According to James R. Ralph, Jr. before Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's arrival in Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley had already "dealt Blacks into the game." Therefore, King and the SCLC confronted a divided Black community in the North: the conservative Black establishment who were content with the familiar old game into which Daley and the like had dealt them and in which they could exercise a modicum of power; and young radicals who were beginning to assert the idea of Black Power, rejecting the idea of Blacks as "a minority," re-framing Black struggles at home in the context of Black, Brown, and Yellow liberation movements abroad, and criticizing King and the SCLC's insistence on the philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience aiming for integration:
<blockquote>Home Truths: Dr. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s James R. Ralph, Jr. American Visions, August-September 1994, <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1546/is_n4_v9/ai_15752030/print>
. . . Throughout the fall and winter, the Chicago Freedom Movement claimed modest victories, but the North was foreign terrain for the SCLC, which had toiled for nearly a decade on Southern soil. The obstacles to successful insurgency in this huge, sprawling and complex city were formidable, and the spark for a truly electrifying campaign remained elusive.
Although King and his allies sought to recruit a "coalition of conscience" to support a program of democratic and social renewal, many influential Chicagoans were skeptical -- and even critical -- of that effort. The Rev. Joseph H. Jackson, the famed pastor of the historic Olivet Baptist Church on Chicago's South Side and the president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest African-American religious association, was one of the sharpest detractors. The older Jackson (who was not related to Jesse Jackson) had already squared off against King and other activist ministers. For years, he had warned against the inevitable harmful repercussions of civil disobedience, and now he lamented that King had brought his crusade to Chicago, Jackson's hometown. . . .
The Rev. Jackson of Olivet was not the only important black Chicagoan who was cool toward the Chicago Freedom Movement. Six of the city's African-American aldermen, who represented wards on both the South and the West sides, wanted no part of this campaign. They had prospered under the current rules, and they -- like some black Chicagoans -- preferred familiar ways to radical change. Indeed, when news broke that King and the SCLC had targeted Chicago as the site of its first Northern campaign, Ralph Metcalfe, the former Olympic sprinter and a leading black alderman, stated, "We have competent leadership in Chicago and all things necessary to work out our city's own destiny."
Metcalfe's words endorsed the view of Chicago's chief politician, Mayor Richard J. Daley. Hailed as America's most powerful mayor and known as a confidant of Democratic presidents, Daley presided over a potent political apparatus, which virtually controlled the black wards, and he simply loathed the arrival of outsiders who were certain, in his mind, to stir up trouble within his city. Daley himself had praised King for his successes in the South, but he saw no reason for the Nobel Peace Prize winner to ally himself with Chicago civil rights agitators who for months now had displayed no respect for the efforts of his regime to make Chicago a better home for its citizens.
King and his supporters, however, were convinced of the necessity of nonviolent protests. There was a need, asserted Al Raby, a. Chicago schoolteacher and the co-leader of the Chicago Freedom Movement, for "a constant pricking of the conscience." And as King told the Rev. Joseph Jackson, social change did not result from "sitting around having nice conversations."
Their sense of urgency heightened with the rise of the black power impulse after the shooting of James Meredith in Mississippi in June 1966 and with the eruption of a riot on Chicago's West Side one month later. It seemed to King and his lieutenants that the most basic assumptions of their crusade -- nonviolence and interracialism -- were being challenged in the African-American community. The nonviolent civil rights movement needed to prove its relevance in this new era, especially to Northern blacks.
Responding to this pressure, the Chicago Freedom Movement decided to focus on housing segregation, one of the culprits behind the ghetto conditions that plagued so many black Chicagoans. Although some in the community doubted that living among whites was a critical issue, real estate discrimination offered an attractive target for some important reasons: It was neither as subtle nor as elusive as most forms of Northern discrimination. Indeed, it was much like the lunch counter discrimination that had been so triumphantly eliminated by the Southern black protest movement. Specific culprits could easily be fingered. Chicago realtors were the Northern George Wallaces, as one activist put it, standing "in the doorway of thousands of homes being offered for sale or rent" and preventing "Negroes and other minorities from choosing freely where they may live."
And so, in July 1966, Chicago activists, led by veterans of Southern demonstrations, began testing real estate firms for discriminatory practices. After their suspicions had proved correct, they mounted marches into white neighborhoods to protest unfair black exclusion and to spur corrective measures. By early August, King could legitimately claim that there was "a good nonviolent fight in Chicago."
The demonstrations persisted through the month of August as insurgents, black and white, warded off hostile whites during forays into Chicago's southwest and northwest sides and into nearby suburbs. The zeal for social justice was intense. "We march," one activist noted, "we return home emotionally drained, from some inner reservoirs replenish our strength, and go back."
The discipline of the marchers was impressive. Even gang members, who often served as march marshals, toed the nonviolent line. "I saw their noses being broken and blood flowing from their wounds; and I saw them continue and not retaliate, not one of them, with violence," King later marveled.
In the end, this most important sustained episode of Northern civil rights protest of the 1960s led to a series of meetings between city officials, including Mayor Daley, civil rights activists, real estate agents, and business and religious leaders that produced a program to promote equal housing opportunity. King hailed this development as the "most significant and far-reaching victory that has ever come about in a Northern community on the whole question of open housing."
Most observers, however, have not been so generous in their assessment of the Chicago Freedom Movement. In a little-known but remarkable book, Unholy Shadows and Freedom's Holy Light, the Rev. Joseph Jackson claimed that it was "most fortunate for Chicago and for the United States of America that the campaign of 1966 ... failed in Chicago." Otherwise, Jackson argued, "the rule of law would have ended in this city, and the headquarters would have been shifted from City Hall to private offices, hotel rooms and streets or wherever the visiting diplomats elected to assemble."
As an old King opponent, Jackson overstated the case, but many historians agreed with his premise that King's campaign had failed. In the mid-1970s, one commentator, Godfrey Hodgson, in his influential history of modern America, dismissed the Chicago campaign as a rout. More recently, historian Adam Fairclough labeled the Chicago initiative a "defeat" for King and the civil rights movement.
Evidence abounds to support such an interpretation. The Chicago campaign did not give the nonviolent movement the lift that King and his supporters had hoped. Unlike the Selma, Ala., protests a year earlier, the Chicago marches did not inspire sweeping federal legislation. Indeed, in September 1966 Congress failed to endorse a civil rights bill, which included a fair-housing measure, for the first time during the Second Reconstruction.
And in Chicago, even some participants in the open-housing marches denounced the final "Summit Agreement" as a "sellout." Under the leadership of Robert Lucas, the head of the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), they staged in early September 1966 their own protest march -- not sanctioned by King or his lieutenants -- into nearby Cicero, known as a bastion of white hostility toward African Americans. The Cicero demonstration was yet another indication that the coalition that had dismantled the Jim Crow regime in the South was now unraveling. For the last months of his life, King would endure greater criticism from black militants than ever before.
And the Chicago Freedom Movement failed to keep its promise to "end slums." The distress of black Chicagoans still confined today to the West Side and South Side ghettos, including some of the most impoverished places in America, dramatically attests to this failure. Years after the Chicago campaign, one West Side resident admitted, "I'm sure that wasn't [King's] dream -- the way things are now." Then she lamented, "Nothing really happened."
Moreover, there has always been some debate within the African-American community about the importance of residential integration. During the summer of 1966, some black Chicagoans -- even some of those sympathetic to the movement -- wondered whether open-housing marches highlighted "a fundamental issue." As one activist remarked, housing discrimination "was more of a middle-class issue." . . .
But should the final judgment of the Chicago Freedom Movement be so negative? This campaign, after all, catapulted Jesse Jackson to the forefront of the civil rights movement. As a college student in the early 1960s, he had been a leader of the protests in Greensboro, N.C., and then had joined the Selma protests; but until SCLC came to Chicago, where he was then a seminarian, Jackson was but one more young black activist. His energy and dynamism soon made him indispensable to the Chicago Freedom Movement, and when the marches stopped he remained in Chicago, nurturing Operation Breadbasket. In the early 1970s, Operation Breadbasket, which had been under SCLC's auspices, became Operation PUSH, a Jackson vehicle and the eventual launch pad of Jackson's political career.
The Chicago Freedom Movement also gave birth to the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities. A product of the Summit Agreement in August 1966, the Leadership Council has retained the support of Chicago business leaders and, through litigation and aggressive tactics, has pioneered attacks on housing discrimination. In the words of two housing experts, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, "probably no fair housing group in the country has been more energetic or successful in promoting equal housing opportunities."
Despite these efforts, residential segregation remains formidable in Chicago, which now ranks as the third. most segregated city in America. Today, nearly 86 percent of metropolitan Chicago's black population would have to be moved in order for each of Chicago's neighborhoods to reflect the city's overall racial makeup.
The Chicago Freedom Movement was the most publicized effort in the nation's history to spotlight the curse of housing barriers. While its legacy must not be overstated, it did expose, as Bernard LaFayette Jr., one of the campaign's chief strategists, noted in late 1966, the myth "that a Negro can live where he wants to in the North," and it did prove that "large numbers of people in a Northern city can be mobilized for nonviolent direct action in the face of mass violence." This is not a meager message for a country still divided by housing segregation and often seemingly lacking faith that citizens themselves, acting together, can organize for change.</blockquote>
As Ralph, Jr. notes, the failure to break down residential segregation is not just evident in Chicago but shockingly visible throughout the United States today -- the failure that we can hardly blame on King and the SCLC but is rooted in the entanglement of race and class. Only would the emergence and development of a powerful working-class political party led by the Black left, originating in social movements (especially the labor movement) led by the Black left, have been able to tackle the problem. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>