Let the Trumpet Sound

by Stephen B. Oates

  Before the riots, King had been scheduled to leave Chicago and address the World Conference on Church and Society in Geneva, Switzerland. But the difficulties in Chicago made it impossible for him to go. So he recorded “A Knock at Midnight,” a sermon that reflected his mood, and sent the tape to Geneva. On Sunday, July 17, at St. Peter’s Cathedral, four hundred delegates sat in rapt attention as King’s disembodied voice boomed from a tape recorder at the empty pulpit: “It is…midnight in our world, and the darkness is so deep that we can hardly see which way to turn…. On the international horizon nations are engaged in a colossal and bitter contest for supremacy. Two world wars have been fought within a generation, and the clouds of another war are dangerously low…. In the terrible midnight of war, men have knocked on the door of the church to ask for the bread of peace, but the Church often disappointed them…. Those who have gone to the Church to seek the bread of economic justice have been left in the frustrating midnight of economic deprivation.…. The Church today is challenged to proclaim God’s son, Jesus Christ, to be the hope of men in all of their complex personal and social problems.”

  ON JULY 30, IN NEW FRIENDSHIP BAPTIST CHURCH, King told his followers that the time for “creative tension” had arrived in Chicago. They were going to march against segregated housing in all-white neighborhoods that ringed the ghettoes, starting with those around Cage and Marquette parks on the Southwest Side. Realtors there had refused to show their listings to black civil-rights teams, in violation of Chicago’s own ill-enforced fair-housing ordinance, and King intended to expose such practices to national opinion and dramatize how the walls of this city sealed Negroes off into enclaves of “poverty and human misery.” He realized, of course, that he couldn’t lead his indigent followers overnight into “the promised land of suburbia,” as one writer put it. Negroes whose yearly income averaged only $4,700 could scarcely afford the $15,000 to $30,000 homes in white communities. But by leading slum blacks into those segregated neighborhoods, King hoped to throw a fright into City Hall—and the state and national capitals beyond—and coerce them into guaranteeing open housing to Negroes, so that they would not feel permanently and psychologically chained to the ghetto. When critics wailed that violence was bound to occur, King replied as he had in Selma and Birmingham: “We do not seek to precipitate violence. However, we are aware that the existence of injustice in society is the existence of violence, latent violence. We feel we must constantly expose this evil, even if it brings violence upon us.” If we bring the evil out in the open, then “this community will be forced to deal with it.”

  King was away on a speaking engagement when Young, Raby, and other movement leaders took the first column of interracial demonstrators into an Irish and Lithuanian working-class neighborhood abutting Marquette Park. When King returned, his staffers related that whites out there had jeered and heckled them viciously and even shoved two of their cars into a muddy lagoon. Sensing the dramatic possibilities here, King exhorted his followers: “We aren’t gonna march with any molotov cocktails. That isn’t our movement. We aren’t gonna march with any weapons. That isn’t our movement. We aren’t gonna march with bricks and bottles. We’re gonna march with something much more powerful than all of that. We’re gonna march with the force of our souls…. We’re gonna move out with the weapons of courage. We’re gonna put on the breastplate of righteousness and the whole armor of God. And we’re gonna march.”

  On August 5, he led 600 Negroes and whites out to Marquette Park for a second trek through an all-white section, this one consisting mostly of second-generation Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, and Germans. A special force of 900 police was on hand to escort the procession and maintain order. As the marchers assembled in the park, a thousand whites stood on a knoll nearby, waving Confederate flags, unfurling Nazi insignias, and shouting “Nigger go home!” “We hate niggers!” “We want Martin Luther Coon!” “Wallace for president!” “Kill the niggers!” Suddenly they let fly with a barrage of rocks, bottles, and bricks. One brick struck King just above his right ear, causing him to stumble to the ground. Reporters surrounded him as he shook off the blow. “Oh, I’ve been hit so many times I’m immune to it,” he said. Then the march would go on? “Oh, yes, very definitely. We can’t stop the march.”

  Behind a flying wedge of police, King marched his followers eight abreast through a residential area, with cadres of Vice Lords, Cobras, and Saints protecting their flanks, moving between the column and whites who lined the sidewalks. “Again there was that terrible noise of people shouting at us,” Al Raby said. “Women are among the most vicious, screaming ‘you monkeys’ at the blacks and ‘you white trash’ at the others. They called all of us apes or told the blacks to go back to Africa.” The procession was heading down a narrow street now, and whites were everywhere—on porches and lawns and up in the trees—screaming insults, chanting “White Power,” and throwing so many rocks that even the police were ducking and getting hit. In one salvo, it seemed that hundreds of cops went down, and King felt an eerie sensation of “the inevitability of death”—the same sensation he’d felt in Philadelphia during the Mississippi march. When the police battered a path to a realtor’s office in a cluster of shops, King and his people knelt in prayer, while hundreds of bystanders shrieked, “Hate! Hate! Hate!” In all the bedlam, a white threw a knife at King, but it missed and stuck in the shoulder of a white onlooker.

  Somehow the police got the marchers safely back to Marquette Park. It was dusk now, and the crowd there had swelled to some 2,500 people—among them well-dressed women and businessmen. As buses and cars filled with demonstrators pulled away, whites chased after them, smashing windows and raging at the cops: “You nigger-loving sons of bitches!” A crazed old woman stood in the tumult sobbing, “God, I hate niggers and nigger-lovers.” An old man railed at a group of marchers, “I worked all my life for a house out here, and no nigger is going to get it!”

  The police were stunned. Many of them were second-generation Poles, Italians, and Germans themselves; these were their people stoning and calling them “nigger lovers,” their people sporting Rebel flags and banners of the American Nazi party and battling them in the streets long after the marchers were gone, their poeple who were rioting now.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” King said of the march that day. “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the south, but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.” And yet he felt a surge of joy at the conduct of the young gang members who had marched with him. He had seen their noses bloodied and broken, but not one of them had retaliated. Surely this demonstrated that “even very violent temperaments can be channeled through nonviolent discipline.”

  Chicago, though, could not face the hate King had exposed here. Across the city, white editors, politicians, religious leaders, conservative Negroes, and even some CCCO people, all vilified King, accusing him of creating the racial tensions in Chicago and insisting that he stop the marches.

  “You want us to stop marching, make justice a reality,” King retorted in a Negro mass meeting. “I don’t mind saying to Chicago—or to anybody—I’m tired of marching. I’m tired of marching for something that should’ve been mine at birth. If you want a moratorium on demonstrations, put a moratorium on injustice. If you want us to end our moves into communities, open these communities…. I don’t mind saying to you, I’m tired of living every day under the threat of death. I have no martyr complex. I want to live as long as anybody in this building. And sometimes I begin to doubt whether I’m going to make it through…. So I’ll tell anybody, I’m willing to stop marching. I don’t march because I like it. I march because I must, and because I’m a man, and because I’m a child of God.”

  Over the next week, his lieutenants led one march after another into white neighborhoods, stirring up more hate, shouts of white power, dancing swastikas and Rebel flags. King himself, back from SCLC’s annu
al convention in Jackson, Mississippi, and a speaking engagement on the West Coast, promised to lead an even larger demonstration on the forthcoming Sunday. But Mayor Daley moved to derail King’s escalating campaign. On August 19, he secured from Cook County Circuit Court a temporary injunction curtailing King’s operation to one march of 500 people a day. Undaunted, King countered with an announcement that panicked officials from Chicago to Springfield. On Sunday he would lead a huge interracial march into all-white Cicero, a suburb outside Cook County that wasn’t covered by the injunction. Cicero was perhaps the most virulently anti-Negro community in the Chicago area. When a Negro family had tried to move there in 1951, whites had gone on such a rampage that Governor Adlai Stevenson had been obliged to send 4,000 National Guardsmen there to restore order. Recently, white toughs had murdered a Negro youth who went to Cicero looking for work. Now King threatened to take a column of blacks and whites into Cicero, marching arm in arm. The sheriff of Cook County said it was suicidal. Governor Kerner put the state police and National Guard on alert. City Hall, Archbishop Cody, and other progressive whites begged King to call the march off. But King vowed that “no one is going to turn me around at this point” and that the demonstration would be “the biggest ever.” “Not only are we going to walk to Cicero, we’re going to work in Cicero, we’re going to live in Cicero.”

  As the fateful day approached, Chicago girded itself for the worst. The Negro couple who had tried to move to Cicero in 1951 appeared on CBS Television, recalled the frenzy of the mob they had faced, and the man said, “I’m scared to death. I don’t know what will happen.” Ironically, though, King’s projected march captured the imagination of the young militants in local CORE and SNCC chapters, who hungered for a showdown with Cicero whites and swore to be out there with King on Sunday.

  The real showdown, however, was between King and Daley. And it was the mayor who backed away. Horrified by King’s threatened march and by the ugliness exposed in his city, Daley agreed to meet with King and try to work something out. This was tantamount to admitting that Chicago’s housing and slum policies did need serious improvement—something Daley had steadfastly denied—and King, Raby, and other movement leaders regarded it as a tremendous breakthrough. Now maybe they could wangle some major concessions out of City Hall.

  On August 26, at the Palmer House, they sat down for two and a half hours with Daley and powerful municipal, labor, and business leaders, and reached what became known as the “Summit Agreement.” According to its terms, Chicago’s Commission on Human Rights would require real-estate brokers to post a summary of the city’s open-housing policy, and the city itself would redouble efforts to enforce it and to encourage state housing legislation; the Chicago Real Estate Board, which had been lobbying against such a bill, would no longer do so (though it refused to drop a legal battle it was waging against Chicago’s own fair-housing ordinance); Chicago’s savings and bankers’ associations agreed to lend money to qualified families regardless of race, thus meeting one of King’s cardinal demands; the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and an impressive array of other business, labor, and municipal organizations all pledged themselves to work in behalf of fair housing. The agreement also set up the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Housing, comprising the major leadership associations in the city, to implement the entire accord.

  King, Raby, and other members of the Chicago Freedom Movement all accepted the accord because they thought it the best they could get. If the agreement mentioned no specific timetable, it was still the most comprehensive of any of King’s previous accords, including that in Birmingham. King himself hailed the Summit Agreement as “the most significant program ever conceived to make open housing a reality in the metropolitan area,” and he “deferred” the Cicero march indefinitely. “But if these agreements aren’t carried out,” he warned, “Chicago hasn’t seen a demonstration.”

  What had the accord actually accomplished? Journalist Paul Good and various Negro leaders believed it demonstrated that King’s forces could move machine politics in a test of strength, and they praised him for driving Daley to the conference table, which set a valuable precedent for future negotiations. But Chester Robinson of the local West Side Organization called it “a sell out” and promised to march on Cicero “come hell or high water.” “This agreement is a lot of words that give us nothing specific we can understand,” Robinson complained. “We want it to say: apartments should be painted once a year. Community people should have jobs in their community…. This situation is just pathetic. We’re sick and tired of middle-class people telling us what we want. And we’re gonna march in Cicero on Sunday.” And CORE, SNCC, and other Black Power dissidents backed him solidly. Even some of King’s white friends in CCCO were upset. “We told King that we haven’t won anything in this agreement,” recalled Meyer Weinberg, a Chicago teacher. “Hell, Daley and his guys are all crooks. You can’t believe anything they say.” Weinberg surmised that the accord gave King an excuse to bail out of Chicago, and others also judged it “a hydra-headed face saver.”

  After the meeting, King appeared at a CCCO-sponsored “victory rally” at a Baptist church on the embattled West Side. On Roosevelt Road two blocks away, dozens of storefronts were boarded up and glass from broken windows glittered on the sidewalks. From a crowded lounge blared the lyrics of a jukebox hit, “Let’s Go Get Stoned.” In the Baptist church down the way, Negroes sang, “This Little Light of Mine, I’m Gonna Let It Shine.” Then King stood at the pulpit, looking imperturbable. “Some people tried to frighten me,” he told his followers. “They said nonviolence couldn’t work in the North. They said you can’t fight city hall; you better go back down South. But if you look at what happened here it tells you, nonviolence can work.” He mentioned Robinson and the local CORE and SNCC people who planned to march on Cicero without him and said fine, they went with his prayers and hopes. Still, there was a strained and plaintive tone in his conclusions, as he confessed something he had long realized: “Let’s face the fact: Most of us are going to be living in the ghetto five, ten years from now. But we’ve got to get some things straightened out right away. I’m not going to wait a month to get the rats and roaches out of my house…. Morally, we ought to have what we say in the slogan, Freedom Now. But it all doesn’t come now. That’s a sad fact of life you have to live with.”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, ROBINSON CANCELED his plans to demonstrate in Cicero. But not CORE and SNCC. On September 4, they staged an anticlimactic march of some 200 people there, with local and state police and 2,000 rifle-toting National Guardsmen holding maddened crowds at bay. King meanwhile announced that jobs were now the main priority in Chicago and that Operation Breadbasket, a program SCLC had tried with considerable success in Atlanta, would be responsible for gaining breakthroughs in hiring for the disadvantaged. Chicago’s Jesse Jackson, a flamboyant young Negro who’d joined SCLC’s staff, was in charge of the operation, which utilized a network of Negro preachers and churches to conduct negotiations and selective buying campaigns. Under Jackson’s watchful eye, Negro preachers investigated the hiring practices of white establishments with a heavy Negro trade. If they did not employ blacks in appreciable numbers and in higher positions, the preachers urged their congregations to boycott the guilty stores. King claimed that within eight months Jackson’s operation produced nine hundred new jobs for Negroes and increased Negro community income by an estimated $6 million.

  With Operation Breadbasket under way, King closed down his Chicago campaign and returned to Atlanta with his executive staff. In the fall, he did send a voter-registration team back to Chicago, but a snowstorm immobilized a “D Day” drive to register 3,000 new Negro voters for the upcoming mayoral election. Daley’s machine and Negro apathy brought the voter-registration attempts to a standstill, too. “Jesus Christ could have come to Chicago and not been able to make an effort,” sighed one gloomy SCLC staffer.

  Excepting Operation Breadbasket, almost everybody involved in the Chicago Freedom
Movement wrote it off as a failure. Many of King’s aides viewed it as a northern Albany: the best that could be said of Chicago was that Doc would learn from his mistakes. Others argued that King had postulated the problem on too narrow an issue—open housing—which was irrelevant for the mass of destitute slum dwellers. And Wachtel claimed that King often said that, too. Al Raby, who quit CCCO and returned to college for graduate work, pointed out that too many Chicago Negroes looked to King as a messiah who could accomplish anything. Well, he wasn’t a messiah. “It frustrates me,” Raby said, “that people keep looking for instant miracles.” He conceded that the campaign had gained “very little” and that the slum system went on, bad as ever. The major problem, he contended, was that their goal—the unconditional surrender of the forces that maintained the ghettoes—was unrealistic to begin with. “I don’t think that Martin or any of us realized what a tough town this is and how strong the Democratic organization is. For us, it had to be a learning process in understanding the power structure.” What had they learned? “That we are in for a much larger and longer fight than any of us thought it was ever going to be.” And what distressed him was that “there may never be an answer!;

  King, too, was besieged with doubts. Despite all his efforts, Negroes had rioted not only in Chicago, but in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and thirty-nine other cities that spring and summer, and whites still refused to understand why. Moreover, the depth of hatred he had found in Chicago appalled him. He could not shake the image of all those maniacal faces, taunting and screaming at him on the march from Marquette Park. He believed that the people of Mississippi ought to visit Chicago “to learn how to hate.” Nor could he forget the obstinacy and blindness of Chicago’s white leaders, the indifference of the federal government, and the silence of white liberal opinion across the land. Truly, in the era of Vietnam, of ghetto riots and the white backlash, King’s old “coalition of conscience” was over. As he told David Halberstam later, Chicago convinced him that most whites did not really want integration, did not really want the Negro as a brother. Up to now he had thought they did. Up to now he had thought he was reaching the best in white America. After Chicago, though, he decided that only a small minority of whites—mostly college students—were committed to the cause of racial equality. His feelings seemed confirmed by polls that year which indicated that 85 percent of white Americans believed that Negroes were demanding too much, going too far, and that 50 percent objected to Negroes living next door to them and 88 percent to interracial dating. King contended that the majority of American whites were not ready for equality because they had made no genuine effort to educate themselves out of their racial ignorance.