- Saul Loeb/Getty AFP/Getty Images
- Rahm Emanuel at President Obama’s inauguration Monday
President Obama’s inaugural address made me think of Rahm Emanuel’s own inaugural speech, delivered 20 months ago. “Today, more than any other time in our history, more than any other place in our country, the city of Chicago is ready for change,” the new mayor said in May 2011.
During the mayoral campaign in 2011, I wrote a story on the subject. I noted that in the 1960s, Chicago’s poor, black neighborhoods had been beset with crime, fires, joblessness, dreadful schools, and abandoned buildings. Segregation had been foisted on blacks by white Chicagoans, with the help of civic and government leaders, throughout the 20th century. It had concentrated the poverty of blacks, leading to the deplorable circumstances that, over decades, millions of Chicagoans had been born into.
