Civil Rights Events

Chicago Freedom Movement

Daunting Objectives

… the slums and ghettos of the mid-1960s are not accidents of fate. They are the inevitable consequences of local (and not so local) power structures practicing covert segregation and overt hypocrisy to benefit their own wealth, power and privilege. …

CORE, NAACP, Urban League, and scores of local civil rights, reform, and economic justice groups have long struggled — with little success — in northern ghettos against racist civic policies and entrenched economic interests. Freedom Movement victories in the South have had little impact in the North, and by mid-1966, impatience and fury in the nation's inner-cities are rising fast.

In Washington, Congress is in no mood for new civil rights or economic justice legislation — its focus is "law and order" and "White Backlash" politics. President Johnson's priority is the Vietnam War, not the War on Poverty. Instead of increasing funds to ameliorate urban misery, money once earmarked for social programs is being diverted to the military budget.

And even if Vietnam were not draining national wealth, by now it is clear that federal poverty programs are mainly benefiting private businesses in the form of grants, subsidies and tax breaks. And it is middle-class professionals who are being employed by the research firms, bureaus, agencies, and training centers that are paid for by the federal poverty programs. Few poor people are being hired for anything, and even fewer are being helped to actually lift themselves out of poverty. LBJ's grand and ballyhooed "War on Poverty" is proving to be an underfunded fraud.

Ever since Birmingham, Movement supporters in the North have been pressing Dr. King to apply his nonviolent direct action strategies to the festering problems of northern ghettos, pleas that become even more insistent after the Selma success. Watts forces the issue (After 1-2).

The world sees Dr. King as a political leader of social/political movements, but in his own heart he is a pastor. The misery and suffering of those imprisoned in the urban ghettos cry out to him. Since his student days he has been powerfully drawn to the social ministry, to the poor, the downtrodden, the dispossessed and disempowered. He passionately believes that nonviolent resistance is the answer to oppression, exploitation, injustice, and despair — not just in the American South, but everywhere.

Yet for "everywhere" to actually be everywhere, it has to include northern slums. He tells his SCLC colleagues, "I realize I must more and more extend my work beyond the borders of the South, and become involved to a much greater extent with the problems of the urban North."

But except for James Bevel and Andrew Young, SCLC leaders and key advisors all oppose expanding out of the South. They argue that SCLC has no base of churches or affiliates in the North, little experience with issues of defacto rather than dejure segregation, and no strategy for addressing pervasive covert discrimination or urban poverty. …

SCLC's southern affiliates all face urgent local problems with scant resources, and the ministers & community groups who make up the organization's Board of Directors desperately need help and support from Atlanta. They know the organization can barely fund its southern programs, it can't possibly finance a struggle on two broad fronts. Moreover, most of SCLC's income now comes from northern white liberals, some of whom have already turned against the Freedom Movement because of Harlem and Watts. How many more will fall away if the Movement begins to confront racism in their own backyard?

…

It also means confronting white-only trade unions and long-standing hiring and promotion standards that are deeply embedded in labor contracts. These issues are all far more complex, and enormously more controversial, than segregated lunch counters or denial of voting rights. And when economic injustice becomes the focus, old allies may turn out to be fierce new adversaries.

Dr. King is well aware of the difficulties and risks inherent in a northern campaign focused on poverty and economic justice. But the Movement has to establish that racism and poverty are national issues — not southern exceptions. Referring to Watts, he says, "[The] ghetto Negro has been invisible so long and has become visible through violence." Nonviolence has to effectively meet that challenge. "We must find the real issues and examine our structure to determine what we can do. ...

For several years, the Freedom Movement in Chicago has been fighting against rigidly segregated, deeply unequal schools, and an adamant school administration committed to the old order and the old ways. They urgently need substantial aid from King and SCLC. Over the course of many months and many meetings, Dr. King eventually convinces a very reluctant SCLC to answer Chicago's call (North 1-2).

It is the policy of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) to build public housing only in Black and Latino communities, usually in the form of high-rise "projects" that in reality are vertical ghettos for the very poorest. On a plot of land in the heart of the South Side ghetto, for example, are the Robert Taylor Homes — the largest public housing complex in the nation, consisting of 28 towers, each 16-stories high, containing 3,340 apartments.

Such intense concentrations of extreme poverty foster despair, vandalism, and crime. They overwhelm neighborhood elementary schools, and quickly prove catastrophic for residents, the surrounding area, and society at large. Nevertheless, CHA insists on building more of them. In the view of many housing activists, the real reasons for large-scale, tower-based projects are racist attitudes on the part of white neighborhoods who refuse to accept nonwhites into their communities and schools, and the lucrative construction and maintenance contracts that go to politically well-connected businesses — and the graft they kickback to the controlling politicians.

Chicago is the home and political base of Mayor Richard J. Daley, a major power within the national Democratic Party who ruthlessly controls one of the strongest urban "machines" in the nation. His Cook County election apparatus is a sophisticated organization of ward bosses, district and precinct captains, business interests (both white and nonwhite), union officials, favored clergy, ethnic leaders, and organized crime. All of whom reliably deliver overwhelming Black, Latino, and white working-class majorities for Daley's candidates and policies. So long as the machine can reliably mobilize Afro-Americans at the ballot box, he can curry favor with white "ethnic" voters by opposing civil rights initiatives such as school desegregation and open housing.

… SCLC strategists believe that confronting Daley is self-defeating. "I don't consider Mayor Daley as an enemy," publicly avows Dr. King who hopes that nonviolent direct action can persuade (or pressure) the Mayor to support civil rights related reforms (Segregation 1-3).

In August of 1965, Dr. King sends Rev. James Bevel and a dozen or so members of SCLC's small field staff to begin working in Chicago. There they join Bernard LaFayette, Bevel's Nashville & Freedom Ride "roll buddy," and a former SNCC organizer, who is working for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in the city's West Side ghetto.

Their assignment is to assist the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) build a powerful, nonviolent, urban mass movement. The CCCO is a loose coalition of 40 or so community and civil rights groups who have been opposing Chicago's rigidly segregated school system. …

Led by Al Raby, the CCCO has fought for years against School Superintendent Benjamin Willis and his policies of defacto segregation. In 1963 and '64, they organized two huge school walkouts with some 200,000 students boycotting classes. Yet despite its efforts, CCCO has had little success. Willis is backed by Daley. And the Johnson administration in Washington is unwilling to offend or upset Daley by enforcing the school desegregation provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which Willis is violating. …

At an SCLC-CCCO strategy meeting in October of 1965, SCLC Project Director James Bevel defines the ultimate, long-range goal as, "Getting rid of slums. [Our task] is not to patch up the ghetto, but to abolish it."

Dr. King later recalled:

When we first joined forces with the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, we outlined a drive to end slums. We viewed slums and slumism as more than a problem of dilapidated, inadequate housing. We understood them as the end product of domestic colonialism: slum housing and slum schools, unemployment and underemployment, segregated and inadequate education, welfare dependency and political servitude. Because no single attack could hope to deal with this overwhelming problem, we established a series of concurrent projects aimed at each facet.

…

Over three days of meetings in early January of 1966, SCLC and CCCO leaders hammer out their strategy. At the urging of Bevel, and after long and contentions debate, the CFM [Chicago Freedom Movement] decides to shift focus from school segregation to a much broader, more general, "War on Slums."

In a 13-page strategy document, they outline a three-phase plan: Phase One (already underway) is organizing tenant unions and forming other community groups, educating supporters and opinion makers, recruiting and training nonviolent demonstrators. Phase Two, expected to begin in March, is to consist of creative nonviolent protests exposing the agents of discrimination and exploitation and educating the public about poverty and suffering in the ghettos. Phase Three, scheduled for May, is large-scale direct action and mass civil disobedience to achieve a "direct confrontation [between] the power of the existing social order and the newly acquired power of the combined forces of good-will and the under-privileged."

…

King tells reporters, "Our work will be aimed at Washington," for an expanded War on Poverty and open-housing legislation. But so long as "Law & Order" ideology and the Vietnam War dominate politics and budgets, the chances of prodding the nation to, "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed," are poor (Chicago 1-5).

It was bitterly cold on January 26, 1966, the day Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, moved into a $90-a-month railroad flat on the top floor of a rundown building on the corner of Hamlin Avenue and 16th Street. The North Lawndale tenement, which stood two blocks from a pool hall that served as headquarters for the Vice Lords street gang, had no lock on its front door and a packed-dirt floor in the foyer.

…

King’s decision to come to Chicago owed in large part to the efforts of two men: Albert Raby [of the CCCO] … and James Bevel [who] … had recently moved to Chicago with his wife, Diane Nash, a native South Sider, and started working at the West Side Christian Parish, an outreach ministry across from Union Park.

Raby and Bevel convinced King that Chicago would be the ideal beachhead: It was a huge city with a substantial black population, and unlike New York and Philadelphia, where influential black leaders let it be known to King privately that they didn’t need or want him, Chicago had a coalition—led by Raby and Bevel—ready to welcome him with open arms. And then there was Chicago’s mayor. Richard J. Daley controlled virtually every lever of power in the city. Persuade Daley of the rightness of change, Bevel and others argued, and the whole city would change along with him. Change Chicago, and the rest of the country would follow.

“We’ve got to go for broke,” Bevel told King. After the Watts riots, King didn’t need much convincing.

The task of finding King a place to live fell to his assistant, Bernard Lee. King had expressed a desire to live on the West Side. “You can’t really get close to the poor without living and being here with them,” King told reporters. “A West Side apartment will symbolize the slum-lordism that I hope to smash.”

Lee and a young secretary named Diana Smith, who had grown up in North Lawndale, posed as a house-hunting couple and, after a week of looking at apartments in and around that neighborhood, settled on the flat at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue. Lee signed the lease before the landlord realized who the real occupant would be. Once he did, he promptly sent over a crew of plasterers, painters, and electricians to fix up the apartment.

“For a long time there was a joke that all Martin Luther King had to do was to move from one building to another on the West Side, and the whole place could get cleaned up in a hurry,” recalls Mary Lou Finley, who co-edited a recent book on the Chicago Freedom Movement. Finley, who is white, was just out of Stanford in 1965 and was given the job of picking out furniture from a church-run thrift shop for the Kings’ two-bedroom apartment. She remembers clearly the tiny kitchen with the refrigerator that didn’t keep food cold and the dilapidated gas stove that didn’t keep it hot.

Coretta Scott King recalled the flat in her memoir, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Our apartment was on the third floor of a dingy building, which had no lights in the hall, only one dim bulb at the head of the stairs. … As we walked in … the smell of urine was overpowering. We were told that this was because the door was always open, and the drunks came in off the street to use the hallway as a toilet.”

The Kings’ apartment was right off a violent stretch of 16th Street, in a part of North Lawndale nicknamed the Holy City—holy because it was where the Vice Lords, one of Chicago’s largest and fiercest gangs, had gotten its start. “In all of my time in the movement all across the South, the only time I was scared was in that neighborhood, going to my apartment at night,” recalls Andrew Young, the former congressman, U.N. ambassador, and mayor of Atlanta, who as a young activist accompanied King to Chicago to help launch the campaign. “I said, ‘I don’t mind giving my life in the civil rights movement, but damn if I want to have a knife stuck in me for 20 dollars in a dark hallway.’ ”

Most of the businesses in this part of the West Side—grocery and liquor stores, payday loan shops, and the like—were owned by whites, many of whom had lived in the neighborhood before blacks moved in. (In 1950, North Lawndale was 87 percent white. A decade later, it was more than 90 percent black.) Customers in these neighborhoods almost always paid more for less. Says Finley: “I remember going to a grocery store and finding Grade B eggs. Never in my life had I seen Grade B eggs anywhere! And they cost the same as Grade A or AA eggs in other grocery stores.” One day, she recalls, a colleague followed a delivery truck that picked up boxes of expired potato chips from a suburban supermarket and brought them to grocery stores on the West Side. “The ghetto was a dumping ground,” says Finley.

After getting settled in the Hamlin Avenue flat, King established a routine of strolling around the neighborhood. On his walks, he saw up close the sense of hopelessness, despair, and anger—what he referred to as an “emotional pressure cooker”—to which the Watts riots had so violently borne testament (Bernstein 10-12).

Works cited:

“After Watts.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War Against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm#1966chi_watts

Bernstein, David. “The Longest March.” Politics & City Life. July 25, 2016. Web. https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2016/Martin-Luther-King-Chicago-Freedom-Movement/

“Chicago Freedom Movement.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War Against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm#1966chi_watts

“North to Chicago.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War Against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm#1966chi_watts

“Segregation – Chicago Style.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War Against Slums. Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm#1966chi_watts

“The Chicago Freedom Movement.” National Low Income Housing Coalition. October 23, 2018. Web. https://nlihc.org/resource/chicago-freedom-movement