Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  King’s entry into Chicago generated tremendous media interest—and plenty of skepticism too. “Can the trumpet tactics of the South work in the North?” more than one reporter wondered. “The white walls of the North may be trumpet-proof.” Mayor Daley pointed out that Chicago already had a slum-clearance program and invited King to join in if he wanted to help. But members of Daley’s staff were furious. “What the hell is he doing here anyway?” they asked. “Does he think we don’t care about slums? Why Chicago, instead of Atlanta or Harlem? King has no knowledge of Chicago.”

  On January 26 King inspired Chicago Negroes by moving into a flat on the West side, where he planned to stay for the duration of the campaign, commuting back to Atlanta once a week or so. The flat was on the third floor of a faded brick building on South Hamlin Street in North Lawndale, a dismal Negro section known as “Slumdale.” Some two hundred slum dwellers cheered when King arrived at the tenement with Coretta, who had come up from Atlanta to help him get settled. On the sidewalk, SCLC staffers played guitars and serenaded King with freedom songs, which earned him a new nickname, “The Pied Piper of Hamlin Avenue.” “You can’t really get close to the poor without living and being here with them,” King explained to a bevy of reporters and photographers clambering into the tenement after him. The front door was unlocked and open, and “the smell of urine was overpowering,” Coretta said, since drunks came in from the street and relieved themselves in the hallway. The group climbed three flights of stairs and entered what Coretta described as “a railroad flat,” with a dingy front sitting room and two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bath all joined like cars on a train. King learned that his white absentee landlords, when they found out who their new tenant was, had dispatched an eight-man crew to scrub and repair the place. This convinced the Chicago Sun-Times that King could end the slums by moving to successive tenements around the city and forcing embarrassed landlords to clean them up. But Coretta was not impressed with the renovations in her husband’s flat. Checking around, she found that the rickety refrigerator was broken down and that the heaters hardly worked either. It was bitter cold outside—and winter inside, too. For this cramped, unfurnished place, King paid $90 a month, not counting utilities. Later he found out that this was the usual rent for a four-room ghetto apartment. He also discovered that in the all-white neighborhoods of Gage Park, South Deering, and Belmont-Cragin, renters paid an average of less than $80 a month for five-and-a-half-room modern apartments.

  That night, King held a “hearing” in a local church, and five hundred Slumdale residents crowded into the sanctuary to recite the harsh facts of their lives. King stood at the pulpit, eyes shining, as a large woman in a black sweater said to him: “I get down and scrub all day. I’m tired of giving people my money. Just filled to the brim. Tired of being walked over. Tired of being mistreated. Thank God you came here, Rev. King. My house, just now the kitchen is falling in. I’m not going to pay no rent where there are rats and nobody going to throw me out.” Her remark elicited a wave of bitter laughter from the others.

  King addressed them with great emotion. “Many things you said tonight I heard in the same kind of session out in Watts right after the riots.” He looked at the reporters jotting down his words. “I say to the power structure in Chicago that the same problems that existed, and still exist, in Watts, exist in Chicago today, and if something isn’t done in a hurry, we can see a darker night of social disruption.” He announced a special all-day workshop on how to fight slums. “We’re going to organize,” he said, “to make Chicago a model city. Remember, living in a slum is robbery. It’s robbery of dignity, and the right to participate creatively in the political process. It’s wrong to live with rats.”

  The next day, King toured Lawndale with several aides and six members of a youth gang who had offered to show him around. The temperature hovered around zero, and their conversation produced puffs of vapor as they walked along the sidewalk, past grimy buildings with “END SLUMS” scrawled on their walls in white chalk and endless rows of tenements, gray and prisonlike in the cold. “This is truly an island of poverty in the midst of an ocean of plenty,” King would say. Chicago had one of the highest per-capita incomes of any city in the world, but you would never know it from walking through Lawndale. Everywhere children were playing in the streets. “Hey, are you Dr. King?” they would ask—and grin happily when he took the time to talk with them. King was distressed at how skimpily they were dressed in the bitter Chicago wind. The mucus in the corners of their eyes reminded him that flu shots and vitamins cost too much for them. He ruminated on how the “runny noses” of Slumdale were graphic symbols of the medical neglect in this, the richest nation in the world.

  In the days that followed, King observed the ebb and flow of daily slum life. And he wrote and spoke caustically about the conditions he witnessed: “I am appalled that some people feel that the civil rights struggle is over because we have a 1964 civil rights bill with ten titles and a voting rights bill. Over and over again people ask, What else do you want? They feel that everything is all right. Well, let them look around at our big cities.” Let them look around Chicago, where a system of “internal colonialism” flourished in the slums “not unlike the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium.” The system imprisoned 97 percent of Chicago’s 837,000 Negroes in neighborhoods so segregated that some schoolchildren thought Negroes the majority race in America. The system not only charged Negroes inflated rents for substandard housing, King said, but conspired to maintain inferior schools that prepared blacks only for unskilled jobs and thus perpetuated Negro inferiority. Though Chicago’s 2.3 percent unemployment rate was one of the lowest in America, the ghettoes were suffering “a major depression,” as King put it, with 13 percent of the work force out of jobs. If the entire country were afflicted with such an unemployment rate, white leaders would call it an economic catastrophe. In ghetto stores, moreover, consumer goods ran from 10 to 20 percent higher than in suburban white stores, even though they often belonged to the same chain. The Chicago Urban League dubbed this a “color tax”—the price Negroes had to pay for living in the slums. How could such discrimination be sustained? King asked. Because many ghetto residents had no cars and couldn’t get out to shop anywhere else. It became a vicious circle. First, you couldn’t get a job because you had a poor education. So you had to go on welfare, which in Chicago meant that you couldn’t own property, not even a car. So you were condemned to buy at neighborhood stores, whose owners exploited you mercilessly on the assumption that you were inferior anyway because you didn’t work and were on welfare. If the Negro ever made it through this maze of handicaps and set foot outside the jungle of poverty and exploitation, realtors would not sell him a house in white neighborhoods even if he had the money. And he had no recourse in the courts, which only enforced the entire system of exploitation.

  As for the cops, King found that the most grievous complaint against them was not police brutality, which was real enough, but their indifference to ghetto crime. Organized crime thrived in slum sanctuaries, operating numbers, narcotics, and prostitution rackets with little or no police interference. Because crime and poverty were omnipresent, with glittering white opulence only a few steps away, many ghetto dwellers surrendered to self-destructiveness, turning to alcohol, drugs, gang warfare, and the cynical nihilism of black separatist ideologies.

  Oh, King was mad at what he saw in Chicago. He was going to bring about the unconditional surrender of the slum system if it was the last thing he did. He was going to organize slum dwellers and mount demonstrations “on a scale so vast that they would dwarf some of the biggest demonstrations we have seen in the history of the movement.” He set about wooing influential white religious leaders like Archbishop John P. Cody of Chicago, who seemed to King in substantial agreement with his goals. (The FBI, however, briefed Cody about King and reported that the archbishop was “not impressed” with him, thought he had “a glib tongue,” and said he intended to be “most circumspec
t” in his dealings with the Negro leader.) King hurried about Negro neighborhoods enlisting nearly all the city’s Negro clergy in his crusade and urging people to join his Slum Union because “together we can do much more than we can divided and unorganized.” The idea behind the union was to build a permanent structure that would remain in Chicago once SCLC moved on. This “organizational undergirding,” King believed, would enable Chicago Negroes “to demonstrate from a position of power. When people are organized, they become a greater political force.”

  So he told church audiences, too, sounding like the evangelizing King of Albany, of Birmingham and Selma.

  “What is our problem?” King would ask.

  “Tell us!” the people would cry.

  “It is that we are powerless—how do we get power?”

  “Tell us, Martin!”

  “By organizing ourselves. By getting together.”

  “That’s right!”

  “We are somebody because we are God’s children.”

  “That’s right!”

  “You don’t need to hate anybody. You don’t need any Molotov cocktails. A riot can always be stopped by superior force. But they can’t stop thousands of feet marching nonviolently!” He waited for the applause to subside. “We’re going to change the whole Jericho road!”

  To change one slum building in his own neighborhood, King simply took the place over and used rent money collected by his lieutenants to pay for badly needed repairs. A court order finally halted what King called his “supra-legal trusteeship.” But his action got results, since the court also ordered the absentee landlord to clean up the tenement in accordance with the city building code or face imprisonment.

  When King wasn’t pushing his union or soliciting help and money for the cause, he was talking with members of Chicago’s youth gangs—violent, mysterious outfits with names like the Vice Lords, Cobras, and Blackstone Rangers. Bevel, James Orange, and other SCLC staffers were working closely with gang members, and they would bring them by King’s flat to meet “the Leader” and share sandwiches with him. One exclaimed incredulously, “Is that really you? Is that really Martin Luther King?”

  “This is me,” King said. “I’m Martin Luther King.”

  “You mean to tell me I’m sitting here with the cat who’s been up there talking to Presidents!” the young man said. “He’s been up there eating filet mignon steaks, and now he’s sitting here eating barbecue just like me.”

  King would visit with the youths late into the night, listening intently as they recounted their hassles with the police and related how Communists and Muslims sought to recruit them and mobsters to use them as dope pushers. But they didn’t mess with narcotics, or rape or prostitution either. Sure, they stole things—no denying that—and they fought. They took pride in their street battles with one another, pride in their toughness and military code of honor. Yes, they would “kill you as soon as look at you.” Why shouldn’t they be violent? This whole country was violent, man. Look at the movies and TV. Look at Vietnam. If the country could use guns in Vietnam, why couldn’t they use guns in Chicago?

  Gently, with great sincerity, King would explain the nature and purpose of nonviolence, asking them to try it as an experiment and put away their guns and knives. If they did, he wanted them to serve as marshals once the marches began. The demonstrations would show them the power of nonviolent confrontation. “Power in Chicago,” he told them, “means getting the largest political machine in the nation to say yes when it wants to say no.” He and his aides held nonviolence workshops for the gangs, and Bevel even showed them a film of Watts, contending that thirty Negroes had died there and only five whites and that the same cops were still in power. In Selma, though, Negroes organized under the flag of nonviolence and now Jim Clark was looking for a job. “That’s the difference between a riot and thinking,” Bevel said.

  In time, some two hundred gang members agreed to give nonviolence a chance and turn out for the demonstrations “as soon as Brother Martin gives the word.” They respected him enormously. “The only person we have faith in is Dr. King,” said one gang leader. “I think Martin Luther King is a very heavy stud,” said another. “Maybe we will get a better deal now.”

  By mid-March, though, King’s campaign was in trouble, with money running short, most Negroes apathetic about his union, and many CCCO people grumbling about his emphasis on the slums—they wanted to stress educational improvement, the original goal of the Chicago movement. Worse still, King and his staff seemed unable to devise a coherent strategy to combat ghetto evils. “Is this something to read about,” complained one welfare mother, “or is it something to help us?” “We haven’t gotten things under control,” Young conceded. “The strategy hasn’t emerged yet, but we know what we are dealing with and eventually we’ll come up with answers.” “We are not perfect,” King told a gathering of Chicago journalists, “we will make mistakes, we are not omniscient or omnipotent…and we need a great deal of support.”

  King’s biggest problem was Mayor Daley, who was out to short-circuit the campaign with a flurry of antislum activity. He boasted that Chicago’s own programs would end the slums by the end of 1967; he contrived a much-publicized investigation of building-code violations in Negro sections where King was operating and bombarded ministers and other potential King allies with fact sheets about what Chicago had done for Negroes without “outsiders telling us what to do.” According to the fact sheets, the city had sprayed 29,000 apartments for rats and insects within the last year, maintained Head Start kindergartens for thousands of ghetto youngsters, constructed 31,000 public-housing units in the last twenty years and would build 3,000 more in the next four. With much fanfare, Daley held a meeting with King and forty-five leading ministers—among them Archbishop Cody—and recited what his administration was doing against the slums. King engaged the jowly mayor in a twenty-minute dialogue about riots, stressing the “collective guilt” of all for the plight of Chicago’s Negroes. But Daley, rotund and gesticulating, argued that Chicago hadn’t created Negro poverty—that came from “a thousand miles away in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama,” where most Chicago blacks had originated. The King-Daley confrontation generated rumors that King would oppose the Mayor’s re-election the next year.But King scotched the stories. “I’m not campaigning against Mayor Daley,” he said. “I’m campaigning against slums.” Still, Daley was taking no chances. He solicited Negro votes, making a great fuss about how benefits from Johnson’s Great Society program would reach Chicago blacks through his antipoverty administration. By April, Daley had neutralized King politically, had the mass of Negro voters “hogtied and hornswoggled” through his own antipoverty projects and promises, and had used the patronage to enlarge his potent outposts in the black community. He felt strong enough to suggest that King go home to Georgia, and seven Negro ward committeemen seconded him.

  Back in SCLC headquarters, in a rotting old church in Lawndale, King talked with his staff about what a shrewd politician Daley was, smarter even than he had expected. It would require all their well-honed skills to make him admit that his antipoverty program was mostly cosmetic, that it failed to address the fundamental causes of slums and riots. And neither for all their promise did the President’s Great Society benefits, which Daley was trumpeting in his own behalf. True, Johnson had recently unveiled a Model Cities plan in Washington, which called for a federal outlay of $2.3 billion to transform America’s decaying cities into “the masterpieces of civilization.” King thought this an “imaginative” plan that correctly defined racial discrimination as “a central issue.” But as he’d said before, it would take “billions and billions” of dollars to reconstruct the ghettoes. He pointed out, too, that most of the Great Society’s social legislation remained unimplemented. What was missing was not legislation but “the will to make it operative.” “The Negro in 1966,” King said, “now challenges society to make law real on the neighborhood level, down to the ghetto streets where he lives
, works and seeks opportunity.”

  On May 18, King was in Hollywood, Florida, speaking before the Unitarian-Universalist Association. “We should be proud of the steps we’ve made to rid our nation of this great evil of racial segregation and discrimination,” he said. “On the other hand, we must realize that the plant of freedom is only a bud and not yet a flower. The Negro is freer in 1966, but he is not yet free.” He made reference to Vietnam again. “The alternative to disarmament under a strong U.N., the alternative to a suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, and the point of coming to that condition of not bombing the north, the alternative to admitting China may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. And our earthly habitat can be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.”