King’s advisers had tried to convince him that things were not going to be so easy. In one memorable meeting, according to an SCLC staffer, King kept running on about what he could do in Chicago while close advisor Bayard Rustin repeatedly interjected warnings like “You don’t know what you are talking about. You don’t know what Chicago is like. . . . You’re going to get wiped out.”42 To be sure, Chicago posed some new problems for King. Unlike southern cities, Chicago possessed its own black political leadership in the figures of black submachine boss William Dawson and a group of black aldermen who received just enough patronage to buy out their potential opposition to Daley’s brand of “plantation politics.” Nicknamed the “silent six” by critics who claimed they could only speak in city council meetings when Daley’s floor leader Thomas Keane allowed them to, this group consisted of William Campbell of the Twentieth Ward, Robert Miller of the Sixth Ward, William Harvey of the Second Ward, Ralph Metcalfe of the Third Ward, Claude Holman of the Fourth Ward, and Benjamin Lewis of the Twenty-Fourth Ward, until 1963, when he was found the night of his victory in the primary elections handcuffed to his desk with three bullet holes in his head and a cigarette burned down to his fingers. Lewis had apparently fallen out with both Daley and William Dawson over his piece of the ward pie; the moral of the story, one can be sure, was clear to the remaining “silent five.” Daley’s men in the so-called plantation wards had already been doing their very best to oppose the CCCO’s school protest movement, and they would surely be no friend to King. Nobody missed the fact that King’s integrationist “dreams” meant nightmares for black submachine politicians whose power depended upon the color lines keeping their constituents hemmed into their wards. And what was good for the black submachine was good for the machine itself.43 Moreover, while King’s southern campaign had received broad support from the black religious community, he could not expect the same in Chicago. By 1966 the machine’s longtime ally Reverend Joseph H. Jackson was coming under increasing fire for his “Uncle Tom” opposition to the Chicago civil rights struggle, but he still presided over a South Side congregation of some 15,000 members. And then there was Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, who could claim thousands of black Muslim followers in Chicago and who, after promising his support to King, turned around and blasted him for selling blacks out to white America.
For King, all of these issues were secondary to what he considered to be the two major challenges ahead: getting average Chicagoans into the streets and keeping things calm. And he understood that Chicago’s big gangs could make or break both of these objectives. Summer was approaching and after the riotous events in Watts and the near-riot in the Garfield Park area during the previous summer, the leaders of the Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM)—the name given to the new alliance between the SCLC and CCCO—feared that the outbreak of rioting might jeopardize their nonviolent campaign. Gangs, some believed, could not only be persuaded to refrain from rioting, but they might also be convinced to help keep the cool on their respective turfs. Moreover, the sheer numbers of youths loyal to these organizations made them useful to King’s and Raby’s objective of amassing an army of nonviolent protesters for a series of marches into Chicago’s lily-white Southwest Side—even if including them came with the additional challenge of keeping them nonviolent.
Hence, in January 1966, just days after King’s family had settled into their dilapidated slum apartment at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in the West Side Lawndale neighborhood, King was already receiving a group of neighborhood kids who also happened to be Vice Lords. By spring, the campaign to win the hearts of the city’s gangs to the nonviolent civil rights movement was in full swing. On May 9, key SCLC organizers James Bevel and Jesse Jackson held a “leadership conference” for over 250 Blackstone Rangers down in the Kenwood area, during which they led discussions on nonviolence after watching footage of rioting in Watts. Then, in the first week in June, the Chicago Freedom Movement’s gang point men took their show to the West Side, where they organized meetings with the Vice Lords and Cobras.44 After sending several members of the Vice Lords and Rangers on a trip to Mississippi to witness the southern civil rights campaign firsthand, the SCLC hosted over fifty gang leaders at the First Annual Gangs Convention, in the Sheraton Hotel downtown on the eve of the CFM’s first big civil rights rally.45
The next day, however, when the Chicago Freedom Movement gathered its army at Soldier Field for a show of unity and strength, serious tensions between Chicago’s black gangs and the CFM revealed themselves for all to see. Some two hundred Vice Lords, Blackstone Rangers, and Disciples occupied the center of the field, several waving a large white banner emblazoned with the words “Black Power”—a phrase that King openly detested. Then a scuffle ensued between some of the gang members and a few newsmen snapping photos, and several minutes later, without warning, the whole group abruptly marched out of the stadium. Afterwards it was learned that a gang member had apparently heard a high-ranking SCLC official insult the gangs, remarking something to the effect that they did not need them there because they would only cause trouble. Upon hearing about the affront, the leaders of the gangs gathered and decided they would all depart in unison on signal.46 With CFM leaders predicting a crowd of 100,000, the turnout, estimated to be some 30,000, was already being spoken of as a disappointment; the gaping hole in the center of the crowd where the gangs used to be seemed to show why. For those close to the gang organizing effort, however, this incident came as no surprise. The nonviolent style of struggle had met with skepticism and outright criticism on the part of gang members from the beginning. On one occasion the Rangers ridiculed the idea of singing freedom songs, causing the physically imposing SCLC organizer James Orange to shout back, “You think you’re too bad to sing? Well I’m badder than all of you, so we’re going to sing.”47 Perhaps most importantly, gang members could not stomach the idea of putting their necks on the line for nonviolent demonstrations whose impact was dubious at best. From the start, mainstream civil rights leaders asked them to be prepared to go to jail and take beatings for the cause, something that in the minds of many gang members offered little reward.48 Longtime Vice Lord, Cupid, one of those who marched out of the Soldier Field rally, later explained: “I can’t sing no brick off my motherfuckin’ head. I just can’t overcome. If a motherfucker hit you, knock that motherfucker down.”49
FIGURE 11. Martin Luther King at Soldier Field, July 10, 1966. Chicago Urban League Records, CULR_04_0194_2204_4, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.
The prevalence of such thinking among black gang members was revealed more strikingly just two days after the rally, when a massive rebellion shook the West Side. The explosion occurred after police responding to the theft of some ice creams from a broken-down truck at Throop and Roosevelt on the Near West Side manhandled a group of kids seeking refuge from a heat wave in the cool water of an open fire hydrant. There were several public swimming pools in the vicinity, but all were off limits to blacks. Despite the efforts of community leaders from the local West Side Organization (WSO) to calm the angry crowd that began to form around the scene, things got out of control. That same night, Martin Luther King addressed a mass meeting at the nearby Shiloh Baptist Church, issuing a plea for nonviolence, but youthful members of the audience abruptly stormed back out onto the streets amidst shouts of “Black Power!” The next evening, a meeting between gang members, police officials, and civil rights leaders yielded similar results. When the SCLC’s Andrew Young took the podium to make an appeal for nonviolence, a teenager in the audience immediately interrupted him, inviting his “black brothers . . . out on the street.”50 By the time a battalion of National Guardsmen had managed to restore order, the West Side riot had caused two deaths, over eighty injuries, and over $2 million in property damage. Mayor Daley exploited the situation by accusing CFM leaders of inciting violence among gangs, pointing to the SCLC’s screening of films about Watts as proof. “Who makes a Molotov cocktail?” he asked at
a press conference.” “Someone has to train the youngsters.” Such ludicrous charges placed the CFM on the defensive, but what was perhaps even more disconcerting about the riot for civil rights leaders was that it had broken out spontaneously among youths unaffiliated with any of the city’s notorious gangs. It seemed to reveal a general mood, not a plan. King and the SCLC, it appeared, were not reaching the younger generation of black Chicago.
FIGURE 12. Black power militants at Soldier Field, July 10, 1966. Photo by Ted Bell. Chicago Urban League Records, CULR_04_0092_0966_001, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.
Nonetheless, despite this falling out between the CFM and Chicago’s elite gangs, when the time came to march into some of the city’s most racist strongholds, at least some gang members were still willing to answer the call. The plan called for a series of “open-housing marches” into the Gage Park–Chicago Lawn–Marquette Park area of the Southwest Side, where, according to the 1960 census, only seven out of more than 100,000 residents were not white. The marches into Chicago Lawn and Gage Park got off to a bad start when angry white residents hurled rocks, bottles, and explosives at the hundreds of marchers and shouted “White Power!” and “Burn them like Jews!”51 The SCLC-CCCO thus mustered up a larger group for the next big march through Marquette Park and Chicago Lawn on August 5. Among the group of some 1,400 gathered at the New Friendship Baptist Church before the march, according to a police operative from the Gang Intelligence Unit (GIU), more than 200 were members from a range of South and West Side gangs. Having sworn to observe the rules of nonviolent protest, they were there to serve as marshals for the march.52 A number of Blackstone Rangers participating in the demonstration wore baseball gloves to catch bottles, bricks, and stones.53 Despite their best efforts, however, they were no match for the thousands of whites who showered them with hate and debris, even fiercely battling with police to get at the demonstrators. Shouts of “Kill those niggers!” and “We want Martin Luther Coon” filled the air. A rock struck Martin Luther King in the head, opening a bloody gash, and he was far from the only casualty. So intense was the frenzied hatred directed at the marchers that King would tell a reporter from the New York Times that “the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”54 Faced with this barrage of violence, much of it perpetrated by kids and young men of about their age, the gang members kept their word. As King recalled proudly after the march, “I remember walking with the Blackstone Rangers while bottles were flying from the sidelines, and I saw their noses being broken and blood flowing from their wounds; and I saw them continue and not retaliate, not one of them, with violence.”55
In spite of this symbolic triumph, that bloody day in Marquette Park destroyed what little was left of the alliance between Chicago’s gangs and the nonviolent movement. South Side gangs like the Rangers and Disciples had participated in the march because King had personally managed to patch up relations between the gangs and the CFM in the aftermath of the civil rights rally and West Side riot; on the other hand, relations were still tenuous with West Side gangs, which were noticeably absent from the event. The gangs that did come no doubt recognized the historic opportunity they had been handed. These gang youths had been marginalized in their communities, knowing only the glory of a world disparaged by many around them; the attention King and other civil rights leaders bestowed upon them inserted them into the flow of history itself. Ironically, however, this same consciousness empowered the gangs to the extent that they no longer needed the CFM, making them wary of being submerged in a movement directed by people they considered to be outsiders.
Moreover, the CFM’s open-housing campaign was out of step with the main concerns of working-class black communities. No doubt touched by the explosion of black power notions of community control around this time, many young African Americans on the West Side could not understand the idea of sticking their necks out to march into a white, middle-class neighborhood where they would not want to live even if they could.56 The Vice Lords, for example, seemed more receptive to organizations addressing immediate problems in their own neighborhood. For example, when the East Garfield Park Community Organization newsletter reported on July 25, 1966 that Vice Lord leader Duck (James) Harris had told the East Garfield Union to End Slums (EGUES) that “the Vice Lords have joined the movement to help organize the people,” the “people” they were referring were their West Side neighbors.57 While Martin Luther King had been instrumental in the founding of EGUES, the success of this organization hinged on its local focus. When EGUES brought slumlords to the negotiating table that summer, people were given the kind of direct taste of empowerment that was lacking in the CFM’s nonviolent movement. Moreover, the SCLC was surely somewhat out of touch with the reality of many gang members. This much was clear early in the campaign, when, in an effort to spark the interest of the Rangers and Disciples, an SCLC representative had told a room full of high school dropouts that they would soon be able to attend classes at the prestigious Northwestern University.58
Any citywide movement would have run up against similar problems: these street gangs had developed within a logic that placed a premium on autonomy and the control of turf, and they followed a code by which one never allowed a physical attack to go unchallenged. Black power ideas of community control and self-defense were thus a much better fit with the consciousness and experience of gang youths. And as the SCLC-CCCO was leading hundreds of marchers into ambushes on the white Southwest Side, others in black Chicago were rallying around black power. At an ACT rally attended by West Side gang members on July 31, speakers referred to the beatings of civil rights leaders in Gage Park that day, advocating the use of violence to deal with such acts by “Whitey.”59 Just four days earlier, Stokely Carmichael, SNCC’s field secretary, had spoken at a “black power rally,” where he had urged blacks to regain control of their communities, even if it meant using violent means to do so. Such ideas filtered down into the ghetto through the words and deeds of a charismatic group of gang elites, whose reinterpretation of black power became the gospel of the streets.
While a good many of these leaders were men in their mid to late twenties who were able to use their street experience to garner the respect of teenagers, perhaps the most charismatic of them all was Ranger leader Jeff Fort. At just nineteen in 1966, Fort was already one of the most influential members of the Main 21 governing body that directed the many semiautonomous groups that composed the Blackstone Ranger Nation. Somewhat small in build, Fort’s ability to capture the hearts and minds of teens on the South Side more than his ability to rumble elevated him through the ranks. Fort articulated a variant of black power ideology shaped to the context of black youths on the South Side. Reverend John Fry, the white pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Woodlawn, which beginning in 1966 provided the Rangers with a space to organize and meet, captured one of Fort’s greatest rhetorical moments in December 1966, during a key moment in the gang’s turn to the politics of community control. After invoking images of ancient Africa and describing the advent of the slave trade, according to Fry, Fort whipped the “younger fellas” into a frenzy of excitement when he told them, “All the studyin’ we do ain’t gonna change one thing. . . . We gonna have our own govament, the way our daddies did long time back. . . . They don’t let us in their govament, we git our own.”60 Then, after speaking about getting roughed up by the police, Fort brought the house down when he declared, “That ain’t right, cause WE’S ALL PRINCES,” evoking the image of strong, beautiful princes with rings on their fingers and crowns on their heads. Fry relates that kids in Woodlawn spent the next several weeks scrawling variations of the word prince on walls all over the neighborhood until someone wrote out “Black P. Stone Rangers.”
The leadership talents of Fort and other leaders—Lamar Bell and Eugene Hairston of the Rangers, David Barksdale and Nick Dorenzo of the Disciples, Bobby Gore and Alfonso Alford of the Vice Lords, among others—were too valuable to be ove
rlooked. Their value derived not only from their ability to mobilize but also from their capacity to demobilize. Watts and then the outbreak of other urban disorders in the summer of 1966 had placed Great Society Democrats on the defensive. Ronald Reagan’s backlash, law-and-order rhetoric had won him the 1966 gubernatorial election in California, and, with a presidential election looming in 1968, Johnson administration officials were looking for damage control as the summer of 1967 approached. Moreover, the Great Society project of investing in lower-income urban communities through its Community Action Program (CAP) and of ensuring the “maximum feasible participation” of local residents in the Community Action Agencies that administered CAP initiatives was put on the line with each outbreak of violence; to successfully incorporate gangs into the legitimate local power structure would have yielded the kind of win-win situation that political strategists dream of. And that gangs were useful to Washington suddenly made them useful to local organizations seeking federal funds for community development programs as well. As it hashed out the details of a youth program with officials from the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in early 1967, TWO found Washington totally unbending on one major point: that the gangs themselves be given a substantial role. The result several months later was a $957,000 OEO grant for a revolutionary youth project that used the Woodlawn area’s existing gang structure—the Blackstone Rangers and the Devil’s Disciples—as the basis of a program to provide remedial education, recreation, vocational training, and job placement services to youths.61 Inspired by their South Side rivals, the Vice Lords, with the help of a researcher who had met the gang’s leaders when conducting a study on gang youths for the President’s Council on Youth Opportunity, registered as a corporation in September 1967 and by early in 1968 had obtained a $15,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and a matching grant from a private sector urban renewal campaign called Operation Bootstrap.62
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