Fire on the Prairie: Harold Washington, Chicago Politics, and the Roots of the Obama Presidency

Gary Rivlin is the author of five books, including Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. – How the Working Poor Became Big Business, and a former staff reporter for the New York Times, where his beats included Silicon Valley and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Wired, and Fortune, among other publications, and also the Chicago Reader, where he worked as a staff writer during the Harold Washington years.

Chicago--a name synonymous with tough urban politics and racial conflict. In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., set the nation's sights on the city when he said, "If we crack Chicago, then we crack the world". Black empowerment "would take off like a prairie fire across the land". Here is the story of Harold Washington's election in 1983 as the city's first black mayor. Photographs.

Acknowledgments; A Note on Sources; Foreword by Clarence Page; Forging Barack Obama: Harold Washington, Chicago, and the Politics of Race by Larry Bennett; Prologue BOOK ONE A Racial Thing 1983 One A Cry in the Wind; Two The Conspirators; Three The Chosen; Four The Catalyst; Five The Jesse Jackson Factor; Six The Family Business; Seven The Liberal Apology; Eight The Tower of Babble; Nine A Racial Thing; Ten Positively Antebellum; Eleven A City Divided BOOK TWO Council Wars, 1983-1986 Twelve The Biggest Bully in the Bar; Thirteen Balancing Acts; Fourteen Beirut on the Lake; Fifteen Black Reform, White Reform; Sixteen The Chicago Experiment; Seventeen A Midterm Blunder; Eighteen The Continuing Saga of Clarence McClain BOOK THREE Something Less than Hate, 1986-1987 Nineteen The Reckoning; Twenty Any White Will Do; Twenty-One The Kingdom At Hand; Twenty-Two The Empire Strikes Back