Chicago on the Make
Page 48
41. Julian Levi, commencement address at the John Marshall Law School, Chicago, Illinois, February 18, 1961, President Beadle Administration Records, box 353, folder 5, Special Collections–University of Chicago.
42. Quoted in Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 203.
43. Quoted in Sanford D. Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky—His Life and Legacy (New York: Vintage, 1992), 102, 105, which provides a meticulous account of the founding of the BYNC, 102–19.
44. Jacques Maritain, “Of America and of the Future,” Commonweal 41 (April 13, 1945), 642–45.
45. For an excellent account of the role played by parishes in the story of race relations and of the struggle of progressive Catholic leaders to promote interracialism in Chicago and throughout the country, see John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
46. OSC Recommendations to Superintendent Wilson, Industrial Areas Foundation Records, folder 334, Special Collections–University of Illinois–Chicago Circle.
47. Quoted in Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel, 315.
48. Ibid., 398, 402.
49. Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
CHAPTER 5
1. Francis J. Carney, Activity Report, September 30, 1963, Chicago Youth Development Project, Hans Mattick Papers, box 3, folder 7, Chicago History Museum.
2. Chicago Tribune, July 3–4, 1955.
3. Chicago Daily News, January 25–26, 1956.
4. Chicago Daily News, January 27, 1956.
5. Chicago Defender, April 27, 1957.
6. The scholarship on the dynamics of social movements is vast. Two key works of reference are Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, eds., Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).
7. Among some of the recent fine works that have complicated the conventional civil rights story are Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Holt, 2007); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2009); and Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010).
8. Frank Carney, Associate Director of Extension Work, Supervisory Report, Crane High School Riot Incident, June 15, 1962, Hans Mattick Papers, box 3, folder 5, Chicago History Museum.
9. Eric Schneider, Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
10. For a discussion that challenges “race-neutral” analyses of gangs, see John M. Hagedorn, “Race Not Space: A Revisionist History of Gangs in Chicago,” Journal of African American History 91, no. 2 (2006): 194–208.
11. For two introductions to Henri Lefebvre’s thinking on the production of space, see Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 141–85; and Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 76–93.
12. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 331.
13. John F. McDonald, Employment Location and Industrial Land Use in Metropolitan Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 71–73.
14. Frank Carney, Report on Activities, Feb. 1, 1961 to Feb. 17, 1961, Hans Mattick Papers, box 3, folder 4, Chicago History Museum.
15. Louise Año Nuevo Kerr, “The Chicano Experience in Chicago, 1920–1970,” (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois–Chicago, 1976), 166.
16. The Jones Act of 1917 granted all Puerto Ricans the right to U.S. citizenship. Many Puerto Ricans arriving in Chicago before the late 1940s had initially settled in New York City, but in the late 1940s a private Chicago-based employment agency, Castle, Barton and Associates, recruited Puerto Rican men to work as unskilled steelworkers and Puerto Rican women to serve as domestic workers in the metropolitan Chicago area. In addition to these North and West Side areas of settlement, a notable community also took shape in the South Side Woodlawn area. For a thorough account of the migration and settlement of Puerto Ricans (and Mexicans) in postwar Chicago, and of their negotiation of Chicago’s racial context, see Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
17. Felix Padilla, Puerto Rican Chicago (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 59.
18. For a detailed account of the racial aggression Puerto Ricans faced in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, see Andrew J. Diamond, Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), chap. 5.
19. Robert Orsi, “The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned ‘Other’ in Italian Harlem, 1920–1990,” American Quarterly 44 (September 1992), 314.
20. “Puerto Ricans in Chicago: A Study of a Representative Group of 103 Households of Puerto Rican Migrants on Chicago’s Northwest Side—and their Adjustment to Big-City Living,” June 1960, Chicago History Museum.
21. Spanish names appear prominently, for example, on the list of youths arrested at the Calumet Park race riot of 1957.
22. Chicago Daily Defender, May 26, 1960.
23. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 441–49.
24. Chicago Daily News, July 29, 1963.
25. Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 302, 304.
26. Chicago Defender, October 12, 1963.
27. Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering, Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 80.
28. John L. Rury, “Race, Space, and the Politics of Chicago’s Public Schools: Benjamin Willis and the Tragedy of Urban Education,” History of Education Quarterly 39 (Summer 1999), 130.
29. Vermont senator and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, at the time a 21-year-old University Chicago student and CORE activist, was another of those arrested by police that day.
30. Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1963.
31. Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 217.
32. Chicago Daily News, October 21, 1963.
33. A.B. Spellman, “Interview with Malcolm X,” Monthly Review 16, no. 1 (1964), 1–11.
34. Cited in Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 85.
35. Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1965; Chicago Sun-Times, July 19, 1965; Chicago Defender, July 23, 1965.
36. David Dawley, A Nation of Lords: The Autobiography of the Vice Lords (1973; Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1992), 103, 107.
37. Noble de Salvi, “Angry Demand for Police Crackdown,” Daily Calumet, September 28, 1966.
38. Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Blackstone Rangers,” in Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987).
39. “A Statement Regarding the Relationship of the First Presbyterian Church and the Blackstone Rangers,” Virgil Peterson Collection, box 42, folder 15, C
hicago History Museum.
40. See the many photos of Lawndale street scenes in Dawley, A Nation of Lords, 55–96.
41. Quoted in Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh, 337–338.
42. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Harper, 2004), 455.
43. One can find no better description of the relationship between the black submachine and the Daley machine in this era than William L. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
44. Investigator’s Report, Meeting at Stone Temple Baptist Church, June 6, 1966, Chicago Police Red Squad Files, box 139, file 940-B, Chicago History Museum.
45. Chicago Sun-Times, July 12, 1966.
46. Investigator’s Report, Intelligence Division, CPD, July 11, 1966, Chicago Police Red Squad Files, box 137, file 940-B, Chicago History Museum.
47. James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 94.
48. Investigator’s Report, Intelligence Division, SCLC Leadership Conference at Holy Cross School at 65th and Maryland, May 10, 1966, Chicago Police Red Squad Files, box 137, file 940-A, Chicago History Museum.
49. Dawley, A Nation of Lords, 110.
50. Anderson and Pickering, Confronting the Color Line, 210–16; Ralph, Northern Protest, 109–13; Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh, 387–92.
51. Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 508.
52. Information Report, Departure and Return of Demonstrators in the Gage Park Vigil, August 5, 1966, Chicago Police Red Squad Files, box 139, file 940-D, Chicago History Museum.
53. Jon Rice, “The World of the Illinois Panthers,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 48.
54. New York Times, August 6, 1966.
55. Quoted in Ralph, Northern Protest, 137.
56. In her analysis of the CFM’s emphasis on the “open occupancy” issue, historian Beryl Satter comes to a similar conclusion: see Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Picador, 2009), 190–92.
57. East Garfield Park Organization Newsletter, July 25, 1966 (in author’s possession).
58. This bit of information was revealed to me by an activist who witnessed the event but who wished to remain anonymous.
59. Investigator’s Report, Washington Park Forum, August 1, 1966, Chicago Police Red Squad Files, box 156, file 973-A, Chicago History Museum.
60. John R. Fry, Locked-Out Americans: A Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 19.
61. For an in-depth and balanced account of TWO’s work with the Blackstone Rangers on this youth program, see John Hall Fish, Black Power/White Control: The Struggle of the Woodlawn Organization in Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 115–74.
62. Letter from Alfonso Alford to the Honorable Richard J. Daley, April 9, 1968, facsimile published in Dawley, A Nation of Lords, 122.
63. See, for example, Dawley, A Nation of Lords, 158–176; Fish, Black Power/White Control, 115–74; and Fry, Locked-Out Americans, chap. 4.
64. Arthur M. Brazier, Black Self-Determination: The Story of The Woodlawn Organization (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman, 1969), 125.
65. Fish, Black Power/White Control, 148–74.
66. James McPherson, “Almighty Black P Stone and What Does that Mean?” Atlantic Monthly 223 (May and June, 1969).
67. Chicago Tribune, June 21, 1969.
68. “Street Gangs: A Secret History,” Time Machine, written and produced by Greg DeHart, hosted by Roger Mudd, produced by Termite Art Productions for the History Channel, 2000.
69. Self, American Babylon, 218.
70. A photo of Chew sitting atop his Rolls Royce appeared in the December 8, 1966, edition of Jet magazine.
71. For a detailed account of the negotiations between King and Daley, see Satter, Family Properties, 203–8. As Satter demonstrates in this pathbreaking study, gains by black Chicagoans in the racially discriminatory housing market would come not from the impetus of City Hall or the Chicago Real Estate Board but rather from a grassroots mobilization of black homeowners who had been forced into exploitive financial arrangements with panic-peddling “contract lenders” because discriminatory redlining practices by the government and the banking industry had shut them out of the conventional home mortgage market.
CHAPTER 6
1. Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 77, 82.
2. Studs Terkel, Division Street America (New York: New Press, 2006), xxx.
3. Several scholars and journalists have reconstructed the events surrounding the Democratic National Convention of 1968. The two finest accounts, to my mind, are Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago; and David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For a compelling cinematic interpretation, see the film Medium Cool (1969).
4. Farber, Chicago ’68, 200.
5. Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: Dutton, 1971), 89.
6. The term southern strategy was popularized by Nixon campaign strategist Kevin Phillips, who in 1969 urged the Republican Party to abandon its liberal establishment constituency in the Northeast and pursue a race-driven strategy that would realign the South with the Republican Party and win increasing numbers of white middle-class voters in the North. A generation of political historians took this idea of a southern strategy at face value, thus viewing Barry Goldwater and George Wallace as the progenitors of a racialized conservatism that saw Republicans using racially coded appeals to mobilize working-class and middle-class white voters. More recently, historians have begun to challenge this interpretation. For an excellent study that views Republican strategy not as a racially driven southern strategy but rather as a colorblind “suburban strategy” oriented around notions of middle-class entitlement, meritocracy, and consumer rights, see Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Few historians have viewed Richard J. Daley as a critical figure in the rise of reactionary populism in the 1960s.
7. For a detailed analysis of the response to Daley’s handling of both the 1968 riot and the protests at the Democratic National Convention, see Farber, Chicago ’68, 246–58; and David Farber, “The Silent Majority and Talk about Revolution,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 291–316.
8. “The Troubled America: A Special Report on the White Majority,” Newsweek, October 6, 1969, 31.
9. Frank J. Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
10. Ibid., 52.
11. Similar “red squads” operated in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, but none as sophisticated and aggressive as that in Chicago.
12. Quoted in Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009) 102.
13. See, for example, Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993); Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Perennial, 1985); and Winifred Breines, “Whose New Left?” Journal of American History 75 (September 1988): 528–45.
14. Chicago Reader, January 25, 1990.
15. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Mariner Books, 1970).
16. For a brilliant account of such tactics in the city of Los Angeles, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2006).
17. Paul Gilroy, “Ther
e Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 247.
18. In the original mural, the hands reached up towards the logo of the Latin American Defense Organization (LADO), a community organization that worked on housing, education, and health issues in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The sun was painted over the LADO logo during a restoration project led by original painter Weber in 2013.
19. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 158.
20. Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1968.
21. John F. McDonald, Employment Location and Industrial Land Use in Metropolitan Chicago (Champaign, IL: Stipes, 1984), 10–11.
22. R.C. Longworth, “How Much Time Do We Have? . . . No Time,” Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1981.
23. Gregory D. Squires, Larry Bennett, Kathleen McCourt, and Phillip Nyden, Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 39–40.
24. McDonald, Employment Location and Industrial Land Use, 12.
25. The Standard Oil building was renamed the Amoco Building in 1985, when the company changed names, and then the Aon Center in 1999, when the Aon Corporation became the building’s primary tenant. The Sears Tower was renamed the Willis Tower in 2009, when London-based insurance broker Willis Group Holdings, Ltd., leased a portion of the building and obtained the building’s naming rights.
26. Los Angeles would never produce a signature structure of this kind, although seven out of its fifteen tallest buildings were completed in the 1970s. On these two historical moments of skyscraper construction, see Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).
27. For a detailed account of this passage from Fordism to a regime of “flexible accumulation,” see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 141–72.