Carol Eisenberg, Muckety
- Oprah Winfrey lives here. Michael Jordan keeps a penthouse on the lake. Jesse Jackson Jr. and Sr. are both here. And of course, there’s Barack Obama.
To a degree unlike any other city in America, Chicago is identified with its black elite. Locals joke that you can find more black millionaires per square foot at the Chicago Urban League’s annual dinner than you can anywhere in the world.
The windy city is home not just to Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and Chess Records, where Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf recorded hits, but also to Winfrey’s wildly successful Harpo Productions, and to “Ebony” and “Jet,” the flagships of Johnson Publishing Company, the world’s largest African-American-owned firm.
It is no coincidence that Chicago has also spawned three of the four black presidential candidates in U.S. history – Jesse Jackson Sr., Carol Moseley Braun and now Barack Obama. Politics, after all, requires money – lots of it.
