by Adam Cohen
CHAPTER
9
We’re Going to Have a
Movement in Chicago
Daley left for Washington on January 17, 1965, to attend President Johnson’s inauguration. In the pecking order of inauguration VIPs, Daley ranked near the top: the Daleys were invited to sit on the platform during the swearing-in ceremony, and to sit in the presidential box during the Inaugural Ball. At a party at the Shoreham Hotel, Daley was chosen to introduce the new president, and Johnson exclaimed: “This looks like a real Dick Daley crowd here, all enthusiastic, all happy, and all Democrats.” When Daley returned to Chicago, however, the mood was less festive. Willis’s contract was due to expire on August 31, and the battle was already under way over whether it would be renewed. Professor Philip Hauser, a respected voice on education issues, had joined the anti-Willis camp, declaring that “in light of recent developments and the animosity of a large part of the population toward him, it would be unreasonable for him to stay on.” Willis’s defenders were equally committed, and it seemed clear that Daley was quietly in their camp. Chicago Sun-Times columnist John Drieske had predicted in late December that Willis would end up keeping his job if he wanted it because Daley had selected him and the mayor was “not one to admit he was ever wrong in anything.” 1
In the spring, with the time drawing nearer for a decision over Willis’s fate, both sides were actively mobilizing. There were the usual anti-Willis protests, including a Good Friday march on City Hall organized by a new group called Clergy for Quality and Equality in Our Public Schools. But now Willis’s white supporters were also speaking out. A citywide group of mothers organized a Tribute to Dr. Benjamin Willis Committee. The committee’s president conceded that it was all white, but added that “we welcome any Negroes who wish to support Dr. Willis.” White PTAs, property owners’ organizations on the South and West sides, and business leaders also weighed in, and more than 100,000 pro-Willis leaflets entitled “The Chicago Public Schools and Benjamin C. Willis” were distributed throughout the city. Political observers handicapping the school board’s politics were saying that it was deeply divided: four for Willis, three against, and three in the middle. The swing votes — Wild, Adams, and Louise Malis — were all recent Daley appointees. Cyrus Adams was typical of this group. He favored integration in theory, but he was convinced it always ended up badly because white parents simply took their children out of the public schools. The more he saw of actual attempts to integrate public schools, he told a meeting of the Citizens’ School Committee, the more convinced he became that the best course was simply to work on “preserving such integration as existed.” 2
In April 1965, the city took a break from its civil rights turmoil to mark Daley’s tenth anniversary as mayor. The City Council held a ninety-minute tribute to “The Daley Decade.” Even by the extravagant standards of the City Council, this ceremony set new records for mayoral flattery. Keane lauded Daley for building new highways, completing O’Hare Airport, and luring the University of Illinois– Chicago campus. Claude Holman breathlessly told Daley that “the city has a rendezvous with destiny,” and that “you are the north star that leads us.” But it was Casimir “Casey” Laskowski, the alderman-mortician from the Northwest Side 35th Ward, whose encomiums reached the highest level. “I hate to speak of this and make a comparison, but once on this earth there walked a man named Jesus Christ,” Laskowski said. 3
In mid-May, it appeared that Willis was finally on the brink of dismissal. The Chicago Sun-Times declared in a banner headline, “Board Refuses Willis Contract.” The word leaking out of the school board was that the board had voted in a secret session not to renew his contract. These reports of Willis’s demise turned out to be premature. His supporters on the board managed to stall the resolution for two weeks, and in the interim both sides launched heavy lobbying campaigns. At a Witness Against Willis rally on the South Side, University of Chicago professors Hauser and Alvin Pitcher called for Willis’s ouster. But on May 22, at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, 1,100 people gathered for a dinner honoring Willis. Machine congressman Roman Pucinski declared that “[t]he children of this city have had a rare experience from his profound wisdom and experience.” During this tense time, rumors were rampant that Daley was secretly working to keep Willis in office. He was overheard by a reporter telling his newly appointed school board members that he hoped they would “be able to sit down and work this thing out.” When the two-week cooling-off period ended, a compromise was reached that allowed Willis to remain in office another sixteen months, until he turned sixty-five. The three votes that changed came from Daley’s recent appointees — Wild, Adams, and Malis. 4
Willis’s opponents were outraged, and they called another school boycott for June 10 and 11. The city’s political and business establishment once again lined up against the boycott. The Board of Education went to court and got an injunction prohibiting the CCCO and the NAACP from leading the boycott. The Sun-Times advised organizers to negotiate instead, asking “Of What Avail a Boycott?” And Daley urged parents to send their children to school. “It is only through education that we will have the type of society we want,” he said. Despite the opposition, on the appointed days 100,000 students stayed away from classes. CCCO head Al Raby, barred by the court order from working on the boycott, led several hundred protesters on a march on City Hall. No one was arrested, but Daley vowed that there would be no more protests. The next day, when the marchers returned, the police arrested more than 250 of them. Daley had limited patience with political demonstrations. He believed that the political process was the appropriate way of making decisions and allocating benefits. The leaders elected by the black wards were the machine politicians who were supporting him and opposing the school boycotts. If civil rights activists wanted their views to prevail, Daley believed, they should present themselves to the voters and win in an election. “Who is this man Raby?” Daley asked after the march on City Hall. “He doesn’t represent the people of Chicago.” Daley also believed in authority, as he was taught to in his traditional IrishCatholic upbringing in Bridgeport, and he was offended by the tactics of the Al Rabys of the world. “I come from a people who had no say in their government and so they came to this country,” Daley told an annual meeting of the South Shore Commission days after Raby’s City Hall march. “When they elected an official here, they had respect for him. But people today have forgotten this. Unless we have free men and women who uphold order and the law and have respect for the public officials they elect, then we have anarchy and conflict.” 5
Daley also blamed the media for the protests. “Consider the millions that are spent by commercial enterprises to get their messages before the readers and viewers of the mass media,” Daley told a graduating class at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “Then consider a lone picket marching around one public building and the publicity he gets. Would all these pickets be willing to march if they didn’t get their pictures on television? Would they stay if the reporters and television cameramen were to leave?” Daley found new villains to blame over the next few weeks. Some of the money for the anti-Willis protests might well be coming from Republicans, he charged at a press conference. And he announced that police files showed that many of the participants in the civil rights marches were Communists. “You know, these people take part in any disturbing thing they can,” Daley said. Raby responded by accusing Daley of engaging in “witch-hunting.” On June 28, school protest leaders met with Daley and the school board to try to work out their differences. Daley opened the meeting with a plea for negotiations “around the table, in the true American way, and not in the streets.” 6 The civil rights activists brought a nine-point list of demands, including immediate removal of Willis and adoption of a plan for integrating the Chicago school system. But it soon became clear Daley did not intend to offer much, and Raby called the two-hour session “fruitless.” The following day, Daley and the civil rights activists met with the school board. After Daley urged “coo
peration,” one CCCO member responded, “We stand ready to cooperate ... if the board will give us anything to cooperate with.” The meetings ended in stalemate, and with the CCCO vowing to take its case against the school system to the federal government. 7
Down South, the civil rights movement had begun to enter a new phase in the spring of 1965. It had been an arduous struggle, but it was finally being won. Popular opinion had steadily shifted in favor of King and his followers. In 1963, Time had named King its “Man of the Year.” In December 1964, he had received the Nobel Peace Prize. And in early 1965, the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches — which brought televised images of Alabama state troopers beating marchers into living rooms across the country — had solidified national support for the cause. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress had put the country firmly on the side of civil rights. There was still important work to be done implementing these new laws. Many schools and public accommodations needed to be integrated, and millions of blacks would have to be registered to vote. But the legal system of Jim Crow had gone down to defeat. 8
These successes had brought division in the ranks of the civil rights movement. Prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference leadership were urging King to declare victory in the South and bring the movement up to the big cities in the North. The debate was about ideology as much as geography. The problems of the urban centers in the North were mainly poverty and ghetto living conditions, not legal discrimination, so taking the civil rights movement north would mean reorienting it toward a greater focus on economic issues. James Bevel, an SCLC staff member with family ties to Chicago, was the most outspoken proponent of heading north. “Chicago is not that different from the South,” he argued. “Black Chicago is Mississippi moved north a few hundred miles.” But other influential activists argued that the SCLC should maintain its focus on the South. Bayard Rustin, the architect of the August 1963 March on Washington and one of the SCLC’s most respected strategists, maintained that the organization’s work in the South was not yet done. “SCLC’s special mission is to transform the eleven southern states,” Rustin argued. “There won’t be any real change in American politics and in the American social situation until that is done.” Andrew Young agreed, arguing that even with good laws on the books, the Justice Department could not be trusted to bring the lawsuits and apply the pressure that would be needed to dismantle the Jim Crow system. Young also worried that the move north was beyond the group’s limited resources. The SCLC was operating with a staff of only about one hundred and an annual budget of less than $1 million. “We’re just kidding ourselves if we say we can do Chicago and maintain the same presence in the South,” he insisted. 9
The real obstacle to bringing the movement north was the different kind of civil rights problems it would confront. In the South blacks were subordinated by law, and King and the SCLC succeeded in arguing that this kind of official discrimination had no place in America. But in the North, the laws were for the most part racially neutral. Discrimination against blacks was often a product of informal policies, like racial steering or racial preferences in employment; the actors were generally private, such as Realtors or union apprenticeship programs; and much of the harm done to blacks was a result of the overall economic and social conditions that prevailed in the ghetto. This kind of de facto discrimination was inherently more difficult to fight than the de jure discrimination that existed in the South. Rustin and others in the movement were convinced that an attempt to cure the racial ills of the North would end in failure. While the SCLC was debating how to proceed, Bevel began to talk openly about the need for a northern civil rights movement. At a fund-raiser at Northwestern University, in the Chicago suburbs, Bevel promised that when the Alabama voting rights campaign concluded, the SCLC would begin a drive to “break up ghetto life” in the North. “[T]he non-violent movement in a few days, in a few weeks, in a few years will call on Chicago to address itself on the racist attitude that is denying Negroes the right to live in adequate housing,” Bevel said. “We’re going to have a movement in Chicago.” 10
By the spring of 1965, critics’ worst fears about the State Street Corridor had been confirmed. In the three years since the first family moved in, Robert Taylor Homes had spiraled downward. In an April 1965 series on the project, the Chicago Daily News reported that its residents were “grappling with violence and vandalism, fear and suspicion, teen-age terror and adult chaos, rage, and resentment.” Garbage, beer bottles, and TV sets were thrown out of windows and over porch railings so frequently that maintenance workers routinely wore hard hats. Assaults were so common in the stairwells that county welfare workers were under orders not to use the stairs. With few sports facilities or social centers available, many young people passed time by loitering outside the buildings, getting drunk, and shooting off guns. “We live stacked on top of one another with no elbow room,” one mother of five told the Daily News. “Danger is all around. There is little privacy or peace and no quiet. And all the world looks on us as project rats.” The paper led one article in the series by quoting a seventeen-year-old boy standing on a twelfth-floor gallery in one of the project’s high-rises. “They ought to tear this whole place down and start all over,” he said. 11
While most impartial observers concluded early on that Robert Taylor was a model for disaster, Daley continued to defend it, even after the devastating Daily News series. The project was better than the “firetraps” and slum housing that had previously existed on the site, he insisted. Daley did not address the idea that after $70 million worth of government housing had been erected on the site, the standard of evaluating it should be higher than whether it was better than the tenement housing it had replaced. Daley, once again, blamed the media for stirring up trouble. Residents were being “castigated as living in ghettos,” he said, and were being “made to feel ashamed” of where they live. It did not help Daley’s credibility on the subject of poor people’s housing that just a few months later the chairman of the CHA, Charles Swibel, was cited for numerous code violations in the skid-row hotels under his management. Daley was also quick to defend Swibel, whom he praised as “one of our most outstanding citizens.” 12
Daley was not only defending the projects that had already gone up in the State Street Corridor — he was actively building new ones there. His latest plan was to build the Raymond Hilliard Center, a 710-unit public housing project, at the north end of State Street. Daley had received ample warning that it was the wrong place to construct still more public housing. In October 1964, when the Hilliard Center was still in the planning stages, the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council issued an urgent warning to Daley not to proceed. The proposed project would just add “more monolithic, high-rise buildings” to the “four-mile wall” along State Street, the council said. Monsignor John Egan, a respected pastor who was deeply involved in racial issues, brought his own objections directly to Swibel. “I appeared before him,” says Egan. “I repeated — they’re high-rise slums.” But Daley ignored the warnings and went ahead with his plan. “I lost because I don’t think the mayor of Chicago and the business community gave one damn,” says Egan. Hilliard was, at least in design, a departure from the Robert Taylor model. The architect was Bertrand Goldberg Associates, designer of the innovative Marina City luxury complex. Hilliard Center’s two buildings for families were made out of reinforced concrete and built in an arc shape, giving them an unusual look for a housing project. The two buildings in the project set aside for elderly tenants were cylindrical, and even more distinctive looking. In the beginning, some whites moved into Hilliard Center, but before long its family units were entirely black. 13
Hilliard Center was the final installment in the State Street Corridor. When it was completed in 1966, this strip of land one-quarter mile wide and four miles long was home to almost 40,000 poor black tenants. The five massive projects lined up along State Street — 710-unit Hillia
rd, 797-unit Harold Ickes Homes, 800-unit Dearborn Homes, 1,684-unit Stateway Gardens, and 4,415-unit Robert Taylor — took up thirty-four consecutive blocks, except for a stretch between 30th and 35th streets where the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is located. To the east lay the old Black Belt ghetto stretching out to Lake Michigan; to the west was the Dan Ryan Expressway, with its fourteen lanes of automobile traffic and commuter rail lines. “Most white Chicagoans thought the idea was splendid,” notes Chicago journalist Bill Gleason. “When lawyers, certified public accountants, stock and bond salesmen and politicians gazed from the windows of Rock Island commuter trains that brought them to the Loop from Morgan Park, Beverly Hills and Brainerd, they saw the progress of the construction of those highrises for the poor and were assured that ‘the Negroes are being kept in their place.’” 14
