`Chicago will have a long hot summer,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. promised in May of 1966, ”but not a summer of racial violence. Rather it will be a long hot summer of peaceful nonviolence.”
King`s civil rights marches and rallies in faraway places such as Mississippi and Alabama came North for the Chicago Freedom Movement that summer.
For the city`s young black activists, the prospect that King was targeting Chicago was the fulfillment of a dream: to spark a movement to break the local power structure headed, of course, by Mayor Richard J. Daley and his Democratic Machine.
For many other blacks, those who had found a measure of success and security in exchange for fealty to the Machine, the prospect was unsettling.
A young up-and-coming worker in the city water department who had caught the eye of 6th Ward powerhouse Robert Miller, an alderman and Democratic committeeman, remembers it well. He watched how the black Daley loyalists either stood silently or even criticized the King marches, echoing Daley`s line that outsiders were bringing trouble to Chicago. Miller was known as one of the ”Silent Six” black aldermen who supported Daley.
The precinct worker believed it was best to lie low in his city job, work his way up in Miller`s ward organization on the South Side and stay away from both the King marches and the criticism of King by Machine blacks.
”I don`t think their hearts were in it,” said the former precinct worker, Eugene Sawyer, of the black leaders who criticized King. ”I was a city employee. I never got involved in it.”
Sawyer now was sitting erect and proud behind the desk of Daley`s old office on the 5th floor of City Hall. A picture of him with Daley is one of many mementos on the credenza behind him.
”The structure of politics here during the Daley years was such that if you did certain things, you hurt people. . . You went along with things in order to make sure that we were able to help people,” he said. ”They (the Machine bosses) delivered to you, but they could also punish.”
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But quietly, he said, black leaders in the Machine such as Miller, U.S. Rep. William Dawson and Ald. Ralph Metcalfe helped the movement, offering financial assistance to King.
”They were people who wanted somehow to break that shackle, but they had so many people that would get hurt, so many people who would lose jobs and positions. . . (who) supported families and sent their kids to school, so it was just a matter of survival.”
”Bob Miller was a part of the Democratic Machine but he always had a commitment to the civil rights movement. While he might have been perceived as being one of the Silent Six, he always got himself involved in giving money to those groups that were doing the kinds of things that Dr. King was doing.
”I traveled to the South with him. My dad had had a stroke. We had raised some money under Bob Miller and we went down to visit my dad, take him the money and we left there and stopped in Philadelphia, Miss. . . . and visited with Dr. King while he was there in a motel room, he and Medgar Evers (both destined to be martyrs of the civil rights movement).”
Ultimately, King`s prediction of a long but peaceful summer was wrong. Riots broke out on the West Side, which Daley blamed on outsiders brought in by King although King tried to halt the disturbances.
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Growing up in Greensboro, Ala., Eugene Sawyer Jr. learned from his father when to buck the establisment and when to live with it. Bernice and Eugene Sawyer raised their six children ”to look out after each other,” said the mayor, the oldest child, born Sept. 3, 1934.
”I grew up in a small Southern town in Alabama. My dad was a mortician and an interior decorator (chiefly painting, sanding floors, wallpapering). And he did both his mortuary work and he did decorating because there really wasn`t enough (work in either field) to carry him.
”We were all taught to work . . . to contribute, to be a part of the family. I used to roast peanuts and sell them on Saturday, because also in that little funeral home dad had a little section set aside where he sold candy and peanuts and things like that,” said Sawyer, laughing at the memory. ”My dad was the only licensed mortician in the county but they did, you know, in those times take the bodies to some other county if they were white. The schools were segregated. While we did play on the white (football) field, we did not play against them nor could we go to their school.
”One case I rememeber, I guess that was during my junior year in high school, we were walking home one night, and some white kids passed by on a truck and threw off what we thought was urine. . . I was so mad and I came on steaming.”
”Dad was always the kind of person who stood up in a sense, but he recognized that a lot of those things were wrought with peril.
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Sawyer attended Alabama State College, an all-black school in Montgomery that was part of the state`s segregated education system. Entered in a premed program, he was also busy with school activities and his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. State Rep. Jesse White (D., Chicago), who attended college with Sawyer, recalled: ”Gene Sawyer has . . . never been a real good speaker. But he was classified as a doer. He could be measured on his follow through and his stick-to-it-ness.”
In his first taste of political action, Sawyer led a campus strike.
”What happened was the food in the dining hall, we thought, was terrible. We used to get for lunch prunes and cheese. We used to call them stoppers and openers,” Sawyer chuckled.
”We had some complaints about not enough toilet paper, hand towels, soap all that stuff in the washroom. . . . So one night a bunch of the guys went out and they got some lime and we marked `strike` all over campus. And the next day everything was shut down just like that.” After a few days the administration agreed to provide better supplies, Sawyer said.
On Dec. 1, 1955 in Sawyer`s senior year, Rosa Parks decided not to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery as blacks were required to do then, and she was arrested. A young black preacher, new in town, was pushed to the forefront by local ministers to head the Montgomery bus boycott. Alabama State students, Sawyer among them, pitched in to help the preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ”We sort of watched around (King`s) house. We went to the post office. We went in there to pick up mail on occasion. There was in Montgomery a local cab stand where most blacks assembled to get taxis; we went by to check on that. We also had the pool situated in the same area, a car pool to transport people around (during the bus boycott).”
Sawyer was struck by the effectiveness of the bus boycott, which started on Dec. 5. ” The word got out to everybody, and you could see men who were carpenters and plumbers walking (to work) with their tools, domestics walking. People just automatically responded.”
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After graduating from college, Sawyer taught high school biology in Mississippi. He had spent summers during college with relatives in Chicago, and his wife, Celeste, also had relatives here. In 1957 the couple moved to Chicago, and Sawyer got a job as a chemist with the City Water Department. (He and Celeste reared three children but later divorced. He is now separated from his second wife, Eleanor, and lives alone in a home on South Michigan Avenue.) ”I never did really think I would ever be really involved in politics,” said Sawyer, but involved he was from the moment he settled in Chicago.
Henrynne Lewis, with her late husband, Simon, both longtime precinct workers, introduced Sawyer to the 6th Ward organization.
”We introduced him to Bob Miller, and he volunteered his servies to the ward,” said Lewis, 73. ”Then he got this job as water meter reader. I think that he was a go-getter. I think that he was ambitious to the extent that he worked his way up through the organization. He started volunteering to help wherever he was needed. After he got home from his job, he would answer the telephone and do anything that Bob Miller asked him to do.”
Miller lost a re-election bid in 1967, and Sawyer, then financial secretary of the ward organization, was selected by the precinct captains to be the new ward committeeman. ”I guess I let a lot of people off from paying their dues,” he jokes. Then he had to go downtown to get the stamp of approval from Daley.
”I thought at one time Daley would be the kind of person who would be a tyrant when you came into the office, but you could hardly hear him speak. He was so quiet. He spoke very softly. And what I thought was it commanded attention. You had to give full attention to what he was saying because he spoke softly, and of course when you`re finished he stood up,” which was Daley`s signal, Sawyer laughed, for ”go on, get out of here, your time`s up, you`re done.”
”I can remember John Stroger, Harold Washington, in fact most of the individuals that you see now in government, a lot of people were all a part of that whole structure because that was the only game in town. Either you were in or you were out. In order to advance and to get the knowledge you needed to learn government, that was the only way you could learn it.”
But even as others were breaking with Daley, Sawyer remained with the Machine. After Daley`s death, in 1976, Sawyer, who had been elected alderman in 1971, supported Michael Bilandic`s mayoral bid in 1977, though Harold Washington was making his first run at the office. However, Sawyer launched the successful effort that elected Roland Burris as state comptroller in 1978, the first black to hold statewide office.
In 1982 the movement to elect a black mayor was building. On the day that Harold Washington announced his candidacy, Sawyer had just attended a groundbreaking in his ward with Mayor Jane Byrne.
”I left and went to the ward office, and the phone rang and somebody from the press said, `Listen, Harold Washington just announced for mayor. Are you going to support him?` and I said yes. Five minutes later the phone rings. (It`s Byrne.) She says what happened? I said, `I told you back in April if Harold or Roland ran I was going to support them.` She said do what you have to do. Even though I had been a part of the whole Machine politics, so was Tim Evans. He was there, too, and he didn`t move out for Harold until way after I did . . . .”
Sawyer was the first alderman and committeeman to endorse Washington in his 1983 race for mayor. Evans, however, says he was also quick to support Washington.
Washington had won Sawyer`s ward in 1977. ”Very honestly I looked at that and analyzed it,” Sawyer said. ”I also looked at the fact that Roland ran very well and he won. . . I spent the whole summer of `82 going all over the ward, to block clubs . . . talking to people, getting their responses.
”And when the issue of a black mayor always surfaced, they always indicated they would be supportive of it, and I had done basically what I felt was a full poll myself and I had made my mind made up.
”In fact, that was probably the biggest fights I had with a lot of friends of mine in politics who were thinking I was crazy, I was stupid, I was dumb, I was going to get . . . run out of town, she (Byrne) was going to win, there was no way this black man was going to ever win the election. I said, well, I`m out there. And it was a decision that I made and I was going to stick with it.”
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Dogging Sawyer through his 14 months in office have been two controversies. Less than a week after his selection as acting mayor by the City Council, on Dec. 2, 1987, The Tribune revealed that Sawyer had voted for a zoning change in 1976 for a supermarket whose attorney, Fred Sudak, had given Sawyer $30,000. Sawyer, who has called the payment a ”finder`s fee”
for helping Sudak obtain a loan at a bank where Sudak already had a relationship, has reneged on a promise to release his tax return to clarify the matter.
Sudak says he does not remember details of the payment but volunteered to Tribune reporters that it occurred long enough ago that it fell beyond the statute of limitations.
”The Internal Revenue Service knows all of these facts,” Sawyer said, although the IRS may not have known all of the facts at the time. ”If I had done something wrong on the Sudak matter, I`m certain they would would have followed through on it,” said Sawyer. ”That money I didn`t even anticipate, I really didn`t, never did, and I was doing it for development in my ward. The area had been redlined, still is being redlined.” If I had been trying to line my pockets or something I would have speculated then, but I didn`t have any money to buy with anyway. I have not ever in any way tried to make a lot of money in government. I live modestly.”
Despite his claim of a modest lifestyle, Sawyer was known for wearing flashy jewelry, traveling extensively and owning two cars, a Mercedes-Benz and a Cadillac, although his tax returns in 1985, for example, showed he made only $25,000. Since becoming mayor, he has dispensed with the jewelry and rides in city cars.
The other issue arose last spring when it took five days for Sawyer to fire mayoral aide Steve Cokely after it was revealed that Cokely had produced anti-Semitic, tape-recorded lectures. Sawyer knew about Cokely`s comments months earlier.
Sawyer says he handled Cokely in a style that he has become accustomed to over the years, letting things play out; but as mayor he says he should have fired him a day or two earlier than he did.
Hurley Green, publisher of the Chicago Independent Bulletin newspaper and manager of Sawyer`s first campaign for alderman, said that Sawyer ”seems to attract loyalty and give loyalty” and that`s what might have gotten him into trouble on Cokely.
Gene liked him and thought he could turn him,” Greeb saud. ”Cokely was trying to make a name for himself, and Gene didn`t understand the full implication of what he was doing. Gene thought Steve should have resigned. Reagan has made the same types of decisions. He has held on to people long after the public thought he should.”
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Being both the mayor and a candidate leaves scant time for enjoying the little things in life. Sawyer says that would change should he be voted out of the mayor`s office.
”You know I have 2 grandkids that I have not spent much time with; I haven`t had an opportunity to because of what happened during the last year. One is 3 and the other one is 7 months. I`d like to keep them for awhile, spend some time. They`re both girls . . . The first grandkid was a boy who passed away when he was 3 days old. He choked . . . And I always wanted a grandson. I`d maybe even sit down and write about my Dec. 2 situation.”
Sawyer`s opponents had argued that Sawyer`s selection that morning as acting mayor by Machine stalwarts, black and white, was a sellout out of Washington`s reform agenda. Thousands of residents who had supported Washington gathered outside city hall in protest.
”I never want to see it again in my life. I really don`t. It wasn`t me they were talking about. People had gotten themselves worked up on something selfishly to protect themselves and to try keep those jobs up here. They weren`t concerned about the people. They didn`t even care about them, nothing. They were concerned about themselves.”
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Friday: Richard M. Daley