Illinois: Seventh District

Rep. Danny Davis (D)

Danny Davis (D) Elected 1996, 6th term up
Born:	09-06-1941, Parkdale, AR
Home:	Chicago
Education:	AR AM&N Col., B.A. 1961, Chicago St. U., M.S. 1968, Union Inst., Ph.D. 1977
Religion:	Baptist
Marital Status:	married (Vera)
Elected  Office:	Chicago City Alderman, 1979–90; Cook Cnty. Commissioner, 1990–96.
Professional Career:	Teacher, Chicago Public Schls., 1962–69; Health Care Planner, 1969–79.
DC Office	2159 RHOB, 20515 202-225-5006 Fax: 202-225-5641 Website: www.house.gov/davis
State Offices	Broadview:708-345-6857; Chicago:773-533-7520;
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The cross-country flyer on a lucky day can get a clear view of the biggest man-made cityscape between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans: Chicago’s Loop. High-rise buildings and the parks along Lake Michigan were pioneered a century ago in the Loop—named in 1897 for the quadrilateral the elevated train forms around the city’s center—by architects like Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham. International School modernists built their most impressive collection of buildings here and along Lake Shore Drive in the years after World War II; in recent years, postmodernists have decorated the Chicago River and reinvented the skyscraper. The Loop now spreads beyond the El, up the wondrous shopping street of North Michigan Avenue with a peak at the John Hancock Tower plus the new Millennium Park and band shell along the lakefront, and west beyond the financial exchanges to the Sears Tower on the Chicago River. This is the face Chicago likes to present to the world: giant structures rising where the prairies meet the inland sea, a vast concentration of brains and muscle, the nerve center of the markets of the nation and the world.

Behind the lakefront, where the air traveler sees the grid spread out below with occasional radials, are the muscle and sinew, gristle and fat of the city. There are parts that do not work so well: houses and apartment buildings are abandoned; commercial space stands empty and vandalized; giant, crime-racked housing projects, like the Robert Taylor Homes off the Dan Ryan Expressway, built by Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1960s (he preferred low-rise projects, but the feds wouldn’t finance them) and torn down by Mayor Richard M. Daley. The West Side of Chicago, the vast acres directly west of the Loop, for years was a dreadful slum, with some areas almost emptied out; the decay spread west to the Austin neighborhood, just before the border of upper-income—and for decades racially integrated—Oak Park. Many factories that made Chicago the chocolate and candy center of the nation were shuttered, and production went mostly overseas. In the 1990s, there was some revival. The United Center, the erstwhile home court of Michael Jordan, sparked commercial development of the West Side, and lower crime rates raised land values once again. Former meatpacking buildings have been turned into art galleries. A massive new downtown dormitory houses students from nearby DePaul University, Roosevelt University and Columbia College.

The 7th Congressional District of Illinois contains the Loop and most of the North Michigan corridor and the Near North Side, where the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project has been replaced by new, mixed-market housing. It goes south, past landmark museums, Soldier Field stadium and 19th century Prairie Avenue mansions to take in a few of the heavily black South Side neighborhoods chronicled in the groundbreaking 1945 book Black Metropolis. Its heart, demographically and spiritually, is the black ghetto of the West Side, more depopulated and socially disorganized than the South Side. To the west, just outside city limits, are Oak Park, the boyhood home of Ernest Hemingway and location of the Frank Lloyd Wright home and museum and many of his prairie-style houses; River Forest; and the much more modest Maywood, which is black-majority; plus Broadview and Hillside, site of a one-lane Chicago expressway bottleneck known as the Hillside Strangler. As with the South Side districts, redistricting in 2001 added nearly 100,000 people to the 7th and reduced slightly the share of black population but left George W. Bush with only 16% and 17% in his two campaigns. Just under two-thirds of the people here are black; there are relatively few Hispanics, since Latino neighborhoods were carefully placed in the 4th District.

The congressman from the 7th District is Danny Davis, a Democrat first elected in 1996 after two unsuccessful tries in the 1980s. Davis grew up on a cotton farm in Arkansas, graduated from college there, then moved to Chicago and worked as a teacher, assistant principal and guidance counselor in Chicago public schools. For 10 years, he ran a community health project on the West Side. He was elected alderman in the 29th Ward on the boundary of Oak Park in 1979 and supported Mayor Harold Washington in the council wars of the 1980s. In 1990 he was elected a Cook County commissioner; in 1991 he made a quixotic run for mayor against Richard M. Daley; he lost his 29th Ward committeeman post to a Daley-backed challenger in 2000.

In 1996, when Cardiss Collins retired after nearly 24 years in the House, Davis decided to run for the House again. His major opponents were 3d Ward Alderman Dorothy Tillman, a Daley ally, and 37th Ward Alderman Ed Smith. Davis campaigned as a big-government liberal, calling for a $7.60 minimum wage, affirmative action, and a national health care plan. Davis won with 33%. He won the general with ease and has not faced a serious challenge since then.

In the House, Davis has a mostly liberal voting record, though he’s moved closer to the center on economic issues. He has opposed income tax cuts, even when advocated by Bill Clinton. He opposed the sugar program as corporate welfare (Chicago remains the nation’s leading candy manufacturer). On the Government Reform Committee, he was a champion of organized labor as he worked with a bipartisan coalition that in 2006 enacted major changes in the Postal Service. With his wife Vera, who was then president of the West Side NAACP, Davis advocated a local program to increase the low share of black home ownership in his district by offering credit counseling and innovative forms of mortgage financing. He has created dozens of advisory task forces to get views from constituents.

Davis speaks in an impressive sepulchral tone, and his self-evident sincerity and concern for the poor helped him to some success in the Republican-controlled House. With the view that everybody deserves a second chance, Davis has taken a deep interest in the problems of former convicts seeking to transition back to the mainstream. He and conservative Republican Mark Souder proposed the Public Safety ex-Offender Self-Sufficiency Act, to use tax credits to encourage transitional housing and job training for former prisoners.

In 2006, he sought to become Cook County Board president when incumbent John Stroger suffered a serious stroke. But Democratic committeemen overwhelmingly supported Stroger’s son Todd for the nomination and Davis was a distant second; with Davis's endorsement, Stroger went on to win easily in November. When Democrats regained the House majority, Davis became chairman of the Federal Workforce Subcommittee at the Oversight and Government Reform panel.

Committees

• Education & Labor (14th of 27 D)
  Early Childhood, Elementary & Secondary Education; Higher Education, Lifelong Learning & Competitiveness.
• Oversight & Government Reform (7th of 23 D)
  Federal Workforce, Postal Service & the District of Columbia (Chmn.); Domestic Policy.

Presidential Vote

District Demographics (More Info)

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: D +35
• Area size: 59 square miles
• Urban Population: 100.0%
• Rural Population: 0.0%
• Population 2000: 653,647
• Population 2005 (est): 627,239
• Median Income: $40,361
• Poverty Status: 24.0%
• Military Veterans: 8.0%
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 27.3% White; 61.6% Black; 3.8% Asian; 0.1% Native Am.; 0.0% Hawaiian; 1.2% Two+ races; 0.1% Other; 5.8% Hispanic Origin;
• Ancestry: 5.6% German%; 5.2% Irish%; 2.9% Italian%;
• Occupation: Blue collar 15.5%; White collar 70.6%; Gray collar 13.9%;