SOUTH LOOP — A local union is pushing back against the city's efforts to name the area around the new DePaul University arena after Col. Robert McCormick, calling the former Tribune publisher a "forefather" to Donald Trump.
Under McCormick, who died in 1955, the Tribune published anti-Mexican editorials.
Karen Kent, president of Unite Here Local 1, on Tuesday likened the city's effort to call the burgeoning entertainment district near McCormick Place "McCormick Square" to renaming it after the Republican front-runner campaigning on anti-immigrant sentiments.
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The Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the quasi-public agency behind the new arena and 1,206-room Marriott Marquis hotel next door, announced in April it was calling the quickly changing part of the South Loop "McCormick Square" after McCormick Place, the nearby convention center that is the city's largest.
"I guess if you name a neighborhood after a racist in 2016, it's OK to continue to promote economic segregation with women and men of color slaving away for conventioneers," Kent said Tuesday.
Kent said in an interview she is not trying to rename McCormick Place, which was christened in 1960, or any other site named after the historic Tribune publisher. But she urged the city not to repeat the "same mistakes" she feels empower racism.
A Chicago native, McCormick fought in World War I and rose to the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army. He co-founded the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, which is named after his grandfather and former mayor and Tribune publisher Joseph Medill. He inherited the Tribune from his family in the 1920s.
A staunch conservative and isolationist, he was an opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and the nation's entry into World War II. Kent said McCormick was also behind many xenophobic editorials that ran during his helm at the paper:
•"If the yellow people should rise against the white, what hideous possibilities confront us," McCormick wrote this his mother, according to a 1997 biography.
•"Mexican immigration will lower our standard of living," the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote in 1930.
•“We need a complete shutting off of immigration," the Daily Tribune wrote in 1929.
Kent's campaign is the latest controversy surrounding the new DePaul University basketball arena, which was announced by Mayor Rahm Emanuel the same week Chicago Public Schools closed 49 schools mostly on the city's South and West sides. The Marriott Marquis nearby is being financed with $55 million in tax increment financing funds diverted from the school district and other local taxing bodies.
Mary Kay Marquisos, a spokeswoman for the agency known as McPier, said in a statement that the McCormick brand "has grown far beyond the name of one individual."
"The name McCormick Square was developed to provide a unifying identity for our campus, one of the major economic hubs of the city," Marquisos said. "We value our relationship with Unite Here and the many other unions we work with each day."
Kent's union represents hotel workers and other laborers and is perhaps best known for leading a decade-long strike at the Congress Plaza Hotel on Michigan Avenue. Kent said she hopes the jobs at the basketball arena and hotel, both set to open next year, employ union workers.
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