SLOW-MOTION RACE RIOT
MAYOR THEODORE MCKELDIN was party to several other conflicts that rolled on beside the expressway fight. Shortly after his inauguration, the all-Democratic city council rejected two of his nominees for the Baltimore Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—created by Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., and the city council in 1956 in the afterglow of the city’s school desegregation effort. The council complained that McKeldin’s nominees were “too liberal.” The council relented and approved McKeldin’s nominees just two weeks later. Apparently, the Democrats had wanted to flex their political muscles for the edification of the Republican mayor.1
Equal opportunity was to become one of McKeldin’s chief preoccupations. While the council grumbled about his nominees for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the mayor was negotiating with African American ministers to ward off “mass demonstrations” at city-financed building projects to demand more jobs for African American construction workers. Rev. Marion Bascom, spokesman for the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, announced that the protests would have “more ‘grass-roots support’ from the city’s Negro community than any previous racial demonstration.” McKeldin agreed to meet with the ministers to reach a “peaceful solution,” which seemed within reach after his first session with the ministers, representatives of the construction unions, and the association of general contractors. Bascom praised the mayor for his part in reaching the agreement, including apprenticeship opportunities for young African Americans and immediate jobs for black workers.2
The black ministers kept up the pressure all summer. Representatives of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality met with the mayor to demand the integration of public swimming pools. In August, McKeldin announced that he would submit a comprehensive civil rights ordinance to the council when it reconvened in the fall.3
Not long after the council returned to city hall, the NAACP’s Juanita Jackson Mitchell arrived there at the head of a demonstration demanding nondiscrimination in public facilities. The mayor invited the leaders of the protest into his office—and then exploded. According to Mitchell, the mayor “became very excited.” “He was damning and helling all over the place.” McKeldin called the demonstration “ill-timed” because he was only a week away from submitting his civil rights bill to the council, including a provision that would prohibit discrimination in restaurants, bars, hotels, hospitals, bowling alleys, swimming pools, and vocational training. He had also announced his support for a fair housing ordinance proposed by Councilman Walter Dixon, one of the council’s two black members.4
The legislation proposed by the mayor and introduced by council president Thomas D’Alesandro III was a comprehensive measure outlawing discrimination not only in public accommodations but in employment, housing, public and private (but not parochial) schools, and health and welfare services. Most of the bill’s provisions do not seem to have elicited much controversy. At the hearing on educational institutions, for example, only one person spoke in opposition. Opposition to the fair housing guarantee, however, endangered the entire ordinance. The bill’s proponents sacrificed the prohibitions against housing discrimination and agreed to an exemption from the public accommodations provision for establishments deriving more than 50 percent of their revenues from the sale of alcoholic beverages. Council members were said to fear that if black drinkers and white drinkers imbibed in one another’s company, trouble was sure to follow.5
Mayor McKeldin had declared the civil rights ordinance his “top-most priority,” and he continued to urge passage of an open-occupancy bill until the end of his administration. The failure to enact a fair housing ordinance, he said, left an “odious mark” on the city.6
Less than two weeks after the city council approved the modified version of McKeldin’s civil rights ordinance, the mayor announced another top priority: the War on Poverty. On March 7, 1964, McKeldin and council president D’Alesandro issued a joint press release stating that “the number one priority for this City” should be “a massive attack on poverty.” The mayor had already written to R. Sargent Shriver, soon to be director of the US Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), to assure him that Baltimore stood “ready to move beyond the traditional approaches to poverty to immediately attack poverty in its broadest form.” He noted that the city would not be able to deal effectively with the problems of its poor unless it received federal assistance, and he asked to meet with Shriver to discuss “the implications of President Johnson’s attack on poverty, for the City of Baltimore.” McKeldin earned points with Shriver by writing to his fellow Republicans in the US Senate to urge their support for the War on Poverty.7
The human renewal program initiated by Mayor Goodman had given Baltimore a head start on its poverty program. Three days before President Johnson sent the antipoverty bill to Congress, McKeldin presided over a meeting to outline the city’s antipoverty strategy. In addition to city officials, the participants included the chairman of the Human Renewal Steering Committee and Walter Sondheim, the mayor’s representative on the committee. Two members of the Health and Welfare Council of the Baltimore Area were also present. In 1962, the council had issued a plan similar to Goodman’s in a “Letter to Ourselves,” calling for an antipoverty effort that extended beyond welfare payments to attack the social sources of poverty.8 Drawing on these preexisting plans, McKeldin was ready to submit his antipoverty ordinance to the city council by the end of 1964. The program would have a budget of $4.3 million; all but $300,000 was to come from the federal government. Baltimore’s Community Action Program was one of the first in the country to qualify for federal funds.9
A WAR WITHIN THE WAR
The city’s antipoverty agency was soon a focus of controversy. Juanita Jackson Mitchell, secretary of the Legal Redress Committee of the Baltimore NAACP, sent a telegram to OEO director Shriver demanding that the local program be suspended because African Americans had not participated in its planning. Stanley Mazer, now the mayor’s staff assistant for the War on Poverty, responded that the president of the Baltimore NAACP, Ms. Mitchell’s mother, Lillie Mae Jackson, had in fact served on the committee that drew up the program. The Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance also contradicted Ms. Mitchell’s charge. The alliance, which included most of the city’s African American clergy, had drafted a 207-page “Plan for Action” to provide guidelines for the city’s antipoverty effort.10
Something more than misunderstanding and disarray may have been at work here. As portrayed by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, the city’s War on Poverty was a warmed-over social services program, not a venture in community organization and empowerment. Unlike its counterparts elsewhere, Baltimore’s poverty agency was not an autonomous organization but a part of city government. Though it received its funds directly from the federal government and not through the municipality, it operated on a short leash.11
The arrangement may have been intended to minimize conflict between the Community Action Agency and city authorities, but it seemed to have just the opposite effect. The CAA had to operate inside city government, with the cooperation of city officials—an arrangement that multiplied occasions for friction between the poverty fighters and other municipal authorities.
The agency’s first director, Dr. Melvin J. Humphrey, a former professor of economics at Morgan State College, was recruited from his position at the OEO in Washington. He resigned after three months, citing unspecified “differences of opinion” with the Community Action Commission that oversaw the local poverty program. All of the commission’s African American members abstained from voting on the motion to accept his resignation.12 Humphrey was succeeded by Parren J. Mitchell, a member of the clan that provided much of the leadership for the local branch of the NAACP. In his former position as executive director of the Maryland Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations, his annual salary was $9,500. As director of Baltimore’s poverty program, he would receive $22,500; the mayor earned only $2,500 more. Mitchell’s compensation became a point of contention, not only in Baltimore, but in the federal government, which announced that it would not provide support for the new director’s salary above $17,000.13
Mitchell’s salary triggered one of the controversies that punctuated his tenure as director of the CAA and spread to Washington and beyond. Mayor McKeldin sent a letter to each member of Maryland’s congressional delegation in an effort to justify Mitchell’s pay grade. He also had to respond to former vice-president Richard Nixon, who cited Mitchell’s salary in a New York speech as a sign that the Community Action Program was a device for “making a profit out of the poor” and claimed that 70 percent of the Baltimore program’s budget was devoted to administrative expenses. McKeldin responded that the agency’s initial budget allocated only 2.2 percent of its funds to bureaucracy.14
The next attack on the leadership of the CAA was aimed at Morton Macht, chairman of the Community Action Commission. Macht was a local homebuilder and the owner of several apartment houses. Early in 1965, James Griffin, president of the local Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), complained that Macht’s residential developments had “not offered equal access . . . to qualified Negro buyers.” Griffin argued that antipoverty officials “connected with discriminatory housing developments” could not “identify with the people of the ghetto” because they bore the responsibility for keeping “the people of the ghetto walled in.” He expressed hope, however, that “our impression of Mr. Macht is incorrect.” “If he does practice equal opportunity in housing . . . you have our very best wishes.”15
CORE renewed its criticism of Macht in August, when the leaders of its Housing Committee charged that his failure to open his apartment houses to black renters was inconsistent with his leadership of the Community Action Commission. Macht replied that he was “an advocate of open-occupancy in housing” but “felt that a voluntary system will not work unless every element in the housing industry is party to the agreement.” Since this was unlikely, he had “advocated and continue[d] to advocate fair housing legislation for the City of Baltimore.”16 Macht implicitly shifted responsibility for residential segregation to the city council, which had repeatedly refused to pass open-housing legislation.
The programmatic expenses of Baltimore’s War on Poverty drew fire along with its leadership. The city’s director of finance recommended a reduction of almost 50 percent in the Community Action Commission’s budget request. The commission appealed to the board of estimates, arguing that the city would lose millions of dollars in federal matching funds and that its program was only a modest start on what the city’s poor people needed. The commission envisioned a Community Action Program in each of 119 neighborhoods where poor households were concentrated, but it was starting with just 20 of the poorest neighborhoods in East Baltimore. It was prepared to reduce its Neighborhood Youth Corps to cut its projected expenditures. But the council decided to reduce the municipal contribution to the poverty program by 30 percent and ruled that the entire sum should be taken from the CAA’s program of legal aid for the poor.17
The legal services program was a flash point in relations between the CAA and the council. Before an audience of “about 100 lobbying attorneys,” the council had voted unanimously to eliminate the legal services program from the CAA’s “Plan of Action.” The council itself included a number of lawyers, and their hostility to the antipoverty agency erupted when they discovered that the Community Action Commission had endorsed the “concept” of a legal services program. Though Parren Mitchell tried to calm them by emphasizing that only the “idea” of such a program had been approved, they denounced his program as “mismanaged,” “arrogant,” a “grab bag, and “a political organization to build up the McKeldin machine.” Mitchell finally mollified them by pledging that no legal services program would be launched without the council’s explicit consent.18
This was not the first time that Mitchell had become a target for the council’s wrath. Only a week before explosion of the legal services controversy, he was summoned to the city council to explain the Community Action Commission’s intention to expand its program’s “action area” from East Baltimore to West Baltimore. Mitchell explained that if the CAA delayed its move into West Baltimore, other groups would get antipoverty grants and take over that side of town. Mitchell’s principal interrogator was Councilman William Donald Schaefer, the council’s representative on the Community Action Commission. Schaefer pointed out that the mayor and council had confined the program to an area of East Baltimore so that the antipoverty effort could prove itself in one target area before expanding to other parts of the city. Premature expansion, said Schaefer, was “the greatest danger the Baltimore program runs.”19
At its next meeting, the Community Action Commission voted to defy the council and expand into West Baltimore. It was the same session at which it approved the “concept” of a legal services program for the poor. Schaefer attended the commission’s executive session but left before any votes were taken, thinking that both issues had been settled as the city council wished. Schaefer was the first councilman to let loose his anger when Parren Mitchell appeared before the council to discuss the legal services program. Schaefer declared that the action of the commission had left him “completely embarrassed” and cast doubt on his integrity. He invited his council colleagues to remove him from the antipoverty commission if they no longer had confidence in him.20
Only Councilman Henry Parks came to the defense of Mitchell and the poverty program. He was one of the council’s two black members. But Mitchell had other allies. Clarence Mitchell, Jr., Parren’s uncle, wrote a column in the Afro-American that decried “the Council’s churlish action of flatly rejecting a legal aid program for the poor and then trying to cover up by pretending that someone was using the anti-poverty program for political purposes.” Richard Steiner, director of Baltimore’s urban renewal agency, declared that the War on Poverty was “essential to the future health of Baltimore.” From the hospital where he would soon die, Morton Macht expressed his strong support for the legal aid program. He also submitted his resignation from the Community Action Commission.21
After the council’s two-hour tantrum, Schaefer sought to make peace with the commission. He suggested that council president D’Alesandro arrange a meeting between the commission and the council. The participants agreed that the commission could proceed, without council approval, to carry out any program included in the antipoverty agency’s original “Plan of Action,” but would submit to the council any program of legal services for the poor. Other initiatives would be referred to the council for its “advice.” Schaefer pointed out that the legal services controversy had obscured the fundamental agreement between the commission and the council concerning the objectives of the antipoverty program. A few months later, the council approved the poverty program’s expansion into West Baltimore.22
At the start of 1966, Mayor McKeldin made another attempt to get council approval for an open-housing ordinance—his third. He assembled a cross-section of the city’s clergy to address a crowd of 2,000 in the War Memorial building in support of the open-occupancy bill. Lawrence Cardinal Sheehan, prelate of the oldest Catholic diocese in the United States and a native Baltimorean, was subjected to booing and catcalls. McKeldin condemned the crowd reaction as a “blot upon the name of Baltimore!” The scolding seems to have had no impact on the city council, which voted 13 to 8 to defeat open-housing legislation once again. The local CORE chapter sponsored a silent vigil outside city hall to protest the result.23
TARGET CITY
In April 1966, Floyd McKissick, national director of CORE, announced that his organization had selected Baltimore as its “target city” for the upcoming summer. Asked whether the city had the country’s worst record on civil rights, he said, “If it’s not the worst, it is very close to it. They’re probably the only city where the Council has voted down a housing law three times.”24 The council, of course, had been able to vote down an open-housing bill three times only because Baltimore had a mayor who proposed it three times.
A local television station assembled a panel of 13 local African American leaders, both inside and outside city government, to comment on CORE’s selection of Baltimore as its target. For more than two hours, they responded to questions on live TV. At first, local news reporters dominated the questioning, but they were soon sidelined by the representatives of black militant organizations. Parren Mitchell went through yet another hostile interrogation. He was asked to defend his antipoverty agency against a CORE official’s charge that it was a “swill-hole.” Next, he responded to a complaint that “too much federal money is going to ‘traditional agencies’ that have no understanding of Negro problems.” The Sun reported that “the panelists uncovered more differences among themselves than with C.O.R.E. officials.”25 Once again, it seemed, no one could claim to speak for black Baltimore.
CORE’s decision to target Baltimore had as much to do with its own organizational needs as with conditions in the city. McKissick had only recently assumed leadership of the group after the resignation of James Farmer, and his organization was more than $250,000 in debt. It needed to make a splash. The organization’s national leadership had considered joining a civil rights crusade in Chicago, where Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned to mount a campaign against residential segregation, but CORE’s leaders worried that King would steal the spotlight in Chicago and leave their organization in the shadows. CORE explained that it chose Baltimore as its target because the city embodied “all the evil attributes of the south and all of the more subtle and discriminatory patterns of the north.” CORE was an organization in transition, trying to redefine its objectives. The new leadership wanted to shift its operations northward, but it had not yet worked out its new identity.26 Baltimore, a border city, might be the place to accomplish this transition.
CORE’s summer in Baltimore followed two summer race riots in other cities—Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965. Baltimoreans were apprehensive that CORE’s protests in the summer of 1966 would trigger a riot. Some local residents and organizations wrote to the mayor to express their anxieties about a CORE-inspired riot or to offer their assistance in keeping the peace.27
McKeldin acknowledged that the city faced “almost insurmountable problems in meeting the legitimate demands of those segments of our population which have, for so long, been denied full access to the benefits of our culture.” But “in spite of any demonstrations which occur, the lives and property of all citizens will be protected . . . those participating in civil rights activities are responsible persons who will not perpetrate any actions which are likely to end in violence.”28
Interim police commissioner George Gelston, in his former role as adjutant general of the Maryland National Guard, had helped to restore order in the Eastern Shore town of Cambridge after race riots in 1963 and 1964. General Gelston met with local and national leaders of CORE to review their plans for “intense civil rights activity in Baltimore.” CORE, he said, was a “responsible organization,” and he was confident that it would work closely with the police to avoid the outbreak of violence. In a speech before the local chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, Gelston told his audience that the spiritual descendants of the nation’s revolutionary heroes were to be found in the streets among the civil rights demonstrators.29 Gelston would later win praise from the secretary of the Maryland Interracial Problems Commission for telling his officers that their job was not to prevent civil rights demonstrations but to “protect the right to hold them while maintaining law and order for the entire community.”30
Gelston embodied Baltimore’s response to CORE’s summer campaign. One of the participants in the CORE protest noted that it was difficult to sustain the emotional edge of the insurgency when subjected to a “constant barrage of accommodationism.”31 The Baltimore establishment embraced the revolution and absorbed it into the status quo. Mayor McKeldin was the architect of a velvet counterrevolution. In early June, he called a meeting of 100 civic leaders to announce an official attack on racial bias. Six committees were to be established, each with two co-chairs, one black and one white. They would address racial discrimination in housing, education, police-community relations, employment, public accommodations, and health and welfare.32 The mayor thus coopted much of the city’s black leadership, including the chairman of the Urban League and the president of the NAACP branch.33 “Before CORE’s organizers stepped off the train in Baltimore,” write Bachrach and Baratz, “their planned campaign was aborted.” The city’s liberals, both black and white, had been preemptively recruited by Mayor McKeldin. CORE would find it difficult to use Baltimore’s black leadership as a local political base.34
CORE’s problems were aggravated by tensions between its national staff and the local chapter in Baltimore. The initiative for the Baltimore project had come from national leaders, who claimed that the impetus had come from local residents. National CORE and local CORE had different agendas. Strategists at the national headquarters wanted the chapter to set aside its “middle-class concerns” and mobilize the poor and working-class residents of the city’s black ghetto. The local members wanted to protest the city’s failure to pass an open-occupancy law that would open high-rise apartment buildings to black renters. One of the most experienced members of CORE’s national staff encouraged them to expand their campaign from the high-rises to “slumlords and rats and roaches” in poor neighborhoods. CORE’s national staff members soon shifted their emphasis from housing and slums to employment. The plan was to create an independent black labor union—the Maryland Freedom Union—concentrating on jobs in the retail and service sectors. Employers who hired retail and service workers in black neighborhoods might be vulnerable to consumer boycotts like the NAACP’s Buy Where You Can Work campaign of 30 years earlier.35
A staff member sent to Baltimore to do research and data collection in preparation for CORE’s campaign of unionization was distracted by reports of low wages and squalid conditions at nursing homes for elderly African Americans. He skipped the research stage and moved directly to the unionization campaign, which resulted in unsuccessful strikes at two nursing homes. (The strikers were fired.) Nursing homes were not vulnerable to consumer boycotts. CORE’s Baltimore project, according to one of its participants, succumbed to “situational opportunism.” The thrill of struggle triumphed over the more tedious work of research and strategizing. CORE also discovered that its venture in unionism trespassed on the turf of some labor unions and turned potential allies into enemies. In addition to encouraging the walkout at the nursing homes, CORE’s Baltimore project staff persuaded the president of Local 195 of the International Union of Laundry Workers to take his organization out of the AFL-CIO and affiliate with the Maryland Freedom Union. Officials at the international office of the Laundry Workers got wind of the move and dispatched an official to Baltimore, who seized the local’s bank account, closed its office, changed the locks, and “captured everything.” After that, according to one Baltimore project staff member, the international union office “called the National Office of CORE and really raised hell.”36
A NEW HORIZON
A dramatic development in the local CORE chapter’s campaign to desegregate high-rise apartments turned the national staff away from its experiment in labor organization. Members of the Baltimore chapter had been picketing Horizon House, a downtown apartment building that excluded black tenants, when a white-robed contingent from the Ku Klux Klan showed up to conduct a counterdemonstration. They were accompanied by a team of booted, helmeted Klan “sentries,” each with a police dog. Some Klansmen carried sticks or long, heavy flashlights.37
The appearance of the Klan provided CORE’s Baltimore project staff with an opportunity to stage the kind of dramatic confrontation they had been unable to elicit from the accommodating Mayor McKeldin and nonconfrontational Commissioner Gelston. The opportunity grew even more attractive when a local judge issued an injunction applying equally to the CORE and Klan demonstrators. It limited the number of pickets to 10 for each group, required that they remain at least 10 feet apart, banned the use of police dogs, and banned loud singing (a standby at CORE protests). The presence of the Klan gave CORE and its nonviolent demonstrators a chance to occupy the moral high ground against notoriously violent racists. But the court’s treatment of CORE and Klan protests as equivalents offered an even more promising protest objective. Dramatic defiance of the injunction could lead to mass arrests of CORE demonstrators, filling city jail cells. The organization would show local authorities just how much trouble it could create. Leaders of the local CORE Housing Committee sent a telegram to Mayor McKeldin threatening more serious disruption. By depriving them of their only means of protest—nonviolent demonstrations—the city judge had opened the way for violence. The restrictions on CORE’s pickets at Horizon House had to be lifted immediately “if this nonviolent indignation is to be maintained.” “The Negro community is at fever pitch from suffering under this yoke of segregation.” A subsequent telegram from the local CORE chapter threatened actions to disrupt “Civic Center events and conventions.” It charged that the court’s injunction “added to an already explosive situation . . . by equating and treating alike non-violent protests and Ku Klux Klan intimidation. They have joined forces with the Klan’s efforts to put CORE out of business. They have told CORE that non-violence does not pay. By removing our only means of protest and self expression . . . the courts are also removing our only means of releasing pent up emotion and hate created by a bigoted inhuman society . . . putting more strain on human endurance than can be tolerated without explosion.”38
McKeldin reminded CORE of his repeated attempts to get the city council to pass an open-housing ordinance. As for the court injunction, he pronounced it “completely outside my jurisdiction as mayor,” but he would forward the text of the telegram to the judge who had issued the order, the city solicitor, and the state attorney general.39
The mayor, however, was preparing to seize the initiative from the demonstrators while circumventing the city council’s rejection of open-housing legislation. He opened direct negotiations with the owners and managers of the city’s largest high-rises and asked CORE to suspend its protest at Horizon House while he attempted to secure desegregation there and at eight other large apartment buildings. The organization asserted that the mayor could not “call the shots on when we will use direct action,” but agreed to withdraw its pickets while McKeldin conducted his negotiations. None of the apartment-house owners wanted to be alone in accepting integration. Each owner’s agreement to open occupancy was contingent upon the acceptance of the other owners. By early June, McKeldin had succeeded in getting all nine owners to open their buildings to African Americans. At the same time, he negotiated an agreement with 22 bar owners on the notorious Baltimore Street “Block,” under which their establishments would serve African Americans.40
CORE’s summer campaign lost several prominent targets for protest. According to Louis Goldberg, it was left “floating in a planless vacuum with an uncertain future.” Its ability to mount a coherent campaign was further handicapped by a shortage of funds. But one of its problems seemed to have been resolved. Having achieved success in desegregation of the city’s biggest high-rise apartment houses, the local chapter of CORE voted to disband all of its committees for the duration of the summer so that members could work directly for the national organization’s Target City Project.41
Deprived of its target at Horizon House, however, CORE’s street rallies and demonstrations subsided. The pullback may also have followed from a demonstration at the end of May that had turned violent. CORE was picketing a white-owned bar in a black neighborhood of East Baltimore. The owner would not seat black customers. They could buy beer and liquor, but only to carry out. In the last week of May, the proprietor shot and wounded a young black man who had apparently created a disturbance at the tavern. A crowd estimated at 2,500 to 3,000 assembled around the bar. Then a contingent of the Klan showed up. Bricks, rocks, pieces of concrete, and other missiles were hurled at the counterdemonstrators. It took a force of 50 policemen to escort the Klan members from danger. Two police officers were injured.42
CORE’s Target City staffers were also diverted from demonstrations when they abruptly acquired other responsibilities. CORE had planned to hold its national convention in St. Louis, but at the last minute decided to move it to Baltimore. The Target City headquarters on Gay Street was filled with workers preparing a convention site and arranging food, lodging, and entertainment for several hundred delegates. A more troubling problem was to ensure that out-of-town activists did not get out of hand and aggravate CORE’s already troubled relations with black and white Baltimoreans. The group adopted the recommendation of one imaginative staff member who suggested that the visiting delegates be recruited to conduct a door-to-door voter registration drive in East Baltimore.43
The city administration tried to be helpful. Commissioner Gelston offered the auspices of his department to arrange a picnic for the delegates in the Maryland countryside or a cruise on the Patapsco, complete with refreshments. The CORE leadership declined the invitations, perhaps to avoid giving out-of-town activists the impression that the Target City Project had gotten too cozy with local law enforcement. CORE leaders did invite McKeldin to address their convention. On the first day of the gathering, Stokely Carmichael of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee addressed the delegates to urge them to embrace “black power.” It did not matter, he said, how white liberals or powerholders understood the term. “We understand what it means,” he shouted, and his audience responded with loud applause. Earlier that day, a closed session of the convention had adopted a resolution holding that “black power,” not integration, was “the only meaningful way to total equality.” The measure endorsed the position already expressed by the group’s new director, Floyd McKissick, in an interview before the convention. The delegates also reconsidered their organization’s commitment to nonviolence, narrowly defeating a resolution that would permit CORE demonstrators to respond with violence when attacked. They approved a substitute that permitted CORE to act in cooperation with other civil rights organizations that approved the use of force in self-defense.44
Mayor McKeldin arrived at the convention to deliver his speech while Carmichael was reaching the end of his remarks. The mayor was told that he had arrived too late to address the delegates and was turned away, unable to present CORE with the key to the city. He returned two evenings later. His address began by acknowledging that those in Baltimore who labored in the cause of equal rights knew “there was much unfinished business to complete in this field.” He recounted the progress that Baltimore had made toward racial equality—much of it the work of his own administration—but conceded that the city would not have been able to move ahead without “the boat-rockers and the agitators,” and he won applause when he said that he was glad CORE had come to town, “because we need you, and you need us.”45
At summer’s end, McKeldin wrote to McKissick to express his “appreciation for the contributions which CORE made to the cause of equal rights, and the sense of responsibility which your organization displayed in carrying out its program in Baltimore.” Though he remained peeved at McKissick’s springtime characterization of the city as the “worst . . . in the country in terms of race relations,” he also conceded that the work of his 200-member task force of civic leaders had been helped by the protest. Without CORE’s presence, it would have been “difficult to achieve such a dramatic response and such dedicated activity.” The mayor asked McKissick to extend his “thanks and appreciation to the Target City Staff for the splendid and effective role that they played in helping to avert a violent reaction.” McKissick wrote back to “express our sincere appreciation” for McKeldin’s “statements of support and congratulations.” He added that CORE would have a continuing presence in Baltimore and hoped for the mayor’s further cooperation.46
Baltimore’s other civil rights organizations expressed far less favorable views of CORE. CORE’s decision to take advantage of the opportunities for confrontation at Horizon House exposed the organization to the same kinds of criticism once voiced by its national staff about the local CORE chapter. As the campaign drew to a close, the leader of a grassroots organization in West Baltimore complained, “We wanted them to get off the high-rise apartment bit and picket a slumlord.” Walter Lively, a leader of East Baltimore’s Union for Jobs or Incomes Now, had cooperated with CORE in some of its protests, but he argued that the Target City Project had “weakened the effectiveness of the civil rights movement by promising so much and doing so little. I think they have made the power structure more cynical about the power of the Negro community.” CORE, said Lively, had “dulled the direction of the movement by carrying on integration of high-rise apartments instead of [confronting] the problems of unemployment, slum housing and welfare.” Juanita Jackson Mitchell, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, conceded that CORE had accomplished some good things, “but on the debit side there has been a definite hardening of segregationist and anti-Negro sentiment which was precipitated by cries of ‘black power.’ ” Parren Mitchell was dismissive of CORE’s summer offensive: “The nature of inner-city problems is such that they can’t be solved on a crash basis.”47
Parren Mitchell, his Community Action Agency, and its grassroots ghetto supporters rose to challenge the city authorities just as the CORE insurgency was waning. The new pressures originated with the OEO, which urged the city to broaden the membership of the Community Action Commission and grant it more independence from the mayor and city council. To comply with federal guidelines, Mayor McKeldin had appointed two representatives of “the poor” to the 15-member commission. The OEO regional director advised that new members should be appointed in a selection process in which the commission itself, rather than the mayor, took the lead. In a move likely to raise hackles in the city council, the OEO regional director also recommended that the Community Action Commission have independent authority to adopt new programs.48
At the close of 1966, a convention of delegates from Baltimore’s low-income, inner-city neighborhoods sounded the new, assertive voice of the poverty program’s local constituency, and the activists received open encouragement from the CAA’s administrative staff. Members of the city council countered the new independence of the poverty program by reining in a proposed “self-help” housing program that would employ about 90 residents to make household repairs in poor neighborhoods and clean trash from the streets. The council insisted that all administrative and clerical employees be hired through the city’s civil service system and that the program’s 80 laborers be hired from a list provided by the Department of Public Works. Council members frequently placed their friends and supporters on this list. The council also cut the salaries of the program’s three administrators. Councilman John Pica was reported to have asked CAA director Parren Mitchell to allow him to name the occupants of these three positions. After the votes, Pica told him, “You wouldn’t give 3, so now you lost 90.” Another council member commented, “We’ll be perfectly frank . . . we think that Parren Mitchell is building a political organization.” McKeldin had been quietly promoting the idea that Mitchell might join him on the Republican ticket in 1967 as candidate for city council president.49 Mitchell did not accept the invitation, but he resigned from the CAA to run successfully for Congress in 1970. Perhaps he had been building a political organization.
In response to the council’s effort to seize control of CAA jobs, about 200 supporters of the local poverty program demonstrated in front of city hall. It was the first occasion on which a protest was openly orchestrated by the administrative staff of the CAA. The crowd was addressed by Juanita Jackson Mitchell, president of the state NAACP and Parren Mitchell’s sister-in-law. The council backed down at its meeting later that evening when its members learned that the OEO would withdraw all funds for the self-help program if the city insisted on the hiring restrictions that the council had imposed.50
The council seemed reconciled to a wider role for the poor in the city’s poverty program. William Donald Schaefer, still the council’s representative on the Community Action Commission, introduced a bill to enlarge the commission to 21 members and give residents of poor neighborhoods 10 of the 21 seats. A predicted battle over the proposal never occurred. Even those council members normally hostile to the antipoverty program fell silent.51
In cooperation with local civil rights and advocacy groups, CAA organizers were mobilizing inner-city residents to confront Baltimore’s welfare, health, and education departments and to pressure the city council. The antipoverty agency’s organizing efforts had a tangible influence on the mayoral election of 1967, when “the large black population was for the first time openly courted by the top of the Democratic ticket.”52
McKeldin, citing “deep divisions” among Baltimoreans on such issues as taxes and civil rights, announced that he would not run for reelection. “While I consider my administration to have been productive and progressive,” he said, “these issues I have just cited and others do not appear to have made my administration popular.”53