American Pharaoh (62 page)

After meeting with Daley, Cohen sat down with school board president Frank Whiston. The CCCO tried to arrange its own meeting
with Cohen, but they were unable to do so. The CCCO leadership realized at that point that Cohen’s mission was not to investigate
the school situation further, but to work out a political accommodation with Daley. On his way back to Washington, Cohen held
a press conference at the airport to announce that he and Whiston had reached an agreement. The Chicago school system would
appoint a five-member committee to review complaints about school boundaries and other matters, and it promised to take steps
to address segregation at Washburne Trade School. And the federal funding would be restored. Whiston said that Daley had been
“very interested” in the negotiations, and called as soon as his meeting with Cohen ended. The CCCO activists were crushed.
The release of the funds was the result of a “shameless display of naked political power exhibited by Mayor Daley,” Raby said.
They had no faith in the agreement worked out between Cohen and Whiston. “They were going to investigate themselves,” says
Weinberg. “That sounded just horrible to us.” Daley loyalists agreed that the commitments the school system made to Cohen
were a sham, and they were overjoyed. “These concessions are meaningless,” Pucinski exclaimed. “They’re just a face-saving
device for Keppel. This is an abject surrender.”
⁵¹

But Daley’s revenge was not complete. After the funding was restored, Keppel was quietly removed to a position where he could
do no further harm. He was given the new title of assistant secretary for education at HEW, and his position of U.S. commissioner
of education was given to a man who would make a point of staying out of Daley’s way. “I was hopeless, I was replaced very
soon,” Keppell recalled later. “Oh, they made me an assistant secretary for some reason — I’ve forgotten — and I just stayed
on . . . and spent most of my time trying to keep out of the way of my successor.... In effect, I was fired.” By April 1966,
Keppel’s service in the federal government was over. Daley’s maneuvers had a lasting impact on how the federal government
would evaluate racial discrimination in the North. The Johnson administration issued new regulations requiring proof of discrimination
— and requiring federal officials to first attempt to elicit voluntary compliance — before education funds could be withheld.
The agreement between Cohen and the Chicago school board was a “black day in the catalogues of mankind’s eternal freedom struggle,”
Adam Clayton Powell declared. The “integrity of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was gutted by the most barbaric exercise of tawdry
ward politics.” But Daley had scored points with his white constituents — the very voters that had abandoned him in the 1963
election. Liberal columnist Joseph Kraft lamented that Daley’s “tactic of blocking civil rights moves in order to court favor
with anti-Negro white[s] . . . has won out again.”
⁵²

By the fall of 1965, word spread that King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would in fact be coming to Chicago
that winter for a prolonged stay. Daley said he would be happy to meet with King whenever he wanted. “No one has to march
to see the mayor of Chicago,” Daley said jauntily. “The door is always open and I’m here 10 to 12 hours a day.” And Daley
insisted that he shared King’s agenda. “I’m always happy to have help and assistance in resolving difficult problems of housing,
education, and poverty,” Daley said. “I would like to show Dr. King some of our fine installations.” At the same time, Daley
began mobilizing black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts in Chicago. Alderman Ralph Metcalfe announced plans
for a community action program designed to provide an alternative to King’s Chicago Campaign. Organizers of the new group,
called the Chicago Conference to Fulfill These Rights, Inc., included three more black aldermen, four black judges, and other
black elected officials, lawyers, and religious leaders with ties to the machine. Metcalfe declared that King was not “objective”
because he had not talked with Daley, and that in any case he was not needed in Chicago. “This is no hick town,” Metcalfe
said. “We have adequate leadership here.” Al Raby called the formation of the group a “tragedy.”
⁵³

With all the headlines about civil rights, it was hard to get excited about yet another scandal in Chicago Traffic Court.
But the newspapers were now reporting that drivers were routinely permitted to substantially underpay their tickets when they
were marked with the initial “D,” for “Democrat,” and the number of a ward organization. In some cases, the payments were
as low as fifty cents on a ten-dollar ticket. The charges were not hard to believe, particularly with the Traffic Court operating
under the supervision of Joseph McDonough. McDonough, the clerk of the Circuit Court, was a longtime Daley protégé, and the
son of Daley’s own 11th Ward mentor, Alderman Joseph McDonough. Daley was quick to brand the scandal as another Republican
plot. “The ‘D’ written on the tickets by the investigators could stand for ‘doctor’ and might mean ‘dog’ and it might mean
a lot of other things,” the mayor said. His old friend McDonough was, he insisted, doing an “outstanding job.”
⁵⁴

In late November, concerns about corruption were raised once again when Daley submitted his 1966 city budget. Republicans
charged that the $545 million budget was inflated with patronage and waste. And they charged that Daley now oversaw a “shadow
budget” for poverty programs, urban renewal projects, air pollution control, and airports, all of which received federal funding.
Daley had been using these new budget lines, they said, to transfer current city welfare bureaucrats into higher-paying jobs
in federal poverty programs. This, in turn, opened up more patronage jobs that could be filled on the city payroll. The new
Daley budget called for a property tax increase of between 8 and 10 percent, well above the rate of inflation. Critics charged
that the steep increases in taxes since Daley took office were destroying the city. The president of the Chicago Real Estate
Board said that apartment buildings in the city had lost 15 percent of their value as a result of higher real estate taxes.
John Hoellen, the Republican alderman, declared that the city’s neighborhoods were “rotting away,” that stores were boarded
up, and that 276 industrial plants had left Chicago in the past ten years. “When we look at the tax bills,” he said, “we know
why.”
⁵⁵

King flew north in October to attend a retreat to work out the details of the Chicago Campaign. The three-day conference,
at a camp in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, brought together about one hundred activists from SCLC and CCCO. On one level, it was
a get-acquainted session, designed to foster camaraderie and trust among two distinct, and in many ways very different, organizations.
One CCCO member who was there recalls that Andrew Young had a guitar and went around making up songs about each of the participants.
But the expressed purpose of the retreat was to develop a joint strategy for what would become the Chicago Freedom Movement.
The two groups were working on a plan that would “broaden our interest — not just schools but housing, political emasculation,
poverty, welfare jobs,” Raby said. To achieve these goals, “protest demonstrations will be heightened.” King told reporters
that the focus of the movement would be the city’s racial problems, not its political system or its leaders. “I don’t consider
Mayor Daley as an enemy,” he said. King, who expressed an interest in “eventually” meeting with the mayor, said that he understood
that Daley would not react with the kind of violent outbursts that had helped the SCLC gain sympathy in the past. “The movement
in Chicago will be different from that in the South,” he said. “There will be fewer overt acts to aid us here . . . naive
targets such as the Jim Clarks and George Wallaces will be harder to find and use as symbols.” Still, hope for the new effort
ran high. “Chicago will be like a test tube,” one King aide declared. “The whole world will be waiting to see what happens
here.”
⁵⁶

After King headed back south, Bevel and other organizers set about planning the details of the Chicago Campaign. They established
a headquarters at the Warren Avenue Congregational Church in the West Side ghetto, and worked with local activists to plan
neighborhood kickoff rallies that were held across the South and West sides between October 20 and November 4, 1965. Jesse
Jackson, then a young SCLC staffer, organized the city’s Baptist ministers to support the upcoming campaign, and other activists
were working with the city’s gangs, some holding weekend workshops designed to direct gang members toward nonviolent political
protest. Bevel led an effort to draft a written outline that would set out the overall themes of the campaign. The drafters
concluded that although the civil rights movement had prevailed in the South by choosing narrow goals, like integrating a
bus system or desegregating a lunch counter, the Chicago Campaign would have to pursue a broader agenda. “The Chicago problem
is simply a matter of economic exploitation,” the document said. “Every condition exists simply because someone profits by
its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the SLUM,” which the outline called “a system of internal colonialism.”
⁵⁷

King returned to Chicago on January 5,1966, for two days of meetings at the Sahara Inn between SCLC representatives and local
black leaders that formally kicked off the campaign. When King emerged, he explained why he had come to Chicago. The city’s
slums were “the prototype of those chiefly responsible for the Northern urban race problem,” he said, and he and the SCLC
had been invited in by the forty-five local civil rights groups that comprised the CCCO. “Our objective will be to bring about
the unconditional surrender of forces dedicated to the creation and maintenance of slums,” King declared. “The Chicago Freedom
Movement will press the power structure to find imaginative programs to overcome the problem.” The group adopted Bevel’s draft
outline, which came to be known as the “Chicago Plan,” and it explained to the press in more detail how the campaign would
proceed. King said the SCLC would be increasing its staff in the city to several dozen. And he announced that when he returned
to the city, he would be moving into a “West Side apartment that will symbolize the ‘Slum Lordism’ that I hope to smash.”
⁵⁸

CHAPTER

10

All of Us Are Trying to
Eliminate Slums

I
n selecting a tenement for King to move into, the Chicago Freedom Movement made a deliberate choice to put him on the West
Side rather than the South Side. Chicago’s South Side, home to more than 400,000 blacks, was the traditional center of the
city’s black life. It was the Chicago’s historic “Bronzeville,” home to great black institutions like the
Chicago Defender
and thriving black businesses, insurance companies, and funeral homes. The West Side was a newer ghetto of roughly 250,000
blacks, many of them recent arrivals from the rural South. Though living conditions in the South Side ghetto were bad, they
were far worse on the West Side. West Side blacks were poorer, job opportunities were fewer, youth gangs were more active,
and more of the residents lived in the kind of dilapidated, below-code apartments the anti-slum campaign was targeting. West
Side blacks were also likely to be easier to organize. Many South Side blacks were more conservative, with strong ties to
old-line black churches and the black submachine, two of the forces in the black community most skeptical of the civil rights
cause. The West Side had fewer community institutions, and those tended to be the kind of grassroots organizations that backed
the CCCO. And not least, West Side blacks were on the whole more culturally similar to the SCLC staff. More of them had been
born in the Deep South, and many of them shared the worldview of the church-inspired southern civil rights movement. “We had
a lot of experience dealing with black Mississippians,” Bernard Lafayette would say later, “and here they were transported
north.”
¹