The Great Black Hope?

Reverend Jerry McAfee of the North Side’s New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, an activist who has battled Samuels over the years, says, “He’s made the right moves for the white community, but he hasn’t courted the black community en masse in the same way. When you make the statements that you make—dang! Whether you meant it or not, it’s insulting. You tell that to some people like my grandmother, who was born on a plantation. Her twin brother was killed by one of the overseers. Talk about some big house and stuff, that ain’t appealing to them.”

By way of explanation, Samuels, who was ordained a few years ago, says a meaningful part of his seminary work was learning about the Twelve Steps of alcoholism recovery. “This is the paradigm: I am an alcoholic; I am a racist. I have to stand up and say I was richer than some of the people in my community, we did have some maids, we did have a lighter complexion. I have to confess those things because then I can look at you and hold you accountable.”

Some wonder, though, whether he hasn’t let Mayor R. T. Rybak off the hook. Though Samuels is not one of city hall’s policy wonks, he backs Rybak on almost every economic and policing issue: He quickly supported the mayor’s nomination of Tim Dolan for police chief, even though no minorities were seriously considered.

Hitching a ride on Rybak’s coattails is not the most popular move on the North Side, where crime has climbed since the mayor’s 2001 election. And even though Rybak won reelection in 2005 with 61 percent of the vote, he lost Samuels’s 5th Ward. Ralph Remington—whose 2005 election to Uptown’s 10th Ward made him the council’s only other African American—recalls attending a black scholarship celebration where “at least ten to fifteen people came up to me and said, ‘You’re my council member.’ I said, ‘You’re in the 10th Ward?’ And they said, ‘No, I’m in the 5th Ward.’ They don’t say specific things, [it’s] more of a feeling—‘Don kisses the white man’s ass; Don kisses the mayor’s ass,’ those kind of comments.’ ”

Samuels is blunt about his relationship with Rybak, which epitomizes the realpolitik of his larger outreach. “This will not be an adversarial relationship where I am demanding things. Because one thing I have discovered about life: When you make demands of people, they will help you and comply with every demand you make that they can’t refute—but they are not going to help you with anything else but that. When a thief says to you, ‘Give me your wallet,’ you don’t give him your watch too. If he asks for the watch, you’ll give him your watch. But I don’t want that kind of relationship. I want one where when I say, ‘Can I have your wallet?’ you say, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s the watch.’ ”

A crime metaphor might not be the best way to exemplify a new North Side vision, but Samuels has survived worse: In the wake of the “big house” imbroglio, he won reelection by 11 percentage points. In Rybak’s first postelection state-of-the-city speech a year ago, he promised to concentrate cops and city economic development energies on the North Side, though the effects so far are unclear. “That totally grew out of Don taking me to meetings in his neighborhood,” Rybak says. “The people told me, ‘You wouldn’t allow this in other parts of town,’ and they were right. Don was willing to stand by me, but he made sure I really listened, really heard that.”