"They said 'You're going to have a riot in Chicago if you don't fire him in "the right way".'..."
Aide Was Controversial Long Before Ethnic Statements
Steve Cokely was a crisis waiting to happen.
It happened last week with the publication of excerpts of four cassette tapes in which the former mayoral aide made a series of anti-white and anti-Semitic remarks.
After a week of meetings and maneuvers, of charges and countercharges, and of denunciations that criss-crossed racial and religious lines, Cokely finally was fired Thursday, and Mayor Eugene Sawyer said he would await whatever political repercussions that might come.
Sawyer and others in his administration seemed surprised when the uproar over Cokely`s remarks erupted following The Tribune`s publication of the tape excerpts. But Coakley didn`t become an issue at City Hall overnight.
Just days after Cokely joined the Sawyer administration in December, a department head had top aides begin to compile information on him, aware the new aide had a controversial history of anti-white, anti-Semitic statements.
Cokely, 35, was known to the Anti-Defamation League of B`nai B`rith, which began gathering its own background on him and presented it to Sawyer in a meeting on April 5.
It was a cordial meeting, league leaders said. Sawyer even had a suggestion for how they could improve their campaign to reduce prejudice by distributing literature in the city`s public libraries. But near the end of the 20-minute meeting, they brought up the issue of Cokely.
Sawyer ``seemed genuinely surprised`` by transcripts of Cokely`s speeches before Louis Farrakhan`s Nation of Islam that excoriated Jews and whites in vitriolic terms, said Michael Kotzin, regional director of the league. But the group sought no sanctions, and Sawyer promised none.
Three weeks later, The Tribune printed an article based on the tapes bought by the newspaper at the Final Call, a Nation of Islam bookstore. The uproar ensued.
One of the late Mayor Harold Washington`s most masterful political strokes had been to forge a coalition that included his deeply loyal black constituency and a solid core of Jewish support that helped draw enough white voters to help him win his two election campaigns.
Washington had drawn praise for appointing top Jewish advisers such as Judson Miner, head of the Law Department. At the same time, several of Washington`s black aides, including Budget Director Sharon Gist Gilliam and Personnel Director Jesse Hoskins, had drawn admiration from Jews for fairness. ``Washington knew that blacks and Jews had once walked arm in arm and had become estranged, and that had to be healed,`` said one Washington aide who is Jewish. ``There`s always been tension between us and them (blacks) at City Hall, but Washington was able to emit a kind of sincerity toward us. They knew he had invested a lot in the people he brought in.``
But that adviser, and others, said things had changed with Washington`s death and Sawyer`s arrival. Within the general upheaval of the sudden change in administrations, the strains of black-Jewish relations in City Hall grew worse.
Sawyer didn`t command the same devotion of prominent Jewish members of the administration, and he didn`t have the overwhelming personality of Washington to still the feeling among many black activists that Jews had gained too much influence in the administration. Cokely was a strain on the black-Jewish alliance that was being stretched to the limit in the weeks after Washington`s death.
Cokely was something of a furtive figure at City Hall. He was an aldermanic aide to Sawyer who jumped to the mayor`s office as a liaison to black community groups, including ones that had opposed Sawyer`s ascent to the 5th floor after Washington`s death.
He regularly conducted his business meetings in the corridor outside the mayor`s office. That is, he conducted them there until he was chastised by Gilliam, who had become Sawyer`s chief of staff.
``It was unprofessional,`` Gilliam said. ``You don`t stand in hallways and conduct business. In time, he complied, but it took a couple of reminders.``
Cokely may have had unusual ways, but he was effective at dealing with the black community groups that had been angered by Sawyer`s selection by a white-dominated coalition of aldermen on Dec. 2.
Cokely, by virtue of his ties to Farrakhan and other black nationalist organizations such as the National Black United Front, couldn`t be reproached by blacks, like other Sawyer allies were, for consorting with the ``old machine`` of white aldermen in City Hall. And he passionately defended Sawyer to blacks who were at best skeptical about the new mayor.
So when Sawyer had to consider firing Cokely in the aftermath of publicity about his taped speeches, he faced conflicting racial emotions that threatened to explode.
By Monday, Sawyer had heard from several angered department heads, including Miner and Planning Commissioner Elizabeth Hollander. But he was also urged by blacks such as Gilliam, and consultant Erwin France, that Cokely was a political liability who had to go.
The mayor`s office tallied 156 calls from city residents who said that Cokely should be fired. Only three calls came in Cokely`s defense.
But on WVON, a radio station with a large black listenership, hundreds of callers defended Cokely. His support stretched beyond the more extreme black nationalist groups, and some aides feared that if Sawyer fired Cokely, he risked a repeat of the angry demonstrations that accompanied his selection as mayor.
The easiest solution would have been for Cokely to resign, and on Monday afternoon a draft letter of resignation and a press release were written by press secretary Monroe Anderson.
Sawyer had agreed that a quick resignation was needed and he expected to get it when he welcomed Cokely and Robert Augustus, a friend of Cokely`s who is a $2,964-a-month aide to the mayor, into his office.
When the trio emerged 45 minutes later, Sawyer stunned advisers by announcing that the best course of action would be an ``apology.``
Sawyer had backed down, but it was clear that he knew the matter wasn`t over. He told reporters that night there would be more to say later.
In that afternoon, Sawyer set in motion a problem that would grow by the day, one that may earn him a reputation for compassion but is more likely to brand him with the mark of indecision.
``Eugene had a very deep concern for Steve Cokely,`` said Charles Sawyer, the mayor`s brother. ``It affected him. He really loved Steve. It hurt him a lot to do what he had to do.``
By Tuesday, rumors swirled around City Hall that a resignation was imminent. In truth, Sawyer was simply waiting for Cokely to change his mind, expecting that his young aide would read the growing political pressure on the mayor and offer his resignation. The political divisions in the city were growing quickly: Virtually no black leader in the city would call for Cokely`s resignation. Many whites were outraged that the drama was dragging on without a conclusion.
Sawyer realized on Wednesday that Cokely was not going to offer a resignation, and he decided to fire him. But Sawyer wanted another meeting with Cokely first, one that became an unusual encounter at the McCormick Center Hotel.
In a 19th-floor suite, the mayor, Charles Sawyer, and Cokely met in one room for an hour while the mayor`s top political advisers, including campaign financiers Al Johnson and Robert Hallock, waited in the living room for word that the controversy was about to end.
It was a last-ditch attempt to get a resignation out of Cokely, and it failed. Sawyer went so far as to meet, at Cokely`s behest, with other black nationalist leaders in the hotel suite in what became a sometimes-angry session that turned into a lecture to Sawyer on the financial needs of their community organizations. Sawyer weathered the whole session, but Cokely wouldn`t resign.
``He was in search of martyrdom, and he was going to get it,`` said one Sawyer aide who was at the hotel suite.
At a Thursday morning meeting of a Sawyer advisory council, several blacks assured Sawyer that Cokely`s dismissal would not trigger major protests. And the mayor told the group that he would fire Coakley that afternoon. Word quickly went through the building that it was about to end.
Almost simultaneously, Ald. Timothy Evans (4th), Ald. Dorothy Tillman
(3d) and Ald. Danny Davis (29th) made their first demands for Cokely`s dismissal. It was a safe political stand by then, because they knew that Sawyer wouldn`t score points over them in black circles by sticking beside Cokely.
Robert Lucas, head of the Kenwood-Oakland Development Corp., a key figure in the Chicago civil rights crusade of Dr. Martin Luther King, was one of the few black leaders who called for Cokely`s dismissal before it was a fait accompli. And he was vehemently upbraided by Cokely`s supporters outside the mayor`s office.
From the ADL Report on Bigorty:
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