- Don Bierman
- In a 1983 debate with Mayor Jane Byrne and Cook County state’s attorney Richard M. Daley, Harold Washington called attention to the enormous black unemployment rate in Chicago, a problem that continues more than 30 years later.
Tonight at 7 PM, WTTW will televise the last of the three mayoral runoff debates between incumbent Rahm Emanuel and Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. The Tribune says moderator Phil Ponce should focus the debate on “the only question that matters”—how to fix the city’s finances. He should force the candidates beyond their usual talking points and accept only very specific answers, the Trib asserts.
More than three decades later, Mayor Emanuel’s $30-million-plus campaign fund has made it easy for him to spread the rosy news about the city’s revival under his leadership. “In the past four years, unemployment has fallen by more than a third and 73,000 new jobs have been created in Chicago—the largest gains in employment of any major city in the country,” one of his press releases boasts.
In a city that truly cared about equality, the vast and persistent disparity between black Chicagoans and other Chicagoans, on this and other measures—graduation rates, mortality rates, crime rates—might be considered “the only question that matters.”
With all his campaign cash, and with the benefits of incumbency, Emanuel can afford to speak frankly about segregation. He can afford to, but he hasn’t. He’s as full of platitudes about segregation as Garcia is about finances.
