Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  But Chicago had in its midst the kind of larger-than-life figure who relished this situation, and the story that was unraveling in Woodlawn in 1961 fit his larger agenda perfectly. Radical community organizer Saul Alinsky had already won accolades from progressives all over the country for his efforts in overcoming the intense ethnoracial conflicts that had divided residents living in the downtrodden, smelly neighborhoods around Chicago’s stockyards in the early 1940s. With the moral support of the Archdiocese of Chicago in the form of renegade Bishop Bernard Sheil and the financial support of enlightened philanthropists like Marshall Field, Alinsky had led a bare-knuckle campaign to unify Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Bohemians, and Mexicans within a grassroots democratic organization known as the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC). The immediate objectives were to fight against poor housing and health conditions, malnutrition, and juvenile delinquency, but the project fit into a much broader framework in Alinsky’s eyes. “This organization,” he had written during the BYNC’s first days, “is founded for the purpose of uniting all of the organizations within the community . . . in order to promote the welfare of all residents . . . regardless of their race, color, or creed, so that they may all have the opportunity to find health, happiness and security through the democratic way of life.”42 Reflecting on the BYNC’s impressive achievements on these fronts in the first years of its existence, the Chicago Daily Times referred to the organization as a “miracle of democracy,” and New York’s Herald Tribune claimed the spread of Alinsky’s methods to other cities “may well mean the salvation of our way of life.”43 Moreover, these efforts at participatory democracy attracted the attention of the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who struck up a close friendship with Alinsky during his wartime exile in the United States. It was Maritain, in fact, who convinced Alinsky to write his first book, Reveille for Radicals, which built upon his organizing experiences in the Back of the Yards to argue for the need for radicals throughout the country to form such “People’s Organizations” and to present them with the strategies for doing so. Faced with the rise of fascism in Europe and the Nazi occupation of his country, Maritain saw Alinsky’s work as a means of bringing about the democratic dream of people working out their own destiny. As Maritain argued in 1945, organizations like the BYNC could produce an “awakening to the elementary requirements of true political life,” which would, in turn, lead individuals to experience “an internal moral awakening.”44

  By the late 1950s, however, such awakenings had been largely disrupted by the forces of everyday white racism. To be sure, Alinsky could take comfort in some remarkable achievements. The BYNC, for example, continued to win praise for its innovative housing revitalization program, which, among other things, fought blight by enabling potential homeowners to procure cheap credit from local lenders for rehabilitating old homes and constructing new ones on vacant lots. This was an impressive feat in view of the economic hardships facing the area after the decline of the meatpacking industry. But the racial issue threatened to undermine such successes. Even if Alinsky had managed to reduce the harassment of black packinghouse workers in the bars, stores, and parks around the stockyards, few black families from the expanding ghetto surrounding the stockyards area had been allowed to move into the community. In essence, “the democratic way of life” Alinsky had established in the Back of the Yards depended, in large part, on the exclusion of African Americans, a situation he deemed unacceptable.

  Moreover, this failure was jeopardizing Alinsky’s relationship with his major donor, the Archdiocese of Chicago, which had recently committed $118,000 to Alinsky’s organizing network, the Industrial Areas Foundation. The archdiocese, much like its counterparts in other cities dealing with the arrival of large numbers of southern black migrants, was seeking a solution to the racial violence and white flight breaking apart its parishes. In Chicago, Catholic leaders like Cardinal Samuel Stritch (until his death in 1958) and his successor Cardinal Albert Meyer represented a more progressive wing within the Church’s upper echelons that viewed a move towards interracialism as the best way of preserving endangered parishes. Yet this position often placed them at sharp odds with many of their clergymen at the parish level. In fact, what was beginning to scandalize the Church leadership, all the way up to the Vatican, was the active role that some priests were playing in rallying parishioners to collectively oppose—through at times violent forms of intimidation—the racial integration of their neighborhoods. Catholic parishes organized community life for many Chicagoans living around the color line. Young people went to parish schools and played on parish sports teams, parents participated in a range of parish social activities, and both young and old attended church on Sundays. Many parishioners envisioned the loss of their whole way of life if blacks breached the territorial boundaries of the parish. The archdiocese thus had a crisis on its hands, and it looked to a Jewish radical—the son of poor Russian immigrants who had made his way from the Jewish West Side to the University of Chicago—to find a solution.45

  Woodlawn would not be Alinsky’s first attempt at confronting the forces that were destabilizing the city’s neighborhoods. In the late 1950s he had launched the Organization for a Southwest Community (OSC) on the predominantly Catholic Southwest Side, working with local pastors—Catholic and Protestant, white and black—on a number of schemes to stop the flow of white residents out of the area. Alinsky’s efforts had brought about some impressive changes. The OSC confronted real estate agents that were spreading panic to make whites sell their homes below market value, forced city inspectors to prevent the illegal conversion of single-family homes, established credit schemes to enable residents to buy homes with lower down payments, and worked tirelessly on campaigns to convince homeowners they did not have to sell their homes just because blacks had moved in. It also worked as a liaison between community workers and the police to try to prevent racial violence between white and black youth gangs.46 Alinsky even toyed with the idea of establishing quotas of black settlement to assure whites that racial integration would not necessarily mean community disintegration. Yet, despite winning over some of the most reluctant pastors to the cause, the OSC faced a relentless onslaught from the area’s more reactionary elements, who labelled its staff members as “commies” and “nigger-lovers.” By the end of 1960, the OSC was looking like a lost cause, and Alinsky had already begun preparing the ground for a new campaign in Woodlawn.

  Part of Alinsky’s genius was his ability to anticipate key shifts that were about to transform the political terrain. Back in the early 1940s, when many on the left were still rallying around the promises of organized labor after the heroic unionization struggles of the previous decade, Alinsky was already asserting that the labor movement had lost its progressive spirit, and that People’s Organizations were needed to move beyond bread-and-butter issues and address the fundamental class injustices of monopoly capitalism. This view, no doubt, was informed by his understanding of how good union men could stand behind their black brothers on the assembly line and then come back home and stand behind the racist mobs attacking them in their neighborhoods. By 1947, the year the rabidly anticommunist Taft-Hartley Act effectively stripped labor unions of any strong ideological orientation, Alinsky’s assessment of the labor movement looked prophetic. Now, as Alinsky began his first campaign to organize blacks, he seemed to understand that he was once again on the cutting edge of progressive politics. “The crucial history of race relations,” he told his protégé Nicholas von Hoffman around this time, “would be written in the northern cities.”47 With the whole nation fixing its eyes on the civil rights battles of the South and most folks in the North thinking the “race problem” was located down there, this statement seemed somewhat far-fetched; several years later, by the mid-1960s, as ghetto riots were ripping apart the urban North and Martin Luther King was being stoned and jeered on Chicago’s Southwest Side, it appeared self-evident. Yet again Alinsky understood where the next frontier of left
politics lay and he rushed towards it with a great sense of urgency, the Catholic Church, ironically enough, behind him all the way.

  That Alinsky was able to convince the Archdiocese of Chicago to come up with $150,000 over three years to fund his organizing efforts in a community that was just 5 percent Catholic and overwhelmingly black suggests just how dire the situation appeared in 1960. Church officials had voiced some muted opposition to the earlier Hyde Park plan from the standpoint that blacks displaced from the area around the university would end up seeking housing at the edges of nearby Catholic neighborhoods, provoking a wave of panic-selling and street-level violence that would further destabilize parishes already on the verge of collapse. The same kind of thinking was likely behind the archdiocese’s sponsorship of the Woodlawn effort, though with the black population of the whole industrial Midwest on the rise, Catholic leaders were also beginning to think about some other benefits that would accrue from preventing viable middle-class black neighborhoods from turning into impoverished ghettos. The private Catholic school system, for example, was facing some potentially serious enrollment problems, and a new wave of pupils from respectable, black middle-class homes offered a potential solution. Thus, even before Alinsky had begun his work in Woodlawn, a visionary Catholic priest in the area had convinced Cardinal Meyer to force the principals of all six Catholic schools in Woodlawn to accept some black students. Questions of social justice were by no means absent from the archdiocese’s agenda, but the money being put into Alinsky’s hands also related to the Church’s pressing need to establish a meaningful presence among the population that would dominate large sections of Chicago and the rest of the urban Midwest.

  That need had already placed the archdiocese in opposition to its working-class base, and it was now on the verge of bringing it into direct conflict with City Hall and its proudly Catholic mayor, not to mention the city’s most powerful institution of higher education. Alinsky had warned Meyer of this when he committed the money, but the cardinal was unflappable. However, what nobody in the archdiocese understood at the outset was just how radical things would get down in Woodlawn. To begin with, Alinsky’s approach to organizing stopped short of nothing for the cause, and organizing a place like Woodlawn often required tactics that would raise eyebrows among the pious. The western part of Woodlawn was largely stable and middle class, but to the east, across Cottage Grove Avenue, was a run-down slum area filled with pot-smelling jazz clubs, gin-soaked bars, and greasy chicken shacks—a territory whose organization Alinsky conferred to his only black organizer, Bob Squires. “I knew every bookie, every whore, every policy runner, every cop, every bartender, waitress, store owner, restaurant owner,” Squires later recalled. “We had chicken dinners, barbecues,” Woodlawn’s other organizer, Nicholas von Hoffman added; “we even had hookers running fund-raisers.”48

  Yet what turned out to be the organizing event that sparked what became a powerful grassroots movement in Woodlawn was when Alinsky’s Temporary Woodlawn Organization (TWO) arranged for southern civil rights activists—Freedom Riders just out of the hospital after being brutally beaten by white mobs as they attempted to desegregate interstate bus lines—to speak to residents about the meaning of their own struggle. In a moment that would completely redefine what was going on in Woodlawn, the Freedom Riders led a jam-packed gymnasium at Woodlawn’s St. Cyril’s Church in a rousing version of the then little-known civil rights protest song “We Shall Overcome.” Almost instantly, the residents who had joined up with TWO established a profound, emotionally charged connection to their brothers and sisters in the South. Woodlawn’s precocious activists had achieved a sense of their own “historicity”—to borrow a term from sociologist Alain Touraine; they now perceived their involvement in TWO as inscribed within a much broader struggle that challenged the very foundations of their society, and the spread of this perception transformed TWO from a protest organization into a movement.49

  Quite suddenly the campaign in Woodlawn caught fire. It began with a voter registration event that witnessed a breathtaking caravan of forty-six buses holding some 2,500 residents descending on City Hall—folks had never beheld such a thing in Chicago. Alinsky’s people had, of course, notified the press in advance, and Alinsky himself had made sure that one bus packed full of nuns would be included in the procession in case the police were tempted to get rough. After that, TWO had the idea—once again inspired by the unfolding struggle to desegregate schools in the South—of capitalizing on the anger of Woodlawn residents about the atrocious condition of their schools, most of which were so overcrowded that they had instituted a double-shift system that caused horrible inconveniences for working parents. TWO activists, many of them mothers, barged into Chicago School Board meetings wearing black capes to symbolize the fact that they were mourning for the plight of their children, established “Truth Squads” to go to white schools and document with cameras the existence of empty classrooms, and carried out school boycotts that made the front pages of the Chicago dailies. Understanding how much the sight of mobs of black bodies stoked fear in middle-class whites, moreover, TWO organized protests against dishonest landlords in front of their stately homes (rather than in front of the buildings of their tenants) and threatened to bring hordes of black shoppers into downtown department stores if they did not begin hiring black employees.

  Then, in July 1963, as the University of Chicago began to move forward on its South Campus plan, TWO mobilized another caravan of buses holding more than six hundred people to head down to City Hall to confront the mayor, with talented local minister and budding civil rights star Arthur Brazier as its spokesman. In this moment that predated “black power” discourse, Brazier’s stern black face, which by now had appeared all over the Chicago newspapers, came to represent Woodlawn’s determination to control its own community, which meant controlling the university’s urban renewal project. The show of might worked. Faced with what was beginning to look like a rebellion in Woodlawn, until then one of the machine’s more reliable districts, Daley conceded to TWO nearly everything it was demanding—that “no Great Wall of China” be built to restrict the access of Woodlawn residents to the Midway recreation area, that Woodlawn residents hold a majority on the citizens council that would oversee the area’s redevelopment, and that TWO have the power to approve or reject the administrator named to direct any urban renewal plan. Saul Alinsky, Arthur Brazier, Nicholas von Hoffman, Bob Squires, and thousands of ordinary people in Woodlawn had won a landmark victory, effectively helping to launch a new era of civil rights struggle in Chicago.

  FIVE

  Civil Rights in the Multiracial City

  WEST SIDE STORY

  Few people felt the heat on Chicago’s streets in the summer of 1963 as intensely as Frank Carney. The weather was typical for that time of year—unrelenting heat and humidity, with overnight lows that never dropped enough to cool things off before the blazing sun rose again. But for Carney, the supervisor of a regiment of youth workers on the city’s Near West Side, the heat rose as much from the friction of clashing teenage bodies as it did from the pavement. Making his rounds of the neighborhood to gather information, Carney listened to stories about black and white youths throwing rocks at each other around the Holy Family Church on Roosevelt, tensions between Mexican and Italian gangs around 18th Street, Puerto Ricans and Italians scuffling at Little Italy’s summer carnival, and Puerto Ricans attacking blacks around St. Jarlath’s Church at the corner of Hermitage and Jackson. Speaking with the priests over at this church, Carney wondered to himself why Puerto Ricans who knew little of such racial antagonism in Puerto Rico would so readily pick it up here. After the interview, he decided to assign one of his youth workers to, as he noted in his report for the day, “cultivate a relationship with the Puerto Ricans who hang out on the corner of Jackson and Wolcott.”1 This was damage control—not nearly enough to change the situation—but it might keep a lid on things for a while.

  Carney worked for the Chicag
o Youth Development Project (CYDP), a delinquency prevention and research program experimenting with a new approach to keeping youths out of trouble. Whereas most programs in the past had been based around the idea of drawing youths into local clubs and community associations by offering various recreational resources—sports facilities or halls for dances, for example—the CYDP was trying out a more aggressive strategy. What youth workers in previous delinquency initiatives had discovered was that the teens who were most in need of guidance kept away from the institutions that were attempting to serve them. The CYDP thus sought to move its “extension workers” out into the streets and parks to become acquainted with the more hardened youths; ideally the extension worker would be young and indigenous to the neighborhood—someone who had the kind of swagger and street cred that would enable him to win the respect of the youths he was trying to reach. However, Carney and his crew would very rapidly discover that the task of preventing juvenile delinquency was almost indistinguishable from that of managing the tense relations between the different ethnoracial groups sharing the streets, parks, snack joints, dance halls, and movie theaters of the multiethnic Near West Side.

  Somewhat ironically, when the CYDP began operations out of its Near West Side “Outpost,” as its staff referred to it, crowds were lining up at cinemas everywhere to see West Side Story—the Academy Award–winning film whose visions of white and brown street toughs pirouetting and jumping in the mean streets of a New York City slum made it the second highest grossing film of 1961. While the experience of dealing with the daily threat of homicidal violence in the real world of Chicago’s Near West Side no doubt made CYDP’s workers somewhat jaded about such glamorized renditions of violence, poverty, and racism, few could deny that the film’s tale of hate and love between Puerto Rican and Italian youths bore some resemblance to the dramas they were encountering. Yet, if the enormous popularity of West Side Story had something to do with its dazzling choreography, electrifying Leonard Bernstein score, and Natalie Wood’s stunning beauty, it also reflected a fascination with the nation’s “troubled” younger generation. In fact, images of wild youths had filled the screens of American theaters since 1955, the year of such provocative films about delinquency as The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. This was the same year in which Bill Haley and the Comets’ Rock Around the Clock shot to the top of the pop charts, and RCA signaled rock ’n’ roll’s takeover of the popular music industry by signing Elvis Presley to a recording contract. The image of the dangerous teen was thereafter coupled with the menacing sounds of rock music droning in the background from some far-off jukebox or transistor radio.