SWEARING-IN CHEERED BY LIGHTFOOT’S MOTHER, MASSILLON CONTINGENT
Of course Chicago’s brand new Mayor Lori Lightfoot had her mother front and center to witness her historic inauguration Monday as the first black woman and first openly gay person to take charge of the country’s third largest city.
But 90-year-old Ann Lightfoot wasn’t the only one who made the trip from her northeastern Ohio hometown where her daughter grew up.
Many in Massillon describe the city of about 32,000 as a family, so along with Lightfoot relatives and church friends, Massillon, Ohio, sent its own mayor, who’d declared May 20 “Lori Lightfoot Day” back home, plus 10 journalism students from the high school where a teenaged Lightfoot made a name for herself as a girl in charge. Talk about a teachable moment. Ann Lightfoot was seated front and center in an unmissable pink pantsuit, flanked by her children, who live all over the country, and her best friend of almost 50 years.
“I gather the whole impact of [the inauguration] hasn’t hit me yet, but nevertheless I’m very happy and very proud,” the elder Lightfoot said before the ceremony. “My four children are all together today — that means a lot.”
Mayor Lightfoot, though typically stoic, cried when she introduced her mother, a former school board member in Massillon, to the crowd of thousands at the Wintrust Arena as the person “who laid the foundation for everything that I am today . . . . She’s my role model, my champion. The woman whose dreams and high expectations for me propelled me through life.”
“Mom, most importantly, you and dad told me that I could be anything I wanted to be. That I could not be held back by my race, gender, or family financial status. That I should hold my head high and not let anyone else dictate the course of my future. That no goal was out of reach, that no victory was too unlikely to pursue.”
Marva Dodson, a family friend from the Lightfoots’ church, traveled to Chicago with her daughter Celeste Jones.
“I’m very happy for your city and hoping that there will be noticeable change,” Dodson said.
High above the floor, kids from Washington High School scribbled notes and shot video of the history unfolding in front of them so they can write about it for class.
“I’m not sure what type of notes they’re taking, what quotes, what’s hit them that they know that they can use in their story,” said teacher David Lee Morgan Jr., a former reporter. “But I’m confident that because of the magnitude of this, and just being here and seeing how important this is and how historical it is, that they’re able to know what they’re looking for.”
Honoring the Massillon Tigers football team so central to the town’s identity, the football coach who came as a chaperone wore a bright orange jacket, and all the boys had orange striped ties embroidered with mascot Obie the tiger. (Mayor Kathy Catazaro-Perry also stood out on the arena floor in an orange dress.)
The students’ assignments include stories about the diversity in Chicago that doesn’t exist in Massillon and some hard news from Lightfoot’s inaugural address.
And 17-year-old Daeshona Miller, who’s now determined to move to Chicago, will file a behind-the-scenes piece about the private luncheon at City Hall — “Amazing!” “Once in a lifetime!” as she and her friends described it — where the new mayor they’ve deemed a role model paused long enough to take a photograph with them.