by Adam Cohen
But if parts of Chicago reminded them of home, King and the SCLC staff quickly realized just how different this sprawling urban metropolis was from the South. It was far larger than the other cities they had organized campaigns in before — 10 times as large as Birmingham, and 100 times as large as Selma. Ralph Abernathy recalls how astonished he was the first time Jesse Jackson took him on a driving tour of Chicago. “As we drove through the South Side, where a large segment of the black population lived, we kept waiting for the slum tenements to give way to warehouses, vacant lots, and then country stores and open fields where cows were grazing,” he recalls. “Instead we saw more slum blocks. And more. And more. We had a feeling that if we drove much farther south we were going to see the Gulf of Mexico. ‘That’s nothing,’ said Jesse. ‘Wait till you see the West Side.’” And to southerners used to a region where almost everyone fell into the simple category of “black” or “white,” Chicago was a confusing array of Irish, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, and other ethnic groups. 2
Another thing the SCLC was unprepared for when it arrived in Chicago was the opposition it would face from significant parts of the black community. “Chicago was the first city that we ever went to as members of the SCLC staff where the black ministers and black politicians told us to go back where we came from,” says Dorothy Tillman, then a young SCLC staff member from Alabama. “Dr. King would frequently say to me, ‘You ain’t never seen no Negroes like this, have you Dorothy?’ I would reply, ‘No, Reverend.’ He said, ‘Boy if we could crack these Chicago Negroes we can crack anything.’” Some Chicago blacks professed to be as offended as Daley that outsiders were coming and telling them what to do. “Dr. King can move into Alabama and say, ‘This is it,’” said the Reverend W.H. Nichols, a West Side minister, “but here in Chicago each man stands on his own two feet.” To some on the SCLC staff, the black opposition seemed to be rooted in years of oppression by whites. “The Negroes of Chicago have a greater feeling of powerlessness than I’ve ever seen,” says SCLC staff member Hosea Williams. “They don’t participate in the governmental process because they are beaten down psychologically. We are used to working with people who want to be free.” But the truth was, much of the opposition came not because Chicago blacks were powerless, but because they had more power than blacks in the rural South. Daley, who needed black votes in a way that southern politicians did not, had handed out elected offices, patronage jobs, and money in the black community, and had singled out a few Dawsons and Metcalfes to represent blacks on a citywide level. These black leaders, and their armies of patronage workers, had a personal stake in the status quo, in a way that few blacks in Selma or Birmingham did. 3
One of the most prominent of the machine’s black allies was the Reverend Joseph H. Jackson, the Olivet Baptist Church pastor who had been booed off the stage with Daley at the NAACP’s July 4, 1963, rally in Grant Park. “When the white establishment wanted to find out what was going on,” says civil rights activist John McDermott, “they consulted J.H.” Jackson, who had been a strong supporter of Willis, bitterly opposed the Chicago Freedom Movement. He was particularly outspoken in his attacks against King, whom he viewed as a rival, accusing him of waging a “militant campaign against his own denomination and his own race.” Jackson never relented in his views of the Nobel Prize–winning civil rights leader. After King’s assassination, Jackson moved the front entrance of his church from South Park Way to a side street so its official address would not bear the boulevard’s new name, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. King and the SCLC were not prepared for these anti–civil rights black ministers, but they were also disappointed to see how reluctant even ostensibly sympathetic black clergy were to stand up for civil rights. “Many ministers who were with us had to back off because they didn’t want their buildings to be condemned or given citations for electrical work, faulty plumbing, or fire code violations,” says the Reverend Clay Evans of the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church. Mattie Hopkins of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, who had worked with King in Selma and Montgomery, says she never saw King as depressed as he was after meeting with a group of black ministers in Chicago. The ministers told King that they supported him, but could not speak out from their pulpits because they had already come under pressure from mortgage holders, city building inspectors, and others with ties to the Democratic machine. “He got his first real picture of the way Daley ran this town,” Hopkins says. The SCLC located its headquarters in the Warren Avenue Congregational Church, which had a white minister, because they could not find a black minister who would give the group space. The other religious group the SCLC was not prepared for was the Chicago-based Nation of Islam, which did not share the Chicago Freedom Movement’s goal of racial integration. “If anything they were more zealous in support of segregation than Mayor Daley, since the mayor paid lip service to racial tolerance and the Muslims were black supremacists,” says Abernathy. “They would probably have joined us if we had proposed killing all the white people, but they certainly didn’t want to listen to anyone preach the gospel of brotherly love.” 4
As political theater, the decision to move King into a tenement apartment was a masterstroke. The Chicago Defender was delighted with the plan, declaring that “[w]hile there he will eat, sleep, and absorb the full meaning of what it is to call a hovel ‘home.’” The Freedom Movement’s initial efforts to secure an apartment for him failed, as landlords declined to rent when they learned who the tenant would be. But eventually, organizers found a four-room, third-floor walk-up apartment at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in the West Side’s Lawndale neighborhood — often called “Slumdale” — and rented it in the name of an SCLC staff member. The $90-a-month apartment was to house King and his wife, Coretta, although the couple planned to make weekly trips to Atlanta so King could conduct Sunday services at Ebenezer Baptist Church. An adjoining apartment was rented for the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the SCLC vice president. Furniture was brought in from a secondhand furniture dealer. When King moved in on January 26, 1966, more than three hundred people were on hand to greet him and Coretta. The apartment was not nearly as bad as most slum apartments in the area, and when the landlord realized who would be moving in he sent work crews out to improve it. “[T]he entire place had been painted, re-papered, and redecorated,” Abernathy says. “It didn’t look like an apartment in House Beautiful, but it was clean and bright — probably the best looking quarters within fifty blocks of that location.” The joke in Chicago civil rights circles was that the best way to end the slums would be to have King move from apartment to apartment and watch each one get fixed up. Still, even after white paint had been thrown on the living room walls, and yellow and gray paint slapped on in the other rooms, the apartment was undeniably a tenement. The building that housed it was still in poor shape, with a strong smell of urine wafting through the stairwells, impervious to all efforts to clean it out with disinfectant. “There were no lights in the hall, and only one dim light at the head of the stairs,” Coretta Scott King said after spending one night in the apartment. “There was not even a lock on the door. I had never seen anything like it.” And the neighborhood was tough enough to cause many of the new southern transplants to fear for their lives. “I was truly frightened that some junkie was going to knife me for twenty dollars,” says Young. “When walking up those four dark, creaky flights of stairs at night, my heart would pound and wouldn’t slow for some time after I was within our apartment with the door securely bolted.” In a matter of days, King saw the effect of the environment on his own children. “Their tempers flared and they sometimes reverted to almost infantile behavior,” he wrote later. The South Hamlin Avenue tenement apartment was “just too hot, too crowded, too devoid of forms of recreation.” Life in Lawndale, King said, “was about to produce an emotional explosion in my own family.” 5
The new tenants were not particularly conscientious about tenement-living. King often stayed at a friend’s more inviting home, and Abernathy, after sp
ending a night or two on South Hamlin, checked into a hotel in a black part of town. But they spent enough time in Lawndale to get an education in northern ghetto life. King used the apartment to hold educational sessions and strategy meetings. He invited activists to talk with him about conditions across the city and ideas for action, and let each of his guests give a presentation on his area of expertise. “After each one talked, King said something to relate it to what had come before,” says Meyer Weinberg, who was there as an education expert. “You could see how brilliant he was, how he was putting it all together tactically.” King and other SCLC staff ventured out on neighborhood tours, which let them witness Chicago slum life up close. On one walking tour, Raby took King to a twelve-unit apartment building, originally built as a six-flat, where two families shared a bathroom that had been burned out in a fire and was no longer fit to be used. “We are here in Chicago,” King told the residents, “to say to ourselves and to the Negro community that we can do something about our condition if we organize a union to end slums.” Another time, King and Abernathy toured a building not far from their own that was without heat, hot water, and electricity, and where mothers said they had to keep a candlelight vigil through the night to protect their children from “rats as large as cats.” Louise Mitchell, a mother of ten children including a ten-week-old baby, showed the visitors her run-down third-floor apartment, where boards and bottles were used to plug up large holes in the walls. Another tenant pointed to an area behind his kitchen stove and told King, “That’s where I usually catch all of the rats.” King and Abernathy asked the tenants if they had considered holding a rent strike. 6
Another aspect of northern life that was unfamiliar to the SCLC staff was Chicago’s gang culture. Atlanta and Montgomery had nothing like the Blackstone Rangers, the Vice Lords, and the Cobras, which had divided up poor neighborhoods on the South and West sides. James Bevel had been working with gang members, and the Freedom Movement leaders hoped they could be brought into the movement. In his first night at the South Hamlin Avenue apartment, King met with six members of the Vice Lords, who stopped by to “meet the leader.” On his tours of the neighborhood, King always made a point of engaging gang members. He listened to the young men’s complaints about the bleakness of ghetto life, and their constant run-ins with other gangs, white mobsters, and abusive Chicago police. The answer, King told them, was not arming themselves with switchblades and handguns, but joining in nonviolent struggle to change the conditions they were living in. “Power in Chicago,” King told them, “means getting the largest political machine in the nation to say yes when it wants to say no.” 7
Rather than accept the role of villain in King’s drama about the Chicago slums, Daley decided to begin his own campaign against substandard living conditions in the ghetto. Coming back from an eight-day vacation with Sis and four of the children to the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico, Daley declared at the San Juan airport that there were “no slums” in Chicago, only “bad housing.” In a January 26, 1966, taped television appearance, he predicted that all of the city’s blighted buildings would be eliminated in the next two years. 8 Daley insisted that he was working as hard as anyone to improve conditions in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. “All of us, like Dr. King, are trying to eliminate slums,” he said. “Elimination of slums is the No. 1 program of this administration, and we feel we have done more in this field than any other city.” Daley argued that federal and state government also had to be part of the solution, and he traveled to Washington on February 3 to lobby President Johnson for a proposed $2.3 billion nationwide anti-slum program. When he returned to Chicago, he held a joint city-county press conference on February 10, 1966, at which he committed “the full power and resources of the city to be used in an unlimited way to erase the slum blight.” Daley’s timetable was speeding up: now he said his goal was to wipe out all slum housing in the city by 1967. 9
Daley’s office gave him some advantages over the civil rights protesters when it came to waging a war on slums. King could try to organize tenants to withhold rent, but Daley could engage in a rent strike of his own, since the county welfare department paid for private housing for many poor families. To drive the point home, he held a joint press conference with the Cook County public aid director, who threatened to withhold monthly rent payments for 1,600 welfare recipients unless their landlords cured building code violations immediately. “I believe we now have in sight the complete wiping out of slums in Chicago,” the public aid director declared. “Slums have been winning the battle up to now, but this changes the tide.” Daley also announced a new drive to inspect living conditions in slum buildings. The city had assigned as many as fifty housing consultants and aides to conduct the inspections, Daley said, and the city’s legal office was considering putting various slum buildings across the city into receivership by the Chicago Dwellings Association, a quasi-public agency, which could collect rent and then arrange for repairs to be made. To show he was serious, Daley made public a list of eight specific landlords who had been ordered to make repairs, most of whom, he said, “have been in and out of court.” 10
It was obvious that his anti-slum campaign was an effort to co-opt King and the SCLC, but Daley denied it. “We have been doing much code enforcement and placing many buildings in receivership long before Dr. King arrived in Chicago,” he said. If the city seemed to be stepping up its efforts, it was only because new laws were now available for use against landlords, Daley said. But the Republican sponsor of a law making it a felony for landlords to violate the building code, state senator Arthur Swanson, said Daley had never bothered to use his substantial legal authority to take on slum conditions until King arrived in town. “It does little good for legislators to act on vital public needs if elected officials will not make efficient use of the new laws,” Swanson complained. Now that Daley had adopted the anti-slum cause, he pursued it aggressively. On March 1, he announced an ambitious new program of door-to-door inspections for code violations in 15,000 buildings in three poor West Side neighborhoods including, as it happened, the one King now lived in. At the same time, Daley was sending emissaries out on a more surreptitious mission: going to community leaders in the neighborhoods the Chicago Freedom Movement was trying to organize and buying them off with offers of city money for their programs. “[A]s fast as they would organize a neighborhood,” recalls Andrew Young, “the Daley forces would come in and offer a preacher a contract for subsidized day care in his church.” 11
The biggest blunder southern officials had made in dealing with the civil rights movement was their angry and poorly planned use of law enforcement. When Alabama state troopers beat up voting rights marchers, it had been a public relations disaster, and when Birmingham police arrested King, he wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Daley was resolved not to turn the Chicago Freedom Movement leadership into martyrs. Police Superintendent O. W. Wilson invited King and his wife, Coretta, for a personal tour of the Chicago Police Department. In an informal meeting between King and top police officials, a warmly complimentary Wilson told the civil rights leader that he understood that King had some Irish ancestors. Daley proudly told reporters that King’s visit with the Chicago Police Department was the first meeting of its kind anywhere in the country. Though King never asked for a police guard, Daley arranged for him to have full-time protection every time he came to the city. But Daley’s hospitality had its limits. When Alderman Leon Despres introduced a resolution inviting King to address the City Council, Daley’s floor manager, Tom Keane, immediately shouted out “subcommittee,” sending the resolution to oblivion. 12
King received a more sincere welcome from Chicago’s Catholic Archdiocese. On February 2, King and Chicago Archbishop John Cody met for an hour at Cody’s North Side mansion to discuss the Chicago Freedom Movement. The Catholic Church in Chicago had a mixed record on civil rights, particularly at the parish level. In some parts of the Bungalow Belt, Catholic priests were known to share the anti-integrationist feeling
s of their flocks, and many worried that racial transition would rob their parishes of their white bases. Cody’s predecessor, Albert Meyer, had spoken out on racial matters, testifying before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and ordering parish priests to give at least three sermons a year on improving race relations. Cody had come to Chicago in August 1965 from New Orleans, where he had overseen the desegregation of the city’s parochial school system in the face of stiff opposition from white Catholics. In the controversy that followed, three segregationists were excommunicated, and Cody was bitterly attacked for promoting integration so forcefully. King was pleased by his meeting with Cody, declaring afterward that it had been “a very friendly and I might say fruitful discussion.” 13
On February 23, King and his followers took the bold step of seizing control of a tenement. The building, located just blocks from King’s apartment at 1550 South Hamlin, lacked heat, and the Chicago Freedom Movement had learned that there was a sick baby living in it. King, Raby, and other members of the SCLC and CCCO dressed in work clothes and personally began cleaning it up. The Chicago Freedom Movement declared that it had assumed trusteeship over the building, and that henceforth rent collected from the tenants would be paid into a fund that would be used to make needed repairs. Asked about the lawfulness of the action, King appealed to a higher law. “I won’t say that this is illegal, but I would call it superlegal,” he said. “The moral question is far more important than the legal one.” The “superlegal” seizure of 1321 South Homan would have been a natural point for Daley’s policy of tolerance to end. Many Chicagoans believed that by seizing a privately owned building the civil rights movement had crossed the line from political protest to lawlessness. James Parson, a respected black judge and chairman of the National Conference on Religion and Race, called the seizure “theft” and “a revolutionary tactic.” But Daley, sticking to his script of agreeable accommodation, said, “The situation at 1321 South Homan is a matter between the lawful owner and those who attempt to assume ownership. We all recognize that what is being done is good for our city — the improvement of housing and living conditions.” 14 Far from defending the landlord at 1321 South Homan, Daley filed his own suit in Chicago Municipal Court the next day charging that the building had twenty-three code violations. What happened next was a powerful illustration of the difficulty of transporting the civil rights movement north. King’s staff had failed to research the ownership of 1321 South Homan. After they took trusteeship, they found out that the cruel landlord they had cast in their morality tale was a sickly octogenarian who was only too happy to let the civil rights activists have the building. “I think King is right,” the old man declared. “I think his intentions are right, and in his place I’d do the same thing.” The Chicago Freedom Movement’s selection of 1321 had unwittingly supported the argument of some of its opponents: that slum conditions were a product of complicated economic forces, and that it was too simplistic to put all the blame on landlords. 15
