Early on a Saturday morning, Ted Thomas is in his storefront campaign office in West Englewood handing out city-service request sheets to volunteers. “We have no alderman in the 15th Ward,” Thomas says several times as the volunteers look over the pink sheets, on which they can check off just about anything a resident might need, from rat abatement to removal of an abandoned car. Their alderman of eight years, Virgil Jones, was convicted in January of taking bribes. “We’ll take these forms and we’ll call them in to the city,” says Thomas, who led a field of 12 candidates in the February 23 primary with 22 percent of the vote. “Be specific when you write down the address now, so the city will know exactly where the pothole is.”
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An electronics technician for the U.S. Postal Service, Thomas is a community activist with impressive credentials–he’s president of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and state chair of the New Party, which was founded by labor and community activists to elect grassroots candidates to local offices. Much more is at stake in Thomas’s crusade than who gets to fix Englewood’s potholes. Thomas stands to be the City Council’s newest independent, at a time when independent aldermen can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
As ACORN’s president, Thomas was a leader in last year’s fight for the “living wage” ordinance, which requires companies with city contracts to pay workers on them at least $7.60 an hour. “The living-wage campaign gave me great insights into what politics was all about. I talked to just about every alderman in the city during that campaign, and in talking to them I learned a lot about Chicago politics,” he says. “We asked [14th Ward alderman Ed] Burke and the people in his office to help us write the ordinance, and they did help us. Then we went to [33rd Ward alderman Richard] Mell. Mell was all for it. He said that he had a company and that he paid his people a living wage and yes, he was for a living wage. But he said, ‘Let me tell you something. If the mayor comes out against it I’m gonna jump ship.’ And he said, ‘Guess what? Burke’s gonna be right behind me.’” Thomas laughs. “And that’s exactly what happened. We had rallies–we had Burke on video signing on for the living wage–but he still voted against it. There were a few other things that I learned, but that was the main one–Chicago politics.”
The 15th Ward is hardly a bastion of Daley supporters–Bobby Rush beat Daley here with 55 percent of the vote, and Virgil Jones disagreed with Daley on important legislative issues, including the living-wage and ethics ordinances. Hemphill doesn’t care. “I feel that unless you’re in my shoes you would not know, and unless you’ve been in the political arena you would not know. I really believe that that may be one reason why [West Englewood] is suffering, because our last couple of administrations have fought the mayor. I’m gonna do what it takes to work with him so that we can start being a viable entity in the city of Chicago.”
Despite Thomas’s activist background, Green says he’s not another Helen Shiller. “He’s a really gentle, sincere guy more than he is a hell-raiser. It’s not a Daley-bashing kind of campaign. Because of Ted’s personality, which is pretty nonconfrontational, he’s able to talk about representing low-income and working-class people without polarizing against the machine.” A win by Thomas, says Green, “certainly would bring home the message that working-class people can take political power if they organize.”
