American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  Racial discrimination in housing had theoretically been illegal in Chicago since the City Council passed the Fair Housing Ordinance of 1963, but the reality was that blacks remained trapped in a few ghetto neighborhoods. When they tried to move to other parts of the city, they found that real estate brokers steered them back to the ghetto. Landlords in white neighborhoods generally would not rent to blacks, and white homeowners would not sell to them. The rigid color bar in Chicago not only prevented blacks from living where they wanted, it also kept them in overpriced, low-quality apartments. A study of the Chicago housing market by the American Friends Service Committee found that white and black families in the city on average paid the same amount in rent, $78 a month, even though white families’ incomes were 50 percent higher. But whites got more value for their rent money, because they had more neighborhoods to choose among. The report found that black families lived in an average of only 3.35 rooms, compared to 3.95 for whites. “Negroes pay the same for slums that whites pay for good conditions,” the AFSC concluded. “The role of supply and demand will always hold true and Negroes will continue to pay a color tax for housing until the entire housing market is open.” 43

  Open housing was also a cause that made good strategic sense. It carried some of the same moral force as the anti–Jim Crow battles in the South. Assigning blame for slums was difficult, and remedies often involved complicated interventions in how people used and maintained private property. But the principle that a family should be able to live anywhere it could afford to was clear-cut, and com-ported with the most fundamental American ideals. Open housing also seemed a worthy goal because if it could be achieved, many other benefits would follow. If blacks moved into middle-class white neighborhoods, their housing conditions would improve, their children’s schools would become better, and they would have greater access to jobs. Housing discrimination also seemed easier to solve than some of the movement’s other targets. There were limits to how much city government could do about joblessness and poverty, or even bringing the housing in poor neighborhoods up to code. But the mayor could end discrimination by enacting a single ordinance, and the city had the power to take away the licenses of real estate brokers who failed to obey it. 44

  Not least among its virtues, an open-housing focus paved the way for the Chigaco Freedom Movement to begin a direct-action phase. By taking the movement directly into white neighborhoods, it had a more confrontational feel, which was satisfying to those who believed that the movement was too accommodationist. It also promised to trigger the kind of dramatic clashes between civil rights demonstrators and white resisters that had been critical to success in the South. “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” King wrote in Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” If the Chicago Freedom Movement started to march into working-class white neighborhoods, it might end up with its own version of Selma — Alabama’s Bloody Sunday — ugly racial violence that played badly on television. Open housing was probably the best option the Chicago Freedom Movement had, but King was becoming increasingly pessimistic about his chances of prevailing. Daley’s response so far had been “to play tricks with us — to say he’s going to end slums but not do any concrete things,” King complained to the New York Times in July. “He’s just trying to stay ahead of us just enough to take the steam out of the movement.” 45

  The Chicago Freedom Movement’s big event of the summer of 1966 was a rally at Soldier Field on Sunday, July 10. Daley worked hard to steal the rally’s thunder. On July 8, he announced publicly that he and King would be conferring the following Monday, as King had requested, “to discuss the many problems affecting our city.” The day before the Soldier Field rally, Daley told reporters that in the previous eighteen months, 9,226 buildings with 102,847 units had been brought into full or partial code compliance. The Chicago Dwelling Association had been named receiver of 151 buildings, and fines imposed by the Housing Court were running at more than twice the rate of the previous year. And 332,000 rooms had been inspected in the city’s rodent control program, and 140,000 rat holes were closed. It was, Daley declared “the most massive and comprehensive rodent eradication program ever undertaken in this country.” 46

  The rally’s organizers had hoped to attract 100,000 people, but they fell short. Whether it was due to Daley’s efforts at dampening enthusiasm, lukewarm support for King and the movement, or the day’s scorching high-90s temperatures, the crowd that showed up in Soldier Field was somewhere between the city’s estimate of 23,000 and the 60,000 rally organizers claimed. The organizers did do an impressive job of attracting performers, ranging from gospel legend Mahalia Jackson to folk singers Peter, Paul, and Mary to a young Stevie Wonder. “Mahalia Jackson sang that day as if the heavens were coming down on Soldier Field,” recalls a community organizer from the West Side. “You can’t explain that feeling, but you knew then that things are going to change, it must change. You felt that God was with us.” Archbishop Cody, who was unable to attend, sent a greeting that was read to the audience. The Black Power movement was not officially part of the program, but they showed up anyway, revealing a growing schism in the black community. About two hundred young people, some members of the Blackstone Rangers youth gang, marched on the field carrying a banner reading “Black Power,” and signs saying “We Shall Overcome,” with a drawing of a machine gun. 47

  King arrived in a white Cadillac to a hero’s welcome. When the thunderous applause died down and the standing ovation ended, he launched into a powerful oration about the hard struggle that lay ahead. “We will be sadly mistaken if we think freedom is some lavish dish that the federal government and the white man will pass out on a silver platter while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite,” King said. “Freedom is never voluntarily granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.” King called for an end to the slums, and said that black Chicagoans must be willing “to fill up the jails of Chicago, if necessary” to make it happen. He also launched into the movement’s newest cause, an open housing campaign that would free blacks to live anywhere they wanted. “We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97.00 a month in Lawndale for four rooms, while whites in South Deering pay $73.00 a month for five rooms,” King declared. Although he had insisted since he first arrived in Chicago that his enemy was the slums and not individual elected officials, King’s Soldier Field address contained his most pointed challenges yet to Daley and the Democratic machine. “This day, we must decide to register every Negro in Chicago of voting age before the [1967] municipal election,” he said. “This day, we must decide that our votes will determine who will be the mayor of Chicago next year.... [W]e must make it clear that we will purge Chicago of every politician, whether he be Negro or white, who feels that he owns the Negro vote rather than earns the Negro vote.” 48

  The rally ended with King leading a march from the stadium to City Hall to present Daley with a list of demands. A crowd estimated at anywhere from 5,000 to 38,000 followed King, whose aides had by now dubbed him the Pied Piper of Hamlin Avenue, and watched as he affixed the movement’s demands to the LaSalle Street door of City Hall. King was harking back to his namesake Martin Luther, who began the Protestant Reformation by nailing his ninety-five theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517, though on this occasion King used cellophane tape. A crowd of demonstrators filled State Street from curb to curb and stretching back for blocks. They sang civil rights songs, chanted “Daley Must Go!” and held up banners with slogans like “End Modern Slavery — Destroy Daley Machine.” The document King attached to City Hall included what it billed as “14 basic goals aimed at making Chicago a racially open city.” Some of the items were addressed to the business community, like demands that real estate brokers show listings on a nondiscriminatory basis, and that companies c
onduct racial head counts and integrate their workforces. Others were aimed at City Hall: that the CHA improve conditions in public housing and increase the supply of scattered-site housing, and that the city create a citizen’s review board for police brutality and misconduct. One demand was addressed directly to the machine: that it require precinct captains to be residents of their precincts, which would end the practice of absentee white captains remaining in charge of West Side precincts that had long since turned black. Jack Reilly, Daley’s special events director, removed the demands after King and Raby taped them up, and said he would deliver them to Daley. 49

  The day after the rally and the march on City Hall, Daley met with King and ten members of the Chicago Freedom Movement. He heard his visitors out with his usual impassive demeanor. Then, reading from a forty-page memo, he launched into a recitation of the “massive programs” he had overseen to improve the lot of the city’s poor blacks. “What would you have us do that we haven’t done?” he asked. 50 Daley refused to get drawn into a discussion of the specific demands King had posted on the door of City Hall. Police superintendent Wilson rejected the demand for a civil complaint review board of the kind New York City had recently introduced, declaring that it would interfere with the department’s efforts to reform itself. But with that single exception, Daley was as careful not to reject any of King’s demands as he was not to accept them. “The Freedom Movement wanted to get a no out of the mayor on each of the demands and he refused .... he’d say, ‘Well, we could look at it from this perspective, and maybe we could do something over here,’” one civil rights observer noted. Daley argued that the problems the Chicago Freedom Movement was taking on were complicated ones, and that the city would need time to work on them. But King insisted that continued delay was unacceptable. “We cannot wait,” King said in his closing statement. “Young people are not going to wait.” 51

  King was more frustrated than ever. When he emerged from the three-hour meeting, he told reporters gathered outside that Daley simply failed to grasp “the depth and dimensions of the problem” facing the city. “We are demanding these things, not requesting them,” King said, because the “seething desperation” among the city’s blacks was “inviting social disaster.” In the face of Daley’s resistance, King said, the movement had no choice but to “escalate” its efforts and engage in “many more marches.” Daley, for his part, came away from the meeting indignant that King was using their impasse for publicity purposes. A furious Daley, so irate that he stumbled over his words, insisted to reporters that the problems they were discussing “cannot be resolved overnight.” There was a need for “massive action,” Daley conceded. “We will continue it. I am not proud of the slums. No one is. We will expand our programs.” 52 But Daley insisted that King was deliberately making the city look bad for his own political purposes. Chicago had “the best record of any city in the country,” Daley said, and even King “admitted himself they have the same problems in Atlanta.” Asked about King’s promise in his Soldier Field address to begin a direct-action campaign that would “fill up the jails of Chicago, if necessary,” Daley was firm. “There is no reason for violation of the law,” he said. “This will not be tolerated as long as I am mayor.” 53

  The peace in Chicago was shattered the following day. The city was going through a massive heat wave on July 12, with temperatures lodged above 90 degrees for the fifth consecutive day. To preserve the city’s water pressure, fire commissioner Robert Quinn ordered that the city’s fire hydrants be kept closed. Two police officers, called to the Near West Side to rescue an ice cream truck caught in a hole in the street, noticed some black teenagers on Roosevelt Road cooling themselves in the water of a fire hydrant. Open hydrants were illegal, but they were also an entrenched Chicago tradition. They were one of the few ways for poor people, and particularly poor blacks, to cool off in the summer heat. There were four Chicago Park District swimming pools within walking distance of this Near West Side neighborhood, but three of them were restricted to whites. When the police turned off this open hydrant, it struck many as yet another abuse at the hands of city government, and it was inevitably fraught with racial implications. “The seething anger over the fire hydrants on the near west side was a mental throwback for older blacks who remembered vividly their inability to eat hamburgers in white restaurants in Chicago,” civil rights historian Dempsey Travis has written. Neighborhood resident Donald Henry defiantly reopened the hydrant, and the police took him into custody. As he was being led away, Henry made an appeal to the crowd forming around him. “You are not going to let these policemen arrest me,” Henry implored. “Why don’t you do something about it?” 54

  The crowd began to resist, and clashes broke out between the police and neighborhood residents. The police called for backup, and thirty squad cars appeared on the scene. Five or six youths were beaten with police clubs, and police began manhandling members of the crowd. The issue quickly shifted from fire hydrants to police brutality, and before long guerrilla-style warfare broke out between residents and police over a several-mile area. At the Liberty Shopping Center on Racine Avenue, most of the windows in the eight stores were smashed. King and other civil rights activists hurried to the area and tried to calm the rioters. At a late-night mass meeting at the West Side’s Shiloh Baptist Church, King pleaded with the community to reject violence. But much of the audience, believing that the principles of nonviolence had already been breached by the actions of the police, walked out in the middle of King’s presentation and headed back onto the streets. By the end of the first night of rioting, ten people were injured, twenty-four were arrested, blocks of store windows were smashed, and some of the stores were looted. On Wednesday morning, King called the incident a “riot,” and put the blame for it on the brutal actions of the police. Daley, seeking to minimize the events of the previous evening, refused to call it a riot, referring to it instead as a “juvenile incident.” The area where the uprising had occurred was quiet throughout the day on Wednesday, but violence broke out again that evening. Rioting spread to new neighborhoods, stores were firebombed and looted, and snipers were shooting down from rooftops. Firemen sent to put out burning stores were stoned. Hundreds of police working until past midnight were needed to put down the rioting. Eleven people, including six police, were injured. 55

  Daley met with key staff members on Thursday to plan a response. He told the group — which included police superintendent Wilson, fire commissioner Quinn, human relations commissioner Marciniak, and Chicago Housing Authority head Charles Swibel — that he would call in the National Guard if necessary to restore calm. Wilson argued that the real problem was that a few agitators in the community were using charges of police brutality to stir up the mob. The violence that followed on Thursday was the worst yet. Rioting spread into the West Side neighborhoods of Lawndale and East and West Garfield Park. Thousands of young blacks roamed the streets looting stores, throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails, and attacking passenger cars seemingly at random. Some black-owned businesses put signs in their windows saying “Soul Brother” or “Blood Brother” to discourage looters from attacking. The police and snipers engaged in furious gunfighting across the West Side. At one point, police identified rounds of gunfire coming from a tenth-floor apartment in the Henry Horner Homes. They turned floodlights on the apartment and sprayed it with bullets. In the end, two blacks were killed, including a twenty-eight-year-old man who police said had been looting, and a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl who was caught in crossfire. Many more people were injured by gunfire, including six policemen. Daley placed police on twelve-hour shifts, and deployed 900 officers in the affected area. He sealed the region off from the rest of the city, and declared that Chicago’s curfew for youth under seventeen would be strictly enforced. By Friday morning, Daley had asked Governor Otto Kerner to mobilize the National Guard. 56

  Daley blamed the Chicago Campaign for the outbreak of violence. “[Y]ou cannot charge it to Martin Luther King d
irectly,” he told a press conference. “But surely some of the people that came in here have been talking for the last year of violence, and showing pictures and instructing people in how to conduct violence. They’re on his staff and they’re responsible....” The “showing pictures” seemed to refer to the film of the Watts rioting that civil rights activists had shown to youth on the West Side. Daley also insisted there were “certain elements” working in the city “training, actually training” young people how to engage in violence. “[W]ho makes a Molotov cocktail?” he asked. “Someone has to train the youngsters.” Daley claimed he had “tapes and documentation” proving the involvement of King’s followers, but he would not make them public or further elaborate on his charges. Police superintendent Wilson argued that the police brutality was the fault of the rioters. “Brutality grows out of arrest incidents where a person resists an officer,” Wilson said. “But some people think they can resist arrest.” The machine’s black allies echoed Daley’s charges. “I believe our young people are not vicious enough to attack a whole city,” the Reverend J. H. Jackson told a press conference. “Some other forces are using these people.” 57

  King was indignant about Daley’s accusations. “It is very unfortunate that the mayor . . . could perpetuate such an impression,” King said. “My staff has preached nonviolence. We have not veered away from that at any point.” The films of Watts that had upset Daley so much were shown “to demonstrate the negative effects of the riots,” King said. The truth was that the civil rights activists had played a critical role in defusing the violence, King insisted, by traveling across the riot-torn neighborhoods and pleading with rioters to desist. “If we [had not been] on the scene,” King told a reporter, “it would have been worse than Watts.” The real cause of the riots, according to King, was Daley’s poor record of dealing with “the problems we face in the Negro community,” and the latest round of rioting was a wake-up call. If Daley continued to resist the reasonable demands of the civil rights movement, King warned, Chicago was headed toward “social disaster.” 58