(Photo from the University of Chicago news office)
I am, heart and soul, a Chicagoan, although I have not lived there for 30 years. Those of us who care about liberal politics in the City of Chicago lost a good one when Len (Leon) Despres died yesterday at the age of 101. Len was born on the South Side on February 2, 1908, exactly two weeks before my Dad. They both went on to attend law school together at the University of Chicago, but while Dad flunked out, Len went on to become the spirit of liberal democratic politics in the City. He served as the 5th Ward (Hyde Park) alderman for 20 years, from 1955 to 1975, and continued to practice law (and bike around Hyde Park) for many years more. He was a liberal thorn in the side of Richard J. Daley (the father of the current mayor), who was alleged to have turned off Despres’s microphone in the City Council chamber every time Len said something that outraged him. He must have turned off that microphone a great many times.
Len Despres started off his professional life as a labor lawyer, and he supported the rights of working people throughout his career. He was a noted civil libertarian, working for the ACLU and as a private lawyer to ensure that government served the citizen (rather than the other way around). He campaigned against restrictive covenants on real estate, and in general fought for equality for the African-Americans who constituted a large part of his constituency.
He seemed to those of us who lived on the South Side the embodiment of the hope that together we could forge a community in which neither skin color nor bank balances would determine who could live decently in our midst. He was the spirit of New Deal urban liberalism in a city that had for too long turned its face to lakeshore inhabitants and its back to those who lived inland.
Len Despres was an inlander. During the years we lived on the South Side in the 1970s, even though Len had retired from the City Council in 1975, he constantly spoke out on public issues, always on the liberal side of any controversy. At a time when so many whites were fleeing to the suburbs, Len and his family stayed right in Hyde Park (his sister was my son’s music teacher), and modeled civic engagement for us.
Chicago is a better city for having been home to Leon Despres, and I hope his career will inspire others to aspire to the old fashioned liberal values of this great urban citizen. Thanks from all of us who dreamed of a better Chicago, Len!
