American Pharaoh (68 page)

The day after the rally and the march on City Hall, Daley met with King and ten members of the Chicago Freedom Movement. He
heard his visitors out with his usual impassive demeanor. Then, reading from a forty-page memo, he launched into a recitation
of the “massive programs” he had overseen to improve the lot of the city’s poor blacks. “What would you have us do that we
haven’t done?” he asked.
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Daley refused to get drawn into a discussion of the specific demands King had posted on the door of City Hall. Police superintendent
Wilson rejected the demand for a civil complaint review board of the kind New York City had recently introduced, declaring
that it would interfere with the department’s efforts to reform itself. But with that single exception, Daley was as careful
not to reject any of King’s demands as he was not to accept them. “The Freedom Movement wanted to get a no out of the mayor
on each of the demands and he refused .... he’d say, ‘Well, we could look at it from this perspective, and maybe we could
do something over here,’” one civil rights observer noted. Daley argued that the problems the Chicago Freedom Movement was
taking on were complicated ones, and that the city would need time to work on them. But King insisted that continued delay
was unacceptable. “We cannot wait,” King said in his closing statement. “Young people are not going to wait.”
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King was more frustrated than ever. When he emerged from the three-hour meeting, he told reporters gathered outside that Daley
simply failed to grasp “the depth and dimensions of the problem” facing the city. “We are demanding these things, not requesting
them,” King said, because the “seething desperation” among the city’s blacks was “inviting social disaster.” In the face of
Daley’s resistance, King said, the movement had no choice but to “escalate” its efforts and engage in “many more marches.”
Daley, for his part, came away from the meeting indignant that King was using their impasse for publicity purposes. A furious
Daley, so irate that he stumbled over his words, insisted to reporters that the problems they were discussing “cannot be resolved
overnight.” There was a need for “massive action,” Daley conceded. “We will continue it. I am not proud of the slums. No one
is. We will expand our programs.”
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But Daley insisted that King was deliberately making the city look bad for his own political purposes. Chicago had “the best
record of any city in the country,” Daley said, and even King “admitted himself they have the same problems in Atlanta.” Asked
about King’s promise in his Soldier Field address to begin a direct-action campaign that would “fill up the jails of Chicago,
if necessary,” Daley was firm. “There is no reason for violation of the law,” he said. “This will not be tolerated as long
as I am mayor.”
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The peace in Chicago was shattered the following day. The city was going through a massive heat wave on July 12, with temperatures
lodged above 90 degrees for the fifth consecutive day. To preserve the city’s water pressure, fire commissioner Robert Quinn
ordered that the city’s fire hydrants be kept closed. Two police officers, called to the Near West Side to rescue an ice cream
truck caught in a hole in the street, noticed some black teenagers on Roosevelt Road cooling themselves in the water of a
fire hydrant. Open hydrants were illegal, but they were also an entrenched Chicago tradition. They were one of the few ways
for poor people, and particularly poor blacks, to cool off in the summer heat. There were four Chicago Park District swimming
pools within walking distance of this Near West Side neighborhood, but three of them were restricted to whites. When the police
turned off this open hydrant, it struck many as yet another abuse at the hands of city government, and it was inevitably fraught
with racial implications. “The seething anger over the fire hydrants on the near west side was a mental throwback for older
blacks who remembered vividly their inability to eat hamburgers in white restaurants in Chicago,” civil rights historian Dempsey
Travis has written. Neighborhood resident Donald Henry defiantly reopened the hydrant, and the police took him into custody.
As he was being led away, Henry made an appeal to the crowd forming around him. “You are not going to let these policemen
arrest me,” Henry implored. “Why don’t you do something about it?”
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The crowd began to resist, and clashes broke out between the police and neighborhood residents. The police called for backup,
and thirty squad cars appeared on the scene. Five or six youths were beaten with police clubs, and police began manhandling
members of the crowd. The issue quickly shifted from fire hydrants to police brutality, and before long guerrilla-style warfare
broke out between residents and police over a several-mile area. At the Liberty Shopping Center on Racine Avenue, most of
the windows in the eight stores were smashed. King and other civil rights activists hurried to the area and tried to calm
the rioters. At a late-night mass meeting at the West Side’s Shiloh Baptist Church, King pleaded with the community to reject
violence. But much of the audience, believing that the principles of nonviolence had already been breached by the actions
of the police, walked out in the middle of King’s presentation and headed back onto the streets. By the end of the first night
of rioting, ten people were injured, twenty-four were arrested, blocks of store windows were smashed, and some of the stores
were looted. On Wednesday morning, King called the incident a “riot,” and put the blame for it on the brutal actions of the
police. Daley, seeking to minimize the events of the previous evening, refused to call it a riot, referring to it instead
as a “juvenile incident.” The area where the uprising had occurred was quiet throughout the day on Wednesday, but violence
broke out again that evening. Rioting spread to new neighborhoods, stores were firebombed and looted, and snipers were shooting
down from rooftops. Firemen sent to put out burning stores were stoned. Hundreds of police working until past midnight were
needed to put down the rioting. Eleven people, including six police, were injured.
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Daley met with key staff members on Thursday to plan a response. He told the group — which included police superintendent
Wilson, fire commissioner Quinn, human relations commissioner Marciniak, and Chicago Housing Authority head Charles Swibel
— that he would call in the National Guard if necessary to restore calm. Wilson argued that the real problem was that a few
agitators in the community were using charges of police brutality to stir up the mob. The violence that followed on Thursday
was the worst yet. Rioting spread into the West Side neighborhoods of Lawndale and East and West Garfield Park. Thousands
of young blacks roamed the streets looting stores, throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails, and attacking passenger cars seemingly
at random. Some black-owned businesses put signs in their windows saying “Soul Brother” or “Blood Brother” to discourage looters
from attacking. The police and snipers engaged in furious gunfighting across the West Side. At one point, police identified
rounds of gunfire coming from a tenth-floor apartment in the Henry Horner Homes. They turned floodlights on the apartment
and sprayed it with bullets. In the end, two blacks were killed, including a twenty-eight-year-old man who police said had
been looting, and a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl who was caught in crossfire. Many more people were injured by gunfire,
including six policemen. Daley placed police on twelve-hour shifts, and deployed 900 officers in the affected area. He sealed
the region off from the rest of the city, and declared that Chicago’s curfew for youth under seventeen would be strictly enforced.
By Friday morning, Daley had asked Governor Otto Kerner to mobilize the National Guard.
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Daley blamed the Chicago Campaign for the outbreak of violence. “[Y]ou cannot charge it to Martin Luther King directly,” he
told a press conference. “But surely some of the people that came in here have been talking for the last year of violence,
and showing pictures and instructing people in how to conduct violence. They’re on his staff and they’re responsible....”
The “showing pictures” seemed to refer to the film of the Watts rioting that civil rights activists had shown to youth on
the West Side. Daley also insisted there were “certain elements” working in the city “training, actually training” young people
how to engage in violence. “[W]ho makes a Molotov cocktail?” he asked. “Someone has to train the youngsters.” Daley claimed
he had “tapes and documentation” proving the involvement of King’s followers, but he would not make them public or further
elaborate on his charges. Police superintendent Wilson argued that the police brutality was the fault of the rioters. “Brutality
grows out of arrest incidents where a person resists an officer,” Wilson said. “But some people think they can resist arrest.”
The machine’s black allies echoed Daley’s charges. “I believe our young people are not vicious enough to attack a whole city,”
the Reverend J. H. Jackson told a press conference. “Some other forces are using these people.”
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King was indignant about Daley’s accusations. “It is very unfortunate that the mayor . . . could perpetuate such an impression,”
King said. “My staff has preached nonviolence. We have not veered away from that at any point.” The films of Watts that had
upset Daley so much were shown “to demonstrate the negative effects of the riots,” King said. The truth was that the civil
rights activists had played a critical role in defusing the violence, King insisted, by traveling across the riot-torn neighborhoods
and pleading with rioters to desist. “If we [had not been] on the scene,” King told a reporter, “it would have been worse
than Watts.” The real cause of the riots, according to King, was Daley’s poor record of dealing with “the problems we face
in the Negro community,” and the latest round of rioting was a wake-up call. If Daley continued to resist the reasonable demands
of the civil rights movement, King warned, Chicago was headed toward “social disaster.”
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While the two men were publicly trading charges, King was trying to schedule a meeting with Daley at City Hall. When he was
unable to secure an appointment, a contingent from the Chicago Freedom Movement simply showed up. Daley was out, but King
and his group settled in and waited for the mayor to return. While they waited, Archbishop Cody and six other clergymen showed
up, also seeking to talk with Daley about the unrest. When he returned to his office, Daley sat down and talked to his visitors.
Face-to-face, Daley was more accommodating toward King than he had been in his comments to reporters. “Doctor,” Daley said
to King, who was seated just to his right, “you know you are not responsible for these unfortunate happenings.” After an hour
and a half of discussion, Daley announced that the group had agreed to take a number of steps, including directing precinct
workers in the riot area to encourage residents to stay home, appointing a citizens committee to advise City Hall on relations
between police and the community, and building more swimming pools in the affected areas. Daley’s course of action struck
King and his followers as paltry — King said they failed to meet the “basic needs” of Chicago’s ghetto residents. Civil rights
leaders had called on Daley to put more swimming pools in poor neighborhoods, but when he agreed to build them, the plan was
easily mocked. Columnist Mike Royko scoffed that City Hall was on a campaign “to make Chicago’s blacks the wettest in the
country.” Daley’s more substantive reforms also struck the Chicago Freedom Movement as unimportant. His citizens committee
on police relations was merely advisory, and fell short of the independent civilian complaint review board that activists
were seeking. Still, King called Daley’s proposals a “step in the right direction,” and said he would be “going back to the
people saying some positive things are being done, that changes are being made.”
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The unrest on the West Side was now over. More than 2,000 members of the National Guard, armed with rifles and bayonets, were
patrolling on foot and in jeeps, while another 2,200 were on reserve at five armories spread out across the city. The Park
District had purchased ten portable swimming pools, and on July 17 installed the first one at a playground near where the
fire hydrant riots had begun. A day later, when the streets were still quiet, Major General Francis P. Kane, commander of
the 33rd National Guard Infantry Division, withdrew his men. The final toll from the fire hydrant riots stood at two dead,
more than eighty injuries, and more than five hundred arrests. Property damage was estimated at more than $2 million, and
many commercial streets in the affected areas were devastated. Roosevelt Avenue, by one account, “looked like a tornado had
churned through.”
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Each side drew its own lessons from the rioting. To Daley, the uprisings were getting too much attention, and were detracting
from the many things that were going right in the city. “I would like to see demonstrations by the thousands of Chicagoans
who have obtained jobs, returned to school, and worked together as tenants and landlords as a result of anti-poverty programs
on the federal, state, and local levels,” Daley told a convention of the United Beauty School Owners and Teachers at the Palmer
House. But King and his followers continued to insist that unless something was done, worse violence would follow. The Freedom
Movement staff set out to work with young people in the ghetto and convince them to adopt a policy of nonviolence. They held
a five-hour meeting at King’s apartment on July 16 with leaders of the major West Side gangs, who by the end of the session
agreed to renounce violence. “This puts us over the hump,” Andrew Young declared. “This was a real breakthrough.” The movement
staff promised one leader of the Roman Saints, who had what one staff member called “almost a religious conversion to non-violence,”
that he would be given a chance to meet with Daley personally to express his views. But the Freedom Movement staff had failed
to check with City Hall first, and when they tried to set up the meeting they soon learned that Daley favored a tougher approach.
“They live in a fantasy world,” one Daley staff member said. “They expect to walk into the Mayor’s office and say they’re
responsible for those killings, for shooting policemen, for looting stores and throwing Molotov cocktails and then make a
planned pitch that society made them that way. Why, the first thing we’d do is throw them in the jug.”
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