Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, a fixture in state and local Democratic Party politics who successfully championed legislation to ban the death penalty in Illinois, died Sunday. She was 73.
For decades, Yarbrough and her husband, Henderson, were political mainstays in west suburban Maywood, where he previously served as mayor, and Proviso Township. She represented the area for years in the Illinois House, eventually serving on then-Speaker Michael Madigan’s leadership team.
Her alliance with Madigan, a longtime Illinois Democratic Party chair, accompanied her rise in state and local Democratic parties and continued through her successful runs first for Cook County’s recorder of deeds and then county clerk. Yarbrough was elected in 2018 as the county’s first African-American and female clerk.
A spokesperson for the county clerk’s office announced on April 2 that Yarbrough was hospitalized with a “serious medical condition,” and confirmed her death Sunday evening.
Yarbrough was a native of Washington D.C. Her family came to Maywood in the early 1960s. She studied business management at Chicago State University and received her masters in Inner City Studies from Northeastern Illinois University.
She became a licensed real estate broker and founded Hathaway Insurance Agency in Maywood in 1975. It followed a path charted by her father, the late Don Williams Sr., who established the first African-American-owned pharmacy in the village in the 1960s and branched out into home building, real estate and insurance, according to his Tribune obituary.
Williams, who was active in the local NAACP and a contemporary of activist Fred Hampton, was elected to one term as mayor of Maywood, and headed up its chamber of commerce. Yarbrough herself later led the chamber starting in 1993.
She first ran for the House in 1998 against incumbent Rep. Eugene Moore but lost by 544 votes in a four-way primary. In 2000, after Moore left the legislature to become recorder of deeds, Yarbrough won the seat.
Yarbrough and Moore often clashed. She lost to him in a 2002 race for Proviso Township Democratic Committeeman, but beat him four years later. When Moore retired as recorder, Yarbrough succeeded him in the county post and left the House position she held for more than a decade.
Her most high-profile accomplishments in Springfield included successfully working on legislation to make Illinois the 22nd state to ban indoor smoking in 2008, but she also secured money for basic local projects ranging from repaving a library parking lot to redoing local alleyways and streetscapes.
Yarbrough garnered her biggest accolades for her House sponsorship of the ban on executions in Illinois, culminating in the dramatic passage of the legislation on the second of two votes taken during one of the closing days of a lame-duck session in January 2011.
After the bill fell short by one vote in the first round, Yarbrough brought it back a second time and passed the historic measure. It was the first time a death penalty ban passed the House since executions were reinstated in Illinois in 1977. The proposed ban was heavily criticized by some lawmakers and prosecutors who argued violent criminals could murder multiple victims without fear of being killed themselves.
The measure quickly passed the Senate, and Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn signed the bill in a private ceremony in his Capitol office with Yarbrough and then-Sen. Kwame Raoul, now the attorney general, looking on with other supporters.
The approval came more than a decade after Republican Gov. George Ryan unilaterally placed a moratorium on the death penalty following revelations that several people sent to death row were not guilty.
Once a supporter of capital punishment, Yarbrough later said the exonerations served as a “painful and stirring reminder that death is an absolute penalty. Once imposed, there is no second chance, no reversal and no way to correct a mistake.”
When she won the recorder’s office in 2012, she inherited a federal court anti-patronage monitor ordered to oversee the office under Moore’s tenure, but she could not shake it during her time in that office.
For years, reformers pushed for the recorder’s office, which oversees land transactions, to be combined with the clerk’s office, which oversees suburban voting and records like birth certificates, and voters approved the merger in 2016.
Despite her early opposition to consolidation, Yarbrough got on board when elected clerk.
Former Cook County Commissioner Ed Moody, then a close Madigan associate who now is expected to testify in the ex-speaker’s upcoming federal corruption trial, was appointed as interim recorder until the merger was complete.
Yarbrough sprinkled her offices with Madigan allies, and served as interim chair of the state Democratic Party when Madigan lost his speakership and gave up the party post amid a burgeoning ComEd lobbying scandal in 2021.
As county clerk, she once was accused of “running an illegal patronage operation” by Michael Shakman, the attorney whose lawsuit filed half-a-century ago against Democratic machine politics led to a series of anti-patronage decrees and eventually federal monitors overseeing several offices, including hers.
Despite frequently being dinged over defying best employment practices, Yarbrough consistently denied the allegations and eventually took advantage of a federal appellate court decision that lifted the oversight of Illinois government.
As a result, Yarbrough’s county clerk’s office, the last public office under a federal monitor, was able to end the Shakman case first launched to fight the stubborn and unfair use of Democratic politics to decide most hiring, firing and promotion in state and local government.
A federal judge officially released her from that oversight last year despite some reservations from watchdogs that she hadn’t fully addressed problematic personnel practices.
Yarbrough briefly considered a run for secretary of state in 2021 when Jesse White announced he would not seek re-election.
She ultimately decided against running statewide, in part, because her husband, Henderson, was being treated for prostate cancer.
“He is my rock,” the county clerk said of her spouse, according to the Sun-Times. “There’s nothing I have done in the past 30 years that he hasn’t been by my side for. He’s quiet, soft spoken, but he’s got a lot of wisdom — especially as it relates to this rough and tumble business I’m in — and he’s the head of our family.”
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