At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  The June 4 address soon would tear the historical sky like a lightning bolt. Johnson opened new ground on his own, skipping the travail of petitions and demonstrations from the civil rights movement, with bold words the New York Times called “remarkable in the history of the Presidency.” Martin Luther King saluted Johnson by wire “for your magnificent speech…[that] evinced amazing sensitivity.” Almost overnight, however, interpretation began to refract. Johnson spoke to and for the whole nation, but at times he adopted a white point of view. He spoke with moral certainty—declaring, for instance, that “white America must accept responsibility” for broken Negro families—but he called for scholarship on baffling mysteries along the racial divide. (“We are not completely sure why this is,” he said of the stark, obdurate inequality. “The causes are complex and subtle…. Nor do we fully understand all of the problems.”) His ambiguities bounced toward opposite conclusions. The Times declared the Howard speech a summons to national investment that would make the $1 billion War on Poverty “seem incredibly puny.” On the same day, a respected columnist for the Washington Star announced that Johnson’s real purpose was to lay open “the failure of Negro family life” as the “hitherto most delicate subject” of national concern. “In persuading the Negroes to talk frankly about their own troubles,” wrote Mary McGrory, “he hopes they will find solutions of their own.” These polar comments were inklings of political mayhem.

  Far away in Bogalusa, bushwhackers struck again on the night of the Howard speech. Sheriff Dorman Crowe identified them as “half-witted white kids” incensed by news reports that a Negro would be eligible for state employee survivor’s insurance. The attorney general of Louisiana already had disqualified the widow of Deputy O’Neal Moore, ruling that he had not been murdered “while engaged in the direct apprehension of a person,” as technically required, and prosecution of Moore’s accused killer was securely stalled (the investigation to be reopened more than twenty years later, in 1989), as often occurred in such cases. Even so, said Sheriff Crowe, young attackers, egged on by their parents, shot up his white deputy’s home to deter “race traitors” in law enforcement. “These people actually believe in their hearts that the Communists would take over before twelve o’clock if it wasn’t for them,” he told reporters.

  MAMMOTH CHICAGO had swallowed poverty in legions since May 15, 1917, the starting date fixed by publisher Robert Abbott for a modern “Flight Out of Egypt.” With shameless tales of balmy winters around the Great Lakes, and with banner headlines about contrasting frost in Georgia and Louisiana (“NEGRO FROZEN TO DEATH IN FIRELESS GRETNA HUT”), his newspaper promoted $3 train tickets to lure refugees from a region that had not yet established its first public high school for Negroes. “SAVED FROM THE SOUTH,” the Chicago Defender cried to welcome hordes that rode against the flow of the Mississippi River—two thousand reaching the Illinois Central Terminal each day at the peak—hungry to replace war-departed doughboys in factory jobs. Sixty-five thousand emigrants stayed put in Chicago within two years, more than doubling its Negro population, and the staid Chicago Tribune recognized the national migration in a scare headline tinged with pride: “HALF A MILLION DARKIES FROM DIXIE SWARM TO THE NORTH TO BETTER THEMSELVES.”

  The Chicago Real Estate Board reacted swiftly with a 1917 resolution that each block of Negro housing “shall be filled solidly, and that further expansion shall be confined to contiguous blocks, and that the present method of obtaining a single building in scattered blocks be discontinued.” Hostility flashed along contested borders even beyond the city beachfront into Lake Michigan, such that when young Negro Eugene Williams floated across an imaginary line extending 29th Street, he was stoned from his swim-raft and drowned on July 27, 1919, touching off wild rumors of gang pillage that came partially true over five days of skittering violence—leaving thirty-eight people dead, twenty-three black and fifteen white, injuring 537 in like ratio—until quelled by 6,500 militia and prolonged summer rains. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 set the national mark for upheaval in the nativist era of World War I. Like the Black Sox baseball scandal later the same year, and the violent Haymarket labor clashes of 1886, it was an epochal event befitting Chicago’s immense blend of rawness and order—vast stockyards, exquisite architecture, giants in violence and art.

  Brokers and regulators squeezed Negro migrants southward through 1920s Chicago, past Al Capone’s headquarters at the Lexington Hotel. At Café de Champion, the legendary ex-heavyweight Jack Johnson—once hounded from the ring into federal prison for flaunting a white mistress—presided over one of the State Street nightspots where Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton developed Southern blues into jazz among peers. (“I saw Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Cassino Simpson, and Art Tatum in a piano playing contest at the Annex Café,” recalled one astonished observer.) Singer Cab Calloway enjoyed what he called a “damned comfortable” married life in a bordello not far from all-Negro Olivet Baptist Church, which mushroomed more properly to become the largest Protestant congregation in the United States. With black settlement following a line of least resistance into Jewish Southside Chicago, Greater Bethel AME bought the Jewish Lakeside Club in 1922, and Pilgrim Baptist acquired the landmark structure designed by the firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan for Chicago’s oldest synagogue, Temple KAM (the Hebrew acronym of Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv, “Men of the West Congregation”).

  World War II loosed a second, larger northward flood, abetted by International Harvester’s publicized field test of a mechanical cotton-picker near Clarksdale, Mississippi, on October 2, 1944. “Each machine did the work of fifty people,” wrote poverty historian Nicholas Lemann. Families of obsolete sharecroppers raised the population of Chicago alone by an average of five hundred Negroes every week for twenty consecutive years, and again they followed a settlement pattern cleaved by Jews—this time into West Chicago through the old Maxwell Street ghetto where open-air markets of live chickens and Yiddish newspapers once teemed with half-starved Slavic immigrants in broad-brimmed hats and black overcoats called kapotes, whose plight had moved Jane Addams to create the Hull House community refuge. The desperate energy of Maxwell Street incubated boyhood talent from swing clarinetist Benny Goodman to CBS president William Paley, from gangster accountant Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik to Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg. As families gained footholds, the Eastern European Jews built their own schools, clubs, and even hospitals, because their more sophisticated predecessors on the South Side—lumped together as the “German Jews”—systematically excluded them. In turn, the most recent and ragged migration of Southern black people crowded down the stately West Chicago “Judenstrasse” of Douglas Boulevard after World War II. They displaced nearly a hundred thousand Jews from the neighborhoods of Lawndale, where fifteen synagogues closed for resale in a single year, 1953. The Hebrew Theological College moved from Lawndale to the suburbs in 1954, just as the bellwether Marshall Field retail stores at last modified company rules that forbade Negro employees.

  With dwelling areas subdivided repeatedly into slum density, the onrushing migrants bulged against settlement “confined to contiguous blocks.” Elizabeth Wood, the first director of the Chicago Housing Authority, sought to disperse “managed integration” into low-rise housing developments, but mobs a thousand strong, mostly of young white women, besieged new apartments near Midway Airport for two weeks in 1946 to drive out the first two selected families of decorated World War II veterans. Wood persisted until a last Pyrrhic victory in 1954, chronicled for magazine readers by South Africa’s anti-apartheid novelist, Alan Paton, when Betty and Don Howard lasted a year in one of the 462 units at Trumbull Park Homes, under police escort to and from work, with windows boarded against mobilized harassment by epithets, rocks, and bombs. (“My people will be in the streets,” vowed neighborhood leader Louis Dinnocenzo, “as long as there are Negroes in the project.”) With Wood fired, Richard J. Daley first won election as mayor in 1955 over the opposition of Chicago’s three major
white newspapers. Daley gained the Defender’s endorsement with a tacit appeal that segregated public housing was better than none, and he gathered his victory margin of 125,000 votes from wards controlled by Negro bosses. As mayor, he used federal dollars to concentrate the most dislocated, unskilled Negroes still more within those wards, most notably in a gargantuan row of twenty-eight sixteen-story brick griddle-stacks down a corridor of South State Street bounded by the new Dan Ryan Expressway. Three-quarters of its first 27,000 residents were children, moving Elizabeth Wood to call such high-rise design “anti-family and antihumane.” Robert Taylor Homes, the world’s largest public housing project on completion in 1962, would contain by 1970 two of the three poorest census tracts anywhere in the United States.

  Machine politics contained Negro grievance for decades. In 1957, criticized for ignoring the Brown decision and the lynch murder of Chicago’s young Emmett Till, Negro ward bosses simply bought enough memberships in the local NAACP chapter—the nation’s largest, claiming fifty thousand members—to replace the activist leader Willoughby Abner. He left behind a study of simmering consequence, “De Facto Segregation in the Chicago Public Schools,” to be published the next year in the NAACP journal, The Crisis. Abner’s surveyors found that more than 90 percent of Chicago’s schools were effectively segregated. Admitting that de facto segregation was a “comparatively new expression,” the Crisis study argued that Chicago officials diligently matched districts and teachers by race, in keeping with housing by contiguous blocks.

  School Superintendent Benjamin Willis evaded the charge for seven years, first by insisting that his education bureaucracy was oblivious to color and did not even keep such records. When a small group of parents sued in 1961 for the right to transfer their children to less crowded schools near their homes, citing racial discrimination, city lawyers in Webb v. Board of Education of Chicago treated race itself as a dubious concept. They advanced a simpler, undisputed cause of crowded public schools—150,000 “extra” students in the past decade, equivalent to the entire student population of Pittsburgh—and defended Willis’s efforts to fill the gap by breakneck school construction. The press called him “Big Ben the Builder.” Future U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel, then dean of Harvard’s School of Education, praised Willis in 1961 as “an administrative cyclone.” Only gradually did independent investigations—some court-ordered, others by prestigious universities—corroborate allegations of managed disparity. White schools had six times the empty space of Negro ones, and one-fifth the burden of half-day “double shift” schedules. Ninety-four percent of new schools since 1955 were mono-racial. Nearly all the city’s 189 mobile classrooms—derided as “Willis Wagons” by civil rights pickets—were stationed at all-black schools to absorb more black students.

  To settle the 1961 Webb case, the Chicago Board of Education agreed in 1963 to conduct the first official head count of schools by race, and to permit—but not initiate—modest relief from unbalanced hardship. The carefully neutral stipulation, that students ranked in the top 5 percent by academic average could seek reassignment to a high school with an honors program, failed to conceal a potential breech of the color line. Seven hundred white parents picketed. More than two thousand held a mass meeting. Willis, who had opposed the settlement as an affront to his authority, successively declared fifteen white high schools ineligible to receive transfers, ducked out a back door to avoid service of court orders, and resigned rather than carry them out. These celebrated gestures sealed Willis as a public champion of white solidarity, causing the board to refuse his resignation, but they coincided with the March on Washington and the Birmingham church bombing—climactic events that shattered distance with opposing emotional force. (“Then came Birmingham,” said Chicago civil rights leader Timuel Black, “which changed all space and time.”) With a growing minority of crossover whites, nearly three thousand Chicagoans made a pilgrimage to Washington on train rides of heightened identification with the great migrations from the South. Their returning fervor was so widespread and palpable that Mayor Daley instructed Democratic precinct captains to tolerate a one-day protest of local school conditions.

  Ten thousand demonstrators marched to the Board of Education on October 22, 1963, calling for the superintendent’s resignation with signs that pilloried him as a bigot: “Willis—Wallace What’s the Difference?” While such noise was no more than a hiccup in cavernous Chicago, an accompanying silence that same day rattled bystanders and participants alike. Nearly a quarter of a million students boycotted classrooms—224,700 by official figures—on release of the court-ordered count showing that Negroes comprised almost half (46.5 percent) of the 536,163 students in public schools. The enrollment census itself was a flare of startling light on migrant accumulations long in the shadow of public awareness. “Negroes are still a minority in Chicago,” the Tribune assured readers in an editorial, urging that Mayor Daley and the school board “must refuse to knuckle under to such ultimatums from troublemakers.” Protest organizers, for their part, were divided in the giddy aftermath of a near-total boycott that surpassed expectation tenfold. The NAACP and other groups withheld support from a follow-up boycott in 1964, which the Daley organization actively opposed, and debate stagnated on whether the turnout of roughly 150,000 constituted a relative letdown or gain. With civil rights negotiators looking to the retirement of Superintendent Willis in 1965, on expiration of his third four-year contract, general attitudes about Northern poverty and segregation lapsed into rosy disregard. “Many Negroes have improved their lot by moving to the cities,” observed BusinessWeek. “But many others still live in the rural South.” The Chicago Daily News, in marked contrast with its support for the Selma demonstrations, dismissed a bad memory of local outbursts that “alternately frightened or bored much of Chicago,” and gave thanks that the city’s protest coalition “for all effective purposes…has expired.”

  SO LAY the ground on May 27, 1965, when three Daley appointees on the Board of Education switched votes to grant Willis a four-year extension. Front-page news revived spasms of outrage, first in an overnight call from Chicago NAACP leaders for an unprecedented five-day boycott of public schools. Dissenters instantly faulted them for ignoring some thirty other groups in the civil rights coalition. Jet magazine reported allied leaders suspicious that “the usually legalistic Chicago NAACP” rushed to escalate a tactic it had derided as waning, counterproductive, and exploitive of school children. King’s aide James Bevel, up from Alabama, warned the leadership caucus never to plunge into sacrifice without a movement strategy. Angry voices scorned as wastefully misguided any further protest aimed at “stooges” in education, and dared the coalition to attack the pervasive influence of Mayor Daley. Tempestuous night sessions deadlocked through more than a week of growing recrimination. “Civil rights forces of Chicago are the laughingstock of America!” shouted a coalition delegate on June 5, the night after President Johnson’s speech at Howard University.

  In frustration, late on Monday, June 7, coalition leader Al Raby left a stalled caucus to carry out a small “pray-in” on the sidewalk—asking for reconsideration of the Willis contract, receiving instead his first trip to jail. Before he could make bail the next day, city lawyers obtained a court injunction barring all the affiliated civil rights groups from any part in a school boycott. When students organized their own walkout on June 10, in numbers estimated upward from sixty thousand, Raby led some of the enjoined adults separately from Soldier Field in a long walk along the edge of defiance—avoiding forbidden school zones, spilling with sympathetic pedestrians into downtown streets, kneeling as a mass in traffic outside City Hall. Mayor Daley announced before the morning of June 11 that there would be no more such marches. Hours later, hemmed in by a police blockade near the perimeter of Grant Park, Raby asked the lines to sit in resistance, and officers hauled away a determined remnant of 252 people, including James Farmer, architect of the 1961 Freedom Rides, who had been a founder of national CORE in C
hicago more than twenty years earlier. The Tribune called the incident “one of the largest mass arrests” in city annals.

  “Who is this man Al Raby?” asked Mayor Daley, in a fit of pique that generated press inquiries and an FBI investigation. He was born in Chicago of Mississippi and Louisiana parents who had met in the World War I migration. In 1935, when Raby was two, his father had fallen ill and died of appendicitis while serving Depression-era guard duty on a mail truck. Shuffled among siblings, Raby dropped out of fourth grade and shined shoes as a truant near the Pershing Hotel. Later, once U.S. Army life brought home the limits of street savvy at minimum literacy, he stuffed himself into small desks through remedial grade school and five years of night classes, to earn a teaching certificate in 1960. In the cause of a colleague fired for her support of the Webb suit, he became a charter member of Teachers for Integrated Schools, which rose to prominence within the ad hoc protest coalition on the fresh example of vulnerable teachers. “You don’t think these children can be saved,” Raby told the Chicago school board of his students at Hess School in Lawndale. “I know they can.” To answer the mass arrest of June 11, he joined 196 people handcuffed the next day at the “world’s busiest intersection” of State and Madison—mostly first-time detainees full of apprehension about the bare-knuckle reputation of Chicago jails. They included several nuns and Richard Morrisroe, a second-year priest whose mother had emigrated from County Kerry, Ireland, as a governess. Raby, like Morrisroe and many of the 448 people in jail, drew on catalyzing experience three months earlier in Selma. Having answered King’s call by long journey to Brown Chapel, and made vigil at the “Berlin Wall” rope, they renewed reciprocal entreaties for King to rally a nonviolent movement in Chicago.