Foster-Bonner Makes Run-Off Against Rubber Stamp 6th Ward Boss

Deborah Foster-Bonner won’t say a bad word about her opponent. She won’t even mention the guy’s name.

“I don’t like to speak about him,” the 6th Ward aldermanic candidate said. “I’ll leave that to you.”

“Him,” of course, is sitting Ald. Roderick Sawyer, Foster-Bonner’s ballot rival in the April 2 run-off election.

Anybody who, like me, is tired of Chicago’s rubber-stamp aldermen can easily come up with a few choice words to say about a ward boss who sides with Mayor Rahm Emanuel every single time he showed up at City Hall to vote.

When I asked Foster-Bonner about that, she raised her eyebrows.

“It’s not about him,” she said.

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Well, she’s wrong about that. The 6th Ward run-off is a referendum on Sawyer, a true-believer in politics practiced with a traditional amount of corruption the Chicago Way. Sawyer recently confessed to pledged allegiance to a City Hall no-snitch code of silence after Ald. Danny Solis got outed as an FBI mole.

Sawyer told the Sun-Times that wearing a wire to catch dirty ward bosses is "not the way I was brought up."

"If I was caught doing something wrong, I'd just take my punishment, deal with the consequences ... and keep my mouth shut," Sawyer said.

The Sun-Times editorial board mentioned Sawyer’s affinity for secrets in its endorsement of Foster-Bonner. When I brought that up, Foster-Bonner shrugged.

“Enough about him,” she says.

Foster-Bonner said she’s neither needed nor received Sawyer’s help making her neighborhood better. There’s no point in wasting time talking about him now.

“If all I can do is talk negative about somebody that means I have no ideas. I want to talk more about what I want to do to help our community,” she said.

Over the years, Foster-Bonner has proven herself as more than an idea lady. People call her “The Fixer,” a nickname she earned by pushing to get things done.

“I’ve always been an activist in the background because it’s not about me,” she said.

Foster-Bonner relaunched her block club, and started a non-profit to raise cash to hire teacher aides at Mark Sheridan school in the mid-1990s. Now, she’s the muscle behind Reunite Chatham, a community group focused on reviving a neighborhood that once was an African-American middle class stronghold.

“I remember having judges, doctors and lawyers on my block. You can’t say that now,” Foster-Bonner said.

The 6th Ward struggles with troubles brought on after generations of disinvestment and City Hall neglect that makes everyday life, well, harder.

You can see the negative cycle of urban decay in the pervasive emptiness and blight plagues “The Nine” — that’s what locals call the struggling stretch of 79th Street between Cottage Grove and the Dan Ryan. Most people live in homes that they don’t own. Head into the side streets and you’ll see “guys on the corner” hustling to make a buck. Shootings, too.

Foster-Bonner got tired of waiting for things to improve long ago.

In 2011, when a local corner store near Dixon School in a dry part of the ward seemed to have the alderman’s blessing to get a liquor license, Foster-Bonner and members of Revive Chatham circulated petitions, and threatened picket lines.

“I told ‘em I’d have 50 seniors in wheelchairs, walkers and canes walking in front of the store. They didn’t get that liquor license,” Foster-Bonner said. “We realized that we had power.”

From there she helped started a neighborhood watch, and got 150 neighbors to install security cameras and link the footage to a private feed stretching from 67th Street south to 109th Street from the Metra to west of the Dan Ryan.

In 2017, footage from those private security cameras to help police capture the man charged with murdering prominent Cook County Judge Raymond Miles in the West Chesterfield neighborhood.

Last year, Target abruptly closed on 87th and Cottage Grove, eliminating precious jobs and a grocery in a South Side food desert.

Foster-Bonner grew up in Chatham back when you could shop for groceries at the A&P, High-Low, National and Jewel. Even before she decided to run for alderman, she launched Revive Chatham’s plan to bring a Rogers Park-style Co-Op grocery to the ward.

“Someone hipped me to Co-Op, so I joined to get an understanding of what a co-op is and how it functioned. I went to Indianapolis to get some training. I told everybody that we’re gonna bring a co-op to the neighborhood. They said, “How are we going to do that?” And I said, “We’re going to say we’re going to do it and we’ll do it.”

Her can-do attitude inspired folks to “push and keep pushing” Foster-Bonner to run for alderman.

“I told them I didn’t want to do it,” she said. “I’m not a politician. I’m an accountant.”

Then, in something like a dream, Foster-Bonner said she heard the voice of her late grandmother say, “Why do you keep expecting somebody else to do something that you know you should do?”

“Grandma always said that, and that’s what she did, how she lived,” Foster-Bonner said. “She had 15 kids of her own, and still had other neighborhood kids over at the house … doing her best to care for them, too.”

Foster-Bonner says she’s running for alderman to inspire folks to work together to revive that spirit in the 6th Ward.

“It is up to us. We have to become a part of that process. If we don’t change and work together what are we going to get? More of the same,” she said.

During campaign stops to talk with Park Manor, Chatham and Englewood community groups, neighbors told her that they still hold onto the mental picture of what their community used to be. They each have visions for the future that don’t include “another liquor store” or a political bait-and-switch that doesn’t bring well-paying jobs to the community.

In 2016, Ald. Sawyer touted a game-changing plan to bring a call center with well-paying jobs to the former Kennedy-King College campus that never happened.

Sawyer recently told Block Club Chicago that he worked on recruiting those call center jobs for years before realizing, “Call centers are more suited for rural areas, and we wouldn’t have been able to offer a living wage.”

“Instead, we got a fleet management garage. And who works there: Union people. That means there’s no new jobs for people in the area,” Foster-Bonner said. “That’s what [Sawyer] is touting as an accomplishment. And it’s next to senior centers. So, our seniors are breathing truck exhaust. Usually I don’t speak about him, but that’s an issue” in this election.

On Tuesday, the Chicago Board of Elections confirmed that the April 2 election is on because Sawyer fell seven votes shy of the 50-percent plus one vote total needed to avoid a showdown election.

That's an important detail Foster-Bonner plans to remind neighbors about while knocking on doors to win their support on Election Day.

“In the 6th Ward, we’re proof that your one vote matters,” she said. “If you don’t vote you can’t complain. You've got to have skin in the game or you get what you get.”

For eight years under the alderman whose name Foster-Bonner won’t mention, that ain’t much.