Studying the Movement
The Chicago Freedom Movement, the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the North, lasted from mid-1965 to early 1967. It represented the alliance of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO). In 1965, SCLC, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., was looking for a site to prove that non-violent direct action could bring about social change outside of the South. Since 1962, the CCCO, headed by Al Raby, had harnessed anger over racial inequality, especially in the public schools, in the city of Chicago to build the most sustained local civil rights movement in the North. The activism of the CCCO pulled SCLC to Chicago as did the work of Bernard LaFayette and James Bevel, two veterans of the southern civil rights movement, on the city’s west side.
The Chicago Freedom Movement declared its intention to end slums in the city. It organized tenants unions, assumed control of a slum tenement, founded action groups like Operation Breadbasket, and rallied black and white Chicagoans to support its goals. In the early summer of 1966, it focused its attention on housing discrimination. By late July it was staging regular marches into all-white neighborhoods on the city’s southwest and northwest sides. The hostile response of white residents and the determination of civil rights activists to continue to crusade for open housing alarmed City Hall and attracted the attention of the national press. In mid-August, high-level negotiations began between city leaders, movement activists, and representatives of the Chicago Real Estate Board. On August 26, after the Chicago Freedom Movement had declared that it would march into Cicero, site of a fierce race riot in 1951, an agreement, consisting of positive steps to open up housing opportunities in metropolitan Chicago, was reached.
The Summit Agreement was the culmination of months of organizing and direct action. It did not, however, satisfy all activists some of whom, in early September 1966, marched on Cicero. Furthermore, after the open-housing marches, the Chicago Freedom Movement lost its focus and momentum. By early 1967, Martin Luther King and SCLC had decided to train their energies on other targets, thus marking the end of this ambitious campaign.
Draft—JRR, 3/4/05
“The ‘summit agreement’ of August 26 was signed as a result of the Palmer House meetings and included commitments by the city’s Real Estate Commission to carry out a fair and open housing policy and establish a process to investigate complaints. There were no guarantees on implementation, but we felt we had taken a significant step forward. For the first time, they had acknowledged a pattern of injustice in Chicago housing practices and had promised to do something about it. Viewed from the perspective of the mid-1990s, when the memory of strict housing discrimination has nearly faded away, it should be said that the Chicago agreement was far more advanced than it may now seem. We felt we had done well, considering the tremendous pressure we were under in Chicago. We had been attacked by the mayor, who resorted to the courts in an attempt to halt our marches and rent strikes, by local and state politicians who denounced us, by the national media, which treated us as if we were presumptuous to attempt a campaign in Chicago in the first place, and by Archbishop John Cody, who was the leader of the most populous and wealthy Diocese of Chicago and was the most powerful Catholic clergyman in America. Within the Chicago coalition there were also attacks by CORE and, of course, by the Chicago chapter of SNCC.”
Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 415.
(Biographical note: Andrew Young was one of the top figures in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Chicago Freedom Movement. He subsequently served as the mayor of Atlanta and as a United States Congressman.)
“It had been decided to concentrate the Chicago movement on open housing first. There was tremendous resistance to this in some white suburbs where Martin led one or two protest marches. He told me that never, even in the South, had he seen such hatred in the eyes of white people. . . .
This aspect of the Chicago movement ended when, to avoid what seemed an inevitable bloody confrontation, a conference was held, over which Martin and Mayor Daley presided. Archbishop John Cody came, and there were representatives of the Chicago Real Estate Board, the Chicago Housing Authority, as well as business and industrial leaders, and, of course, people from SCLC and black leaders from Chicago. An agreement on open housing was reached and announced on August 26.
We felt that we had achieved a victory after a long struggle against recalcitrant forces. The opposition knew that change was inevitable, but change does not come without pressure and without sacrifice and real determination. Unfortunately the agreement was never properly implemented. The city officials failed to keep their promises. I believe that Chicago could have avoided much tension, strife, and bloodshed later had this agreement been lived up to.”
Coretta Scott King, My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Avon, 1969), p. 290.
(Biographical note: Coretta Scott King went to Chicago with her husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., to live for a time in a rented apartment in North Lawndale. She has been the inspirational force behind the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta.)
". . .In 1965, Dr. King decided it was time to come North to highlight that Northern racism was more concealed than in the South but still very much alive. He narrowed the choices to New York and Chicago, cities representing the nation's largest Black populations. SCLC staff people concluded that New York's Harlem was too disorganized and fragmented. They chose Chicago, the hub of America’s Black life. . . .
During that period, I attended Chicago Theological Seminary, along with David M. Wallace and Gary Massoni. We three pioneered Chicago's Operation Breadbasket. In our last year of school, our lives were changed directly by Dr. King's visit to Chicago. Dr. Alvin Pitcher, our ethics professor, helped us organize a minister's meeting held on Wednesday evenings, where we discussed social justice concepts. The Reverends Frank Sims, A.L. James, Clay Evans, Edmund Blaire, Stroy Freeman, the Reverends Claude and Addie Wyatt and Henry Hardy belonged to this group. As the ministers internalized these new ideas and impressions, their social attitudes and ministries changed. Not all accepted that. One minister became so disturbed by our thrust that he chased us out of the church with a loaded gun. . . .
It was in these conditions, in the heat of resistance, that the Chicago Chapter of Operation Breadbasket was born. We organized in 1966. We met on Saturday mornings. Our goal was to use the power of the Church to produce employment and business opportunities for Blacks. . . .
Dr. King's move to Chicago redefined the city. King was seen as a direct threat by the late Mayor Richard Daley, whose throne was shaken. The power political machine was troubled . . . .
Marches into communities like Marquette Park and Gage Park became part of Chicago's bloody history. Dr. King commented after he was hit in the head with a rock from the Gage Park open housing march that it had never been so bad in the Deep South. During the Gage Park demonstration, cars were overturned and burned, and policemen attacked from tree tops. Midwesterners were attacking a Nobel Peace prize winner on their front yards. The urban jungle had exploded. Daley painted Dr. King as a 'troublemaker.' He tried to punish him, his workers and his supporters. Daley lost . . . ."
From Reverend Jesse L. Jackson in "A Lasting Impression: A Collection of Photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr." by John Tweedle (University of South Carolina Press, 1983)
“Our nonviolent marches in Chicago last summer brought about a housing agreement which, if implemented, will be the strongest step toward open housing taken in any city in the nation. Most significant is the fact that this progress occurred with minimum human sacrifice and loss of life. Fewer people have been killed in ten years of nonviolent demonstrations across the South than were killed in one night of rioting in Watts.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 58.
(Biographical note: Martin Luther King, Jr., was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when it allied with a coalition of Chicago civil rights groups to form the Chicago Freedom Movement.)
“As you know, right after the Meredith march, Dr, King and SCLC went into Chicago. Not unexpected. Walking down those Delta roads, we’d discussed how the movement would have to take on the Northern cities. I was quite naturally curious to see how well SCLC’s hit-and-run mobilization techniques from Selma and Birmingham would fare in the North. Chicago would be a serious test. The sheer scale of the city, its ethnic neighborhoods, its politics, the infamous Daley machine, the entrenched industrial capitalism. . . .
“On the other hand, SCLC’s Chicago project program exactly the opposite of ours: integration and something they called ‘open housing.’ The tactic: nonviolent marches into the surrounding ‘white ethnic’ suburbs, presumably to ‘open’ them up so inner-city blacks can move in? Hey, there are people already living there. Aye-yai-yai. I thought. Right issue, wrong approach, wrong strategy, wrong solution. I didn’t see what good could result, but honestly? I never, never expected the size and ferocity of the white response. It was ugly and you know very sad. Because it didn’t really have to happen at all.”
Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: the Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael {Kwame Ture} (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 537-538
(Biographical note: Stokely Carmichael was leader with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; he was instrumental in developing the concept of “Black Power.” He was not a participant in the Chicago Freedom Movement.)
“This campaign of non-violence helped to create tensions and, after these tensions, came violence. One newspaper said that the civil rights leaders who had come to Chicago for the summer campaign’s had come to bring revolution. As we look back over the months, we have discovered that no revolution has come to Chicago—increased bitterness, but not a revolution. There has been some divisions, some peoples have lost confidence in some leaders in Chicago, and the campaign of the summer of 1966 has not strengthened confidence on the part of local leaders in one another. “
J.H. Jackson, Unholy Shadows and Freedom’s Holy Light (Nashville: Townsend Press, 1967), p. 161.
(Biographical note: The Reverend J.H. Jackson was the president of the National Baptist Convention, the most powerful association of black Baptists in the country, in the 1960s. He did not support nonviolent direct action. He did not support the Chicago Freedom Movement. He was the pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side.)
Reverend A. P. Jackson was the pastor of the Liberty Baptist Church at the time of the Chicago Freedom Movement. He was one of the few black ministers who headed a large church to support Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work in Chicago.
“[Mayor Daley] had a large number of ministers at City Hall eating from the king’s table. You don’t talk against the king when you are eating at his table.
“And quite naturally, when Dr. King came to Chicago these ministers were afraid of inviting Dr. King to their churches because they were afraid they would alienate the feelings of Mayor Daley . . . “
“We were free of eating at the mayor’s table. We had no fear of any reprisal coming from Mayor Daley because our church was independent. The membership of Liberty made sure that I was independent of any politicians, so we never accepted money from any politicians or anyone else. . . . So I could afford to have [Dr. King] come to Liberty because we were not afraid of any reprisal from Mayor Daley.”
“Chicago was a suburb of Mississippi. We didn’t know we were not free until Dr. King woke us up. We were sleeping . . . .”
Reverend A. P. Jackson interview with Jim Ralph, January 3, 1992.
Al Raby was a teacher in the Chicago public schools when he became swept up by the Chicago civil rights movement. Soon he was the convenor of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) and then the co-chair with Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Here Raby reflects on the decision to reach an agreement during the so-called Summit negotiations with the leadership of the city, the real estate industry, the business community, and organized religion:
“Our concern with the Summit meeting, and the problem with movements in general is that movements have a momentum and once they have lost their momentum they are difficult if not impossible to create. And a movement is always vulnerable to its opposition and particularly if its opposition is an institution and has an institutionalized capacity. And where the movement has been most successful it has institutionalized its demands. And so the movement for voting rights, the institutional enforcement of that rested with the Justice Department and it had the capacity to carry on and hold to account people who violated that. It was not the movement’s responsibility to do that. . . . And so the question was could you institutionalize, since the movement could not do it, unless it became an institution itself, could you institutionalize that capacity.”
Al Raby interview with Jim Ralph, September 12, 1986.
Remember Why You’re Here, Brother
Sometimes it pays to be late. On July 31, 1966, I intended to meet up with civil rights marchers at a Southside church who were going to march in Marquette Park for open housing. The purpose of going to a church, like the demonstrations in Selma, Alabama and elsewhere, was to mentally and spiritually prepare for a nonviolent response to what could be a violent afternoon. As I was driving east toward the church, the demonstrators were driving west, so instead of going to the church, I fell in behind and was the last car in the procession as we approached Marquette Park.
The cars filled all the spaces in the small parking lot on the southeast corner of the park, so I was left parking between two police cars near the entrance. I went to this march with the intention of photographing the marchers and the landmark event because I was a teacher at the time, but seeing the size of the opposition, I put my camera back in the car and joined the march.
As we started marching, angry whites started spitting on me and the other marchers. Not being mentally prepared to accept this kind of degrading abuse, I told someone in the mob, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” as if I were ready to take onthe whole mob. (I think I may have been a little naïve at the time.) Then an older African-American man in front of me turned around and said, “Remember why you’re here, brother” and from that point on, I remained silent andwalked in solemn procession while rocks, bottles and cherry bombs were being thrown at us over the heads of the police who were “escorting” the marchers through the park. With the escort of reluctant police officers, it turned out to be the most brutal march I had ever been involved in. In fact, when we returned to our cars, we saw several pushed into the lagoon and others that were set on fire, turned over or damaged in some way. Ironically, there were only three cars not damaged. One was mine, and the other two were the police cars I had parked between. Had I arrived earlier, my car would have been damaged or destroyed like the others.
Due to the condition of our cars and the angry white mob, it was impossible to return to our cars. So, the marchers headed east on 71st Street where at least for awhile, police protection broke down completely. For example, before reaching 71st Street, when the police were still walking alongside the demonstrators, the mob came close enough to spit on us. Then, when we reached 71st Street, our police escort disappeared, and ironically, the mob moved further away from us, to the other side of the street. However, without the police presence, the mob threw the rocks much harder and windows broke above and around us. Even though the rocks hit my legs and the marchers around me, we had to just keep walking. Even if the police escort had been there, little would have been done to protect the marchers. However, the police did take swift action when one of the mob hit a police officer. Then the police clubbed him down to the ground.
It wasn’t until we approached Ashland Avenue that the mob retreated because Ashland, at that time, was the “dividing line” between Black and White. The white mob seemed to lose their “courage” as they approached Ashland Avenue. Later that night, a police officer escorted me back to my car that had remained undamaged throughout the entire demonstration.
Executive Director
HOPE Fair Housing Center
Wheaton, Illinois
Source: People's Weekly World Newspaper, 01/19/02 see
http://www.pww.org/article/view/439/1/44/
The impact of the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement on the decade's civil rights struggles was as significant as any other campaign of that era. By bringing the freedom struggle to Chicago, where the Democratic Party machine was closely linked to the national party and the White House of President Lyndon Johnson, the movement raised the bar and gave the struggle for equality a national focus.
It was a time when thousands were on the move. Calling for an end to Jim Crow in public accommodations, they boycotted the city bus system in Montgomery, Alabama. They sat in at lunch counters across the South, demanding service.
National guardsmen and federal troops were protecting children who were breaking down the walls of segregated schools. Black and white teams of youth had gone south to challenge poll taxes and organize voter registration drives. "Whites Only" signs were being torn down.
People from all walks of life were getting involved in the struggle to eliminate the legacies of slavery. Although the struggle took on many forms and covered diverse areas of the South, it came to be called simply the "movement." To say someone or some organization was "part of the movement" was to say it all.
Made up of many diverse groups, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy in the mid-1950s, sparked the imagination of civil rights supporters everywhere.
As its prestige grew far beyond its numbers, the SCLC and its leaders became the spark plug that ignited mass protests across the South, bringing the demands of the movement to the attention of the nation as scenes of snarling police dogs flashed on screens television.
King and Abernathy decided to bring the movement "up south" and the search for a place to begin brought them to Chicago. There they found the ingredients they were seeking: a substantial base of support among both white and Black ministers, a base of Black and white activists, steeled in struggles against racist hiring practices, police brutality and racial discrimination in housing and education.
As important as any other consideration, the struggle for equality enjoyed the support of important sections of organized labor – Region 4 of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Packinghouse Union, both led by African Americans.
In addition, many individual leaders and rank-and-file activists had long been associated with the civil rights movement. SCLC planners noted that Walter Reuther, the UAW president, walked arm in arm with King at the 1963 March on Washington. King and other SCLC leaders saw these as the essential elements of a successful campaign.
Thus was born the Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM), with King and Al Raby, a leader of Chicago's Coordinating Committee of Community Organizations (CCCO), its co-chairs. CFM activities and policies were determined by an committee made up of representatives of the city's diverse civil rights organizations.
SCLC dispatched field staff to help lay the groundwork. In the spring of 1966, King, his wife and their children moved into an apartment on the west side of Chicago and the campaign of the summer of 1966, with its demand to end slums, began in earnest.
Richard J. Daley, Chicago's "shoot -to-kill" mayor, made known his displeasure that "outside troublemakers" were coming to "his" city and told all who would listen there were no slums in Chicago. He also declared that he would not meet with King, thus drawing a line in the sand.
For those who were to lead the summer campaign, these statements were ominous. The nation and the world were to soon learn what they already knew – that the likes of "Bull" Connor, Lester Maddox and George Wallace had their counterparts in the Richard J. Daleys of Chicago and other northern cities.
During the summer of 1966 the movement staged a number of marches in white communities protesting housing discrimination, a practice generally accomplished by "red-lining" and "block-busting."
Although the marchers were pledged to non-violence, the community was not. Each march saw an escalation of violence, until the chief of police asked city hall to seek an injunction because his resources were being stretched.
The ferocity and scope of the violence that met the marchers was unmatched by any previous attacks anywhere. King was felled when struck in the head with a stone during a barrage of assorted missiles. Marchers feared for their lives when their parked automobiles were rolled over and their tires flattened, set on fire and some pushed into a small lake in the park. Many feared that without their cars there was no way to escape the crowd when the demonstration ended and, with nightfall coming, they could be in mortal danger.
By summer's end Daley had to back down. After several face-to-face meetings with CFM leaders, he agreed to negotiate an agreement and appointed a 19-member committee chaired by Thomas Ayers, head of Commonwealth Edison, the giant utility company.
King and Raby headed the movement's six-member team. The real estate board had two members, the religious and liberal community four. Others included one each from the City of Chicago, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Chicago Commercial Club.
Eventually a 10-point agreement was signed that called for various measures to strengthen the enforcement of existing laws and regulations with respect to housing. The city would enforce its 1963 open housing ordinances and Daley agreed to work for state open housing legislation.
The real estate board agreed to end its "philosophical" opposition to open housing, while the city housing authority agreed to seek "scattered sites" for public housing.
Cook County promised to provide "the best housing available" for those receiving public assistance and a similar pledge was made by city agencies for those dislocated by urban renewal projects.
Savings and loan associations and mortgage institutions agreed to make money available on an equal opportunity basis. Others pledged efforts to educate their members and the public on the importance of the measures outlined in the agreement.
King called the agreement "the first step in a thousand-mile journey" and "one of the most important programs ever conceived to make open housing a reality."
Daley said he was "satisfied that the people of Chicago and its suburbs ... will accept the program in light of the people who endorsed it."
Others thought the campaign a failure because the agreement contained so little, especially in the area of enforcement. Still others downplayed its significance because of the misconception that "success" can only be measured by the size of the "trophy."
Not only did the Chicago Freedom Movement forever change the way the people of Chicago lived, it highlighted the tremendous problems that would confront the movement as it sought to bring the struggle to the big cities of the North. The strategy and tactics of the southern Black Freedom struggle, where segregation and discrimination were open and labeled with signs, had to be reworked when applied to the de facto injustices of the big northern cities.
The agreement won by the summer campaign of the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966 was a work in progress, one that confirmed, once again, that freedom is a constant struggle.
Carolyn Black was a member of the SCLC staff who worked in Chicago during the summer of 1966. Bill Appelhans was a member of the Du Bois Clubs in Chicago at that time.
**************
An interview with Bill Hogan
Keep your eyes on the prize
Bill Hogan, then Father William Hogan, remembers the Summer of 1966. Well he should, having served as recording secretary of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), the group that, together with Martin Luther King, Jr. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), formed the Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM), which led the massive civil disobedience direct action campaign of the summer of 1966 in Chicago.
Hogan said that while King was "first among equals," the composition of the CFM staff was exceptional and reflected the scope of the movement: James Bevel, C.T. Vivian, Al Sampson, James Orange, Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young, who went on to become mayor of Atlanta and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
"All were veterans of major battles in the South," he said, adding that key players from Chicago included Edwin "Bill" Berry of the Urban League, Bob Lucas of CORE and Carl Fuqua of the NAACP.
"In addition to traditional civil rights organizations, CFM included representatives from the religious and liberal communities. Some of the unions affiliated with AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department provided staff assistance."
Hogan told of the long hours spent in meetings: "We planned demonstrations, discussed how to deal with police harassment and confrontations with the Nazis and, eventually, negotiations with then-Mayor Richard J. Daley."
There was always the question of welding the conflicting views and goals of individuals and their organizations. Through it all, Hogan was there busily taking notes.
"Can you imagine – 25 strong-willed people with as many ideas of what should be done. Try reflecting all of that in the minutes!"
Hogan said there were many lessons to be drawn from the Chicago events of 1966, one of them embodied in the song "Keep Your Eye on the Prize."
"Although that song, as were others, was generally seen as a morale builder meant to strengthen resolve, we in the CFM saw it in a different context, Hogan said. "If we were to build our coalition, if we were to keep it together in the face of contending forces, goals, ideas and yes, personalities, we had to keep our eye on the prize. But first we had to define the prize – to decide where we were trying to go and how to get there. Both were tests of our coalition-building ability."
Over the course of countless demonstrations and picket lines, the "prize" was established: open housing and school desegregation.
"The two were really two sides of the same coin," Hogan said. "Segregated housing patterns guaranteed segregated schools, with all that implies for quality education." As a consequence of that decision, he said, they made real estate companies their main focus, together with insisting on the right to use the city's parks.
Hogan said some of the lessons of the CFM and the civil rights struggles of the '60s are applicable today. "Non-violent mass action can work, as witness the civil rights laws of 1964, 1965 and 1967, and it is applicable to many struggles, as witness the movement that forced an end to the war in Vietnam."
He said today's prize is the defeat of the ultra-right. "They've opened a no-holds-barred attack on our living standards, on the victories won in years of struggles and the democratic institutions that are the foundation of our society. The only way they can be defeated is by building a broad-based coalition of the victims and intended victims of that attack."
– Fred Gaboury
AN INSIDER’S VIEW OF THE DEEP ORIGINS OF THE CHICAGO FREEDOM MOVEMENT
EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW with DAVID JEHNSEN
By Seth McClellan, July 24, 2006
(Transcribed by Emily Hoover on December 8, 2006)
Seth McClellan (SM): WHEN YOU GOT INVOLVED IN CHICAGO, WHO WERE YOU… HOW’D THAT HAPPEN?
David Jehnsen (DJ): I grew up in the Church of the Brethren. It’s one of the three historic peace churches: the Brethren, the Mennonites, and the Quakers. And for nearly three hundred years (and in the case of the Mennonites case, longer), we have been a religious denomination that has opposed violence and slavery as a way to solve problems—that both were a violation of the Creation.
So even before there were soldiers in Vietnam, I had decided at the age of 18 to be a Conscientious Objector. And so, my project turned out to be here in Chicago. Some of our volunteers went to Africa, to Haiti, to Mexico, to Europe, but I had decided to work on a project that dealt with race, because race and religion are going to be the cause of future wars… so I arrived at the project site . . . . The West Side Christian Parish was a joint inter-denominational effort of what was then called the Chicago Community Missionary Society. (It’s now called the Chicago Community Renewal Society).
It was an inner-city Protestant parish, sponsored by five denominations, including the Church of the Brethren.
And so I was assigned to a church . . . and started working with young people; I started working with young gangs – guys on the street . . . .
Then Dr. King wrote a letter, inviting the various church groups in Chicago to send a delegation of church leaders, an inter-faith delegation, to Albany, Georgia, in August of 1962. Because I was under selective service, the parish did not want to let me go, even though they were going to send three people. And just before the day it was going to happen, and the minister I worked for was going to be the one going, he said . . . . “David, I have a medical emergency and need to have an operation tomorrow. I know they said you can’t go, but here’s the money.”
So 35 of us including Rev. Porter, John Porter here, were called the Albany Delegation; and . . . we went down there and we spent anywhere from three to five (and in some cases seven) days in jail for a prayer vigil in support of Martin Luther King’s movement and the Albany movement.
There was a delegation from Detroit, from Washington DC, from NYC and from Los Angeles. So there were about 80 church leaders. I was nineteen years old. I had just turned nineteen a couple months before that but I was determined to be a part of nonviolent campaigns.
So that was the beginning and when we came back that delegation met off and on for two years to provide support for the southern movement. . . .
SM: AND…YOU WERE WORKING ON PREPARATION IN CHICAGO?
. . . I took advantage of any opportunity that existed to connect work to end slums and or to solve the problems with economic and racial injustice on the near West Side to the movements in the South. And one of the specific things I did, because I served on a committee on peace education for the American Friends Service Committee, was to see to it that any time C. T. Vivian or any of the other southern ministers would come up, that they would come in and speak to my ministers’ groups . . . .
Well, Jim Bevel was one of the speakers that I had at the church, and we were kind of talking, and having a reflection; and he said, “David, he said, I can see where were moving to a larger organization; a larger effort; a more permanent effort”; and he said, "there’s a young pastor named Shelvin Hall at Friendship Baptist church on the West Side out in Lawndale . . . . and you tell him I sent you, and I’ll talk to him, I think he could really help to organize a really broader group."
So I did, and between Shel and myself, we organized over the next 90 days . . . The West Side Federation . . . and we worked out of [Reverend Hall’s] church and about that time they were going to have a big rally, in June [1964], at Soldier Field, and [Martin Luther King] was going to speak . . . I said that I think we could take three or four thousand people to this rally. . . . And wouldn’t that be dramatic to have a bunch of people from the West Side come in to that rally as a group.
Well, so we went to work on it . . . So it gave an opportunity for this group of ministers and organizations to show that they could really deliver a group of people. . . .
SW: SO IT SOUNDS LIKE, WHEN THE WORK WITH DR. KING STARTED, THERE WAS A REAL FOUNDATION.
DJ: Yes—there’s one more step to it.
Because what happened at that same time is Bernard LaFayette came to the West Side working through the American Friends Service Committee. And right after that rally there was an institute, up at Lake Geneva, and Bernard and I were standing in Lake Geneva, in water up to here, and were just talking and getting acquainted, and he said, “Well, David what do you do?” And I said, “Well, I have laid the groundwork, I hope, for a movement from the north to the south in terms of nonviolent movement.”
. . . . And so I told him what I was doing and I said, the reason I’m here is they said I did a good job at the Soldier Field rally bringing the West Side delegation in and they thought I deserved a week’s vacation. . . But anyway so Bernard was asking me this and he was looking at me and said, “That’s why I’m here. Maybe we ought to work on this together.” That was 1964. So that’s what we did. He worked for the American Friends’ Service Committee . . . which was out in Garfield Park and I worked for the West Side Christian Parish which moved, later on in that year, to Garfield Park . . . . So we started working together and we had a similar philosophy both of nonviolence and of organizations. And we were both good organizers, and we knew that there were always going to be good leaders who were very charismatic, and up front, but we knew that the question of who’s going to develop the future leadership always has to be first on your plate.
How the Marches Began
The summer of 1966, when the Chicago Freedom Movement kicked into high gear will long be remembered as the time of civil rights marches into hostile white neighborhoods—but those marches were never on the movement’s initial agenda. Here’s what actually happened.
One phase of the CFM housing agenda was aimed at achieving open occupancy (as it was called then) by showing up the nature of housing discrimination by the real estate industry and the toothlessness of Chicago’s open-housing ordinance.
The agenda began by testing real estate agencies to determine racial steering. We carefully selected white communities that were at least one mile from racial boundary streets (such as Ashland Ave. on the South Side) and at a median economic level that the typical black family could afford. A white couple would go to a local real estate office to see what apartments might be available in the neighborhood, followed by a black couple and then by another white couple. As expected, the white couple would be shown places only in a white section, the black pair would only be shown something in the black sector—and told nothing else was available—then the second white would be again shown something only in a white section.
A report of this would be made to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, which had the responsibility under the ordinance for sanctioning the real estate broker. If nothing happened following the report, a vigil was to be called outside the offending real estate office.
One of the agencies to be tested, reported and not sanctioned was F.H. Halvorsen Real Estate at 63rd and Kedzie, serving the targeted Gage Park neighborhood. A vigil was called on Thursday, July 28.
About 100 black and white demonstrators stood outside the agency doors holding placards and singing freedom songs. The Reverends Jesse Jackson and James Bevel were in charge of the program because Dr. King was out of the city and CFM co-chair Al Raby was occupied elsewhere.
As the day wore on, local whites began gathering near the vigil, heckling and jeering. Toward sundown the white crowd grew larger and increasingly vociferous, though the police were successful at that point in keeping the groups separated.
The white crowd grew noisier and may have begun tossing stones or other small missiles at the demonstrators. It seemed that violence was imminent—all under the glare of TV lights with a full complement of media looking on. (I was at that time the CFM press secretary/media liason.)
It was evident that violence would grow as the dark of might came on. No one wanted to disperse near the angry white crowd. The police then offered an alternative: they would truck the demonstrators away in police wagons. Bevel and Jackson agreed to the deal and the world was treated to the sight of peaceful civil rights demonstrators filing into the wagons much like common criminals. The white crowd jeered louder and screamed obscenities at each of the demonstrators climbing into the wagons.
We were deposited at the Southside Freedom Center in Englewood.
In the back room a group of the leadership clustered in grief and embarrassment. Raby returned to the Center, furious. He said we should have demanded police protection for a march back to the Center. He conferred with Dr. King by phone.
Brainstorming the issue, I, among others, said that because of the humiliating retreat the only way to retrieve our dignity and affirm our right to demonstrate peacefully was to plan a march back to the Halvorsen office from the Freedom Center. Dr. King agreed and the action was set for the two days later, Saturday, July 30th.
That march met with local white opposition, and another march was scheduled for Sunday, July 31st. That march, led by Raby, planned to go west on 79th Street, then through Marquette Park, then north to the office. But it was met by jeering, rock-and-bottle-throwing white crowds lining 79th street when we got west of Ashland, then massive violence when the line of march got to the park itself.
Cars were burned and run into the pond in the parks. The police not only failed to protect, but also seemed to encourage the white youths to carry on with the violence.
We were stymied at the park. Groups of us sat down and sang. The whites just ahead of screamed epithets and sang their own racist song parodies. One of them was, to the tune of an Oscar Meyer jingle, "I wish I was an Alabama trooper…then I could kill a n---er fearlessly."
With many people hurt by flying missiles, their cars burned and other damage inflicted because the police failed in their duties to protect us, we headed back to the Freedom Center. Angry whites lined the south side of 79th as we filed on the north side—then, almost magically, things were peaceful as we crossed Ashland. I recall describing the scene by phone later that day to Lu Palmer, who was then a reporter for the old Chicago’s American.
It would be almost another week before we made the march all the way through Marquette Park and to the Halvorsen office—this time protected by Chicago police, who were given orders to do so after the earlier debacle. But they could not fully protect Dr. King, who had returned to Chicago to lead this particular, successful march. That was the day he was stunned and briefly felled by a flying brick in the middle of Marquette Park.
That was also the beginning of a series of marches throughout that summer, into a host of hostile of white communities that met our economic and geographic criteria. Our agenda had changed.
By Don Rose, October 2005
Edwin C. "Bill" Berry was the executive director of the Chicago Urban League. The Urban League was an essential player in the rise of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) and then in the Chicago Freedom Movement. He was a member of the Agenda Committee of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Here he reflects on why Martin Luther King decided to come to Chicago:
"Martin said frequently that he was enticed into coming to Chicago because of the movement we had going. And Chicago was a major city, presenting a laboratory with all the problems and if, we all felt like, if we could do the thing here we’d pretty well have a formula for doing it anywhere. And we told Martin, if he didn’t already know, we had a tough town. It was hard to crack, but if we did crack it in a political sense we had a mayor who could deliver. But he was impressed with CCCO. He was impressed with the big rally, the organization of it, the way people turned out, how to pull the whole thing off. I think those were the major factors. He’d been coming in and out of Chicago. He knew something about it. There were some of us in the movement who would work."
Edwin C. Berry with Kale Williams, February 26, 1972.
BACKGROUND:
After having taught in the Chicago Public School system for five years, in June of 1964, I was accepted to do an internship with the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation for one year. The foundation required that I choose from a list of social agencies one where I would spend that year. I selected to do my internship with the American Friends Service Committee at 431 South Dearborn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. I was assigned to work in the Housing Opportunities Program that was designed to creatively encouraging the Chicago real estate industry to consider abandoning the discriminatory real estate practices, and make housing opportunities equal for all people. Within the Housing Opportunities Program was a unit called HOME, Incorporated, (Home Opportunities Made Equal), where I worked full time. Recognizing the racially segregated housing market, HOME was run as a real estate office to serve African American people who were in the market for housing in non traditional African American neighborhoods. The housing and rental stock was made available by willing White persons who sold or rented their properties to African Americans, thereby bypassing the city’s real estate system. HOME provided services free of charge with a monthly listing service.
The city of Chicago had a fair housing ordinance on the books but with no evidence of enforcement. HOME, Inc. organized a citywide real estate testing program with White and African American testers, and found, over a period of time, blatant wide spread housing discrimination through the city.
The city’s Office of Human Rights was obligated, by the terms of the ordinance, to use their enforcement powers. However, no positive resolution came from the city.
After the Selma, Alabama SCLC civil rights campaign, Martin Luther King, Jr. began looking for targets of opportunity in northern cities in an effort to demonstrate that racial segregation was not limited to the south. Because of the work that was being done by HOME, Inc., we produced a paper on the problems that we had encountered with unequal housing in Chicago, and sent it to Martin Luther King for review, and without a doubt, Chicago was agreed to be the targeted city in the north. In May of 1966 I was given the liberty by Kale Williams, who served as Director of the American Friends Service Committee, to work full time with SCLC to direct the Southside Action Center where most of the marches to Gage and Marquette Parks were organized and launched.
SUNDAY JULY 31, 1966:
A planned demonstration that was assembled at the New Friendship Baptist Church went to Marquette Park, via, automobiles, and reassembled in the park for a march through the neighborhood, and certain selected real estate offices that were known to discriminate from our testing program. We were given permission, by the police to park our automobiles in the park while marching through the neighborhood. We were under the assumption that the police would protect our automobiles. While the march was underway, the automobiles were set aflame, and pushed into the park’s lagoon, leaving us with no transportation to return to New Friendship. The police were complacent, and declared that they saw nothing of the perpetrators. We were left to the mercy of the police who were clearly adverse to our being in Marquette Park. Many were hostile and not helpful. This was a frightening time, and especially for many of the participants who were new at demonstrating in a nonviolent setting. We became sitting ducks for the hecklers.
I remember the constant refrain of a chorus that was sung by many young White male hecklers, as we were in the line of march. The refrain was sung by using the melody of the Oscar Meyer jingle:
“ I wish I were an Alabama Trooper, that is what I’d truly
truly like to be. Cause’, if I were an Alabama Trooper,
then I could kill the niggers legally.”
MAPPING THE MARCH ROUTES
Other tenuous times was the march route mapping in hostile neighborhoods in the middle of the night. In order to orchestrate well ordered marches, I was accompanied by a White Air Force Academy drop out volunteer, who happened to be proficient in mapping. He and I would go into Marquette and Gage Park, Belmont Cragin, and *Cicero to mark the march routes to be taken at the time of march. Often, we were recognized by the residents who yelled obscenities, which made us uncomfortable.
The hecklers in Marquette and Gage Park were violent in the attack on the marchers, and the police, for a while did nothing to restrain the hecklers until the brutal behavior was widely televised across the country, giving Chicago the reputation of a break down of law and order that caused a political concern for the mayor. The mayor gave orders to the Chief of Police to restrain the hecklers with force, and they did. Blood flowed like water, as the police turned on the hecklers with their truncheons. It took the request of Martin Luther King, Jr. to say to the mayor to stop the police from beating the hecklers, in the name of nonviolence.
* While Cicero was prepared for a march, once the Summit Agreement was reached, the Chicago Freedom Movement decided not to march on Cicero.
Elbert Ransom now lives in Virginia. he is President of Reach Incorporated: Racial Equality and Cultural Harmony. www.reachcultures.com
In the Spring of 1963, Jerry traveled with a Campus (ISU) Ministry group to Savannah, Georgia to work with a local effort to register Black voters. Hosea Williams, who was to become a key SCLC organizer around Mississippi Summer headed the local group. Jerry finished his work at the University later that year and moved to Chicago. He joined the demonstrations against the "Willis Wagons" while teaching in the Chicago Public School system. He taught first at a middle school on the South Side and later at Crane and Forrestville High Schools. As a new teacher, he quickly became aware of the school systems inadequacies. He described them as virtually criminal if one considered the impact of this kind of negligence on the future of Chicago students. He continued his community organizing, joining with Dick Gregory in challenging the notion that Blacks were confined by history and activity to the inner areas of Chicago. They held major breakthrough demonstrations in Bridgeport. They were arrested continuously in the summers of 1964/65.
After the joint decision by CCCO and the SCLC to form the Chicago Freedom Movement, an effort to break the unspoken restrictions on Black life, Jerry began an organizing support effort on the Near North Side of Chicago. Al Raby asked Jerry to attend a Saturday meeting with him in a downtown hotel, where they met with Walter Fauntroy, an SCLC representative. Jerry remembers this meeting as his first understanding of how the joint organizational effort would work. The SCLC staff began arriving in Chicago and setting up shop on the West side. Dorothy Wright (Tillman) was assigned to work with him on the Near North side of the city. The Chicago movement continued to probe ways of engaging the city, meaning whether the central thrust would be housing, labor, schools, etc. Jerry reflected that housing and closed communities seemed to be the issues that created the most tension. He thinks that the demonstrations in areas like Bridgeport helped the movement leadership decide to challenge closed communities with the concept of open housing.
The demonstrations in racially closed areas commenced and resistance were immediate and violent. Jerry participated in every demonstration, including the violence in Marquette Park. Thousands of White residents, mostly young folks attacked the busses with an intensity that obviously worried demonstrators, but also the city and state government. The city government, aware of its image, finally sent in busses to transport them out of the violence. Jerry remembers how they hugged the floor as the busses shuttled through a gauntlet of bottles and bricks. Every window was smashed in his bus. Jerry was more concerned about the numbers of students he had brought into the movement, many of whom had attended the march. Fortunately they survived without injuries. Martin King was struck in the head during the Marquette Park demonstrations.
Later the city government began meeting with the Chicago Freedom Movement Leadership. These meetings led to an "agreement" on a protocol toward an open city. Many local Chicago community leaders felt that King’s threat of a March to Cicero, which was used as a wedge to move the "agreement" forward, should have been carried out. Jerry agreed with the need to use the threat of a march to Cicero strategically, but felt that because a march to Cicero was being called by a number of community leaders, that he was obliged to participate. Jerry recalls, feeling very strongly that citizens have the right to walk safely in every neighborhood in Chicago and in the nation. He joined the march, and recalls it as one of the most difficult of the period.
Jerry Herman went on to direct a major organizing effort against apartheid in South Africa and for a fundamental change of U.S. policy in Southern Africa.
JH, August 2005
John McDermott was the executive director of the Catholic Interracial Council in Chicago, a veteran member of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), and a member of the Agenda Committee of the Chicago Freedom Movement.
Here he comments on the national dimension of the Chicago Freedom Movement:
“We were thinking in national terms . . . front-line kind of experience. I was a front-line commander. You went to meetings day and night. You were exhausted. You had some people get arrested. . . . And you didn’t really have a lot of time or energy to think globally. But the basic strategy was this: we were in a northern city which had lots of laws against discrimination, where the problem was not the same as in the South. This was the watershed through which King had gone, through places of overt discrimination, de jure segregation and discrimination to a city of de facto segregation and discrimination. How do you deal with de facto discrimination and segregation? That is what we were confronting. And how to develop a national policy on that was very unclear at that time.”
John McDermott interview with Jim Ralph, July 15, 1988
How I Got Started in the Movement
Rev. Dr. Kwame John R. Porter, Ph.D.
I was introduced to Dr. Martin Luther King, aJr. And the Non-Violent Movement in 1957-58 by Dr. Warren Steinkraus, my philosophy professor at Iowa Wesleyan College (IWC). Upon graduating in 1959 from IWC, I received a three-year graduate fellowship to study the Christian Ministry at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary located on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. While there in 1960, we formed a 90-member CORE Chapter (Congress of Racial Equality) composed of faculty and students from Northwestern, the local seminaries and the Evanston community. We picketed the local Woolworth’s Stores in support of the southern Sit-In Movement.
After graduating from Garrett in June of 1962, I was called to Pastor the Christ United Methodist Church in Chicago’s Englewood Community. In July of 1962 I received a telegram from Dr. King inviting me and other clergy to support SCLC’s first mass non-violent demonstration against racial segregation in the city of Albany, Georgia. During our first march there, about 500 of us were arrested. I spent 6 days in an Albany jail.
When I returned to Chicago, I began vigorously organizing an SCLC support group in Englewood. In 1962, we developed an ad-hoc committee, the Englewood Civic Organization, and became members of CCCO (Coordinating Council of Community Organizations). On August 28, 1963, a group of us including attorney Anna Langford, George Murphy, Rev. Willie T. Barrow and myself traveled to join the March on Washington in Washington, D.C. During this summer of 1963, we petitioned Dr. C. T. Vivian, SCLC’s National Chapter Director for Chicago Chapter Membership. C. T. informed us that another minister was trying to organize a chapter in Chicago.
After several weeks when this chapter did not materialize, C.T. told us that if we were incorporated in the state of Illinois, paid the $100 affiliate fee, continued organizing and teaching non-violent methods, and were active enough to offset a minister in Robbins, Illinois who had organized the Northern Christian Leadership Conference without SCLC’s authorization, then we could become an official chapter in Chicago. In September of 1963, we pulled 100 children out of the Beal Elementary School in Englewood and set up the first ‘Freedom School” at Christ United Methodist Church. Time Magazine featured our Freedom School that year. So in January 1964, we held an open house for the new Englewood Chicago Chapter of the SCLC, with 50 people in attendance. We began our chapter with a total of 75 members. During the winter of 1964, our new chapter elected the following officers: I, as President; William Bill Henderson, Field Director; Betty Edwards, Secretary; James T. Smith, Treasurer; Joseph C. Brown, Historian & Public Relations; Sharon Carter and Louis Boyd, Artists in Residence; Leroy Whitfield, Attorney; and 10 student organizers. We demonstrated almost weekly against police brutality, school segregation, employment discrimination at the 63rd and Halsted Street Shopping Center, gang violence, slum landlords. We registered people to vote and recruited individuals to travel south to support the movement there. On October 29, 1964, with the Dr. King “Get Out the Vote” Caravan Rally that had 7-9 stops across the City of Chicago, our chapter mobilized 10,000 people to rally in Ogden Park. I had the privilege of introducing Dr. King on this occasion. Some 25 new members were added to our chapter as a result of the rally; we had become “A Movement-Centered Church.” During the winter of 1965, we mobilized two bus loads (80 people) for the Selma, Alabama Voting Rights March. Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. entered Chicago Theological Seminary during this period. He and a group of seminary students visited our chapter once or twice. When we saw the brilliant young Jesse Jackson again, he was in Selma, Alabama serving as an assistant to Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy. Within 8 months, Jesse had been appointed National Director of SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket with headquarters in Chicago. Also during this time, I, and the Rev. Richard (Dick) Lawrence, Pastor of the Normal Park United Methodist Church, mobilized an Englewood Freedom Movement Component and became co-leaders.
During the summer of 1966, CCCO convinced Dr. King to bring the movement to Chicago. CCCO and National SCLC temporarily merged efforts to become the Chicago Freedom Movement. We began organizing and training hundreds of people for mass non-violent marches into segregated white neighborhoods such as Gage Park, Marquette Park, Belmont-Cragin, Southeast Chicago, etc. Bob Lucas, chairman of Chicago CORE, decided to march in the volatile, racist Cicero community. Most of the Chicago Freedom Movement Leadership did not support marching into Cicero at that time. These marches finally brought Mayor Daley, the City Council and the Real Estate Boards to the negotiating table. The result was that the Chicago Freedom Movement ended De Facto Segregated Housing in Chicago.