American Pharaoh (64 page)

It was obvious that his anti-slum campaign was an effort to co-opt King and the SCLC, but Daley denied it. “We have been doing
much code enforcement and placing many buildings in receivership long before Dr. King arrived in Chicago,” he said. If the
city seemed to be stepping up its efforts, it was only because new laws were now available for use against landlords, Daley
said. But the Republican sponsor of a law making it a felony for landlords to violate the building code, state senator Arthur
Swanson, said Daley had never bothered to use his substantial legal authority to take on slum conditions until King arrived
in town. “It does little good for legislators to act on vital public needs if elected officials will not make efficient use
of the new laws,” Swanson complained. Now that Daley had adopted the anti-slum cause, he pursued it aggressively. On March
1, he announced an ambitious new program of door-to-door inspections for code violations in 15,000 buildings in three poor
West Side neighborhoods including, as it happened, the one King now lived in. At the same time, Daley was sending emissaries
out on a more surreptitious mission: going to community leaders in the neighborhoods the Chicago Freedom Movement was trying
to organize and buying them off with offers of city money for their programs. “[A]s fast as they would organize a neighborhood,”
recalls Andrew Young, “the Daley forces would come in and offer a preacher a contract for subsidized day care in his church.”
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The biggest blunder southern officials had made in dealing with the civil rights movement was their angry and poorly planned
use of law enforcement. When Alabama state troopers beat up voting rights marchers, it had been a public relations disaster,
and when Birmingham police arrested King, he wrote
Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Daley was resolved not to turn the Chicago Freedom Movement leadership into martyrs. Police Superintendent O. W. Wilson invited
King and his wife, Coretta, for a personal tour of the Chicago Police Department. In an informal meeting between King and
top police officials, a warmly complimentary Wilson told the civil rights leader that he understood that King had some Irish
ancestors. Daley proudly told reporters that King’s visit with the Chicago Police Department was the first meeting of its
kind anywhere in the country. Though King never asked for a police guard, Daley arranged for him to have full-time protection
every time he came to the city. But Daley’s hospitality had its limits. When Alderman Leon Despres introduced a resolution
inviting King to address the City Council, Daley’s floor manager, Tom Keane, immediately shouted out “subcommittee,” sending
the resolution to oblivion.
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King received a more sincere welcome from Chicago’s Catholic Archdiocese. On February 2, King and Chicago Archbishop John
Cody met for an hour at Cody’s North Side mansion to discuss the Chicago Freedom Movement. The Catholic Church in Chicago
had a mixed record on civil rights, particularly at the parish level. In some parts of the Bungalow Belt, Catholic priests
were known to share the anti-integrationist feelings of their flocks, and many worried that racial transition would rob their
parishes of their white bases. Cody’s predecessor, Albert Meyer, had spoken out on racial matters, testifying before the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission and ordering parish priests to give at least three sermons a year on improving race relations. Cody
had come to Chicago in August 1965 from New Orleans, where he had overseen the desegregation of the city’s parochial school
system in the face of stiff opposition from white Catholics. In the controversy that followed, three segregationists were
excommunicated, and Cody was bitterly attacked for promoting integration so forcefully. King was pleased by his meeting with
Cody, declaring afterward that it had been “a very friendly and I might say fruitful discussion.”
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On February 23, King and his followers took the bold step of seizing control of a tenement. The building, located just blocks
from King’s apartment at 1550 South Hamlin, lacked heat, and the Chicago Freedom Movement had learned that there was a sick
baby living in it. King, Raby, and other members of the SCLC and CCCO dressed in work clothes and personally began cleaning
it up. The Chicago Freedom Movement declared that it had assumed trusteeship over the building, and that henceforth rent collected
from the tenants would be paid into a fund that would be used to make needed repairs. Asked about the lawfulness of the action,
King appealed to a higher law. “I won’t say that this is illegal, but I would call it superlegal,” he said. “The moral question
is far more important than the legal one.” The “superlegal” seizure of 1321 South Homan would have been a natural point for
Daley’s policy of tolerance to end. Many Chicagoans believed that by seizing a privately owned building the civil rights movement
had crossed the line from political protest to lawlessness. James Parson, a respected black judge and chairman of the National
Conference on Religion and Race, called the seizure “theft” and “a revolutionary tactic.” But Daley, sticking to his script
of agreeable accommodation, said, “The situation at 1321 South Homan is a matter between the lawful owner and those who attempt
to assume ownership. We all recognize that what is being done is good for our city — the improvement of housing and living
conditions.”
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Far from defending the landlord at 1321 South Homan, Daley filed his own suit in Chicago Municipal Court the next day charging
that the building had twenty-three code violations. What happened next was a powerful illustration of the difficulty of transporting
the civil rights movement north. King’s staff had failed to research the ownership of 1321 South Homan. After they took trusteeship,
they found out that the cruel landlord they had cast in their morality tale was a sickly octogenarian who was only too happy
to let the civil rights activists have the building. “I think King is right,” the old man declared. “I think his intentions
are right, and in his place I’d do the same thing.” The Chicago Freedom Movement’s selection of 1321 had unwittingly supported
the argument of some of its opponents: that slum conditions were a product of complicated economic forces, and that it was
too simplistic to put all the blame on landlords.
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In early March, Al Raby announced that the CCCO was starting to build a political organization that would take on Daley and
the machine if the Chicago Freedom Movement’s demands were not met. Raby said that the CCCO’s efforts to improve black schools
had failed because they had been organized on a “civic” rather than a “political” basis. “Instead of organizing wards, amorphous
political groups were formed,” said Raby. “The Democratic party could thus justifiably predict that Negro defection would
not reach the danger point.” With the help of the SCLC, Raby said, “cohesive organizations are now being formed in the ghetto
communities that can become politically active if necessary.” Turning the CCCO into a political organization would not be
easy. It was a coalition of disparate groups, some of which were prohibited by their charters from engaging in partisan political
activity. But the biggest obstacle to Raby’s plan was King’s reluctance to use civil rights to organize a political movement.
Throughout his career, King had always worked outside the political system, hoping to draw people of all political persuasions
to the cause of civil rights. He still had not given up hope that Daley could eventually become an ally of the Chicago Freedom
Movement. Still, Raby was not alone in seeking to shift the movement toward electoral politics. Dick Gregory, the comedian
and protest leader, had already announced plans to challenge Daley for mayor in 1967. It was unlikely Gregory would win, but
a strong third-party candidacy could conceivably take enough black votes away from the machine to put a Republican in City
Hall.
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On March 10, Daley held a slate-making meeting at the Sherman Hotel to select the machine’s candidates for the 1966 elections.
Daley’s primary interest was in the political assassination of a wayward officeholder. Seymour Simon, the bright and ambitious
president of the Cook County Board, had been placed on the board as a protégé of Thomas Keane. He was widely regarded as a
rising star on the Chicago political scene, and the talk was that he would run for mayor if Daley stepped down in 1967, or
perhaps for governor. But first, he had to be renominated as Cook County board president. The first indication that there
might be trouble was on the day before the 1966 slate-making meeting, when Daley called Simon and told him, “Seymour, be humble
when you go before the slate-makers. Some of them say you are arrogant. So take my advice and be humble.” Simon took the advice
as an indication that Daley was on his side. But when Simon showed up before the slating committee, an enemy of his, Irwin
“Izzy” Horwitz, was there. Horwitz was not a member of the Central Committee, from which members of the slate-making committee
were usually drawn, but he came with the proxy of the 24th Ward committeeman. When the proceedings began, Horwitz launched
into a bitter attack on his foe, and Simon was denied renomination.
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The abrasive Simon was brought down by a number of missteps, including a feud with another member of the board who was close
to Daley. But the critical factor was that Keane, his onetime patron, now wanted him out of the presidency and off the board.
Simon would later explain that their falling-out had come about one day when Keane showed up in Simon’s office and asked him
to reverse a decision of the county zoning board. A developer friend of Keane’s had applied to turn a piece of land into a
garbage dump. The board had sided with neighborhood residents, who were bitterly opposed to the plan.
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Simon later explained that he was against the landfill both because of the neighborhood opposition, and because the commander
of a nearby naval air station had said that seagulls attracted to the dump would pose a danger to his aircraft. When Simon
refused to support the developer’s plan, he said, his friendship with Keane was over. Keane was apparently mad enough to go
to Daley and demand that Simon be removed from the board in the next election. After he was dumped, the newspapers were filled
with headlines like “Simon Names Old Pal Keane as Ax Man in His Party Execution” and “Simon Dumped by a Dump?” When word of
Simon’s unslating got out, the machine nomination for Cook County board president was hardly worth having. Simon’s replacement,
postmaster Harry Semrow, lost badly to his Republican opponent. Although Daley lost the position, he was able to send a clear
message to everyone in the machine about the cost of independence. “People in the organization realized that if he could knock
me out, he could knock them out if they didn’t toe the line,” says Simon.
¹⁹

On March 12, the Chicago Freedom Movement held a major fund-raiser at the International Amphitheatre. Organizers, who had
been planning the event for months, sold 12,000 tickets and lured some of the leading black stars of the day, including Sidney
Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, and Mahalia Jackson. “Never before in the history of the civil rights movement has
an action campaign been launched in such splendor,” King told the enthusiastic crowd. “Never has a community responded more
splendidly to the call for support than you have in Chicago.” The rally demonstrated the broadest support yet in the black
community for the Chicago Campaign, and brought in a much-needed $80,000. But a few days later, Daley had his own effusive
public gathering that demonstrated how popular he remained with other segments of the city. On March 17, Daley presided over
the city’s massive Saint Patrick’s Day parade. As was his custom, Daley personally led the throng of 70,000 marchers down
State Street, while a crowd of 350,000 cheered from the sidelines. The parade was the usual exuberant mix: the Shannon Rovers
Bagpipe Kilty band, Daley’s favorite, played a medley of Gaelic airs; the University of Notre Dame’s marching band played
“McNamara’s Band”; and a float with thirty members of the Illinois Toll Highway Commission sang “Hello, Dolly.” An array of
machine politicians, ranging from Senator Paul Douglas to local precinct captains, jammed the reviewing stand on Madison Street.
Ireland’s secretary of commerce and industry, who had flown in for the festivities, declared that “Chicago was more Irish
than Ireland — I cannot say the isle has anything to compare with this.”
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In mid-March, Daley held an open meeting at City Hall to report on his administration’s progress in improving conditions in
the ghetto. Deton Brooks, head of the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity, announced that the city was operating seven
urban progress centers with a staff of 928, and had already conducted visits to 96,761 poor families. Kenneth Plummer, director
of information for the City Board of Health, reported that a federally funded rodent-control program had found that 85 percent
of housing in poor neighborhoods was rodent-infested, with an estimated ten rats for every citizen. The city had already visited
4,461 buildings, Plummer reported, to fill 27,301 rat holes, and an estimated 1,675,941 rats had been killed. Daley outlined
four major goals for the future: improvements in education; increased employment opportunities; better access to health care;
and elimination of slums by December 31, 1967. Daley continued his publicity campaign by holding a joint press conference
on March 18 with John Boyle, chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, to announce that the city’s Housing Court was being
expanded from four to six full-time judges, to handle the extra work being created by the new door-to-door inspections on
the West Side, and the city’s other anti-slum initiatives. “Mayor Daley has made an all-out effort to eliminate slums and
blight and the courts will cooperate 100 per cent,” Judge Boyle told reporters. Daley’s image as a slum-buster, which he was
working so hard to burnish, was set back two weeks later when it was revealed that building code violations had been found
in two buildings run by Marks & Co., the real estate firm headed by Charles Swibel, Daley’s Chicago Housing Authority chairman.
City buildings inspectors discovered twenty-eight code violations, and evidence that apartments in the buildings had been
unlawfully converted to smaller units. Daley asked for a report on the charges, saying, “I’m sure the law should be applied
equally and strongly to everyone, and that will be the case here.”
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