[Movement organizers claimed a hard-won collective victory with
Brandon Johnsons election. Now the Windy City’s first movement mayor
faces a formidable array of challenges, testing him and the coalition
that brought him into office. ]
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ORGANIZING PAYS OFF: BRANDON JOHNSON’S CHICAGO WIN  
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Barbara Ransby
April 13, 2023
The Nation
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_ Movement organizers claimed a hard-won collective victory with
Brandon Johnson's election. Now the Windy City’s first movement
mayor faces a formidable array of challenges, testing him and the
coalition that brought him into office. _

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Brandon Johnson’s victory in the Chicago mayoral race last week is a
major victory for the education justice movement, the 21st-century
Black freedom movement, and the left in general. Johnson is a former
teacher and Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU) leader, a protégé of a
legendary union president, the late Karen Lewis
[[link removed]]. One
of 10 children from a Black working-class family that struggled to
make ends meet, Johnson comes out of social movements more than from
the Democratic Party. And he brought movement organizing, movement
demands, and trusted movement allies into his mayoral race with him.

Johnson described his victory as the coming together of the civil
rights and labor movements, much as Martin Luther King always
envisioned. It is that and more. A new generation of
organizers—sexual minorities, abolitionists, undocumented activists,
socialists, and environmental justice warriors—are also a critical
part of what made Johnson’s bid for mayor a historic success.

In the wake of Johnson’s triumph over his well-funded and widely
touted centrist rival Paul Vallas, the pundits pondered: What the hell
happened? After all, in the general election Johnson did not have high
name recognition, except within labor and movement circles. Vallas
had more money
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more experience (albeit much of it of a dubious nature
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and powerful political connections.

What was Johnson’s secret sauce? It was not, as my friend John
Nichols suggests
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“a string of high-profile endorsements that turned the
tide”—although they did boost morale. The savvy campaign staffers
who worked day and night on his behalf were indispensable. The
financial support of Chicago’s social justice unions—SEIU State
and local leadership, and the mighty CTU, led by Stacy Davis
Gates—was crucial and foundational. But it was above all Johnson’s
ground game that made all the difference. Without massive outreach and
grassroots one-on-one contact, his name would never have been
sufficiently known and a nasty opposition would not have been
effectively countered. It took money, but it also took a lot of love
and optimism.

Johnson’s campaign centered on the kind of relentless grassroots
organizing you simply cannot buy. Repeatedly people told me, “We
know Brandon,” and that’s why they volunteered, donated, signed up
to work long hours for the campaign, and gave him the benefit of the
doubt when mistakes were made.

On the night of the general election, February 28, over 1,000 of
us—grateful that there wasn’t a blizzard—crammed into an
unimposing little community center on the West Side of Chicago.
Johnson had already gone from 2 percent in the polls to the 14 percent
that put him in the runoff.

United Working Families
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labor-community coalition comprising the CTU, SEIU, and a number of
progressive local groups—coordinated much of Brandon’s’ field
operation. Led by longtime UWF director Emma Tai, an indefatigable
organizer, and a team of field organizers, including two young
campaign field directors—Asha Ransby Sporn (yes, we are related) on
the South Side and Crystal Gardner on the West Side—the campaign
knocked on over a half million doors. Tai is quick to add this was a
movement wide effort not a single organization. The electoral arm of
various groups leapt into action. People United for Action, and
Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation mobilized their
respective bases, debated issues, and countered opposition narratives.
Groups like Equity and Transformation, conducted more general Get Out
the Vote campaigns. And there was phone banking too. Hundreds of
thousands of calls were made to Chicagoans, to make this “unknown”
candidate legible to them.

Volunteers—ordinary working-class folk, young professionals, and a
few older radicals who wanted an end to business as usual in Chicago
politics—were another crucial ingredient. They got up early, argued
with their neighbors, buoyed each other’s confidence. And they made
all the difference. One volunteer who had been skeptical about
elections persuaded her entire extended family to join “team
Brandon,” as she put it, and engaged in intergenerational canvassing
on weekends.

Officially, Johnson’s journey to City Hall began on October 27 of
last year, when the then-46-year-old stood in Seward Park—across
from the site of the former Cabrini Green Housing Projects where he
began his teaching career—and said, “I want to be the next mayor
of Chicago.” In reality, it started long before that. It is rooted
in the deep Chicago organizing tradition that has yielded a new
generation of fighters.

One important prelude was the 2016 “Bye Anita” campaign that
ousted reactionary State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and paved the way
for the election of her progressive successor, Kim Foxx. Black
progressive youth organizers in Assata’s Daughters and Black Youth
Project 100
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that campaign with unrelenting determination.

But electoral challenges and legislative fights have long been part of
a larger landscape of grassroots organizing in Chicago around housing,
police, immigration, health care, and education. The 2015 Dyett High
School hunger strike—which Johnson joined—was a community-based
campaign to save the Black neighborhood school from closure.

Last year’s Treatment Not Trauma Ordinance—championed by
democratic socialist Alderperson Rossana Rodriguez, and moved forward
by the Collaborative for Community Wellness—was the culmination of a
multiyear struggle to reopen shuttered mental health centers and to
de-center police in response to mental health crisis calls. Over a
number of years, anti–police violence organizers formed a broad
coalition to expose the torture and forced confession practices
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the Chicago Police Department, resulting in the passage of a 2020 city
council reparations ordinance for torture survivors and their
families. Most recently, 81-year-old movement leader Frank Chapman led
a campaign—mostly peopled by young activists—which won passage of
the Empowering Communities for Public Safety Ordinance
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elected civilian oversight committees in each of the 22 police
districts in the city for the first time ever. That, too, was a
long-fought struggle. And this entire protest and organizing tradition
was essential to Johnson’s campaign and victory.

MORE FROM BARBARA RANSBY
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“Our union and our rank and file supported Brandon because we knew
Brandon before he was running for mayor,” SEIU leader Erica
Bland-Durosinmi insisted. SEIU Local 73, Local 1 and Local 1600 all
contributed volunteers to the campaign. Progressive as he was, Harold
Washington—the city’s first Black mayor, elected in 1983—was a
party politician, not a movement organizer. “Brandon is movement,”
as one supporter shouted out at his victory party.

Johnson’s camp out-organized the opposition, plain and simple. And
the opposition, as hard as it tried, underestimated and miscalculated
the ability of organizers to change the narrative on the ground—in
defiance of the headlines consistently featured in mainstream media
and on nonstop opposition ads. Fearmongering around crime did not work
in Chicago—even as the racist and right-wing head of the local
Fraternal Order of Police warned 
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cops would quit and there would be “blood on the streets,” if
Johnson were elected. Turning “defund” abolitionists into
caricatures, and distorting their demands, also did not work.

The April 4 runoff election night party for Johnson was held at the
Marriott Marquis hotel just south of downtown. The venue was a bit
more upscale than the “beer in the back” celebration on February
28—but what had not changed was who was there. Organizers from each
of the struggles mentioned here were in that room, exuberant and
claiming a hard-won collective victory. People who had protested in
sit-ins at City Hall were sending one of their own to the mayor’s
office. Now what?

How will Brandon Johnson govern? Or co-govern? He will undoubtedly
face heavy pressures—and even threats—from a formidable array of
forces. He is the most progressive mayor this city has ever seen.
Johnson’s election comes at a time when the city and country are
deeply divided between a right-wing authoritarian vision of the future
and a more hopeful one. Perhaps the bold and uncompromising young
state legislators in Tennessee who have risked their jobs to stand up
against gun violence
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pointing in the right direction: principled steadfastness in the face
of unreasonable and unjust opposition—even if it means sometimes
breaking the rules. It will undoubtedly be difficult and challenging,
but, by every indication, Johnson is up to the task. With the energy
and optimism of his grassroots supporters, and a growing cohort of
progressive city council allies, he is poised to make history. Perhaps
a glimpse of what kind of mayor he will be was evident in his response
to faculty strikes at three Chicago public universities serving
largely Black and working-class students. On April 11, Mayor-elect
Johnson was on the picket line.

_Barbara Ransby
[[link removed]] TWITTER
[[link removed]] is a historian, writer, and
longtime political activist. She is a distinguished professor of
African American studies, gender and women’s studies, and history at
the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she directs the
campus-wide Social Justice Initiative._

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* Brandon Johnson
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* chicago
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* Grassroots Organizing
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* elections
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