Politics & Power Quote by Harold Washington

“Affirmative action works” is a deliberately blunt opening, and Harold Washington knew exactly what he was doing with that brevity: he’s treating the policy not as a moral aspiration but as a proven instrument. The verb “works” is technocratic on purpose. It refuses the sentimental framing that opponents often caricature, and it forces the argument onto results: representation changes when barriers are actively countered.

Then comes the real message: “but we’re going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.” Washington shifts from policy efficacy to power reality in one clause. The subtext is that success doesn’t protect a reform; it endangers it. If affirmative action produces visible redistribution of opportunity, it also produces backlash from constituencies invested in the old allocation. “Keep it in place” sounds almost military, as if the policy is a position under siege, not a settled consensus.

Context matters: Washington rose in an era when civil-rights gains were being steadily litigated, administratively narrowed, and rhetorically recast as “special treatment.” As Chicago’s first Black mayor, he governed at the intersection of reform and machine politics, where victories were transactional and reversible. The line reads like counsel to allies who think the moral argument is self-sustaining. Washington is warning that the battlefield is institutional: courts, budgets, hiring rules, enforcement agencies, elections. “All our political resources” is a call to coalition discipline, not purity - votes, litigation, messaging, appointments, turnout. The quote works because it marries confidence to vigilance: progress isn’t fragile because it’s weak, but because it’s contested.