Watching Chicago make history, again

A staff photographer at The New York Times since 1989, Agins covered the votes that sent the first African-American man and woman, Harold Washington and Lori Lightfoot, to the top spot at Chicago’s City Hall.

The Times sent Agins, who lives in Brooklyn, to her native Chicago last month for what promised to be a historic vote: a contest between two black women, who bested 12 other candidates in the primary.

In the 36-year interim between the elections of Washington and Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor, two other Chicago politicians made history: Carol Moseley Braun, who became the first black woman in the U.S. Senate, in 1993; and Barack Obama, who became the nation’s first black president, in 2009.

Agins is a trailblazer herself. She is the Times’ second black female staff photographer and was part of a Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for the series “How Race Is Lived In America” in 2000. Agins joined the city of Chicago as a photographer in 1977 and wound up as the mayor’s official photographer.

It was a heady time at the end of April 1983 when Washington took office. Years later, Obama would reflect that “part of the reason, I think, I had been attracted to Chicago was reading about Harold Washington.”

This week, Agins recalled Washington’s victory speech in 1983 and said she felt a similar excitement in the crowd after Lightfoot’s win.

Agins followed Lightfoot every day toward the end of her campaign. “Even though I had been there for two weeks, it felt like it was a lifetime,” she said. Many people at Lightfoot’s campaign stops remembered Agins from her previous career as a city photographer.

Race is a major factor in politics in Chicago, which is divided nearly evenly among white, black and Latino residents, and politicians are used to counting on support from voters of their own race.

Agins described black voters as “resolute” in pushing Washington on the way to his breakthrough victory, in which he narrowly defeated the Republican candidate in a vote that was split almost entirely along racial lines. Agins was with Washington daily during his first term in office, and she said “we were always worried about him.”

It was decidedly different in the lead-up to Tuesday’s election. Agins said she hardly ever saw Lightfoot heckled. Mostly she saw the candidate’s support coalesce. It was especially striking, she said, at packed Irish pubs in the Beverly neighborhood on the Far South Side.

On Tuesday, Lightfoot, who will also be the first openly gay mayor of Chicago, swept all 50 City Council wards and won an astonishing 74 percent of the vote, margins that were reminiscent of victories by mayors named Daley.

Agins, while in Chicago, also made a pilgrimage to the grave site of Washington, who died of a heart attack at age 65 in 1987, just seven months into his second term.

“I watched the history of Chicago,” she said, noting that two black women in a mayoral runoff would have been unthinkable not so long ago. “I had my camera and took the long ride.”