Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  The subsequent story of the involvement of the Rangers, Disciples, and Vice Lords in youth services and community improvement projects is as complicated as it is controversial. Several scholars and activists, most of them somehow associated firsthand with the organizations, have attempted to sort out some of the issues surrounding the scandals and legal proceedings that led to the termination of funding to such programs. For gang sympathizers, the argument is generally that Mayor Daley used the Gang Intelligence Unit (GIU) to actively harass, infiltrate, and subvert the gangs involved in these programs because their apparent success compromised his power on the black South and West Sides—areas of the city that had traditionally delivered a strong vote for the Daley machine.63 Those who have made this argument have pointed to the fact that the reinforcement and reconfiguration of the GIU in 1967 occurred not coincidentally while TWO, the Rangers, and the Disciples awaited notification of funding from the OEO. They have also referred to the antimachine activities of the Rangers and Vice Lords, including their support of antimachine aldermanic candidates and their active promotion of a 1967 mayoral election boycott that dramatically reduced Daley’s vote totals in what had been known as the plantation wards. They could have made even stronger cases had they had the benefit of seeing the GIU’s files, which, as a result of a 1981 court decision in an ACLU lawsuit against the city’s political surveillance activities, are now accessible to researchers. Despite the destruction of a large part of the files, what is left provides compelling evidence of the role the GIU played in sabotaging these programs. Readily apparent from a survey of the files is the fact that infiltrators were not only on hand to observe and dig up dirt; they were also there to plant the seeds of destruction in the already fragile alliances of gangs, community organizations, and black power groups.

  Of particular interest to GIU operatives were any signs of cooperation between the different super gangs, as well as the developing links between the gangs and a range of black power groups—ACT, RAM, SNCC, the Afro-American Student Association, the Deacons of Defense, and later the Black Panthers. The surveillance, to be sure, went way beyond sniffing out possible criminal enterprises, and, even if the threat of a plot to foment urban disorders was somewhat credible during these years, the large body of GIU reports detailing the political and social activities of the Rangers, Disciples, and Vice Lords can hardly be explained away in this manner—as the city attempted to do. As John Hall Fish has argued, most observers, including a team of independent evaluators appointed by the federal government to examine the OEO grant program, tended to agree with the view of TWO’s spokesman, the Reverend Arthur Brazier, that “The project was killed because the political establishment could not tolerate an independent community organization such as TWO receiving federal funds that were not controlled by the Establishment itself.”64 According to Fish, there were just too many interests in Chicago—the mayor, the police, and even the social services community—invested in the failure of TWO’s program.65

  While the most cynical detractors would paint their “positive results” as merely attempts to create smokescreens to distract from ongoing criminal activities, the list of achievements that can be credited to the Rangers and Disciples in a relatively short span of time is impressive: they staged a successful musical production, Opportunity Please Knock, under the direction of jazz pianist Oscar Brown, that played to sold-out audiences for six weekends; they helped calm near-riots in their territories on a number of occasions, including most notably after the assassination of Martin Luther King, when rioting broke out in many other areas of the city; the two gangs managed a truce during their involvement in the TWO program, and, according to the TWO evaluators, played a key role in significantly reducing the violent crime rate in the Third Police District; and their vocational training efforts led to the placement of between 83 and 107 of 634 trainees in jobs—results that the TWO evaluators qualified as equal to or better than most programs of this kind in the city.66 Across town, in the Lawndale area, with much less funding but nearly as much police malevolence, the Vice Lords boasted an even more remarkable set of accomplishments, including a highly successful neighborhood clean-up campaign (“Where there was glass there will be grass”); a vocational training program funded by the Coalition for Youth Action and the U.S. Department of Labor; a Tenants’ Rights Action Group that blocked forty-three evictions and relocated thirty-two families; two youth centers and an employment agency; an African heritage shop and snack restaurant; and an art gallery (Art and Soul). As in Woodlawn, moreover, such activities corresponded with a drop in violent crime.

  The memory of these striking accomplishments has been deeply tarnished by the Daley administration, which declared its “war on gangs” in 1969, and by the sensationalistic media coverage of the hearings of Senator John McClellan’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations in the spring of 1968. Seeking to expose the shortcomings of the program, McClellan charged, among other things, that the OEO grant was a “payoff” for peace in black neighborhoods, that the Rangers had demanded kickbacks from trainees (who were paid a modest weekly stipend to attend job training programs), and that the gangs had used the program as a front to continue their criminal activities, which included murder, robbery, rape and extortion. Such allegations, while substantiated by the subcommittee’s very dubious star witness, George “Watusi” Rose, a former Ranger warlord turned police informant, were enough for the OEO to pull the plug on the Youth Manpower Project. For their part, the Vice Lords continued on after 1968, but their image also suffered enormously from scores of highly publicized legal problems, including the controversial murder conviction of their talented leader Bobby Gore, who maintained his innocence until his death from lung disease in 2013. Typical of the ways in which the local press, especially the notoriously pro-Daley Tribune, exploited the legal problems of the Vice Lords and Rangers to arouse outrage about their community activities was the June 21, 1969 edition of the Chicago Tribune, which included a story about Vice Lord murder convictions beside another entitled “U.S. and Private Grants Pay Big Dividends to Street Gangs.”67

  However, while Gore may have been innocent of the charges against him, he candidly admitted that many in his gang were not as able as he was to trade their gangbanging ways for the roles of students, activists, or youth workers. In an interview conducted for a History Channel documentary on the Vice Lords, Gore argued that the GIU’s success in sabotaging the efforts of the Vice Lords was made possible by the fact that members of his gang were continuing to commit murders, robberies, and rapes. “We screwed ourselves somewhat,” Gore claimed, “because had it not been for guys doing dumb shit—excuse the expression—they wouldn’t have had the excuse to pounce on us as they did.”68 Such observations suggest that the search for manhood and respect continued to push youths affiliated with these gangs into violent acts, and the gang leadership structure was not nearly strong enough to do much about it, especially as the GIU continued to target the most powerful gang leaders in a concerted strategy to cut off the heads of the nation gangs.

  Yet black power consciousness, even if not for the overly simplistic reasons often offered by its detractors, also played a disruptive role in the struggle of ordinary black Chicagoans for their fair share of the pie. “Black Power,” as Robert Self has argued, “was an extraordinarily plastic concept.”69 In the hands of people like Jeff Fort, it largely represented the continuation of the same logic of turf control that had organized black street gangs since the 1950s. The tragic irony of this form of black power ideology centered on local control is that while it directed street gangs onto the route of protest politics, it also limited how far down this road they could go. In particular, the idea of community control in the minds of street gangs already fixated on the boundaries of their turf made the project of uniting gangs a virtual impossibility. When Jeff Fort electrified his audience of young Rangers by telling them, “We gonna have our own govament,” few in the roo
m imagined the “we” to include Disciples or anyone else in the city, for that matter. Then there were problems arising from the emphasis that the black power movement placed on power. After being courted by nationally recognized civil rights leaders and then—in the cases of the Rangers, Vice Lords, and Disciples—being given the chance to earn income and praise by working to improve their communities, the thousands of youths affiliated with these gangs expected a piece of the action and there was not nearly enough to go around.

  The story of how Chicago’s most powerful street gangs joined the civil rights struggle but ultimately became disenchanted with its goals and methods of protest tells us a great deal about why King’s northern campaign ultimately ended in failure. But there were other reasons why the open-housing “summit negotiation” that would take place between King and Daley in August 1966 would be referred to by West Side community leader Chester Robinson as “empty promises” and by Chicago CORE’s Robert Lucas as “nothing but another promise on a piece of paper.” Perhaps most importantly, the broader ideological context surrounding the Chicago civil rights theater had changed dramatically. When the struggle for civil rights arrived at the doorstep of white northerners, the well of northern sympathy that had seemed so deep in 1964 suddenly ran dry—a phenomenon reflected in polls after the open-housing marches revealing that whites blamed the marchers rather than the counterprotesters for the violence that ensued. Yet Daley had played an active part in bringing this about, a situation that King might have prevented had he not greatly underestimated Daley’s ability as a political strategist as well as his will to resist the kinds of demands the CFM was making.

  From the moment King had begun planning a Chicago campaign, Daley was devising ways to defuse the situation by creating shadow programs to counter every CFM initiative. “All of us, like Dr. King, are trying to eliminate slums,” he announced early in January 1966, and from that point onward the objective in City Hall was not to take on the CFM but to give the impression of supporting its goals—albeit in a colorblind way that was nebulous enough not to stir up any anger in the Bungalow Belt. When, for example, Seventeenth Ward alderman Charles Chew, the first black city council member to oppose the machine, joined liberal lakefront alderman Leon Despres in sponsoring an open-housing bill, Daley made sure his own “fair housing” bill was passed in its place. And when the SCLC launched Operation Breadbasket, which, under the aggressive leadership of Jesse Jackson, put pressure on white-owned businesses in and around black neighborhoods to hire more African Americans, Daley responded with his own symbolic rendition of a minority recruitment program, which he ironically called Operation Lite (an acronym for “Leaders Information on Training and Employment”). Moreover, although King was an expert in exploiting the brutal police repression directed at civil rights protesters in the South, he would not have this same tactical resource in Chicago, where the police—under the direct orders of Daley—would not only not be fighting with black demonstrators, but they would actually be protecting them from unruly white mobs. Finally, King had never really had to deal with the stubborn opposition of local black leaders in the South as he did in Chicago. Indeed, Daley’s ability to throw counterpunches depended on the political and religious support he could marshal in black Chicago. From the moment Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty had through its concept of “maximum feasible participation” mandated that local people be put in charge of the antipoverty programs it was financing, Daley had been using all of his resources in black Chicago to make sure that those local people were his local people. And as soon as it became clear that King was not going to change the rules of the game—far from it—even some of the black leaders he thought he could count on turned against him. Alderman Charles Chew, for example, flipped from strident supporter of the CFM to active critic and was often seen driving around his ward in a white Rolls Royce in the months after the movement had died.70

  Yet all these things aside, the fact is that King did not arrive at the summit negotiating table holding the bargaining chip he needed—a credible threat to paralyze the city with massive demonstrations—because he had failed to capture the hearts and minds of gang leaders and other young blacks who appeared ready to rise up. To be sure, Daley did not like what was transpiring in Chicago’s Bungalow Belt, where, in the mayoral election of 1963, his support had dipped below 50 percent. The spectacle of angry white crowds numbering in the several thousands clashing with his policemen in the streets of their own neighborhoods to get at civil rights demonstrators was problematic to say the least. A radical spirit of antistatism was taking root on the Southwest Side—so radical, in fact, that the American Nazi Party had moved into the area and had begun organizing demonstrations that were attracting thousands of local youths. And yet, as bad as this situation looked, Daley knew that King could not muster the kind of mass participation he needed to really disrupt the city, and he knew that the support King had was waning rather than waxing in the wake of the open-housing marches. His intelligence operatives were reporting that even among the black Chicagoans who were least sympathetic to the machine and its black puppets, the nonviolent movement was failing to pick up momentum. And this allowed him to control the dialogue of the open-housing summit from the start, diverting blame from his administration onto the real estate industry, and then conceding only his word on a set of principles: the city would do more to enforce the open-housing ordinance of 1963, the CHA would try to build public housing units outside of the ghetto and limit buildings to eight stories, the Department of Urban Renewal would try to make sure that lending practices were not promoting segregation, the Chicago Real Estate Board would try harder to make realtors obey the law. These were mostly promises that would never really be kept, a fact that escaped much of the rank and file of the white anti-integration movement. Indeed, whites joined their black counterparts in complaining that Daley had sold them out—a sign of just how polarized the city had become in the twilight of the civil rights era.71

  SIX

  Violence in the Global City

  1968

  To many, the roughly two-year period that began with the toxic mob violence surrounding the open-housing marches and ended with the apocalyptic chaos that reigned in the streets outside the Democratic National Convention of 1968 represented the darkest of moments in Chicago’s history. This was a time when American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, regaled in black boots and swastikas, drew admiring crowds of thousands of angry white youths in Marquette Park, when black youths on the West Side took to the streets in a riotous outburst of destruction while Mayor Daley told his police force to “shoot to kill . . . arsonists,” and when Chicago cops savagely beat antiwar demonstrators during the convention, the air thick with choking teargas, nightsticks cracking bones, shouting “kill, kill, kill!” It was a time when political organizations with names like Black Panthers and Young Lords patrolled the streets in color-coded berets and military attire, when ordinary African Americans wore dashikis and spoke in a stylized language about “brothers” and “sisters,” and when college students kept their hair long and greasy, dressed like factory workers or flower children, and swore they really believed the revolution was imminent. It was a time when politics was in the streets, out there for all to see. Many cities had some of this, but Chicago seemed to have it all, which, was, in part, why in 1968 Norman Mailer called it “perhaps . . . the last of the great American cities.” In one of the more enigmatic passages of his masterful reportage for Harper’s on the tumultuous events surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year, Mailer mused that “only a great city provides honest spectacle, for that is the salvation of the schizophrenic soul.”1

  While what Mailer meant by “honest spectacle” is a matter of interpretation, he may have been contrasting Chicago’s gritty, kick-in-the-face feel—captured by the blood and entrails on the floors of its packinghouses, its beefy mayor, and the very visceral beatings its police force doled out to those who dared oppose h
im—to the kind of dishonest spectacle being disseminated by the advertising industry that, according to Guy Debord’s 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle, was distancing people from both “authentic” experience as well as from each other. It was not difficult to see traces of Debord’s ideas on a range of student groups in the United States, who, after years of seemingly futile marches and administration-building occupations against the war in Vietnam, began to look for new methods of combat that would change the traditional endgame of student demonstrators being beaten and hauled away by the authorities. The Youth International Party (commonly referred to as the “Yippies”) was the most high profile group to use alternative forms of association and expression—high-concept pranks and political theater in the streets—to bring about transformations in consciousness, but the whole countercultural student movement was moving in this direction. This was not a movement that had a great deal to do with Chicago, whose campuses never mustered very much newsworthy activism during the peak years of student protest. The national bases of the student movement and of the counterculture were San Francisco, Berkeley, New York City, and a number of midwestern college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. A courageous group of politicos belonging to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had launched the ambitious Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in 1964 to organize working-class whites in Chicago’s tough Uptown neighborhood on the North Side, but the initiative had largely failed to accomplish anything lasting. The “city of the big shoulders” was resistant to the idealism and countercultural ethos of the student movement. The only university of any national prestige within the city limits had been building walls around itself for years, and the city’s tradition of radicalism was far too rooted in a jaded, Old Left, workerist vision of the world to embrace the faddish existential critique circulating around the New Left in the late 1960s. And then there was the racial divide, which, as black power consciousness surged throughout the ghetto, was becoming wider by the minute. With good reason the white middle-class SDS cadres that started Chicago’s ERAP chose to knock on doors in largely white Uptown rather than in the heart of the West Side ghetto.