American Pharaoh (72 page)

The summit broke for a fifteen-minute recess, at Raby’s request, so the Freedom Movement could discuss how to proceed. The
civil rights delegates were well aware, Ralph Abernathy says, of Daley’s habit of “mak[ing] vague promises about an unspecified
future, while refusing to be pinned down about any specific goals and timetables.” None of them favored a moratorium based
on what had been offered so far. “In your mind the question may be a moratorium,” Raby told the summit after the recess, “but
we would have to say that we would have a moratorium on demonstrations if we had a moratorium on housing segregation.” Under
questioning from Heineman, Raby said the demonstrations would continue. At this, Daley leaped up:

I thought we were meeting to see if we couldn’t, if there couldn’t be a halt to what is happening in our neighborhoods because
of the use of all the police and the crime rate rising throughout our city,” he said. “I repeat, as far as the city is concerned,
we are prepared to do what is asked for. I appeal to you to understand that we are trying. I ask you why you picked Chicago?
I make no apologies for our city. In the name of all our citizens I ask for a moratorium and that we set up a committee.

It was classic Daley vagueness, a style one summit participant described as “many words, but they have so little content,
they’re so general, that you are not sure that anything has been said when [he] is done.” Raby tried once more to move the
discussion to specific remedies. “[L]et me give you an example,” Raby said. “Is the mayor going to ask for the legislation
to require brokers to post the ordinance in their windows? Will he ask for that legislation next Tuesday and will he get it?
Will that actually be implemented?” But Daley responded that the Freedom Movement first had to show the City Council it was
doing something. It was the first time Daley had expressly made a halt in the marches a quid pro quo for progress on fair
housing. Raby was irate. “If I come before the Mayor of Chicago some day, I hope I can come . . . with what is just and that
he will implement it because it is right rather than trading it politically for a moratorium.” Heineman jumped to Daley’s
defense. “In a cooler moment, I think you’ll realize that the Mayor cannot help but want fewer demonstrations, he’s concerned
about the safety of the people. And the Mayor is accustomed to having his word taken.”
¹⁶

With Raby and Daley at loggerheads, the prospects for a summit agreement were beginning to look grim. It was King who broke
the tension by delivering a moving, but ultimately conciliatory, explanation of why Raby and the others were so reluctant
to give in on the moratorium issue. “This has been a constructive and creative beginning,” King said. And if Daley was tired
of demonstrations, he should realize that the Chicago Freedom Movement was equally tired of demonstrating. But the marches
were necessary, King contended, in order to change conditions. “Now, gentlemen, you know we don’t have much,” King said. “We
don’t have much money. We don’t really have much education, and we don’t have political power. We have only our bodies and
you are asking us to give up the one thing that we have when you say, ‘Don’t march.’ We want to be visible. We are not trying
to overthrow you; we are trying to get in.” By the time King was done, the tension in the room had broken considerably.
¹⁷

Young suggested that a working committee be appointed to consider the kind of specific measures that Raby and the other members
of the Freedom Movement were demanding. Heineman, who had been pushing the two sides to keep talking, agreed. He named a committee
that included representatives from the Freedom Movement, the Chicago Real Estate Board, business, labor, and City Hall. Heineman
directed them to return after a nine-day recess with “proposals designed to provide an open city.” Before the summit could
adjourn, an issue had to be resolved: What would be said to the reporters massed outside about the day’s progress? Heineman
hoped to say something about the marches. If he could not announce a moratorium on the protests, he at least wanted to say
that “the movement would proceed with great restraint” and with “the overall interests of the city” in mind. Swibel pressed
the issue further, trying one last time to extract an agreement that there would be no marches at all, but Raby snapped, “[T]hat
question has already been answered.” Eventually, Daley stood up and said, “I think everybody should be allowed to say anything
they want to, that it be made clear this is a continuing meeting, and that this has been a beginning.” It was almost 9:00
P.M.
when the summit participants filed out of the meeting room.
¹⁸

Both King and Daley were skeptical after the first day of the summit meeting. King was not convinced that the Real Estate
Board would be willing or able to deliver on its promise to change its members’ ways. The following day, he announced plans
for a sweeping new program of racial testing. The Chicago Freedom Movement was going to send 250 testers to 100 realty firms
on the Northwest and Southwest sides to see if anything had changed as a result of the summit. “The real estate people indicated
in our meeting on Wednesday that they wanted to do something about open housing in Chicago,” King told an overflow crowd of
1,000 at the Greater Mount Hope Baptist Church. “We want to see if they are serious. Some people have high blood pressure
when it comes to words and anemia when it comes to action.” The Freedom Movement also resolved the moratorium issue by announcing
that it was resuming its open-housing marches. In a public utterance clearly designed to get under Daley’s skin, Bevel declared,
“We will demonstrate in the communities, until every white person out there joins the Republican Party.”
¹⁹

Daley, for his part, was also unhappy with how things were going with the summit. He was angry that King and Raby had still
not agreed to a march moratorium, which he regarded as an affront to his control over the city. He was also furious at the
damage the Freedom Movement was doing to the machine’s political base. The white neighborhoods that King and Raby were targeting
with the latest round of marches had already started drifting toward the Republicans in the 1963 elections. And ward committeemen
and precinct captains were reporting that the civil rights activity since then had done even more damage to the machine. “We
lose white votes every time there’s an outburst like this,” one precinct captain complained after a march came to his neighborhood.
At the same time, the civil rights movement was tearing loyal black voters away from the black machine. Every successful open-housing
march increased the standing of the Al Rabys of the black community, and hurt the Dawsons and the Metcalfes. Daley had agreed
to the summit to get a moratorium on marches, and now he had no confidence he would get one from the negotiations.
²⁰

Tired of waiting for the civil rights movement to agree to a moratorium, Daley decided to go to court. On August 19, 1966,
city lawyers showed up in Cook County Circuit Court Chancery Division seeking a court order stopping the fair-housing marches.
Daley was in friendly territory when he went into the county court system. Most of the judges had made it to the bench by
performing years of service for the machine, and Daley had slated many of them. Daley did not hesitate to tell judges how
to rule in the cases before them. Senator Paul Simon recalls visiting Daley at City Hall and hearing him ask a judge, in a
telephone call, to rule in favor of a party in a pending case. Weeks later, Simon saw a newspaper article reporting that the
judge had done as Daley asked. Daley was known to punish judges who ruled against him, just as he retaliated against officeholders
who failed to toe the machine line. Daley had approached one judge, Daniel Covelli, early in his career, about a case. Daley
asked Covelli if he was not inclined to rule the machine’s way to give the case up to a judge who would. Covelli refused to
give up the case and ended up ruling against the machine. Daley unslated him in the next election.
²¹

The march moratorium case went more smoothly. Cases filed in the Chancery Court went to Chief Justice Cornelius J. Harrington
for assignment. Harrington was a product of the same world as Daley. He was a director of Catholic Charities, vice president
of the Catholic Lawyers Guild, a trustee of DePaul University, and a member of the Knights of Columbus. As a young soldier,
he vowed that if he survived World War I he would go to church every day, which he did for the next fifty years of his life.
He graduated from Daley’s alma mater, DePaul University’s law school. Most important, he was strongly aligned with the machine.
Cornelius was a “political animal,” recalls Jerome Torshen, a lawyer with close ties to Tom Keane, and a frequent litigant
before the Chancery Division. “In order to have that position you had to be extremely tied in, and they had to be able to
rely on you in cases like that.” Harrington decided to assign the march moratorium case to himself. Daley’s lawyers told Harrington
the marchers were a threat to the “order, peace, and quiet, health, safety, morals, and welfare of the city.” The Freedom
Movement would have responded that it was the white counterdemonstrators who posed the real threat, but they never got a chance
to make the argument. Hours after Daley’s motion was filed, before Raby and the others could even be located, Harrington granted
the injunction. Depriving the Chicago Campaign of their constitutional right to demonstrate without even allowing them to
state their case was an outrageous way for the court to proceed, but it prompted little reaction from the Chicago press or
white Chicago.
²²

Daley’s lawyers chose not to ask for a complete prohibition on open-housing marches, which would have been hard to defend
constitutionally. Instead, Harrington’s injunction imposed onerous conditions on future marches. There could be no more than
one civil rights march a day within the city limits. No more than 500 marchers could participate. Marches had to be held during
daylight hours, but not during rush hours, which the order defined as 7:30
A.M.
to 9:00
A.M.
and 4:30
P.M.
to 6:00
P.M.
And written notice of the time and route had to be given to Police Superintendent Wilson twenty-four hours in advance. “The
Negroes assert the right to full-fledged participation in society,” city corporation counsel Raymond Simon said after the
injunction was issued. “We must make sure there is a society to participate in.” After Harrington issued the order, Daley
requested ten minutes of evening television time on the city’s three main stations to explain why it was necessary. “There
is no desire on anyone’s part to interfere with these orderly civil rights demonstrations,” Daley said. The real issue, he
insisted, was that the marches “diverted too many police who were needed in other parts of the city particularly at those
areas where there are the most families—the most children.”
²³

When King and the rest of the Freedom Movement learned that Daley had gone to court to achieve what he had not been able to
win from them at the bargaining table, they felt betrayed. “The city’s move is unjust, illegal, and unconstitutional,” King
told reporters at the Greater Mount Hope Baptist Church. “I deem it a very bad act of faith on the part of the city in view
of the fact that we are negotiating.” It was particularly galling to King and his followers that Daley had gotten a court
order that even Governor George Wallace of Alabama, at the height of the Selma voting rights campaign, had been unable to
obtain. Wallace had tried to stop King’s planned march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. He had argued, much
like Daley, that King’s voting rights campaign in Selma had already disrupted “the normal function of government.” But U.S.
District Court judge Frank Johnson ruled that Wallace’s attempt to stop the march was a violation of the demonstrators’ First
Amendment rights. The burden was on the state to “preserve peace and order,” Johnson ruled. Days later, 25,000 supporters
of black voting rights marched to Montgomery and demonstrated outside the Alabama State Capitol. The streets of Alabama, it
turned out, were freer for civil rights demonstrations than the streets of Chicago. The City Council, not surprisingly, sided
with Daley. A resolution introduced by Alderman Keane, and adopted 45–1, lauded him for his handling of the marches and his
decision to obtain an injunction. All seven black aldermen voted for the resolution, with Metcalfe declaring that “people
of good intent should realize we lose our gains through actions such as Watts and several things that have happened here.”
Another black alderman called King “a great man whose intentions are right, but who is surrounded by a lot of people who are
not right.” Alderman Despres cast the single negative vote, but his dissent was not allowed to spoil the sentiment. Keane
declared that he could not remember “any such unanimity in commendation” in his forty years in political life.
²⁴