Letter: Mystery in Harold Washington’s early death?
December 31, 2007
Substance:
“IT WAS THE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING’, 1987…”
It has been twenty years since Harold Washington tragically perished in the not so friendly confines of Chicago City Hall.
Though I had lived in Chicago for only a couple of years, it was nonetheless, very shocking, when I turned on the radio of the truck that I had rented to move our furniture the day before Thanksgiving. It announced that mayor Harold Washington had died. I had taken the afternoon off from Kosciuzko School, which now has a new building named after Rudy Lozano, a Harold Washington supporter.
Lozano, a labor organizer in part, had been mysteriously murdered, and though there is a man in prison (Escobar) for it, as the song goes, “no one believed in the Police story” (“Nadie creia en los cuentos de la policia”).
On the radio that afternoon I learned that “Harold” as his friends called him, had died. I was very impressed by this articulate gentleman, and his sophisticated smile, who so valiantly stood up to the 29 aldermen who tried their to thwart his progressive agenda.
I only recall having seen Harold up close just once. After the tragic Mexico City earthquake, while passing out some political literature about Nicaragua out front of where they were having a benefit for the victims, the mayor was getting out of a big black car, and he looked me squarely in the face, while I was saying “La Realidad en Nicaragua” (the reality in Nicaragua), a Quixote center publication out of Washington D.C.
My Nicaraguan spouse and our three very young children were down there, while Ronald Reagan “zap” and his likes were waging a not so secret war against that sovereign country. Sound familiar? I found it interesting that later, while I was in Central America, the city had invited Daniel Ortega to Chicago, and a peace proposal had been drafted. So I can’t say that I actually ever met Harold, but a respectable retired African American educator once told me that I was fortunate to have met some of the distinguished people that I have met.
One such person was Al Raby, who I had no idea who he was while chatting with him about our Peace Corps experiences in Ghana, and Costa Rica in a school cafeteria. Only after reading about him in his obituary did I learn that he had been working for Harold in communications, was a self-educated person for the most part, and was largely responsible for having invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Chicago 40 years ago.
The following Sunday I went to a Baptist church, and never in my life had I heard so much gospel music in one setting. Upon leaving I told a lady who asked me why I had visited the church that it was because of this distinguished activist that touched me so much upon learning about his passing on. Why he died a year after Harold near the same place that the mayor had perished is more than peculiar. Did Al Raby know something about what really happened to Harold? Just the other day an instructor told me, “they took him out”.
The first time I ever heard such a thing was over a dozen years ago, when a poor neighbor lady asked me to take her to a food depository to get some groceries that they were giving away. She was convinced that something was put into Harold’s coffee,that brought on his massive heart failure.
Countless others have told similar stories about how mayor Washington died. Of course if so, this has been a monumental cover-up.
John Whitfield,
Washington HS, Chicago
jwhitfi894@aol.com
By: Mark Shaeffer
Harold Washington's Death
I just heard for the first time that there is widespread belief that Mayor Washington was assassinated. My friend believes it was a cough drop given to him right before he was to address the press or some group of people.