defines the border between the lives of people like me and the lives of hundreds of thousands of others living mere miles away in this most segregated of major American cities. Paula, and Devon, and his sister and brothers and his own children and his nieces and nephews have no experience of “justice” as it is commonly understood. Despite the weight, the details of all that she has endured, which is a story that I will write more about soon, Paula has responded to my return from a long absence with a loving welcome. 

 

They bear up under what should be properly understood as unbearable. They live with injustice. They live with no opportunity to thrive. The system that denies them benefits us. And we tolerate that system. And our taxes pay for it. When will the rest of us acknowledge the fundamental indecency, the immorality, of all that?

A further thought about Natalie Moore's book

 

Written in my journal shortly after starting The South Side:

 

In the process of reading the chapter headed “separate but equal” in Natalie Moore’s The South Side, I felt the need to place her biographically in a context that made sense to me. As it turns out, she will be 44 sometime this summer, which makes her about three and a half years younger than my son Nate and a little more than two years older than my daughter Julie. This mattered, at least in part, because in reading her personal stories of growing up on the south side, I needed to understand the period of her growing up in some sort of relationship to my childhood and youth in the South Shore neighborhood some 30 years earlier.

 

Having reached that point in the book, less than halfway through, I felt a growing anger at the city’s municipal government, and at the Chicago Public School (CPS) system, for policies and decisions that drove, exacerbated, and accelerated the inequity, inequality and injustice that have so thoroughly plagued the lives of Chicagoans these past 100 years and more. Those feelings developed in reaction to Moore’s thorough historical indictment of the white supremacist political regimes of former mayor Richard J. Daley and former CPS superintendent Benjamin Willis (and the fundamentally similar political leaderships that followed).

 

Nevertheless, that anger was also accompanied by a feeling somewhat like awe at Moore’s ability to conjure far more benign descriptions of the Chatham neighborhood of her growing up and of her high school years at Morgan Park on the far south side, and her clear descriptions of the positive effects her experiences had on her life and career since. Into the bargain, I also felt a kind of shock that I could be so fundamentally unaware of the actual existence of neighborhoods in Chicago like Chatham, and schools like Morgan Park, that nurtured their own in such positive ways, not by accident, but by the deliberate design and action of African American communities that existed and persisted, and thrived despite the neglect and exploitation of a system designed to destroy whatever they built.

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.

Miss Washington, but love Chicago,

deplore the Donald and, oh, three cheers for Karen Lewis and the Chicago Teachers Union

Our recent move from Washington, DC to Chicago is still in its transitional phase. We left very good friends behind in DC and we'll miss them all. Our challenge in Chicago will include developing a network of close friends as diverse and sustaining as the group of friends we left behind.

But I am optimistic about the possibilities. Our friends in Washington were often quite accomplished people, and some of them were native to the DC area, but in Chicago even the transplants from elsewhere seem to grow very deep roots here. I don't know what to make of that difference just yet, but the potential for movement-building seems more real here than it is in Washington. Yes, Chicago is a very segregated city, but the demographic diversity is astounding. There simply is no racial majority. If you want to make change here, coalition is the only way to go.

It is reliably colder in Chicago than in Washington and that does take some getting used to, but the solution is layers, lots of them--and not hunkering down. One has to live outdoors with vigor here or settle for hiding from the weather.

Another noteworthy difference is how big the sky seems in Chicago and how far away the horizon appears to be. That's a good thing. A great thing, really. At the lakefront one's eyes simply bask in the glory of unobstructed views. Yes, Chicago is flat and that's not so good, but the payback in being able to see the skyline, to watch the lake rage in the cold wind, to scan open vistas, like the green midway running through the University of Chicago, is a nice tradeoff. The eyes can't help exulting.

I have to say that back in DC, the Washington Post used to piss me off more often than not. The frequent failures to call out official spokespeople for their meaningless drivel, to call the powerful out for their nonsense, could often drive me to rants that Marrianne must have found tiresome. But the Chicago Tribune seems at least an order of magnitude more hapless than the Post. The Trib has some stalwart opinion writers, like Eric Zorn, Rex Hupke, Mary Shmich and Clarence Page, who still favor evidence-based journalism, but they are book-ended by right-wingers who make Jennifer Rubin and George Will look like moderates.

Of course, here and everywhere Donald Trump's election victory seems to have upended reality. Steven Chapman, a regular columnist for the Trib, has always been too right-wing for my taste. I used to marvel at how predictably he would find fault with Bill Clinton and applaud George W. Bush. Admittedly, Clinton was a person with numerous faults, whose instinct to parse political positions, appease critics and develop compromises that pleased no one is, or should be, legendary. Chapman's inclination to distrust Clinton, to believe that he was a liberal wolf in a moderate sheep's skin, made sense, but his willingness to refrain from strong criticism of Bush while he launched ridiculously expensive wars and failed in fundamental leadership ways, like rebuilding New Orleans, seemed to be a perfect example of abandoning conservative principles in favor of rooting for the home team.

But here comes Trump, who has turned out to be so extreme that he has created opportunities for compromised conservative thinkers to get past partisanship and return to principle. Chapman's column in Wednesday's Trib ("Trump the Weakling and his latest surrender") thoroughly indicts Trump for numerous offenses, all of which fall under the category of buckling in the face of resistance. "Backing down is not a departure from [Trump's] usual style. It is his usual style. Trump is not a guy who can be counted on to stand his ground. Often, he crumbles under the slightest pressure."

Trump, Chapman noted, responded to a federal court order blocking his first travel ban with, "see you in court, the security of our nation is at stake." But instead of going to court in a presidential effort to protect the "security of our nation," Trump, seeking to avoid another judicial rebuke, modified the travel ban. We'll see how that goes.

But Chapman wasn't finished. He noted that Trump defiantly took a call from the president of Taiwan, ignoring the long-standing one-China policy that has guided U.S. policy for more than 40 years. But he backed down and reaffirmed the one-China policy when Chinese premier Xi Jinping refused to speak to Trump "until he agreed to eat his words."

Trump, Chapman added, didn't even bring up the idea that Mexico would pay for a border wall when he visited with Mexican president Pena Nieto, but "only when he was safely back across the Rio Grande did Trump dare to repeat that our neighbor will foot the bill."

There's more, and if one is looking for an enjoyable moment with a right-wing columnist who is essentially calling Trump out for cowardice, just follow the link above. In any case, I'm not saying that I suddenly have warm feelings about Steven Chapman, but I am encouraged to see that for some conservatives, partisanship really does not compromise every principle.

Nor do I think that Chapman is the first right-winger to find a way to resist the siren call of partisanship at any cost. The Post's Jennifer Rubin, for years an inveterate critic of Barack Obama and constant flatterer of Paul Ryan, has begun routinely denouncing Trump's behavior and policy nonsense for at least the last six months. Check out Jonah Goldberg in the National Review, also.

"By now you may have noticed the difficulty many conservatives have defending everything President Trump does and says. I’m not just referring to the big policy moves, most of which conservatives can support fairly easily (so far). I mean the whole whiplash-inducing spectacle: the unfiltered, impulsive tweeting, bizarre interview non sequiturs, glib insults and distractions.

"If you honestly have no idea what I’m talking about, you may need to be de-programmed from a personality cult," Goldberg wrote in a piece for USA Today ("The Right can't defend Trump's behavior"). Of course, one reflects, these things are entirely clear to virtually all of us--except that they are not. A recent Suffolk poll finds that Trump is unpopular with the majority of Americans, but still somehow more popular than Hillary Clinton, who actually hasn't done anything to offend any of us for months now. I will therefore take the piece by Goldberg, the editor of the National Review, and others he has written that are also deeply critical of Trump and Republicans who cannot seem to separate themselves from Trump politically, as a good sign.

After all, every democracy not suffering from complete gridlock needs conservatives and liberals who can hear each other think. I'm not saying a few columns prove anything one way or the other, but I am encouraged by conservatives who are writing "I'm not with him."

Anyway, back to good-bad things about Chicago. I am definitely going to go to more performances/art exhibits/concerts/slams/whatevers here than I ever went to in DC. Washington certainly had a vital grassroots culture of its own, but the high-end, high-culture stuff often seemed to dominate. But everybody and her cousin seems to have some street-slam culture thing going in Chicago and I aim to be close by when some of that stuff goes off. I will concede, though, that I've only briefly sampled thus far and am only talking (or writing) about good intentions. We shall see.

Not surprisingly, serious urban problems and an apparent inability to solve them are among the things Washington and Chicago share. They also both suffer under a federal government that shows no signs of a willingness or ability to help. Given its druthers, the Trump administration will do its best to further damage public education, an agenda that will harm black and brown America first, but ultimately take down white America, too.

Of course, Trump, himself, volunteered to intervene to make Chicago's gun violence problem worse than it already is. But given his obviously short attention span, it appears likely that the city will avoid being wounded by that particular stray bullet. Not that there aren't plenty of others around who can't help barking both fruitlessly and endlessly at the sound of gunfire.

"It is time for a radical response. Time to stop talking and start doing. Time to take steps to clear the air of gunshots so our lofty plans for more police and more jobs can seed and grow rather than wither from the spray of automatic weapon fire," wrote former prosecutor Donna Moore in a March 8 column in the Trib (Stop the indifference: Bring in the National Guard).

Arf. Arf. Arf.

"...the city should ask that [the National Guard] be deployed, along with local police, to the South and West sides, not to militarize them," Moore recommended, "but to restore public safety and save lives."

Moore's single argument that her plan will work rests on an example of "one blessed weekend in November 2016," when "Chicago police, Cook County sheriffs, state police and federal agents saturated the three most dangerous police districts in the city...The strategy worked. The killing ceased. That weekend there was exactly one shooting--one--in the area under patrol."

This is nonsense. Dare we ask what causes such high levels of violence in the first place? How does a show of force address the underlying causes of violence in Chicago (and elsewhere, for that matter)? Moore cites a weekend of intensive policing during which only one shooting occurred. Are we to believe that focussing on a specific-area did not have adverse effects outside those limited boundaries? What were the patterns and frequencies of violence and crime before and after the weekend under examination? How is it possible to patrol streets, alleyways and parks with uniformed, heavily armed personnel without militarizing the area? What would be the downside consequences to the communities under lockdown and to the city, in general?

Arf. Arf. Arf.

Because the Trib routinely favors harsher punishments and longer prison sentences for the perpetrators of violence, the paper's willingness to accommodate opinion pieces that advocate counter-productive tactics like increased armed occupations of poor and minority neighborhoods comes as no surprise. Nevertheless, more thoughtful perspective pieces do run in the paper from time to time. One such piece, written by Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis ("Invest in schools, teachers to reduce violence"), ran in the paper on March 7.

Lewis's piece, a sustained and effective argument that advocates spending on social service interventions that reduce the traumatic effects of ongoing violence in neighborhoods, and in the process, addressing the causes of subsequent traumas, merits reprinting in its entirety here. But the link above will take interested readers to the full piece. In the meantime, here's an extended quote:

"While we are not typically thought of as first responders to violence, teachers and school staff are often the first responders to the trauma that violence brings, especially when it happens to the very students entrusted to our care," Lewis wrote.

"At Henderson Elementary School in West Englewood, teachers helped students write notes to Kanari [Gentry-Bowers], their classmate, before she died in the hospital. Since November, seven Henderson students or former students have been killed or injured by gun violence.

"Every shooting of a child brings confusion, sorrow and fear for their classmates. Left untreated, these emotions cast a dark cloud, affecting young people's ability to learn and focus — and, in the worst scenarios, leading them down the path to violence.

"That's why CTU members held out for crucial violence-prevention provisions in our most recent contract. Our new contract expands counseling and supports staffing community schools with clinicians, restorative justice practitioners and wraparound services to help break the cycle of violence.

"At the time, Mayor Emanuel claimed that there was no money to pay for these demands. And even after signing the contract, the mayor has continued to starve our schools, with help from [Illinois governor] Rauner. Carson Elementary School, down the street from Henderson, will lose more than $200,000 in the millions of cuts just announced.

"We live in one of the richest cities, in one of the richest states, in the richest nation in the world. Elected officials who line up to mourn the latest shooting while claiming that 'there is no money' to pay for prevention, or that the wealthy already 'pay too much,' are really saying that they care too little.

"Enough with the talk.

"CTU members were willing to strike to ensure that all Chicago's children get the resources that they deserve. We've forced the mayor to put our tax dollars toward young people, instead of into developer slush funds.

"But if Takuya [Holmes], Kanari and Lavontay [White Jr.] are to be more than just names on an endless list, then we will need to do much more.

"We must eradicate the conditions that create violence. That means policy change and resources: fully funded schools and thousands of new jobs that pay a fair wage.

"The members of the Chicago Teachers Union show up for our students when the cameras are off. We need our public officials to do the same."

Can I add Karen Lewis and the Chicago Teachers Union as two more of the really great things about Chicago?

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.

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.

Always Jewish, Lately Palestinian

I am Jewish because the love of others made me so.
I am Jewish because I grew up on the south side of Chicago; there even my public school was Jewish.
I am Jewish because my grandfather was oh, so Jewish, and I felt it then and feel it now.
I am Jewish because angry Irish boys felt my Jewish nose at the end of their Catholic fist.
I am Jewish because we are commanded to remember when we were slaves in Egypt and I do.
I am Jewish because we are commanded to seek justice and because I believed my teachers who said we must do so.
I am Jewish because I have never felt any other way.
I am Jewish because dissent is my faith and my chosen fate.
I am Jewish because I learned Hebrew and then forgot nearly every word of it.
I am Jewish because in my grandmother's kitchen nothing would rise, but of everything there was plenty.
I am Jewish because the South Shore Country Club was founded by people who would not let us in.
I am Jewish because my Dad once slugged a guy at Comiskey Park who cussed a Jewish pitcher for the White Sox.
I am Jewish because the Jewish god is not diminished by my disbelief.
I am Jewish because Dad was thrilled that Grandpa lived to my Bar Mitzvah and a little beyond.
I am Jewish because I wouldn't have it any other way.
I am Jewish because Emma Goldman was Jewish, and so was Karl Marx and so was Groucho Marx and Jesus, too, for that matter.
I am Jewish because of the Maccabees and Masada and crusader violence and Spanish inquisitors and Cossack pogroms and the ghetto and the death camps and because I also planted trees in Israel.
I am Jewish because Jewish workers fight in labor struggles and because Jewish people resist racism and because, like all the world’s poor, poor Jews endure.
I am Jewish because being Jewish means never using violence against another except when life, itself, is directly threatened, and that principle must never be compromised.

I am Jewish because with that claim I also claim my humanity and in my humanity I find this:
I am Palestinian because I, too, have been homeless.
I am Palestinian because Palestinian yearning is so like Jewish yearning.
I am Palestinian because I have been uplifted by the love of Palestinians.
I am Palestinian because peace in Arabic and in Hebrew bestows the same gift.
I am Palestinian because we are all children of Abraham.
I am Palestinian because, although Sarah and Hagar are our separate birth mothers, we all live in the embrace of one mother, and will return to her.

I am Jewish because if you come for the Jews, why not me also?
I am Palestinian because if you come for the Palestinians, why not me also?