American Pharaoh (67 page)

The rising tide of black nationalism was in evidence from July 1 to July 4, when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held
its national convention in Baltimore. The traditionally integrationist and interracial group invited Black Muslims and other
black nationalists to share the platform for the first time in its history. The NAACP, the National Urban League, and the
SCLC all boycotted the meeting. King, who had been expected to speak, announced on the first day of the convention that his
“duties as a pastor in Atlanta” prevented him from attending. Giving the keynote address, Carmichael declared that “[t]his
is not a movement being run by the liberal white establishment or by Uncle Toms.” Other speakers attacked the black middle
class as “handkerchief heads” and “Dr. Thomases,” and moderate ministers like King as “chicken-eating preachers.” Although
CORE had been 50 percent white only five years earlier, few whites attended the Baltimore meeting. One of the few who did,
a nun, complained to the press that “[t]his is the Congress for Racial Superiority.” On July 5, white author Lillian Smith,
author of the haunting novel
Strange Fruit,
resigned from CORE’s advisory committee. “CORE has been infiltrated by adventurers and by nihilists, black nationalists and
plain old-fashioned haters, who have finally taken over,” she said. From July 5 to July 9, the NAACP held its own national
convention in Los Angeles, where delegates distanced themselves from the Black Power movement. Vice President Hubert Humphrey
told fifteen hundred delegates on July 6, “We must reject calls for racism whether they come from a throat that is white or
one that is black.” The convention passed a resolution stating that the NAACP would not cooperate with civil rights groups
that were headed in a more radical direction. “In view of the sharp differences,” said assistant executive director John Morsell,
“unified action just seems unlikely.”
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The Chicago Freedom Movement was itself at a crossroads. It was nowhere near adopting the rallying cry of Black Power. The
Chicago movement had always been resolutely interracial, and its guiding force remained King, the nation’s leading voice for
integration and racial cooperation. And at a time when Carmichael and his followers were rejecting campaigns aimed at mere
“freedom,” the goals of the Chicago Freedom Movement — such as integrated education in regular classrooms — remained strikingly
mainstream. But Chicago’s black community was feeling the radical tides that were sweeping across the country, and King worried
that Daley’s intransigence could force the movement in a more radical direction. “[H]e fails to understand that if gains are
not made and made in a hurry through responsible civil rights organizations, it will open the door to militant groups to gain
a foothold,” King told the
New York Times.
The more immediate issue confronting the Chicago Freedom Movement, though, was the need for a new issue to rally around.
Willis’s departure had been a great victory, but it had also removed the single best organizing tool Chicago activists had
ever had. It was hard to keep up the demonstrations and school boycotts when a racially moderate new superintendent was just
taking office. The inclination among most fair-minded people was to give him time to make improvements first. At the same
time, Daley had been doing a brilliant job of stealing away the issue of slums. The power of the anti-slum cause had receded
since Daley began holding almost daily press conferences announcing stepped-up code enforcement, tenements put in receivership,
and sweeping new anti-rat campaigns. King and the other members of the Chicago Freedom Movement debated how to proceed, and
at a steering committee in late June 1966 decided to focus the movement on a new issue — open housing.
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Racial discrimination in housing had theoretically been illegal in Chicago since the City Council passed the Fair Housing
Ordinance of 1963, but the reality was that blacks remained trapped in a few ghetto neighborhoods. When they tried to move
to other parts of the city, they found that real estate brokers steered them back to the ghetto. Landlords in white neighborhoods
generally would not rent to blacks, and white homeowners would not sell to them. The rigid color bar in Chicago not only prevented
blacks from living where they wanted, it also kept them in overpriced, low-quality apartments. A study of the Chicago housing
market by the American Friends Service Committee found that white and black families in the city on average paid the same
amount in rent, $78 a month, even though white families’ incomes were 50 percent higher. But whites got more value for their
rent money, because they had more neighborhoods to choose among. The report found that black families lived in an average
of only 3.35 rooms, compared to 3.95 for whites. “Negroes pay the same for slums that whites pay for good conditions,” the
AFSC concluded. “The role of supply and demand will always hold true and Negroes will continue to pay a color tax for housing
until the entire housing market is open.”
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Open housing was also a cause that made good strategic sense. It carried some of the same moral force as the anti–Jim Crow
battles in the South. Assigning blame for slums was difficult, and remedies often involved complicated interventions in how
people used and maintained private property. But the principle that a family should be able to live anywhere it could afford
to was clear-cut, and com-ported with the most fundamental American ideals. Open housing also seemed a worthy goal because
if it could be achieved, many other benefits would follow. If blacks moved into middle-class white neighborhoods, their housing
conditions would improve, their children’s schools would become better, and they would have greater access to jobs. Housing
discrimination also seemed easier to solve than some of the movement’s other targets. There were limits to how much city government
could do about joblessness and poverty, or even bringing the housing in poor neighborhoods up to code. But the mayor could
end discrimination by enacting a single ordinance, and the city had the power to take away the licenses of real estate brokers
who failed to obey it.
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Not least among its virtues, an open-housing focus paved the way for the Chigaco Freedom Movement to begin a direct-action
phase. By taking the movement directly into white neighborhoods, it had a more confrontational feel, which was satisfying
to those who believed that the movement was too accommodationist. It also promised to trigger the kind of dramatic clashes
between civil rights demonstrators and white resisters that had been critical to success in the South. “Nonviolent direct
action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate
is forced to confront the issue,” King wrote in
Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
“It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” If the Chicago Freedom Movement started to march into
working-class white neighborhoods, it might end up with its own version of Selma — Alabama’s Bloody Sunday — ugly racial violence
that played badly on television. Open housing was probably the best option the Chicago Freedom Movement had, but King was
becoming increasingly pessimistic about his chances of prevailing. Daley’s response so far had been “to play tricks with us
— to say he’s going to end slums but not do any concrete things,” King complained to the
New York Times
in July. “He’s just trying to stay ahead of us just enough to take the steam out of the movement.”
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The Chicago Freedom Movement’s big event of the summer of 1966 was a rally at Soldier Field on Sunday, July 10. Daley worked
hard to steal the rally’s thunder. On July 8, he announced publicly that he and King would be conferring the following Monday,
as King had requested, “to discuss the many problems affecting our city.” The day before the Soldier Field rally, Daley told
reporters that in the previous eighteen months, 9,226 buildings with 102,847 units had been brought into full or partial code
compliance. The Chicago Dwelling Association had been named receiver of 151 buildings, and fines imposed by the Housing Court
were running at more than twice the rate of the previous year. And 332,000 rooms had been inspected in the city’s rodent control
program, and 140,000 rat holes were closed. It was, Daley declared “the most massive and comprehensive rodent eradication
program ever undertaken in this country.”
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The rally’s organizers had hoped to attract 100,000 people, but they fell short. Whether it was due to Daley’s efforts at
dampening enthusiasm, lukewarm support for King and the movement, or the day’s scorching high-90s temperatures, the crowd
that showed up in Soldier Field was somewhere between the city’s estimate of 23,000 and the 60,000 rally organizers claimed.
The organizers did do an impressive job of attracting performers, ranging from gospel legend Mahalia Jackson to folk singers
Peter, Paul, and Mary to a young Stevie Wonder. “Mahalia Jackson sang that day as if the heavens were coming down on Soldier
Field,” recalls a community organizer from the West Side. “You can’t explain that feeling, but you knew then that things are
going to change, it must change. You felt that God was with us.” Archbishop Cody, who was unable to attend, sent a greeting
that was read to the audience. The Black Power movement was not officially part of the program, but they showed up anyway,
revealing a growing schism in the black community. About two hundred young people, some members of the Blackstone Rangers
youth gang, marched on the field carrying a banner reading “Black Power,” and signs saying “We Shall Overcome,” with a drawing
of a machine gun.
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King arrived in a white Cadillac to a hero’s welcome. When the thunderous applause died down and the standing ovation ended,
he launched into a powerful oration about the hard struggle that lay ahead. “We will be sadly mistaken if we think freedom
is some lavish dish that the federal government and the white man will pass out on a silver platter while the Negro merely
furnishes the appetite,” King said. “Freedom is never voluntarily granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.”
King called for an end to the slums, and said that black Chicagoans must be willing “to fill up the jails of Chicago, if necessary”
to make it happen. He also launched into the movement’s newest cause, an open housing campaign that would free blacks to live
anywhere they wanted. “We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97.00 a month in Lawndale for four rooms, while whites
in South Deering pay $73.00 a month for five rooms,” King declared. Although he had insisted since he first arrived in Chicago
that his enemy was the slums and not individual elected officials, King’s Soldier Field address contained his most pointed
challenges yet to Daley and the Democratic machine. “This day, we must decide to register every Negro in Chicago of voting
age before the [1967] municipal election,” he said. “This day, we must decide that our votes will determine who will be the
mayor of Chicago next year.... [W]e 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.”
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The rally ended with King leading a march from the stadium to City Hall to present Daley with a list of demands. A crowd estimated
at anywhere from 5,000 to 38,000 followed King, whose aides had by now dubbed him the Pied Piper of Hamlin Avenue, and watched
as he affixed the movement’s demands to the LaSalle Street door of City Hall. King was harking back to his namesake Martin
Luther, who began the Protestant Reformation by nailing his ninety-five theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg,
Germany, in 1517, though on this occasion King used cellophane tape. A crowd of demonstrators filled State Street from curb
to curb and stretching back for blocks. They sang civil rights songs, chanted “Daley Must Go!” and held up banners with slogans
like “End Modern Slavery — Destroy Daley Machine.” The document King attached to City Hall included what it billed as “14
basic goals aimed at making Chicago a racially open city.” Some of the items were addressed to the business community, like
demands that real estate brokers show listings on a nondiscriminatory basis, and that companies conduct racial head counts
and integrate their workforces. Others were aimed at City Hall: that the CHA improve conditions in public housing and increase
the supply of scattered-site housing, and that the city create a citizen’s review board for police brutality and misconduct.
One demand was addressed directly to the machine: that it require precinct captains to be residents of their precincts, which
would end the practice of absentee white captains remaining in charge of West Side precincts that had long since turned black.
Jack Reilly, Daley’s special events director, removed the demands after King and Raby taped them up, and said he would deliver
them to Daley.
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