For much of his career, Mike Simmons ’06 has worked behind the scenes. He’s helped craft economic policy for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.); developed and implemented legislation to increase food access in Chicago under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel; served the Obama Foundation as deputy director of the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance; and started his own firm to help clients develop and enact anti-racist public policy.
Now, Simmons has scored a starring role: he was appointed in February to fill Illinois’ 7th district State Senate seat. He is the first openly gay state senator in Illinois, and the first Black state senator to represent the 7th district.
When Heather Steans announced her resignation from the seat in January, many expected the selection committee to choose the current state representative, Kelly Cassidy, to replace her. But while five members voted for Cassidy, the voting is weighted, and the four who chose Simmons held more voting power. That surprise move handed Simmons a majority—67,516 votes out of 90,009—and, therefore, the seat.
Simmons tossed in his hat after witnessing, in his words, the “reckoning around racial justice” of the past year. “The killing of George Floyd, the maiming of Jacob Blake right up the road [in Kenosha, Wis.], Breonna Taylor and so many others, has ignited a strong cry for justice all across the country, and certainly in the 7th district,” Simmons says. “As a Black person—half Black American, half Ethiopian—and as a gay person, I felt like now was the time for more people like me to step up and serve—people who historically have not been given the opportunity to serve.”
Simmons’ mother, Ramona Rouse, and grandmother Dorothy Harrison raised him in the district’s Lincoln Square neighborhood. They lived in public housing that had been recently integrated following the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision Hills v. Gautreaux, which said the Chicago Housing Authority was segregating Black families. “There was rampant racism when my family moved in: people throwing eggs at my grandmother, yelling misogynistic and racist epithets at my mom, a teenage mother, when she was just going back and forth from work,” Simmons says of the majority-white neighborhood. “I experienced some of it too, when I was in grade school—casual racial epithets, homophobic epithets, in some instances by adults in the school.”
Photo: Illinois Senate Democrats
Today, he views those early years—specifically, being raised by a single mother and a grandmother in a low-income, multigenerational household—as having guided him into politics: “I think I have a responsibility to articulate the challenges of the tens of thousands of people who live in this district.”
This is not Simmons’ first time representing a community: he was president of the Association of Amherst Students his senior year. In that position, he backed a successful student effort to persuade the College to
divest any direct holdings in companies whose business activities supported the Sudanese government and its Darfur genocide.
“I felt like I was the face and the voice of the entire student body,” Simmons says. “The 7th district is similar in that way, although it’s even more diverse here. That is what I love the most about representing this district.”
Harry Osterman, an alderman in the 7th district, chaired the committee that appointed Simmons. He says members “were impressed by his deep commitment to the people of our community, to those individuals and voices who are underrepresented within our diverse community, his significant experience, but also his strong willingness to dedicate himself to being a great state senator. He represents what I would say is a new leadership in the Senate, and he can really tap into his life experience and who he is as a person.”
So much of who Simmons is as a person, and as a politician, comes from his mother, who died last year. In her 25 years running a hair salon in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, “she shaped my compassion for people in my community,” he says. “My mother had compassion for everybody, never held a grudge. She would push me to give people the benefit of the doubt, even when I didn’t think it was justified.”
She’s on his mind now, as he creates his agenda in Springfield. Simmons has proposed a $600 child tax credit for low-income parents and sponsored bills that would expand access to Medicaid and mental health resources. He’s also passed a bill that prohibits schools from discriminating against Black hair and organized a vaccine clinic for underserved members of his district.
Of his mother, he also says this: “Somehow this woman got me all the way to Amherst College, and that’s incredible. I mean, she was a teenage mother in public housing, with very little help, and managed to get her oldest son to Amherst College.”
And that was only the beginning.
Photograph by Paul Elledge