King came to Chicago to try to recruit people to turn the CRM in the direction of class issues. It turned out to be a failure, but mainly because King had underestimated the hostility of right-wing whites in the North.
King was trying to use Chicago as a launching pad for a national anti-poverty movement. There was nothing the Mayor of Chicago could have promised (and it's rather preposterous of Garrow to imply he wanted to) SCLC that would have mattered to their goals.
The original point of discussing all this was not to deny that MLK made some mistakes, but to ask the 10,000 Worker March people to stop bandying King's name about as the inspiration for their wild goose chase. King did not see every answer as lying in marches, and knew damned well that marches had better deliver the goods they promised.
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of John Adams Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 6:25 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The Million Worker March: Black People Did Not Get theVote by Voting
On Monday, October 18, 2004, at 07:54 AM, Michael Pollak wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Oct 2004, John Adams wrote:
>
>>> Martin Luther King was a great political strategist.
>>
>> Till he fucked up in Chicago, where he had a chance to move from
>> protest to power.
>
> Could you elaborate on that a bit, John? And are there any books or
> URLs which you like that make this case?
Yeah, Garrow says in _Bearing the Cross_ that when King came to Chicago, Daley (no fool) was ready to deal blacks into the game, just like he'd dealt in other ethnic minorities. However, King and the CFM anticipated a protracted campaign similar to the various southern struggles and didn't have a real negotiating position. At that point, Daley decided he was dealing with amateurs (which, considering the outcome, seems a fair judgment) and stepped away. Daley was trying to cut a deal rather than go through a fight, but when he didn't have a negotiating partner, he decided he'd risk the fight.
He won the gamble, too--the CFM was not particularly effective in the short term, and (per Yoshie's account) it took a long time for Chicagoans to realize the gains of the civil rights movement. It's particularly bitter to realize that the strategy of the civil rights movement worked--that the threat (greater than the execution, eh? But it was less a threat than a bluff, as it turned out) of massive civil disobedience brought the mayor of one of the most (perhaps the most) segregated racist cities in the north straight to negotiation. Then, by not being prepared for success, they lost at the negotiating table what they'd won in the streets of the south.
That's how Garrow tells the story--I'd be curious what Daley biographers and students of Chicago history have to say. (I screwed up my chance to meet Dick Simpson last time around--if I have another shot, I'll make a point of asking him.)
All the best,
John A
P. S. I silently fixed a typo in my original comment.
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