ArcaMax

How many other small towns, we wonder, operate similarly elegant shakedown rackets in the name of law 'n' order? It hurts to hear about such realities after years of ignorance. That pain may well be reflected in the polls. But as Dr. King might say, such pain is a small price to pay in the pursuit of justice and fairness.

A few days before the anniversary of the Selma march, I was interviewing David Axelrod, President Obama's former political advisor whom I have known since our days as young Chicago Tribune reporters in the 1970s.

His new autobiography, "Believer: My 40 Years in Politics," took me back to a time in the 1980s that makes today's racial clashes look like a picnic. The "Council Wars" that Harold Washington faced as Chicago's first black mayor, whom Axelrod also counseled, previewed the backlash, polarization and legislative gridlock that Obama has faced as president from his conservative opposition.

Though Washington was renominated handily in 1987, he lamented his mere 21 percent of the vote in the city's white precincts. Axelrod and other aides tried to cheer him up. After all, he won only 8 percent four years earlier.

Washington was unimpressed. He remembered how he "probably spent 70 percent of my time in those white neighborhoods," trying to be "a good mayor."

Washington then smiled, shook his head and remarked sarcastically, "Ain't it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

Yet a happy ending to this narrative came in 2004, Axelrod points out, when Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate carrying a majority of the white votes in wards that gave Washington his heaviest resistance. "I told Barack," he recalled, "that Harold Washington is smiling down on us."

I like to think so. Race relations really work in the long run. You can't take a snapshot on just one day and think you have the whole picture.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.