American Pharaoh (53 page)

In early July, NAACP delegates descended on Chicago for the organization’s national convention. The summer of 1963 had already
been an upsetting one for the civil rights movement. The NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary, Medgar Evers, had been shot
dead by a white supremacist outside his Jackson, Mississippi, home. The local police had shown little interest in cracking
the case, but they did arrest 160 mourners for marching silently in Evers’s memory. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Governor George
Wallace had made his famous stand in the schoolhouse door to stop black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.
And in Birmingham, public safety director Eugene “Bull” Connor had greeted nonviolent protesters with snarling police dogs
and high-pressure fire hoses. Chicago blacks followed all the ugly details in the pages of the
Chicago Defender,
whose headlines lately had been a steady drumbeat of “New Miss[issippi] Violence: Club-Swinging Jackson Cops Attack Evers
Murder Protest March” and “Birmingham Still on the Edge of Racial Blow-Up!”
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As difficult as events were down South, the NAACP delegates were also aware of the problems blacks faced in their host city
— the slums, the segregated schools, the high-rise housing projects. Daley delivered an opening address to the convention
that scrupulously avoided taking on any of these controversial issues. Instead, he declared that there were “no ghettos in
Chicago.” He meant the remark to be uplifting, a statement of his high regard for all of the city’s neighborhoods. But Dr.
Lucien Holman, the Joliet, Illinois, dentist who headed the statewide chapter of the NAACP, snapped at a startled Daley, “We’ve
had enough of this sort of foolishness.” And then Holman launched into a spirited rebuttal. “Everybody knows there are ghettos
here.... And we’ve got more segregated schools than you’ve got in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana combined.” Still, when
it was over, members of the black submachine and other black allies rushed to assure Daley that they understood what he meant.
It seemed to be an isolated incident.
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The highlight of the convention was a July 4 “Emancipation Day” parade through the Loop. Daley agreed to lead a procession
of 50,000 civil rights marchers through downtown. The parade, whose slogan was “Free in ’63,” was a cost-free way for Daley
to make a gesture to the black community, since its focus was on the South. No homeowner in the Bungalow Belt would much care
if Daley took a stand against conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. Daley marched in front of a car carrying Medgar Evers’s
young widow, Myrlie, and smiled as spectators along the route rang “freedom bells” and shouted “Jim Crow must go.” Daley and
the other marchers finished their hour-long trek at Grant Park, a stretch of green wedged between downtown and Lake Michigan.
The parade’s organizers asked him to make a few remarks to the large crowd now gathered around the park’s bandshell. Daley
had not expected the invitation, but he readily agreed. He was soon spouting his usual brand of painfully bland expressions
of civil goodwill. “May I say that we are happy to welcome this convention and the delegates to our city,” he began. But as
Daley spoke, a crowd of between one hundred and two hundred protesters began to march toward the speaker’s platform. If he
saw them, he ignored the disruption and plunged ahead. “We are glad you have come to see us and we hope you come to see us
again and again.”
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The hecklers picked up their pace, and they were fast winning converts. The air began to fill with shouts of “Daley must go!”
and “Down with ghettos!”— a reference to his recent comment about there being no ghettos in Chicago. Daley forged ahead, but
the hecklers would not give up. One woman turned her back to the speaker’s platform and bowed her head. She seemed, at first
glance, to be embarrassed by the crowd’s behavior. But she turned out to be a city worker who was trying to join the booing
without being seen by her Democratic precinct captain. Bishop Stephen G. Spottswood, chairman of the NAACP national board
of directors, stepped down from the speaker’s platform and tried to quiet the protesters, but their yelling only grew louder.
The more the hecklers shouted, the more flustered Daley became. After fifteen minutes of boos and catcalls, he angrily stormed
off the stage.
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Moments after Daley left, the Reverend Joseph H. Jackson took the podium. Jackson was minister of the South Side’s 15,000-member
Olivet Baptist Church and president of the National Baptist Convention, whose 5 million members and 30,000 affiliated churches
made it the nation’s largest black organization. Jackson was an outspoken opponent of the civil rights movement, who had most
recently angered activists by coming out against the proposed March on Washington that Martin Luther King Jr. was to lead.
The previous Sunday, protesters had picketed outside Jackson’s church during services. The moment Jackson was called on to
speak, a deafening roar arose from the crowd. For fifteen minutes, the audience booed and yelled “Uncle Tom must go!” When
a group of fifty demonstrators circled him and shouted “Kill him! Kill him!” the embattled minister had to be escorted from
the park by police. Daley also fled the scene and, after wading through the crowd, located his limousine. Asked by a reporter
what had gone wrong, Daley replied curtly that the protest must have been planned by the Republicans.
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In fact, the July 4 heckling indicated just how quickly race relations were changing in Chicago. When the NAACP convention
held its closing session at the Morrison Hotel on July 6, it was clear that Daley still retained significant support in the
black community. The delegates adopted a resolution thanking him for his cooperation. But another version, which pointedly
expressed appreciation only to unnamed “municipal authorities,” got about one-third of the vote. A few days later, after the
NAACP delegates had left town, an interracial group from the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality held a sit-in
at the Board of Education to protest segregation in the public schools. The protesters occupied a conference room for eight
days, until the police finally removed them. The situation was “bordering on anarchy,” said the president of the Board of
Education. Board business was being interrupted, and the protesters had broken the door between the conference room where
they were holding the sit-in and the president’s office. Daley supported the police, who arrested and carried off seven men
and three girls, saying, “We can’t let anybody physically take over city offices.” But the protesters were only getting started.
On July 22, CORE held a one-hour demonstration in a hallway outside Daley’s office. In a brief meeting, the protest leaders
asked Daley to mediate the school crisis. Daley responded that the Board of Education was an independent body, and insisted
he could not possibly intervene. It was, of course, merely an excuse. Daley was intimately involved in the schools and meddled
with them when it suited his purposes. Clair Roddewig, school board president during the early years of the crisis, would
later say that he spoke to the mayor “almost daily about school matters.”
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The next civil rights battle was waged in the City Council. The 1963 aldermanic elections had produced Charles Chew, a civil
rights leader unlike any Chicago had ever seen. Chew had run as an independent in the racially changing 17th Ward on the Far
South Side. He won by persuading middle-class black voters to reject the white machine candidate and the machine’s “plantation
politics.” When he got to the City Council, he was the only black alderman who did not need to follow Daley’s edicts on civil
rights. On July 1, he joined Alderman Despres in sponsoring an open-housing bill. As usual, the six black machine alderman
— the so-called silent six — led the opposition. Judiciary Committee chairman Claude Holman, one of the “silent six,” got
the bill tabled until August 22. When the Despres-Chew bill came up again, Daley was ready with an open-housing bill of his
own. Daley’s bill, which he had arranged to have sponsored by a biracial coalition of aldermen, was a pale imitation of the
Despres-Chew proposal. The Daley bill required only that real estate brokers not engage in unfair practices. Rather than stressing
“fair housing,” it used the term only twice, both times in the preamble. It was, as critics pointed out vociferously, a “subterfuge”
designed to co-opt the open housing movement by making it look as if the City Council had acted.
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In normal circumstances, Daley would have had no trouble getting his bill passed. He controlled a large majority on the council,
and it was an elemental rule that officeholders slated by Daley — whether for Sanitary District board or U.S. Senate or alderman—gave
him their vote when he asked for it. The machine was not subtle about sending out instructions to its legislators, which was
just as well, since many were not particularly bright. “They put out a so-called idiot sheet every day during the [state]
legislative session,” former suburban Democratic commiteeman Lynn Williams recalled. “A mimeographed sheet is sent around
to the Chicago delegations — House Bill 2351, dog muzzles, yes; House Bill 2500, change judiciary, no; House Bill 2961, divorce,
no. There’s no secret about it. You can go to the desk and see them sitting there with this sheet.” Daley sent the word out
to the City Council to vote for his fair housing ordinance. That should have ended the matter, but most of the white aldermen
were afraid to vote even for the machine’s toothless bill. James Murray, who ended up sponsoring the bill, initially told
Daley he was worried. “I said, ‘Why me? — My community is up in arms,’” Murray recalls. “He said I was [president pro tem
of the City Council] and the city needed the ordinance.” Keane and Murray met in Daley’s office the day of the City Council
vote, and Daley called each alderman personally to tell them they were expected to back the bill. At the council, the vote
was delayed eighty minutes while Daley and Keane threatened to deny patronage to aldermen who broke with the machine. In the
end, the bill passed 30–16, the most defections Daley had ever suffered in the City Council.
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As the summer wore on, the civil rights movement gained momentum. On July 21, pickets marched outside the Olivet Baptist Church
in opposition to Reverend Jackson and school board member Mrs. Wendell Green, two of the leading anti–civil rights figures
in the black community. Green, a machine loyalist, was possibly the most anti-integrationist member of the board. The protesters
carried signs reading “Birds of a feather flock together — Green, Jackson, and Jim Crow,” and “Mrs. Green, enemy of our children.”
At the same time, whites were continuing their own protests. When two black families moved into apartments, there were three
days of clashes at 56th and Morgan streets on the Southwest Side, and Daley had to plead for “law and order to prevail everywhere.”
When civil rights protesters demonstrated outside the president of the Board of Education’s home, Daley lashed out at the
media. “Without publicity, the demonstrators would stop tomorrow,” he said. Taking a leaf from the book of governors and sheriffs
across the South, Daley also began to blame outside agitators for the unrest. “They come from all over town, and some from
out of town,” says Daley. “I see that some of them are from out of state, one is from Nassau County, N.Y., and another from
Green Bay, Wisconsin.” Chicago’s racial difficulties were starting to become national news. A page-one story in the
New York Times
on August 26 concluded that “the situation seems potentially more explosive than in most Southern communities.”
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The school protesters were coming to realize that they had an ideal villain in their midst: School Superintendent Benjamin
Willis. Willis had gotten his start as the principal of a four-room schoolhouse in rural Maryland, and worked his way up through
the state’s racially segregated educational system. After a stint as superintendent of schools in Buffalo, New York, he came
to Chicago. Willis’s admirers considered him a skilled administrator, who championed teacher salary increases, smaller class
sizes, and rigorous graduation requirements. But to his critics, both black and white, Willis was un-communicative and arrogant.
The president of the Chicago PTA, at the end of her two-year term, complained that Willis had not met with her or her delegate
assembly once. “We have asked, but Dr. Willis has not found time for us,” she said. Even the Board of Education found him
to be imperious. Willis had “contempt for the judgment of any board member who has the temerity to disagree with him,” one
member said in 1966 as he stepped down from the board. Willis also shared Daley’s secretive nature. He instructed his staff
to refuse requests for information about double-shifts, empty classrooms, and other basic facts about the public schools.
Many blacks had a more specific problem with Willis: they were convinced that his views on race were the ones he had absorbed
early in his career in the Jim Crow school system in Maryland. “There are certain people who stand out from all others and
epitomize evil, wrongness, or just plain bigotry,” says Ira Dawson. “Willis was a bigot who said, ‘You don’t exist’ to the
black community.”
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Civil rights activists who met with Willis said his inability to reach out to blacks was almost visceral. “He couldn’t say
the word ‘Negro,’” said TFIS activist Meyer Weinberg. “He said ‘them’ or ‘they,’ or he would point a certain direction with
his chin.” Willis seemed like the closest thing Chicago had to the epic civil rights enemies of the South. He was, the
Chicago Defender
declared, “the Gov. Wallace of Chicago standing in the doorway of an equal education for all Negro kids in this city.”
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