American Pharaoh
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At the same time Daley was extending the State Street Corridor to the north and south, the CHA was actively keeping blacks out of public housing projects in the white parts of the city. In the mid-1960s, although blacks made up a large part of the public-housing waiting list, projects in white parts of the city remained almost completely white. At Trumbull Park, there were still only 27 blacks among the 435 families. At Lathrop Homes, located four miles north of the Loop, the 900 families included only 30 blacks, and at Lawn-dale Gardens, blacks were only 4 out of 125 families. At Bridge-port Homes, the housing project in Daley’s backyard, there were no blacks at all. It therefore came as no great surprise when, in late 1966, a former CHA supervisor revealed that the housing authority had been intentionally handing out apartments on the basis of race in order to keep the projects racially segregated. In a sworn statement in a race discrimination suit against the CHA filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Tamaara Tabb, the agency’s former supervisor of tenant selection, revealed that the housing authority kept separate waiting lists for white and black applicants — white families were called “A” and black families “B.” The CHA staff kept apartments in Trumbull Park, Lathrop Homes, Lawndale Gardens, and Bridgeport Homes vacant until a white applicant was available, rather than rent it to blacks on the waiting list. For a black family to be moved into a white project, Tabb said, there had to be “specific prior clearance of the executive director or his designee.” The agency’s experience was that if it took long enough to act, blacks on the waiting list would eventually accept an apartment in one of the city’s black projects. 15
On July 4, 1965, Al Raby filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Education charging the Chicago Board of Education with operating a segregated and unequal public school system. The CCCO formally requested that the federal government cut off all federal aid to the Chicago schools until the illegal conditions were corrected. In a second filing later in the month, the CCCO set out in detail its claims that the school system had drawn its district lines to keep the schools segregated, and that black schools were systematically shortchanged by the system. These practices were all intentional, the CCCO argued. “After all, it takes some real know-how to segregate a big-city school system,” said Meyer Weinberg. “You have to adopt elaborate rules and processes to make it work.” 16
The CCCO’s complaint was a bombshell. The modern round of civil rights laws had been passed by Congress to address the de jure racial discrimination that still prevailed in the South. The states of the Old Confederacy had laws on the books, and years of entrenched tradition, that expressly established separate schools for white children and black children. Federal education officials fully expected to be asked to use statutes such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred discrimination on the basis of race in federally funded activities, to force those states to dismantle their dual school systems. What they did not foresee was that, along with complaints from the South, they would receive challenges to the school systems of Chicago, Boston, and Chester, Pennsylvania. 17 The U.S. Office of Education was not even certain that statutes like Title VI applied to the de facto discrimination that existed in the North. When the CCCO’s complaint came in, staff members were not certain how to proceed. 18
The stakes for the CCCO’s complaint were high. In past years, a federal funding cutoff would have meant little, since school systems were mainly financed by states and localities. In April 1965, however, President Johnson and Congress signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, appropriating $1.3 billion in aid to the nation’s schools. The law was touted as benefiting education for poor children, and in fact it did provide more than $1 billion in new money for disadvantaged students. But a major reason for the new funding was to give President Johnson leverage to convince southern school systems to comply with the integration provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To get the new federal money, states had to be certified as meeting the integration requirements of the act for the start of the 1965–66 school year. The new funding law put enormous power in the hands of the U.S. commissioner of education, Francis Keppel, to prod southern schools to desegregate — and to do it more quickly than the Supreme Court, with its relatively undemanding “all deliberate speed” standard, was requiring. Keppel warned the seventeen southern and border states that they risked losing a total of $867 million in federal funds if they did not take specific steps to desegregate their schools, including integrating four out of twelve grades by the start of the new school year. Alabama stood to lose $54 million if it failed to comply, and Georgia would lose $64 million. What no one close to Daley considered at the time was that if the cutoff were applied to Chicago, it would lose $32 million. 19
After the Office of Education examined the CCCO’s complaint about the Chicago schools, Keppel declared it “unquestionably . . . the most detailed” one his department had ever received. One of the most compelling examples in the complaint concerned the schools in and around the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the Far South Side. Altgeld had been built during World War II as housing for black workers in nearby war industry plants. At the time, the sparsely populated area already had an all-white elementary school called Riverdale. Its graduates fed into nearby Fenger High School, which was more than 95 percent white. When Altgeld Gardens was built, three elementary schools and one high school, Carver High School, were included on the site. The school board issued a directive that no children from the Altgeld housing project would be assigned to Riverdale, even though it was only five blocks away. And even though Riverdale was only a few blocks from Carver High School — the new school built on the grounds of Altgeld, whose enrollment was 99 percent black — and a full three miles from Fenger, Riverdale students would continue to be assigned to Fenger after they graduated. The school system worked out this arrangement by adopting the fiction that Riverdale was actually a “branch” of another virtually all-white school, located four miles away, that fed its graduates to Fenger. The few white families who lived right next to Altgeld were taken care of through a second fiction. The area near the project was declared to be a “neutral zone,” whose residents could choose to attend any of the schools in the area, not necessarily the closest one. As it worked out, the white families chose to send their children to white schools. There was no way to explain the school board’s elaborate efforts except as an intentional attempt to keep white students from having to attend school with blacks. These race-based assignment rules applied even when they forced black children to attend badly overcrowded schools, and to attend in double-shifts. In 1964, average class sizes at the four schools in the housing project were 32.7 and higher, while average class size at Riverdale was less than 17. 20
The CCCO complaint also presented the Office of Education with the case of Orr High School. Orr was created in 1962 as a white “unit” of black West Side Marshall High School. It was housed not at Marshall, but inside the building of white Orr Elementary School. At first, Orr shared a principal with Marshall, but in 1964 it was given one of its own. The attendance zone for Orr High School was drawn so its feeder schools included the three white elementary schools in the area. The attendance zone for Marshall was drawn to include the black schools. Marshall ended up being severely overcrowded, and Orr significantly underutilized, but the school system did not alter the assignment patterns. The CCCO complaint also included twenty “cases for further study.” Among these were two schools in the racially changing North Lawndale neighborhood, all-white Hammond and all-black Pope. Hammond seemed to be underused — part of its building was demolished — while the overcrowded Pope operated on double-shifts for six years. The CCCO argued that Chicago’s school system was as unequal as it was segregated. The complaint marshaled an array of statistics showing that the more white a school was, the better off it seemed to be. White elementary schools in Chicago had an average of 29.7 pupils per classroom, while integrated and all-black elementary schools had averages of 34.0 and 34.4 respectively. White scho
ols had 12 percent noncertificated teachers, while integrated schools had 23 percent and black schools had 27 percent. And in white schools, when a teacher was absent a substitute was sent to cover the class 80 percent of the time, while in black schools, substitutes covered classes with absent teachers only 41 percent of the time. The complaint also raised questions about the Washburne Trade School, operated jointly by the school system and the city’s trade unions. Washburne was the only school in Chicago that prepared students for apprenticeships in the city’s trades. Though the city school system was majority black, Washburne’s enrollment was 97 percent white. 21
Martin Luther King and the SCLC were still trying to decide whether to bring their movement north. On July 23, King came to Chicago to lay the groundwork for a possible campaign there. Ironically, one of the factors that was drawing King to Chicago was Daley. King was impressed by how much power Daley had, and he was convinced that Daley’s absolute control over the city could ultimately work to the movement’s advantage. “King decided to come to Chicago because . . . Chicago was unique in that there was one man, one source of power,” says the Reverend Arthur Brazier, of The Woodlawn Organization. “This wasn’t the case in New York or any other city. He thought if Daley could be persuaded of the rightness of open housing and integrated schools that things could be done.” Earl Bush, Daley’s press secretary, agrees that Daley’s role was a critical factor in bringing King to town. “King considered Daley to be in complete control of Chicago, which in a way he was,” says Bush. “King thought that if Daley would go before a microphone and say, ‘Let there be no more discrimination,’ there wouldn’t be.” 22
Daley dispatched Ed Marciniak, executive director of the Commission on Human Relations, to greet King personally on his arrival. It was Marciniak’s introduction to a role he would play repeatedly over the next year. “My job,” he says, “was to never let it grow into . . . confrontation.” The warm welcome belied Daley’s true feelings about King and his tactics. Daley was bitterly opposed to the civil rights movement’s insistence on working outside the existing political structure. In his machine-politics view of the world, blacks elected aldermen and ward committeemen to represent them, and Chicago blacks had never elected King and his followers to anything. “Daley felt there were good black people and bad black people,” says Edward Holmgren, a former CHA official under Elizabeth Wood who went on to become executive director of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities. “The good black people were people like Bill Dawson and the Silent Six.” King also insisted on carrying out his campaign in a language Daley did not speak. To Daley, politics was a process of negotiation. A ward committeeman who delivered 20,000 votes on election day was entitled to a certain number of patronage jobs, and to a say in where a fire station was placed in his ward. Anyone who wanted city policy to change had to show where his support was coming from, and why he had the kind of clout that made him worth listening to. King’s appeals were not to politics, but to a sense of right, and his tools were not votes, but slogans, marches, and publicity. “King didn’t think, ‘I have thirty units of power so I get thirty units of results,’” says veteran Chicago reporter Paul McGrath. “He was operating in a whole different way.” 23
Nor did Daley agree with the substance of King’s message. It was one thing in Montgomery, Alabama, to say that blacks should not be forced by law to ride in the back of a public bus. But Chicago did not have legally enforced racial segregation. To King, Chicago was the “most segregated city in the North,” but to Daley it was simply a “city of neighborhoods.” What King viewed as Jim Crow–like segregation, Daley saw as the natural instinct of free people to stick with their own kind. Daley also believed that King was asking the government to do things for blacks that they should be doing for themselves. Of course blacks did not want to live in slums — just as Irish immigrants, if given a choice, would not have wanted to live in shacks along the banks of the Chicago River. The Irish worked hard, digging canals and slaughtering livestock, until they could move into better jobs and better neighborhoods. Daley did not see why King’s followers could not work hard and pursue their own path to the American dream. “Why don’t blacks act like the Jews, the Poles, the Irish, and the Italians — he was constantly frustrated by that question,” recalls former Daley aide Richard Wade. 24
Daley’s opposition to King was also rooted in simple politics. King’s prescription for Chicago would have freed blacks to move out of the ghetto and into white neighborhoods. If King succeeded in integrating Chicago, it would change the demographic layout of the city to the detriment of the machine. Blacks would move out of the traditional black wards, where ward committeemen and precinct captains had for years been turning them out consistently for the machine’s candidates. And when blacks moved in, whites would flee their neighborhoods for the suburbs, cutting into another important part of the machine base. Just as troubling, the civil rights movement challenged the machine’s careful racial balancing act. The machine held on to black votes by giving the black community patronage jobs rather than civil rights, and it held on to the white vote by assuring the Bungalow Belt that it would not be integrated. If integration became a real possibility, the machine would be challenged from the left in black wards, by independent candidates promising to fight hard for integration. And in the white wards, white backlash candidates would run to the machine’s right, promising to be more out-spoken in opposition to open housing. Even King’s visit had set off warning signals among white voters, who were watching to see how Daley handled it. “Daley’s main job as political leader was to keep the lid on blacks,” says independent alderman Leon Despres. “He was terrified when Martin Luther King Jr. came to Chicago.” 25
There was also something more visceral about Daley’s reaction to King’s arrival. Chicago was Daley’s city, and he did not understand what King and his followers were doing there. “It was like if you came home and found a burglar in your living room,” said McGrath. Like many southern politicians before him, Daley was irate that out-of-town agitators — even ones led by a Nobel Peace Prize recipient — had arrived to stir up trouble and make demands. “Daley was very dogmatic,” says CHA chairman Charles Swibel. “He felt that no one was going to come into his city . . . and disrupt it.” This direct challenge to his control over Chicago bothered Daley to the point of making him physically ill. Before King’s Chicago Campaign was over, Dan Rostenkowski would suggest to presidential aide Lawrence O’Brien that the White House find an assignment that would take his friend Daley “out of the country for a week or two.” Rostenkowski was “most concerned,” he told O’Brien, about the toll the civil rights campaign in Chicago was having “on the mayor personally.” 26
Unlike the governors and sheriffs King squared off with in the South, Daley was shrewd enough to keep his emotions in check. King had a productive visit in Chicago, meeting with community groups, preaching at two churches, and speaking to a crowd of 15,000 in suburban Winnetka. On July 26, King addressed an even larger gathering at Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park, and then led a march on City Hall. Standing outside City Hall, King offered a prayer for the “nonwhite citizens of this city, who have walked for years through the darkness of racial segregation and a nagging sense of nobodyness.” After King returned home, Daley showered him with kind words. His “position against poverty and discrimination, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” was one that “all right-thinking Americans should support,” Daley said. The two men had minor differences, Daley acknowledged, but “there can be no disagreement that we must root out poverty, rid the community of slums, eliminate discrimination and segregation wherever they may exist, and improve the quality of education.” Daley sounded like a committed civil rights activist. No wonder that before King’s Chicago Campaign concluded, he and his followers would compare their encounter with Daley to “punching a pillow.” 27
Meanwhile, by the summer of 1965, Chicago’s home-grown civil rights marches were no longe
r generating much attention. Dick Gregory, the comedian and civil rights activist, had led more than forty marches from Buckingham Fountain to City Hall, and they were all starting to look the same. Civil rights activists were trying to come up with more innovative approaches. At a July 24 CORE march on City Hall to protest slum housing, the fifty demonstrators came armed with dead rats. One female protester placed a dead rat on the desk of a receptionist for one of Daley’s aides. The marchers carried signs with slogans like “Mayor Daley, would you want a rat for a roommate?” The next day, Chicago civil rights activists added a new twist by following Daley outside the borders of Illinois. When he arrived in Detroit for a meeting of mayors, they arranged for pickets to be on hand to welcome him. “Mayor Daley, won’t you please go home?” asked one of the signs. 28
Another variation, introduced by Gregory, was a series of evening marches into Bridgeport. These demonstrations drew heightened media attention because of the drama of blacks descending on Daley’s home. And they had the added advantage of highlighting the fact that Chicago’s mayor lived in a neighborhood that was not integrated. The marchers were under orders to behave themselves, walking two-by-two, keeping on the sidewalk, and remaining silent. The sight of blacks in the heart of Bridgeport was unsettling to many neighborhood residents, but they also made an effort to restrain themselves. A few whites held signs reading “We know and love our Mayor” and “Daley is for Democracy, pickets are for publicity,” and some shouted “Go back to the zoo!” But Daley had 11th Ward precinct workers circulate through the neighborhood telling residents not to get drawn into any confrontations. “The one overwhelming impression you get is this,” journalist Lois Wille wrote in The Nation. “Here are two teams of superbly disciplined, fiercely determined combatants. Neither is going to yield — ever.” 29