Lori Lightfoot

Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago, speaks after being sworn in during an inauguration ceremony in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Monday, May 20, 2019. Chicago makes history Monday as Lightfoot becomes its first black, female mayor after sweeping all 50 wards by promising to reform the third-biggest U.S city. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesPhoto by Bloomberg-Contributor

Last year, when GO spoke with Lori Lightfoot, she was one of several candidates for mayor of Chicago. This year, Lightfoot is back in these pages as the winner of that election—and as the first black woman and lesbian to hold the title (and the second woman in the city’s history). In fact, she’s the first out lesbian to ever run for the office in the history of Chicago. Originally from Massillon, Ohio (where her parents landed in the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South), and the youngest of four children, Lightfoot became a true Chicagoan. One example: she has held Chicago Bears season tickets for 20 years. Lightfoot has always been an achiever from the moment she decided to pursue a legal career. “It was really economics that drove me to think about the law,” she said to the Chicago Sun-Times. “I just wanted to be able to do something where I would be able to take care of myself financially.” And she has done that and more. Lightfoot, whose father was a sharecropper, studied at the University of Chicago Law School on a full scholarship, served as a clerk under Justice Charles Levin of the Michigan Supreme Court, has been an equity partner in law firm Mayer Brown, and headed both Chicago’s Office of Professional Standards and the Police Accountability Task Force. And now, she’s the Mayor of the third largest city in the United States. “I feel like, as an African-American woman,” she told the Sun-Times, “I have a responsibility to give something back.”—JDG