This year marks the 40th anniversaries of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1968 Democratic convention uproar. Having worked with King and played an active role in organizing the convention demonstrations I will take some note of these in coming columns.

But it is also the 25th anniversary year of Harold Washington’s hard-fought nomination and election as Chicago’s first black mayor—four and a half Camelot years for the city’s black and progressive white communities, riddled with historic significance.

For several weeks now I’ve been attending a series of panel discussions, exhibitions and meetings to relive or analyze the event. Some of course composed of sentimental fluff, others offering excellent retrospective insights into sociopolitical Chicago.

One permanent product is a fine book of HW photos by Antonio Dickey and Marc PoKempner with an elegant summation of the years by Salim Muwakkil. (Full disclosure: there’s even a photo of me in it—but with Jane Byrne, not HW!)

A big question that emerges at many meetings has to do with why the Washington Coalition—consisting of virtually the entire black community, a cadre of Latino warriors and a small but active band of progressive whites—did not continue as a political force.

For some years following Washington’s death there were, indeed, “networks” that emerged in a host of north side wards from the 1983 and1987 campaigns, in addition to and sometimes overlapping with longer-standing Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO) ward groups. With a few exceptions, these rarely proved potent against the revived machine in subsequent elections.

Many progressives grew tired and frustrated; others were bought off or compromised; but key to the failure of it all was a long-lasting political rupture in the black communities. This is rarely discussed.

We must look back to what happened immediately after Washington’s death. Midst all the sturm und drang in those crazed post-Thanksgiving days when now-Cook County Clerk David Orr reigned as mayor-of-the-week, the City Council, in a sharply split vote named Eugene Sawyer as interim mayor.

Sawyer, an amiable but limited guy, had come out of the machine but became a Washington guy fairly early. Another 7–10 black aldermen also were basically machine men who didn’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blew, so they became Washingtonians of expedience.

When HW took his power to the grave, those guys reverted and supported Sawyer, with the excuse that even though he was Vrdolyak’s patsy, he was at least a black patsy who would funnel a lot of goodies to the black Vrdolyak, the late Erwin France.

The balance of the Washington coalition went with Tim Evans, now chief judge of the circuit court. They sued and won an early election in 1989 rather than 1991, the end of Washington’s second term.

So at first the Democratic primary would have two black candidates representing both machine and progressive-independent ideologies. It was bitter between them. Now comes a guy named Richard Daley with an M in between, who could sneak right between the two—looking like the reverse of two whites and a black that nominated Washington in 1983.

The Evans forces decided to drop out of the primary and form the Harold Washington Party to run in the general election against the Democratic nominee.

Now here’s the rub.

Not only did Evans not endorse Sawyer in the primary, which would have been a logical act of racial solidarity and keep the black voting population together—but one faction actually organized a black voter boycott to assure Daley’s victory because they thought he would be easier to beat!

Sawyer lost to Daley 56%-44%.

In the general election Evans got 44,000 more votes than Sawyer received, but that represented a bit more than 41% of the total vote to Daley’s 55%—while Vrdolyak, now running as a Republican, picked up the scraps.

My view then, when I was with Evans, was that there should have been an alliance with Sawyer, not open warfare, in order to have a chance to defeat Daley. The split remained an open sore for a decade or more and the black community never re-coalesced on local elections—though it came together for Carol Moseley Braun and of course Barack Obama.

The key element in the Washington coalition obviously was a progressive-led black community. Some of those leaders are still with us today, including Congressmen Danny Davis and Bobby Rush and Aldermen Ed Smith and Rick Munoz. But they appear to be more local in influence than citywide, as Washington turned out to be.

Perhaps Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. can assume the leadership of a new progressive urban movement. It’s been 25 years—time to begin again.

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Don Rose has been a longtime leader of progressive forces in Chicago and the nation; he was Martin Luther King’s press secretary when Dr. King was in Chicago. Rose is a regular political columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.