Savage Appeal
We called Jarrett and asked him what in the world he was doing. It turned out that young Reynolds rubs Jarrett the wrong way. “Reynolds has a wide reputation as being a sort of mysterious phony,” Jarrett told us. “This man works incessantly to convince people he is some kind of deliverer. He’s very ambitious to go to the top quickly.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Jarrett’s own language was troublesome enough. His columns hammered at Reynolds for “bringing in powerful Jewish sources,” and he singled out an appeal for funds from Robert Asher, national chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Jarrett told us that the help Reynolds got from AIPAC had Savage “absolutely picked to the quick.” Furious, Savage boasted at a rally the Saturday before the primary that virtually every single contribution to his own campaign “came from a black.” And according to the Sun-Times Savage went on to say: “You might wonder why these people all over the country want to send money to get rid of Gus Savage. . . . Let’s look at foreign affairs, and you may just find an answer. . . . One-third, almost, of all the United States’ foreign assistance for all the world goes to one little nation, Israel . . .”
But as Jarrett sees it, Reynolds had been playing into the hands of black nationalist demagogues, of whom Savage, for all his ranting, isn’t one. “Anti-Semitic feeling in the black community is almost incidental, and it shouldn’t dominate public discussion the way it does,” Jarrett said. But “if word gets out that some Jewish money came in here and knocked [Savage] out–do you think that’ll set well? It’ll reinforce what these other characters are saying.” Jarrett meant Farrakhan and Steve Cokely in particular–“that whole crowd that called Harold Washington the captive of the Jews.”
Chicago possesses “the strongest black nationalist community of any city in the country except maybe Brooklyn,” Muwakkil said. “If you talk to black college students, young blacks generally, they feel the black community is leaderless. The only ones who meet the criteria are ones like Farrakhan who are uncompromising in their views. . . . Farrakhan and Gus Savage, for example, are the only ones who’ll speak out against the invasion of Panama, which was an outrage, there were thousands of civilians killed. . . . At the end of the year, there was news of Israel cooperating with South Africa on nuclear technology, and when Shamir came to the States he met with the [congressional] black caucus and admitted it and said he’d stop it. But the black caucus didn’t say anything. The only person to say anything was Gus Savage. . . . There are reasons people vote for Gus Savage. The people who supported Gus Savage are not aliens or mutants.”
Yet it’s Reynolds who’s taken college students to visit Africa. Muwakkil conceded the times are full of contradictions. “He was such a good candidate,” Muwakkil said, “it’s a shame he got involved in the peculiar dynamic the black community happens to be in right now.”
John Callaway (on Chicago Tonight, election night): “Bruce, you’ve been out all day. Tell us where you’ve been, how many wards you’ve been in, and what you’re seeing.”
