With her crepe soled shoes, wash-and-wear haircut, granny glasses and plain dresses, Ald. Toni Preckwinkle often comes off as a schoolmarm. Preckwinkle taught history in the classroom for 10 years, and she’s never really stopped lecturing on the subject.
Preckwinkle pedagogy came up at last week's City Council meeting, when alderman were honoring local winners of the Golden Apple Award, a high honor for schoolteachers.
Ald. Robert Fioretti mentioned “Ald. Preckwinkle, who was a teacher -- and still is.”
The chamber burst into laughter.
“If we keep listening to you, we’ll turn into a teacher!” Mayor Daley shouted jovially.
Preckwinkle stood up to confess that, yes, she was a teacher.
Chicago Politics
“I rise to support this resolution as an actual teacher,” Preckwinkle said. “Ten years in the classroom, teaching history.”
Ward Room can attest that Preckwinkle has never really stopped teaching history. When I interviewed Preckwinkle about her run for the county board presidency, she mentioned that Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1,000-page history of the civil rights movement, was one of the best books she’d ever read. I was intrigued, because Parting the Waters is also one of Barack Obama’s favorite books, so much so that he once told an acquaintance, “This is my story.”
So I checked it out of the library. It’s both a biography of Martin Luther King and a story of the early civil rights demonstrations -- the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch counter sit ins, the Freedom Rides. It’s one of the most dramatic works of history I’ve ever read, particularly the accounts of how the Freedom Riders kept traveling on Greyhound buses even after they were beaten by racist mobs in Alabama.
Parting the Waters told both Barack Obama’s story and Toni Preckwinkle’s story. They both owe their stations in life to the civil rights movement. A black county board president, here in Irish-dominated Chicago, was once as inconceivable as a black president.
If Toni Preckwinkle tries to give you a history lesson, listen to her.
