American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen

  In response to the CCCO complaint about the school system, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare sent a team of investigators to Chicago. It was a chance for Willis to respond to the civil rights group’s charges, but he refused to cooperate. Even before the CCCO complaint, Willis had a history of defying federal requests for education information. He would not let Chicago school-children take achievement tests given nationally in connection with a U.S. Office of Education survey mandated by the Civil Rights Act. And he would not meet with a Northwestern University professor working on a federal report, even though he came with a letter of introduction from Office of Education commissioner Keppel. After four months, the professor finally got a phone call. “It consisted of a denunciation of my mission and myself,” the professor wrote later. “He refused at that time to discuss any matter of substance, but indicated that I could call for an appointment this week.” He was never given an appointment, and was not allowed to see published reports prepared by Willis’s staff. Even with the city’s federal education aid at risk, Willis remained defiant. He refused to provide the Office of Education investigators with attendance data to evaluate the claims of segregation. He would have to consult with the Illinois congressional delegation first, he said, and if he did respond “the answer might well be two months in coming — if that soon.” The Office of Education was also hearing that Willis intended to use the new federal education money, which was earmarked for economically disadvantaged students, for middle-class white districts — and to build more Willis Wagons. Keppel took these reports seriously because they went to “the fundamental purposes” of the earmarked federal aid, “which was to put money behind the poor kids.” Willis, it seemed, was all but daring the federal government to rule against Chicago on the CCCO complaint. 46

  On October 1, 1965, Keppel did just that. In letters to Willis and to the state superintendent of public instruction, he declared that the Chicago school system was in “probable non-compliance” with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He said he believed the matter could be investigated quickly, if Willis’s department cooperated, but that it would have to be “satisfactorily resolved before any new commitments are made of funds.” Keppel had put millions of dollars in federal education aid to a major Democratic city, presided over by the nation’s most powerful mayor, in jeopardy. That was, as Keppel recalls, “when everything happened.” Daley was irate that the federal government had taken the side of a ragtag group of civil rights activists against Chicago’s mayor and school board. Keppel’s irresponsible action had “done irreparable damage,” Daley seethed, “to the whole concept of federal aid to education.” A furious Willis sent Keppel a telegram asking “What is ‘probable non-compliance’” and “When will you let us know?” The Chicago congressional delegation immediately applied pressure to get Keppel’s order reversed. Representative Pucinski demanded an investigation by the General Accounting Office, and vowed that “Congress won’t appropriate another nickel for education programs” unless the federal government backed down. Illinois Democrats also threatened that William Dawson’s House Government Operations Committee would begin an investigation of Keppel. 47

  But the key to resolving the standoff between the Office of Education and the Chicago school system was Daley’s relationship with President Johnson. Johnson had treated Daley with great deference since becoming president. “I’m a Dick Daley man,” he had said in a phone call after the 1964 elections. “I always have a warm spot for you.” Daley returned the good feeling, saying, “My wife said that never did we meet a finer couple than you and Mrs. Johnson.” There may have been some real affection between these two men. Lady Bird Johnson wrote in an April 21, 1964, diary entry that Daley was “one of her husband’s ‘favorite people,’” and went on to describe Daley as “a very arch type of political boss, ruddy-faced, emanating efficiency and friendliness.” But Johnson also had clear political reasons for cultivating Daley. He was still planning on running for reelection in 1968, and would want Daley’s help in winning Illinois. And Johnson had grown to appreciate Daley’s control over the machine’s sizable congressional delegation. “Daley was critical to the success of the Great Society,” former Johnson domestic adviser Joseph Califano recalled. “A call to Daley was all that was needed to deliver the fourteen votes of the Illinois Democratic delegation. Johnson and others of us had made many calls to the Mayor and Daley had always come through.” 48

  Daley insisted on taking the matter to the president directly. Johnson was in New York on October 3, to sign an immigration bill at the Statue of Liberty, and then to visit with the pope. Daley rushed to New York, and waited for the president in Ambassador Arthur Goldberg’s apartment at the Waldorf Towers. When Johnson arrived, Daley was seething. He “was so mad,” Keppel said later, that he was “just sputtering.” Johnson said later that Daley was so unrelenting in his arguments that the money be restored that the meeting between the president and the pope was delayed by ten minutes. Johnson assured Daley he would look into the matter as soon as he returned to Washington. The next day, the president called in HEW secretary John W. Gardner and Keppel and “gave them unstinted hell.” 49 Gardner sent undersecretary Wilber Cohen to Chicago to investigate. Cohen found that Daley was deeply offended with how the federal government had proceeded. “You’re taking away the funds from me without ever having consulting me,” Cohen recalls Daley protesting. “You never told me about the issue; you never consulted me or asked me what my views are; you never tried to get me to resolve it; all you do is send a telegram and I read it in the newspapers.” 50

  After meeting with Daley, Cohen sat down with school board president Frank Whiston. The CCCO tried to arrange its own meeting with Cohen, but they were unable to do so. The CCCO leadership realized at that point that Cohen’s mission was not to investigate the school situation further, but to work out a political accommodation with Daley. On his way back to Washington, Cohen held a press conference at the airport to announce that he and Whiston had reached an agreement. The Chicago school system would appoint a five-member committee to review complaints about school boundaries and other matters, and it promised to take steps to address segregation at Washburne Trade School. And the federal funding would be restored. Whiston said that Daley had been “very interested” in the negotiations, and called as soon as his meeting with Cohen ended. The CCCO activists were crushed. The release of the funds was the result of a “shameless display of naked political power exhibited by Mayor Daley,” Raby said. They had no faith in the agreement worked out between Cohen and Whiston. “They were going to investigate themselves,” says Weinberg. “That sounded just horrible to us.” Daley loyalists agreed that the commitments the school system made to Cohen were a sham, and they were overjoyed. “These concessions are meaningless,” Pucinski exclaimed. “They’re just a face-saving device for Keppel. This is an abject surrender.” 51

  But Daley’s revenge was not complete. After the funding was restored, Keppel was quietly removed to a position where he could do no further harm. He was given the new title of assistant secretary for education at HEW, and his position of U.S. commissioner of education was given to a man who would make a point of staying out of Daley’s way. “I was hopeless, I was replaced very soon,” Keppell recalled later. “Oh, they made me an assistant secretary for some reason — I’ve forgotten — and I just stayed on . . . and spent most of my time trying to keep out of the way of my successor.... In effect, I was fired.” By April 1966, Keppel’s service in the federal government was over. Daley’s maneuvers had a lasting impact on how the federal government would evaluate racial discrimination in the North. The Johnson administration issued new regulations requiring proof of discrimination — and requiring federal officials to first attempt to elicit voluntary compliance — before education funds could be withheld. The agreement between Cohen and the Chicago school board was a “black day in the catalogues of mankind’s eternal freedom struggle,” Adam Clayton Powell declared. The
“integrity of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was gutted by the most barbaric exercise of tawdry ward politics.” But Daley had scored points with his white constituents — the very voters that had abandoned him in the 1963 election. Liberal columnist Joseph Kraft lamented that Daley’s “tactic of blocking civil rights moves in order to court favor with anti-Negro white[s] . . . has won out again.” 52

  By the fall of 1965, word spread that King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would in fact be coming to Chicago that winter for a prolonged stay. Daley said he would be happy to meet with King whenever he wanted. “No one has to march to see the mayor of Chicago,” Daley said jauntily. “The door is always open and I’m here 10 to 12 hours a day.” And Daley insisted that he shared King’s agenda. “I’m always happy to have help and assistance in resolving difficult problems of housing, education, and poverty,” Daley said. “I would like to show Dr. King some of our fine installations.” At the same time, Daley began mobilizing black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts in Chicago. Alderman Ralph Metcalfe announced plans for a community action program designed to provide an alternative to King’s Chicago Campaign. Organizers of the new group, called the Chicago Conference to Fulfill These Rights, Inc., included three more black aldermen, four black judges, and other black elected officials, lawyers, and religious leaders with ties to the machine. Metcalfe declared that King was not “objective” because he had not talked with Daley, and that in any case he was not needed in Chicago. “This is no hick town,” Metcalfe said. “We have adequate leadership here.” Al Raby called the formation of the group a “tragedy.” 53

  With all the headlines about civil rights, it was hard to get excited about yet another scandal in Chicago Traffic Court. But the newspapers were now reporting that drivers were routinely permitted to substantially underpay their tickets when they were marked with the initial “D,” for “Democrat,” and the number of a ward organization. In some cases, the payments were as low as fifty cents on a ten-dollar ticket. The charges were not hard to believe, particularly with the Traffic Court operating under the supervision of Joseph McDonough. McDonough, the clerk of the Circuit Court, was a longtime Daley protégé, and the son of Daley’s own 11th Ward mentor, Alderman Joseph McDonough. Daley was quick to brand the scandal as another Republican plot. “The ‘D’ written on the tickets by the investigators could stand for ‘doctor’ and might mean ‘dog’ and it might mean a lot of other things,” the mayor said. His old friend McDonough was, he insisted, doing an “outstanding job.” 54

  In late November, concerns about corruption were raised once again when Daley submitted his 1966 city budget. Republicans charged that the $545 million budget was inflated with patronage and waste. And they charged that Daley now oversaw a “shadow budget” for poverty programs, urban renewal projects, air pollution control, and airports, all of which received federal funding. Daley had been using these new budget lines, they said, to transfer current city welfare bureaucrats into higher-paying jobs in federal poverty programs. This, in turn, opened up more patronage jobs that could be filled on the city payroll. The new Daley budget called for a property tax increase of between 8 and 10 percent, well above the rate of inflation. Critics charged that the steep increases in taxes since Daley took office were destroying the city. The president of the Chicago Real Estate Board said that apartment buildings in the city had lost 15 percent of their value as a result of higher real estate taxes. John Hoellen, the Republican alderman, declared that the city’s neighborhoods were “rotting away,” that stores were boarded up, and that 276 industrial plants had left Chicago in the past ten years. “When we look at the tax bills,” he said, “we know why.” 55

  King flew north in October to attend a retreat to work out the details of the Chicago Campaign. The three-day conference, at a camp in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, brought together about one hundred activists from SCLC and CCCO. On one level, it was a get-acquainted session, designed to foster camaraderie and trust among two distinct, and in many ways very different, organizations. One CCCO member who was there recalls that Andrew Young had a guitar and went around making up songs about each of the participants. But the expressed purpose of the retreat was to develop a joint strategy for what would become the Chicago Freedom Movement. The two groups were working on a plan that would “broaden our interest — not just schools but housing, political emasculation, poverty, welfare jobs,” Raby said. To achieve these goals, “protest demonstrations will be heightened.” King told reporters that the focus of the movement would be the city’s racial problems, not its political system or its leaders. “I don’t consider Mayor Daley as an enemy,” he said. King, who expressed an interest in “eventually” meeting with the mayor, said that he understood that Daley would not react with the kind of violent outbursts that had helped the SCLC gain sympathy in the past. “The movement in Chicago will be different from that in the South,” he said. “There will be fewer overt acts to aid us here . . . naive targets such as the Jim Clarks and George Wallaces will be harder to find and use as symbols.” Still, hope for the new effort ran high. “Chicago will be like a test tube,” one King aide declared. “The whole world will be waiting to see what happens here.” 56

  After King headed back south, Bevel and other organizers set about planning the details of the Chicago Campaign. They established a headquarters at the Warren Avenue Congregational Church in the West Side ghetto, and worked with local activists to plan neighborhood kickoff rallies that were held across the South and West sides between October 20 and November 4, 1965. Jesse Jackson, then a young SCLC staffer, organized the city’s Baptist ministers to support the upcoming campaign, and other activists were working with the city’s gangs, some holding weekend workshops designed to direct gang members toward nonviolent political protest. Bevel led an effort to draft a written outline that would set out the overall themes of the campaign. The drafters concluded that although the civil rights movement had prevailed in the South by choosing narrow goals, like integrating a bus system or desegregating a lunch counter, the Chicago Campaign would have to pursue a broader agenda. “The Chicago problem is simply a matter of economic exploitation,” the document said. “Every condition exists simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the SLUM,” which the outline called “a system of internal colonialism.” 57

  King returned to Chicago on January 5,1966, for two days of meetings at the Sahara Inn between SCLC representatives and local black leaders that formally kicked off the campaign. When King emerged, he explained why he had come to Chicago. The city’s slums were “the prototype of those chiefly responsible for the Northern urban race problem,” he said, and he and the SCLC had been invited in by the forty-five local civil rights groups that comprised the CCCO. “Our objective will be to bring about the unconditional surrender of forces dedicated to the creation and maintenance of slums,” King declared. “The Chicago Freedom Movement will press the power structure to find imaginative programs to overcome the problem.” The group adopted Bevel’s draft outline, which came to be known as the “Chicago Plan,” and it explained to the press in more detail how the campaign would proceed. King said the SCLC would be increasing its staff in the city to several dozen. And he announced that when he returned to the city, he would be moving into a “West Side apartment that will symbolize the ‘Slum Lordism’ that I hope to smash.” 58

  CHAPTER

  10

  All of Us Are Trying to

  Eliminate Slums

  In selecting a tenement for King to move into, the Chicago Freedom Movement made a deliberate choice to put him on the West Side rather than the South Side. Chicago’s South Side, home to more than 400,000 blacks, was the traditional center of the city’s black life. It was the Chicago’s historic “Bronzeville,” home to great black institutions like the Chicago Defender and thriving black businesses, insurance companies, and funeral homes. The West Side was a newer ghetto of roughly 250,000 blacks, man
y of them recent arrivals from the rural South. Though living conditions in the South Side ghetto were bad, they were far worse on the West Side. West Side blacks were poorer, job opportunities were fewer, youth gangs were more active, and more of the residents lived in the kind of dilapidated, below-code apartments the anti-slum campaign was targeting. West Side blacks were also likely to be easier to organize. Many South Side blacks were more conservative, with strong ties to old-line black churches and the black submachine, two of the forces in the black community most skeptical of the civil rights cause. The West Side had fewer community institutions, and those tended to be the kind of grassroots organizations that backed the CCCO. And not least, West Side blacks were on the whole more culturally similar to the SCLC staff. More of them had been born in the Deep South, and many of them shared the worldview of the church-inspired southern civil rights movement. “We had a lot of experience dealing with black Mississippians,” Bernard Lafayette would say later, “and here they were transported north.” 1