American Pharaoh
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The tense peace in Bridgeport did not hold. A minor riot broke out on August 2, 1965, when two thousand whites threw eggs, tomatoes, and rocks at the civil rights marchers. The police told the black protesters that their presence was creating a dangerous situation, and ordered them to leave. When most decided to remain, sixty-five were arrested, including Gregory. In a letter to NAACP Legal Defense Fund counsel Jack Greenberg requesting legal help, Al Raby described the scene. “Large ‘Ku Klux Klan’ signs were prominently displayed in several places,” Raby wrote. “‘Wallace for President’ signs were numerous, and a group of sub-teens, mostly girls, sang, ‘I wish I were an Alabama trooper. Yes, that is what I would truly like to be, I wish I were an Alabama trooper, Cuz then I could kill niggers legally.’ The police, however, arrested us, the silent demonstrators, stating publicly that they were arresting ‘the cause of the riot,’ not the rioters.” Daley stayed in his home throughout the confrontation, and later lashed out at the marchers for coming to Bridgeport. “People in their homes have a right to privacy,” he said. “I don’t think it helps their cause to be marching in residential areas. I think they are surely trying to create tension.” 30
The fight over Chicago’s anti-poverty programs was starting to heat up. The War on Poverty was being attacked on both sides: Daley and his fellow mayors charged that it was being used to undermine elected city government, while poverty activists contended that city governments had hijacked programs that were intended to be run by poor people. Chicago’s CAP was operating, its critics said, with maximum feasible participation of the Democratic machine. At the central office, Deton Brooks and his staff carefully screened funding applications to make sure that no anti-poverty money found its way to the machine’s enemies. And at the community level, the advisory Organization protested that only seven of its nominees had been selected for the twenty-five-member Woodlawn advisory council — not enough to have any real impact on its decisions. Daley responded by raising the number of TWO members to twenty-one, but at the same time increasing the council’s total membership to seventy-five, maintaining machine control. In making its funding decisions, the Woodlawn advisory council steered clear of projects that might possibly stir up trouble. It rejected a $500,000 program by the Interreligious Council on Urban Affairs to develop leaders in West Side neighborhoods, but accepted another proposal for choir singing. The Woodlawn Organization tried an end-run around the machine by submitting two proposals — for a medical center and for a day-care center — directly to the OEO, but both were rejected. The overall result of the Chicago Concept, its critics charged, was that poor people were shut out of the decision-making process. “The poor are being pushed out of planning poverty programs by men who drive Cadillacs, eat three-inch steaks and sip champagne at their luncheon meetings,” one minister complained. 31
The allegations that Daley’s Chicago Concept was violating the CAP guidelines were heard in Washington. In January 1965, the OEO notified Brooks that Chicago’s CAP was in danger of having councils were firmly in the grip of machine loyalists. The Woodlawn its funding cut off. As it turned out, Chicago kept its funding but Robert D. Shackford, the acting head of the OEO’s midwestern office who lodged the complaint, lost his job. His post was later filled by Theodore Jones, the same black machine politician Daley and Dawson had installed as president of the Chicago branch of the NAACP in 1956, replacing the activist Willoughby Abner. Though it seemed obvious that Daley had forced Shackford out and dictated Jones’s appointment, Shriver dismissed the charges as “rumor-mongering.” Daley was one of “hundreds of people” who had been consulted before Jones’s selection, Shriver conceded, “but under no stretch of the imagination did Daley suggest him or force such an appointment.” A year later, Governor Kerner rewarded Jones for his work at the OEO by appointing him state revenue director. In April 1965, the House Committee on Education and Labor’s subcommittee on the War on Poverty held hearings at which critics were given a national forum to lash out against Daley’s management of CAP. “In Chicago, there is no war against poverty,” TWO president Lynward Stevenson fumed. “There is only more of the ancient, galling war against the poor.” Stevenson attacked Chicago’s CAP for shutting out neighborhood organizations. “We have asked Deton Brooks for funds for a day care center and for a medical center, but he cannot talk sense,” he said. “He speaks the meaningless sociological drivel designed not to lift people but to keep them dependent.” But for Stevenson, the real villain was Daley, whom he called “a plantation boss who thinks he knows what’s right for the slaves.” 32
Daley had his own concerns about CAP. He worried that poor people’s advocates would find a way to gain access to the program’s funding, and use it to hurt the machine. And he believed that the OEO was too sympathetic to these insurgent forces. As the Shack-ford firing showed, Daley’s political connections allowed him to have his way with the program. When necessary, he was willing to take his complaints directly to the president. “What in the hell are you people doing?” Johnson aide Bill Moyers recalls Daley asking. “Does the President know he’s putting money in the hands of subversives? To poor people that aren’t a part of the organization? Didn’t the President know they’d take that money to bring him down?” Johnson, who did not want to risk losing Daley’s support over the issue of community participation in CAP, would regularly take his side over the OEO. “We had problems with Daley on everything, ” says CAP director of operations Frederick Hayes, “and he always went to the White House, and always won.” Other mayors had more trouble fighting off the federal bureaucrats. Philadelphia mayor James Tate tried to create a city department to run the War on Poverty, but when he asked for $13 million in federal funds, Sargent Shriver turned him down until the city established an independent anti-poverty organization. Shriver was also openly feuding with Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty over that city’s failure to establish a program that sufficiently included the poor. The OEO said the city’s Youth Opportunities Board failed to meet federal guidelines because it did not represent all of the city’s constituencies. Yet despite its obvious domination by City Hall and the machine, Shriver hailed Chicago’s CAP as “the model CAP in the country.” 33
Daley eventually became the leader of a group of big-city mayors who shared his concerns about the uses to which CAP was being put. In New York, Mayor Wagner was at war with Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell over control of New York’s anti-poverty funds, which Powell charged were being used for “fiestas of political patronage.” In Los Angeles, Mayor Yorty was risking $22 million in federal funds by refusing to appoint representatives of the poor to his board, insisting that it would be wrong to allow nonelected private citizens to make decisions about spending public money. In San Francisco, Mayor John Shelley also refused to allow representatives of the poor, asking, “What if they elect a Communist or a criminal?” And Syracuse’s Republican mayor William Walsh charged that anti-poverty money in his city was going to political activists who seemed intent on removing him from office. “These people go into a housing project and talk about setting up a ‘democratic organization’ — small ‘d’ — but it sounds just the same as Democratic — big ‘d,’” Walsh complained. 34
Daley and the other mayors insisted that more control over the program be given to city government. The mayors made it clear that unless CAP yielded to them, they would withdraw their political support. Daley warned that the “irresponsible, scurrilous charges” being lodged by organizations like TWO threatened the very survival of the War on Poverty. Congressman Roman Pucinski, following his boss’s lead, warned that as a result of the “fantastic power struggle going on all over America” for control of CAP, “the poverty program has never been in graver danger.” At a June 1965 meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Saint Louis, Daley was chosen to chair a new War on Poverty Committee. The mayors were prepared to adopt a resolution accusing federal anti-poverty programs of “fostering class struggle” against city government, and urging the OEO to work t
hrough city halls in administering CAP projects. But they agreed that rather than embarrass the president by doing so, they would work with the administration to change its anti-poverty policy. Later in the month, Daley and a group of his fellow mayors had a productive meeting on the subject with Vice President Hubert Humphrey. “It was agreed that the success of the program depends on very extensive leadership by local government and that’s what they are going to get,” said Conference of Mayors executive director John J. Gunther. “The local government is to be the principal organizer at the local level.” The Johnson administration, true to its word, began to exert pressure on the OEO to address the mayors’ concerns. A front-page article in the New York Times on November 5, 1965, reported that the Budget Bureau, the fiscal arm of the White House, had informed the OEO that in its view maximum feasible participation “means primarily using the poor to carry out the program, not to design it.” Reports leaking out of the OEO also indicated that controversial programs would no longer be permitted to bypass city government and appeal for funds directly to Washington. 35
In another sign of warming relations between the OEO and the nations’ mayors, Shriver went to Chicago on December 6 for a Daley-sponsored conference on the War on Poverty. Daley used the conference to promote his idea of having politicians control anti-poverty efforts. “What’s wrong ... if the politician is conducting his office in a proper manner with integrity and with honor?” Daley asked. In his remarks, Shriver echoed Daley’s views by praising the positive role “the establishment” was playing in the War on Poverty. “Let’s not prejudge the establishment,” Shriver said. “The establishment is not a bunch of guys in black hats against good guys in white hats.” Shriver was warmly received inside the hall. But the two hundred demonstrators gathered outside, holding placards with slogans like “The war on poverty is a big fraud,” were less impressed. And The Woodlawn Organization was circulating an eleven-page “black paper” attacking the War on Poverty as a war against the poor. “We are sick unto despair of having rich whites and their carefully chosen black flunkies tell us what our problems are, make decisions for us, and set our children’s future,” the black paper declared. Shriver’s new stand on maximum feasible participation seemed to reflect the current thinking of the Johnson administration, but some critics also suspected a more personal motivation. Shriver reportedly wanted to run for governor or senator from Illinois, and his new views on CAP seemed like a blatant appeal for Daley’s support. 36
What was being lost in the rush to capitulate to Daley was the fact that his CAP continued to flout federal law. There was still, as Republican congressman Charles Goodell insisted, an “almost total lack of involvement of the poor in the Chicago program.” There was also evidence that much of the money was not making its way to poor people: a study of Chicago’s Head Start program found that more than 27 percent of the enrolled children came from families with incomes above the legal limit, including some “very affluent” children. Federal investigators had also determined that more than 70 percent of all anti-poverty funds spent in the city was going to pay salaries of anti-poverty workers, which seemed to support critics’ charges that money for poor people was being used for patronage. A bipartisan delegation headed by New York Democrat Hugh Carey came to Chicago on February 16, 1965, to investigate Chicago’s anti-poverty programs firsthand. But no one had made Daley comply with the law so far, and it seemed unlikely a few critics in Congress would have any more success. 37
Martin Luther King, who was by now leaning strongly toward bringing his movement north to Chicago, had his mind made up for him one sweltering summer night in Los Angeles. On August 11, 1965, a California highway patrolman pulled over a black man for what should have been a routine driving-while-intoxicated stop. But Watts, a northern-style ghetto set down among the palm trees of Southern California, responded by erupting in rioting. As false rumors spread — among them, that the officers had attacked a pregnant woman with a billy club — a crowd showed up at the scene and began throwing rocks at the police. A mob of 2,000 was soon roaming the area, vandalizing cars, looting stores, and assaulting strangers. It grew to 5,000, many armed with guns and Molotov cocktails, and spread out over a 150-block area. Arsonists set hundreds of fires, and snipers shot at the 14,000 National Guardsmen who had been called in to put down the disturbance. After six days of rioting, the death toll stood at 34, with another 898 injured, and more than 4,000 arrested. Economic losses were estimated at $45 million. 38
The Watts riots stunned the nation. The sheer fury that had been unleashed was unprecedented. Only the Detroit race riots of 1943 had produced as many fatalities, and they had resulted in far less physical damage. King traveled to Watts just as the unrest was ending, and when he toured the riot-scarred neighborhood he was deeply affected by what he saw. It was not lost on King and his followers that the uprising had occurred not in the South, where black anger was expected, but in a big-city ghetto. The depth and breadth of the anger that set off the rioting struck him as a powerful argument for extending the civil rights movement to the rest of the country, and trying to improve the condition of blacks in places like Watts. Having come around to the view that he and his followers had mistakenly “neglected the cities of the North,” King now added his powerful voice to those who were pushing for SCLC to choose a northern site for its next major campaign. 39
The SCLC considered several large cities, including New York, for its historic journey north. But there were many compelling reasons for choosing Chicago. In terms of racial segregation, it was as bad as any major city, north or south. In 1959, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had called Chicago “the most residentially segregated large city in the nation.” The racial separation that the Jim Crow system preserved by law, Chicago had simply achieved through other means: racial steering by real estate brokers; racially restrictive covenants on house sales; and the ever-present threat of violence if established racial boundaries were crossed. Blacks were no more welcome in working-class white neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago than they were in white neighborhoods in Alabama. To King, Chicago was “the Birmingham of the North,” and he said that if the civil rights movement could “break the system in Chicago, it can be broken anywhere in the country.” 40
The SCLC staff was also impressed by Chicago’s indigenous civil rights activists. The CCCO was the largest local civil rights network in any northern city. And it had already scored some notable successes, with its two school boycotts and the anti-Willis campaign, which had succeeded in getting the superintendent of schools to resign, if only briefly. Chicago’s civil rights community had received King warmly on his last visit, which had not been the case in every city he stopped in. On the same trip, King and the SCLC had been greeted warily by black leaders in other cities. In New York, Adam Clayton Powell, the influential Harlem congressman, had been critical of King and publicly warned him against bringing the movement to New York. The head of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, Cecil Moore, had also warned King away, protesting loudly that his visit would only serve to help the white power structure to diminish “my stature in the Negro community” and pit blacks against blacks. Chicago’s civil rights leadership, by contrast, had been actively campaigning for the SCLC to come to town. The SCLC had learned hard lessons in the South about the importance of working closely with the local leadership, and the CCCO seemed to offer the best new allies for what would be a difficult campaign. 41
A decision was reached, but it was not unanimous. Some SCLC activists were skeptical about the movement’s chances of succeeding in the north, and they did not agree that Chicago was hospitable terrain. At a meeting in Atlanta, Rustin and SCLC staffer Tom Kahn tried to persuade King he was underestimating the difficulty of prevailing in Chicago — and underestimating Daley. “King had this naive faith that he could do in Chicago what he had done in the South, that he could reach down and inspire them, and so forth,” says Kahn. “And Bayard kept saying, ‘You don’t know what you are
talking about. You don’t know what Chicago is like.... You’re going to get wiped out.’” 42
The day after the rioting began in Watts, Chicago had its own ghetto uprising. On August 12, 1965, a speeding hook-and-ladder truck lost control on its way out of a fire station, knocking over a stop sign, and a young woman in the West Garfield Park neighborhood was killed. West Garfield Park had deteriorated considerably since Daley stopped the University of Illinois from locating its Chicago campus in the area. In just five years, it had changed from being 84 percent white and solidly middle-class to 85 percent black and desperately poor. The fire station involved in the accident was staffed entirely by whites, and civil rights protesters had been picketing outside it for weeks, protesting its employment policies. Neighborhood residents, prodded by rumors and leaflets alleging that a “drunken white fireman” had caused the fatal accident, began to riot and did not stop for the next four nights. Roving bands of neighborhood residents threw rocks and bricks at white pedestrians and drivers, and a white plainclothes policeman was beaten up. 43
At a City Hall press conference, Police Superintendent Wilson, flanked by Daley, warned that unless West Side residents did “all in their power” to assist the police, the situation was in danger of becoming as bad as Watts. When the violence finally ended, there were 80 injuries and 169 arrests. Together with Watts, the rioting was a sign of the growing level of desperation in black ghettos across the country. And like Watts, it showed the chasm of mistrust that had developed between poor blacks and the largely white police and fire departments that worked in their neighborhoods. Raby and other black leaders regarded the riots as a warning of serious social problems that had to be addressed before more violence occurred. But Daley viewed the unrest in less complicated terms. “It was a question of lawlessness and hooliganism,” he said. 44 Raby asked for a meeting to discuss the situation, and Daley agreed. But rather than engaging in the substantive discussion Raby was hoping for, Daley had various city officials explain how much was already being done for the black community. “This was not the meeting I had requested,” Raby said bitterly. The riots did succeed in getting the first black firefighters assigned to the West Garfield Park station. “We have been trying to integrate that firehouse for 10 years,” said National Urban League executive director Edwin Berry, “and with a killing and a riot they integrated it in two minutes.” Six weeks after the riot, 40 of the city’s 132 fire-houses were racially integrated. But of the 4,446 uniformed firemen only 209, or at least minimally less than 5 percent, were black. 45