Harold! Photographs from the Harold Washington Years Edited by Ron Dorfman.

Text by Salim Muwakkil.

Photos by Antonio Dickey and Marc PoKempner.

Evanston, Northwestern University press, 2007.

April 29th of this year will mark the 25th anniversary of the inauguration of Harold Washington as Chicago's first African American mayor. That extraordinary moment in the life of Chicago is being celebrated with the beautiful and powerfully written book of photographs titled Harold!: Photographs from the Harold Washington Years in conjunction with the Harold Washington Commemorative Year celebration.

The book contains dozens of black and white photos as well as a few color photos covering the campaign to elect Washington and the ensuing years. Memorable among the photos are: Oprah Winfrey, then an aspiring Chicago television reporter interviewing the mayor; Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) along with civil rights heroine Rosa Parks campaigning with Washington in the 1983 primary; labor leader Rudy Lozano campaigning with Mayor Washington; and, Mayor Washington walking the streets of the city with boxing champion Muhammad Ali surrounded by hundreds of African American people of all ages just as eager to meet the mayor as the champ.

Just as stirring are Dickey's and PoKempner's photos of the African American, Latino, and, yes, even whites who are greeting Mayor Washington on the streets and at the campaign rallies for his reelection, protesting the Chicago political machine's obstructionist tactics, or sitting in at City Hall after the mayor's sudden death in the fall of 1987 to demand that the reformer's agenda move forward. Heart-wrenching are the photos of the thousands of people who lined the city's streets with flowers, their blue 'Harold Washington for Mayor' buttons, and tears streaming down their cheeks after Mayor Washington's sudden death in late 1983.

In the text are a handful of sidebar quotes taken from Barack Obama's best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, in which he recalls first moving in 1983 to Chicago's South Side as a community organizer and encounters the Washington movement. 'His picture was everywhere,' writes Obama. '[O]n the walls of shoe repair shops and beauty parlors; still glued to lampposts from the last campaign; even in the windows of the Korean dry cleaners and Arab grocery stores, displayed prominently, like some protective totem.' The people who supported Washington came to think of his as a member of their family.

But the campaign wasn't merely about Washington's personality, as is evidenced by Muwakkil's detailed biographical background of Washington's life and his accounts of the campaigns and struggles in the city during Washington's tenure as mayor. After decades of machine-dominate politics in Chicago, African Americans grew tired of lending their votes to white and machine-controlled African American candidates whose promises fell flat after election day.

So in 1982, some community activities began to organize independent organizations of voters, to register new voters, and to seek out a mayoral candidate who could unite the city's diverse communities and peoples around a movement for change. That candidate was Harold Washington. Voter registration drives quickly doubled and quadrupled their goals. A multi-class coalition of African Americans, Latinos, and some whites, workers, the very poor and marginalized, business owners, union members, radicals and leftists and many others united to push Washington to victory in 1983. This, despite a cynical campaign pushed by a coalition of white Democrats and Republicans motivated purely by racism and greed for power. Indeed, Washington's candidacy is a valuable lesson about coalition building and independent politics.

Harold! is the type of book you must read and browse many times. The photos are so stunning and tell such an immense part of the story, that a reader may be discouraged initially from scrutinizing Muwakkil's incisive and sparkling text. So when you get this book, and you will not want to be without it, you will thoroughly enjoy taking the time to go through it again and again.