Climbing a Great Mountain: Selected Speeches of Mayor Harold Washington [Hardcover]

Harold Washington (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 229 pages
• Publisher: Bonus Books (October 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0933893957
• ISBN-13: 978-0933893955
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,674,971 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars The speechwriter comments on his work, November 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Climbing a Great Mountain: Selected Speeches of Mayor Harold Washington (Hardcover)

I had the honor to serve as Mayor Harold Washington's press secretary and speechwriter for 1000 days, from February 1985 through his death in November, 1987. While working on a memoir of those days (HAROLD WASHINGTON, THE MAYOR, THE MAN, published in 1989) I negotiated with my publisher to produce another book in time for the first anniversary of the mayor's death, which I titled CLIMBING A GREAT MOUNTAIN, quoting from his first inaugural address.

These speeches (and photographs) capture some of the spirit of that period -- what he called the "New Spirit of Chicago." I may have been his speechwriter, but his speeches were completely his own -- initially shaped by his philosophy, then massaged by his phrasings through our endless conversation, and then finally recast in his own words as he spoke, often without notes.

Paging back through those speeches ten years later, I find there a sometimes lost language of progressive politics -- an unabased defense of affirmative action, for example, and of activist governmental solutions to social problems.

Coretta Scott King was kind enough to provide a foreword, and I have briefly sketched a context for each speech. But the ideas -- and the passion for fairness and the strength to persevere against the politics of hate, and the articulate optimism about democracy -- are pure Harold.