The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Even so, the South Side was one of the most culturally vibrant black communities in the country. With the ferment of the Harlem Renaissance a memory, the South Side was arguably the capital of black America. Joe Louis lived there. The Defender, which, in 1956, began to publish a daily edition, was there. Joseph H. Jackson, the pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church and the head of the conservative National Baptist Convention, was there. All the best blues performers, gospel singers, jazz musicians, and actors came to the Savoy Ballroom and the Regal Theater. Chicago was home to establishment figures like Dawson and Jackson, but also to a range of political radicals, religious leaders, and cultists, including Elijah Poole, who, as Elijah Muhammad, moved the headquarters of the Black Muslims from Detroit to the South Side. Richard Wright, who had come North from Mississippi to Chicago as a young man, insisted that life was so hard on the South Side that no one should be surprised at what political ferment might one day arise there. "Chicago is the city from which the most incisive and radical Negro thought has come," he wrote in his introduction to Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's classic 1945 study of the South Side. "There is an open and raw beauty about that city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life. I felt those extremes of possibility, death and hope, while I lived half hungry and afraid in a city to which I had fled with the dumb yearning to write, to tell my story. But I did not know what my story was."

  By the nineteen-forties, the rise of a distinct, heterodox, and growing black population on the South Side inspired the white press to publish countless scare headlines. The white neighborhoods on the South Side built "improvement associations" designed to prevent the influx of blacks. White taverns installed locks and buzzers to keep out blacks. A black Chicagoan had to be careful not to wander into the wrong neighborhood lest he ignite a riot like the one near the lake in 1919.

  Even after the 1948 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer barred state enforcement of restrictive covenants and promised an end to housing segregation, Chicago remained one of the most racially segmented cities in the country. (It remains so, today.) When, in 1951, a black family moved into an apartment in the white working-class town of Cicero, thousands attacked the building for several nights in a row until the National Guard was ordered to end the violence. Mayor Martin Kennelly, a son of Bridgeport and a product of the machine, sent police to the South Side to raid the policy wheels, and Bill Dawson decided to assert his will. The Cook County Democratic Central Committee had to decide whether to re-anoint Kennelly as its mayoral candidate in the 1951 election. Furious with City Hall's assault on the policy wheels, Dawson sent word from Washington that he opposed Kennelly's nomination. Dawson told Kennelly, "Who do you think you are? I bring in the votes. I elect you. You are not needed, but the votes are needed." The Central Committee decided on a compromise: it would allow Kennelly one more term and then, in 1955, turned to another son of Bridgeport, Richard J. Daley.

  At first, Mayor Daley built on Cermak's principle of machine politics that an effective organization would come not merely from the Irish base but from a coalition of all ethnic groups and the effective use of patronage systems. For Daley, blacks were a dependable source of support. They were crucial to his first election. And yet Daley could not tolerate a wholly independent sub-machine. Almost immediately after taking office, he undermined Dawson, taking away his right to appoint the committeemen in his wards.

  Daley's ruthless efficiency could not be doubted. Through a web of loyal aldermen, committeemen, and precinct workers, he dispensed thousands of jobs---forty-five thousand at the machine's peak. He was so intimately involved in the city's workforce, it was said, that he could greet many of the forty thousand employees by name. Daley was shrewd enough to bridge a political culture that ranged from buffoonish ward hacks to independent liberals like Governor Adlai Stevenson and Senator Paul Douglas. While more than a few members of the machine over the years took bribes or committed other crimes, Daley lived modestly, went to Mass every day, and showed at least a grudging respect for some of his political foes. Still, as the radio broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel once said of Daley, "He's marvelous when it comes to building things like highways, parking lots, and industrial complexes. But when it comes to healing the aches and hurts of human beings, he comes up short." This was especially so in the case of race.

  Daley had inherited ugly, racist sentiments about black men and women. When he became mayor, his antipathy to blacks showed itself gradually at first, and then, for many, wholly eclipsed his better qualities. However delusionally, he thought of himself as fair-minded and believed that blacks would assimilate and advance in much the same way that other ethnic groups had. His condescension was brutally offhand. When a young man from South Carolina named Jesse Jackson moved to Chicago after making a name in the Southern civil-rights campaigns, Daley offered him a job--as a toll-taker on the highway.

  Daley enforced policies of de-facto segregation, not so much because of closely held theories of black inferiority as because of his view of political power and how to retain it. In the late fifties and sixties, he built a series of vast housing projects--Henry Horner Homes on the near West Side; Stateway Gardens on the South Side; Cabrini-Green on the near North Side; and the twenty-eight sixteen-story towers of the Robert Taylor Homes. To isolate Robert Taylor and Stateway from any white neighborhoods, he routed the Dan Ryan Expressway so that it locked in the separation of the races.

  Beginning in 1959, when the League of Negro Voters ran an independent candidate for city clerk, there were signs of some resistance to Daley in the black community. At a national convention of the N.A.A.C.P. in 1963, in Chicago, Daley was booed off the stage, mainly because he had so consistently opposed the integration of the public-school system. The half dozen blacks who won seats on the City Council by the nineteen-sixties, however, were so compliant that they were known as "the Silent Six." The most outspoken alderman on questions of race was Leon Despres, who was white; Despres was a leading example of the post-war liberal Democrats who kept their distance from the machine and called themselves independents. Some admiring blacks called Despres "the lone Negro on the City Council."

  "Whenever I would raise a point about discrimination, segregation, oppression, civil rights, or an ordinance on those matters, which I increasingly did, Daley would always sic one of the 'Silent Six' to answer me," Despres said. One of the six, Claude W. B. Holman of the Fourth Ward, practiced a form of loyalty and devotion to Daley that seemed almost North Korean in its blind passion. Despres recalls Holman once telling Daley, with the cameras on, "You are the greatest mayor in history--greatest mayor in the world and in outer space, too."

  Even as the civil-rights movement came to the forefront of American political life, doing battle and making advances in the South, black activists in Chicago like Willoughby Abner, Timuel Black, Albert Raby, and Dick Gregory could make little headway against Daley's implacable machine. "A good legitimate Negro wanting to go into politics in Chicago," Gregory said in the mid-nineteen-sixties, "not only has to run against a handkerchief-head Negro but also against a machine getting kickbacks from dope and prostitution.... You have to respect Daley. He has a big job being mayor, governor, prosecutor, and president of the Chicago Branch of the N.A.A.C.P."

  The most dramatic challenge to Daley's hegemony came in the mid-sixties, from Martin Luther King, Jr. After winning victories on the streets of Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham, after successfully pushing Lyndon Johnson on voting rights, King and his lieutenants started debating where and how to bring the campaign North. Adam Clayton Powell, among others, was unenthusiastic about having the movement come to New York, and so King started thinking that Chicago, with eight hundred thousand blacks, might be the right choice. At a downtown rally in 1965, King said:

  Chicago is the North's most segregated city. Negroes have continued to flee from behind the cotton curtain, but now they find that after years of indifference and exploitati
on, Chicago has not turned out to be the new Jerusalem. We are now protesting the educational and cultural shackles that are as binding as those of a Georgia chain gang.

  Despite the warnings and the opposition of some members of his inner circle, King planted himself in Chicago and launched a bold, if vaguely conceived, anti-poverty and anti-discrimination plan. He rented an apartment in a grim building in Lawndale, on the West Side. "King decided to come to Chicago because Chicago was unique in that there was one man, one source of power," Arthur Brazier, the Pentecostal minister who worked with Saul Alinsky in Woodlawn, and then with King, said. "This wasn't the case in New York or any other city. He thought that if Daley could be persuaded of the rightness of open housing and integrated schools that things could be done."

  Daley proved an elusive and stubborn foe. In the South, King had been helped by the grotesque dimensions and reliable brutality of his adversaries. Bull Connor, Jim Clark, and George Wallace were ideal foils for a movement steeped in the language of the Gospels and the tactics of Mahatma Gandhi. The moral contrast was, to millions of Americans, increasingly self-evident. In Daley, King faced a far craftier opponent, one gifted in the art of political manipulation, public compromise, and private deceits. And he was on his home turf.

  At first, King's associate Andrew Young said, "We didn't see Mayor Daley as an enemy. In 1963, he had held one of the biggest, most successful benefits that S.C.L.C. had ever had at the time of Birmingham. Mayor Daley and Mahalia Jackson put it together." Daley's fear now was primal: if the civil-rights movement succeeded in registering more voters, it might threaten his coalition and the very existence of the machine. "The machine had served the black community well, but its days were over and we were there to announce that," Andrew Young said. "But Daley wasn't ready to turn loose."

  Daley could rely on more than just the compliance of a cadre of black politicians. Many black clergymen, for instance, realized that if they sided overtly with King against City Hall they might suddenly lose their patronage. Who would give jobs to their parishioners? Who would pick up the garbage, repair the roads, maintain electricity and sewage, and prevent crime in the neighborhood? King could not provide these things, but Daley could take them away. He had the capacity to make life miserable. Dorothy Tillman, who came to town with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and who later became an alderman, said, "Chicago was the first city that we ever went to as members of the S.C.L.C. staff where the black ministers and black politicians told us to go back where we came from."

  The Nation of Islam, under Elijah Muhammad, was a growing presence on the South Side, especially for disaffected young black men and women who had grown tired of the more obedient Christian ministers. But King could not expect any help from the Nation, which denounced 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," Ralph Abernathy, King's closest adviser, wrote. "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."

  The prospects for victory in Chicago were so grim that there was real division in King's own ranks. "I have never seen such hopelessness," Hosea Williams, a King adviser, said. "The Negroes of Chicago have a greater feeling of powerlessness than I've ever seen. 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."

  Nevertheless, King organized a huge rally for July 10, 1966, at the city's main football stadium, Soldier Field. On a ninety-eight-degree day, with thirty-eight thousand people in the seats, King was driven to the speaker's platform in the backseat of a white Cadillac convertible. Members of the Blackstone Rangers gang hoisted a Black Power flag. Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Peter Yarrow performed. And King, introduced by a leader of the Chicago archdiocese, gave a speech that announced the movement's weariness with the status quo in Chicago and the other industrial cities of the North:

  Yes, we are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North. We have also come here today to remind Chicago of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. We have also come here today to affirm that we will no longer sit idly by in agonizing deprivation and wait on others to provide our freedom.... Freedom is never voluntarily granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed....

  This day, henceforth and forever more, we 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.

  King not only employed one of his favorite phrases--"the fierce urgency of now," a phrase that he had employed at the March on Washington three years earlier to signal an unwillingness to delay--but also recognized the growing appeal of a more radical Black Power movement and tried to suggest the moral interdependence of the races: "The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt. Any approach that overlooks this need for a coalition of conscience is unwise and misguided. A doctrine of black supremacy is as evil as a doctrine of white supremacy."

  Then, after leading demonstrators on a long march downtown to City Hall, King, in an echo of Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, attached a list of demands for equality in housing, employment, and education to the Mayor's door.

  Daley did not deny King an audience. Rather, he invited him into his office and then, with a combination of courtesy and stubborn guile, he paid lip service to greater equality if King would, in exchange, end his demonstrations and leave town. Occasionally, Arthur Brazier recalled, Daley poked King by noting that he was the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and saying, "So why are you here in Chicago? Why don't you go back South?"

  King kept up the pressure, staging marches on the West Side, in black neighborhoods, where he was received warmly, and in white neighborhoods like Marquette Park, where he was greeted with shouts of "Go back to Africa!" and a rock that was hurled at his head, hitting him. "I've never seen anything like it in my life," King said. "I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate."

  "I'd never seen whites like these in the South," Dorothy Tillman said. "These whites was up in trees like monkeys throwing bricks and bottles and stuff. I mean, racism, you could almost cut it, a whole 'nother level of racism from hatred. And the sad thing about it was that most of those neighborhoods we went to were like first- or second-generation Americans.... Most of them were fleeing oppression."

  Roger Wilkins, a young African-American lawyer working in Johnson's Justice Department, was dispatched to Chicago to talk to both sides and report back to Washington. Wilkins discovered that the tactics that had worked for the S.C.L.C. in the South had been rendered toothless in Chicago. Wilkins visited King at his apartment in Lawndale--"It was ugly and the stairwells stank of urine"--and found him negotiating with leaders of two gangs, the Blackstone Rangers and the Devil's Disciples, to march nonviolently against Daley and participate in various community programs. "The Illinois National Guard was out there in armored personnel carriers and these kids wanted to throw Molotov cocktails and Martin was saving their lives," Wilkins recalled. "He wouldn't let them go. He was conducting a nonviolence seminar." After the gang leaders left, King told Wilkins what he was learning in Chicago was that, in Wilkins's words, "you can have all the rights in the world, but if you were impoverished, those rights meant nothing; and if you went to a terrible school, you were nowhere. Martin now understood that the whole system was out of balance and, the way it was tilted, poor black people fell off. What he wanted to do now was not just about race. It was deeply about poverty." Wilkins was amon
g those who thought that if King hadn't been killed, less than two years later, he would have started an anti-poverty movement no less profound than the civil-rights movement he had led in the South.

  Daley made promises that he broke and offered compromises that he had no intention of adhering to. Tired and temporarily defeated, King left Chicago. "Like Herod, Richard Daley was a fox, too smart for us, too smart for the press ... too smart for his own good, and for the good of Chicago," Ralph Abernathy wrote.

  King's trials in Chicago, however, along with the war in Vietnam, helped to radicalize him. He began to realize that the problem of racism was even more deeply rooted than he had imagined. Chicago, David Halberstam wrote in a profile of King in Harper's, left him "closer to Malcolm than anyone would have predicted five years ago--and much farther from traditional allies like Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins." It was a defeat that led to his proposal, in 1967, for a Poor People's Campaign and a multibillion-dollar Marshall Plan for the inner cities.

  When King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, there was rioting in Chicago. Whole blocks on the West Side, the more recent of Chicago's black enclaves, were leveled. At a press conference, Daley betrayed how deep his antipathy toward the city's blacks now ran. He thought that the police had behaved with excessive restraint. Policemen should have had instructions, Daley said, "to shoot, to maim or cripple any arsonists and looters--arsonists to kill and looters to maim and detain."

  It appeared that Daley, using both political guile and sheer brutality, had crushed the forces of reform that had "invaded" his city: the Woodlawn Organization, the S.C.L.C., the hippies, the Yippies, and S.D.S. Daley's victories, however, were far from permanent. Gradually, even some of the older, obedient politicians of the black sub-machine changed their minds.