Chicago heads to the polls to elect city's first black woman as mayor
CHICAGO - Chicago voters went to the polls on Tuesday to choose between two African-American women running for mayor, with the winner of the historic vote inheriting a city steeped in violent crime and wracked by fiscal woes.
The victor will become the first African-American woman to lead Chicago, a rarity in the United States, where only 6 percent of mayors in the 200 U.S. largest cities are women of color, according to the Reflective Democracy Campaign. Lightfoot would also become the first openly gay mayor in Chicago. She has never held political office, while Preckwinkle was a city councilwoman for almost 20 years before becoming Cook County board president in 2010.
“People talk about change but don’t understand that there is a lot to deal with on the day-to-day business, like snow plows," Williams said during an event on Saturday at the Rainbow PUSH headquarters, where both candidates agreed to unite after the election.Tuesday's winner will take over a city ranked as one of the nation's most violent. Homicides in Chicago declined by more than a quarter in 2018 from its five-year high of 769 in 2016.
Preckwinkle and Lightfoot both support an elected rather than a currently appointed board to govern the debt-dependent Chicago Public Schools, which is controlled by the mayor.
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