Another one joins the Ancestors--A" Race Man"

Mr. Savage said he began his career in activist politics and journalism after serving in a segregated Army unit during World War II.
One of his early publications, the American Negro, was a protest magazine that was among the first to print a photograph of the mutilated body of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Mr. Savage said he ran the image before Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, although it was those larger black publications that sparked national outrage over Till’s death.
In 1965, Mr. Savage founded Citizen Newspapers, a small chain of Chicago-area weeklies that railed against the city’s Democratic machine, personified by Mayor Richard J. Daley. With that maverick sensibility, Mr. Savage supported the political rise of Harold Washington, a friend and college classmate who became Chicago’s first black mayor in 1983.

“He was the architect behind the election of a black mayor,” Sidney Ordower, a political activist and Washington aide, told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. “You have to give him credit. He was the acknowledged leader of the independent progressive black political movement.”
Mr. Savage twice ran for Congress unsuccessfully before winning an open seat in 1980. He became the first African American to represent a district that in the 1960s and 1970s had seen a turbulent transition from a white industrial enclave to an area with a working-class black majority.
In office, Mr. Savage served on what is now the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He consistently fought President Ronald Reagan’s defense budgets, arguing that expensive military programs such as the Strategic Defense Initiative — the so-called “Star Wars” missile defense program — were diverting money from programs that benefited the poor.

In 1986, the congressman co-sponsored one of the largest set-aside measures in history, calling for 10 percent of defense contracts to go to minority-owned businesses. The measure would have brought about $20 billion to those businesses, but it was killed in the Senate.