Professor from Practice Sharon Fairley on Chicago's Mayoral Election
Chicago, Seeking a New Mayor, Sees Many Black Residents Voting With Their Feet
CHICAGO — The glitz of downtown, the influx of tech jobs, the tourist dollars pouring into city coffers: None of those things are keeping many in Chicago’s black neighborhoods from loading their belongings into car trunks and moving vans and seeking better lives someplace else.
As Chicagoans go to the polls on Tuesday to choose a new mayor in one of the most wide-open elections the nation’s third-largest city has experienced in generations, many African-Americans have cast their votes another way. They have moved out.
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Chicago stands at a pivotal crossroads, and with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision not to seek a third term, its next leader must contend with a longstanding sense of division between a prosperous economic core and forgotten neighborhoods.
“People are frustrated and they’re saying, ‘We’ve just had enough. No more mayors for the 1 percent. This city belongs to all of us, not just the people who live in the Gold Coast,’” Sharon Fairley, a former federal prosecutor who also led an agency that oversees Chicago police, said of the hurdles facing the next mayor. “The biggest challenge that anyone coming into this position now is facing is generating a feeling of inclusiveness.”
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