Bearing the Cross by David J. Garrow

Author:David J. Garrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

8.

Chicago and the “War on Slums,” 1965–1966

Civil rights activism in Chicago had traveled a fitful path in the years preceding Martin King’s exploration of the city in July, 1965. Chicago’s main racial issue was the extensive segregation of the city’s schools, and the grossly inferior facilities to which black children were assigned. A biracial group, Teachers for Integrated Schools, was formed in 1961 to combat these conditions, and in April, 1962, two of its most active members, Al Raby and Meyer Weinberg, joined with other Chicago civil rights leaders to organize a new association of activist groups, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO). This caucus limited its activities to monthly meetings until the fall of 1963, when Chicago’s hard-line school superintendent, Benjamin C. Willis, tendered his resignation after local CORE chapter members picketed the Board of Education for several weeks to protest how school assignment boundaries maintained segregation. A ten-to-one vote of the school board, whose members were appointed by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, rebuffed Willis’s attempt to resign, and on October 16 the controversial superintendent returned to his job with a strong endorsement of his policies. Civil rights activists were outraged, and on October 22, CCCO called a student boycott to protest the maneuver. More than 200,000 youngsters, almost 50 percent of those enrolled in the city system, stayed home from classes that day, but neither CCCO nor other civil rights forces followed up on that success.

By January, 1964, Raby had become CCCO’s chairman or “convener,” and in late February a second school boycott took place. Participation fell short of October’s, and CCCO, lacking both an office and regular staff, drifted quietly into the summer months despite a report issued by University of Chicago Professor Philip Hauser that rigorously documented CCCO’s charges against the segregationist policies of Superintendent Willis. King’s appearance at a massive June rally at Soldier Field gave Chicago civil rights activists a moment of celebration, but no notable efforts were undertaken during the balance of the year. In early 1965, CCCO was “in disarray,” with one Chicago newspaper columnist proclaiming that “for all effective purposes it has expired.” Public calls for Willis’s removal continued, and two spring demonstrations were mounted in the hope of influencing the Board of Education not to renew the sixty-three-year-old superintendent’s contract. On May 27 the board reappointed Willis until his sixty-fifth birthday in December, 1966, a decision that “brought life back to the moribund civil rights movement in Chicago.”1

Two days later, CCCO met to consider new protests, and many recommended that a new school boycott of longer duration be mounted. Among those present was SCLC’s Jim Bevel, who had taken an interest in Chicago’s civil rights situation since April, when former SNCC activist Bernard Lafayette, now urban affairs director for the local office of the American Friends Service Committee, invited him to give a series of workshops on the southern movement. Those visits had led Bevel to agree with Lafayette’s suggestion that Chicago was an ideal target for SCLC’s expansion into the North.

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