Civil Rights Events

Chicago Freedom Movement

Inroads

For all of the hoopla surrounding King’s arrival, the campaign started slowly. King spent his first weeks touring the city and meeting with local activists, city officials, and ghetto residents (Bernstein 1).

Working with Rev. Clay Evans of the Chicago Baptist Ministers Conference and Al Pitcher a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, SCLC staff member and divinity student Jesse Jackson begins organizing a chapter of SCLC's Operation Breadbasket. This is a program that uses church-led consumer boycotts to combat job discrimination and open up employment opportunities for nonwhites — an effort that finds favor among Afro-American clergymen who are reluctant to participate in militant protests or directly confront the Daley machine around a hot-button issue like segregated housing.

King addresses a meeting of more than 200 Black ministers who form committees to investigate, and if necessary target, racist hiring practices in the food industry, particularly soda-pop, milk, bread, and soup companies all of which sell well in the ghetto. By late spring they are having some success — 75 Afro-Americans hired by two milk companies and 44 at a third, for one example. But the Daley machine strikes back. Evans is erecting a new church. Suddenly, without explanation, his city building permits are withdrawn — halting construction for seven years (Steps 1).

SCLC leaders and organizers like Bevel, Andy Young, Big James Orange, and Jimmy Collier begin working with the Vice Lords, Blackstone Rangers, Cobras, and Roman Saints, urging them to stop fighting each other, support the CFM, and participate in nonviolent direct action.

At first they make scant progress. But they persist. Orange is beaten by gang members, not once but several times. He maintains nonviolence and he doesn't quit. Gradually he begins winning respect. Eventually, Bevel reports great success, and Dr. King addresses a "gang convention" at the Palmer House hotel. "From that period on," Orange later recalled, "we worked with these guys." Later on, some of the gang members guard Dr. King from racist attack, while others act as marshals on the mass marches into white neighborhoods that begin at the end of July.

…

But while some gang members do commit to tactical nonviolence as a requirement for participating in SCLC-led protests, the large number that Bevel hopes to recruit for his "freedom army" does not materialize. Most remain unwilling to forego their enmity with rival gangs, participate with whites in interracial actions, or accept nonviolent discipline — even temporarily (Ghetto 2).

Late in February, five desperate residents of a tenement on South Homan in the West Side ghetto ask Dr. King for help. They have no heat or electricity. Trash and garbage are not being collected. The landlord is doing nothing, and neither are city officials. There are 20 children living in the four occupied flats (the other two are empty). On a frigid winter day, Dr. King leads some 200 marchers to their dilapidated apartment house. King declares they are "seizing" the building and placing it in "supralegal trusteeship" so they can repair it. The Movement will collect the roughly $400/month rent on behalf of the tenants and use the money to make the place habitable. "The moral question is far more important than the legal one," he tells reporters who challenge him on the legality of bypassing the building owner.

Three of the unemployed tenants are to be hired for janitorial and general labor. They will be paid $2/hour (equal to $14.50 in 2014), which Dr. King considers a "fair minimum wage" (the actual federal minimum wage in 1966 is $1.25/hour, equal to $9.13 in 2014). Dressed in work clothes, King, his wife Coretta, Al Raby, and other activists begin cleaning out the furnace and shoveling up mounds of uncollected, frozen trash and garbage while efforts are made to get the electricity and heating back in service.

Media, politicians, and pillars of the community roundly condemn the seizure as "anarchy," "theft," and "revolutionary." Andy Young counters that after seeing a shivering infant wrapped only in newspapers they could not wait months for lawsuits to meander through the courts. "We wanted to do it illegally. We want to be put in jail for furnishing heat and health requirements to people with children in the winter."

But the SCLC staff has failed to do its homework and the seizure blows up into an embarrassment. … the owner is not a greedy real estate corporation, but rather an ailing 81 year old invalid almost as poor as his tenants. "I think King is right," he tells reporters, and he offers to give the building to anyone willing to assume the mortgage and make the necessary repairs.

In Birmingham, defenders of the racist status quo struck back at challenges to their authority with police dogs and fire hoses, in Selma they used billy clubs and tear gas. In Chicago, Mayor Daley and his machine are more sophisticated, they use promises and bureaucracy rather than police violence. Instead of arresting King for seizing the tenement, Daley loudly announces a "crash program" to inspect 15,000 West Side buildings for health and safety problems. The ailing Homan St. owner is charged with 23 code violations.

Behind the scenes, the county welfare department withholds the tenants' rent subsidies so there's no money going into Movement hands. After three months, a court orders that control of the property be returned to the owner. SCLC ends up spending $2000 (equal to $14,500 in 2014) to repair the building, but only collects $200 in rent (Steps 1-3).

The Chicago campaign is draining SCLC's financial resources. …Harry Belafonte recruits Mahalia Jackson, Dick Gregory, Sidney Poitier, and George Kirby to star in a "Freedom Festival" on Saturday evening, March 12, at Chicago's International Amphitheater on the South Side …. A sellout crowd of more than 12,000 attend the festival and thousands more are turned away for lack of space. After expenses, more than $80,000 is raised for the CFM (equal to $580,000 in 2014).

The festival is also an organizing tool. SCLC staff and CCCO activists work the ghetto, selling tickets and using the opportunity to meet, educate and learn from people in the community. Gathering 12,000 enthusiastic supporters in one place imparts a sense of strength and hope inspired by Dr. King's address, in which he says:

The purpose of the slum is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness. In the slum, the Negro is forced to pay more for less, and the general economy of the slum is constantly drained without being replenished. In short, the slum is an invisible wall which restricts the mobility of persons because of the color of their skin. The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn. ...

It is clear to me that we must organize this total community into unities of political and social power. ... As long as injustice is around, demonstrations will be necessary. So when it is appropriate, we will encourage sit-ins, stand-ins, rent-strikes, boycotts, picket lines, marches, civil disobedience, and any form of protest that are nonviolently conceived and executed.

The day after the Freedom Festival, Mayor Daley again undercuts the CFM. Without mentioning King or the movement, he boasts that his inspection teams have visited more than 96,000 poor families, and he claims that his administration has exterminated more than 1,600,000 rats and rodents in the ghetto. He goes on to promise eradication of all slum conditions in Chicago by the end of the following year, 1967.

Meanwhile, his allies in the Afro-American community continue working against the Freedom Movement. Rev. J.H. Jackson asserts that civil disobedience as practiced by King and SCLC is, "not far removed from open crime," and that Daley and school chief Willis are true-hearted friends of Chicago Blacks. Dr. King responds by observing that, "I don't think Dr. Jackson speaks for [even] 1% of the Negroes in this country" (Freedom 1-2).

Led by local attorney Gil Cornfield, ghetto tenants, fed up with high rents and atrocious living conditions, had begun the employment of a legal strategy, subsequently supported by the CFM, designed to pressure landlords to act responsibly.

In early 1966 tenants on the West Side had begun a rent strike. “The strike,” Gil Cornfield remembers, “was over the poor conditions and services among apartment dwellers in the community and centered on a handful of absentee owners and their real estate companies which controlled many, if not most, of the large apartment buildings.” Residents held mass meetings where they aired their grievances and developed their strategy. “The rent strike,” Cornfield recalls, “was resulting in wholesale eviction proceedings being brought by the affected real estate companies in the Circuit Court of Cook County.”

With Cornfield’s assistance, a strategy was developed to challenge each eviction in court, contending that if a tenant’s nonpayment of rent was in response to the landlord’s failure and refusal to maintain the rental premises in accordance with the requirements of the municipal code, this could be used as a defense in an eviction case. In housing court, defense attorneys presented photographs of the deplorable conditions, along with supporting testimony about unheeded complaints to the landlord. This strategy resulted in the finding that evictions were no longer pro forma, and the attendant legal costs would be borne by the landlords. At each eviction proceeding, the court was filled to overflowing with tenants and members of the community. This legal strategy, coupled with the ongoing rent strikes, prevented landlords from breaking the strikes through evictions.

Beyond court petitions, the coalition of labor and the Chicago Freedom Movement became the platform for conceptualizing the development of a tenant union federation that would use collective bargaining to change real estate management practices. Collective bargaining would empower residents to demand decent, safe housing and result in a fundamental change in the landlord-tenant relationship.

When massive rent strikes in properties held by the Condor and Costalis real estate firm became too onerous, the firm agreed to negotiate. Because of Cornfield’s labor background, the idea of a collective bargaining agreement covering all tenants in Condor and Costalis properties in East Garfield Park and parts of Lawndale was conceived. The collective bargaining approach was intended to improve housing conditions to conform to municipal codes and to strengthen community organization and leadership within a democratic framework (Cornfield 5-6).

Bernard Lafayette and Bill Moyer of the AFSC urge the coalition to focus less on forcing slum-lords to improve and maintain their properties and more on housing segregation as the key demand …. With a local anti-discrimination law already on the books and restrictive covenants unenforceble, achieving an open housing market in the city is a matter of public opinion and political will rather than forcing through new legislation or litigating in court. Perhaps through nonviolent direct action they can generate enough social pressure to make the city actually enforce its own law.

…

… in Bevel's view, addressing the psychology of ghetto oppression is as important as the economic and political aspects. Challenging and defying hate- filled white racists over residential segregation provides a way for those at the bottom of society to, "stand up and be a man, to declare that he was a human being and would henceforth expect to be treated as one."

By May of 1966, SCLC and the Friends are talking about vigils, picket lines and sit-ins at real estate offices — and marches through adamantly resistant all-white neighborhoods. Some in the CCCO coalition fear that such tactics will provoke a ferocious "white-backlash" — and mob violence. Others are impatient to confront residential racism head on (Focus 2).

In late May, King kicks off the action phase of the War on Slums by calling for a mass rally at Soldier Field followed by a march to City Hall. …

…

Shortly before the Soldier Field rally, CFM finally agrees on a Program of the Chicago Freedom Movement which they issue to the press. It's a 12-page document that broadly analyzes the problems faced by Blacks in the urban ghetto, calls for a wide range of systematic reforms and development programs, and lists an extensive (and diffuse) set of "Immediate Action Demands" that cover a variety of issues …

Included is this statement.

For our primary target we have chosen housing. As of July 10 we shall cease to be accomplices to a housing system of discrimination, segregation, and degradation. We shall begin to act as if Chicago were an open city. We shall act on the basis that every [family] is entitled to full access of buying or renting housing that is sound, attractive, and reasonably priced.

On the day before the Soldier Field rally, Daley boasts to the press that his administration has "moved to repair" 102,847 apartments in 9,226 dilapidated tenements and that housing fines have doubled over those levied the previous year.

Movement activists try to point out that "moved to repair" is not the same as actually made habitable, and that the level of housing code enforcement was so abysmally low that doubling the fines was little more than changing one drop in an empty bucket to two drops in the same empty bucket. But local media is well trained to accept at face value whatever pronouncements emanate from City Hall, so the Mayor's claims convince many people that the slum problem is being effectively addressed — and that therefore there is no need for disruptive protests.

Sunday, July 10, dawns oppressively hot and muggy, with temperatures in the high 90s. Soldier Field is the only available large venue, but it has no shade and the crowd swelters through songs and speeches. Organizers had hoped for 100,000 participants but the turnout falls clearly short of that goal. As is typical of large protests in the 1960s, number estimates by the police, media, and activists vary widely — the cops say 23,000, media estimates 30-35,000, and SCLC claims 60,000.

After the rally, King leads marchers out of Soldier Field for an almost three-mile trek to City Hall. Long hikes are not a normal part of urban life, and for many the distance and oppressive heat is too much and they fall out of line well short of the goal. But 5,000 or so manage to make the distance and reach Daley's seat of power. It's Sunday, and the building is closed. In a gesture of contempt that speaks louder than words, neither the Mayor nor any of his functionaries or bureaucrats deign to meet the thousands of constituents who have come to petition for redress of grievances. In an act reminiscent of his namesake Martin Luther, Dr. King tapes Demands of the Chicago Freedom Movement to the locked doors.

By previous arrangement, on the following day CFM leaders meet with Mayor Daley and his top aides. The meeting does not go well. King calls for real action and change, not just empty promises. Daley argues that all cities have slums and he lauds his own "massive" anti-slum efforts which he asks King to join. King restates the necessity of ending housing segregation by making Chicago an "open city," a point the Mayor does not respond to. Al Raby of CCCO goes through the demands, detailing them point by point until he gets to, "Creation of a citizens review board for grievances against police brutality and false arrests or stops and seizures," which evokes angry resistance from officials and umbrage on the part of Daley at the lack of trust in local government shown by Afro-American leaders.

The Mayor refuses to specifically address any of the Movement's itemized demands. King asks him to endorse the Civil Rights Act of 1966 then being debated in Congress — a bill supported by Democratic Party leader President Lyndon Johnson which includes open-housing provisions — Daley evades the question and refuses to do so.

The meeting ends in acrimony and Raby tells Daley, "I want you to know we're going to begin direct action immediately!" Each side speaks separately to the press. The New York Times reports: "Mr. Daley was scarlet faced, as his words tumbled over each other in indignation as he declared that Chicago already had 'massive' anti-slum and civil rights programs." And in the same article: "Dr. King said, 'We're demanding these things, not requesting them,' in the face of 'seething desperation' among Chicago Negroes that was inviting social disaster."

"We cannot wait," Dr. King tells the press. "Young people are not going to wait" (Marching 1-3).

Works cited:

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/

Cornfield, Gil, Heaps, Melody, and Hill, Norman. “The Chicago Freedom Movement’s Quest for Economic Justice.” The Chicago Reporter. January 15, 2018. Web. https://www.chicagoreporter.com/the-chicago-freedom-movements-quest-for-economic-justice/

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

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

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

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

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

Civil Rights Events

Chicago Freedom Movement

The Immediate Problems

Hoping to profit from economic opportunity and gain social justice, African Americans fleeing Jim Crow life in the South during the first half of the Twentieth Century had been systematically herded into and kept inside urban pockets of the industrial cities of the North.

One of the major problems that Dr. King and the SCLC had to deal with in the ghettos of Chicago was segregated housing. A black family arriving in Chicago was not permitted the freedom to choose where it might reside. The most notorious tactic used to restrict residence “was redlining, the refusal of banks and insurance firms to issue or insure mortgage loans in predominantly black neighborhoods, which would often get delineated on city maps with a red line” (Bernstein 8).

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which was created to make homeownership accessible for all Americans, denied loan insurance to African Americans and even those who lived near them. … the FHA created maps that were marked with red ink in the areas where minorities lived to signify that the FHA believed that these neighborhoods were “undesirable” for investment.

Restrictive covenants – a second tactic -- were laws that prevented African Americans from moving into white neighborhoods. These policies were a deliberate attempt by the government to segregate blacks and whites. … African Americans were forced into low-opportunity neighborhoods. (Chicago 2-3).

In the greater Chicago-area, almost all homes and apartment buildings occupied by whites are covered by restrictive covenants written into the property deeds. These covenants prohibit nonwhites (and in some cases Jews) from buying or renting. For example:

"Said Property shall not be sold, conveyed, granted or leased, in whole or in part, to any Hebrew person or family, or any person or family not of the white race, nor shall any Hebrew person, or other person not of the white race, be permitted to occupy any portion of said property or any building thereon, except a domestic servant actually employed by the owner of said property."

Courts have ruled restrictive covenants illegal and unenforceable, but owners and brokers do as they wish. From time to time, a few Blacks manage to evade real estate industry discrimination and defy the covenants to actually move into a white neighborhood. They are met with harassment and mob violence.

Back in 1963, a local Chicago ordinance was passed outlawing racial discrimination in real estate. But it was never enforced, owners, brokers, landlords, rental agencies, and mortgage lenders simply ignored it. In '65, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) tried to promote "open occupancy" through moral suasion — without success (Focus 1).

Not only were African Americans limited to living in certain neighborhoods, they also faced discrimination when they tried to buy homes. Most financial institutions would not lend to African American families. Many white realtors took advantage of this exclusion through “contract selling.” In contract sales, African Americans made monthly payments on their homes to the seller, with the promise of receiving the deeds to the homes once they were entirely paid off, usually decades later. These families had all of the responsibilities of a homeowner but none of the security—they did not build equity and they could be evicted for missing a single payment. Additionally, the realtors often sold these homes for prices that were double and triple their value. African American families were forced into these exploitative deals because they had no options to buy homes in the traditional market. It is estimated that 90% of African Americans in Chicago bought their homes through contract sales during the 1950s. This practice resulted in black families having thousands of dollars of debt and sent many spiraling into poverty (Chicago 3).

As the black population grew, the Black Belt [Chicago’s ghettos] eventually loosened, and blacks started pushing into white neighborhoods (often paying double the market value for white-owned homes). “Realtors would sell a piece of property to a Negro, … and then they tell the white people, ‘The Negroes are coming!’” These blockbusters, as such real estate agents were called, fanned white panic, warning residents that the value of their homes would plummet. Many whites sold quickly and left, most often for the suburbs.

By the mid-1960s, on the eve of King’s Chicago campaign, the Harlem of Chicago, as Bronzeville was often called, was well on its way to becoming blighted. Many of its graystone blocks had been replaced by the two-mile stretch of bleak concrete towers known as the Robert Taylor Homes or by the eight massive apartment blocks of Stateway Gardens. These public housing complexes would become, arguably, the country’s most notorious (Bernstein 8-9).

The Chicago Freedom Movement focused on homeownership and rental injustices facing black families. Dr. King and his staff visited tenants in apartments with atrocious conditions. Many of the apartments were rat-infested, without heat, dangerous, not regularly repaired by the landlords, and extremely overpriced (Chicago 3). … so long as Blacks have no alternatives because segregation walls them into the ghetto, there is no economic incentive for slum-lords to maintain their properties or charge market-rate prices because they have a captive customer base with no other choices (Focus 2). These unsafe and unaffordable housing conditions became the focus of tenant organizing over the course of 1966 (Chicago 3).

Job Opportunity was another problem that needed to be addressed. Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket was designed to open employment in companies that had previously employed whites only. Picket lines and boycotts were planned “to force businesses in black neighborhoods to hire black workers, use black-owned banks, and stock black products and brands” (Bernstein 32).

Then there was the absence of movement support from youth.

In the South, young protesters are the backbone of Freedom Movement campaigns. In the communities where they live, significant and influential segments of the Afro-American population support nonviolent strategies; both for religious reasons and because they understand that Black violence against white interests would result in ferocious and devastating repression. So SCLC can mobilize young people through the church, from Black college campuses, and by recruiting high school student-body officers, prom queens, athletes, cheerleaders, and other natural youth leaders. In the South, marching for freedom has become a respected badge of honor and those who defy Jim Crow by going to jail are by now respected by their peers and praised as heroes by many adults and community leaders.

In the North, not so much. Religion has less influence, the practical political rationale for nonviolence is not so clear, community solidarity is weaker, frustration is greater, and rage less focused. While CORE activists in the North who picket and go to jail are honored by some in the ghetto, they are also derided by others as "chumps," "suckers," "fools," and un-manly, nonviolent wimps. And in Chicago, as elsewhere in the North, it is the swaggering, macho gangs who have glamour and prestige among restless angry teenagers ….

…

Most of Chicago's Black gang members are antagonistic to authority — any authority, regardless of race. They disdain religion and clergy, are hostile to whites in general, and are openly contemptuous of nonviolence. Rival gangs hate each other and have little interest in mutual cooperation (Ghetto 1-2).

Additionally, King and the SCLC had to overcome influential individuals motivated less by empathy, more by self-interest.

King and his people would need to “force a local victory with local forces against an array of powerful economic interests all of which have supporters and allies within the Black community. Elements of the CCCO coalition itself are closely aligned with the Democratic Party which in turn is thoroughly entwined with the corporations, institutions, and associations that are deeply involved in ghetto segregation and exploitation.”

Moreover, radical solutions for economic injustice favored by CORE, SNCC, and SCLC activists are anathema to some (though not necessarily all) of the ministers, some of the business-oriented NAACP & Urban League leaders, and some of the labor unions (Chicago 5).

Dr. King’s most powerful opponent was Chicago’s mayor.

Richard J. Daley made known his displeasure that “outside troublemakers” were coming to the city and told all who would listen there were no slums in Chicago. He also declared that he would not meet with King, thus drawing a line in the sand.

For those who were to lead the summer campaign, these statements were ominous. The nation and the world were to soon learn what they already knew — that the likes of Bull Connor, Lester Maddox and George Wallace had their counterparts in the Richard J. Daleys of Chicago and other northern cities (Black 5).

Dorothy Tillman, 17, was part of the advance team that came to Chicago in the fall of 1965 to help prepare for Dr. King’s forthcoming activist movement.

She related how a lot of Chicago’s black ministers—even a few who had marched with him down south—rebuffed King. Far from rolling out the welcome mat, they told him in plain terms—in front of TV cameras, no less—to butt out and go home. “We were rejected by most of the black leadership,” says Tillman. “Dr. King could hardly get into a church to speak. We never experienced that before. And I told Dr. King, I said, ‘If they don’t want us to be here, I don’t want to stay. I want to go back home.’ ”

Back then, she says, Chicago’s black politicians, as well as nearly all of the city’s black ministers, were in the stranglehold of Mayor Daley’s Democratic machine. “Dr. King said that Daley’s plantation was worse than the plantation in Mississippi,” says Tillman. “He’d say, ‘Those Negroes was in deep.’”

Ministers who backed the administration’s policies got rewarded with patronage and political favors—$1 city lots for church expansions, say, or federal money for social service programs. Those who didn’t play ball got punished with visits from city building or health inspectors, or Sunday parking tickets, or permit and zoning denials. Tillman likes to tell the story of the South Side pastor Clay Evans. In 1964, Evans defied Daley and let King preach at his church, which happened to be under renovation. The next day, the lending institutions that were bankrolling the construction withdrew financing, and the crews stopped work. Evans continued to support King throughout the Chicago Freedom Movement; his church addition stood unfinished for eight years (Bernstein 16-17).

A key Daley supporter in the Black community is the Rev. J.H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, a large and influential organization of Afro-American ministers. He and King have long been adversaries. Jackson staunchly opposes protests and civil disobedience, favoring instead the NAACP program of litigation and legislative lobbying. In 1961, his "civil rights through law and order" stand, and his enmity to the direct action and civil disobedience strategy of SCLC, drove King and many others to form a new, rival organization, the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Now King and Jackson confront each other again in Chicago. Afro-American ministers are a mainstay of Daley's political machine, and as SCLC tries to mobilize Black clergy in support of direct action for social justice, Jackson and his conservative allies maneuver against them (Chicago 2).

Walking the streets of the neighborhood where he resides, King has yet to comprehend the magnitude of the difficulties he must surmount.

Works cited:

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/

Black, Carolyn, Appelhans, Bill, and Gaboury, Fred. “The Chicago Freedom Movement: Summer 1966.” People’s World. January 18, 2002. Web. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/the-chicago-freedom-movement-summer-1966/

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

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

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

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