FROM BLACK PANTHER TO CONGRESSMAN
Self-proclaimed 1960s revolutionary Bobby Rush changed with the times
“A lot of people expected me to walk into the City Council wearing a leather jacket, dark glasses and a bandoleer of shotgun shells on both sides. I’m not like that.” — Bobby Rush, after he won a seat as 2nd Ward alderman
Considering his political zigzagging, assigning longtime congressman Bobby Rush his final grade is no mean trick. A self-proclaimed revolutionary, he worked as a financial planner and insurance salesman. As defense minister of the Black Panthers, he said African Americans needed arms to defend themselves from rogue cops. In Congress, he championed gun control.
Fortunately, the 15-term congressman’s contradictions aren’t impenetrable.Rush’s measure can be taken by comparison with another revolutionary politician. In 1848 Alexandre August Ledru-Rollin, the leader of a revolution in France, was asked why he was chasing after an infuriated Parisian crowd.
“There go the people,” he replied. “I must follow them, for I am their leader. “
Rush has similarly kept pace with an African American community that is far different from what it was when he stepped into the political spotlight.
Sixty years ago Black leaders didn’t dare question the Democratic machine. They quietly accepted the white political bosses’ crumbs.
Today, Chicago is led by its third Black mayor. The U.S. has had a Black president.
Rush probably couldn’t guess who that would be when he first crossed paths with Barack Obama in 2000 as the young political upstart made a bid for Rush’s seat in a largely African American and working-class congressional district.
“Barack Obama went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” said Rush during that year’s Democratic primary campaign before soundly defeating Obama with more than 60% of the vote.
Obama spoke like the University of Chicago professor that he was. Rush spoke the language of the streets where he was raised, just west of the city’s glitzy Gold Coast neighborhood. He attended an integrated grade school and was a Boy Scout.
Money being scarce in his mother’s household, he dropped out of high school and joined the Army. He was motivated by President John F. Kennedy’s call for young people to devote themselves to public service.
Assigned to an anti-aircraft base in Chicago, he encountered a vocally racist commanding officer from Alabama, then went AWOL when the Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. As the West Side erupted in rioting, he found his way into the Black Panthers. He saw it as an opportunity to do something for desperately poor people abandoned by the city’s establishment.
“He was responsible for the party’s breakfast program for black school children, a medical program, and a food giveaway plan,” the Tribune reported in 1984.
But in 1969 police, under orders from State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan, shot their way into a West Side apartment where Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and another Panther were sleeping, killing both men. The assassination of Hampton, founder of the Panthers’ Illinois chapter, left Rush its chairman.
Attempting to cover up the crime, Hanrahan said the occupants shot first. The Tribune bought into the lie, printing a photo of supposed bullet-exit holes in the door. In reality, they were nail heads.
The gruesome affair infuriated the Black community, which came out in mass to defeat Hanrahan’s bid for reelection. That demonstrated a potential for reform via the electoral process.
Initially Rush didn’t take that route. In 1972 he served six months in prison on a weapons charge, having carried a gun into a police station. But shortly thereafter he left the Panthers.
“We started glorifying thuggery and drugs.” he told People magazine. “I don’t repudiate any of my involvement in the Panther party — it was part of my maturing.”
When Harold Washington, until then a machine loyalist, mounted an independent campaign for mayor in 1983, Rush ran for 2nd Ward alderman. Both won, shocking the city’s political establishment.
“A lot of people expected me to walk into the City Council wearing a leather jacket, dark glasses and a bandoleer of shotgun shells on both sides,” Rush said. “I’m not like that. “
But that’s how he appeared in the imaginations of machine aldermen facing their worst nightmare: a Black mayor with a reform agenda. Rush was a sitting target during the Council Wars,
the guerrilla resistance of Washington’s opponents that stymied his administration.
When Washington died shortly after being reelected to a second term, the machine regained City Hall and Rush was earmarked for political limbo. He also mounted a quixotic campaign to preserve the late mayor’s heritage. It was provoked by a School of the Art Institute student who painted a portrait of Washington wearing women’s underwear.
With two other Black aldermen and accompanied by police officers, Rush took the painting off the museum’s wall in 1988. “Mirth & Girth,” as the painting was titled, suffered a small tear during the fracas.
A judge found the action “a crude display of government censorship” that violated the student’s First Amendment rights and the city settled with the student for $95,000 in damages.
By 1992 Rush had his eye on the congressional seat held by Charles Hayes, a Black union official and civil rights activist.
Saying Hayes had been “close to a nonentity” in Congress, the Tribune endorsed Rush. On the eve of the primary, a breaking news story revealed that Hayes had bounced 716 checks at the House of Representatives bank.
Hayes counterpunched, alleging that Rush had stiffed his ex-wife the child support due her.
“Not one child has gone hungry because of what we did in the House on these bank overdrafts, as you call them,” Hayes said.
Rush won the argument at the polls.
“Being sworn into Congress after almost being murdered by police officers, that’s a giant step,” Rush said in January 1993, noting that “25 years ago he thought he would be dead by now. “
For the next three decades Rush did the steady stream of grunt work that comes with the job: serving on committees, drafting prospective legislation, making you-scratch-my-back, I-scratch-yours deals.
Yet he occasionally drew upon theatrical skills honed in his Black Panther days. In 1995 he led a march down Clark Street demanding that Gregory Becker, an off-duty cop who killed a homeless man, not be let off with a slap on the wrist.
Then Rush hurried back to Washington and flipped a switch to register his vote on an issue of the day, as the Tribune noted. Becker was indicted and served prison time.
When Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida, Rush noted that the self-appointed security guard who shot the 17-year-old African American assumed he was a thief because of the cut of his clothes.
“Racial profiling has to stop,” Rush, dressed in a hoodie, said in the House of Representatives on March 28, 2012. “Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum. “
He was gaveled out of order for violating the rule against wearing a hat in the House.
By the time Rush announced he wouldn’t run for a 16th term, some of his most cherished projects had been realized, such as the first federal legislation against lynching. Others were languishing, including an inquiry into FBI surveillance that he and other dissidents were subject to in the 1960s, without a judge’s authorization.
He explained his taking leave of Washington variously. Having belatedly taken a doctoral degree, he was pastoring at a Chicago church, thus returning to community organizing.
But he also offered a highly personal riff on the well-worn mantra of retiring politicians: wanting to spend more time with family.
“I don’t want to be an historical figure to my grandchildren,” he told the Sun-Times. Someone they’d learn about in school, or maybe see in a televised biography.
“I want them to know me on an intimate level, know something about me, and I want to know something about them. “