Brandon Johnson on the campaign trail: Banter, invocations of Black forebears — and promises of a Chicago brimming in ‘vibrancy’

Diane Thunderbird eagerly waited in the community room at her Auburn Gresham senior home as a stream of supporters inching toward Brandon Johnson gradually thinned with each handshake and side hug.

When she got her chance, the 65-year-old who has lived at the New Pisgah Haven Homes since 2021 cut straight to the chase.

“I want to vote for you so bad,” she told the Chicago mayoral candidate, but she had concerns about the Cook County commissioner’s position on policing.

“Why would you defund them?” Thunderbird asked. “They are leaving in droves; they are leaving the force in droves.”

Johnson nodded and then spoke in a hush.

“Yeah, I’m not going to defund the police,” Johnson said. “It’s a lie, sister.”

As the two continued, their voices overlapping in crosstalk, Thunderbird tried to follow-up but Johnson interjected: “I didn’t say it,” he said. “I didn’t.”

Thunderbird laughed awkwardly as Johnson dug in, attacking his opponent’s record leading schools in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago, before turning back to his own views on policing.

“There were over 100 men who were exonerated because they were tortured and tortured into false confession. We also understand our communities have been brutalized and terrorized by people of the police force. And so when you see someone like George Floyd begging for his life and a knee on the neck, that doesn’t engender confidence,” Johnson said. “So there are people who are frustrated with law enforcement because even after we fought (for body cameras) it still continues to happen. There is a degree of frustration that we have. But I assure you my public safety plan is an investment plan. We’re not going to defund the police.”

The answer satisfied Thunderbird, who pinned to her pocket a black and white image of Johnson and his campaign slogan: “Brandon is better.” She showed it off to the crowd as Johnson asked to take a photo with his new voter.

But the brief tension highlighted a central issue for Johnson, who has been hammered by opponent Paul Vallas in the April 4 election over Johnson’s previous support for the “defund the police” movement.

Despite Johnson’s denials, he repeatedly endorsed activist-backed calls to adjust police budgets and send funds to other agencies following Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police.

He has referred to “defund the police” as “a cause that I think, quite frankly, is not just admirable, but is necessary” and, in 2020, praised organizers of a “We Don’t Call Police: Fighting for a Police-Free Future” panel for pushing “an agenda that actually can transform people’s lives.”

“And part of it is removing ourselves away from this, you know, state-sponsored policing,” Johnson said.

While those comments play better with many of the lakefront liberals and progressives in parts of the Northwest Side who helped him get to the runoff election, Johnson also has distanced himself from more strident “defund the police” positions as he tries to appeal to a broader audience.

When asked during a debate about his statement that defunding police was “a real political goal,” Johnson said, “I said it was a political goal. … I never said it was mine.”

More recently he promised the Police Department’s budget would not be “one penny” less.

Part of the shift stems from a need to win over older and more conservative Black voters who primarily supported Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the election’s first round as well as voters in the growing Latino community who tend to be more supportive of police.

Two days after he made the runoff, Johnson visited another senior home, one in Bronzeville that also hosted him before the Feb. 28 election.

“Y’all do know the last time I was here, they didn’t predict me as the winner,” Johnson began. “And when I left out of here, I knew one thing for sure: That I’m gonna be the next mayor of the city of Chicago.”

The candidate playfully pointed a finger at the tables filled with seniors seated in front of bingo cards as he teased, “So it’s y’all’s fault.”

Johnson then launched into his stump speech centered on the single-word theme of his campaign: “investment.” He vowed access to fully funded neighborhood schools, affordable housing, new senior facilities, reliable transportation, a healthy environment and good jobs.

“These are not radical ideas,” Johnson said. “These are basic ideas that every single community should have, and the fact that they believe a radical idea is giving people guaranteed access to a good job and to a safe community — that tells you that we don’t need them in power. We don’t.”

‘If we can figure it out in Chicago, we can do it anywhere in the world.’

While on the trail, Johnson has cast his candidacy as a historic extension of the civil rights movement in an attempt to coalesce Black voters.

In March, he joined the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. at Rainbow/PUSH Coalition headquarters as the longtime activist calmly sat in his wheelchair. Jackson, who is 81 and struggling with Parkinson’s disease, told the crowd his ailment “is not gonna hold me down, not going to stop the fight for freedom.”

At one point, Jackson paused mid-remarks to catch his breath, and Johnson leaned down and tipped a water bottle to his lips as concerned whispers rumbled around the room.

“Reverend got a lot to say, y’all,” Johnson trumpeted to the audience.

Jackson regained vitality soon afterward and delivered a sermon on Black history in Chicago, from the lynching of Emmett Till to the disinvestment of public schools. In a powerful moment, Jackson gingerly pulled himself up from his wheelchair and bowed his head in prayer.

“We need Brandon,” Jackson whispered. “We pray for him.”

Johnson has regularly invoked the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, whose assassination in 1968 on April 4 coincides with this year’s election.

“This is the day that we will recognize one of the greatest humanitarians to ever walk the planet Earth,” Johnson said during a City Club of Chicago speech last week, his throat catching. “He had a dream that one day that every single stripe could come together to solve the critical problems, and when he came to Chicago, he said there’s no place like it. He said there’s no place like it. He had been to the Deep South for our people who were murdered for this day, but he said that if we can figure it out in Chicago, we can do it anywhere in the world.”

As Johnson has tried to unite Black voters, Vallas has promoted endorsements from African American businessman Willie Wilson and several Black pastors. Johnson has responded with stops at churches on the South and West sides where he often flatters everyone from the clergy to the live band. One Sunday, Johnson hit five places of worship, including Sweet Holy Spirit Church in South Chicago for a service with influential Bishop Larry Trotter.

Johnson began with a promise to celebrate his victory by purchasing a size 13 pair of snakeskin shoes like Trotter’s and talked about his relationship with God. Johnson often invokes his father, who was a preacher and a carpenter — a confluence that has led him to facetiously bemoan the pressure of being the son of “Black Jesus.”

“The author and the finisher of my faith is the only one who can keep any of us from falling,” Johnson said next to Trotter. The former Chicago Public Schools teacher added: “I know I get to go to heaven no matter what I do — I taught middle school.”

From the classroom to the campaign trail

While Vallas has criticized Johnson for his role as a Chicago Teachers Union organizer, blaming him for labor unrest and instability within the school district, Johnson regularly advocates for fully funded schools and hiring more teachers and social workers.

After a series of church stops, Johnson headed inside MacArthur’s Restaurant, a West Side institution visited by Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Lightfoot, Chicago Bulls star Zach LaVine and rapper Kanye West.

“How you doing sister?” Johnson asked as he sat down at a table with trays of soul food.

“Praying for ya, and hope you get in,” said Denise Miranda, a teacher at Ruggles Elementary on the South Side. “We know that you’re going to take care of us at CPS who are still in the trenches, fighting that fight.”

As Miranda and others at the table who work for CPS shared their experiences, Johnson talked of his time at the Jenner Academy elementary school where he spent most of his four-year teaching career before becoming a union organizer.

“I had a rule if I sat down, I took a time out, people needed to be quiet,” he said. One day, during a time out, a student raised her hand. “I thought she was going to say something silly like, ‘I got to go to the bathroom.’ And she said, ‘Mr. Johnson, I am going to tell you what the problem is.’”

The women stopped eating and leaned in.

“She says, ‘you shouldn’t be teaching here,’” Johnson recalled. “She said, ‘you should be teaching at a good school.’”

“Ah,” Miranda responded. “She felt that way.”

“I probably sat in that classroom for about three hours after they went home,” Johnson reflected. “She knows what quality looks like but don’t believe that she deserves it.”

‘Muy simpatico’

Besides trying to unify support from Black voters, Johnson also has worked to build a rainbow coalition like the one that helped Harold Washington win in 1983.

Already backed by several Northwest Side Latino progressives, including U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez and City Council members Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez and Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, Johnson’s campaign hopes an endorsement from former mayoral opponent U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García will spur even greater support, even though García placed a disappointing fourth in February.

Standing just inside the doors at the La Villita Community Church on the Southwest Side, García greeted Johnson with a hug and asked, “You’ve been here before?”

“No, this is my first time,” Johnson said, before wryly quipping, “I’ve been to church before!”

“You better have!” García responded before leading him in front of the altar and a group of supportive Latino politicians.

The next day, Johnson joined Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez to tour the sprawling Little Village Discount Mall, a staple in the Mexican American neighborhood embroiled in an evictions dispute.

Within the complex’s maze of towering electronics, quinceañera dresses and home goods, vendors warmly greeted the mayoral candidate as a woman running a shoe stall flagged him down. “We got to get you some of those boots,” Sigcho-Lopez told Johnson, who soon pointed at some pairs that caught his eye.

“Muy simpatico,” Johnson said as he was handed a pair of regal brown leather boots. Very nice. “I really want to wear them now, but I’mma save ‘em for election night.”

Deeper inside the mall, he elicited gifts from vendors, including a golden-white ring that he happily showed off, saying, “Bling!”

Twenty minutes later, as he left with a pile of gifts balanced clumsily atop his and his aides’ arms, he turned around for one last wave and heard a plea from vendors.

“Don’t forget the discount mall, please,” they said.

Family values

As Johnson has campaigned about his progressive goals, he also has aggressively sought to define Vallas as a Republican.

While accepting an endorsement from Service Employees International Union Local 1, he lifted both hands and invoked the axiom “Sí, se puede” — a United Farm Workers motto and the inspiration for Obama’s famous “Yes, we can!” 2008 campaign slogan.

Claiming Vallas would not approve of the spirit of “Sí, se puede,” Johnson declared: “Paul Vallas doesn’t want us to be woke” as some union members behind him grunted in approval.

Hardly a speech goes by without Johnson stressing the values of family, from his childhood spent sharing a bathroom with nine siblings to the heartache he feels telling his teenage son where he cannot ride his bike safely.

Days before the election, Johnson spoke at St. Paul Church of God in Christ in Grand Boulevard then headed straight for a “very important woman” in his life.

Minnie Smith, Johnson’s aunt, sat in her wheelchair. Dressed in a purple blouse with a flower homburg hat, Smith smiled as she watched Johnson work the crowd.

“She’s blowing up my phone every day, telling me what I am doing right on the campaign,” Johnson said, to which Smith shared a different recollection.

“I say, you got to speak up louder, you got to be stronger,” she said, noting as a young man Johnson kept many of his siblings together after his mother died. “You are a great man, speak like you are a great man.”

Despite his aunt’s light ribbing, Johnson is a far more comfortable public speaker than Vallas and he often fills his events with banter. He has referred to himself as the “lover-in-chief” because he “loves people” and says he has a knack for settling differences.

When a resident asked why Chicago can’t have two football teams since it has both the Cubs and White Sox, he said he understood the logic but then tried to defuse the question by joking, “Can we at least get at least one winning team?”

He also frequently uses his family as a backdrop for his colloquial style.

“Listen, my family fights over the Thanksgiving menu and it’s the same menu every year,” he often says. And recently he joked his daughter, already preparing for life at City Hall, has filed a “list of demands,” but then later proudly showed off to a couple of kids a beaded bracelet she made him reading, “DAD.”

“Don’t tell my sons, but my daughter is my favorite,” he said.

Toward the tail end of his campaign, some of Johnson’s most enthusiastic visits took place on the South and West sides where he stirred a hopeful message of a city rejuvenated.

While touring small businesses last week, he visited The Woodshop, an art gallery and custom frame shop on 75th Street that’s been in Chatham since 1979.

Before Johnson arrived, owner Marvita D’Antignac reminisced about how lively the 75th Street corridor used to be when it was one of Black Chicago’s main thoroughfares that blossomed during the Great Migration.

“Everything was just jumping,” she said.

After his visit and as the candidate continued down 75th Street, the store’s venerate aura shifted as its walls of regal faces depicted inside its picture frames — including a drawing of Harold Washington — melted away into a landscape of fading brick exteriors and jarring metal gates.

Johnson said he envisions much more for this street and beyond.

“I believe that what people want is to be able to shop in their neighborhoods. They want to be able to afford to live in their neighborhoods,” Johnson said. “They want to be able to go hang out and listen to good music, eat good food. But most importantly, you know, they want the vibrancy.”

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