American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Now that Daley was no longer the candidate of white Chicago, he faced a stark choice. He could have decided to govern in the New Deal tradition of the Kelly-Arvey wing of the Democratic Party. Like Kelly, he could have tried to govern as a racial progressive, and then worked to keep enough moderate white voters behind him to stay in office. It would have been a difficult path — Kelly had failed to make it work. But Daley would have had four years to navigate the issues of open occupancy and public housing and chart a compromise-filled political course that kept the Democrats in power and promoted the civil rights of his most loyal voting block. Chicago might have become an entirely different city if he had proceeded along that path. But instead, Daley decided to make a strong appeal to the white “backlash” voters in the Bungalow Belt who had begun to desert him in the 1962 bond referendum and the 1963 mayoral election. He would come out more directly against open housing and equal rights for blacks, so there would be no confusion among white voters about where he stood. He intended to hold on to as much of his black support as he could, but he would do that not by his stand on the issues, but through patronage and the work of the black ward organizations. Alderman Despres, Daley’s foremost foe in the City Council, drafted a memo setting out what he took to be Daley’s cynical approach to racial politics. “While controlling the votes of Negro Chicagoans through partisan patronage and the national attraction of the Democratic label, make all necessary concessions to white segregationists by maintaining the pattern of racial housing segregation, school segregation, and social segregation,” Despres wrote. But he added a warning: “Since a pattern of housing and school segregation guarantees a growing ghetto and a declining city, the segregation policy which wins each election hastens a tragic explosion.” 40

  In early July, NAACP delegates descended on Chicago for the organization’s national convention. The summer of 1963 had already been an upsetting one for the civil rights movement. The NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary, Medgar Evers, had been shot dead by a white supremacist outside his Jackson, Mississippi, home. The local police had shown little interest in cracking the case, but they did arrest 160 mourners for marching silently in Evers’s memory. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Governor George Wallace had made his famous stand in the schoolhouse door to stop black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. And in Birmingham, public safety director Eugene “Bull” Connor had greeted nonviolent protesters with snarling police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses. Chicago blacks followed all the ugly details in the pages of the Chicago Defender, whose headlines lately had been a steady drumbeat of “New Miss[issippi] Violence: Club-Swinging Jackson Cops Attack Evers Murder Protest March” and “Birmingham Still on the Edge of Racial Blow-Up!” 41

  As difficult as events were down South, the NAACP delegates were also aware of the problems blacks faced in their host city — the slums, the segregated schools, the high-rise housing projects. Daley delivered an opening address to the convention that scrupulously avoided taking on any of these controversial issues. Instead, he declared that there were “no ghettos in Chicago.” He meant the remark to be uplifting, a statement of his high regard for all of the city’s neighborhoods. But Dr. Lucien Holman, the Joliet, Illinois, dentist who headed the statewide chapter of the NAACP, snapped at a startled Daley, “We’ve had enough of this sort of foolishness.” And then Holman launched into a spirited rebuttal. “Everybody knows there are ghettos here.... And we’ve got more segregated schools than you’ve got in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana combined.” Still, when it was over, members of the black submachine and other black allies rushed to assure Daley that they understood what he meant. It seemed to be an isolated incident. 42

  The highlight of the convention was a July 4 “Emancipation Day” parade through the Loop. Daley agreed to lead a procession of 50,000 civil rights marchers through downtown. The parade, whose slogan was “Free in ’63,” was a cost-free way for Daley to make a gesture to the black community, since its focus was on the South. No homeowner in the Bungalow Belt would much care if Daley took a stand against conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. Daley marched in front of a car carrying Medgar Evers’s young widow, Myrlie, and smiled as spectators along the route rang “freedom bells” and shouted “Jim Crow must go.” Daley and the other marchers finished their hour-long trek at Grant Park, a stretch of green wedged between downtown and Lake Michigan. The parade’s organizers asked him to make a few remarks to the large crowd now gathered around the park’s bandshell. Daley had not expected the invitation, but he readily agreed. He was soon spouting his usual brand of painfully bland expressions of civil goodwill. “May I say that we are happy to welcome this convention and the delegates to our city,” he began. But as Daley spoke, a crowd of between one hundred and two hundred protesters began to march toward the speaker’s platform. If he saw them, he ignored the disruption and plunged ahead. “We are glad you have come to see us and we hope you come to see us again and again.” 43

  The hecklers picked up their pace, and they were fast winning converts. The air began to fill with shouts of “Daley must go!” and “Down with ghettos!”— a reference to his recent comment about there being no ghettos in Chicago. Daley forged ahead, but the hecklers would not give up. One woman turned her back to the speaker’s platform and bowed her head. She seemed, at first glance, to be embarrassed by the crowd’s behavior. But she turned out to be a city worker who was trying to join the booing without being seen by her Democratic precinct captain. Bishop Stephen G. Spottswood, chairman of the NAACP national board of directors, stepped down from the speaker’s platform and tried to quiet the protesters, but their yelling only grew louder. The more the hecklers shouted, the more flustered Daley became. After fifteen minutes of boos and catcalls, he angrily stormed off the stage. 44

  Moments after Daley left, the Reverend Joseph H. Jackson took the podium. Jackson was minister of the South Side’s 15,000-member Olivet Baptist Church and president of the National Baptist Convention, whose 5 million members and 30,000 affiliated churches made it the nation’s largest black organization. Jackson was an outspoken opponent of the civil rights movement, who had most recently angered activists by coming out against the proposed March on Washington that Martin Luther King Jr. was to lead. The previous Sunday, protesters had picketed outside Jackson’s church during services. The moment Jackson was called on to speak, a deafening roar arose from the crowd. For fifteen minutes, the audience booed and yelled “Uncle Tom must go!” When a group of fifty demonstrators circled him and shouted “Kill him! Kill him!” the embattled minister had to be escorted from the park by police. Daley also fled the scene and, after wading through the crowd, located his limousine. Asked by a reporter what had gone wrong, Daley replied curtly that the protest must have been planned by the Republicans. 45

  In fact, the July 4 heckling indicated just how quickly race relations were changing in Chicago. When the NAACP convention held its closing session at the Morrison Hotel on July 6, it was clear that Daley still retained significant support in the black community. The delegates adopted a resolution thanking him for his cooperation. But another version, which pointedly expressed appreciation only to unnamed “municipal authorities,” got about one-third of the vote. A few days later, after the NAACP delegates had left town, an interracial group from the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality held a sit-in at the Board of Education to protest segregation in the public schools. The protesters occupied a conference room for eight days, until the police finally removed them. The situation was “bordering on anarchy,” said the president of the Board of Education. Board business was being interrupted, and the protesters had broken the door between the conference room where they were holding the sit-in and the president’s office. Daley supported the police, who arrested and carried off seven men and three girls, saying, “We can’t let anybody physically take over city offices.” But the protesters were only getting started. On July 22, CORE held a one-hour demonstration in a hallway outside
Daley’s office. In a brief meeting, the protest leaders asked Daley to mediate the school crisis. Daley responded that the Board of Education was an independent body, and insisted he could not possibly intervene. It was, of course, merely an excuse. Daley was intimately involved in the schools and meddled with them when it suited his purposes. Clair Roddewig, school board president during the early years of the crisis, would later say that he spoke to the mayor “almost daily about school matters.” 46

  The next civil rights battle was waged in the City Council. The 1963 aldermanic elections had produced Charles Chew, a civil rights leader unlike any Chicago had ever seen. Chew had run as an independent in the racially changing 17th Ward on the Far South Side. He won by persuading middle-class black voters to reject the white machine candidate and the machine’s “plantation politics.” When he got to the City Council, he was the only black alderman who did not need to follow Daley’s edicts on civil rights. On July 1, he joined Alderman Despres in sponsoring an open-housing bill. As usual, the six black machine alderman — the so-called silent six — led the opposition. Judiciary Committee chairman Claude Holman, one of the “silent six,” got the bill tabled until August 22. When the Despres-Chew bill came up again, Daley was ready with an open-housing bill of his own. Daley’s bill, which he had arranged to have sponsored by a biracial coalition of aldermen, was a pale imitation of the Despres-Chew proposal. The Daley bill required only that real estate brokers not engage in unfair practices. Rather than stressing “fair housing,” it used the term only twice, both times in the preamble. It was, as critics pointed out vociferously, a “subterfuge” designed to co-opt the open housing movement by making it look as if the City Council had acted. 47

  In normal circumstances, Daley would have had no trouble getting his bill passed. He controlled a large majority on the council, and it was an elemental rule that officeholders slated by Daley — whether for Sanitary District board or U.S. Senate or alderman—gave him their vote when he asked for it. The machine was not subtle about sending out instructions to its legislators, which was just as well, since many were not particularly bright. “They put out a so-called idiot sheet every day during the [state] legislative session,” former suburban Democratic commiteeman Lynn Williams recalled. “A mimeographed sheet is sent around to the Chicago delegations — House Bill 2351, dog muzzles, yes; House Bill 2500, change judiciary, no; House Bill 2961, divorce, no. There’s no secret about it. You can go to the desk and see them sitting there with this sheet.” Daley sent the word out to the City Council to vote for his fair housing ordinance. That should have ended the matter, but most of the white aldermen were afraid to vote even for the machine’s toothless bill. James Murray, who ended up sponsoring the bill, initially told Daley he was worried. “I said, ‘Why me? — My community is up in arms,’” Murray recalls. “He said I was [president pro tem of the City Council] and the city needed the ordinance.” Keane and Murray met in Daley’s office the day of the City Council vote, and Daley called each alderman personally to tell them they were expected to back the bill. At the council, the vote was delayed eighty minutes while Daley and Keane threatened to deny patronage to aldermen who broke with the machine. In the end, the bill passed 30–16, the most defections Daley had ever suffered in the City Council. 48

  As the summer wore on, the civil rights movement gained momentum. On July 21, pickets marched outside the Olivet Baptist Church in opposition to Reverend Jackson and school board member Mrs. Wendell Green, two of the leading anti–civil rights figures in the black community. Green, a machine loyalist, was possibly the most anti-integrationist member of the board. The protesters carried signs reading “Birds of a feather flock together — Green, Jackson, and Jim Crow,” and “Mrs. Green, enemy of our children.” At the same time, whites were continuing their own protests. When two black families moved into apartments, there were three days of clashes at 56th and Morgan streets on the Southwest Side, and Daley had to plead for “law and order to prevail everywhere.” When civil rights protesters demonstrated outside the president of the Board of Education’s home, Daley lashed out at the media. “Without publicity, the demonstrators would stop tomorrow,” he said. Taking a leaf from the book of governors and sheriffs across the South, Daley also began to blame outside agitators for the unrest. “They come from all over town, and some from out of town,” says Daley. “I see that some of them are from out of state, one is from Nassau County, N.Y., and another from Green Bay, Wisconsin.” Chicago’s racial difficulties were starting to become national news. A page-one story in the New York Times on August 26 concluded that “the situation seems potentially more explosive than in most Southern communities.” 49

  The school protesters were coming to realize that they had an ideal villain in their midst: School Superintendent Benjamin Willis. Willis had gotten his start as the principal of a four-room schoolhouse in rural Maryland, and worked his way up through the state’s racially segregated educational system. After a stint as superintendent of schools in Buffalo, New York, he came to Chicago. Willis’s admirers considered him a skilled administrator, who championed teacher salary increases, smaller class sizes, and rigorous graduation requirements. But to his critics, both black and white, Willis was un-communicative and arrogant. The president of the Chicago PTA, at the end of her two-year term, complained that Willis had not met with her or her delegate assembly once. “We have asked, but Dr. Willis has not found time for us,” she said. Even the Board of Education found him to be imperious. Willis had “contempt for the judgment of any board member who has the temerity to disagree with him,” one member said in 1966 as he stepped down from the board. Willis also shared Daley’s secretive nature. He instructed his staff to refuse requests for information about double-shifts, empty classrooms, and other basic facts about the public schools. Many blacks had a more specific problem with Willis: they were convinced that his views on race were the ones he had absorbed early in his career in the Jim Crow school system in Maryland. “There are certain people who stand out from all others and epitomize evil, wrongness, or just plain bigotry,” says Ira Dawson. “Willis was a bigot who said, ‘You don’t exist’ to the black community.” 50 Civil rights activists who met with Willis said his inability to reach out to blacks was almost visceral. “He couldn’t say the word ‘Negro,’” said TFIS activist Meyer Weinberg. “He said ‘them’ or ‘they,’ or he would point a certain direction with his chin.” Willis seemed like the closest thing Chicago had to the epic civil rights enemies of the South. He was, the Chicago Defender declared, “the Gov. Wallace of Chicago standing in the doorway of an equal education for all Negro kids in this city.” 51

  Daley, however, was hearing none of it. Rose Simpson, chairman of the Parents Council for Integrated Schools, met with Daley in August and urged him to remove Willis. He “is not concerned about Negro education and he fosters segregation in the schools,” she said. Daley responded curtly that Willis was doing a fine job and that he continued to support him. It was Willis’s contentiousness, not Daley’s lack of support, that got him in trouble. In the fall, Willis took several white high schools off a list to receive student transfers under a new school board plan. It seemed clear that he had done it to stop those schools from being integrated. The school board ordered him to restore the schools to the list, and they backed it up with a court order. Willis responded by announcing on October 4 that he was stepping down. If Willis’s resignation was a tactical ploy to rally whites behind him, it worked. White community groups like the Southwest Council of Civic Organizations and the Property Owners Coordinating Committee threatened a march on City Hall unless Willis was convinced to stay on. Twenty-three of Chicago’s top business leaders wired the Board of Education to register the business community’s strong support for Willis. The machine’s allies in the black community also stepped forward to defend the man others were branding an enemy of black schoolchildren. The attacks on Willis were “mass hysteria,” the Reverend J. H. Jackson said, and it would be trag
ic if they were allowed to bring down a man of his “professional caliber.” Daley had, of course, previously told black parents that he could not intervene in educational matters. But now that Willis was threatening to leave, Daley had no qualms about publicly rushing to his defense. “I think it’s pretty much hoped by everyone that he comes back,” Daley said in a television interview. Within days, a school board committee had prevailed upon Willis to rescind his resignation. 52

  Outraged that Willis was back, civil rights leaders announced a boycott of the public schools. Support for the boycott grew rapidly, with thousands of black parents promising to keep their children out of school on the appointed day. It was a sign of just how strong the pro-boycott sentiment was in the black wards that Daley, in a break with tradition, freed members of the black machine to support it if they wanted. He was not going soft on civil rights, historian Dempsey Travis notes. He just wanted his black allies “to run as fast as hell and catch up with the majority of their constituents.” With this clearance from the Morrison Hotel, Dawson’s 2nd Ward Organization and several of the “silent six” black aldermen issued statements expressing their support for the boycott. On October 22, the day of the boycott, the response from black parents and children was overwhelming. About 225,000 students stayed out of school, far more than even the organizers expected. Activists set up “freedom schools” in churches, meeting halls, and community rooms, providing alternative instruction. They offered an improvised curriculum of civil rights songs and lessons on freedom and equality. In one exercise, black children were asked to analyze the word “equal” from a variety of perspectives, starting with arithmetic and moving on to current events. The idea, they were taught, was that equality meant not being the same, but being worth the same. At the same time, about ten thousand demonstrators marched on City Hall and the Board of Education. Despite the success of the boycott, activists were still having trouble translating their protests into new educational policy. Weeks of meetings between the CCCO and school officials ended in deadlock. Frustrated by the lack of progress, the CCCO called a second boycott for the following February. 53