American Pharaoh
Page 46
In early March, Al Raby announced that the CCCO was starting to build a political organization that would take on Daley and the machine if the Chicago Freedom Movement’s demands were not met. Raby said that the CCCO’s efforts to improve black schools had failed because they had been organized on a “civic” rather than a “political” basis. “Instead of organizing wards, amorphous political groups were formed,” said Raby. “The Democratic party could thus justifiably predict that Negro defection would not reach the danger point.” With the help of the SCLC, Raby said, “cohesive organizations are now being formed in the ghetto communities that can become politically active if necessary.” Turning the CCCO into a political organization would not be easy. It was a coalition of disparate groups, some of which were prohibited by their charters from engaging in partisan political activity. But the biggest obstacle to Raby’s plan was King’s reluctance to use civil rights to organize a political movement. Throughout his career, King had always worked outside the political system, hoping to draw people of all political persuasions to the cause of civil rights. He still had not given up hope that Daley could eventually become an ally of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Still, Raby was not alone in seeking to shift the movement toward electoral politics. Dick Gregory, the comedian and protest leader, had already announced plans to challenge Daley for mayor in 1967. It was unlikely Gregory would win, but a strong third-party candidacy could conceivably take enough black votes away from the machine to put a Republican in City Hall. 16
On March 10, Daley held a slate-making meeting at the Sherman Hotel to select the machine’s candidates for the 1966 elections. Daley’s primary interest was in the political assassination of a wayward officeholder. Seymour Simon, the bright and ambitious president of the Cook County Board, had been placed on the board as a protégé of Thomas Keane. He was widely regarded as a rising star on the Chicago political scene, and the talk was that he would run for mayor if Daley stepped down in 1967, or perhaps for governor. But first, he had to be renominated as Cook County board president. The first indication that there might be trouble was on the day before the 1966 slate-making meeting, when Daley called Simon and told him, “Seymour, be humble when you go before the slate-makers. Some of them say you are arrogant. So take my advice and be humble.” Simon took the advice as an indication that Daley was on his side. But when Simon showed up before the slating committee, an enemy of his, Irwin “Izzy” Horwitz, was there. Horwitz was not a member of the Central Committee, from which members of the slate-making committee were usually drawn, but he came with the proxy of the 24th Ward committeeman. When the proceedings began, Horwitz launched into a bitter attack on his foe, and Simon was denied renomination. 17
The abrasive Simon was brought down by a number of missteps, including a feud with another member of the board who was close to Daley. But the critical factor was that Keane, his onetime patron, now wanted him out of the presidency and off the board. Simon would later explain that their falling-out had come about one day when Keane showed up in Simon’s office and asked him to reverse a decision of the county zoning board. A developer friend of Keane’s had applied to turn a piece of land into a garbage dump. The board had sided with neighborhood residents, who were bitterly opposed to the plan. 18 Simon later explained that he was against the landfill both because of the neighborhood opposition, and because the commander of a nearby naval air station had said that seagulls attracted to the dump would pose a danger to his aircraft. When Simon refused to support the developer’s plan, he said, his friendship with Keane was over. Keane was apparently mad enough to go to Daley and demand that Simon be removed from the board in the next election. After he was dumped, the newspapers were filled with headlines like “Simon Names Old Pal Keane as Ax Man in His Party Execution” and “Simon Dumped by a Dump?” When word of Simon’s unslating got out, the machine nomination for Cook County board president was hardly worth having. Simon’s replacement, postmaster Harry Semrow, lost badly to his Republican opponent. Although Daley lost the position, he was able to send a clear message to everyone in the machine about the cost of independence. “People in the organization realized that if he could knock me out, he could knock them out if they didn’t toe the line,” says Simon. 19
On March 12, the Chicago Freedom Movement held a major fund-raiser at the International Amphitheatre. Organizers, who had been planning the event for months, sold 12,000 tickets and lured some of the leading black stars of the day, including Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, and Mahalia Jackson. “Never before in the history of the civil rights movement has an action campaign been launched in such splendor,” King told the enthusiastic crowd. “Never has a community responded more splendidly to the call for support than you have in Chicago.” The rally demonstrated the broadest support yet in the black community for the Chicago Campaign, and brought in a much-needed $80,000. But a few days later, Daley had his own effusive public gathering that demonstrated how popular he remained with other segments of the city. On March 17, Daley presided over the city’s massive Saint Patrick’s Day parade. As was his custom, Daley personally led the throng of 70,000 marchers down State Street, while a crowd of 350,000 cheered from the sidelines. The parade was the usual exuberant mix: the Shannon Rovers Bagpipe Kilty band, Daley’s favorite, played a medley of Gaelic airs; the University of Notre Dame’s marching band played “McNamara’s Band”; and a float with thirty members of the Illinois Toll Highway Commission sang “Hello, Dolly.” An array of machine politicians, ranging from Senator Paul Douglas to local precinct captains, jammed the reviewing stand on Madison Street. Ireland’s secretary of commerce and industry, who had flown in for the festivities, declared that “Chicago was more Irish than Ireland — I cannot say the isle has anything to compare with this.” 20
In mid-March, Daley held an open meeting at City Hall to report on his administration’s progress in improving conditions in the ghetto. Deton Brooks, head of the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity, announced that the city was operating seven urban progress centers with a staff of 928, and had already conducted visits to 96,761 poor families. Kenneth Plummer, director of information for the City Board of Health, reported that a federally funded rodent-control program had found that 85 percent of housing in poor neighborhoods was rodent-infested, with an estimated ten rats for every citizen. The city had already visited 4,461 buildings, Plummer reported, to fill 27,301 rat holes, and an estimated 1,675,941 rats had been killed. Daley outlined four major goals for the future: improvements in education; increased employment opportunities; better access to health care; and elimination of slums by December 31, 1967. Daley continued his publicity campaign by holding a joint press conference on March 18 with John Boyle, chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, to announce that the city’s Housing Court was being expanded from four to six full-time judges, to handle the extra work being created by the new door-to-door inspections on the West Side, and the city’s other anti-slum initiatives. “Mayor Daley has made an all-out effort to eliminate slums and blight and the courts will cooperate 100 per cent,” Judge Boyle told reporters. Daley’s image as a slum-buster, which he was working so hard to burnish, was set back two weeks later when it was revealed that building code violations had been found in two buildings run by Marks & Co., the real estate firm headed by Charles Swibel, Daley’s Chicago Housing Authority chairman. City buildings inspectors discovered twenty-eight code violations, and evidence that apartments in the buildings had been unlawfully converted to smaller units. Daley asked for a report on the charges, saying, “I’m sure the law should be applied equally and strongly to everyone, and that will be the case here.” 21
While the Chicago Freedom Movement focused on its anti-slum campaign, SCLC staff member Jesse Jackson pursued a different tack. Jackson was heading up Operation Breadbasket, an economic self-help initiative that was being tried in a number of cities across the country. Operation Breadbasket took its name from boycotts of Atlanta bread companies in 1962, and its
inspiration from the selective buying campaigns of Reverend Leon Sullivan in Philadelphia. Its goal was to convince white-owned businesses working in and near black neighborhoods to hire more blacks and make greater investments in the black community. Operation Breadbasket’s strategy combined moral appeals, negotiations, and threats of boycotts. It focused its efforts on businesses that sold directly to the public, and which were therefore particularly vulnerable to consumer boycotts. Operation Breadbasket started its work in Chicago in February 1966, and in its first months scored some impressive victories. Hawthorne-Melody Farms, a Chicago dairy whose workforce was more than 90 percent white, agreed to hire an additional 55 blacks. Hi-Lo grocery stores agreed, after ten days of picketing, to hire an additional 183 blacks. And after fourteen weeks of protests, A&P committed itself to hire 970 blacks in its Chicago stores, and to hire a black firm to collect its garbage. Operation Breadbasket also negotiated increased work for the city’s black exterminators. “We have a monopoly on rats in the ghetto, and we’re gonna have a monopoly on killing ’em,” Jackson said. Some civil rights activists dismissed Operation Breadbasket’s work as less than significant — one commentator, writing in The Nation, dubbed it “Operation Drop-in-the-Bucket.” But it was attracting enough attention that Daley decided to unveil a similar program of his own. Daley’s version was called Operation Lite — an acronym for Leaders Information on Training and Employment — and it was aptly named. Daley’s version was, in every sense, an Operation Breadbasket light. It recruited 160 businessmen, clergy, and social service professionals to distribute job information folders. As part of the program, Daley and John Gray, the city’s merit employment chairman, announced that ministers and volunteers would make 800 calls to businessmen and others in a position to counsel blacks about job opportunities. They also planned to distribute a directory of job training and placement opportunities. Operation Lite did little for Chicago’s disadvantaged, but it succeeded in its real purpose: making it appear that Daley was concerned about black employment opportunities. 22
Daley invited King to join him at a summit with Chicago clergy to discuss the city’s efforts to combat slums. The invitation was yet another illustration of how different the civil rights struggle was in Chicago than it had been in the South — Governor George Wallace of Alabama and Selma mayor Joe Smitherman had not looked to King for advice on how to govern. But Daley was shrewd enough to try to have his first meeting with King occur at a meeting of clergymen, so it would seem less like a showdown between the civil rights movement and City Hall, and more like a group inquiry into how to work toward change. King turned down Daley’s invitation to the clergy summit, pleading a “long standing prior engagement” in Texas. But the summit went forward, and many of the city’s leading clergymen did attend, including Archbishop Cody, Episcopal Bishop Gerald Francis Burrill, and the omnipresent Reverend Joseph H. Jackson. Daley discussed his work combating poverty and racial discrimination, and delivered updates on the city’s progress. And he asked the clergymen to return for a second summit the following week, bringing along recommendations for how the city should proceed. King did come to this second meeting, on March 25, making it the first time the two men had met since the civil rights leader had arrived in Chicago. King listened attentively as city officials reeled off what the Daley administration was doing on a variety of fronts, and outlined areas where help was needed. Police Superintendent O. W. Wilson said there were more than 100,000 unauthorized firearms in the city, and asked the clergymen to encourage their parishioners to turn them in to the police. Fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn told the audience that accumulated garbage was the biggest cause of fires, and asked for help in reducing the amount of refuse in their neighborhoods. Charles Swibel, chairman of the CHA board, said his agency planned to build an additional six thousand units in the next two years, and then asked the clergymen to deliver messages from their pulpits on the importance of cleanliness and being good neighbors. But the greatest drama in the three-hour meeting came when King and Daley engaged in a thirty-minute colloquy about the city’s problems. King told the meeting that Chicago “has a long way to go,” and described some of the problems he had seen firsthand since arriving in the city. 23 Daley responded that “these problems were created thousands of miles away from here in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. This deprivation of education can’t be laid to the people of Chicago. They had nothing to do with it.” After the closed-door meeting ended, King and Daley spoke about each other in respectful terms. “I believe the mayor is concerned in his search for answers...” King said. And Daley pronounced King “a religious leader who feels intently the causes he espouses.” The next day King settled an important question when he told a reporter, “I’m not leading any campaign against Mayor Daley. I’m leading a campaign against slums.” Without King’s support, the prospect of a strong black independent mayoral campaign diminished considerably. 24
Daley continued his high-profile work as a champion of Chicago’s slum residents. The same day as the clergy summit, he spoke to the opening session of the First International Conference on Freedom of Residence at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Daley told an audience of labor, religious, and civil rights leaders that “opportunity for freedom of residence for everyone can only be achieved if thousands of people become greatly concerned.” On March 27, he convened a meeting of one hundred business leaders in the City Council chambers and urged them to increase job opportunities for minorities. John D. deButts, president of Illinois Bell Telephone, reported that through the work of the Chicago Association of Commerce 312 companies had agreed not to discriminate in employment and had pledged to work for equal opportunity in hiring and agreed to offer in-house skills training for employees who needed it. The following day, Daley announced that he was stepping up the city’s war on rats, promising that an additional $250,000 would be spent to treat all 20,427 blocks of alleys in the city over the next two months. 25
Daley was finding it increasingly hard to keep his real feelings about the civil rights movement in check. Even as he spoke about his commitment to improving slum housing, he began to argue that the Chicago Freedom Movement was overstating the extent of the problem. “Look at 35th and State Street,” he said, referring to a once-run-down area that had been razed to build public housing. “I lived there and went to school there. It was one of the worst areas in the city, but what do you see now?” In fact, most people still thought it looked pretty bad. In private, Daley was even less restrained in his attack on King and his followers. At a closed-door meeting of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee in mid-April, Daley told machine leaders that King and his followers were simply trying to “grab” power. “We have no need to apologize to the civil rights leaders who have come to Chicago to tell us what to do,” Daley said. “We’ll match our integrity against their independence.” 26
The spring of 1966 was not all run-ins over slums and civil rights. Daley’s work in building up the city was increasingly being recognized, and was bringing him accolades. The National Clean-Up, Paint-Up, Fix-Up Bureau honored Chicago as the cleanest large city in the nation at a luncheon at the Bismarck Hotel. It was the fifth time in seven years that Chicago had taken the prize. The Loop, in particular, was thriving. The clearest illustration of downtown Chicago’s impressive upswing was the rapid transformation of North Michigan Avenue. North Michigan, the upscale retailing strip jutting out of the northeast corner of the Loop, had undergone one of the most dramatic transformations of any part of the Chicago landscape. It had begun life as narrow and dowdy Pine Street. Burnham’s 1909 plan called for widening it into a grand European-style boulevard, and that process began in 1920, with the building of the Michigan Avenue Bridge across the Chicago River. In the next few years, several architecturally significant buildings went up along the avenue, including the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building. In 1947, developer Arthur Rubloff dubbed North Michigan the “Magnificent Mile,” but it was at that point still wishful thinking. It was only du
ring the mid-1960s that it was truly beginning to approach magnificence. In 1965, the thirty-five-story Equitable Building opened, adjacent to the Tribune Tower, and in the next few years the march of development continued northward up the avenue. A decade later, the avenue would be capped off by Water Tower Place, a sixty-two-story hotel and condominium that included eight floors of luxury stores, contained in the nation’s first vertical shopping mall. In time, Michigan Avenue would become so overrun with swank stores and high-rent office towers that one critic would lament that it had become “alas, the Manhattanized Mile.” 27