American Pharaoh (66 page)

Daley held a press conference on March 31 to announce plans for a new bond issue. He had been stung badly by the defeat of
the 1962 bonds, and this time he was leaving nothing to chance. He had an all-star lineup of civic leaders on hand to speak
out in favor of the additional debt for the city, including Continental Illinois National Bank chairman David Kennedy and
Chicago Federation of Labor president William Lee. The $200 million package of bonds covered an assortment of new projects,
from rapid-rail lines on the Kennedy and Dan Ryan expressways to more mundane undertakings like $45 to $100 million for sewer
modernization. To avoid the racial backlash that had hurt the 1962 bonds in white wards, Daley had decided not to use the
words “urban renewal” anywhere in the text of the initiative this time. After the initial press conference, Daley continued
to round up endorsements. The Civic Federation, a good-government watchdog that had backed only one of the 1962 bond issues,
this time endorsed the whole package. And in a flourish of bipartisan-ship, Daley even won the support of Republican state
treasurer William Scott.
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It was a measure of just how important the bonds were to Daley that he testified for them before the City Council Finance
Committee, a first in his eleven years in office, and took questions for an hour. Daley promised, in his testimony, that the
bonds would not raise taxes, but his critics in the economy bloc remained skeptical. “This familiar promise was expressed
with each package of bond issues since 1955, and each package that passed brought an increase,” Alderman Despres argued. “The
only bond issues that ever failed to increase taxes were the 1962 bond issues, which were defeated.”
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In early April 1966, the General Services Administration announced that construction of the forty-five-story federal office
building that Daley had worked so hard to bring to the Loop was being delayed indefinitely. The decision appeared to be an
economy measure by the regional GSA chief, coming as it did after President Johnson made an appeal to cut federal spending
wherever possible. Daley was outraged by the move, and made it clear that he would not tolerate a delay. “We want that building,”
he declared. “We are going to urge the federal government to go ahead immediately with the construction.” In a lower-key repeat
of the showdown with Francis Keppel over school funding, Daley made a direct appeal to Washington, and the GSA quickly backed
down. Within two days the agency said that its announced “indefinite delay” had been a misunderstanding. The agency said it
would be seeking bids for construction of the foundation of the $45.5 million project in June.
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On May 2, Daley presided over the dedication of the Civic Center, a major component of his restoration of the Loop. Daley
had been laying the groundwork for a new complex to house state and local governments as far back as his 1958 plan, and he
had done a brilliant job of making it a reality. The Civic Center was constructed by the Public Building Commission, a public
authority that Daley had created in 1956. The PBC was invested with sweeping powers to condemn property through eminent domain,
and to issue revenue bonds to finance its projects without going to the voters with a referendum or going to Springfield.
It was Chicago’s version of the public authorities Robert Moses was quietly using in New York to fund and build projects without
approval from the voters or the political branches. “He used the Public Building Commission to achieve things he might not
have achieved if he had gone to the legislature,” says former Chicago Plan Commission chairman Miles Berger. “If you have
the bonds, you can build whatever you want to build.” Daley himself was chairman of the PBC, and his planning commissioner
Ira Bach was secretary. Daley used his position with the PBC to oversee every aspect of the project, from the financing to
the choice of architects. The $87-million glass-and-steel Civic Center, which would later be renamed the Richard J. Daley
Center, substantially improved the facilities available to local government. It provided 111 courtrooms and eight hearing
rooms for the Cook County Circuit Court, as well as space for the Illinois Appellate Court, the Illinois Supreme Court, the
state’s attorney, the sheriff, and other government personnel. A vibrant city block, filled with stores and restaurants, was
bulldozed to make room for the Civic Center and a large open-air plaza surrounding it. But most critics, including the authors
of the American Institute of Architect’s
Guide to Chicago,
found that the trade-off was well worth it. “[S]omething wonderful was gained; the plaza has become Chicago’s forum,” the
Guide
concluded. “As the locus of activities as diverse as concerts, farmers’ markets, and peace rallies, the Daley Center fulfills
a civic purpose consistent with its architectural dignity.”
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Although the war on slums had been grabbing the headlines since King came to town, the battle over the schools had still not
been resolved. On March 21, Daley announced his new appointments to the School Board Nominating Commission. In a concession
to the black community, he added a representative of the Chicago Urban League, declaring that “the commission should be a
cross-section of our city.” But at the same time, he also added a representative of the Teamsters Joint Council, who could
be counted on to cancel out the Urban League’s vote on any sensitive racial issues. On March 31, Daley held a third closed-door
meeting with the city’s clergy to discuss racial matters. King, who was on a European fund-raising tour, did not attend. Daley
pronounced the session “amicable, friendly and highly informative,” but Chicago Freedom Movement representatives were disappointed
that Board of Education chairman Whiston, who was supposed to attend to discuss the school situation, did not show up.
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The school controversy heated up again when Willis, who was scheduled to retire on December 23, his sixty-fifth birthday,
announced plans to push his departure date up to August 31. The Chicago Freedom Movement was overjoyed. Willis’s departure
would remove “a major stumbling block [to] quality integrated education in Chicago,” Raby declared. A committee of the school
board had been actively looking for a successor. By late April, they had interviewed six candidates, and Daley said that a
decision on a successor was imminent. When Willis left office, the board hired James Redmond, superintendent of the Syosset,
New York, schools, who had a reputation as a racial progressive when he served as New Orleans school superintendent in the
1950s. That Daley was willing to go along with the selection of a racial moderate at this point was not surprising. By the
end of his career, Willis had become a polarizing figure, who had only helped the Chicago Freedom Movement to win converts
in the black community. Redmond would fit in well with Daley’s current policy of co-opting the civil rights movement by appearing
to share its concerns. At the same time, Daley’s control over the Chicago school board would ensure that Redmond would not
take any steps extreme enough to scare voters in the white wards. And Daley was not ceding any power on the school board to
the black community. Three positions on the school board had recently become vacant. Although his nominating committee forwarded
two blacks among its seven nominees, Daley passed over the two black women — one of whom was a Yale graduate, doctor’s wife,
and mother of three — to choose three white men. The departure of Willis did not appear to have made much difference. “Mayor
Daley has tightened his grip of direct political control over the schools,” one critic observed a few years into Redmond’s
term as superintendent. “The school board, with the pretense of independence, performs a puppet show for public consumption.
Redmond does what he is told.”
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King and the Chicago Freedom Movement were continuing their efforts to reach out to Chicago’s youth gangs. On May 9, movement
staff screened a documentary on the Watts uprising for about four hundred Blackstone Rangers. The civil rights activists were
trying to demonstrate the futility of violence, but the screening would later be seen by some whites as an attempt to encourage
young blacks to riot. Two days later, King himself spoke to a meeting of gang members, urging them to turn away from violence
and toward voter registration and other civil rights work. These efforts to bring gang members into the movement suffered
a setback on May 13, when fighting and gunfire broke out at an SCLC meeting at a South Side YMCA to which both the Blackstone
Rangers and their rivals, the East Side Disciples, were invited. Some fissures were emerging in the Chicago Freedom Movement,
particularly around the issue of nonviolence. Moderate members of the movement, including organizations such as the Chicago
Catholic Interracial Council, worried that the campaign was becoming more accepting of violence and “spreading hate.” But
King insisted that the Chicago Freedom Movement’s commitment to nonviolence was as strong as ever. “Chicago will have a long
hot summer, but not a summer of racial violence,” King said. “Rather it will be a long hot summer of peaceful non-violence.”
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The long hot summer erupted earlier than expected, and in an unexpected quarter. While all of Chicago wondered whether blacks
would rise up, on June 10 it was the city’s small Puerto Rican enclave on the Near Northwest Side that broke out in rioting.
Chicago’s Puerto Ricans were as poor and discriminated against as blacks, but because of their small numbers and the language
barrier, they were even more marginalized. Daley “manages to attend many wakes in his part of town,” Mike Royko wrote. “But
when the Puerto Ricans invited him to a banquet last week — their biggest social event of the year, except for the riot —
he couldn’t make it.” But the Puerto Rican community’s invisibility ended when a police officer shot and killed twenty-one-year-old
Arceilis Cruz while he allegedly tried to pull out a revolver. More than a thousand neighborhood residents, many of them women,
threw bricks and bottles at the hundred policemen sent to restore order. The crowd set fire to police cars, pulled fire hoses
away from firemen trying to put them out, and looted stores along Division Street, the neighborhood’s main shopping area.
The unrest continued for two days, and before it was over several dozen were injured. King cautioned that the Near Northwest
Side riots reflected the broad disaffection that prevailed in all of the city’s poor neighborhoods, but Daley blamed them
on instigation by “outsiders.”
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In 1966, the national civil rights movement was entering a new and more difficult era. What civil rights theoretician Bayard
Rustin called its “classical” period of destroying the “legal foundations of racism in America” had drawn to a close. What
would follow was uncertain. To a growing number of activists, the answer was “black power,” a militant strain that promoted
nationalism and was skeptical of the role of whites in the movement. On May 14, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
held a watershed election at its annual meeting in a camp outside Nashville. Stokely Carmichael, a charismatic Black Power
champion, was elected chairman over moderate John Lewis by a single vote. Carmichael and his followers mocked the integrationist
ideals and Gandhian tactics of King and his followers. “To ask Negroes to get in the Democratic Party,” Carmichael declared
acerbically, “is like asking Jews to join the Nazi Party.” Under the new regime, SNCC stopped using integrated field work
teams. The organization would “not fire any of our white organizers, but if they want to organize, they can organize white
people,” Carmichael said. “Negroes will organize Negroes.” Many whites, believing they were not welcome, resigned from the
organization. In June, Carmichael delivered a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, that has been credited with bringing the integrationist
era of the movement to a close. Forget the goal of “freedom,” he told a large crowd gathered in a schoolyard. “What we gonna
start saying now is Black Power.”
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