July–August 1966
BLACK power followed the civil rights movement up the Mississippi River heartland, from the Delta’s primitive soil to Chicago’s granite expanse. Hosea Williams stayed behind in Grenada, where police outside the jail clubbed three hundred people to break up a sympathy vigil for forty-three others arrested earlier, and King charged publicly that local officials had reneged on “every promise made” during the Meredith march. Headlines favored the new national controversy—“CORE Hears Cries of ‘Black Power,’” “Black Nationalists Gain More Attention in Harlem,” “NAACP Head Warns ‘Black Power’ Means ‘Black Death’”—which framed the front-page coverage even for Chicago’s grand kickoff rally on July 10: “Dr. King and CORE Chief Act to Heal Rights Breach.” Floyd McKissick trimmed his speech at Soldier Field to fit a movement trumpeted with warm-up music that ranged from the Singing Nuns of Mundelein College to blues legend B. B. King. Reporters chased a roving band of the Blackstone Rangers gang to photograph their black power banner. A white limousine delivered Martin Luther King, who spoke under a parasol in clammy 98 degree heat. His children begged to see the headquarters of the famous Mayor Daley, but three-year-old Bunny collapsed on Andrew Young’s shoulders before the baked remnant of five thousand walked three miles downtown. She slept while King ceremoniously taped the parchment of fourteen demands to a locked door at City Hall.
Mayor Richard Daley once again bracketed the challenge with official events. He announced one day before the rally that Chicago had moved to repair 102,847 apartments in 9,226 substandard buildings so far, with housing fines double those of the previous year, then hosted preliminary negotiations two days later on July 11. King conceded Daley’s evasive points that slum conditions existed in every major city and had preceded his administration, but declined entreaties to join or critique the local abatement drive. Likewise, Daley endorsed King’s goal but avoided comment on his “Open City” demands for integrated housing and employment. With each side firmly refusing to be drawn into the other’s agenda, the mayor complained of nonconstructive pressure and emerged ever the booster for Chicago—“We will expand our programs”—while King called for nonviolent direct action to reveal “the depth and dimensions of the problem.” James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette were leading drills for five hundred nonviolent volunteers to be deployed the next day, but a pothole intervened on the Near West Side corner of Roosevelt and Throop.
While calling for roadside assistance, the driver of an ice cream truck saw children dart from his paralyzed vehicle with purloined treats, and he told the first arriving police that the culprits were playing in the spray from nearby fire hydrants. Officers shut them off, drawing protest from adults who cited long-standing tradition and pointed to gushing hydrants only three blocks north. Beneath a crossfire of shouts—that the Italian neighborhood was in a different police precinct, with no reported ice cream thieves, versus complaints that three of the four closest swimming pools were off-limits to black residents—a sporadic duel of wrenches turned the hydrants on and off until officers arrested Donald Henry, who appealed to the gathering crowd: “Why don’t you do something about it?” A cascade of curses, splashes, and rocks brought thirty backup police cruisers. Broken windows radiated from street reports of black children whacked with truncheons for trying to cool themselves.
King and Coretta, on their way to a mass meeting, detoured around jolting sights of zigzag marauders and a crescendo of sirens. Confused reports filtered into Shiloh Baptist Church about the terms set by gang leaders to parley about the ongoing violence—expulsion of white people from the church and/or proof that prisoners were alive. Responding to the latter, King made his way with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to the 12th District police station and negotiated the release of six battered teenagers who presented their own grievances to a tumultuous Shiloh crowd, chiefly police brutality and the lack of playgrounds or swimming pools. King preached against riots and halfhearted reform. “It’s like improving the food in a prison,” he said. “One day that man wants to get out of prison.” He invoked President Kennedy on the urgency of the movement—“those who will make this peaceful revolution impossible will make a violent revolution inevitable”—and confessed his own anguish: “We have stood up for nonviolence with all our hearts…. I need help. I need some victories. I need some concessions.” For once he could not hold an audience against hecklers inside and the noise of urban chaos beyond the walls. Hundreds of young people stalked out. At a roadblock of garbage cans on Ashland Avenue, gang members shattered windows on a car and surrounded the occupants until Bill Clark of the West Side Organization jumped among them, pointing to familiar faces and shouting, “You gotta beat me if you’re going to beat these guys.” Rev. Archie Hargraves and Al Sampson of SCLC joined Clark in a human shield around three terrified Puerto Rican men. Nearly all night, leaders from the Chicago movement coalition roamed at their own peril with pleas for angry people to go home.
Violence subsided until late Wednesday, July 13, when crews from the water department began to refit the water hydrants with tamperproof locks. Bricks flew through windows again, then at firefighters who answered alarms to burning, looted stores. Vandalism and the first sniper shots jumped a mile to housing projects on West Madison Avenue. Thursday night, on his continuous rounds of mediation, King received notice that more serious riots were spreading miles west into Lawndale and Garfield Park. His children at the Hamlin Avenue apartment rushed impulsively to see what caused the sudden bangs and crashes of glass below, which prompted Coretta to shriek, “Get away from that window or you’ll get your heads blown off!” Her quotation spiced a scoop for an encamped British reporter.
By Friday morning, when King briefly returned home, the riots had claimed two fatalities nearby: a pregnant fourteen-year-old killed while walking with friends and a twenty-eight-year-old black man from Mississippi, shot in the back. Mayor Daley, who until then had minimized the disturbance as “juvenile incidents,” appealed publicly for National Guard troops to quell a situation he said outsiders had incited beyond his control. He blamed King’s staff—“people that came in here have been talking for the last year of violence, and showing pictures and instructing people in how to conduct violence”—and his leading Negro ally indicted the movement at a tandem press conference. “I believe our young people are not vicious enough to attack a whole city,” declared Rev. J. H. Jackson. “Some other forces are using these young people.”
King and Raby reacted within hours by leading what amounted to a sit-in at City Hall, protesting “unfortunate” distortions of their struggle to prevent rather than start violence. When Catholic Archbishop James Cody himself joined them, Daley received the group with conciliatory effusion. “Doctor King, I want to make one thing clear,” he said. “We know that you did nothing to cause the disorders, and that you are a man of peace and love.” King reciprocated with a pared-down list of four suggestions, one of which sealed a heavily satirized truce. “Now there was a program, and Daley liked it,” wrote Mike Royko in the Chicago Daily News. “Give them water. He had a whole lake of it right outside the door.” City workers would distribute ten portable swimming pools and refit the hydrants yet again with spray nozzles instead of locks. “We don’t need sprinklers,” grumbled a dissenter. “We need jobs.” Attorney General Katzenbach, with White House approval, dispatched two top assistants to Chicago as four thousand National Guard troops rolled in to restore order late Friday, July 15. The riots were a miniature Watts, with the two fatalities and eighty serious injuries, including six police officers wounded by gunfire, plus $2 million in property damage and some five hundred arrests.
John Doar and Roger Wilkins of the Justice Department knocked unannounced at Hamlin Avenue before midnight. For Doar, who had been diverted from a canoe vacation in his native Wisconsin, the big city was unsettling after six years of civil rights field trips to the rural South. A bottle shattered against his car en route from appointments with Chicago officials. Wilkins, nephew of NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, expected King to have slipped after hours to the hotel comforts cherished by his peers, and was surprised to find him in a ghetto “showplace” rattier than advertised. Scores of Vice Lords and Cobras were crammed into chairs and floor spots, questioning King intensely. Some vented hardships and toughness blankly to King as a stranger, saying Molotov cocktails got attention, while others knowingly articulated their gang culture to one of the most famous people in the world. King engaged them one by one, sometimes turning to Abernathy to share their own war stories from jail or the relief of a joke about black preachers. The Washington men waited four hours—“four hot hours, four sweaty hours,” Wilkins recalled—mesmerized by an unrecorded seminar on pain and respect that preempted their exalted rank. For Andrew Young, the turning point was a perceptive, heartfelt speech on distinctions between the tactics and philosophy of nonviolence by Richard “Peanut” Tidwell, leader of the Roman Saints, who engineered a pact to give movement methods a try. When the gangs left, consultations between the Justice Department men and King commenced and continued into dawn on Saturday, July 16.
Internal deliberations reeled from a disastrous beginning. The gang summit was regarded as a crucial but tentative step toward recovery, neutralizing a random force prone to sabotage. Stanley Levison thought most Americans would not blame King for the riots but might believe he could have stopped them. He said Daley’s cleverly mixed signals would turn the riots against the movement unless the movement turned them against Daley. To retreat now would suggest failure. To go forward meant trying to revive nonviolence from the lingering smoke of a riot. King bemoaned the prior delays, and confessed that an earlier launch for the action campaign might have averted this setback. The sprawling coalition had nothing to show for nearly a year’s preparation beyond its own urgent warnings and postponements into a record-breaking siege of heat. (In New York City alone, an extra 650 deaths for the week spiked the mortality rate 40 percent above normal.) Woes had piled up like biblical pestilence with discovery on Thursday of eight student nurses systematically bound, raped, strangled, and stabbed in their South Chicago dormitory. Horror over an unfathomable mass murder sapped low reserves of public trust. Even so, movement leaders mounted rebuilding demonstrations Sunday in Gage Park, then Monday in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood. “We must move on with our positive program to make Chicago an open city,” King declared.
MAYOR DALEY hacked at the movement’s weakened lines of appeal to the national government. “King’s rally on a week from Sunday was fifty percent Johnson—‘Johnson’s a killer, Johnson’s a destroyer of human life, Johnson is a killer in Vietnam,’” he told the President privately on July 19. “He [King] is not your friend. He’s against you on Vietnam. He’s a goddam faker.” Daley portrayed the riots as a result of sinister and mystifying ingratitude toward Northern benefactors. His monologue skewed the movement’s demands, some of which duplicated Johnson’s own legislation in Congress.
The President squeezed in a word to seek an end point. “What shape have you got King in?” he asked. “Is he about ready to get out?”
“I don’t think so,” Daley replied. He spilled plans to overwhelm the movement with patronage and the poverty programs—“We got rodent control, we got insects, we destroyed a thousand slum buildings in six months”—while branding King a defector in the great quest for fairness. “What the hell, that’s the main thing you’ve been fighting for,” the mayor exclaimed, “and then to see them run on the goddam foreign question!
“You don’t run from people who have been your friends,” Daley continued emphatically. “You stick with them.” Like Richard Russell, he opposed the war but subordinated his opinion in national crisis. Pointedly, Daley pledged Chicago’s entire machine to Johnson’s Vietnam course by their two-way code of political loyalty. “That’s what I’ve been talking about with our leaders tonight,” he declared. “Eighty of them in the convention, and I told ’em the same thing. I told ’em, ‘We don’t run. We might be defeated, but we stand with Johnson on Vietnam. We stand for justice for all our people, and we also stand for law and order, and I’ll be damned if we let anyone take over themselves the running of the city.’”
“You’re just as right as you can be, Dick,” said the President, who signed off succinctly: “And I’ll support you.”
ON THURSDAY, July 28, King called for an all-night vigil Friday outside a real estate office that consistently refused to serve black customers. Earlier in the day, several clergy on the agenda committee had argued for a respite instead, to calm potential allies already strained by the daily actions such as integrated shopping trips and “friendship” basketball games on white playgrounds. Others still resisted the movement’s emphasis on residence—“All housing should be available to all people”—as a misguided, elitist approach to the goal of ending slums. The heated tactical debates essentially deferred to James Bevel, who in turn relied on his Nashville seminary friend and Freedom Ride cellmate Bernard Lafayette. After Lafayette and his young wife, Colia, created SNCC’s first Selma project in 1963, the American Friends Service Committee had hired them on the recommendation of James Lawson to test nonviolent methods in Chicago, where they found comparative weakness in the popular drives for open schools and open employment. The school struggle proved tired after a decade, with its target, Superintendent Benjamin Willis, set to retire late in August, and a diffuse jobs campaign yielded piecemeal results.* Housing showed contrasting potential, even though relatively few black people wanted or could afford to live in white neighborhoods. Lafayette called the inner boundaries of Northern cities an invisible indicator of Jim Crow that was anything but subtle—“segregation without signs.” Studies by his American Friends Service Committee colleagues estimated that only one percent of residential listings was open to black applicants, with restrictions traceable from the formal policy of 1917 to a blunt contemporary statement by the Illinois Association of Real Estate Boards: “All we are asking is that the brokers and salesmen have the same right to discriminate as the owners who engage their services.” By harrowing tests from working-class Belmont Cragin to upscale Oak Park, Lafayette’s action groups sampled the latent capacity of housing demonstrations to expose human forces that locked people into slums.
To begin the new stage of nonviolent witness, fifty volunteers set up Friday outside F. H. Halvorsen Realty at the corner of Kedzie Avenue and South 63rd Street, but hecklers ten times their number gathered with such menace that Bevel aborted the vigil before midnight. He accepted an offer to leave in police vans, which touched off marathon debates with Al Raby about whether the ground for nonviolent witness had been abandoned or insufficiently prepared. Some workers stayed up to paint signs such as “All God’s Children Need a Place to Live,” making sure their message would reach adversaries and the public alike, while others summoned reinforcements with extra warnings that this was no training exercise.
A column of 250 left New Friendship Baptist Church at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, July 30. They walked west from Halsted Avenue for twenty-four blocks along South 71st Street, turned north at Kedzie through a golf course, and emerged from pastoral Marquette Park at 67th Street, where several hundred angry white residents chanted, “Nigger go home!” Chicago police officers with nightsticks cordoned the route toward 63rd Street, but eggs, bottles, and rocks flew over them to strike the marchers with such force that Bevel and Raby turned back in pell-mell retreat without reaching Halvorsen Realty, one of twenty-three firms in the area that had refused to show properties to black or integrated test groups. New leadership arguments complicated the aftermath. Should the movement complain about lax police protection, at the risk of diluting its witness, or steel supporters to “receive” blows that dramatized the depth of hatred at the color line? Organizers mobilized to try again rather than surrender to violence.
Sunday afternoon, a caravan of automobiles parked under police guard at the foot of Marquette Park to facilitate the return trip. An escort of some two hundred officers in riot helmets guided 550 people up Kedzie into a waiting crescendo of neighborhood fury. The previous day’s rocks escalated to cherry bombs and bricks. Some errant missiles went through store windows, but others felled victims. Sister Mary Angelica, a first-grade teacher at Sacred Heart School, went down unconscious and bleeding to cheers of “We got another one,” as movement marshals pushed through with her to a police cruiser bound for Holy Cross Hospital. Older residents aimed special venom at “white niggers”—roughly half the marchers—and pelted the police escorts as traitors. Chants of “white power” gave way to mob cries of “Burn them like Jews!” When a captain persuaded Raby to turn west for the shelter of a narrow tree-lined street, teenagers dashed through alleys for flank attacks, opened fire hydrants to drench the confined lines, and swarmed ahead to mass four thousand strong. A radio alarm from the Eighth District rallied police units citywide, but forty marchers and two officers had been carried off to the hospital when the besieged lines recrossed Marquette Park. Before Bevel and Raby could decide whether to risk dispersing to the parked cars, teenagers fanned out to slit tires, smash windows, and roll over vehicles bearing the telltale “End Slums” stickers. Dodging officers in pursuit, they set a dozen cars ablaze with Molotov cocktails and pushed two others into a pond on the golf course. Andrew Young saw the taillights of his rented Ford at the water line. Jesse Jackson said he had been hit three times but waved off questions about what happened. “I don’t know,” he told reporters blankly on the forced return walk. Some of the dazed and weary joined a chorus of “We Shall Overcome” raised by supporters waiting at the Ashland Avenue color line.
The shock of Southern-style hate images, which made front pages everywhere, put Chicago’s leaders under severe stress. Rabbi Robert J. Marx regretted his role as a community observer for the Chicago Federation of thirty-three Reform Jewish congregations, saying he had seen in the raging fears of ordinary parents and children “how the concentration camp could have occurred and how man’s hatred could lead them to kill.” Marx wrote a pained confession about the difficulty of being a prophet close to home. “I was on the wrong side of the street. I should have been with the marchers.” The august Chicago Tribune, on the other hand, identified with the rampage of those “baited into a near-riot last weekend,” and drew battle lines against “the imported prophets of ‘nonviolence’ who are seeking to incite trouble with marches into white neighborhoods.” Mayor Daley, caught in the middle, told neighborhood representatives from Chicago Lawn and Gage Park that community violence would only backfire against their worthy goal to end the unrest. His pleas for restraint—to let the marchers deplete their energy and go away—struck local leaders as mealy-mouthed bunk unworthy of America’s strongest mayor. Many of them found it especially galling that Daley’s police officers, widely known to them by their first names, were arresting the young white defenders rather than the uninvited strangers.
The mayor sent his black alderman to meet with Raby and King for the first time, creating a muffled fanfare that he was probing toward a settlement. Within the movement, daily housing tests in other areas stoked expectations that peaked Thursday night in a mass meeting of 1,700 people. “If there is any doubt in anybody’s mind concerning whether we have a movement here in Chicago,” King told a live radio audience from New Friendship, “you ought to be in this church tonight!” Announcing that he would lead the next day’s showdown personally—“My place is in Gage Park”—King addressed ethnic friction within the movement. Even if Jews or Catholics should reject his help, he pledged, “I would still take a stand against bigotry.” By the same token, he urged new white allies to uphold their principles in spite of distrust from unfamiliar, frustrated black people. “You ought to stand up and say, ‘I’m free and this is a free country and I believe in justice,’” King urged, “‘and I’m gonna be in the movement whether you want me or not.’” He acknowledged fatigue with a watchword of tenacity. “I still have faith in the future,” he said. “My brothers and sisters, I still can sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’”
On Friday afternoon, August 5, specially trained vanguards of twenty went ahead to establish picket lines outside Halvorsen and three other real estate companies along Kedzie. A huge body of 960 Chicago police deployed in riot helmets between the assembling march lines and some five thousand residents who had descended in advance to the northern edge of Marquette Park. Young men carried Confederate flags or crude handmade signs such as, “The Only Way to End Niggers Is Exterminate.” Noise built impatiently for the arrival of King, who was late as usual. No sooner did he emerge from a car at five o’clock than a perversely hostile chant broke out, “We want King! We want King!” Officers held the crowd back beyond the range of bricks but not rocks or cherry bombs, and screams answered the first explosions. Densely packed marchers moved forward awkwardly, some with bent arms shielding their heads. A palm-sized rock soon staggered King to the pavement, his chin propped on his left knee, which raised both shrieks of triumph and cries of fear. Pulled up to his feet, he flinched from a bang above the roar of voices. Officers and aides asked if he was all right. “I think so,” said King, swaying slightly just before the gunlike report of another cherry bomb made him duck again. He straightened up with a glazed stare, a lump swelling behind his right ear.
As the embattled columns moved slowly through Chicago Lawn toward Gage Park, families of mostly Italian, Lithuanian, and Polish origin emerged on bungalow porches to aim special abuse at vested Catholic clergy. One middle-aged woman ran alongside the black cleric George Clements until she collapsed, screaming, “You dirty nigger priest!” Marshals secluded Clements in one of the escort cars, which became a prime target for rocks. Back in the ranks, Rabbi Marx was struck by a rock as he kept his pledge to join some six hundred marchers. Up front, blood streamed from the broken nose of a volunteer bodyguard who shielded King with Raby, Lafayette, and Jesse Jackson. Ahead, a phalanx of seventy-five officers cleared a path through teenagers, one of whom retreated with the sign, “King Would Look Good with a Knife in His Back.” A knife that fell short pierced the shoulder of a heckler, who was hauled away among thirty casualties. King paused only briefly to salute and absorb steadfast pickets at the four real estate offices, curtailing ceremonies because of intensified bombardment in the commercial district.
By seven o’clock, when the three-mile march reentered Marquette Park under remorseless pursuit, Deputy Police Chief Robert Lynskey waited with a fleet of transit buses to speed evacuation and extra police to meet a new threat. “There are at least twenty-five hundred people up there,” he said, pointing to a knoll in the open park space. While nimble teenagers chased the buses—an undercover officer in one reported broken windows and injuries from flying glass—angry adults just home from work ran down to attack through gaps in the police line. Women poured sugar into gas tanks. Men set more vehicles on fire. A small group wrenched Father George Clements from his escort car and beat him until police intervened. A larger group of one hundred surrounded and pummeled six isolated officers until emergency help arrived. “The reinforcements came running, firing pistols in the air,” observed New York Times correspondent Gene Roberts, “and pummeling and clubbing whites with their nightsticks. ‘You nigger-loving S.O.B.’s,’ said a middle-aged man in a green Ivy League style suit. ‘I’ll never vote for Mayor Daley again.’”
Deprived of marchers, swirling bands stoned police cars until midnight while King consoled a stunned and disoriented crowd that filled New Friendship. He said it was a sad day for Chicago when people called nuns bitches. He explained again how he believed disciplined courage could bring social sickness into healing light, earned cheers with drumbeat vows that violence would not stop the movement, and endorsed plans to march in twenty neighborhoods like Gage Park. Dripping with perspiration, King left the church to face news cameras about the day of mayhem. “I have never in my life seen such hate,” he said. “Not in Mississippi or Alabama. This is a terrible thing.”
KING PREACHED at Ebenezer on his way to the tenth annual convention of SCLC. One year after the triumphant celebration in Birmingham, when the Selma movement had melted national indecision about voting rights, a pervasive climate of violence paralyzed and even hardened the response to the Chicago marches. He marveled that gang marshals had batted down incoming missiles and insults on the marches with a uniform forbearance conceded by astonished police officers who despised them as thugs. “I saw their noses being broken and blood flowing from their wounds,” King remarked, “and I saw them continue and not retaliate—not one of them—with violence.” He hesitated to publicize the miracle reform, however, because the gang pact was unstable at best. A Vice Lord nicknamed “Duck” already threatened to shoot Bevel for over-praising his commitment to nonviolence. Tempers sizzled in church between rivals who had fortified themselves with alcohol to endure white attackers, and multiple strains closed New Friendship Baptist to future use by the civil rights coalition.
Lurid details of extraneous horror seeped from the arraignment of Richard Speck for the July 14 serial murder of eight nurses. In hiding, the twenty-four-year-old Dallas drifter had tried to commit suicide at a Chicago Loop flophouse that rented “fireproof” cubicles covered with chicken wire for ninety cents a night. Conflicted nurses at Cook County Hospital helped save his life for trial, but the first court appearance on August 1 eerily overlapped a landmark of terror on live television. From the high observation deck of a university tower in Austin, Texas, barricaded sniper Charles Whitman killed fourteen and wounded thirty-one random pedestrians before officers killed him. Stupefied viewers learned that the young ex-Marine left frank notes—“I don’t really understand myself these days”—about murdering his wife and mother just beforehand to spare them the embarrassment of his plans. Four days later, a teenager said he shot a night watchman “to have fun like the guys in Chicago and Austin.” White Americans recoiled from a monstrous contagion among themselves. Crime statisticians soon added a new category for mass murder, and police departments invented SWAT teams. The news from Texas eclipsed Speck’s “crime of the century” as well as the first White House family wedding since the era of Theodore Roosevelt.
On Monday, August 8, two days after Luci Johnson’s marriage, King answered questions at an airport press conference about why his convention was in Mississippi if racial hatred was worse in Chicago. He described regional differences as subtle but important, arguing that Southern brutality “came in many instances from the policemen themselves,” whereas the Chicago police “are doing a good job of seeking to restrain the violence.” It was a relief in some respects for him to return to the clarity of outspoken segregationists. By tradition, Mississippi politicians had just launched the election season at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, where Deputy Cecil Price remained indicted, with every candidate jockeying to impress outdoor crowds. Governor Paul Johnson inveighed against “a dark and ominous cloud” unlike any normal political slogan—“Don’t be fooled!”—calling black power “a storm that contains the thunder of terror…and harbors the seeds of a hurricane of hate and hostility that can sweep sanity aside.” State Auditor Hamp King welcomed a pendulum of change “back our way, away from the colored madness.” U.S. Senator James Eastland quoted J. Edgar Hoover that civil rights groups were “nothing but a hatchery for Communists,” heaped wry praise on the Yankee mayor of Chicago—“He said no, we’re not gonna give you nothin’!”—and won his usual prize for foot-stomping laughter and acclaim with a caricature of the Meredith march. “I flew over the scene at 3,500 feet,” Eastland shouted, “and the marchers smelled up that high.”
With Coretta, King returned Monday night to Rankin County Airport. He went personally to draw along his Jackson police escort and provide what assurance he could for the keynote speaker, Edward Kennedy. The three of them drove back through hate leaflets and nails strewn on the roadway, declining to stop when flat tires stranded two police cruisers and several reporters from their convoy. (FBI agents estimated three hundred pounds of “what appeared to be 1¾" roofing nails,” and advised headquarters that Kennedy arrived safely at the King Edward Hotel despite nails in all four tires.) King tinkered hurriedly with his introduction of “a young man on the way up,” though Kennedy at thirty-four was only three years his junior. He praised his precocious legislative skill, noting how “this freshman senator earned the respect of his colleagues,” then presented Kennedy like a baptismal candidate as “the ninth child, the fourth and youngest son of proud parents.” Nearly a thousand SCLC delegates in the emotion-charged banquet hall erupted for one who dared to come among them looking so much like the revered, assassinated President. They stood to cheer when Kennedy asked why the nation would spend upward of $2 billion per month to make war in South Vietnam and not make “the same kind of effort for the twenty million people of the Negro race right here in America, whose freedom and future are also at stake?” They stood again when he cautioned against separatism: “If you isolate yourselves, you will be crippling your effectiveness in what is basically not a white or Negro cause, but an American cause.” The Kings rushed Kennedy back for a late-night departure that minimized the risk of his first visit to Mississippi.
A high fever sent King to bed for most of the convention with what Abernathy called “his virus, the one he always got during the tensest moment in a campaign.” He complained of depletion until Stanley Levison mollified him with rosy predictions for mail solicitations and a new book contract. (“We’re at a real turn in the movement,” Levison said on a wiretapped line. “A lot of people are confused…this is the time when a book can be useful.”) King sent Andrew Young in his stead to deliver a downbeat president’s address, which acknowledged a broad shift of interest from race to Vietnam and claimed grim success already for one of the prime objectives of a Northern movement: to break down persistent illusions that race was a regional rather than national issue. “Chicago has proven that not long can one section of this nation wallow in pious condemnation of another,” Young declared, “while it practices worse atrocities against its black citizens.”
In King’s absence, the delegates passed a resolution to support a guaranteed income base for all Americans. They ratified Al Lowenstein and Charles Morgan as the first two white board members, and bid farewell to staff members departing from movement fatigue. Among them, King apologized to the fastidious program director Randy Blackwell for SCLC’s “non-existent structural and organizational foundations” to manage the avalanche of daily crises across the South. A youth group in Jackson was petitioning SCLC for help with city swimming pools still closed to evade the civil rights law, and Hosea Williams, who risked his life to integrate Grenada’s public library, left Blackwell a trail of browbeaten colleagues, bail bills, and complaints from rental companies about cars he had lost, wrecked, or abandoned.* King nearly always tolerated backwash from his quarrelsome, headstrong lieutenants as the price of creative tension essential to a movement—and teased Andrew Young for being so “normal” that he would teach people to adjust to segregation—but the unruly competition exacted a toll. On his sickbed, King learned that his latest staff prodigy had committed him impulsively to a suicidal march.
Jesse Jackson idolized, imitated, and almost literally absorbed King. On his first staff trip to Atlanta, lodged in King’s home for lack of money, he had explored tirelessly the nexus between theology and movement politics, nearly always answering his own questions before the nonplussed host could reply. Andrew Young among others resented but admired his urge to take charge, which was vital and irrepressible like a wonder of nature. Jackson churned out sermons and strategy papers for the Chicago movement framed in King’s grand language, and he synthesized the tactical flair of nonviolent mentors Lafayette and Bevel, especially Bevel’s gift for poetic flights of imagination. In the aftershock of Gage Park, Jackson cut through backroom disagreements about whether to continue or suspend the marches. He plumbed layers of historical degradation before a mass meeting at Warren Avenue Congregational Church. “I have counted up the cost,” Jackson solemnly concluded. “My life. Bevel’s life. Even Dr. King’s life. Over and against the generation and the continuation of a kind of sin that’s going to internally disrupt this country and possibly the world.” He spread his arms in surrender. “I counted the cost!” Jackson shouted. “I’m going to Cicero!”
Apoplexy flashed through Chicago. Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie announced that the response of his suburban jurisdiction “would make Gage Park look like a tea party.” In May, teenager Jerome Huey had been beaten to death on a Cicero street when his job interviews extended past dusk. While movement leaders gritted their teeth over the freelance outburst, Bevel gamely supported Jackson in public. “They can buy tanks and they can arm every child,” he declared, “but we are going to Cicero.”
HOWLS AGAINST the daily vigils put Cicero in abeyance, and a month’s upheaval since the Soldier Field rally buckled major figures on all sides. On August 10, “with a heavy heart,” Archbishop Cody of Chicago called for a moratorium on demonstrations to prevent loss of life. His edict exonerated the marchers—“They have not been guilty of violence and lawlessness, others have”—repeated his seminal blessing for their “Open City” principles, and went so far as to confess a contravention of moral order. “It is truly sad, indeed deplorable, that the citizens should ever have to be asked to suspend the exercise of their rights because of the evil doing of others,” the archbishop declared. “However, in my opinion and in the opinion of many men of goodwill, such is the situation in which we now find ourselves.”
Chicagoans debated whether Cody had defected from the movement, come to his senses, or succumbed to a runaway revolt in his diocese. Intermediaries crisscrossed the city with feelers toward settlement. Walter Reuther among others relayed proposals to King and Al Raby in Mississippi. Mayor Daley welcomed Cody’s stand but pursued multiple avenues toward relief. With every neighborhood march, his subordinates were reporting wholesale erosion of support for the fall reelection of Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, a prominent supporter of President Johnson’s open housing bill. Challenger Charles Percy had safely endorsed one item from the list King taped to City Hall—replacement of the “absentee” Democratic precinct captains assigned to black neighborhoods—which infuriated the mayor as cross-party tampering by a Republican. Beyond the Douglas-Percy contest, continued marches so threatened his political base that Daley himself initiated peace talks. When the president of the Chicago Real Estate Board stalled a request to convene them, fearing correctly that the mayor sought to sidestep the public spotlight, Daley enlisted the prestigious Chicago Conference on Religion and Race. Named for the ecumenical assembly in January of 1963, at which King met Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the CCRR was the home chapter of the commission formed since by the National Council of Churches. Rev. Robert Spike, ex-director of the parent group, had relocated from New York just in time to be drafted with pillars of the local clergy.
Paradoxically, the prospect of talks heightened tension. The American Nazi Party warned of race betrayal at a Chicago rally, spawning a mob that attacked police officers. Newspapers and some marchers bridled at continued demonstrations now that civilized compromise lay within reach, while others discerned plots to puncture the movement with false hope. Seven hundred people with eight hundred police guards entered the Bogan neighborhood on August 12, when, by coincidence, John Lennon was apologizing downtown for long-ago remarks about Jesus before an evening concert to begin the Beatles’ last American tour.* Twelve hundred people survived simultaneous marches two days later into three different neighborhoods, led by Raby, Bevel, and Jesse Jackson. On Tuesday, August 16, vigils drew hostile crowds to six real estate offices in Jefferson Park, and pickets formed at selected sites throughout the Chicago Loop. “We are here,” read signs outside an imposing structure at Dearborn and Madison, “because the Savings and Loan Associations refuse to loan money to Negroes who wish to buy beyond the ghetto.” Most bystanders shunned, but some spontaneously joined, the teaching demonstrations about broad institutional resistance.
Summit negotiators filed Wednesday morning into the Cathedral House of St. James Church, Chicago’s oldest Episcopal congregation(1857). Sealed from the press, forged by public crisis, the biracial mix of potentates, Quakers, and shop stewards was scarcely imaginable before nor likely ever again. Men occupied all fifty-six seats around a giant horseshoe of tables. Ben Heineman of the Chicago North West Railroad, who had chaired the White House Conference in June, presided by request of the CCRR clergy. Clark Stayman, president of the Chicago Mortgage Bankers Association, said his members accepted the movement’s guidelines for equal housing loans. Mayor Daley agreed to each of the six demands that required city action, centering on enforcement of the dead-letter fair housing ordinance of 1963.
Soaring hope collided with the Chicago Real Estate Board, whose executives said their members acted merely as agents for property owners, and could no more betray their clients by showing listings to black people than Martin Luther King could endorse segregation. “You can accuse us as though we created that bigotry until the end of the world,” said Arthur Mohl, “but we are not the creators. We are the mirror.” King objected that the real estate industry had spent $5 million to repeal California’s fair housing law by Proposition 14. Only the day before, he added, Attorney General Katzenbach had told him that lobbying expenditures to kill the federal housing bill could cure the slums of a major city. “Now don’t tell me you’re neutral,” King said sharply. “Leadership has got to say that the time for change has come.”
Industry spokesmen deflected pressure by casting doubt on Mayor Daley’s promise that the Chicago Housing Authority would disperse public housing units outside the ghetto. CHA director Charles Swibel, while emphasizing his loyal commitment to initiate the process, described so many obstacles to the necessary site approvals that he foresaw a need for more ghetto high-rises in the meantime. His equivocation prompted Al Raby to move for summary dismissal, but Daley secured a recess. Aides leaked to reporters a terse sentence from his ensuing phone call to president Ross Beatty of the Chicago Real Estate Board: “In the interest of the City of Chicago, you cannot come back here this afternoon with a negative answer.”
When they reconvened, Beatty’s discourse turned hushed expectation to puzzlement. “We’ve heard your statement,” Raby responded, “but we’re not sure what you’re saying.” On cross-examination, Beatty clarified that his board refused to modify established positions, such as the Real Estate Board’s legal attack on the 1963 ordinance, but indicated a willingness to “withdraw all opposition to the philosophy of open occupancy at the state level—provided it is applicable to owners as well as to brokers.” Bevel dismissed the maze of qualification. “The question is whether Negroes are going to be served in your office tomorrow morning,” he said. Arguments shifted erratically. Jesse Jackson pressed the real estate executives to seek King’s “theological level.” Mayor Daley asked again why the movement picked Chicago. Rev. Spike complimented the “profound” change in Beatty’s stance. Charles Hayes of the United Packinghouse Workers cautioned Spike: “If I as a union negotiator ever came back to my men and said to them, ‘I got the company to agree that philosophically they were in support of seniority,’ I’d be laughed out of court.”
By evening, King implored exhausted negotiators to let a delegated subcommittee advance the day’s “constructive and creative” start, understanding that marches would continue. “Let me say that if you are tired of demonstrations, I am tired of demonstrating,” he asserted. “I am tired of the threat of death. I want to live.” He said marches no more created the problem than a doctor caused a cancer by finding it. “I hope we are here to discuss how to make Chicago a great open city, and not how to end marches,” he continued. “We’ve got to have massive changes. Now, gentlemen, you know we don’t have much. We don’t have much money.” He reviewed the grim shortages of training and advantage among movement people. “We have only our bodies,” said King, “and you are asking us to give up the one thing we have when you say, ‘Don’t march.’ We want to be visible…. If we hadn’t marched, I don’t think we’d be here today. No one here has talked about the beauty of our marches, the love of our marches, the hatred we’re absorbing.” A skeptical delegate asked how more talks could resolve the impasse, and Chairman Heineman gaveled adjournment with stolid ambiguity. “The purpose of the subcommittee,” he declared, “is to come back with proposals designed to provide an open city.”
News outlets considered the summit a failure, quoting Mayor Daley’s bitter regret that “there does not seem to be a cessation of the marches.” In seclusion, King appraised Daley as a decent man, fixated on control, “about my son’s age in understanding the race problem.” Thursday night, he exhorted a mass meeting at Mount Hope Baptist Church to prepare overnight for marches and reprisals. Bevel tweaked the mayor by vowing to keep up the neighborhood demonstrations “until every white person out there joins the Republican Party.” On Friday, August 19, as movement teams tested racial barriers at one hundred real estate offices, including several in Daley’s home area of Bridgeport, the mayor sent lawyers to Chancery Court Judge Cornelius J. Harrington, a political vassal, and obtained within two hours a sweeping injunction to ban more than one demonstration per day, strictly confined between the daylight rush hours. News of the court order interrupted the first session of the summit subcommittee, and prompted an outraged Robert Spike to suggest aborting the talks for breach of faith. Bevel and Raby restrained him with the argument that dramatic action by either side raised the crisis toward resolution. In Birmingham and Selma, crippling injunctions had preceded historic national breakthroughs. In Chicago, announced Raby, “The issue is still justice in housing.”
SUNDAY, ON a ninety-minute edition of Meet the Press, King revealed a temporary decision not to defy the injunction. Questioners passed lightly over Chicago to focus on a general theme that black initiatives had turned noxious across the country. “Isn’t it time to stop demonstrations that create violence and discord?” moderator Lawrence Spivak asked a panel of guests. King insisted that nonviolent demonstrations neither caused nor cured anything in themselves, and were designed to bring hidden conditions into conscious public responsibility. Floyd McKissick of CORE said King’s process was endangered for the simple reason that “nonviolence is something of the past.” Prompted on this point, James Meredith endorsed black vigilante groups while Stokely Carmichael distinguished between vigilantes and self-defense. Carmichael, in a business suit, refused invitations to rescue his black power doctrine from a storm of alleged press distortions, saying SNCC had just banned further attempts to clarify the term. He did acknowledge defining any black soldier in Vietnam as a mercenary, which provoked a surge of comment. “I personally think that one of the greatest things happening in America today is the war in Vietnam,” said Meredith, “because for the first time black men, Negroes, are fighting [without unit restrictions] in a war.” Carmichael sheepishly denied reports that he had called King and Roy Wilkins “Uncle Toms” in recent speeches—“I couldn’t have possibly said that”—citing a SNCC policy that forbade speaking ill of any black leader. Wilkins claimed a larger unity in the historic purpose of civil rights, and tried to make light of the nationally televised bickering that so “terribly distressed” fellow panelist Whitney Young. It was a kind of promotion, Wilkins observed with his laconic smile, for young radicals to call him a tool of the black power structure instead of the white one.
King had cut short his appearance and slipped out of Chicago’s NBC affiliate less than halfway through the contentious broadcast. Aides said only his presence could contain the fierce yearning to break the injunction. (“Get your grandmother up from the South!” Bevel cried. “So she can keep the kids while we’re in jail.”) At Liberty Baptist Church, the new march headquarters for the South Side, King defended the chosen course. Exactly five hundred volunteers—the maximum number permitted—filled an eighty-six-car caravan that arrived punctually for once at the lone demonstration site for the afternoon. In a steady rain, King led a march five miles through East Side neighborhoods near the city steelworks and Trumbull Park, where novelist Alan Paton had recorded a year-long siege against the last pioneer black family in 1954. “About 2,000 residents lined the route despite the downpour,” observed one correspondent, hurling jeers and projectiles over a buffer of four hundred officers. Some held signs denouncing “Archbishop Cody and His Commie Coons.” King detoured with his nervous escort toward one clump of angry teenagers. “You are all good looking and intelligent,” he said, as they backed away. “Where did all that hate come from?”
Sunday’s East Side march, which made front pages in distant cities, fueled only one of several burners underneath local politics. In Marquette Park, American Nazi commander George Lincoln Rockwell invited four robed Klansmen and the anti-Jewish polemicist Connie Lynch to share a swastika-draped spectacle that mortified Chicago’s civic dignity. At a rally on the North Side, Republican senatorial candidate Charles Percy denounced the “failed” Democratic machine. In suburban Evergreen Park and Chicago Heights, Bevel, Jesse Jackson, and American Friends Service Committee activist Jerry Davis led satellite marches in two areas not covered by Judge Harrington’s injunction. Such deployments, as an alternative to jail-going defiance in the city, revealed a calculation that dispersal into Cook County suburbs would intensify rather than relieve pressure on Mayor Daley. King himself announced preparations to take three thousand marchers the following Sunday into Cicero.
Instantly, Jesse Jackson’s prior outburst about Cicero was reborn a strategic thunderclap. Mayor Daley showed hints of panic at a press conference: “We’ve got commies, we’ve got Nazis, and everybody else you can name showing up. I wish they’d go home!” Sheriff Ogilvie declared marching in Cicero “awfully close to a suicidal act,” and Governor Otto Kerner dispatched National Guard units in advance. While daily marches ventured into new areas such as West Elsdon, the Chicago Daily News denounced King’s Cicero plan as blackmail by threat of martyrdom. On Thursday, when the New York Times pleaded for a moratorium on Chicago demonstrations to avoid “the present downhill course to nowhere,” all seven black aldermen joined a 45–1 solidarity vote for Daley and rejected a consolation motion simply to disapprove of segregated housing. Still, votes of every color were leaking beyond the chamber, and all sides seized a last chance for reprieve.
Summit negotiators reconvened at the Palmer House hotel on Friday, August 26, with television cameras posted outside the stately Walnut Room. Thomas G. Ayers, president of both the Commonwealth Edison power company and the Association of Commerce and Industry, delivered subcommittee recommendations that strengthened the August 17 commitments in minor respects. The parties accepted a modest goal of at least one percent black occupancy in all seventy-five Chicago neighborhoods within a year, but they omitted the figure from the written document to avoid specific quotas or ceilings, and also to minimize potential ridicule for the great furor and effort over such nominal stakes. Mayor Daley moved immediately to approve the report, but Raby asked first to hear the assembled leaders embrace steps to reach the one percent goal. Archbishop Cody rose for the first time to say that the Roman Catholic association of Rogers Park already had resolved to accept Negro residents, and that priests in all 454 parishes would pursue the seven-step campaign outlined for religious groups. “We are like a little United Nations,” he said, “and we will commit our moral, financial, and religious resources to the fulfillment of this agreement.” Rabbi Marx said likewise for the Reform Jewish congregations. Heads of labor, business, and civic groups followed suit until Ross Beatty wavered on behalf of the Chicago Real Estate Board. King interrupted to ask whether Beatty could reconcile support with his complaints on radio that real estate companies would go out of business if forced to sell or rent to Negroes. Beatty filibustered. “We’ll do all we can, but I don’t know how we can do it,” he replied. “Frankly, I’m confused.”
Daley fidgeted and scowled through a miserable soliloquy from the refined Princeton graduate. (Beatty said, “I hope everyone will understand that we are not all bums.”) He moved again for a vote, and glowered impatiently when the rattled parties secured a recess instead. Staff members stalled the waiting reporters. Bevel and Jesse Jackson urged the movement caucus to demand more guarantees, but others predicted that Daley would walk out and leave them to face jail or Cicero. Back in plenary session, King declared a willingness to vote despite misgivings on his side, especially about the surviving injunction. Rev. Donald Zimmerman, chairman of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago, benignly suggested that a court review of the injunction would set fair limits for protest, and King, taken aback, asked if he knew that the appeals would consume several hundred thousand dollars of scarce civil rights money over at least three years. Raby also bristled at the casually academic idea, and charged the city with bad faith for seeking to cripple the movement only two days after forming the Ayers subcommittee.
The mayor stood up. People could make any statement about bad faith, he shrugged, then offered a testimonial. “I was raised in a workingman’s community in a workingman’s home,” he said. “My father was a union organizer, and we did not like injunctions. I know the injustice of injunctions. But I faced the decision of what to do with three and a half million people.” His police force was battered, said Daley. Violence was draining protection from much of the city, and he had resisted advice to shut down the marches altogether. King thanked the mayor for his candor and confessed a reciprocal dilemma. “If that injunction stands,” he said, “somewhere along the way we are going to have to break it.” Chairman Heineman, seizing a moment of favorable chemistry, brokered a compromise with a proposal to keep the ban only for marches in residential areas, reflecting the agreement, and to restore protest rights elsewhere for the movement agenda on schools and employment. Daley agreed—“we can amend our injunction”—and King adjusted a few words to fit his constitutional position. “I don’t think that we can accept a conference ‘to modify the injunction,’” he said, “because we are opposed to the injunction totally, but we can accept ‘a separate negotiation through the continuing body on that issue.’” With that final nuance, the ten-point Open Housing Summit Agreement passed unanimously.
“This is a great day for Chicago,” Heineman told the press.