On June 23 the column reached Canton in a driving rainstorm and tried to set up camp in a soaked Negro schoolyard. With sinister precision, a wall of state and local police closed in on the schoolyard, ordering the marchers—2,000 of them now—to pitch their tents somewhere else. But King and the other leaders refused: their people were wet and weary, and anyway this was a Negro school. With explosive force, the police laid down a barrage of tear gas and then crashed into the marchers with whips, sticks, and gun butts. With Negroes falling all around him, Carmichael became hysterical. “Don’t make your stand here,” he sobbed, “I just can’t stand to see any more people get shot.” A local Negro woman, her eyes red from tear gas, picked herself up from the mud and shouted, “We are not going to stay ignorant, and backward, and scared.” Andrew Young toppled off a truck, vomiting from tear gas, thinking, “If I had a machine gun, I’d show these motherfuckers!” John Doar of the Justice Department clamped a handkerchief over his nose and waded into the melee in a useless attempt to restrain the police. Somehow King and McKissick got the marchers away to a nearby Negro church, where they tended their wounds in bitter despair. Veterans of Selma’s bloody Sunday claimed this was worse. King himself had never witnessed anything so vicious. Only in Mississippi would the police assault unarmed Negroes under his personal leadership. Again he telegraphed Washington to send U.S. marshals down here before somebody was killed. Again Washington ignored him, and King ascribed its cynical attitude to his stand on Vietnam. Federal presence on the march was confined to Doar, a man from the Federal Community Relations Service, and a few indifferent FBI agents.
Understandably, SNCC and CORE were furious. To hell with Johnson, McKissick raged. “I’m committed to nonviolence, but I say what we need is to get us some black power.” When King rejected a proposal that they go back and put the tents up anyway, the SNCC and CORE leaders deserted him. “What we do from now on will be on our own,” one said. Over King’s objections, they carried a vote that excluded the NAACP from a final rally at the statehouse in Jackson. “It’s all right,” said Charles Evers. “I’ll be here when they’re all gone.”
King was perplexed, angry, and deeply apprehensive about what was unfolding in Mississippi. But his courage did not desert him. On June 24, with motorists speeding within inches of them, King led 300 nonviolent volunteers back to Philadelphia, to show its white citizens that “we can stand before you without fear after we were beaten and brutalized the other day.” As he and Abernathy approached the courthouse to pray, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey intercepted them. “You can’t go up these steps,” he drawled menacingly. “Oh yes,” King said, “you’re the one who had Schwerner and the other fellows in jail.” Rainey was proud to say he had done that all right. King looked behind him at a white crowd gathering around the courthouse, and he thought for sure he was going to die. As he and Abernathy knelt to pray, King said under his breath, in reference to the slain civil-rights workers, “I believe the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment.” “You damn right,” Rainey said, “they’re right behind you.” King and Abernathy rose, walked away from Rainey and the mob at the courthouse, and somehow got their people out of Philadelphia without mishap. With aides later, King recounted the scene at the courthouse steps, with Rainey and all those whites behind him. “And brother,” King said, “I sure did not want to close my eyes when we prayed.” He grinned. “Ralph said he prayed with his open.”
In searing heat, King and his cohorts headed into Jackson for the climactic rally. Coretta and the older children—Yoki and Marty—joined him for the procession to the statehouse, a band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” At the capitol grounds, 11,000 to 15,000 people applauded as King, Carmichael, and McKissick all gave speeches in blazing sunlight. But civil-rights veterans noticed that whites who had marched with King in other demonstrations were not in Jackson. Afterward, as the marchers prepared to leave, Carmichael approached a white SCLC staffer and shot him between the eyes with a water pistol.
Had the march accomplished anything? “Oh, I think so,” King told a reporter. “It’s just unfortunate that we weren’t able to get across the incredible conditions, the degradation Negroes live under in Mississippi, because of all the dissension within.” Although the march had left voter-registration teams everywhere in its wake, it was the cry of “Black Power” that alerted the country and thrust Carmichael to national prominence as the new Malcolm X. “We’ve learned a lesson from this march,” Bernard Lee told The Reporter. “We can’t work with SNCC, or for that matter with CORE either. This time it was unavoidable. We had to pick up the march once Meredith was shot. And SNCC was here when we arrived. But we’ve learned. From now on we’ll keep Stokely off Dr. King’s coattails. Did you notice that every time the cameras were running, there was Stokely right next to Dr. King?”
For King, the Meredith March Against Fear was a terrible blunder. He had undertaken it to unify the civil-rights movement and confront white Mississippi under the banners of nonviolence. Instead, the march had unleashed a combustible slogan that embarrassed and bewildered him and that fragmented the movement, perhaps irreparably. As Carmichael and McKissick stormed across the country, crying “Black Power” and giving it various definitions, Roy Wilkins had no doubt what it connoted. “No matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term black power means antiwhite power. It has to mean ‘going it alone.’ It has to mean separatism…. We of the NAACP will have none of this.” For Wilkins, the slogan was “the father of hate and the mother of violence.” Rustin too declared it “positively harmful.” Vice-President Humphrey called it reverse racism. And journalist Pat Watters thought it signaled that SNCC and CORE had given up appealing to the best in their people and were now appealing to the worst. “No Negro who is fighting for civil rights,” said Randolph, “can support black power, which is opposed to civil rights and integration.” “This is no time for romantic illusion and empty philosophical debates about freedom,” King said wearily. “What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible.”
KING FLEW BACK TO CHICAGO determined to find an answer to Black Power. If he could extract from Daley a real commitment to fair housing and equal jobs, perhaps he could nullify Black Power by demonstrating to the Negro masses that they could share the blessings of America through integration, not separation. He was “almost desperately determined” to gain economic advancement for black people within the system. “We have got to deliver results—nonviolent results in a Northern city—to protect the nonviolent movement,” Young said.
With SNCC and CORE promoting Black Power right here in Chicago, King announced that it was time for mass civil disobedience, to force the Daley machine to make Chicago “a just and open city.” SCLC would kick off demonstrations with a mass rally and a march to City Hall on July 10, “Freedom Sunday.” And if there were those who thought King naive in taking on Chicago’s “enlightened bossism,” King felt that he had no other choice. For him, the future of integration—of the movement, the country, and maybe humankind itself—was increasingly on the line in this perilous hour. It was the great mission of America to prove that people of all racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds could live together in love and equality as children of God. If America could demonstrate that, then God’s Kingdom could begin here. But if America failed in her mission, if human beings could not get along here as brothers and sisters, then no doubt they could not do so in the world at large.
As he hurried about Chicago, urging Negroes to turn out for Freedom Sunday, trying to convey an idea of the issues at stake, he was booed in one meeting by members of the Black Power movement. He recalled how he had spoken countless times around the country, even before hostile whites, but until now nobody in an audience had booed him. “I went home that night with an ugly feeling,” he said later. “Selfishly I thought of my sufferings and sacrifices over the last twelve years. Why would they boo one so cl
ose to them? But as I lay awake thinking, I finally came to myself, and I could not for the life of me have less than patience and understanding for those young people. For twelve years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not too distant day when they would have freedom, ‘all, here and now.’ Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises.”
Still, the boos rang in his ears. Sometimes he felt too discouraged to go on. But he reminded himself that “there is a balm in Gilead that makes the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead that heals the sin-sick soul.” In the frenetic countdown to Freedom Sunday, he reflected on the story of Martin Luther, his namesake, the German monk who had ignited the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. It all began when the Catholic Church, which controlled Europe then, raised the levies, or indulgences, it imposed on its vast flock. The church’s system of collection had become a form of “high spiritual finance,” crass, commercial, and hypocritical. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the system in a symbolic act that shook the medieval world: he nailed the ninety-five theses against indulgences on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg. This led to a showdown with the Pope that aroused all Germany and set in motion a religious revolution that helped open the way for the very concepts King was struggling for in Chicago—equality, representation, and self-determination, not for the pleasure of some, but for the liberty and dignity of all. The episode at Wittenberg inspired King to do something equally symbolic. On Freedom Sunday he would nail his own ninety-five theses on the door of City Hall.
Freedom Sunday came in with a heat wave. By the time of the rally, the temperature stood at 98 degrees, and more than a half million Chicagoans swamped the beaches of Lake Michigan. Only 30,000 people—movement leaders had hoped for 100,000—gathered in Soldiers Field to hear King give the keynote address of the campaign. Speaking under a black parasol that shielded him from the sun, he called on Chicago blacks to withdraw their money from all banks and finance houses that discriminated against them, and to boycott any company that refused to employ an adequate number of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and other ethnic minorities in better-paying jobs. They must say to Mayor Daley: if you do not respond to our demands, our votes will decide the next mayor of Chicago. We will fill up the jails here in order to end the slums.
Then with thousands in pursuit, he set out for City Hall with his own version of the ninety-five theses—a set of demands that called for an end to police brutality and discriminatory real-estate practices, increased Negro employment, and a civilian review board for the police department like that in New York City. But the oppressive heat got to him; already worn down from the tension and exertion of the Mississippi march, he had to ride part of the way in an air-conditioned car. At City Hall, with some 36,000 followers looking on, King strode to the LaSalle Street entrance and stuck his theses on the metal door with adhesive tape. Then he faced the cheering multitude, hoping that this day marked the symbolic beginning of an American reformation.
The next day, King returned to City Hall and presented his demands to Daley himself. But the mayor, his face red with anger, rejected them on the grounds that Chicago already had a “massive” antislum program. For Daley and his men, King was becoming an intolerable nuisance. They found it incomprehensible that he couldn’t be bought off. Here he stood, solemn and obdurate, warning Daley that he was inviting “social disaster” if his administration did not do something bold, something meaningful, to rectify the “seething desperation” in the ghettoes. To expose racial oppression in Chicago and force a recalcitrant Daley to act, King promised to launch sit-ins, camp-ins, boycotts, and mass demonstrations in the streets.
BACK IN HIS LAWNDALE FLAT, King was learning firsthand what a pressure cooker ghetto life was in the summer. After the Mississippi march, Coretta and the children had moved into the apartment with King, intending to stay until the fall. Right away, the children started whining. There was nothing to do except play outside in patches of black dirt. Even the pitiful playground was black dirt. The streets were too congested and dangerous for them to release their stored-up energy there. Because the ghettoes had no swimming pools or parks, there was no place for them to escape the torrid heat. Confined too often to King’s small, suffocating flat, the children fought and screamed at one another and even reverted to infantile behavior. “I realized that the crowded flat we lived in,” King said, “was about to produce an emotional explosion in my own family.”
On July 12, the day after King’s face-off with Daley, the West Side exploded in a riot that left nine people injured and twenty-four in jail. To cool off in the 100-degree temperature, youths on the West Side had turned on water hydrants and frolicked in the spray. But the police came in their flashing cars to shut the hydrants off; a crowd gathered, and a fight broke out between a cop and one youth that set off a powder keg. Two hundred and fifty Negroes—most of them gang members—took to the streets, breaking windows and hurling Molotov cocktails at police cars, setting one ablaze.
With the whole ghetto threatening to blow, King and his aides called slum residents to a mass meeting in a Negro church and urged them to speak from the floor “to relieve the tension.” Six gang members King had gotten out of jail claimed that the police had beaten them, and their comrades in the audience swore retaliation. When a man rose and said he had lived in Chicago all his life and couldn’t understand why anybody would want to tear up the neighborhood, the gang members walked out in a huff, scoffing at King’s entreaties. Through the night insurgent gangs roamed the streets and shattered windows.
So it had come to this—what King had warned and feared would happen since the start of the campaign. All the next day he held emergency staff sessions, searching for ways to prevent another eruption. He blamed last night’s disorders on police brutality—and Daley’s stubborn refusal to make concessions. “He can do much more to stop riots than I can,” King told the press. And he reiterated his demand for a civilian review board to oversee the police and importuned City Hall to install swimming pools and parks on the West Side.
That night rioting broke out anew after another clash over the fire hydrants. Four hundred police swept West side streets in wedge formations, and hundreds of Negroes in housing projects hurled bricks and Molotov cocktails down on them. In King’s own neighborhood, across from his flat, Negro boys smashed shop windows, cried “Black Power,” and ran off. As lightning splintered the sky and rain lashed Chicago, King and his aides toured the riot-torn area, preaching nonviolence and pleading with people to stay inside. But it was no use. The next day, July 14, war flamed up on the West Side as hundreds of police shot it out with Negro snipers in a high-rise apartment building, and youth gangs fire-bombed white-owned stores. King and his men were in the streets until 4 A.M., King speeding by car from one battle site to another in a desperate attempt to stop the fighting. By dawn, 2 people had been killed, 56 injured, and 282 thrown in jail. One of the dead was a girl, fourteen and pregnant. The next day, Governor Otto Kerner ordered 4,000 National Guardsmen to Chicago, and by dusk soldiers with carbines and bayonets were patrolling the riot area in jeeps and troop trucks. The West Side looked like Vietnam.
Chicago rocked with recriminations. Pro-Daley Negroes blamed the disturbances on “outside interference,” and the mayor himself pointed a finger at anarchists, Communists, and then at King’s own staff, which he accused of instructing Negroes “how to conduct violence” by showing them films of Watts. But in a ninety-minute confrontation at City Hall, King persuaded the mayor to make concessions lest the rioting and killing continue. The city rushed in ten portable swimming pools for the West Side and affixed sprinklers to water hydrants there for the children to use in summer weather. Later Daley even established a citizens’ committee to make a study of the police department. No, King admitted, these measures scarcely dealt with the “basic needs” of the ghetto, b
ut they were something “concrete to offer people.”
After his meeting with Daley, King contacted fifteen top leaders of the Cobras, Vice Lords, and Roman Saints, whose members had been at the forefront of the disorders, and assembled them in his flat for a dialogue. For hours, he let them pour out their grievances against the police, the Daley machine, and its Negro “pawns.” Then he beseeched them to renew the commitment they had made to nonviolence, reminded them what he had said before—that demonstrations were far more “sensible and effective” than aimless rioting. Civil disobedience was about to commence, and he asked them again to serve as march marshals. At last, Richard “Peanut” Tidwell, leader of the Roman Saints, pledged himself to King and went around the room, persuading each of the other leaders to do the same. Then they left to subdue their followers and prevent any further trouble. When peace returned to Chicago, the New York Times correspondent attributed it not so much to the show of military force as to King’s influence with the Negro gangs.
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