American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  On August 9, the day after Jackson’s ominous announcement, Daley called on both sides to stop marching and start negotiating. Archbishop Cody echoed Daley’s appeal, saying a moratorium on marches was needed to “avert serious injury to many persons and even the loss of life.” Daley lobbied influential Chicagoans to support his efforts to bring a halt to the marches. On August 11, he sat down with seventeen of the city’s top labor leaders, including his old friends William McFetridge and William Lee, at a meeting called by United Auto Workers midwestern regional director Robert Johnston. The Freedom Movement’s “demonstrations on the streets” were the city’s “number one problem,” Daley said. Daley’s proposal for ending them was to convene a summit meeting at which all the necessary parties could hammer out an agreement on open housing. He directed his Commission on Human Relations to begin laying the groundwork. The commission would have been the logical choice to host the summit, but Daley was intent on not being put in the position of negotiating against the Chicago Freedom Movement. He preferred to frame the summit as a meeting between the Freedom Movement on one side, and the Chicago real estate industry on the other. Daley asked the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, a respected group with known civil rights sympathies, to convene the summit. It was a clever arrangement, and one that, human relations commissioner Marciniak noted, “took the focus” off Daley. 73

  The Freedom Movement was divided about whether to attend Daley’s summit. Many of the younger, more militant members distrusted Daley and favored continuing to engage in direct action. They noted that the civil rights movement had tried negotiating with him in the past, and it had always gone badly. Daley always had his mind made up going in, and simply used the meeting for publicity purposes. That was, in fact, Daley’s record in dealing with the movement. Meyer Weinberg recalls the time he and other CCCO representatives met with the mayor to discuss Willis and conditions in black schools. The CCCO delegation made their case with passion, but it elicited almost no response from Daley. “He was very bored with us,” Weinberg recalls. “He just seemed like he couldn’t wait to go home. We went away just feeling terrible.” But King and the movement’s more moderate leaders wanted to participate in the summit. King argued his position with what seemed to be an almost naive belief in the possibility that Daley could be converted to the cause. Daley “is no bigot,” he told other members of the Freedom Movement, but he “is about my son’s age in understanding the race problem.” The decisive factor, though, was that the Chicago Campaign was stalled, and the movement was eager for any kind of victory, even a negotiated one. “The most significant event of this year is the spread of the Negro revolution from the sprawling plantations of Mississippi and Alabama to the desolate slums and ghettos of the North,” King said in his report to the annual meeting of the SCLC in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 10. Chicago was the “test case,” King declared, for whether the civil rights movement could succeed in the North. Daley’s summit seemed to offer at least a chance that the northern civil rights movement would not end in total failure. After considerable debate, the Chicago Freedom Movement agreed to negotiate. 74

  CHAPTER

  11

  The Outcome Was

  Bitterly Disappointing

  In the days leading up to Daley’s housing summit, the Chicago Freedom Movement continued taking its fight to the streets. On August 12, the same day the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race sent out formal invitations, James Bevel led 600 protesters on a march to a high school on the Southwest Side. Two days later, Bevel, Jackson, and Raby led simultaneous marches on Bogan, Gage Park, and the Northwest Side. And on August 16, the day before the summit started, civil rights protesters held another round of demonstrations. There were vigils in Jefferson Park on the Northwest Side, and pickets at City Hall, the Chicago Housing Authority, and the Cook County Department of Public Aid. The Chicago Freedom Movement was sending a clear message that although they were willing to negotiate, they intended to keep up the “creative tension” until a satisfactory agreement was reached. The movement also embarked on a pre-summit campaign of real estate–agent testing. As expected, blacks were lied to about the availability of housing in white neighborhoods and turned away. King and Raby collected enough evidence to file seventy-four discrimination complaints against sixteen real estate brokers. Equally important, the testing gave them fresh evidence going into the summit that the problem of housing discrimination was real, and that the city’s Fair Housing Ordinance of 1963 was not being enforced. 1

  The leaders of the Chicago Freedom Movement, stretched thin by the need to keep their campaign of direct action going, found little time to plan for the upcoming negotiations. The night before the summit began, they quickly cobbled together a set of proposed reforms. True to his character, Daley plotted his course of action more carefully. He assembled a team of experts who would be able to go head-to-head with the civil rights delegation on any subject they were likely to raise. Edward Marciniak and Ely Aaron, executive director and chairman, respectively, of the city’s Human Relations Commission, would be on hand at the summit to speak to the overall racial situation in the city. And Daley called on city administrators such as Charles Livermore, executive director of the city’s Commission on Youth Welfare, and Charles Swibel of the CHA, to be prepared to discuss their areas of expertise. Daley wanted Swibel at the summit for more than just his knowledge of housing. He was, in an odd way, Daley’s ambassador to parts of the city’s progressive community. Swibel, who was a slumlord by trade and ran the much-criticized public housing authority, was no great liberal. But he had managed to cultivate ties with some leading civil rights activists, including Chicago Urban League executive director Edwin Berry. Berry hosted many parties, and Swibel showed up frequently, usually the only person in attendance who was not part of Chicago’s progressive community. Berry was likely to be a key player on the Freedom Movement side of the table. He was well regarded in civil rights circles, and had a good relationship with King, whom he helped to convince to come to Chicago. There was a chance that the most difficult issues at the summit could be resolved between Swibel and his friend Berry. 2

  To prepare for the negotiations, Daley and his team drew up an eleven-point proposal for resolving the conflict. Daley’s approach, as it had been with the 1963 open-housing ordinance he drafted, was to blame the lack of fair housing in Chicago on the real estate industry rather than city government. Once again, it was a formulation that made Realtors and the civil rights movement the combatants, and avoided placing Daley in a showdown with King. As Daley envisioned the summit, he would act as a mediator between the two parties to the conflict: King and his followers on one side and the Chicago Real Estate Board on the other. It was a clever strategy, and once the summit began the civil rights contingent would become convinced that Daley had always viewed the summit in purely tactical terms. “It never seemed to me that Daley was trying to figure out how to deal with the broader race and housing problems in Chicago,” says John McKnight, who attended the summit as a U.S. Civil Rights Commission observer. “It was about stopping the marches, which were tearing at the heart of the Democratic Party.” 3

  The summit began at 10:00 A.M. on Wednesday, August 17, in a parish meeting hall of the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint James. Almost seventy men gathered around three tables shaped in a U configuration. The room was hot and stuffy, cooled only by a single floor fan. 4 After sending out the invitations, the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race had decided that it did not want to preside, so its members would be free to speak out in support of the Chicago Freedom Movement. The gavel passed to Ben Heineman, chairman of the board of Chicago North Western Railway. Heineman was sympathetic to open housing, and had presided in June at a White House conference on civil rights for President Johnson. But he was above all a member of the city’s business establishment and a friend of Daley’s. Flanking him at the center table were some of the city’s most important religious leaders, among them Archbishop Cody and
Robert Marx, a prominent rabbi. Daley sat on the left-hand branch of the U, with some of the city’s leading business and political figures. Thomas Ayers, president of Commonwealth Edison and head of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry, represented downtown business. Two of the city’s leading bankers came, David Kennedy, president of the Commerce Club, and Chicago Mortgage Association president Clark Stayman. The Chicago Real Estate Board, whose role would be critical, was represented by its board president, Ross Beatty, and past board president Arthur Mohl. On the right-hand branch of the U was the Chicago Freedom Movement delegation. It was led by King, recently back from a trip south, and Raby, and included James Bevel, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Arthur Brazier of The Woodlawn Organization. 5

  It had been agreed that King would speak first, followed by Daley, and that King would then issue the Freedom Movement’s demands. But Heineman let Daley start off. His opening remarks were characteristically vague. “We have to do something to resolve the problems of the past few weeks,” Daley said by way of introduction. When King’s turn came, he delivered a more lofty oration, describing Chicago in the same terms he had used in the past to depict the South. Chicago’s problem, according to King, was one of “dualism.” It had “a dual school system, a dual economy, a dual housing market,” King said, “and we seek to transform this duality into a oneness.” Raby followed, and assumed the bad-cop role he would maintain throughout the summit. “I am very pessimistic about the negotiations today because my experience with negotiating has indicated that our success has always been very limited,” he said. The only reason the summit was occurring, Raby contended, was because of the open-housing marches. “We will not end the marches with a verbal commitment,” Raby said. 6

  Despite the agreement that King would be allowed to present the Freedom Movement’s demands first, Heineman called on Aaron to present Daley’s eleven-point proposal. The city’s position was that the real estate industry would have to take firmer steps to ensure that it was not discriminating in the sale and rental of housing, and that the civil rights movement had to promise to halt its marches into the neighborhoods. If Daley’s plan had been to deflect attention from the city by pitting these two groups against each other, it worked. The Real Estate Board, both in Chicago and nationally, strongly opposed government-imposed fair-housing policies. The Chicago Real Estate Board had lobbied against state and city fair-housing laws, and it had filed a lawsuit challenging the Chicago fair housing ordinance. Real estate agents saw open housing as bad for business, but with the whole housing summit focused on them, it was not a good time to make a full-blown philosophical argument against it. Instead, they argued that open-housing mandates directed at real-estate agents were impractical. Realtors were mere agents of the sellers and landlords they represented, the Chicago Real Estate Board’s Mohl said, and these were the people the civil rights movement needed to focus on. “We need a cooperative venture here, not bullying, but a program to sell people in the neighborhoods on the idea that the world won’t end if a Negro moves in,” he argued. King had little sympathy for the Real Estate Board’s predicament. “All over the South I heard the same thing we’ve just heard from Mr. Mohl from restaurant owners and hotel owners,” said King. “They said that they were just the agents, that they were just responding to the people’s unwillingness to eat with Negroes in the same restaurant or stay with Negroes in the same hotel. But we got a comprehensive civil rights bill and the so-called agents then provided service to everybody and nothing happened and the same thing can happen here.” The civil rights delegates were no happier than the Real Estate Board with what Daley’s presentation called for. They did not want to agree to give up their right to march until they could be assured that they would get what they wanted at the summit. At this early juncture, that was not looking likely. Daley’s proposal fell far short of what the movement was hoping for with regard to open housing, and King reminded Daley that the movement had demands “in the areas of education and employment and you are hearing here only our demands in the area of housing.” 7

  The Chicago Freedom Movement finally got its turn to lay out its position. The movement’s nine-point proposal focused on Daley and the city, not the Realtors. It called for the city to step up enforcement of fair-housing laws, through a program of real estate–office testing and filing complaints against violators. The civil rights delegates also wanted a commitment that the CHA would stop building high-rises in the ghetto, and a promise that urban-renewal programs would in the future be used to decrease segregation. When King asked Daley if he would agree to the demands aimed at the city, he quickly said he would. Once again, King’s efforts to engage Daley in combat were defeated by the mayor’s unwillingness to disagree. The movement delegates would have little choice but to aim most of their fire at the parties at the table who continued to resist. Not long after Daley agreed to King’s demands, Swibel began to chip away at the terms. It would be hard, he said, for the CHA to agree to a total moratorium on high-rises in the ghetto, since the agency intended to build some high-rises for the elderly, and might not be able to get land elsewhere. Rather than suggest that an exception be made for elderly housing, Swibel instead substantially restated the public housing demand, saying that he was agreeing “that we will build non-ghetto low-rises as much as feasible.” For good measure, Swibel also asked the civil rights movement delegates to have the American Civil Liberties Union’s recently filed Gautreaux lawsuit, which challenged racial discrimination by the CHA, withdrawn.

  Marciniak made one of Daley’s favorite points: that the open-housing problem was a “metropolitan” one, and that the Chicago Freedom Movement needed to spend more time working on opening up the suburbs. It was true that the suburbs were every bit as exclusionary as the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods, and that opening them up would give Chicago blacks a broader range of choices about where to live. The problem was, there was little civil rights activists could do to open the white suburban ring. The Freedom Movement had leverage with Daley because it posed a two-pronged threat to the Democratic machine’s hold on power. Its activism in black neighborhoods had the potential to radicalize black voters and drive them away from the machine. And its rallies in ethnic neighborhoods threatened to push the machine’s white base to move to the suburbs. It was in Daley’s interest to reach a compromise with the movement before it started to erode his hold on power. But the Freedom Movement had nothing to threaten the Republican suburbs with. It also had few legal weapons at its disposal, since the Illinois legislature had refused to pass an open-housing law that applied to the suburbs, and suburban governments were not about to pass their own civil rights laws. Daley may have been right that Chicago was being singled out, but as a practical matter the Freedom Movement had little choice. 8

  The original plan was for the summit to last no more than two hours, but Daley told Heineman he wanted to work through to an agreement. Heineman went along. “We’re going to stay here,” he told the crowded parish meeting room. “I have no plans to recess except for lunch.” At this point, Thomas Ayers gave the first indication of where the business community stood. “I think we support all the points in the proposals of the Chicago Freedom Movement,” he said, following Daley’s lead and further isolating the Realtors. It was now virtually everyone in the room against the real estate industry. “The key problem, the core problem, is that Realtors refuse to serve Negroes in their offices,” Bevel said. “And that must change.” The Real Estate Board representatives in the room insisted that they could not speak for all Chicago real estate agents. But King tried to lift the real estate delegates to a higher moral plane. “I appeal to the rightness of our position and to your decency,” he told them. “I see nothing in this world more dangerous than Negro cities ringed with white suburbs. Look at it in terms of grappling with righteousness. People will adjust to changes but the leadership has got to say that the time for change has come. The problem is not the people in Gage Park. The problem is that thei
r leaders and institutions have taught them to be what they are.” 9

  Daley had been sitting back for some time now — in a pose one participant described as “Buddha-like” — watching contentedly as the Freedom Movement focused its discontent on the real estate industry. When Raby suggested that the meeting be adjourned, Daley spoke up to urge that the proceedings continue. What was needed, he said, was for the Real Estate Board to “get on the phone to their members and do something about these demands now.” Daley’s comments came as a surprise, and they put considerable pressure on the real estate representatives to modify their uncompromising position. One member of the real estate contingent tried to stall for time, saying, “We cannot possibly deal on the phone — we cannot possibly work out a resolution to these things today.” But Daley’s allies in the room followed his lead. In the guise of “summarizing” what had transpired, Heineman told the Real Estate Board that “the monkey, gentlemen, is right on your back, and whether you see it as fair or not, everyone sees that the monkey is there.” The question now, Heineman told them, was “how are you going to deal with the demands placed on you?” Swibel had been acting throughout the negotiations, according to one participant, as “the chief cheerleader for Mayor Daley,” and at this point he launched into an impromptu pep rally. “We need a victory for Mayor Daley, a victory for the City of Chicago.” At the mention of a victory for Daley, a groan went up from the Freedom Movement side of the room. 10