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Bishop Arthur Brazier is an important man. The leader of the Apostolic Church of God in Woodlawn, Brazier was a civil rights activist and organizer in the 1960s and ’70s, a supporter of Harold Washington in the ’80s, and one of the first and most prominent black ministers to endorse—and contribute to—Mayor Daley after the collapse of the Washington coalition in the early ’90s. A Daley aide once described Brazier and other key black clergy to me as “surrogate aldermen” who could be counted on when the actual officeholders couldn’t—the implication being that he was the real source of power in his community. I never saw any reason to doubt it; when I once wrote a story Brazier didn’t like I received a letter complaining about it from 20th Ward alderman Arenda Troutman.
Brazier told me this wasn’t true. “I have not called other pastors,” he said. “It’s something I would do, but not something I have done.”
