Thus, the trigger of the Watts Riot was the misperception by blacks that the Fryes had been brutalized by the police. But there were deeper reasons for black resentment in South Central and they were exactly the same factors that caused unrest in all the other urban ghettoes: unemployment, particularly among young males, poverty, bad schools, wretched health, rampant crime, drugs, and isolation from the larger community. Added together, they caused rage and it was no surprise that the black hero of the young people of Watts was Malcolm X.
The white community in Los Angeles, the President’s task force reported, was “deeply shocked” by the riot. The reaction was to “condemn the lawlessness, the impatience, and the destruction. There is a wide feeling that the Negro community lacks gratitude for recent economic and civil rights advances and that its demands will grow.” Assistance to the riot areas was seen as a reward for lawlessness. Whites, as well, strongly supported the police. The department received 17,864 letters and telegrams, 99 percent commendatory. “Police Chief Parker,” Martin wrote, “seems to be adored like Edgar Hoover by the whites in power.” Mayor Sam Yorty, who had earlier attacked him, was “now squarely in his corner.”
The President ordered Califano and Lee White of his staff to comb the resources of the federal government for programs that could be started or expanded to address the problems of the ghetto. On September 2 he approved of 49 projects and his task force recommended 35 more. They dealt with manpower training, adult education, business development, legal aid, basic education, and health services. Several years later Sherman M. Mellinkoff, the dean of the UCLA Medical School and a member of the McCone Commission, played a key role in establishing the greatest monument to the Watts Riot, the Martin Luther King, Jr./Drew Medical School in Watts.
King himself was baffled by the riot. He was in Miami on Friday, August 13, en route to Puerto Rico, when he heard the news. Black preachers in Los Angeles asked him to come out. He talked to Bayard Rustin, who thought he could accomplish nothing and might damage himself. King agreed and flew to San Juan. But, on Sunday, as the riot was ending, he decided to go to Los Angeles. Rustin and several other advisers urged him not to do so, but his conscience ruled otherwise. He arrived with Rustin on Tuesday afternoon. He talked with Otis Chandler, the publisher of the Times, and Governor Brown. King was awed by the devastation. “You know, Bayard,” he said, “I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I’ve got to do something … to help them get the money to buy it.” King met with Yorty and Parker and urged a police review board to look into charges of brutality. Parker was enraged and told him there was none in Los Angeles. After the meeting Yorty publicly attacked King and King demanded that Parker be fired.
Rustin was right. King had no reason to come to Los Angeles because he had no power to control events. The trip may have salved his conscience, but it accomplished nothing. Nevertheless, the Watts Riot for Martin King, as for Lyndon Johnson, was a critical turning point.3
King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been the locomotive driving the civil rights movement. He compiled a decade of triumph from the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 to the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. It was significant that the first word in the organization’s name was “Southern.” These victories had been won in the South, where unconstitutional roadblocks to civil rights were widespread, and where black respect for the black clergy prevailed. Here he could also win support—moral, political, and financial—from many northern whites who thought the time had come to end the legal denial of civil rights. King had solidified white backing by insisting on nonviolence.
But by 1965 the situation had changed. There were virtually no constitutional battles left to be won, either in the South or in the North. The dominant residual issue, as Watts had demonstrated, was the northern urban ghetto. Here the problems were exceptionally complex and intractable—poverty, unemployment, housing, crime, health, education, and family—and did not lend themselves to solution by demonstration. Further, the white backlash was growing swiftly and, with it, northern support for civil rights was eroding.
King, like Johnson, had little interest in administration. SCLC, even in the best of times, had been run haphazardly, suffering from a chronic shortage of funds, internal bickering, and sloppy execution, including corruption. Moreover, by 1965 new young black leaders were emerging who were more militant than King and who rejected both him and nonviolence. This was dramatically evident in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and, further left, in the Black Muslims with their formidable voice, Malcolm X, as well as in the soon-to-appear Black Panthers.
From Selma in 1965 to his assassination in 1968 King searched vainly for a mission. He made forays into three areas: an attack on a massive northern urban ghetto—Chicago—opposition to the war in Vietnam, and help for the poor. All aroused strong opposition and none was successful.
LBJ, like King, was insatiable. He had gained notable victories in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite waning support and the fact that he did not know what it should deal with, he insisted on another civil rights law in 1966.
In January 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, head of the Office of Policy Planning and Research in the Labor Department, had sent Bill Moyers a memorandum arguing that the disintegration of the Negro family in the urban ghettoes stemmed from the declining status of the black male. This had created a “pathological matriarchal situation.” In May, Secretary Wirtz sent the President a more detailed analysis which he called “nine pages of dynamite.” In June, Moynihan’s study,The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, was published. He pointed to the decline in marriages, the rise of illegitimacy, female-headed families, and a dramatic increase in welfare dependency. Moynihan called for a national policy to “strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.” His report aroused a firestorm of controversy in the black community and in some liberal white circles.
On June 4 the President delivered a wide-ranging commencement address at Howard University in which he dealt with many black problems, including family breakdown. He promised to call a White House conference in the fall on the theme “To Fulfill These Rights.” But the planners were unable to agree upon an agenda and it was deferred until June 1966.
These controversies in 1965, obviously, provided no basis for civil rights legislation. Johnson, therefore, instructed Attorney General Katzenbach to form an interagency task force to draft a bill for 1966, and he drew in Labor, HEW, Defense, OEO, and, significantly, Housing and Home Finance. An idea that emerged was the thorny and explosive question of fair housing, a topic carefully sidestepped in all prior legislation. After extended negotiations between Katzenbach and the White House, the President sent up an omnibus civil rights bill on April 28, 1966.
It was peculiarly lopsided. There were several very specific legal provisions—nondiscrimination in jury selection, authority for the Attorney General to initiate desegregation suits in education and public accommodations, and protection of the security of civil rights workers. Title IV was the block-buster: a prohibition of discrimination in the sale or rental of all housing.
The timing of Title IV was abominable. Watts had been joined by other ghetto riots. Stokely Carmichael, who had taken over SNCC, was bellowing “Black Power!” to enormous coverage in the media. While the bill was being debated during the summer, King was leading demonstrations for open housing in Chicago which were arousing violent opposition. The white backlash was in full tide. In Congress southerners were delighted and Republicans were licking their chops over their prospects in the November elections. In fact, the civil rights leaders had warned Johnson that open housing would arouse fatal opposition. Dirksen declared that Title IV was “absolutely unconstitutional.” Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, agreed and added with some satisfaction, “For the first ti
me, we have a bill which proposes that other than Southern oxen are to be gored.” A southern Democratic-Republican coalition and a filibuster were inevitable in the Senate.
Thus, the strategy was to start in the House. In the hearings the National Association of Real Estate Boards, representing 83,000 brokers, denounced the bill for abridging “the fundamental right of every person to sell, lease, or rent any part of his real property, or to decline to sell, lease or rent such real property.” Between May and August 1966 the House tore Title IV to pieces in both the committee and on the floor. The administration, helpless, caved in on amendment after amendment in the hope of getting a bill, any kind of bill, through. Finally the House passed a measure by a vote of 259 to 157. The mutilated remains of Title IV looked like this: No one could discriminate in the sale, rental, or advertising of a dwelling if he had entered into more than two real estate transactions within the previous twelve months. A broker would be allowed to discriminate with the written consent of the owner. A landlord renting no more than four rooms in his/her own home was exempt, a nod to the famous mythical widow Mrs. Murphy, trying to make ends meet on Social Security and room rents. Banks were prohibited from imposing discrimination as a condition for making real estate loans.
The Senate never considered this monstrosity. Because Eastland would have killed it in his Judiciary Committee, Mansfield brought it straight to the floor on September 6. The Senate adjourned for lack of a quorum for several days. The leaders then agreed to conduct other business. On September 13 the President pleaded with an unshakable Dirksen to provide the necessary Republican votes. Mansfield called for cloture on September 18. The vote was 52 to 41, 10 votes shy of the necessary two-thirds.
After this defeat the President promised to propose civil rights legislation again in 1967, but he refused to say whether he would include open housing. King said that this catastrophe
surely heralds darker days for this social era of discontent. The executioners of the 1966 civil rights bill have given valuable assistance to those forces in the Negro communities who counsel violence. Although I will continue to preach with all my might the moral Tightness of nonviolence, my words are now bound to fall on more deaf ears.
Larry O’Brien later reflected on “our greatest setback in that session.” The President and he had miscalculated politically. They counted on the huge Democratic majorities and Johnson was confident that he could persuade Dirksen to deliver Republican votes for cloture. But the housing and real estate issue went “beyond civil rights.” “We were hit with a firestorm from the outset on the Republican side, and, as time went on, the opposition broadened.” The President tried “mightily” to move Dirksen, but the minority leader “made a point of announcing his opposition at the outset.” Dirksen reflected “the disarray in the House and the cloture vote in the Senate.” The Watts Riot did no good. The President was “troubled” and “frustrated.”4
The sole surviving major city political machine in the U.S. ruled Chicago. “In no other big city in the nation,” Len O’Connor wrote, “is Democratic Party control so absolute as in Chicago and in no other city is there so absolute a boss as Richard J. Daley.” The mayor could pile up huge majorities for his slates in the city and in Cook County. They had been big enough to squeeze out a victory for Kennedy in Illinois in 1960 and, of course, to carry the state easily for Johnson in 1964. Daley spoke with a powerful voice in Springfield, delivered the entire Illinois Democratic delegation in the House, and was heard loud and clear in the White House. In return for their votes, the machine was said to have 30,000 jobs at its command and provided its supporters with at least 350 in each of the city’s 50 wards, pay for those who rounded up voters and for poll watchers on election days, and, in the poorest districts, food, lawyers, and help with the bureaucracy and the police. These services were provided fairly to all ethnic groups, including blacks.
Chicago was called a “city of nations.” Nowhere else were ethnic politics played so ubiquitously and by no one so masterfully as Dick Daley. Most of the Irish had come over in the nineteenth century and not many remained in the inner city. But, with the Irish gift for politics, they still sat in the top seats, notably in the mayor’s office. The Germans and the Scandinavians did not count because they voted Republican. Only Warsaw had more Poles. There were large concentrations of Czechs, Jews, Italians, Croatians, and Lithuanians. All of the Eastern and Southern Europeans, except the Jews, were Roman Catholic. In fact, in 1960 there were 2.2 million Catholics in Cook and Lake counties, and Chicago was the largest archdiocese in the U.S. You could always tell which ethnic enclave you were in, Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko wrote, by the “odors in the food stores and the open kitchen windows, the sound of the foreign or familiar language, and by whether a stranger hit you in the head with a rock.”
Royko, who knew almost everything about Chicago, caught the essence of its mayor in his 1976 obituary:
If a man ever reflected a city, it was Richard J. Daley and Chicago.
In some ways, he was this town at its best—strong, hard-driving, working feverishly, pushing, building, driven by ambitions so big they seemed Texas-boastful.
In other ways, he was this city at its worst—arrogant, crude, conniving, ruthless, suspicious, intolerant.
He wasn’t graceful, suave, witty, or smooth. But, then, this is not Paris or San Francisco.
He was raucous, sentimental, hot-tempered, practical, simple, devious, big, and powerful. This is, after all, Chicago … belly to belly, scowl to scowl, and may the toughest or loudest man win. …
Daley was a product of the neighborhoods and he reflected it in many good ways—loyalty to the family, neighbors, old buddies, the corner grocer. You do something for someone, they do something for you. If somebody is sick, you offer the family help. If someone dies, you go to the wake and try to lend comfort. The young don’t lip off the old; everybody cuts his grass, takes care of his property, and don’t play your TV too loud.
That’s the way he liked to live, and that’s what he thought most people wanted, and he was right.
But there are other sides to Chicago neighborhoods—suspicion of outsiders, intolerance toward the unconventional, bigotry, and bullying.
That was Daley too. As he proved over and over again, he didn’t trust outsiders, whether they were long-hairs against war, black preachers against segregation, reformers against his machine, or community groups against his policies. This was his neighborhood—ward—city—county, and nobody could come in and make noise. He’d call the cops. Which he did.
Blacks were by far the largest ethnic group in Chicago, about 1 million in 1965. They were concentrated in two vast crowded ghettoes—the old Black Belt on the South Side and the former Jewish ghetto on the West Side. The other ethnic groups did not want to mix with them. They wanted to keep their own neighborhoods and to send their children to white schools, that is, they insisted on segregation. No one knew better than Daley that racism was a time bomb waiting to go off that could tear his machine and his beloved city to shreds. In 1965–66 he faced two tough tests.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required that local school boards disburse federal funds without discrimination based on race. During 1965 Congress enacted the Elementary and Secondary Education Act with a $1 billion appropriation for federal aid to low-income areas. Chicago qualified for a $32 million grant, which the mayor, the board of education, and school superintendent Benjamin C. Willis, who supported the segregation of the schools, were eager to obtain for their underfunded system.
During the summer of 1965 the President imposed enormous pressure on Califano and Francis Keppel, the Commissioner of Education, to obtain pledges from the 5000 southern school districts to desegregate by the time school opened in the fall. “He talked to me several times each day,” Califano wrote, “about ideas to spur compliance and gave me the names of politicians, educators, labor and business leaders across the South to call.” Johnson made a special effort in Texa
s. Keppel said, “He damn near drove me crazy.” Keppel had a large staff in the field talking to school boards and he kept a daily score card. “We’ve now got 3,800 of them!” By September only a couple of hundred were left and he “was ready for a nervous breakdown.”
In the South the issue was de jure segregation, that is, legally mandated segregation under state law in defiance of both Brown v. Board of Education and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. In September, as Keppel was catching his breath, his office began to receive complaints about de facto segregation in the North. This raised several troubling questions. Did Title VI apply to this type of segregation? If it did, what procedural rules would the agency employ in seeking compliance? What pressures could it bring on school boards to push them into action?
Until August, Anthony Celebrezze had been the Secretary of HEW. A former mayor of Cleveland who knew all about northern big-city segregation, he wanted no trouble before he went onto the bench. John Gardner succeeded him. Assistant Secretary James Quigley had jurisdiction over complaints. Thus, Gardner, Quigley, and Keppel would make the policy at HEW. All opposed segregation on deeply held principle; none showed a concern for political reality or seemed even to be aware of its significance.
Between them, they made a series of critical political mistakes. Quigley had received complaints from Chicago, Gary Orfield wrote, “the scene of the nation’s most bitter struggle over school segregation, Boston, the city where the defense of the neighborhood school had made an obscure woman school-board member a dominant figure in local politics, and Chester, the bleak Pennsylvania city where a CORE campaign had produced local violence.” HEW chose Chicago because the complaint from Albert A. Raby of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations was thorough, documented, and brought serious charges. Preliminary investigation suggested that they had substance.
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