Her bags aren’t packed yet, but friends and political allies are on the phone. The word has slowly leaked that Heather Booth–one of Chicago’s premier political and community organizers–is leaving town. Her husband, Paul Booth, has already left; he’s in Washington, D.C., where he’ll work as director of field services for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Heather Booth says she will join him as soon as their Lakeview flat is subleased, probably in May.
Booth will remain president of the academy but will devote most of her time in Washington to the Citizen Action Fund, a nationwide coalition of community groups she organized in 1980.
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That was in 1963, when at the age of 18 she enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. “I’d been somewhat socially aware as a kid,” says Booth. “But coming to the University of Chicago was like magic for me. There were all these struggles, all these movements. This was the 60s–anything was possible.”
That fall, she returned to Chicago. Within a few years, she had graduated from college, married Paul Booth–then national secretary of Students of for a Democratic Society–had two children, gotten a job as an editorial consultant for a market analyst, and settled down. Or so she thought. A few months after being hired, she was fired for encouraging the secretaries to organize for their rights.
“One of the most important things about the academy is that activists can go there to network,” Booth adds. “It’s so encouraging to see that there are other people in other communities all over the country struggling with the same problems. You realize you’re not alone. We wanted to show that all organizing does not have to be factional.”
In 1980, Booth stepped down as executive director of the academy to found the Citizen Action Fund, a lobbying group.
“It really bothers me that white voters feel compelled to judge all black politicians by the actions of a few,” says Booth. “Tim Evans has never, ever uttered anything vaguely anti-Semitic. In fact, if you read the first articles in the Tribune about Steve Cokely, you will see that Evans denounced anti-Semitism. Yet so many members of the white and liberal communities fell back on their previous assumptions and prejudices after the Cokely affair. Meanwhile, no one ever asked Daley to be accountable for the words and deeds of his white supporters who had been members of the Vrdolyak 29.”
