This is part 1 of a series of 3 recordings of the Chicago City Council on the evening of December 1st and the early morning of December 2nd, 1987. The Council met to decide on the replacement of deceased Mayor Harold Washington, who died just before Thanksgiving, 6 months into his second 4-year term. City Council had the power to name a replacement to serve as mayor until a required special election in early 1989, which was won by former Mayor Richard M. Daley who served from 1989 through 2010, and was succeeded in 2011 by Rahm Emanuel.
This 2-hour initial episode was recorded partially as commentary in the WMAQ-TV newsroom, featuring Carol Marin, Ron Magers and Dick Kay with guest panelist former Alderman Edward Vrdolyak (14:00). The episode has news crews reporting organized protests from the streets of inner city Chicago. It features a succession of 2-minute interviews with Jesse Jackson, Aldermen Patrick O’Connor (Mayor Emanuel’s floor leader), Roman Pucinski (31:00) and Tim Evans (41:00), State Representative Art Turner (47:00), Aldermen William Beavers (50:00), Larry Bloom (53:00), Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (59:00), Bill Henry (1:14:00), Edwin Eisendrath (1:23:00), David Orr (1:29:00), Ed Burke (1:37:00) and Michael Sheahan (1:39:00), community organizers Slim Coleman (1:43:00) and Bob Lucas (1:50:00), and Alderman Sheneather Butler. This episode starts at about 4:45PM and is preliminary news coverage of a scheduled meeting of the Chicago City Council to select a new Mayor, set for 5:30 PM, but which started much later and lasted past 4 AM. The coverage in this part 1 cuts away at about 5:30PM, as aldermen were meeting with their caucuses, and resumes around 9:45PM, about two hours prior to the actual start of the meeting.
Alderman Timothy Evans was the choice of the group of Harold Washington supporters who, in Chicago, were the roots of the ongoing 21st century Democratic Party progressive movement. Evans was Washington’s choice to serve as Finance Committee Chairman (the most powerful City Council committee). Evans was believed by this group to be the successor Mayor Washington would have wanted, had he named one. Alderman Eugene Sawyer was the choice of a coalition of white and black, more conservative, aldermen. Sawyer supporters included all of Harold Washington’s white City Council antagonists, and a group of several “old-school” black aldermen who formerly supported Washington out of racial solidarity, but did not openly espouse his progressive values. The black defectors from Washington’s narrow 26-24 City Council majority helped elect Sawyer.
The original news coverage is from Chicago’s WMAQ TV news (NBC), and was later re-broadcast, in the early 1990s, on a local Chicago cable access TV station in a program assembled by the Chicago Bar Association. These episodes were copied from tapes of those cable access TV programs.
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