American Pharaoh (70 page)

Meanwhile, the clashes between open-housing marchers and angry neighborhood mobs showed no signs of letting up. Two days after
the latest confrontation at Marquette Park, 1,100 demonstrators, 500 police, and 5,000 white residents faced off on the streets
of the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood on the Northwest Side. Business and civic leaders from the Chicago Lawn neighborhood asked
Daley to join them in petitioning the U.S. attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, to investigate Communist infiltration of
the civil rights movement. The
Chicago Tribune
called on the black community to shake off King and his fellow civil rights agitators. “Why not a great petition, or a huge
rally, to signify to King and his imported troublemakers that Chicago Negroes want an end to this campaign to stir up the
antipathy of white people and want to give the races a chance to live in harmony?” the Republican paper asked. But harmony
was not what the city seemed to be moving toward.
⁷¹

Jesse Jackson had been talking for some time about leading a march into the all-white suburb of Cicero. Cicero was so hostile
to integration — and its response to civil rights marchers was likely to be so violent — that Jackson’s talk struck most observers
as an idle threat. But at an August 8 rally, Jackson announced that he would lead a march into Cicero in the next few days.
“We expect violence,” Jackson said, “but it wouldn’t be any more violent than the demonstrations last week.” In fact, such
a march was likely to be incendiary. Cicero, population 70,000, was perhaps the largest municipality in the country without
a single black resident. A working-class town made up predominantly of Poles, Italians, and Bohemians living in simple brick
bungalows, Cicero had cemented its reputation for racial hatred in 1951, when black bus driver Harvey E. Clark Jr. rented
an apartment there. A crowd of 5,000 whites surrounded the building and threw bricks, rocks, and bottles through the windows.
Members of the white mob eventually got inside the building, smashing stoves and refrigerators, and burning Clark’s furniture.
After Governor Adlai Stevenson called in the National Guard to restore order, and Clark left town, there were no further attempts
to integrate Cicero.Only a few months before Jackson’s announcement, a black teenager named Jerome Huey had been killed by
white teenagers when he went to Cicero looking for a job. When a network TV reporter said Cicero had a reputation for hating
Negroes “deserved or not,” one native scoffed. “The people of Cicero would be the first to say that the reputation was deserved,”
he insisted.
⁷²

On August 9, the day after Jackson’s ominous announcement, Daley called on both sides to stop marching and start negotiating.
Archbishop Cody echoed Daley’s appeal, saying a moratorium on marches was needed to “avert serious injury to many persons
and even the loss of life.” Daley lobbied influential Chicagoans to support his efforts to bring a halt to the marches. On
August 11, he sat down with seventeen of the city’s top labor leaders, including his old friends William McFetridge and William
Lee, at a meeting called by United Auto Workers midwestern regional director Robert Johnston. The Freedom Movement’s “demonstrations
on the streets” were the city’s “number one problem,” Daley said. Daley’s proposal for ending them was to convene a summit
meeting at which all the necessary parties could hammer out an agreement on open housing. He directed his Commission on Human
Relations to begin laying the groundwork. The commission would have been the logical choice to host the summit, but Daley
was intent on not being put in the position of negotiating against the Chicago Freedom Movement. He preferred to frame the
summit as a meeting between the Freedom Movement on one side, and the Chicago real estate industry on the other. Daley asked
the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, a respected group with known civil rights sympathies, to convene the summit.
It was a clever arrangement, and one that, human relations commissioner Marciniak noted, “took the focus” off Daley.
⁷³

The Freedom Movement was divided about whether to attend Daley’s summit. Many of the younger, more militant members distrusted
Daley and favored continuing to engage in direct action. They noted that the civil rights movement had tried negotiating with
him in the past, and it had always gone badly. Daley always had his mind made up going in, and simply used the meeting for
publicity purposes. That was, in fact, Daley’s record in dealing with the movement. Meyer Weinberg recalls the time he and
other CCCO representatives met with the mayor to discuss Willis and conditions in black schools. The CCCO delegation made
their case with passion, but it elicited almost no response from Daley. “He was very bored with us,” Weinberg recalls. “He
just seemed like he couldn’t wait to go home. We went away just feeling terrible.” But King and the movement’s more moderate
leaders wanted to participate in the summit. King argued his position with what seemed to be an almost naive belief in the
possibility that Daley could be converted to the cause. Daley “is no bigot,” he told other members of the Freedom Movement,
but he “is about my son’s age in understanding the race problem.” The decisive factor, though, was that the Chicago Campaign
was stalled, and the movement was eager for any kind of victory, even a negotiated one. “The most significant event of this
year is the spread of the Negro revolution from the sprawling plantations of Mississippi and Alabama to the desolate slums
and ghettos of the North,” King said in his report to the annual meeting of the SCLC in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 10.
Chicago was the “test case,” King declared, for whether the civil rights movement could succeed in the North. Daley’s summit
seemed to offer at least a chance that the northern civil rights movement would not end in total failure. After considerable
debate, the Chicago Freedom Movement agreed to negotiate.
⁷⁴

CHAPTER

11

The Outcome Was
Bitterly Disappointing

I
n the days leading up to Daley’s housing summit, the Chicago Freedom Movement continued taking its fight to the streets. On
August 12, the same day the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race sent out formal invitations, James Bevel led 600 protesters
on a march to a high school on the Southwest Side. Two days later, Bevel, Jackson, and Raby led simultaneous marches on Bogan,
Gage Park, and the Northwest Side. And on August 16, the day before the summit started, civil rights protesters held another
round of demonstrations. There were vigils in Jefferson Park on the Northwest Side, and pickets at City Hall, the Chicago
Housing Authority, and the Cook County Department of Public Aid. The Chicago Freedom Movement was sending a clear message
that although they were willing to negotiate, they intended to keep up the “creative tension” until a satisfactory agreement
was reached. The movement also embarked on a pre-summit campaign of real estate–agent testing. As expected, blacks were lied
to about the availability of housing in white neighborhoods and turned away. King and Raby collected enough evidence to file
seventy-four discrimination complaints against sixteen real estate brokers. Equally important, the testing gave them fresh
evidence going into the summit that the problem of housing discrimination was real, and that the city’s Fair Housing Ordinance
of 1963 was not being enforced.
¹

The leaders of the Chicago Freedom Movement, stretched thin by the need to keep their campaign of direct action going, found
little time to plan for the upcoming negotiations. The night before the summit began, they quickly cobbled together a set
of proposed reforms. True to his character, Daley plotted his course of action more carefully. He assembled a team of experts
who would be able to go head-to-head with the civil rights delegation on any subject they were likely to raise. Edward Marciniak
and Ely Aaron, executive director and chairman, respectively, of the city’s Human Relations Commission, would be on hand at
the summit to speak to the overall racial situation in the city. And Daley called on city administrators such as Charles Livermore,
executive director of the city’s Commission on Youth Welfare, and Charles Swibel of the CHA, to be prepared to discuss their
areas of expertise. Daley wanted Swibel at the summit for more than just his knowledge of housing. He was, in an odd way,
Daley’s ambassador to parts of the city’s progressive community. Swibel, who was a slumlord by trade and ran the much-criticized
public housing authority, was no great liberal. But he had managed to cultivate ties with some leading civil rights activists,
including Chicago Urban League executive director Edwin Berry. Berry hosted many parties, and Swibel showed up frequently,
usually the only person in attendance who was not part of Chicago’s progressive community. Berry was likely to be a key player
on the Freedom Movement side of the table. He was well regarded in civil rights circles, and had a good relationship with
King, whom he helped to convince to come to Chicago. There was a chance that the most difficult issues at the summit could
be resolved between Swibel and his friend Berry.
²

To prepare for the negotiations, Daley and his team drew up an eleven-point proposal for resolving the conflict. Daley’s approach,
as it had been with the 1963 open-housing ordinance he drafted, was to blame the lack of fair housing in Chicago on the real
estate industry rather than city government. Once again, it was a formulation that made Realtors and the civil rights movement
the combatants, and avoided placing Daley in a showdown with King. As Daley envisioned the summit, he would act as a mediator
between the two parties to the conflict: King and his followers on one side and the Chicago Real Estate Board on the other.
It was a clever strategy, and once the summit began the civil rights contingent would become convinced that Daley had always
viewed the summit in purely tactical terms. “It never seemed to me that Daley was trying to figure out how to deal with the
broader race and housing problems in Chicago,” says John McKnight, who attended the summit as a U.S. Civil Rights Commission
observer. “It was about stopping the marches, which were tearing at the heart of the Democratic Party.”
³

The summit began at 10:00
A.M.
on Wednesday, August 17, in a parish meeting hall of the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint James. Almost seventy men gathered
around three tables shaped in a U configuration. The room was hot and stuffy, cooled only by a single floor fan.
⁴
After sending out the invitations, the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race had decided that it did not want to preside,
so its members would be free to speak out in support of the Chicago Freedom Movement. The gavel passed to Ben Heineman, chairman
of the board of Chicago North Western Railway. Heineman was sympathetic to open housing, and had presided in June at a White
House conference on civil rights for President Johnson. But he was above all a member of the city’s business establishment
and a friend of Daley’s. Flanking him at the center table were some of the city’s most important religious leaders, among
them Archbishop Cody and Robert Marx, a prominent rabbi. Daley sat on the left-hand branch of the U, with some of the city’s
leading business and political figures. Thomas Ayers, president of Commonwealth Edison and head of the Chicago Association
of Commerce and Industry, represented downtown business. Two of the city’s leading bankers came, David Kennedy, president
of the Commerce Club, and Chicago Mortgage Association president Clark Stayman. The Chicago Real Estate Board, whose role
would be critical, was represented by its board president, Ross Beatty, and past board president Arthur Mohl. On the right-hand
branch of the U was the Chicago Freedom Movement delegation. It was led by King, recently back from a trip south, and Raby,
and included James Bevel, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Arthur Brazier of The Woodlawn Organization.
⁵

It had been agreed that King would speak first, followed by Daley, and that King would then issue the Freedom Movement’s demands.
But Heineman let Daley start off. His opening remarks were characteristically vague. “We have to do something to resolve the
problems of the past few weeks,” Daley said by way of introduction. When King’s turn came, he delivered a more lofty oration,
describing Chicago in the same terms he had used in the past to depict the South. Chicago’s problem, according to King, was
one of “dualism.” It had “a dual school system, a dual economy, a dual housing market,” King said, “and we seek to transform
this duality into a oneness.” Raby followed, and assumed the bad-cop role he would maintain throughout the summit. “I am very
pessimistic about the negotiations today because my experience with negotiating has indicated that our success has always
been very limited,” he said. The only reason the summit was occurring, Raby contended, was because of the open-housing marches.
“We will not end the marches with a verbal commitment,” Raby said.
⁶

Despite the agreement that King would be allowed to present the Freedom Movement’s demands first, Heineman called on Aaron
to present Daley’s eleven-point proposal. The city’s position was that the real estate industry would have to take firmer
steps to ensure that it was not discriminating in the sale and rental of housing, and that the civil rights movement had to
promise to halt its marches into the neighborhoods. If Daley’s plan had been to deflect attention from the city by pitting
these two groups against each other, it worked. The Real Estate Board, both in Chicago and nationally, strongly opposed government-imposed
fair-housing policies. The Chicago Real Estate Board had lobbied against state and city fair-housing laws, and it had filed
a lawsuit challenging the Chicago fair housing ordinance. Real estate agents saw open housing as bad for business, but with
the whole housing summit focused on them, it was not a good time to make a full-blown philosophical argument against it. Instead,
they argued that open-housing mandates directed at real-estate agents were impractical. Realtors were mere agents of the sellers
and landlords they represented, the Chicago Real Estate Board’s Mohl said, and these were the people the civil rights movement
needed to focus on. “We need a cooperative venture here, not bullying, but a program to sell people in the neighborhoods on
the idea that the world won’t end if a Negro moves in,” he argued. King had little sympathy for the Real Estate Board’s predicament.
“All over the South I heard the same thing we’ve just heard from Mr. Mohl from restaurant owners and hotel owners,” said King.
“They said that they were just the agents, that they were just responding to the people’s unwillingness to eat with Negroes
in the same restaurant or stay with Negroes in the same hotel. But we got a comprehensive civil rights bill and the so-called
agents then provided service to everybody and nothing happened and the same thing can happen here.” The civil rights delegates
were no happier than the Real Estate Board with what Daley’s presentation called for. They did not want to agree to give up
their right to march until they could be assured that they would get what they wanted at the summit. At this early juncture,
that was not looking likely. Daley’s proposal fell far short of what the movement was hoping for with regard to open housing,
and King reminded Daley that the movement had demands “in the areas of education and employment and you are hearing here only
our demands in the area of housing.”
⁷