Mayor Lori Lightfoot

Mayor Lori Lightfoot (1962- ), attorney and politician. Lori Elaine Lightfoot was born in Massillon, Ohio, and her interest in politics was shaped in part by watching the Watergate hearings in the early 1970s. When she was young her father suffered a serious illness that put him in a coma for nearly a year and left him with a permanent hearing loss, but he supported the family as a barber and laborer, while her mother was a home healthcare aide who also served on the school board. At her predominantly white high school she was elected class president and played in the school band and on the basketball team. She earned a political science degree from the University of Michigan with honors in 1984, then worked for several members of Congress before enrolling at the University of Chicago Law School. There she served as student body president, clerked for a member of the Michigan Supreme Court, and led efforts to ban a prominent law firm from campus after one of its recruiters made racist and sexist remarks to a student. After graduating in 1989 Lightfoot went to work for Mayer Brown, one of the largest law firms in the world, where she represented clients on both sides of issues such as police brutality and racial gerrymandering and also chaired the firm’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. After several years she left private service to become a federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Illinois, motivated in part by a desire to bring more diversity to the office and by her family’s past difficulties with the criminal justice system. As a federal prosecutor, she fought violent crime, bankruptcy fraud, and public corruption, most notably Operation Silver Shovel, an FBI investigation that led to the convictions of six alderman and twelve other individuals. From 2002 to 2004 Lightfoot served as chief administrator of the Chicago Police Department Office of Professional Standards, which investigated charges of police misconduct such as shootings of unarmed civilians. She then moved to the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and the Chicago Department of Procurement Services, where she acted against corruption in the Illinois governor’s office. In 2015 Lightfoot was appointed president of the Chicago Police Board, which replaced the Office of Professional Standards as the institution responsible for investigating police misconduct and proposing reforms such greater community oversight and bans on chokeholds and shooting into crowds. Her work received international attention after a black teenager named Laquan McDonald was shot by a police officer while walking away and then shot fifteen more times while lying on the ground. More than a year later, video footage led to what Lightfoot called an “utter lack of a culture of accountability” and a culture that had “essentially turned the code of silence into official policy.” The outcry over this murder and the broader problem of police brutality led to the conviction of McDonald’s killer and effectively ended the careers of several Chicago politicians. 

In May 2018 Lightfoot resigned from the Police Board and announced that she would run for Chicago mayor. She was initially considered a longshot in a field of fourteen candidates that included establishment politicians such as the son and brother of former mayors, the former heads of the Illinois Board of Education and the Chicago Public Schools, and Tony Preckwinkle, the president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Lightfoot, however, ran as an outsider who would bring reform, combat crime, and increase access to housing, and the desire for change amongst voters increased with the arrest of an alderman who had ties to several of the other candidates. In the February 2019 election Lightfoot received the most votes, 17% of the total, but because no candidate had received more than 50% city law required a run-off election two months later. Her opponent was be Preckwinkle, thus guaranteeing that the next mayor would be a black woman, and this divided Chicago’s black community, with some activists and politicians charging that she had not done enough to advocate for African Americans. At the same time, she received the endorsement of both the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, as well as the African American publication N’Digo, several dozen labor unions, the LGBTQ Victory Fund, Father Michael Pfleger, and seven candidates who had been eliminated after the first round. In April 2019 Lightfoot received 73% of the votes, winning all fifty voting wards and 2,049 of 2,069 voting precincts. This made her Chicago’s second female mayor (following Jane Byrne), third African American mayor (following Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer), first black female mayor, and first LGBT mayor. She was also one of only eighteen black woman and one of six openly LGBT people in history to serve as mayor of a city ranked in the top 100 in population. On election night she stood next to her wife, whom she had married in 2014 on the first day that same-sex marriage was legalized in Illinois, and declared “out there tonight, a lot of little girls and boys are watching. They’re watching us, and they’re seeing the beginning of something, well, a little bit different. They’re seeing a city reborn, a city where it doesn’t matter what color you are…where it doesn’t matter who you love just as long as you love with all your heart.”

After taking office in May 2019 her first act was an executive order that ended the tradition of aldermanic prerogative, which gave members of the City Council veto power over bills that impacted their wards. Her other proposals to combat Council corruption included live streaming of committee meetings, banning alderpersons from most outside employment, increasing fines for ethics violations, having the ward boundary map drawn by an independent commission rather than the Council itself, and enabling the city inspector general to audit alderpersons. “This is a first of many changes that we’ll ultimately make over the course of the four years,” she declared, “people who are elected officials and appointed officials have to put the peoples’ work first.” She renegotiated a multi-billon dollar development plan on the North Side so that the development company would hire more minority and female contractors, and she created the new position of chief equity officer to address racial inequality. Her efforts to combat crime include increasing police patrols and park district youth programs during the traditionally violent Memorial Day weekend and a new community policing initiative to strengthen connections between law enforcement and local business leaders. Other plans include raising minimum wage to $15 an hour, reducing the city’s deficit, and increasing civilian oversight in the police department. As the Democratic mayor of America’s third-largest city, she has also been asked to comment in national political issues, and when recently asked about the upcoming presidential election she responded “[Democrats need] an agenda that defends human rights, our planet and our economy. We’ve got to inspire and mobilize folks in 2020. This is no time for defeatism. It’s a time for courage. And we’ve got to stand for more than we are against Donald Trump.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.

U.S. Representative Rev. Richard H. Cain

U.S. Representative Rev. Richard H. Cain (1825-1887), minister and politician. Richard Harvey Cain was born in Greenbrier County, Virginia (now West Virginia), the son of free parents, and grew up in Gallipolis, Ohio. Cain learned to read and write in Sunday School and worked as a barber before attending divinity school in Missouri. He was licensed to preach by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, but he was frustrated by the denomination’s racial policies and so moved to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). In 1859, he received his first ministerial assignment in Muscatine, Iowa, which had one of the first black churches founded west of the Mississippi River. He pastored a church in Brooklyn during the Civil War, and when the war ended he went to Charleston to help the recently freed slaves as superintendent of missions. His congregation grew to more than 4,000 members, and in the words of one biographer, “Church after church sprang into existence as if by magic under his charge.” He also operated a school for former slaves, edited the newspaper Missionary Record, and called for greater rights for African Americans in his 1868 article “Address to the People of South Carolina.” Black South Carolinians in fact did gain the right to vote that year, and Cain was nominated to serve as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. Many whites were so strongly opposed to his nomination and to any black political activity that his school was forced to close and there were several attempted attacks against his family and property; “He was compelled to have a bodyguard wherever he went,” his daughter later recalled. In response to the threats, Cain publicly declared that African Americans were “prepared to stand by their liberties...and see that the liberties of their children are guarded with sleepless vigilance. Let their foes be aware!”

He helped create a new state constitution with greater rights for African Americans, then earned election to the state legislature, where he became a strong advocate for racial equality and black economic empowerment. In 1869, he created a proposal to help former slaves purchase government land, and when the government failed to provide funding, he used his own money. The community known as Lincolnville prospered for several years but then failed when Cain was unable to keep up the mortgage payments. In 1870, he helped create the black-owned Enterprise Railroad and served as its president. Two years later, he became one of the first African Americans elected to the United States Congress, winning 71% of the vote in a four-way race. U.S. Congressman Cain focused his energies on passing a civil rights law to ban racial discrimination in restaurants, public transportation, and other venues. In several speeches before Congress, he described his own experience of being denied a train seat while traveling to Washington D.C. and stated that “There will be no real and enduring peace so long as the rights of any class of men are trampled under foot.”

During his second term, he introduced a bill to fund public schools through the sale of government land, arguing “The education of the nation is paramount, and should not be neglected…It is an accepted axiom, I believe everywhere, that the more intelligent the citizen is the better citizen he is.” By the mid-1870s, though, southern blacks were losing their hard-fought political rights due to racial violence and indifference by the federal government. Between 1871 and 1901 there were twenty-three African Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives, all in the Deep South. After African Americans lost the ability to vote in the South, there were no more black members of Congress anywhere in the country until the Great Migration helped launch the careers of black politicians in the urban North, and it was not until after the Civil Rights Movement that southern blacks returned to Congress. As part of this late 19th-century movement back towards white supremacy, Cain was not nominated for reelection in 1880. He briefly considered moving to Liberia but instead went to Texas, where he distanced himself from politics and focused on church affairs. He was elevated to the position of bishop and also served as president of Paul Quinn College, the oldest black university west of the Mississippi River. In 1884 he returned to Washington D.C., where he served as a bishop for that district until his death in 1887. Upon his passing, a group of fellow ministers and activists declared: “Full of mercy and good fruits he gave himself...He died in the Lord; ‘he rests from his labors; his works do follow him.’”

©David Brodnax, Sr.