With Lori Lightfoot as mayor, women of color to hold 5 top city, county offices

[Stellar]

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/lori-lightfoot-mayor-female-politicians-chicago-cook-county-toni-preckwinkle-kim-foxx-melissa-conyears-ervin-anna-valencia

With Lori Lightfoot as mayor, black women will hold the top political offices in Chicago and Cook County for the first time. Lightfoot (left) holds hands above with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, whom she defeated, during a prayer Wednesday at Rainbow PUSH headquarters. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Now that we’ve wrapped our brains around the reality that Chicago elected a mayor who is black, female and gay, there’s more to celebrate.

As a friend pointed out, for the first time in the city’s history, black women will hold the top political offices in the city and county: Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and city Treasurer-elect Melissa Conyears-Ervin.

“That’s really historical,” she said.

When Harold Washington was elected mayor in 1983, George Dunne was Cook County Board president, Richard M. Daley was state’s attorney, and Cecil A. Partee was city treasurer.

Former Ald. Dick Simpson, a University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor, said add City Clerk Anna M. Valencia, a Latina, to the mix, and “it is an all-female executive team in city government made up of minority females. There’s not another city in America that has all of that. Some have women. Some have minorities and minority women. I don’t know of any city that has minority women across the board like this.”

It’s more than coincidence, Simpson said. “This has been sort of the year of the women since 2018,” he said. “In this particular race, all of these minority women are very qualified for the offices they hold.”

So we’ve come a long, long way.

But forgive me for being a bit cynical. Unfortunately, Tuesday’s election is historic for another reason, too: Of the 1,592,658 registered voters in Chicago, only 507,524 of them cast a ballot — a 31.8 percent turnout.

Though this barrier-smashing election is being compared to the 1983 election that gave the city Washington as its first black mayor, consider that voter turnout that year was 77.49 percent, with more than 1.2 million Chicagoans going to the polls.

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