You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Chicago Elects First Woman and Openly Gay Mayor in Lori Lightfoot

HeadlineApr 03, 2019

In Chicago, voters made history Tuesday night by electing the city’s first African-American woman as mayor. She will also be the city’s first openly gay mayor. Lori Lightfoot won a landslide victory, beating her opponent Toni Preckwinkle in a runoff vote and receiving 73 percent of votes.

Lightfoot is a newcomer to electoral politics, who previously worked as a federal prosecutor. In 2015, now-outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed her to head the Chicago Police Board. She was also chair of the Police Accountability Task Force in 2016, which issued a damning report after the police killing of African-American teenager Laquan McDonald. Part of her mayoral campaign focused on ousting Chicago’s political machine. This is Lightfoot addressing her supporters in a victory speech.

Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot: “Together, we can and will finally put the interests of our people, all of our people, ahead of the interests of a powerful few. Together, we can and will make Chicago a place where your ZIP code doesn’t determine your destiny.”

We’ll have more on Chicago’s historic mayoral election later in the show with professor and author Barbara Ransby.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top