The day after Lori Lightfoot made her historic win as Chicago’s first African-American female mayor and as the only same-gender-loving mayor of one of America’s three largest cities, she and her former opponent and current Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle held a joint press conference with Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Chicago is in Cook County.

Both women, who represent overlapping jurisdictions, vowed to work together to face the challenges ahead. Jonathan Jackson, national spokesman for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and son of Jesse Jackson, placed the struggles ahead in economic context – more retires, less workers to put money into the retirement system, and a shrinking city that had 3.8 million people at its peak in 1950, but now is home to only 2.6 million. “We are the incredible shrinking city,” the younger Jackson concluded.

Despite the barbs on the campaign trail, the two advanced similar ideas to boost the city's deeply troubled finances, which include an estimated $250-million budget deficit next year and billions in unfunded pension liabilities.

Chicago, which had been the nation's second city since 1890, behind New York City, slipped to number three in 1984 when Los Angeles became number two. Unless Chicago’s shrinkage reverses course, Houston is poised to pass Chicago as the third biggest city in the US in the next decade.

The elder Jackson reminded the audience that two days after the election, April 4, Dr. King was killed 51 years earlier and that his work planted the seeds for the historic election. “Great leaders plant seeds, they grow trees, whose limbs they may never see,” he said in traditional rhyming fashion.