American Pharaoh (59 page)

The CCCO complaint also presented the Office of Education with the case of Orr High School. Orr was created in 1962 as a white
“unit” of black West Side Marshall High School. It was housed not at Marshall, but inside the building of white Orr Elementary
School. At first, Orr shared a principal with Marshall, but in 1964 it was given one of its own. The attendance zone for Orr
High School was drawn so its feeder schools included the three white elementary schools in the area. The attendance zone for
Marshall was drawn to include the black schools. Marshall ended up being severely overcrowded, and Orr significantly underutilized,
but the school system did not alter the assignment patterns. The CCCO complaint also included twenty “cases for further study.”
Among these were two schools in the racially changing North Lawndale neighborhood, all-white Hammond and all-black Pope. Hammond
seemed to be underused — part of its building was demolished — while the overcrowded Pope operated on double-shifts for six
years. The CCCO argued that Chicago’s school system was as unequal as it was segregated. The complaint marshaled an array
of statistics showing that the more white a school was, the better off it seemed to be. White elementary schools in Chicago
had an average of 29.7 pupils per classroom, while integrated and all-black elementary schools had averages of 34.0 and 34.4
respectively. White schools had 12 percent noncertificated teachers, while integrated schools had 23 percent and black schools
had 27 percent. And in white schools, when a teacher was absent a substitute was sent to cover the class 80 percent of the
time, while in black schools, substitutes covered classes with absent teachers only 41 percent of the time. The complaint
also raised questions about the Washburne Trade School, operated jointly by the school system and the city’s trade unions.
Washburne was the only school in Chicago that prepared students for apprenticeships in the city’s trades. Though the city
school system was majority black, Washburne’s enrollment was 97 percent white.
²¹

Martin Luther King and the SCLC were still trying to decide whether to bring their movement north. On July 23, King came to
Chicago to lay the groundwork for a possible campaign there. Ironically, one of the factors that was drawing King to Chicago
was Daley. King was impressed by how much power Daley had, and he was convinced that Daley’s absolute control over the city
could ultimately work to the movement’s advantage. “King decided to come to Chicago because . . . Chicago was unique in that
there was one man, one source of power,” says the Reverend Arthur Brazier, of The Woodlawn Organization. “This wasn’t the
case in New York or any other city. He thought if Daley could be persuaded of the rightness of open housing and integrated
schools that things could be done.” Earl Bush, Daley’s press secretary, agrees that Daley’s role was a critical factor in
bringing King to town. “King considered Daley to be in complete control of Chicago, which in a way he was,” says Bush. “King
thought that if Daley would go before a microphone and say, ‘Let there be no more discrimination,’ there wouldn’t be.”
²²

Daley dispatched Ed Marciniak, executive director of the Commission on Human Relations, to greet King personally on his arrival.
It was Marciniak’s introduction to a role he would play repeatedly over the next year. “My job,” he says, “was to never let
it grow into . . . confrontation.” The warm welcome belied Daley’s true feelings about King and his tactics. Daley was bitterly
opposed to the civil rights movement’s insistence on working outside the existing political structure. In his machine-politics
view of the world, blacks elected aldermen and ward committeemen to represent them, and Chicago blacks had never elected King
and his followers to anything. “Daley felt there were good black people and bad black people,” says Edward Holmgren, a former
CHA official under Elizabeth Wood who went on to become executive director of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open
Communities. “The good black people were people like Bill Dawson and the Silent Six.” King also insisted on carrying out his
campaign in a language Daley did not speak. To Daley, politics was a process of negotiation. A ward committeeman who delivered
20,000 votes on election day was entitled to a certain number of patronage jobs, and to a say in where a fire station was
placed in his ward. Anyone who wanted city policy to change had to show where his support was coming from, and why he had
the kind of clout that made him worth listening to. King’s appeals were not to politics, but to a sense of right, and his
tools were not votes, but slogans, marches, and publicity. “King didn’t think, ‘I have thirty units of power so I get thirty
units of results,’” says veteran Chicago reporter Paul McGrath. “He was operating in a whole different way.”
²³

Nor did Daley agree with the substance of King’s message. It was one thing in Montgomery, Alabama, to say that blacks should
not be forced by law to ride in the back of a public bus. But Chicago did not have legally enforced racial segregation. To
King, Chicago was the “most segregated city in the North,” but to Daley it was simply a “city of neighborhoods.” What King
viewed as Jim Crow–like segregation, Daley saw as the natural instinct of free people to stick with their own kind. Daley
also believed that King was asking the government to do things for blacks that they should be doing for themselves. Of course
blacks did not want to live in slums — just as Irish immigrants, if given a choice, would not have wanted to live in shacks
along the banks of the Chicago River. The Irish worked hard, digging canals and slaughtering livestock, until they could move
into better jobs and better neighborhoods. Daley did not see why King’s followers could not work hard and pursue their own
path to the American dream. “Why don’t blacks act like the Jews, the Poles, the Irish, and the Italians — he was constantly
frustrated by that question,” recalls former Daley aide Richard Wade.
²⁴

Daley’s opposition to King was also rooted in simple politics. King’s prescription for Chicago would have freed blacks to
move out of the ghetto and into white neighborhoods. If King succeeded in integrating Chicago, it would change the demographic
layout of the city to the detriment of the machine. Blacks would move out of the traditional black wards, where ward committeemen
and precinct captains had for years been turning them out consistently for the machine’s candidates. And when blacks moved
in, whites would flee their neighborhoods for the suburbs, cutting into another important part of the machine base. Just as
troubling, the civil rights movement challenged the machine’s careful racial balancing act. The machine held on to black votes
by giving the black community patronage jobs rather than civil rights, and it held on to the white vote by assuring the Bungalow
Belt that it would not be integrated. If integration became a real possibility, the machine would be challenged from the left
in black wards, by independent candidates promising to fight hard for integration. And in the white wards, white backlash
candidates would run to the machine’s right, promising to be more out-spoken in opposition to open housing. Even King’s visit
had set off warning signals among white voters, who were watching to see how Daley handled it. “Daley’s main job as political
leader was to keep the lid on blacks,” says independent alderman Leon Despres. “He was terrified when Martin Luther King Jr.
came to Chicago.”
²⁵

There was also something more visceral about Daley’s reaction to King’s arrival. Chicago was Daley’s city, and he did not
understand what King and his followers were doing there. “It was like if you came home and found a burglar in your living
room,” said McGrath. Like many southern politicians before him, Daley was irate that out-of-town agitators — even ones led
by a Nobel Peace Prize recipient — had arrived to stir up trouble and make demands. “Daley was very dogmatic,” says CHA chairman
Charles Swibel. “He felt that no one was going to come into his city . . . and disrupt it.” This direct challenge to his control
over Chicago bothered Daley to the point of making him physically ill. Before King’s Chicago Campaign was over, Dan Rostenkowski
would suggest to presidential aide Lawrence O’Brien that the White House find an assignment that would take his friend Daley
“out of the country for a week or two.” Rostenkowski was “most concerned,” he told O’Brien, about the toll the civil rights
campaign in Chicago was having “on the mayor personally.”
²⁶

Unlike the governors and sheriffs King squared off with in the South, Daley was shrewd enough to keep his emotions in check.
King had a productive visit in Chicago, meeting with community groups, preaching at two churches, and speaking to a crowd
of 15,000 in suburban Winnetka. On July 26, King addressed an even larger gathering at Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park,
and then led a march on City Hall. Standing outside City Hall, King offered a prayer for the “nonwhite citizens of this city,
who have walked for years through the darkness of racial segregation and a nagging sense of nobodyness.” After King returned
home, Daley showered him with kind words. His “position against poverty and discrimination, for which he was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize,” was one that “all right-thinking Americans should support,” Daley said. The two men had minor differences, Daley
acknowledged, but “there can be no disagreement that we must root out poverty, rid the community of slums, eliminate discrimination
and segregation wherever they may exist, and improve the quality of education.” Daley sounded like a committed civil rights
activist. No wonder that before King’s Chicago Campaign concluded, he and his followers would compare their encounter with
Daley to “punching a pillow.”
²⁷

Meanwhile, by the summer of 1965, Chicago’s home-grown civil rights marches were no longer generating much attention. Dick
Gregory, the comedian and civil rights activist, had led more than forty marches from Buckingham Fountain to City Hall, and
they were all starting to look the same. Civil rights activists were trying to come up with more innovative approaches. At
a July 24 CORE march on City Hall to protest slum housing, the fifty demonstrators came armed with dead rats. One female protester
placed a dead rat on the desk of a receptionist for one of Daley’s aides. The marchers carried signs with slogans like “Mayor
Daley, would you want a rat for a roommate?” The next day, Chicago civil rights activists added a new twist by following Daley
outside the borders of Illinois. When he arrived in Detroit for a meeting of mayors, they arranged for pickets to be on hand
to welcome him. “Mayor Daley, won’t you please go home?” asked one of the signs.
²⁸

Another variation, introduced by Gregory, was a series of evening marches into Bridgeport. These demonstrations drew heightened
media attention because of the drama of blacks descending on Daley’s home. And they had the added advantage of highlighting
the fact that Chicago’s mayor lived in a neighborhood that was not integrated. The marchers were under orders to behave themselves,
walking two-by-two, keeping on the sidewalk, and remaining silent. The sight of blacks in the heart of Bridgeport was unsettling
to many neighborhood residents, but they also made an effort to restrain themselves. A few whites held signs reading “We know
and love our Mayor” and “Daley is for Democracy, pickets are for publicity,” and some shouted “Go back to the zoo!” But Daley
had 11th Ward precinct workers circulate through the neighborhood telling residents not to get drawn into any confrontations.
“The one overwhelming impression you get is this,” journalist Lois Wille wrote in
The Nation.
“Here are two teams of superbly disciplined, fiercely determined combatants. Neither is going to yield — ever.”
²⁹

The tense peace in Bridgeport did not hold. A minor riot broke out on August 2, 1965, when two thousand whites threw eggs,
tomatoes, and rocks at the civil rights marchers. The police told the black protesters that their presence was creating a
dangerous situation, and ordered them to leave. When most decided to remain, sixty-five were arrested, including Gregory.
In a letter to NAACP Legal Defense Fund counsel Jack Greenberg requesting legal help, Al Raby described the scene. “Large
‘Ku Klux Klan’ signs were prominently displayed in several places,” Raby wrote. “‘Wallace for President’ signs were numerous,
and a group of sub-teens, mostly girls, sang, ‘I wish I were an Alabama trooper. Yes, that is what I would truly like to be,
I wish I were an Alabama trooper, Cuz then I could kill niggers legally.’ The police, however, arrested
us,
the silent demonstrators, stating publicly that they were arresting ‘the cause of the riot,’ not the rioters.” Daley stayed
in his home throughout the confrontation, and later lashed out at the marchers for coming to Bridgeport. “People in their
homes have a right to privacy,” he said. “I don’t think it helps their cause to be marching in residential areas. I think
they are surely trying to create tension.”
³⁰