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Let me name a few: Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology; Thom Clark, president of the Community Media Workshop; Sunny Fischer, executive director of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation; Harriet Meyer, president of the Ounce of Prevention Fund; the Reverend Calvin Morris, executive director of the Community Renewal Society; former state senator Dawn Clark Netsch; Alexander Polikoff, former executive director of BPI; George Ranney, CEO of Chicago Metropolis 2020; Jackie Taylor, founder of the Black Ensemble Theater; Judy Wise, senior director of Facing History and Ourselves.
What is certain is that the 40 — and even more so, these friends, members, and benefactors of BPI sitting in the banquet room applauding the 40 — represent a stratum of power and leadership as essential to a full description of how Chicago functions as those political mechanics in City Hall whose grubby corruptions make headlines and get columnists foaming. It would be simple to say that this layer of power represents an alternative to that one. The history of BPI, as described on the organization’s Web site, has Gordon Sherman, president of Midas Muffler, responding to a Chicago “marked by stark inequities to which government was unresponsive and institutions indifferent” by asking businessmen to ante up $1,000 each, his goal being “to create an organization that would fight for the public interest.” The organizing and staffing was largely the doing of its first executive director and legal counsel, Marshall Patner. Early BPI campaigns helped defeat Mayor Richard J. Daley’s plan to build an airport in Lake Michigan and challenged segregation in public housing with Gautreaux v. CHA, a suit litigated by Polikoff that concluded with a Supreme Court victory in 1976.
A thoughtful conservative would have bristled at that, or perhaps laughed. For the occasion contradicted him. Some of the people in the room were in government, or had been in government, or hoped to arrive there, but the name they gave to the things they did together was BPI. On other nights in other banquet rooms there will be other names (the next dinner on my personal docket is for Judy Wise’s Facing History) — but government won’t be one of them.
