How Mayor Washington Influenced Barack Obama

" Harold Washington, who died 25 years ago Sunday, wasn’t Chicago’s greatest mayor, or its most powerful. Those honors go, respectively, to Carter Harrison Sr. and Richard J. Daley. But he was the mayor who played the largest role in American history, because of his relationship with a young man he met only once: Barack Obama. If Harold Washington had never been mayor of Chicago, Obama would not be president.

In the mid-1980s, Obama was just out of Columbia University and was looking to build both a career and an identity as a black man. He wanted to live and work in a city where blacks were in charge of their own political destiny. At that time, Harold Washington was the most prominent black elected official in America. Obama wrote a letter to City Hall, asking for a job. He got no response. But when he saw an ad for a community organizer in Chicago, he jumped at it "

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