The congressman from the 1st District is Bobby Rush, a man who has gone through several transformations. He grew up on the North Side, a Boy Scout whose mother was a Republican precinct captain. While in the Army, he became involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the South, then became disillusioned with the military and went AWOL in 1968. That year, he founded the Illinois Black Panthers, with its “Power to the People” slogan, and recruited Fred Hampton, who became chairman of the organization but was later killed by police in a 1969 raid. The next day, police raided Rush’s family’s apartment, but he wasn’t there. Rush served six months in prison for illegal possession of firearms, but also during his time with the Black Panthers he ran a program providing free breakfasts to children and a medical clinic that developed the nation’s first mass sickle-cell-anemia testing program. “I don’t repudiate any of my involvement in the Panther party. It was part of my maturing,” Rush later said. Lately, he has commemorated the anniversary of the raid by holding a job fair to promote the future. In 1983, he was elected the 2nd Ward alderman on the Chicago City Council and became a strong supporter of Harold Washington, who became mayor. As he built a career in politics, Rush went back to school and earned master’s degrees in political science and theological studies. In 1992, he challenged Democratic Rep. Charles Hayes, an older-generation politician with a union background. Just before the primary, it was revealed that Hayes had 716 overdrafts on the House bank, a practice among lawmakers that blossomed into a national scandal. Rush won 42%-39%. Read More

The congressman from the 1st District is Bobby Rush, a man who has gone through several transformations. He grew up on the North Side, a Boy Scout whose mother was a Republican precinct captain. While in the Army, he became involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the South, then became disillusioned with the military and went AWOL in 1968. That year, he founded the Illinois Black Panthers, with its “Power to the People” slogan, and recruited Fred Hampton, who became chairman of the organization but was later killed by police in a 1969 raid. The next day, police raided Rush’s family’s apartment, but he wasn’t there. Rush served six months in prison for illegal possession of firearms, but also during his time with the Black Panthers he ran a program providing free breakfasts to children and a medical clinic that developed the nation’s first mass sickle-cell-anemia testing program. “I don’t repudiate any of my involvement in the Panther party. It was part of my maturing,” Rush later said. Lately, he has commemorated the anniversary of the raid by holding a job fair to promote the future. In 1983, he was elected the 2nd Ward alderman on the Chicago City Council and became a strong supporter of Harold Washington, who became mayor. As he built a career in politics, Rush went back to school and earned master’s degrees in political science and theological studies. In 1992, he challenged Democratic Rep. Charles Hayes, an older-generation politician with a union background. Just before the primary, it was revealed that Hayes had 716 overdrafts on the House bank, a practice among lawmakers that blossomed into a national scandal. Rush won 42%-39%.

In the House, Rush has a liberal voting record. His rhetoric has softened over the years, and his more deliberate style contrasts sharply with his days as a Panther. Gun violence caused great pain to Rush in 1999, when his son Huey Rich, who was born three weeks before the 1969 police raid, was murdered by a man wielding a handgun as he returned to his South Side home with his fiancée. Ordained as a Baptist minister, Rush founded a church in 2002 in the depressed Englewood community, but it struggled financially. Legislatively, he has focused on children’s health and the nursing shortage.

In recent years, he has devoted much of his time to the Energy and Commerce Committee, where he was chairman of the Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee until Democrats lost control of the House in 2011. He is now the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Power Subcommittee. In the 111th Congress (2009-10), he worked on measures to protect companies’ private information against data security breaches, to add protections to consumers’ personal information and to ensure that tax-exempt hospitals treat patients without insurance. He also got an unexpected audience with Cuban leader Fidel Castro during an April 2009 visit to Havana. Rush told the Chicago Tribune that Castro said he respected his involvement with the Black Panthers because of its attitudes toward human rights.

Rush waged a quixotic campaign in 1999 against Richard M. Daley’s iron grip on the mayor’s office. Rush was a frequent Daley critic, and during the campaign he attacked the mayor for tolerating police brutality, inadequate mass transit service, and cronyism in city government. Only three of the 50 aldermen endorsed him, and although Rush tried to build a multiracial coalition, his only chance was with black voters. Daley was popular, and his financial advantage overwhelming. The incumbent won the primary 72%-28%, with nearly 45% of the African-American vote and the support of many prominent black ministers.

After that pounding, Rush found himself challenged in his own re-election primary in 2000 by two state senators—Donne Trotter and the then little-known Barack Obama. Obama waged an aggressive campaign, saying at the time that Rush “exemplifies a politics that is reactive, that waits for crises to happen then holds a press conference, and hasn’t been particularly effective at building broad-based coalitions.” But Obama came under attack for being absent from the legislature for two months and missing a vote on a gun control bill while on a family trip to Hawaii, where he was raised. “It was a race in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” Obama later wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope. Rush was also helped by an endorsement from President Clinton and beat Obama 61%-30%. Surely not by coincidence, redistricting in 2002 shifted Obama’s Hyde Park home two blocks outside the new lines and removed the 19th Ward that he had carried. Rush has been routinely re-elected since then.

When Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Rush backed Democrat Blair Hull, who finished third in the primary. Afterward, he endorsed Obama. During Obama’s pitched battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton in the presidential primary four years later, Rush again endorsed Obama, calling it “one of the most difficult decisions I’ve had to make in politics.”

In other political machinations in recent years, Rush in 2008 pushed to ensure that President-elect Obama’s vacant Senate seat went to an African-American. He applauded Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s appointment of Roland Burris, and then, when Burris declined to run for re-election in 2010, he backed former Chicago Urban League President Cheryle Robinson Jackson. After Jackson finished third in the Senate primary, Rush declined for months to endorse the winner, state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, who is white. He finally did so in October. After Daley announced he wouldn’t run for re-election as mayor, Rush in early 2011 joined other black Democratic leaders in backing former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun. The job ultimately went to former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Rush had a brush with cancer in 2008. He was absent from Capitol Hill for much of the year recovering from salivary gland cancer and surgery to remove a tumor near his jaw. Doctors in August ruled him cancer free.