Longtime Hyde Park resident and former local politician Abner Mikva passed away on Monday, July 4, at the age of 90.
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“We’re all better off because we were sent Ab Mikva, and because Ab in turn sent us forward to do big things”, the president said in the release.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said Mikva “remained true to his moral compass to try, in the finest Jewish tradition, to heal the world”.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Mikva Challenge, a nonprofit organization that Mikva and his wife Zoe started in the late 1990s to encourage civil and political engagement among high school students.
I walked in and I said “I’d like to volunteer to work for Stevenson and Douglas.’ This quintessential Chicago ward committeeman took the cigar out of his mouth and glared at me and said, ‘Who sent you?’ I said, ‘Nobody sent me.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth and he said, ‘We don’t want nobody that nobody sent.’ This was the beginning of my political career in Chicago”.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan clerked for Mikva when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
After serving 10 years in the Illinois House of Representatives, he was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1968. “In an era of cynicism and disappointment, Abner’s record of public service was proof that the good guys can win without selling their souls”. For me, one of those people was Ab Mikva.
“Ab Mikva was the pol “nobody sent” but IL and America are better today because he defied the Bosses and rallied thousands to beat them”, Democratic U.S. Sen. “But as we mourn his passing, I’m comforted by the thought that countless Americans will continue fighting for progressive causes Ab believed in because he pushed them toward public service, both during his time in government and through Mikva Challenge, which he established with his wonderful wife, Zoe”. In 1994, Judge Mikva resigned from the bench to become White House Counsel to Clinton.
He is survived by three daughters and seven grandchildren.
President Barack Obama has said Mikva was one of his political mentors, and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.
Mikva, who was born in 1926 in Milwaukee to Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian immigrants, described his familys economic hardship during the Great Depression to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in 2012, saying his father was often unemployed and that the family relied on welfare. It was when he was living in Hyde Park that he chose to run for a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives for the 23rd District and after winning the primary, was the first independent Democrat from Chicago to have been elected to the state legislature.
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Obama recalled how Mikva was interested in hiring him to be a law clerk when he was finishing Harvard Law School and Mikva was a federal judge based in Washington, D.C. After the ceremony in 2014, Mikva explained more of the story. She also served on Mikva’s staff when he was Bill Clinton’s White House Counsel. “It is fundamentally unjust to abort a most promising military career exclusively because of a truthful confession of a sexual preference different from that of the majority”.
