American Pharaoh (58 page)

The real obstacle to bringing the movement north was the different kind of civil rights problems it would confront. In the
South blacks were subordinated by law, and King and the SCLC succeeded in arguing that this kind of official discrimination
had no place in America. But in the North, the laws were for the most part racially neutral. Discrimination against blacks
was often a product of informal policies, like racial steering or racial preferences in employment; the actors were generally
private, such as Realtors or union apprenticeship programs; and much of the harm done to blacks was a result of the overall
economic and social conditions that prevailed in the ghetto. This kind of de facto discrimination was inherently more difficult
to fight than the de jure discrimination that existed in the South. Rustin and others in the movement were convinced that
an attempt to cure the racial ills of the North would end in failure. While the SCLC was debating how to proceed, Bevel began
to talk openly about the need for a northern civil rights movement. At a fund-raiser at Northwestern University, in the Chicago
suburbs, Bevel promised that when the Alabama voting rights campaign concluded, the SCLC would begin a drive to “break up
ghetto life” in the North. “[T]he non-violent movement in a few days, in a few weeks, in a few years will call on Chicago
to address itself on the racist attitude that is denying Negroes the right to live in adequate housing,” Bevel said. “We’re
going to have a movement in Chicago.”
¹⁰

By the spring of 1965, critics’ worst fears about the State Street Corridor had been confirmed. In the three years since the
first family moved in, Robert Taylor Homes had spiraled downward. In an April 1965 series on the project, the
Chicago Daily News
reported that its residents were “grappling with violence and vandalism, fear and suspicion, teen-age terror and adult chaos,
rage, and resentment.” Garbage, beer bottles, and TV sets were thrown out of windows and over porch railings so frequently
that maintenance workers routinely wore hard hats. Assaults were so common in the stairwells that county welfare workers were
under orders not to use the stairs. With few sports facilities or social centers available, many young people passed time
by loitering outside the buildings, getting drunk, and shooting off guns. “We live stacked on top of one another with no elbow
room,” one mother of five told the
Daily News.
“Danger is all around. There is little privacy or peace and no quiet. And all the world looks on us as project rats.” The
paper led one article in the series by quoting a seventeen-year-old boy standing on a twelfth-floor gallery in one of the
project’s high-rises. “They ought to tear this whole place down and start all over,” he said.
¹¹

While most impartial observers concluded early on that Robert Taylor was a model for disaster, Daley continued to defend it,
even after the devastating
Daily News
series. The project was better than the “firetraps” and slum housing that had previously existed on the site, he insisted.
Daley did not address the idea that after $70 million worth of government housing had been erected on the site, the standard
of evaluating it should be higher than whether it was better than the tenement housing it had replaced. Daley, once again,
blamed the media for stirring up trouble. Residents were being “castigated as living in ghettos,” he said, and were being
“made to feel ashamed” of where they live. It did not help Daley’s credibility on the subject of poor people’s housing that
just a few months later the chairman of the CHA, Charles Swibel, was cited for numerous code violations in the skid-row hotels
under his management. Daley was also quick to defend Swibel, whom he praised as “one of our most outstanding citizens.”
¹²

Daley was not only defending the projects that had already gone up in the State Street Corridor — he was actively building
new ones there. His latest plan was to build the Raymond Hilliard Center, a 710-unit public housing project, at the north
end of State Street. Daley had received ample warning that it was the wrong place to construct still more public housing.
In October 1964, when the Hilliard Center was still in the planning stages, the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council
issued an urgent warning to Daley not to proceed. The proposed project would just add “more monolithic, high-rise buildings”
to the “four-mile wall” along State Street, the council said. Monsignor John Egan, a respected pastor who was deeply involved
in racial issues, brought his own objections directly to Swibel. “I appeared before him,” says Egan. “I repeated — they’re
high-rise slums.” But Daley ignored the warnings and went ahead with his plan. “I lost because I don’t think the mayor of
Chicago and the business community gave one damn,” says Egan. Hilliard was, at least in design, a departure from the Robert
Taylor model. The architect was Bertrand Goldberg Associates, designer of the innovative Marina City luxury complex. Hilliard
Center’s two buildings for families were made out of reinforced concrete and built in an arc shape, giving them an unusual
look for a housing project. The two buildings in the project set aside for elderly tenants were cylindrical, and even more
distinctive looking. In the beginning, some whites moved into Hilliard Center, but before long its family units were entirely
black.
¹³

Hilliard Center was the final installment in the State Street Corridor. When it was completed in 1966, this strip of land
one-quarter mile wide and four miles long was home to almost 40,000 poor black tenants. The five massive projects lined up
along State Street — 710-unit Hilliard, 797-unit Harold Ickes Homes, 800-unit Dearborn Homes, 1,684-unit Stateway Gardens,
and 4,415-unit Robert Taylor — took up thirty-four consecutive blocks, except for a stretch between 30th and 35th streets
where the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is located. To the east lay the old Black Belt ghetto stretching
out to Lake Michigan; to the west was the Dan Ryan Expressway, with its fourteen lanes of automobile traffic and commuter
rail lines. “Most white Chicagoans thought the idea was splendid,” notes Chicago journalist Bill Gleason. “When lawyers, certified
public accountants, stock and bond salesmen and politicians gazed from the windows of Rock Island commuter trains that brought
them to the Loop from Morgan Park, Beverly Hills and Brainerd, they saw the progress of the construction of those highrises
for the poor and were assured that ‘the Negroes are being kept in their place.’”
¹⁴

At the same time Daley was extending the State Street Corridor to the north and south, the CHA was actively keeping blacks
out of public housing projects in the white parts of the city. In the mid-1960s, although blacks made up a large part of the
public-housing waiting list, projects in white parts of the city remained almost completely white. At Trumbull Park, there
were still only 27 blacks among the 435 families. At Lathrop Homes, located four miles north of the Loop, the 900 families
included only 30 blacks, and at Lawn-dale Gardens, blacks were only 4 out of 125 families. At Bridge-port Homes, the housing
project in Daley’s backyard, there were no blacks at all. It therefore came as no great surprise when, in late 1966, a former
CHA supervisor revealed that the housing authority had been intentionally handing out apartments on the basis of race in order
to keep the projects racially segregated. In a sworn statement in a race discrimination suit against the CHA filed by the
American Civil Liberties Union, Tamaara Tabb, the agency’s former supervisor of tenant selection, revealed that the housing
authority kept separate waiting lists for white and black applicants — white families were called “A” and black families “B.”
The CHA staff kept apartments in Trumbull Park, Lathrop Homes, Lawndale Gardens, and Bridgeport Homes vacant until a white
applicant was available, rather than rent it to blacks on the waiting list. For a black family to be moved into a white project,
Tabb said, there had to be “specific prior clearance of the executive director or his designee.” The agency’s experience was
that if it took long enough to act, blacks on the waiting list would eventually accept an apartment in one of the city’s black
projects.
¹⁵

On July 4, 1965, Al Raby filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Education charging the Chicago Board of Education with
operating a segregated and unequal public school system. The CCCO formally requested that the federal government cut off all
federal aid to the Chicago schools until the illegal conditions were corrected. In a second filing later in the month, the
CCCO set out in detail its claims that the school system had drawn its district lines to keep the schools segregated, and
that black schools were systematically shortchanged by the system. These practices were all intentional, the CCCO argued.
“After all, it takes some real know-how to segregate a big-city school system,” said Meyer Weinberg. “You have to adopt elaborate
rules and processes to make it work.”
¹⁶

The CCCO’s complaint was a bombshell. The modern round of civil rights laws had been passed by Congress to address the de
jure racial discrimination that still prevailed in the South. The states of the Old Confederacy had laws on the books, and
years of entrenched tradition, that expressly established separate schools for white children and black children. Federal
education officials fully expected to be asked to use statutes such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred
discrimination on the basis of race in federally funded activities, to force those states to dismantle their dual school systems.
What they did not foresee was that, along with complaints from the South, they would receive challenges to the school systems
of Chicago, Boston, and Chester, Pennsylvania.
¹⁷
The U.S. Office of Education was not even certain that statutes like Title VI applied to the de facto discrimination that
existed in the North. When the CCCO’s complaint came in, staff members were not certain how to proceed.
¹⁸

The stakes for the CCCO’s complaint were high. In past years, a federal funding cutoff would have meant little, since school
systems were mainly financed by states and localities. In April 1965, however, President Johnson and Congress signed the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act, appropriating $1.3 billion in aid to the nation’s schools. The law was touted as benefiting education
for poor children, and in fact it did provide more than $1 billion in new money for disadvantaged students. But a major reason
for the new funding was to give President Johnson leverage to convince southern school systems to comply with the integration
provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To get the new federal money, states had to be certified as meeting the integration
requirements of the act for the start of the 1965–66 school year. The new funding law put enormous power in the hands of the
U.S. commissioner of education, Francis Keppel, to prod southern schools to desegregate — and to do it more quickly than the
Supreme Court, with its relatively undemanding “all deliberate speed” standard, was requiring. Keppel warned the seventeen
southern and border states that they risked losing a total of $867 million in federal funds if they did not take specific
steps to desegregate their schools, including integrating four out of twelve grades by the start of the new school year. Alabama
stood to lose $54 million if it failed to comply, and Georgia would lose $64 million. What no one close to Daley considered
at the time was that if the cutoff were applied to Chicago, it would lose $32 million.
¹⁹

After the Office of Education examined the CCCO’s complaint about the Chicago schools, Keppel declared it “unquestionably
. . . the most detailed” one his department had ever received. One of the most compelling examples in the complaint concerned
the schools in and around the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the Far South Side. Altgeld had been built during World War
II as housing for black workers in nearby war industry plants. At the time, the sparsely populated area already had an all-white
elementary school called Riverdale. Its graduates fed into nearby Fenger High School, which was more than 95 percent white.
When Altgeld Gardens was built, three elementary schools and one high school, Carver High School, were included on the site.
The school board issued a directive that no children from the Altgeld housing project would be assigned to Riverdale, even
though it was only five blocks away. And even though Riverdale was only a few blocks from Carver High School — the new school
built on the grounds of Altgeld, whose enrollment was 99 percent black — and a full three miles from Fenger, Riverdale students
would continue to be assigned to Fenger after they graduated. The school system worked out this arrangement by adopting the
fiction that Riverdale was actually a “branch” of another virtually all-white school, located four miles away, that fed its
graduates to Fenger. The few white families who lived right next to Altgeld were taken care of through a second fiction. The
area near the project was declared to be a “neutral zone,” whose residents could choose to attend any of the schools in the
area, not necessarily the closest one. As it worked out, the white families chose to send their children to white schools.
There was no way to explain the school board’s elaborate efforts except as an intentional attempt to keep white students from
having to attend school with blacks. These race-based assignment rules applied even when they forced black children to attend
badly overcrowded schools, and to attend in double-shifts. In 1964, average class sizes at the four schools in the housing
project were 32.7 and higher, while average class size at Riverdale was less than 17.
²⁰