The Civil Rights Movement Revised Edition

Black Power 129

Coordinating Council of

Community Organiza-

tions: The group formed

in 1962 to integrate

Chicago’s housing and

schools.

Chicago Freedom Move-

ment: An ill-fated attempt

by Martin Luther King to

move the civil rights

movement to the North.

American society that was on the verge of becoming two nations, one black
and poor and the other white and rich [Doc. 17, p. 154]. The controversial
report blamed this division on institutional racism and maintained that only
a long-term national commitment larger than Johnson’s Great Society could
reverse the ‘deepening racial trend.’ Although Johnson was insulted by the
report, he had abandoned domestic reforms to run what he termed ‘that
bitch of a war’ in Vietnam. Some cities attempted to ameliorate the miserable
conditions that produced such chaotic violence. Slum clearance, job training,
recreational facilities, and civilian review boards of police actions provided a
kind of ‘riot insurance’ for local governments. In case social programs proved
ineffective, mayors trained their police in riot control and bought them pow-
erful weapons. California governor Ronald Reagan dismissed social programs
as unnecessary since he guessed that just 2 per cent of ghetto dwellers – ‘mad
dogs,’ he called them – were involved.
Martin Luther King gambled that his nonviolent formula would work
in the explosive ghetto, which he called ‘a system of internal colonialism.’
He now believed that blacks were just as oppressed by low-wage jobs, inad-
equate housing, and inferior schools as by racist laws. Al Raby, a young
teacher who presided over the Coordinating Council of Community
Organizations, invited King to address these thorny problems in Chicago,
infamous for its high-rise housing projects on the South Side. In 1966, King
put together a grassroots coalition called the Chicago Freedom Movement
and moved with his family into a urine-stenched tenement.
Focusing on open housing, King persuaded some tenants to withhold
their rents, but he was overwhelmed by the ‘monster of racism’ in the nation’s
second-largest city. The local black leadership was largely unsupportive
mainly because the Tammany-style political machine employed minorities.
When King led a march through a white ethnic neighborhood, he was nearly
stoned to death by screaming Poles, Italians, and Irish wearing Nazi insignia
and waving Confederate flags. King admitted that he had ‘never seen, even
in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled.’ Chicago’s boss – Demo-
cratic mayor Richard Daley – kept the police in line and killed the movement
with soothing words and empty promises, a far cry from Birmingham’s fire
hoses. Because of Daley’s influence as a kingmaker, the national Democratic
party had no interest in pressuring him as it had southern governors. Never
again did the civil rights movement make a serious effort to change the
North, where the commitment to racial equality was more abstract than real.
All that was left in Chicago was Operation Breadbasket, an SCLC program
headed by Jesse Jackson that boycotted businesses with few, if any, black
workers.
In the South, King found his vision and tactics questioned as never before.
In June 1966, James Meredith, the first black graduate of Ole Miss, began a

Operation Breadbasket:

SCLC’s selective buying

campaign to force white

businesses to hire black

workers.