The Chicago Blueprint: Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson and Carol Moseley Braun's Multiracial Majority

Builders of Multiracial Democracy · Part 4 of 5

On the night of November 3, 1992, Carol Moseley Braun stood before a cheering crowd in Chicago as the first Black woman ever elected to the United States Senate. The victory looked sudden. Eight months earlier, almost no one had expected her to beat a two-term incumbent in the Democratic primary. But the coalition that carried her had been under construction for a decade, block by block, in the campaigns of Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson. Her win showed that a multiracial majority, organized from the bottom up, could carry a whole state.

Harold Washington's Chicago, 1983

For most of the twentieth century, Chicago's Black voters were delivered to the Cook County Democratic organization by precinct captains who traded jobs and favors for loyalty. Black wards turned out for the machine, but the machine rarely turned out for them. By the early 1980s, under Mayor Jane Byrne, frustration had boiled over: cuts to Black appointees on the housing and school boards, a boycott of the city's ChicagoFest and a growing sense that loyalty had bought nothing.

The road to 1983 began two decades earlier with a Chicago schoolteacher named Albert "Al" Raby. In 1962 Raby helped build the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), a coalition of neighborhood, parent and civil rights groups that fought segregation and discrimination in Chicago's public schools. Raby was among those who persuaded Martin Luther King Jr. to bring his movement north, and from 1965 to 1967 the two led the Chicago Freedom Movement together. Raby led open-housing marches into hostile white neighborhoods, sat across the table from Mayor Richard J. Daley, and stands beside King in photograph after photograph of the northern campaign. In 1983 Harold Washington chose Raby as his campaign manager, carrying the organizing discipline and moral authority of the King years straight into the fight for City Hall.

Activists, ministers, Black newspapers and community groups launched a voter-registration drive in 1982 that added well over 100,000 new voters to the rolls, most of them Black. Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH joined the effort. The movement then drafted a reluctant congressman, Harold Washington, a former state legislator who had broken with the machine. In the February 1983 Democratic primary, Washington defeated Byrne and Richard M. Daley, the son of the late mayor, as the two white candidates split the vote.

In the April general election, many white Democrats deserted their party for the Republican, Bernard Epton, whose slogan was "Before It's Too Late." Washington won with an overwhelming Black vote, a large majority of Latino voters and a meaningful share of white liberals along the lakefront. He took office as Chicago's first Black mayor.

Council Wars and a New Coalition

The machine did not surrender. For three years, a bloc of 29 aldermen led by Edward Vrdolyak blocked Washington's appointments and budgets in what Chicagoans called "Council Wars." Washington broke the stalemate only after a federal court ordered new ward maps under the Voting Rights Act and special elections in 1986 gave his allies control. He won reelection in 1987 and died in office on November 25 of that year.

His legacy was a coalition: Black voters at its core, joined by Mexican American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, white progressives, labor and reformers. It was the urban rehearsal for a national idea.

Jackson Takes the Idea National

Jackson had watched Washington's registration drive turn latent Black voters into a decisive bloc. He took the lesson national. His 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, under the banner of the Rainbow Coalition, registered new voters across the South and the industrial Midwest and brought Arab Americans, Latinos, farmers and gay and lesbian Americans into the same tent as Black Democrats. In 1988 he won about 6.9 million votes and carried primaries and caucuses from Michigan to Mississippi. Jackson did not win the nomination, but he proved that a multiracial, working-class coalition led by a Black candidate could compete across the country.

Moseley Braun in Springfield

Carol Moseley Braun, born in Chicago on August 16, 1947, was a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and a former federal prosecutor. She won a seat in the Illinois House from Hyde Park in 1978. When Washington became mayor, she became one of his most important allies in Springfield, serving as his legislative floor leader and fighting for the city's share of state money and for education funding. In 1988 she was elected Cook County Recorder of Deeds, the first Black woman to hold executive office in Cook County government.

The Year of the Woman, 1992

In October 1991, the Senate Judiciary Committee's handling of Anita Hill's testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas outraged many women. Illinois Sen. Alan Dixon, a Democrat, voted to confirm Thomas. Moseley Braun challenged him. With little money, she relied on the networks Washington and Jackson had built: Black churches and wards in Chicago, women's groups, Latino organizers and suburban liberals. On March 17, 1992, she won the primary with about 38 percent of the vote as Dixon and the wealthy attorney Al Hofeld split the rest. In November she defeated Republican Richard Williamson by about ten points.

"This Flag Is Not Our Flag," 1993

In the Senate, she became the first woman to sit on the Finance Committee. In July 1993, Sen. Jesse Helms tried to renew a federal design patent for the insignia of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which featured the Confederate flag. Moseley Braun took the floor and refused to yield. The insignia, she argued, honored those who had fought to keep her ancestors enslaved, and the Senate had no business putting its seal on it. Her speech changed votes, and the Senate reversed itself and rejected the patent, 75 to 25. She lost her seat in 1998, later served as ambassador to New Zealand and ran for president in 2004.

The Thread That Runs Through All Three

Shirley Chisholm called herself the candidate of "the people." Barbara Jordan built a Black-Latino alliance into the Voting Rights Act. Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson and Carol Moseley Braun turned that idea into majorities. Each understood that Black political power grows strongest when it leads a coalition rather than waits for one. In 2026, with Louisiana v. Callais narrowing the Voting Rights Act and new maps dividing Black communities, that lesson is not nostalgia. It is a strategy.

This concludes our three-part series on the architects of multiracial democracy. Subscribe free to follow our post-election coverage, or become a Black Thread founding member for $9.99 a month for life.

Builders of Multiracial Democracy

This piece is part 4 of five in the HistorianSpeaks series Builders of Multiracial Democracy, tracing how Black leaders built the coalition at the center of American democracy:

1. Cultivating Democracy: Jesse Jackson and the Multiracial Bench 2. Unbought, Unbossed, Unfinished: Shirley Chisholm and the Road to Hakeem Jeffries 3. “My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole”: Barbara Jordan, Gus Adair and Texas 4. The Chicago Blueprint: Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson and Carol Moseley Braun (you are here) 5. Alexis Herman Opened the Doors of Labor

Subscribe free for every piece, or join Black Thread as a founding member for $9.99 a month for life.

Follow the Thread into Black Thread

The history we write here is not a collection of isolated past events. It is the thread that ties together, connects and extends the Black struggle for justice, equity and inclusion, from historic moments in the past to monumental changes in the present. Experience these moments in our blogs, and go deeper in the long-form features of our magazine, Black Thread. Subscribe free, or become a Founding Member at $9.99 a month for life.