Chicago divided: the making of a black mayor.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew

Chicago Divided: The Making of a Black Mayor.

Paul Kleppner. Northern Illinois University Press, $26.00. In 1955, Richard Daley, just elected major, reneged on his promise to resign as head of the Cook County Democratic Party. While earlier mayors had to appease neighborhood committeemen (who ran their wards like fiefdoms and cared little about citywide problems), Daley sought and gained control of all the levers of political and governmental power--candidate selection, endorsements, patronage, and the like.

Chicago blacks were a part of the machine until the mid-1960s. They didn't have must choice: black citizens needed the machine for public employment, and black candidates relied on the machine for their political survival.

This uneasy alliance ended in the 1960s when race was pushed to the top of the political agenda--and blacks saw an indifferent Daley turn hostile. Kleppner gives it scant attention, but surely a signal event came in 1966 during Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign. With the major civil rights legislation behind him, King settled in the Chicago tenements to draw attention to that city's slum conditions. When he tested Illinois's openhousing laws, whites greeted him with rocks and fists. For many Chicago blacks this was proof that they had it as bad as their Mississippi brethren. Two years later the mayor, confronted by rioting on the night of King's death, issued "shoot-to-kill' orders to Chicago policy.

Black political fortunes began to rise in 1975 when Daley's death set off a feud within the machine. By the 1983 election, the rift among machine politicians had widened so much that half of the party backed June Byrne and the rest sided with prodigal son Illinois Attorney General Richard Daley Jr. This split plus a mobilized black electorate...