American Pharaoh (49 page)

Daley’s highest priority, when he returned to Chicago, was once again working on his plans for urban renewal and new construction.
In April, he unveiled an ambitious new five-year capital improvement program that included more than 1,200 projects at a cost
of $2.1 billion. Daley budgeted $179 million for new expressways, $145 million for new public housing sites, $83 million for
new bridges, viaducts, and grade separations, and other large sums for street improvements, streetlighting, airports, and
sewers. He hoped that with a new Democratic administration more federal money for cities would be forthcoming, and he tried
to help the process along, traveling to Washington to testify for a Kennedy-backed housing bill that would increase federal
spending by $3.2 billion over the next ten years. With the proper funding, Daley told the congressional committee, Chicago’s
slums could be eliminated in that time period. But even with more funds from Washington, Daley understood that much of the
money he wanted would have to be raised locally. One of his ideas for increasing municipal revenue was to raise the city sales
tax by 0.5 percent. To get authority for the tax increase, he had to go to the state legislature, just as he had after his
election in 1955. This time, the governor was the machine’s own man, Otto Kerner, and he immediately endorsed the tax hike.
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Daley worked to build a coalition of supporters that extended beyond the Chicago city limits, but he always had trouble working
with politicians he could not control. He emerged from a dinner with mayors and village presidents and announced that the
group had unanimously voted to support his sales tax bill. But one member of the group, the village president of Mount Prospect,
disputed Daley’s account, saying that in fact between one-third and one-half of those present had not raised their hands when
Daley asked for their support. Even with Governor Kerner’s support, Daley’s tax bill failed in the Illinois legislature. The
Democratic-controlled House passed it, despite Republican sniping that it was an “attempt to bail out a corrupt administration
in Chicago.” But the bill — which was quickly dubbed the “Daley double,” because it would double Chicago’s share of the sales
tax — was voted down in the Republican-controlled Senate in a party-line vote.
³

Without the authority to raise sales taxes, Daley was forced to fall back on trying to raise property taxes. His 1962 budget
called for a nearly 11 percent property tax hike. But that route also proved problematic. Daley’s critics pointed out that
taxes had been rising steeply since he took office, up 14 percent in the last year alone. And they argued that he should not
be given more tax money until the machine stopped raiding the city’s coffers for political purposes. A citizens’ committee
appointed by Daley recommended that the city stop the use of temporary employees, because those positions were so frequently
used for political patronage. Daley accepted some of the committee’s minor proposals, but not that one. James Worthy, president
of the Republican Citizens League of Illinois, accused the machine of defending municipal waste. “The loafing city gangs of
so-called workers, exposed time after time by the newspapers, are all immune to punishment because of powerful political sponsorship,”
he charged. Daley’s response was an ad hominem attack on the suburbanite Worthy. “Does Mr. Worthy live in Chicago?” Daley
asked. Daley’s talk of higher property taxes eventually prompted a grassroots uprising. More than one hundred civic leaders
from the South and Southwest Side met in Marquette Park to plan a march on City Hall.
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The big showdown over Daley’s property-tax proposal came late in 1961, when the City Council had to vote on Daley’s 1962 budget.
George Hermann, vice president of the Republican Citizens League of Illinois, came to the City Council to testify against
the budget. Daley and Keane had seen a written version of Hermann’s remarks in advance, and Keane had pointedly introduced
Hermann as a resident of suburban Winnetka who had come to “deliver a political diatribe in behalf of a political party.”
Hermann responded that he owned a business in Chicago and paid city taxes. In his testimony, Hermann called the budget “strong
arm robbery.” Daley was trying to stock the city payroll, Hermann charged, with patronage workers, including “bookmakers and
juice men, subsidized by Chicago taxpayers as courtesy to the Democratic political organization.” As Hermann left the chamber,
a red-faced Keane shouted out questions about the budget of Winnetka after him. When Hermann’s appearance was over, Daley
collapsed in his chair and gulped from a glass of water, as the Democratic aldermen gave him a standing ovation. To the surprise
of no one, the City Council adopted Daley’s budget 40–3.
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The other big issue confronting Daley at the start of the new decade was race. Black Chicagoans had been watching the civil
rights drama unfolding in the Deep South, many with extra interest because they were born down South or had family there.
For years, Chicago’s black community had been largely quiescent. There had been a few isolated demonstrations in the 1940s,
including the White City Roller Rink protests of 1946. In the 1950s, Willoughby Abner organized the NAACP’s Chicago chapter
into an activist organization promoting the cause of racial integration. But it was really after the southern sit-in movement
got its start at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, that a modern civil rights movement began to emerge in Chicago.
The Chicago chapter of CORE and the Youth Chapter of the NAACP organized scattered pickets of Woolworth stores, in solidarity
with the southern lunch counter protests. And in the summer of 1961, blacks and whites on the South Side organized “wade-ins”
to protest the racial segregation that still prevailed at the beaches along Lake Michigan. But the first major flash point
of Chicago’s civil rights movement was the public schools.

The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
had drawn the nation’s attention to the problem of racial segregation in southern schools. What was less well known was that
many of the large northern school systems were almost as segregated, by practice if not by law. A 1958 NAACP study had found
that 91 percent of Chicago’s elementary schools were segregated, which it defined as being either 90 percent black and Puerto
Rican or 90 percent white. Chicago’s schools turned out to be as unequal as they were separate. As the city’s black population
grew, black school enrollment had also been increasing rapidly. From 1953 to 1963, overall Chicago school enrollment jumped
from 375,000 to more than 520,000, and much of that growth had occurred in black neighborhoods. The NAACP report found that
the average black elementary school had almost twice as many students as the average white elementary school. The city had
built some additional school buildings to handle the enrollment increases, but not enough.
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School superintendent Benjamin Willis’s response to the overcrowding in black schools was to require their students to attend
class in double-shifts, the first group in the morning and the second in the afternoon. The educational consequences of attending
school in shifts were significant: for double-shift students, the school day ended as early as noon. Some white schools were
also on double-shift, but more than 80 percent of all double-shift students in the city were black. Willis’s other solution
to the overcrowding problem was expanding the use of mobile classrooms, which were quickly dubbed “Willis Wagons.” What made
the situation particularly troubling for many in the black community was that while black students were going to school in
shifts and trailers, there were vacancies in many of the city’s white schools. Prodded by the
Chicago Defender
and civil rights groups, many black parents applied to the Board of Education to transfer their children to underutilized
white schools. As part of this campaign, called “Operation Transfer,” CORE sent the Board of Education a seven-page list of
schools that were reported to contain empty classrooms, and urged that black students be admitted to them. The Board of Education
refused the transfers.
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Protests against the school system began quietly at the grassroots level. The movement started in middle-class neighborhoods
along the expanding borders of the Black Belt. In September 1961, parents from the South Side neighborhood of Chatham whose
children were denied transfers to white schools filed a lawsuit. A few months later, mothers staged a protest at an overcrowded
school in another black neighborhood when their children were transferred to a distant black school, bypassing a closer, underused
white school. But the most heated rhetoric about schools was coming out of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The Woodlawn
Organization, a community group founded by radical organizer Saul Alinsky, was encouraging poor parents to protest about the
conditions in the neighborhood and teaching them how to bring their concerns to the attention of the city. TWO quickly became
a driving force in the school movement. Led by the Reverend Arthur Brazier, the group organized a massive protest at an October
1961 public hearing at the Board of Education. The following month, TWO began holding “death watches” at Board of Education
meetings, with several members in the back dressed in black as an arresting form of protest. School activists also started
holding teach-ins across the city to educate more citizens about the problems in the Chicago school system and what should
be done. In February 1962, the Chatham–Avalon Park Community Council sponsored a conference called “Segregation in the Chicago
Public Schools.” A month later, the Chicago Urban League held a citywide conference on “quality and equality” in the schools.
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Around the same time, an influential interracial group of teachers, Teachers for Integrated Schools, was forming. One of TFIS’s
first projects was producing a short pamphlet called “Hearts and Minds,” which made a personal appeal to Mayor Daley to do
something about the overcrowding, segregation, and educational shortcomings of the city’s public schools. On May 17, 1962,
the eighth anniversary of
Brown v. Board of Education,
teachers affiliated with TFIS fanned out across the Loop at the end of the workday to hand out “Hearts and Minds” and urge
Chicagoans to take a stand in favor of integrating and upgrading the public schools. These teacher-activists distributed some
65,000 copies of “Hearts and Minds” in downtown Chicago, an extraordinary event for that still politically restrained era,
but there were no news stories about it the following day. “The most curious thing about the pamphleteering was that nobody
mentioned it,” recalls college professor Meyer Weinberg, who helped found TFIS. “No newspaper, not even the
Defender,
and none of the local news shows.” Shortly after the demonstration, Weinberg ran into an old classmate who was working at
the
Chicago Daily News
and asked why they had not covered it. “He said, ‘Don’t you know they refer to this as “nigger news,” and nobody [wants]
to get into trouble by printing ... it....’”
⁹

In April 1962, a new coalition formed in Chicago that would become the driving force for the city’s civil rights movement.
The Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) was a citywide organization that included representatives of both
large national organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League and local groups such as Teachers for Integrated Schools
and The Woodlawn Organization. The CCCO immediately threw itself into the battle over schools, and made one of its first causes
the nominations Daley was about to make to the Chicago Board of Education. There were two vacancies on the board, and Daley’s
all-white nominating commission had just sent him a list of candidates, all of whom were white and none of whom had a record
of concern about matters of race. The CCCO met with Daley to express its unhappiness with the candidates. Daley went ahead
and chose two of the white nominees, though he later invited a black group, the Cook County Physicians Association, to send
a representative to the nominating commission.
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Meanwhile, protests against Willis Wagons were gaining force. They made a good target for the protesters because they were
a concrete enemy for a movement that largely concerned itself with abstractions. During protests in May and June, Reverend
Brazier and other leaders emphasized that Willis Wagons were “a means of maintaining segregation.” The U.S. Civil Rights Commission
issued a report late in the year that found that, just as the black community was charging, there was enough extra space available
in white schools to alleviate the overcrowding, but the school system had failed to use it. The Board of Education had most
likely “impeded rather than promoted integration,” the report concluded.
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Throughout these early school protests, Daley kept a low profile. He had no reason to get involved. He did not believe in
school integration philosophically, and he realized it would not help him politically. Like open housing, school integration
threatened to destabilize the working-class white neighborhoods that were the heart of the machine’s electoral base. But at
the same time, Daley realized he had little to gain by coming out forcefully against school integration. He was in a different
position from the southern politicians who were fulminating against integration and vowing “massive resistance.” Because blacks
in the South were systematically denied the right to vote, white politicians there did not need to worry about offending black
voters. But in Chicago blacks did vote, and their votes went overwhelmingly to Daley and the machine. There was no need to
jeopardize this support needlessly by appearing insensitive on the subject of black education. Daley claimed he was staying
out of the school controversy because of a philosophical commitment to keeping politics out of the school system. It was a
position that sounded admirably reformist, but his philosophy was more likely rooted in some advice Mayor Kelley had given
him years ago: “Avoid the public schools. They’ll kill you.”
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