America’s second largest city, Chicago, had a population in the 1960s of 3.5 million, not counting the suburbs. Beginning with the first “great migration” of black southerners to the North during the World War I years, by the 1960s the “Windy City” had become the home of more African Americans than lived in the whole state of Mississippi. Attracted there by jobs and opportunity, most found the welcome of white Chicagoans just as chilly as the winter wind blowing across Lake Michigan. Many of these whites were first- or second-generation immigrants themselves, and they tended to huddle together in neighborhoods and communities that did not easily accept outsiders, no matter their race. Not surprisingly, blacks likewise huddled together in vast, sprawling, working-class areas on the south side, although more by necessity than choice. Only two real estate firms in the Chicago area would sell homes in white neighborhoods to black buyers, and only 1 percent of all home listings were open to an integrated market. Many banks and mortgage companies also discriminated, refusing to lend to blacks. White city leaders had long imposed a pseudolegal form of racial segregation on the black population, restricting their access to the better neighborhoods and schools. Indeed, Jim Crow was just as alive and well in Chicago as any place in the Deep South.
In 1955, while Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading the now-famous Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, in Chicago Richard J. Daley was winning election as mayor, partly because of his successful strategy to win black votes. Daley, a Democrat, would go on to serve as mayor throughout the rest of the 1950s and 1960s, becoming the most powerful mayor in America. In the early 1960s, he secured federal funding to build bigger and better public housing for African Americans on the south side, but these projects ended up serving more as traps to keep blacks stuck in their own communities than as homes that would raise their residents’ standard of living. Meanwhile, neither the Daley administration nor the Chicago public school system made any effort to implement the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and in 1961 the U.S. Supreme Court got involved through Webb v. Board of Education of Chicago. Still, the city followed the example of the Deep South states, and, rather than integrate with all deliberate speed, it took its sweet time improving the school situation for black students, who, incidentally, made up nearly 47 percent of all Chicago public school students.
In 1965, in the midst of his ongoing struggle to integrate the South, King, against the advice of some of his supporters, began looking for an opportunity to take the civil rights movement north. Local Chicagoans such as Al Raby and SCLC leaders in the Chicago office, including James Bevel, had been asking King for months to come and lead a demonstration there. After considering several possible locations for his northern campaign, and after visiting the Windy City, he finally decided that Chicago was the right place. It had a large black underclass, it suffered from many of the same ills that he had been dealing with for years in the South, it had an obstinate white power structure, headed by Daley, and it had already seen a demonstration recently when James Farmer and CORE had held a “pray-in” there earlier in the year. Once King made public his decision to start the Chicago Freedom Movement, Daley condemned it in no uncertain terms. He did precisely what southern governors such as George Wallace of Alabama and Ross Barnett of Mississippi had done in the face of civil rights agitation—he condemned King as an outside agitator and told him to mind his own business. Daley wanted to protect his turf, and he had powerful allies in the black community, such as the Reverend J. H. Jackson, who benefited from a quid pro quo with the mayor; they delivered black votes to him, and he delivered patronage to them. King, however, was not deterred by such alignments against him, having withstood similar ones in the South for a decade.
On January 7, 1966, King issued his plan for what he called the northern “freedom movement.”17 It included himself, his wife, Coretta, and several of his staff living in a dilapidated building on the southwest side in order to get a feel for real life in a Chicago slum. On Wednesday, January 26, he took up a two-day residence in a building in the North Lawndale community, which locals called “slumdale.”18 The building had a dirt floor, an open entrance with no door, and inadequate heat, and it reeked of urine because of the homeless people who used it as a public bathroom. After surviving the first night there, King walked the neighborhood the next day, meeting the residents and drumming up support for the campaign. Business in Alabama later in the week gave him an excuse for pulling out of the ramshackle tenement. Upon returning to Chicago a few days later, he slipped into a clean hotel, saying he just could not let his wife stay in such a deplorable place, although he had no problem letting his staff stay there.
After making weekly trips back and forth from Alabama to Chicago, with day trips on the side to New York and other places, on February 23 King led his first march through the streets of Chicago. He took 200 supporters and commandeered some of the worst buildings in the ghetto, cleaning and repairing them for the benefit of their poor tenants. Legally, he had no authority to do it, but he wanted to thrust the issue squarely in the face of both the slumlords who owned the buildings and the city leaders who let them get away with renting them. He then called a public meeting in which he confronted the slumlords to their face, and they mostly agreed to the reforms he demanded. These actions embarrassed the proud Mayor Daley, and he determined to grab the headlines away from King. He immediately publicized his own plan for the renovation of the black section of town over the next two years. With haste he sent a team from city hall to visit some 100,000 poor Chicagoans and offer them whatever assistance they needed, and he funded a project to eradicate the rats in the ghetto. Within days, he announced that more than 1.5 million rats had been destroyed. On March 17, he led a march of 70,000 supporters down the main thoroughfare, State Street, in a well-planned show of his power, designed to let King know who ran the town.
Undaunted by Daley’s power plays, on May 27 King announced that 163 local organizations had joined with him and the SCLC to clean up the slums of Chicago. He also said he intended to lead a march down State Street on June 26. That march never took place, however, because events down in Mississippi diverted everyone’s attention from Chicago in the month of June. At that time, James Meredith, who had integrated Ole Miss in 1962, was shot while attempting a solo march from Memphis to Jackson. King and a whole array of other civil rights leaders descended upon Mississippi to take up the Meredith March on their fallen comrade’s behalf. The march ended at the destination of Jackson on June 26. During this march, the most infamous rift in civil rights movement history occurred, as the new leader of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, began opposing King’s nonviolent philosophy by trumpeting the “Black Power” slogan. This episode created dissension in the ranks that would never be repaired, headed the civil rights movement in a new direction, contributed to the outbreak of violence and rioting that would soon characterize American race relations for the rest of the 1960s, and arguably killed the movement in the long run.
All of the consequences of the advent of Black Power can be seen in retrospect, but at the time, in July and August 1966, they were not yet evident. King had no idea how much the credibility of his nonviolent demonstrations had been challenged by Black Power. He soon found out. Back in Chicago, he kicked off his better-housing campaign on July 10. Coincidentally, the same day, just down the road from where he had set up headquarters to coordinate his activities and meet with the media, a minor race riot erupted. It started with an ice cream truck getting stranded in the road and black children taking advantage of the opportunity to loot it. It was 98 degrees outside, and these and many other children just like them routinely played in the water gushing from fire hydrants in their neighborhoods. The white police, responding to the looting of the ice cream truck, had no way of finding the guilty parties, so they decided to punish all the local black children by turning the water off at the hydrants. A black man came behind them, however, and turned the water back on. The police responded by arresting the man and locking the hydrants. An angry mob formed and began rioting. King and fellow civil rights leaders, upon hearing the news, rushed out to calm the crowd, and temporarily it seemed that a full-scale riot might be averted. Then, on Wednesday, July 13, the rioting broke out anew for no apparent reason. On Friday, Mayor Daley called for the National Guard to intervene. The riot, although nothing to laugh about, ended with far less damage done than had occurred in Watts the year before. It would likewise pale in comparison to the series of race riots about to erupt later in 1966 and 1967. It has consequently been consigned to a footnote in history among the many cataclysmic events of the 1960s.
King continued his Chicago campaign as if nothing had happened. The next week, he called for a picket line to be formed outside a local real estate company known for its discriminatory practices. The picketers, led by James Bevel, were heckled so badly that they ended their demonstration before the day was over. The next day, Saturday, July 30, a civil rights march of 250 people took place through a white community near Marquette Park, which brought a violent response from the residents, who threw bottles, rocks, curses, and epithets at the integrationists. The following day, the march continued, this time moving back in the opposite direction with 550 marchers under supposed police protection. The white mob, however, weaved in and out of the police line as if it was not there, assaulting the marchers and vandalizing their parked cars. Mayor Daley called on the white citizens of Chicago to end the violence, saying if they would just leave the integrationists alone to march in peace, the marchers would soon exhaust themselves and go home, and nothing would have to change. He believed that if whites ignored the marchers, they would not want to continue their demonstrations, because getting attention was what really fueled them. Whites certainly heard the mayor, but they did not listen to him. Instead, they ignored him, rather than ignoring the integrationists.
Despite so many obstacles, still King persevered. On August 5, he led another march near Marquette Park. Nearly 1,000 police showed up in full riot gear, but they were outnumbered five to one by the white mob. King, the star attraction, arrived late. Upon entering the street to lead the march, he was struck in the head with a rock by someone in the white crowd behind the police line. The blow sent the Reverend to his knees. Chaos ensued. Even with a bloody lump behind his ear, King still led the march. At the end of the day, he returned to his home base in the city, New Friendship Baptist Church, where he vowed to supporters and reporters alike not to end his Chicago campaign, even though he claimed never to have known such hate in his life as he had encountered in Chicago, not even in Alabama or Mississippi. All the attention that King drew to the city caused a backlash, however, among the American Nazi Party of Lincoln Rockwell. On Sunday, August 21, as King led yet another march in south Chicago, Rockwell and his neo-Nazis, along with some Klansmen and other assorted racists, staged a counterdemonstration at Marquette Park, which amounted to little more than preaching to the bigots’ choir.
King’s next and final move in Chicago came with the announcement of his intention to lead a march through the most violently racist suburb of Chicago, Cicero. His new protégé, Jesse Jackson, who happened to be living in Chicago and attending seminary there at the time, had already declared his intention to march in Cicero. King reiterated the pledge, setting the date for September 4, which caused Governor Otto Kerner to deploy the National Guard a day in advance to keep the peace. As it turned out, King never led that march, although it went on as scheduled, led by local civil rights leaders. There was another minor riot that day, but, all in all, it was an anticlimactic affair.
The final result of the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966 was that King and his civil rights cohorts had to accept a modified version of their list of demands. The campaign was not a complete failure, but it certainly did not represent the finest moment of either King or the civil rights movement. Some people at the time, and some historians since, have viewed it as a failure because it did not bring about an overnight, dramatic turnaround of racial discrimination in Chicago. It did sow the seeds of change, however, and that makes it a valuable piece of the mosaic of civil rights history. It showed an ugly reality about the United States that white northerners had for the most part managed to keep under cover before then—that racism was a national, not merely a southern, problem.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Sunday, January 13th 2013 at 11:08PM
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