American Pharaoh
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While the two men were publicly trading charges, King was trying to schedule a meeting with Daley at City Hall. When he was unable to secure an appointment, a contingent from the Chicago Freedom Movement simply showed up. Daley was out, but King and his group settled in and waited for the mayor to return. While they waited, Archbishop Cody and six other clergymen showed up, also seeking to talk with Daley about the unrest. When he returned to his office, Daley sat down and talked to his visitors. Face-to-face, Daley was more accommodating toward King than he had been in his comments to reporters. “Doctor,” Daley said to King, who was seated just to his right, “you know you are not responsible for these unfortunate happenings.” After an hour and a half of discussion, Daley announced that the group had agreed to take a number of steps, including directing precinct workers in the riot area to encourage residents to stay home, appointing a citizens committee to advise City Hall on relations between police and the community, and building more swimming pools in the affected areas. Daley’s course of action struck King and his followers as paltry — King said they failed to meet the “basic needs” of Chicago’s ghetto residents. Civil rights leaders had called on Daley to put more swimming pools in poor neighborhoods, but when he agreed to build them, the plan was easily mocked. Columnist Mike Royko scoffed that City Hall was on a campaign “to make Chicago’s blacks the wettest in the country.” Daley’s more substantive reforms also struck the Chicago Freedom Movement as unimportant. His citizens committee on police relations was merely advisory, and fell short of the independent civilian complaint review board that activists were seeking. Still, King called Daley’s proposals a “step in the right direction,” and said he would be “going back to the people saying some positive things are being done, that changes are being made.” 59
The unrest on the West Side was now over. More than 2,000 members of the National Guard, armed with rifles and bayonets, were patrolling on foot and in jeeps, while another 2,200 were on reserve at five armories spread out across the city. The Park District had purchased ten portable swimming pools, and on July 17 installed the first one at a playground near where the fire hydrant riots had begun. A day later, when the streets were still quiet, Major General Francis P. Kane, commander of the 33rd National Guard Infantry Division, withdrew his men. The final toll from the fire hydrant riots stood at two dead, more than eighty injuries, and more than five hundred arrests. Property damage was estimated at more than $2 million, and many commercial streets in the affected areas were devastated. Roosevelt Avenue, by one account, “looked like a tornado had churned through.” 60
Each side drew its own lessons from the rioting. To Daley, the uprisings were getting too much attention, and were detracting from the many things that were going right in the city. “I would like to see demonstrations by the thousands of Chicagoans who have obtained jobs, returned to school, and worked together as tenants and landlords as a result of anti-poverty programs on the federal, state, and local levels,” Daley told a convention of the United Beauty School Owners and Teachers at the Palmer House. But King and his followers continued to insist that unless something was done, worse violence would follow. The Freedom Movement staff set out to work with young people in the ghetto and convince them to adopt a policy of nonviolence. They held a five-hour meeting at King’s apartment on July 16 with leaders of the major West Side gangs, who by the end of the session agreed to renounce violence. “This puts us over the hump,” Andrew Young declared. “This was a real breakthrough.” The movement staff promised one leader of the Roman Saints, who had what one staff member called “almost a religious conversion to non-violence,” that he would be given a chance to meet with Daley personally to express his views. But the Freedom Movement staff had failed to check with City Hall first, and when they tried to set up the meeting they soon learned that Daley favored a tougher approach. “They live in a fantasy world,” one Daley staff member said. “They expect to walk into the Mayor’s office and say they’re responsible for those killings, for shooting policemen, for looting stores and throwing Molotov cocktails and then make a planned pitch that society made them that way. Why, the first thing we’d do is throw them in the jug.” 61
The Chicago Freedom Movement opened a new chapter when it began leading a series of peaceful open-housing marches into the working-class white neighborhoods of Gage Park, Chicago Lawn, and Marquette Park. These Southwest Side neighborhoods were located near the black ghetto, and had housing stock that was within the financial reach of the city’s growing black middle class. But according to the 1960 census, only seven of the 100,000 residents of the Gage Park–Chicago Lawn–Marquette Park area were nonwhite. Blacks who tried to buy or rent in the area quickly encountered a white wall of resistance, starting at neighborhood real estate offices. The Freedom Movement had been sending testers into Gage Park, and had already documented 121 cases of racial discrimination. The marches began uneventfully. On Saturday, July 16, an integrated group of 120 demonstrators marched from an “action center” in the black neighborhood of Englewood into nearby Marquette Park for a picnic. The next day, 200 marchers held a prayer vigil near a Catholic church in Gage Park, where they were taunted by neighborhood white youths. To ensure that there was no confusion about what was at stake, a protest leader declared that the marchers “had come to take a look at the community because this is where they plan to send their children to school and to live.” 62
The peace finally gave out on July 29, when protesters held an all-night vigil at F. H. Halvorsen Realty in Gage Park. The Freedom Movement had selected Halvorsen because, according to recent testing, it repeatedly discriminated against black applicants. Movement staff had also done research into the various white neighborhoods and “determined that this was the area that we were going to [get the] greatest resistance,” says civil rights activist Gloria Palmer. “And the researchers and analysts were correct—we almost got destroyed.” Not long after the open-housing protesters arrived at Halvorsen, white counter demonstrators showed up and the atmosphere turned tense. “The police protecting [the protesters] were getting more edgy,” recalls the Freedom Movement’s press officer. “Jesse Jackson and Jim Bevel made an agreement to get the crowd out in paddy wagons.” The protesters left under police guard but, worried that their departure would be seen as a giving in, a crowd of about 250 movement demonstrators returned the next day to continue the vigil. Once again, they were met by a hostile white crowd that pelted them with rocks and bottles. This time, the marchers were forced to turn back even before they reached Halvorsen. Fortunately, the protesters could always escape from the white mobs by running over the racial dividing line and back into the ghetto. “The really stunning thing about Chicago segregation was that there was this war going on — rocks being thrown, bottles — but as soon as we got to the color line,” says activist Don Rose, “it was just peace.” 63
A larger crowd of demonstrators returned on Sunday, July 31. This time, 500 neighborhood residents met them, hurling cherry bombs, rocks, and bottles. It was the meanest crowd yet. When Sister Mary Angelica, a first-grade teacher marching with the open-housing demonstrators, was hit in the head and fell to the ground, the counterdemonstrators cheered and shouted, “We’ve got another one!” Others yelled “White power!” “Polish power!” and “Burn them like Jews!” Before it was over the white mob, which had grown to 4,000, injured more than 50 people, including a Catholic priest, burned a dozen of the protesters’ cars, overturned a dozen more, and pushed two into a lagoon. “I’d never seen whites like these in the South,” says Dorothy Tillman, who left Alabama to join the Chicago Freedom Movement. The Gage Park counterdemonstrators were “up in trees like monkeys throwing bricks and bottles and stuff,” Tillman says. “I mean racism, you could almost cut it.” To make clear that they were not singling out any one part of the city, the open-housing demonstrators next shifted their focus to the Northwest Side. The reception they received in the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood, though hostile, was more subdued than
what they had seen on the Southwest Side. 64
Daley finally entered the fray on August 2, when he met with political, community, and religious leaders from Gage Park and adjoining Chicago Lawn. The white residents of these neighborhoods had assumed Daley would come to their aid, but he had been remarkably silent. Making matters worse, the police on the scene were widely seen as taking the side of the civil rights demonstrators, since they generally tried to prevent the white mobs from attacking. The community leaders who met with Daley represented some of the most conservative organizations in Gage Park and Chicago Lawn, including the infamous homeowners’ associations, whose primary interest was in stopping integration. They wanted to hear specific plans from Daley for how demonstrators would be kept out of their neighborhoods. But Daley spoke only about the need for all sides to observe the law. “We are in agreement that this is a reflection on the city and that recognizing law and order is necessary,” Daley said afterward. “I appeal to all people in all communities to cooperate with the Police Department.” The white residents felt Daley had betrayed them. “[T]he Mayor’s only answer was ‘They have a right to march,’” one complained afterward. 65
In fact, Daley was just as eager as the white neighborhood delegations to see the marches stop. But he understood that issuing an order, or having the police stop them forcibly, would only advance the protesters’ cause. What Daley wanted to do was negotiate. He approached the Chicago Freedom Movement through CHA board chairman Charles Swibel. Swibel argued that since King had “gotten in over his head and needed a ‘victory,’” the movement and the city would both benefit by working out some kind of deal. Swibel was a canny negotiator, and he opened with a lowball offer. The city would install elevator guards in public housing, establish a committee to investigate integration issues, and build or restore about 400 units of housing. In exchange, Swibel asked King to issue a statement lauding Daley’s “wise leadership” and promising his “cooperation to Mayor Daley in implementing the positive programs the city has underway.” When King rejected Swibel’s offer, Daley and Swibel announced they would implement the improvements anyway. Next, Daley dispatched a delegation of black machine politicians to negotiate with King and Raby. The aldermen and state legislators, who met with the civil rights leaders for three hours, said they shared many of the movement’s goals, including tougher open-housing legislation, stricter building standards, more bank loans for blacks, and a racial head count of employees. These were strange words, certainly, coming from men who regularly opposed civil rights measures in the City Council. But the machine delegation insisted that the city and the Freedom Movement should be able to work out some kind of agreement. As it happened, this attempt to begin negotiating with King and his followers was well timed. After seven months in Chicago, King had grown increasingly discouraged, and was looking for a way of ending his campaign gracefully. “He told us they just couldn’t go any further, but they had to have some kind of victory so they could withdraw without loss of prestige and that they wanted our help in achieving that,” said Alderman Despres, the one white elected official present. “King was really announcing a surrender, and they worked out a formula for King to leave town.” The gathering ended with Metcalfe, the leading black machine alderman, putting his arm around King’s shoulder. 66 The whole scene made Despres “very sad,” he said later. “Metcalfe could hardly conceal his pleasure with the thought that King was ready to leave town.” 67
While both sides worked toward some process for entering into negotiations, the marches continued, and the violence in the neighborhoods grew worse. On August 5, Raby and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson led more than five hundred demonstrators — the biggest contingent yet — back to Marquette Park. White residents had been gathering for hours in the park, a grassy expanse with a golf course and a lagoon. The crowd waved Confederate flags and held banners supporting Alabama governor George Wallace for president, and a few wore Nazi helmets. When the civil rights marchers began to arrive in the late afternoon, the white counterdemonstrators called out, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate,” and yelled, “We want Martin Luther Coon” and “Kill those niggers.” A gray-haired woman shouted, “God, I hate niggers and nigger-lovers.” Other whites screamed out “nigger-loving cops” at the police who were trying to keep the two sides apart. “About ten thousand screaming people showed up to harass, curse, and throw debris on us,” Andrew Young recalled. “Bottles were flying and cherry bombs were going off. We felt like we were walking through a war zone.” 68
King arrived by car and joined the demonstration. While he was marching, he was struck above the right ear by a rock “as big as [a] fist.” The nation’s foremost advocate of nonviolent protest fell to the ground. “When we saw Dr. King go down in that line I didn’t realize that I could be so mad at the world,” said civil rights activist Nancy Jefferson. “I think everybody in that line wanted to kill everybody that was on the other side of the line.” King got up and continued marching. As the marchers continued to make their way toward Halvorsen Realty, another heckler threw a knife at King. It missed him and hit a young white man in the neck. Members of the crowd yelled, “Kill him, kill him,” as King walked by. Demonstrators held up signs with such slogans as “Reds, race mixers, queers, junkies, winos, muggers, rapists ... you are all persona non grata here,” and “King would look good with a knife in his back.” King escaped without further harm, but the scene only got more tense. As the marchers prepared to board buses, a crowd of about 2,500 whites threw bottles, smashed bus windows, and clashed with the police. White women ran down the street with bags of sugar, which they poured into the gasoline tanks of protesters’ cars. Other cars were set on fire. A mob descended on Father George Clements, a black Catholic priest, and police had to escort him to safety. Even after the marchers left, the clashes between the white mob and almost 1,000 police went on for another five hours. In the end, forty-four people were arrested, and thirty-one were injured enough to require hospitalization. “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the south, but I can say that I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago,” King said afterward. “I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” 69
With the open-housing campaign under way, Chicago blacks were starting to resist the CHA’s plans to build more public housing in the ghetto. On July 6, the City Council voted down a ten-story building the CHA proposed to build in Woodlawn — one of twelve new sites the CHA had submitted — after an outpouring of neighborhood opposition. The Reverend Arthur Brazier, chairman of The Woodlawn Organization, testified against the building, saying it would overcrowd the neighborhood. Mrs. Tarlease Bell, one of more than one hundred Woodlawn residents who showed up to oppose it, told the City Council that “high-rise housing is a monument to segregation.” A few weeks later, residents of Kenwood-Oakland, another ghetto on the South Side, turned out for a hearing at CHA headquarters to oppose plans to build more public housing in their neighborhood. A pastor from Kenwood United Church of Chicago charged that the CHA was “intensifying the ghetto.” Swibel, however, continued to defend the CHA’s plans. “I am taken aback that you seem to object to the poor and say they ought to live elsewhere,” said Swibel, who himself lived in suburban Winnetka. “Everybody wants public housing to be somewhere else. I wish you would join us in making public housing so good that it will be accepted everywhere.” 70
Meanwhile, the clashes between open-housing marchers and angry neighborhood mobs showed no signs of letting up. Two days after the latest confrontation at Marquette Park, 1,100 demonstrators, 500 police, and 5,000 white residents faced off on the streets of the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood on the Northwest Side. Business and civic leaders from the Chicago Lawn neighborhood asked Daley to join them in petitioning the U.S. attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, to investigate Communist infiltration of the civil rights movement. The Chicago Tribune called on the black
community to shake off King and his fellow civil rights agitators. “Why not a great petition, or a huge rally, to signify to King and his imported troublemakers that Chicago Negroes want an end to this campaign to stir up the antipathy of white people and want to give the races a chance to live in harmony?” the Republican paper asked. But harmony was not what the city seemed to be moving toward. 71
Jesse Jackson had been talking for some time about leading a march into the all-white suburb of Cicero. Cicero was so hostile to integration — and its response to civil rights marchers was likely to be so violent — that Jackson’s talk struck most observers as an idle threat. But at an August 8 rally, Jackson announced that he would lead a march into Cicero in the next few days. “We expect violence,” Jackson said, “but it wouldn’t be any more violent than the demonstrations last week.” In fact, such a march was likely to be incendiary. Cicero, population 70,000, was perhaps the largest municipality in the country without a single black resident. A working-class town made up predominantly of Poles, Italians, and Bohemians living in simple brick bungalows, Cicero had cemented its reputation for racial hatred in 1951, when black bus driver Harvey E. Clark Jr. rented an apartment there. A crowd of 5,000 whites surrounded the building and threw bricks, rocks, and bottles through the windows. Members of the white mob eventually got inside the building, smashing stoves and refrigerators, and burning Clark’s furniture. After Governor Adlai Stevenson called in the National Guard to restore order, and Clark left town, there were no further attempts to integrate Cicero.Only a few months before Jackson’s announcement, a black teenager named Jerome Huey had been killed by white teenagers when he went to Cicero looking for a job. When a network TV reporter said Cicero had a reputation for hating Negroes “deserved or not,” one native scoffed. “The people of Cicero would be the first to say that the reputation was deserved,” he insisted. 72