Violence subsided until late Wednesday, July 13, when crews from the water department began to refit the water hydrants with tamperproof locks. Bricks flew through windows again, then at firefighters who answered alarms to burning, looted stores. Vandalism and the first sniper shots jumped a mile to housing projects on West Madison Avenue. Thursday night, on his continuous rounds of mediation, King received notice that more serious riots were spreading miles west into Lawndale and Garfield Park. His children at the Hamlin Avenue apartment rushed impulsively to see what caused the sudden bangs and crashes of glass below, which prompted Coretta to shriek, “Get away from that window or you’ll get your heads blown off!” Her quotation spiced a scoop for an encamped British reporter.
By Friday morning, when King briefly returned home, the riots had claimed two fatalities nearby: a pregnant fourteen-year-old killed while walking with friends and a twenty-eight-year-old black man from Mississippi, shot in the back. Mayor Daley, who until then had minimized the disturbance as “juvenile incidents,” appealed publicly for National Guard troops to quell a situation he said outsiders had incited beyond his control. He blamed King’s staff—“people that came in here have been talking for the last year of violence, and showing pictures and instructing people in how to conduct violence”—and his leading Negro ally indicted the movement at a tandem press conference. “I believe our young people are not vicious enough to attack a whole city,” declared Rev. J. H. Jackson. “Some other forces are using these young people.”
King and Raby reacted within hours by leading what amounted to a sit-in at City Hall, protesting “unfortunate” distortions of their struggle to prevent rather than start violence. When Catholic Archbishop James Cody himself joined them, Daley received the group with conciliatory effusion. “Doctor King, I want to make one thing clear,” he said. “We know that you did nothing to cause the disorders, and that you are a man of peace and love.” King reciprocated with a pared-down list of four suggestions, one of which sealed a heavily satirized truce. “Now there was a program, and Daley liked it,” wrote Mike Royko in the Chicago Daily News. “Give them water. He had a whole lake of it right outside the door.” City workers would distribute ten portable swimming pools and refit the hydrants yet again with spray nozzles instead of locks. “We don’t need sprinklers,” grumbled a dissenter. “We need jobs.” Attorney General Katzenbach, with White House approval, dispatched two top assistants to Chicago as four thousand National Guard troops rolled in to restore order late Friday, July 15. The riots were a miniature Watts, with the two fatalities and eighty serious injuries, including six police officers wounded by gunfire, plus $2 million in property damage and some five hundred arrests.
John Doar and Roger Wilkins of the Justice Department knocked unannounced at Hamlin Avenue before midnight. For Doar, who had been diverted from a canoe vacation in his native Wisconsin, the big city was unsettling after six years of civil rights field trips to the rural South. A bottle shattered against his car en route from appointments with Chicago officials. Wilkins, nephew of NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, expected King to have slipped after hours to the hotel comforts cherished by his peers, and was surprised to find him in a ghetto “showplace” rattier than advertised. Scores of Vice Lords and Cobras were crammed into chairs and floor spots, questioning King intensely. Some vented hardships and toughness blankly to King as a stranger, saying Molotov cocktails got attention, while others knowingly articulated their gang culture to one of the most famous people in the world. King engaged them one by one, sometimes turning to Abernathy to share their own war stories from jail or the relief of a joke about black preachers. The Washington men waited four hours—“four hot hours, four sweaty hours,” Wilkins recalled—mesmerized by an unrecorded seminar on pain and respect that preempted their exalted rank. For Andrew Young, the turning point was a perceptive, heartfelt speech on distinctions between the tactics and philosophy of nonviolence by Richard “Peanut” Tidwell, leader of the Roman Saints, who engineered a pact to give movement methods a try. When the gangs left, consultations between the Justice Department men and King commenced and continued into dawn on Saturday, July 16.
Internal deliberations reeled from a disastrous beginning. The gang summit was regarded as a crucial but tentative step toward recovery, neutralizing a random force prone to sabotage. Stanley Levison thought most Americans would not blame King for the riots but might believe he could have stopped them. He said Daley’s cleverly mixed signals would turn the riots against the movement unless the movement turned them against Daley. To retreat now would suggest failure. To go forward meant trying to revive nonviolence from the lingering smoke of a riot. King bemoaned the prior delays, and confessed that an earlier launch for the action campaign might have averted this setback. The sprawling coalition had nothing to show for nearly a year’s preparation beyond its own urgent warnings and postponements into a record-breaking siege of heat. (In New York City alone, an extra 650 deaths for the week spiked the mortality rate 40 percent above normal.) Woes had piled up like biblical pestilence with discovery on Thursday of eight student nurses systematically bound, raped, strangled, and stabbed in their South Chicago dormitory. Horror over an unfathomable mass murder sapped low reserves of public trust. Even so, movement leaders mounted rebuilding demonstrations Sunday in Gage Park, then Monday in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood. “We must move on with our positive program to make Chicago an open city,” King declared.
MAYOR DALEY hacked at the movement’s weakened lines of appeal to the national government. “King’s rally on a week from Sunday was fifty percent Johnson—‘Johnson’s a killer, Johnson’s a destroyer of human life, Johnson is a killer in Vietnam,’” he told the President privately on July 19. “He [King] is not your friend. He’s against you on Vietnam. He’s a goddam faker.” Daley portrayed the riots as a result of sinister and mystifying ingratitude toward Northern benefactors. His monologue skewed the movement’s demands, some of which duplicated Johnson’s own legislation in Congress.
The President squeezed in a word to seek an end point. “What shape have you got King in?” he asked. “Is he about ready to get out?”
“I don’t think so,” Daley replied. He spilled plans to overwhelm the movement with patronage and the poverty programs—“We got rodent control, we got insects, we destroyed a thousand slum buildings in six months”—while branding King a defector in the great quest for fairness. “What the hell, that’s the main thing you’ve been fighting for,” the mayor exclaimed, “and then to see them run on the goddam foreign question!
“You don’t run from people who have been your friends,” Daley continued emphatically. “You stick with them.” Like Richard Russell, he opposed the war but subordinated his opinion in national crisis. Pointedly, Daley pledged Chicago’s entire machine to Johnson’s Vietnam course by their two-way code of political loyalty. “That’s what I’ve been talking about with our leaders tonight,” he declared. “Eighty of them in the convention, and I told ’em the same thing. I told ’em, ‘We don’t run. We might be defeated, but we stand with Johnson on Vietnam. We stand for justice for all our people, and we also stand for law and order, and I’ll be damned if we let anyone take over themselves the running of the city.’”
“You’re just as right as you can be, Dick,” said the President, who signed off succinctly: “And I’ll support you.”
ON THURSDAY, July 28, King called for an all-night vigil Friday outside a real estate office that consistently refused to serve black customers. Earlier in the day, several clergy on the agenda committee had argued for a respite instead, to calm potential allies already strained by the daily actions such as integrated shopping trips and “friendship” basketball games on white playgrounds. Others still resisted the movement’s emphasis on residence—“All housing should be available to all people”—as a misguided, elitist approach to the goal of ending slums. The heated tactical debates essentially deferred to James Bevel, who in turn relied on his Nashville seminar
y friend and Freedom Ride cellmate Bernard Lafayette. After Lafayette and his young wife, Colia, created SNCC’s first Selma project in 1963, the American Friends Service Committee had hired them on the recommendation of James Lawson to test nonviolent methods in Chicago, where they found comparative weakness in the popular drives for open schools and open employment. The school struggle proved tired after a decade, with its target, Superintendent Benjamin Willis, set to retire late in August, and a diffuse jobs campaign yielded piecemeal results.* Housing showed contrasting potential, even though relatively few black people wanted or could afford to live in white neighborhoods. Lafayette called the inner boundaries of Northern cities an invisible indicator of Jim Crow that was anything but subtle—“segregation without signs.” Studies by his American Friends Service Committee colleagues estimated that only one percent of residential listings was open to black applicants, with restrictions traceable from the formal policy of 1917 to a blunt contemporary statement by the Illinois Association of Real Estate Boards: “All we are asking is that the brokers and salesmen have the same right to discriminate as the owners who engage their services.” By harrowing tests from working-class Belmont Cragin to upscale Oak Park, Lafayette’s action groups sampled the latent capacity of housing demonstrations to expose human forces that locked people into slums.
To begin the new stage of nonviolent witness, fifty volunteers set up Friday outside F. H. Halvorsen Realty at the corner of Kedzie Avenue and South 63rd Street, but hecklers ten times their number gathered with such menace that Bevel aborted the vigil before midnight. He accepted an offer to leave in police vans, which touched off marathon debates with Al Raby about whether the ground for nonviolent witness had been abandoned or insufficiently prepared. Some workers stayed up to paint signs such as “All God’s Children Need a Place to Live,” making sure their message would reach adversaries and the public alike, while others summoned reinforcements with extra warnings that this was no training exercise.
A column of 250 left New Friendship Baptist Church at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, July 30. They walked west from Halsted Avenue for twenty-four blocks along South 71st Street, turned north at Kedzie through a golf course, and emerged from pastoral Marquette Park at 67th Street, where several hundred angry white residents chanted, “Nigger go home!” Chicago police officers with nightsticks cordoned the route toward 63rd Street, but eggs, bottles, and rocks flew over them to strike the marchers with such force that Bevel and Raby turned back in pell-mell retreat without reaching Halvorsen Realty, one of twenty-three firms in the area that had refused to show properties to black or integrated test groups. New leadership arguments complicated the aftermath. Should the movement complain about lax police protection, at the risk of diluting its witness, or steel supporters to “receive” blows that dramatized the depth of hatred at the color line? Organizers mobilized to try again rather than surrender to violence.
Sunday afternoon, a caravan of automobiles parked under police guard at the foot of Marquette Park to facilitate the return trip. An escort of some two hundred officers in riot helmets guided 550 people up Kedzie into a waiting crescendo of neighborhood fury. The previous day’s rocks escalated to cherry bombs and bricks. Some errant missiles went through store windows, but others felled victims. Sister Mary Angelica, a first-grade teacher at Sacred Heart School, went down unconscious and bleeding to cheers of “We got another one,” as movement marshals pushed through with her to a police cruiser bound for Holy Cross Hospital. Older residents aimed special venom at “white niggers”—roughly half the marchers—and pelted the police escorts as traitors. Chants of “white power” gave way to mob cries of “Burn them like Jews!” When a captain persuaded Raby to turn west for the shelter of a narrow tree-lined street, teenagers dashed through alleys for flank attacks, opened fire hydrants to drench the confined lines, and swarmed ahead to mass four thousand strong. A radio alarm from the Eighth District rallied police units citywide, but forty marchers and two officers had been carried off to the hospital when the besieged lines recrossed Marquette Park. Before Bevel and Raby could decide whether to risk dispersing to the parked cars, teenagers fanned out to slit tires, smash windows, and roll over vehicles bearing the telltale “End Slums” stickers. Dodging officers in pursuit, they set a dozen cars ablaze with Molotov cocktails and pushed two others into a pond on the golf course. Andrew Young saw the taillights of his rented Ford at the water line. Jesse Jackson said he had been hit three times but waved off questions about what happened. “I don’t know,” he told reporters blankly on the forced return walk. Some of the dazed and weary joined a chorus of “We Shall Overcome” raised by supporters waiting at the Ashland Avenue color line.
The shock of Southern-style hate images, which made front pages everywhere, put Chicago’s leaders under severe stress. Rabbi Robert J. Marx regretted his role as a community observer for the Chicago Federation of thirty-three Reform Jewish congregations, saying he had seen in the raging fears of ordinary parents and children “how the concentration camp could have occurred and how man’s hatred could lead them to kill.” Marx wrote a pained confession about the difficulty of being a prophet close to home. “I was on the wrong side of the street. I should have been with the marchers.” The august Chicago Tribune, on the other hand, identified with the rampage of those “baited into a near-riot last weekend,” and drew battle lines against “the imported prophets of ‘nonviolence’ who are seeking to incite trouble with marches into white neighborhoods.” Mayor Daley, caught in the middle, told neighborhood representatives from Chicago Lawn and Gage Park that community violence would only backfire against their worthy goal to end the unrest. His pleas for restraint—to let the marchers deplete their energy and go away—struck local leaders as mealy-mouthed bunk unworthy of America’s strongest mayor. Many of them found it especially galling that Daley’s police officers, widely known to them by their first names, were arresting the young white defenders rather than the uninvited strangers.
The mayor sent his black alderman to meet with Raby and King for the first time, creating a muffled fanfare that he was probing toward a settlement. Within the movement, daily housing tests in other areas stoked expectations that peaked Thursday night in a mass meeting of 1,700 people. “If there is any doubt in anybody’s mind concerning whether we have a movement here in Chicago,” King told a live radio audience from New Friendship, “you ought to be in this church tonight!” Announcing that he would lead the next day’s showdown personally—“My place is in Gage Park”—King addressed ethnic friction within the movement. Even if Jews or Catholics should reject his help, he pledged, “I would still take a stand against bigotry.” By the same token, he urged new white allies to uphold their principles in spite of distrust from unfamiliar, frustrated black people. “You ought to stand up and say, ‘I’m free and this is a free country and I believe in justice,’” King urged, “‘and I’m gonna be in the movement whether you want me or not.’” He acknowledged fatigue with a watchword of tenacity. “I still have faith in the future,” he said. “My brothers and sisters, I still can sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’”
On Friday afternoon, August 5, specially trained vanguards of twenty went ahead to establish picket lines outside Halvorsen and three other real estate companies along Kedzie. A huge body of 960 Chicago police deployed in riot helmets between the assembling march lines and some five thousand residents who had descended in advance to the northern edge of Marquette Park. Young men carried Confederate flags or crude handmade signs such as, “The Only Way to End Niggers Is Exterminate.” Noise built impatiently for the arrival of King, who was late as usual. No sooner did he emerge from a car at five o’clock than a perversely hostile chant broke out, “We want King! We want King!” Officers held the crowd back beyond the range of bricks but not rocks or cherry bombs, and screams answered the first explosions. Densely packed marchers moved forward awkwardly, some with bent arms shielding their heads. A palm-sized rock soon staggered King to the pavement,
his chin propped on his left knee, which raised both shrieks of triumph and cries of fear. Pulled up to his feet, he flinched from a bang above the roar of voices. Officers and aides asked if he was all right. “I think so,” said King, swaying slightly just before the gunlike report of another cherry bomb made him duck again. He straightened up with a glazed stare, a lump swelling behind his right ear.
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