by Adam Cohen
Chicago’s was not the only American downtown to boom in the post-war years, but it was one of the few in the northern Rust Belt whose fortunes were rising. What prevented Chicago from going the way of Cleveland and Buffalo? Much of the credit lies with Daley’s aggressive program for downtown redevelopment. Beginning with the 1958 plan, Daley declared his intention to put the full power of his office behind Loop redevelopment. And he did a masterful job of keeping all of the key constituencies in place. His strong working relationships with the city’s business leaders kept them invested in the city, and helped persuade them to build and expand in the Loop. His close ties to the city’s major unions were a key factor in the years of labor peace that prevailed in the city. And his influence in Washington and Springfield brought in millions of dollars to fund urban renewal projects that benefited the central business district. Edward Logelin, vice president of U.S. Steel and chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission, said the renaissance of Chicago’s downtown was in large part due to Daley’s ability to bring together “the best of labor, politics, religion, education, and business.” 28
Another critical factor in Chicago’s downtown development was the way in which Daley professionalized the city’s planning and development bureaucracy. The Department of City Planning that he formed in 1957 with twenty-four employees had grown to eighty-four by 1964, and its budget had soared from $149,500 to $914,500. Daley also assembled an unusually talented group of workers, who would come to be known as the “whiz kids,” to fill these positions. Hired on the basis of ability rather than patronage, they were highly qualified — most had trained as engineers — and committed to the nuts-and-bolts work of improving the city. “It was a very well-educated, professional group of people,” recalls David Stahl, who started with Daley at age thirty-two and would eventually become a deputy mayor. “That group could have run any company in the United States of that size.” Typical of the whiz kids was John Duba, forty-three, whom Daley appointed in June 1965 to head the city’s new Department of Development and Planning. Duba, who taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology before joining city government, was a hands-on technocrat. 29 When he supervised the construction of the Kennedy Expressway, he often walked its entire length to check on progress. “It really wasn’t so bad,” Duba said. “It would take only about three hours and it was the way to get to see the problems and what could be done about them.” Duba’s deputy, Louis Westmore, had been head of the Department of City Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois. 30 Daley also named Lewis Hill, thirty-nine, an engineer with degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Minnesota, as commissioner of the Department of Urban Renewal. Brooklyn-born Milton Pikarsky, Daley’s commissioner of public works, was also an engineer. Although Daley cared enough about development issues to make merit appointment to these positions, the whiz kids worked alongside many city workers who were still hired the old-fashioned way. John J. Gunther, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, recalls attending a budget meeting of Daley’s and being impressed with the caliber of his planning staff. “As we were going over to the Sherman Hotel for lunch I asked him where the hell is all this patronage I keep hearing about, because I had met his people and they were very able,” Gunther recalls. “We got off the elevator and were walking across the lobby and there was an old fella there that was showing you which elevator to get on, and another old fella running the elevator. Daley said, ‘That’s the patronage.’” 31
Daley held a press conference on March 31 to announce plans for a new bond issue. He had been stung badly by the defeat of the 1962 bonds, and this time he was leaving nothing to chance. He had an all-star lineup of civic leaders on hand to speak out in favor of the additional debt for the city, including Continental Illinois National Bank chairman David Kennedy and Chicago Federation of Labor president William Lee. The $200 million package of bonds covered an assortment of new projects, from rapid-rail lines on the Kennedy and Dan Ryan expressways to more mundane undertakings like $45 to $100 million for sewer modernization. To avoid the racial backlash that had hurt the 1962 bonds in white wards, Daley had decided not to use the words “urban renewal” anywhere in the text of the initiative this time. After the initial press conference, Daley continued to round up endorsements. The Civic Federation, a good-government watchdog that had backed only one of the 1962 bond issues, this time endorsed the whole package. And in a flourish of bipartisan-ship, Daley even won the support of Republican state treasurer William Scott. 32 It was a measure of just how important the bonds were to Daley that he testified for them before the City Council Finance Committee, a first in his eleven years in office, and took questions for an hour. Daley promised, in his testimony, that the bonds would not raise taxes, but his critics in the economy bloc remained skeptical. “This familiar promise was expressed with each package of bond issues since 1955, and each package that passed brought an increase,” Alderman Despres argued. “The only bond issues that ever failed to increase taxes were the 1962 bond issues, which were defeated.” 33
In early April 1966, the General Services Administration announced that construction of the forty-five-story federal office building that Daley had worked so hard to bring to the Loop was being delayed indefinitely. The decision appeared to be an economy measure by the regional GSA chief, coming as it did after President Johnson made an appeal to cut federal spending wherever possible. Daley was outraged by the move, and made it clear that he would not tolerate a delay. “We want that building,” he declared. “We are going to urge the federal government to go ahead immediately with the construction.” In a lower-key repeat of the showdown with Francis Keppel over school funding, Daley made a direct appeal to Washington, and the GSA quickly backed down. Within two days the agency said that its announced “indefinite delay” had been a misunderstanding. The agency said it would be seeking bids for construction of the foundation of the $45.5 million project in June. 34
On May 2, Daley presided over the dedication of the Civic Center, a major component of his restoration of the Loop. Daley had been laying the groundwork for a new complex to house state and local governments as far back as his 1958 plan, and he had done a brilliant job of making it a reality. The Civic Center was constructed by the Public Building Commission, a public authority that Daley had created in 1956. The PBC was invested with sweeping powers to condemn property through eminent domain, and to issue revenue bonds to finance its projects without going to the voters with a referendum or going to Springfield. It was Chicago’s version of the public authorities Robert Moses was quietly using in New York to fund and build projects without approval from the voters or the political branches. “He used the Public Building Commission to achieve things he might not have achieved if he had gone to the legislature,” says former Chicago Plan Commission chairman Miles Berger. “If you have the bonds, you can build whatever you want to build.” Daley himself was chairman of the PBC, and his planning commissioner Ira Bach was secretary. Daley used his position with the PBC to oversee every aspect of the project, from the financing to the choice of architects. The $87-million glass-and-steel Civic Center, which would later be renamed the Richard J. Daley Center, substantially improved the facilities available to local government. It provided 111 courtrooms and eight hearing rooms for the Cook County Circuit Court, as well as space for the Illinois Appellate Court, the Illinois Supreme Court, the state’s attorney, the sheriff, and other government personnel. A vibrant city block, filled with stores and restaurants, was bulldozed to make room for the Civic Center and a large open-air plaza surrounding it. But most critics, including the authors of the American Institute of Architect’s Guide to Chicago, found that the trade-off was well worth it. “[S]omething wonderful was gained; the plaza has become Chicago’s forum,” the Guide concluded. “As the locus of activities as diverse as concerts, farmers’ markets, and peace rallies, the Daley Center fulfills a civic purpose consistent with its architectural dignity.” 35
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Although the war on slums had been grabbing the headlines since King came to town, the battle over the schools had still not been resolved. On March 21, Daley announced his new appointments to the School Board Nominating Commission. In a concession to the black community, he added a representative of the Chicago Urban League, declaring that “the commission should be a cross-section of our city.” But at the same time, he also added a representative of the Teamsters Joint Council, who could be counted on to cancel out the Urban League’s vote on any sensitive racial issues. On March 31, Daley held a third closed-door meeting with the city’s clergy to discuss racial matters. King, who was on a European fund-raising tour, did not attend. Daley pronounced the session “amicable, friendly and highly informative,” but Chicago Freedom Movement representatives were disappointed that Board of Education chairman Whiston, who was supposed to attend to discuss the school situation, did not show up. 36
The school controversy heated up again when Willis, who was scheduled to retire on December 23, his sixty-fifth birthday, announced plans to push his departure date up to August 31. The Chicago Freedom Movement was overjoyed. Willis’s departure would remove “a major stumbling block [to] quality integrated education in Chicago,” Raby declared. A committee of the school board had been actively looking for a successor. By late April, they had interviewed six candidates, and Daley said that a decision on a successor was imminent. When Willis left office, the board hired James Redmond, superintendent of the Syosset, New York, schools, who had a reputation as a racial progressive when he served as New Orleans school superintendent in the 1950s. That Daley was willing to go along with the selection of a racial moderate at this point was not surprising. By the end of his career, Willis had become a polarizing figure, who had only helped the Chicago Freedom Movement to win converts in the black community. Redmond would fit in well with Daley’s current policy of co-opting the civil rights movement by appearing to share its concerns. At the same time, Daley’s control over the Chicago school board would ensure that Redmond would not take any steps extreme enough to scare voters in the white wards. And Daley was not ceding any power on the school board to the black community. Three positions on the school board had recently become vacant. Although his nominating committee forwarded two blacks among its seven nominees, Daley passed over the two black women — one of whom was a Yale graduate, doctor’s wife, and mother of three — to choose three white men. The departure of Willis did not appear to have made much difference. “Mayor Daley has tightened his grip of direct political control over the schools,” one critic observed a few years into Redmond’s term as superintendent. “The school board, with the pretense of independence, performs a puppet show for public consumption. Redmond does what he is told.” 37
King and the Chicago Freedom Movement were continuing their efforts to reach out to Chicago’s youth gangs. On May 9, movement staff screened a documentary on the Watts uprising for about four hundred Blackstone Rangers. The civil rights activists were trying to demonstrate the futility of violence, but the screening would later be seen by some whites as an attempt to encourage young blacks to riot. Two days later, King himself spoke to a meeting of gang members, urging them to turn away from violence and toward voter registration and other civil rights work. These efforts to bring gang members into the movement suffered a setback on May 13, when fighting and gunfire broke out at an SCLC meeting at a South Side YMCA to which both the Blackstone Rangers and their rivals, the East Side Disciples, were invited. Some fissures were emerging in the Chicago Freedom Movement, particularly around the issue of nonviolence. Moderate members of the movement, including organizations such as the Chicago Catholic Interracial Council, worried that the campaign was becoming more accepting of violence and “spreading hate.” But King insisted that the Chicago Freedom Movement’s commitment to nonviolence was as strong as ever. “Chicago will have a long hot summer, but not a summer of racial violence,” King said. “Rather it will be a long hot summer of peaceful non-violence.” 38
The long hot summer erupted earlier than expected, and in an unexpected quarter. While all of Chicago wondered whether blacks would rise up, on June 10 it was the city’s small Puerto Rican enclave on the Near Northwest Side that broke out in rioting. Chicago’s Puerto Ricans were as poor and discriminated against as blacks, but because of their small numbers and the language barrier, they were even more marginalized. Daley “manages to attend many wakes in his part of town,” Mike Royko wrote. “But when the Puerto Ricans invited him to a banquet last week — their biggest social event of the year, except for the riot — he couldn’t make it.” But the Puerto Rican community’s invisibility ended when a police officer shot and killed twenty-one-year-old Arceilis Cruz while he allegedly tried to pull out a revolver. More than a thousand neighborhood residents, many of them women, threw bricks and bottles at the hundred policemen sent to restore order. The crowd set fire to police cars, pulled fire hoses away from firemen trying to put them out, and looted stores along Division Street, the neighborhood’s main shopping area. The unrest continued for two days, and before it was over several dozen were injured. King cautioned that the Near Northwest Side riots reflected the broad disaffection that prevailed in all of the city’s poor neighborhoods, but Daley blamed them on instigation by “outsiders.” 39
In 1966, the national civil rights movement was entering a new and more difficult era. What civil rights theoretician Bayard Rustin called its “classical” period of destroying the “legal foundations of racism in America” had drawn to a close. What would follow was uncertain. To a growing number of activists, the answer was “black power,” a militant strain that promoted nationalism and was skeptical of the role of whites in the movement. On May 14, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee held a watershed election at its annual meeting in a camp outside Nashville. Stokely Carmichael, a charismatic Black Power champion, was elected chairman over moderate John Lewis by a single vote. Carmichael and his followers mocked the integrationist ideals and Gandhian tactics of King and his followers. “To ask Negroes to get in the Democratic Party,” Carmichael declared acerbically, “is like asking Jews to join the Nazi Party.” Under the new regime, SNCC stopped using integrated field work teams. The organization would “not fire any of our white organizers, but if they want to organize, they can organize white people,” Carmichael said. “Negroes will organize Negroes.” Many whites, believing they were not welcome, resigned from the organization. In June, Carmichael delivered a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, that has been credited with bringing the integrationist era of the movement to a close. Forget the goal of “freedom,” he told a large crowd gathered in a schoolyard. “What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.” 40
The rising tide of black nationalism was in evidence from July 1 to July 4, when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held its national convention in Baltimore. The traditionally integrationist and interracial group invited Black Muslims and other black nationalists to share the platform for the first time in its history. The NAACP, the National Urban League, and the SCLC all boycotted the meeting. King, who had been expected to speak, announced on the first day of the convention that his “duties as a pastor in Atlanta” prevented him from attending. Giving the keynote address, Carmichael declared that “[t]his is not a movement being run by the liberal white establishment or by Uncle Toms.” Other speakers attacked the black middle class as “handkerchief heads” and “Dr. Thomases,” and moderate ministers like King as “chicken-eating preachers.” Although CORE had been 50 percent white only five years earlier, few whites attended the Baltimore meeting. One of the few who did, a nun, complained to the press that “[t]his is the Congress for Racial Superiority.” On July 5, white author Lillian Smith, author of the haunting novel Strange Fruit, resigned from CORE’s advisory committee. “CORE has been infiltrated by adventurers and by nihilists, black nationalists and plain old-fashioned haters, who have finally taken over,” she said. From July 5 to July 9, the NAACP h
eld its own national convention in Los Angeles, where delegates distanced themselves from the Black Power movement. Vice President Hubert Humphrey told fifteen hundred delegates on July 6, “We must reject calls for racism whether they come from a throat that is white or one that is black.” The convention passed a resolution stating that the NAACP would not cooperate with civil rights groups that were headed in a more radical direction. “In view of the sharp differences,” said assistant executive director John Morsell, “unified action just seems unlikely.” 41
The Chicago Freedom Movement was itself at a crossroads. It was nowhere near adopting the rallying cry of Black Power. The Chicago movement had always been resolutely interracial, and its guiding force remained King, the nation’s leading voice for integration and racial cooperation. And at a time when Carmichael and his followers were rejecting campaigns aimed at mere “freedom,” the goals of the Chicago Freedom Movement — such as integrated education in regular classrooms — remained strikingly mainstream. But Chicago’s black community was feeling the radical tides that were sweeping across the country, and King worried that Daley’s intransigence could force the movement in a more radical direction. “[H]e fails to understand that if gains are not made and made in a hurry through responsible civil rights organizations, it will open the door to militant groups to gain a foothold,” King told the New York Times. The more immediate issue confronting the Chicago Freedom Movement, though, was the need for a new issue to rally around. Willis’s departure had been a great victory, but it had also removed the single best organizing tool Chicago activists had ever had. It was hard to keep up the demonstrations and school boycotts when a racially moderate new superintendent was just taking office. The inclination among most fair-minded people was to give him time to make improvements first. At the same time, Daley had been doing a brilliant job of stealing away the issue of slums. The power of the anti-slum cause had receded since Daley began holding almost daily press conferences announcing stepped-up code enforcement, tenements put in receivership, and sweeping new anti-rat campaigns. King and the other members of the Chicago Freedom Movement debated how to proceed, and at a steering committee in late June 1966 decided to focus the movement on a new issue — open housing. 42
