CFM40

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.