THE ROCK that shamed Chicago must have flown out of the massive mob over on the knoll. Some of those young tough guys in their T-shirts with their slicked-back hair had been getting ready to make their move on Marquette Park for hours, jacking themselves up on beer, driving around in convertibles, waving Confederate flags, shouting “White Power!”
But the truth is, it was impossible to say for sure who threw it. There were thousands of suspects in and around the park, screaming for blood like Romans in the Coliseum. It could have been those punk kids up in that tree. Or maybe it was that 50-ish white woman, the one looking so bitter and betrayed. She’d been yelling her head off at the nuns and priests, accusing them of being traitors to their church and their race for standing shoulder to shoulder with a pack of lousy Negroes, only she used another word that starts with “n.”
Wherever the rock came from that August afternoon in 1966, it hit Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the back of the neck, knocking him to one knee. Timuel D. Black, the historian and political activist, was standing nearby, ready to follow King on the protest march deeper into the park. He remembers thinking, “If they’ve hurt Doc, this town will go up for sure. It’s already a tinderbox, has been all summer.”
The park was the latest battleground in the Chicago Freedom Movement, a yearlong campaign for open housing that turned the city into the center of the civil rights struggle. It had begun that January, when King and his wife Coretta moved into a North Lawndale slum.
It was King’s first Northern civil rights crusade and its impact is still being debated four decades later: The movement failed . . . it opened doors for tomorrow. . . it was sold out . . . it planted the seeds for the election of the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington . . . King lost . . . Mayor Richard J. Daley won . . . We shall overcome.
A lot of people in the thick of the action back then are gone now; some of their names are in history books and others reside only in family Bibles. Forty years is a long time. But many are still with us and they have important stories to tell and lessons to teach about a time when a good number of people in Chicago feared the city might erupt in a full-scale race riot.
Their stories are also about a spirited interracial effort to make the city better and more open for everyone, an effort Chicago should be proud of. Over the coming year, the veterans of ’66 will share their memories, good and bad, in a series of seminars and reunions to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Chicago Freedom Movement, the year Martin Luther King brought his crusade north.
Even before the outbreaks of violence in white neighborhoods, racial tensions ran high in Chicago that year. There were two days of rioting in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on the Northwest Side and later another days-long riot in a black neighborhood on the West Side. Two people were killed, dozens injured. The National Guard was called in to settle the unrest.
Yet, it was King and the freedom movement that dominated the headlines and exposed a sad truth about American life-then and now. Racism was not just the South’s problem. There was absolutely no reason for the North to be smug. Not when the pain and sorrow of segregation were just down the street.
King and the movement wanted to make Chicago a racially open city, a place where black families and Latino families could live wherever they could afford without fear of bricks, fire bombs or burning crosses in the front yard. But the movement wasn’t just about open housing and it did not just start in 1966.
A month before the Marquette Park march, King addressed more than 30,000 people on a 98-degree day at Soldier Field. He said black people were tired of “inferior, segregated and overcrowded schools,” political subjugation and job discrimination.
“We will be sadly mistaken if we think freedom is some lavish dish that the federal government and the white man will pass out on a silver platter while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite,” he told the rally. “Freedom is never voluntarily granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.”
Then he led at least 5,000 people from the lakefront stadium to City Hall. He taped on the front door a list of demands, calling on the city, political parties and the business community to do more for the poor, the black and the brown. The list included revocation of city contracts with firms that lacked full-scale fair employment, a vast increase in the supply of low-cost housing on a scattered-site basis and nondiscriminatory lending practices.
Before the summer was over, movement activists held marches and prayer vigils across the city in all-white neighborhoods from Chicago Lawn and Gage Park on the Southwest Side to Belmont-Cragin on the Northwest Side and several places in between. Almost everywhere the non-violent marchers went they were met by whites armed with rocks and rage. George Lincoln Rockwell brought his American Nazi Party to town to try to stir things up even more.
It was a Herculean effort to change decades of pervasive racism, but the movement came up short. So did the city.
“We have to admit, while there has been some progress in creating integrated housing and neighborhoods in Chicago, we still have a very large problem,” says Kale Williams, the co-chairman of the “CFM40” observance and a longtime open-housing advocate. “The [commemorative] events of 2006 are not in any sense a celebration of victory, but an attempt to revitalize the activism necessary to address these lingering issues.”
Today, the Chicago area ranks as the fifth most residentially segregated metropolitan area by race in the United States, according to a recent Urban League study, “Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago” written by Paul Street. The area ranks fourth in black-white school segregation. Of the city’s 15 most impoverished neighborhoods in 1999, the report says, 14 were disproportionately black and 11 were 94 percent or more black.
Much of the city’s and region’s black population, Street wrote, remains trapped in what King called “a triple ghetto: a ghetto of race, a ghetto of poverty and a ghetto of human misery.”
King took up part-time residence in one of those ghettoes during that stormy year, spending two to three nights a week in the crumbling apartment building on the West Side, sometimes talking through the night with street-gang leaders about the power of non-violence. He envisioned the city becoming the model for the rest of the country, the proving ground for his notion that the non-violent methods that were transforming the South could also liberate the tough urban streets of the North, where its neglected inner cities were exploding in rage and flames, one “long, hot summer” after another.
King was confident that if the movement could “open” Chicago-end the de facto segregation here-then doing the same anywhere else in the North would be a relative stroll in the park.
That was, of course, before he set foot in Marquette Park.
When King was felled by the rock, the mob started chanting: “Kill him! Kill him!”
King’s people didn’t know what to do. They expected trouble, but nothing like this. They were outnumbered 10 to 1; still, some wanted to strike back. But they knew King would be sorely disappointed by that reaction. Non-violence wasn’t just a tactic with him. It was a way of life, like his faith in God and the mountaintop. Besides, the 500 to 600 marchers who joined him that day-black and white, men and women, Christian and Jew-had given their word that, no matter what, they would remain non-violent.
King stayed down on his knee for a few seconds. It seemed a lot longer. His head bent as if in prayer.
Then he rose to his feet, visibly shaken. But he continued marching, at one point tearing off his tie as he went. “I have to do this-to expose myself-to bring this hate into the open,” he said, as reporters scribbled and ducked.
People in the mob-up to 5,000 strong-were throwing everything they could get their hands on-bricks, bottles, eggs, pails of water, apples, cherry bombs, spit and, according to the Chicago Tribune’s account, “at least one knife that sailed through the air.”
Some of the 1,200 police on hand started chasing after the rock throwers, cutting the humid air with their nightsticks. No doubt many of the officers were from that same all-white neighborhood of bungalows, two-flats and ringing church bells or places just like it. But for the most part, they did their jobs.
“I have seen many demonstrations in the South,” King told reporters as he marched, “but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”
PREXY NESBITT, A former football star at Francis W. Parker, the private school on the city’s North Side, tried to stay as close to King as possible. Nesbitt was part of the security detail. “I’m one of the guys who missed [catching] the rock,” he says, still a little sheepish after 40 years.
His instructions were to catch bricks and bottles and anything else someone might throw at King, put the object on the ground and keep marching. “We could not respond in any way physically,” he says.
In 1966, Nesbitt was 22, back home in Chicago after a year of study in Africa and eager to get involved with the Chicago Freedom Movement. Its West Side headquarters were in his boyhood church, Warren Avenue Congregational, one of the few integrated houses of worship in the city then. “The church helped give me a vision that whites and blacks could be together,” Nesbitt says.
He drove people to demonstrations and conducted workshops with young people on non-violence. He also joined the movement’s interracial teams of real-estate testers. A black person would walk into a real estate office in a white neighborhood and apply for an apartment. Almost always they were told there was nothing available. Minutes later, a white team member would go into the same office and be shown a long list of apartments. King and the marchers were headed to a Realtor’s office when the civil rights leader was struck by the missile in Marquette Park.
“Nobody had any idea of the depth of hate until that summer,” says Nesbitt, who teaches African history at Columbia College Chicago. “In Marquette Park I was really scared. We were surrounded. The women were the scariest. I had never seen such vitriolic hatred in women before. We knew there was going to be a reaction. The vehemence of the reaction is what surprised us.”
THEY SHOULD NOT have been surprised, says one of the whites arrested that day. “How would you feel if somebody you didn’t like started marching in your neighborhood?” he asks. “The people only wanted to protect their property. Do you know how long white people been fleeing blacks? This was the beginning of the end.”
The man is 57 now and does not want his name used or his photograph taken. He says a black cop accused him of throwing rocks that day in the park, but “I was just jeering and watching. They were asking for it.”
Not long after he was arrested and thrown into a police wagon, the man was drafted into the Army. “I often wondered if getting arrested for that was part of the reason I had a hard time in the military,” he says. “I could never achieve any rank.”
He hasn’t worked in years. He’s on full disability and spends a lot of time with his buddies at a Veterans Administration Hospital. The human heart is complicated. The man swears that two of his best friends at the VA are black. “We never talk about race,” he says. “They come up to me and give me a hug. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I had anything to do with that stuff in the park. I’m not prejudiced. Your mind matures. I don’t even call niggers niggers.”
Today, he lives in a Latino neighborhood. “There’s nowhere else for whitey to run,” he says. “If you can’t get along with Mexicans, you’re through. I still like Chicago. But if this neighborhood starts turning black, I’m out of here.”
Rev. George Clements might have been a target of that angry man’s jeers in the park that day. What Father Clements knows for sure is that he will never forget the elderly white woman who trailed him as he marched in his collar. “Nigger priest, nigger priest,” she shouted, working herself into a frenzy. Then she fell silent. Clements turned to see where she was but at first couldn’t see her. Then he spotted her, on her knees, vomiting into a gutter. “I said to myself, ‘God, this is really some hate.’ “
Then the 34-year-old priest left the woman and the march to retrieve his car. He had a wedding rehearsal to oversee. As he approached his car there was a crowd of whites standing around the vehicle. “They started yelling profanities at me,” he says. “I was naive. It didn’t bother me that much.”
As he got in, someone knocked his straw hat off his head and the crowd of about 100 people began rocking his car. “That’s when I got scared,” he says.
Two especially menacing-looking men approached the car. They appeared to be the ringleaders. Suddenly, they pulled guns and started yelling at the mob to “get back, get back.”
That’s when Clements hit the gas and escaped. He checked his rearview mirror and saw the two gunmen were racing after him in another car. They caught up to him and pulled him over. One of the men handed Clements back his straw hat. The two gunmen turned out to be plainclothes police officers.
Over the years, Clements kept in touch with one of his saviors, David Hebron. When Hebron died several years ago, Clements traveled to southern Illinois to officiate at his funeral.
Clements has remained an activist ever since, leading anti-drug campaigns, encouraging black adoptions, convincing parishioners to open their hearts to ex-offenders. He often joins forces with a white activist priest, Rev. Michael Pfleger, the pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church on the South Side. As it turns out, Pfleger was also in Marquette Park the day King was hit with the rock.
PFLEGER WAS 16, a kid from nearby Thomas Moore parish. Everywhere he went for several days leading up to the march, people in his Southwest Side neighborhood were talking about the pending march. Why couldn’t they stay in their own place? They took away our old house. They took away our old neighborhood. They took away our old church. They drove us out. Now is the time to draw the line.
Pfleger and two friends hopped on their bikes and rode to the park to see if they could get a look at King, the man who was causing all the trouble. When they got to the park, it was scary. “I saw this hate,” he says. “I had never seen them, my neighbors, like that. I’d never seen that side of white people.”
His neighbors were cursing and throwing rocks. There were police in riot gear and there he was, King, looking calm, trying to say something to the mob. But Pfleger couldn’t hear over the screams of “Niggers, go home!”
“King was in control,” Pfleger recalls. “And the more in control he was, the angrier the crowd became. I thought to myself, ‘Either this man is crazy, or this man has some sort of power I want to know about.’ It was the greatest, most powerful class in non-violence I’ll ever get in my life.”
The next day, Pfleger started reading whatever he could find about the march and about King. He cut out photos of King and taped them to the back of his bedroom closet door as a sort of shrine. Today, in his office at St. Sabina, he has half a dozen photographs of him: King addressing thousands of people at the rally at Soldier Field, King speaking at a temple on the North Shore, King and a young Jesse Jackson the night before King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
“People ask me all the time why I became a priest,” Pfleger says. “I tell them it was really a black Baptist minister who called me into ministry. My activism today was unquestionably birthed that day in Marquette Park. I think of him as a mentor.”
THE CHICAGO FREEDOM Movement started with such high hopes and grand ambitions: End the slums. Open housing. Integrate the schools.
For King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Chicago was a strange new world. And a big one. “They really didn’t know what they were getting into in Chicago,” says Alan Anderson, the co-author of “Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago” and professor in the philosophy and religion department of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. “The city was on such a different scale than any place they had previously worked.”
Until Chicago, King had waged his civil rights crusade almost exclusively in his native South and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. By 1966, he and his movement were on a roll throughout the Old Confederacy. Jim Crow segregation was falling to Earth, its wings clipped in places like Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma, Ala. Even President Lyndon Johnson got into the act, promising the nation that “we shall overcome.”
King had considered a few other Northern cities before settling on Chicago, which was as segregated as any big city in the country-the schools, the housing, the churches. Ald. Dorothy Tillman, then a teenage SCLC staff member named Dorothy Wright from Alabama, hoped King would decide on Cleveland instead. “It was a little more country,” she says.
But after touring Philadelphia, Cleveland and Boston, King and his senior staff decided the other cities were either too small or would not command the same level of media attention as Chicago, home of one of the most powerful and skilled politicians in the United States, Mayor Richard J. Daley.
At first, King even believed Daley might be an ally, certainly not an obstacle to racial and economic justice. “There are two sides to the mayor,” says Anderson, who was part of the civil rights movement in Chicago for many years before writing about it. “Nationally he was a liberal. At home he was an ethnic politician who was balancing the claims of the Irish, Italians and Jews against those of African-Americans. Mayor Daley was a much more complicated and multifaceted person than either his critics or supporters give him credit for. He was a great mayor except when it came to two things: race and urban renewal.”
Daley also loved his city. And, as the saying goes, love is blind. He once proclaimed that there were no slums in Chicago. That must have come as a shock to the hundreds of thousands of blacks trapped in sprawling ghettoes on the South and West sides. Even when they had the money to move up and out, real estate agents in white neighborhoods, sometimes just blocks away, refused to rent to them or even show them listings.
When King moved to Chicago he said he wanted to join his brothers and sisters in the slums. His colleagues Bernard LaFayette Jr. and James Bevel suggested he go to the West Side, where rats bit babies and toddlers chewed on lead paint chips that fell from the walls and ceilings of crumbling apartments. So on a cold day in January 1966, a couple of weeks after his 37th birthday, King and his wife, Coretta, moved into a four-room, third-floor walkup at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. in North Lawndale. The walls were gray. The heat was iffy. The rooms were small.
That first night in the apartment, King and some of his aides, including a recent Stanford University grad named Mary Lou Finley, sat on the just-laid linoleum floor eating ribs. There was a knock on the door. The police officer stationed in the hall said there was a boy who wanted to see Dr. King. Could he come in? Sure, send the young brother in.
“Are you really Martin Luther King?” the boy asked. A short time later, he returned with a dozen friends. Outside, older boys, gang members, patrolled the freezing street corners. “The Vice Lords were impressed that Dr. King had moved into the neighborhood,” Finley says. “They decided to protect him. They didn’t think the police would do a good enough job.”
Samuel Mitchell was also impressed. A few weeks after King moved into North Lawndale, Mitchell and his daughter, Edna Stewart, opened a soul food restaurant on Madison Street. Since his daughter did all of the cooking, they named the restaurant after her.
Today, Edna’s is a West Side institution, popular with politicians, preachers and police officers. In 1966, it was popular with King’s staff. They usually ate for free; Sam Mitchell insisted on it. “He just loved those civil rights workers,” his daughter says, sitting in a booth recently in her bustling restaurant, a picture of her late father on the wall. “He felt he was helping the movement by feeding them.”
He certainly was; the workers didn’t have any money. “We were making $37.50 every two weeks,” says Rev. Al Sampson, a member of the SCLC field staff. “No health care. No insurance. All we had was justice and Edna’s.”
THE MOVEMENT IN Chicago didn’t just start when King arrived in town; it had been going strong for years. That was another reason he had come-Chicago had a foundation of protest already in place. It was the birthplace of the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE, and home to an aggressively activist group called the Chicago Area Friends of SNCC-the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
There were “Don’t shop where you can’t work” campaigns in the 1930s and interracial struggles to integrate restaurants, taverns, movie houses, department stores and housing projects in the 1940s and ’50s. In 1960, there were several “wade-ins” at Rainbow Beach, where African-Americans could swim only at their own risk, not from drowning, but from being attacked by whites.
But it was the segregated school system that became the main battlefront and where an African-American woman named Rosie Simpson comes in. History is filled with people like Simpson, unheralded, unrecognized, unbowed.
She was the mother of six and a former official with the Packinghouse Workers Union. She had dropped out of school at age 15 to work at the stockyards but wanted much more for her children. That’s why, when the telephone rang in her South Side apartment at 5 o’clock on a rainy morning in 1963, she was ready to go to jail.
“They’re coming,” the caller said. “Spread the word.”
Simpson, who was 32 at the time, dialed the next name on the list of mothers willing to join her behind bars.
“The bulldozers are here,” she said, and with her heart racing, Simpson hung up, quickly got dressed and rushed out the door for the showdown in a vacant lot at 73rd Street and Lowe Avenue.
Schools in predominantly black neighborhoods were often so badly overcrowded that pupils attended classes in half-day shifts or in mobile classrooms set up in playgrounds and vacant lots. Meanwhile, maybe just eight blocks to the west or south, there were empty classrooms in predominately white schools. Activists called the mobile classrooms “Willis Wagons” after the superintendent of schools, Benjamin Willis. “Wherever the black community went,” Simpson says, “the Willis Wagons followed.”
Now bulldozers were coming to clear the lot for an entire school of Willis Wagons, 18 mobile classrooms and one to be used as an office and library. “It was an insult,” Simpson says.
She was joined by three other mothers, a pastor and a man who blocked one end of the alley that led to the lot with his Volkswagen. The mothers blocked the other end with their bodies. “We lay down in the rain,” Simpson recalls.
The bulldozers stopped in their tracks. Soon the mothers were joined by members of CORE and SNCC. The demonstrators grew from six to a couple dozen. The police moved in and began making arrests. Simpson didn’t get out of jail until 10 that night.
Days later, the bulldozers returned and so did the parents. As soon as a bulldozer dug a hole, one of the mothers would jump in. Other mothers chained themselves to the earth-moving equipment. “We were mad,” Simpson says. “We decided we were going to make sure our kids were going to go to a regular school whatever it took.”
That protest was followed in the fall of 1963 by a massive boycott of the entire school system organized by the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, or CCCO, a coalition of 20 civil rights groups and organizations, including CORE, the NAACP and the Urban League. CCCO wanted the schools desegregated and Supt. Willis fired. The Tribune announced the effectiveness of the one-day boycott in a headline: “224,770, or 47 Pct. of All Pupils, Miss Classes.”
The next year there was another boycott, but it was not as successful, and it was clear that the movement was losing steam. Albert Raby, the head of CCCO, Robert Lucas, the chairman of Chicago CORE, and several other activists sent King a telegram asking him to come to Chicago to help recharge the movement. “We decided we had hit the wall, that we had not been successful in doing a lot of things; mainly the integration of the schools,” Lucas says. “He was nationally, internationally known. We needed him.”
King agreed to come and the Chicago Freedom Movement was born, with both the CCCO and the SCLC calling the shots. By then, Willis had decided to retire, removing a key issue. After debating what to do next, the movement’s focus shifted to open housing, jobs and ending slums.
Not everyone was happy that King was coming. A group of black politicians and preachers loyal to the Democratic Party machine held a news conference to declare that outsiders were not needed in Chicago. The city could handle its own affairs.
For once, Timuel D. Black found himself agreeing with the political establishment about something. He thought King should stay away, too. Black, a longtime political and labor activist, wrote King a letter urging him not to come. He warned him about the perils of Chicago and the absolute power of Daley. “I thought Doc was walking into a political trap,” says Black, 88. “He could not have picked a more anti-change venue than Chicago.”
Black says he wasn’t just worried about Daley and his machine. He was also concerned that elements within the CCCO were trying to “control the movement” and muffle the more insistent voices for change. But once the decision was final that King was coming, Black threw himself into the Chicago Freedom Movement. “I loved Doc,” Black says. “I just didn’t want to see him get hurt.”
A few months later, Black was about four rows of marchers behind King in Marquette Park when the latter was hit by the rock. Black held his breath until King stood up. “That was the day I decided I couldn’t be non-violent anymore,” he says. “If one of those so-and-so’s hit me, the non-violent movement was over.”
DALEY WANTED THE marches to end. He was losing support within white ethnic Chicago because he had ordered his police department to protect the marchers. Elections were coming up. He went to court and won an injunction, limiting the marches to one per day with no more than 500 people and never during rush hour. There was heated debate within the movement about whether to defy the injunction and fill the jails. In the end, King reluctantly decided to obey the ruling.
But the injunction didn’t say anything about the all-white, blue-collar town of Cicero, so in late August, organizers announced a march there. Government officials feared the reaction among Cicero residents would make Marquette Park look like a love-in.
Before the Cicero march, the movement, the Realtors and the Daley administration reached what they called a summit agreement. The marches would stop, and in return the city and the Realtors agreed to work toward making Chicago an open city. But there was no enforcement provision or timetable for changes.
“The summit agreement we worked out, we all agree, was very weak,” says Kale Williams, who was part of the movement’s negotiating team and the director of the American Friends Service Committee in Chicago. “The city didn’t do anything significant at all.”
The one tangible result of the summit was the creation of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, a private group that continues to help place African-American families in largely white suburbs. It also conducts educational programs about interracial living. Williams headed the group for years.
When the agreement was announced at the Palmer House hotel, Robert Lucas of CORE stood outside the meeting, surrounded by reporters and cameras. “I started raising hell and talking about how the Freedom Movement sold the blacks out,” Lucas says. “There were no teeth in the agreement. It was not worth the paper it was written on.”
The Chicago Freedom Movement was not a victory for King. Lucas is not alone in saying that King wanted to find a way to free himself from Chicago, and that is why he accepted the document’s vague terms. He was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the anti-war movement and taking the civil rights movement into the fight for economic and human rights. The black political establishment in Chicago was against him. Daley was against him. Time was against him.
“I believe Doc was looking for a way out,” Lucas says. “It was sort of like getting out of Vietnam. How do you save face and get out?” Lucas pauses to weigh his words.
“Let’s face it,” he says. “King went up against Richard J. Daley, and he lost.”
But James R. Ralph Jr., the author of “Northern Protest,” a history of the Chicago Freedom Movement, says King’s efforts were not in vain. “It’s a mistake to view the Chicago Freedom Movement as a defeat,” he says. “There’s no doubt it did not live up to expectations. But it did spotlight like never before national attention on housing discrimination. This was a tough issue for a lot of white citizens across the country. They feared having a black neighbor more than they did sitting next to a black person at a lunch counter.”
Ralph, a professor of history at Middlebury College in Vermont, says there is a direct link between the 1966 protests in Chicago to the passage of a national fair housing law in 1968. “The movement also gave a bit of an opening to independent black politicians in Chicago,” he adds, an opening that Harold Washington walked through when he was elected the city’s first African-American mayor in 1983. Washington’s mayoral campaign was filled with veterans from the Chicago Freedom Movement, including his campaign manager, Raby, and Don Rose, who was the press spokesman for the Chicago Freedom Movement and came up with the slogan on its buttons, “WE’RE ON THE MOVE TO END SLUMS.”
The movement’s economic arm was called Operation Breadbasket. King put a young Jesse Jackson in charge. It was the beginning of Rev. Jackson’s long stay in the national spotlight.
In 1966, using threats of boycotts and other pressure, Breadbasket secured hundreds of jobs for African-Americans in the dairy and soft drink industries and in area supermarkets. The movement also won agreements that the companies would do business with black banks. The organization reportedly opened 2,500 jobs to blacks worth $16 million in its first 18 months.
“How do you measure progress?” Rose muses. “Inches, yards, percentage points? It was not what it could have been, but it was responsible for setting a lot of things in motion.”
Today, there is a vacant lot at the corner of 16th Street and Hamlin Avenue where King’s apartment building once stood. There is no sign or plaque to say an American hero once lived there among us.
Rev. Robin Hood was 3 years old when King moved into North Lawndale. He grew up a few blocks away and remembers how excited the neighborhood was when he arrived.
One evening in 1966, King walked into a nearby pool hall and shot a few racks with the guys, including Hood’s father, who bragged about that night until the day he passed away a few years ago. “My father said Dr. King knew how to talk to the people no matter what condition they were in,” Hood says. “That’s what I try to do. Be real and connect with folks. It’s the only way to organize.”
Hood works for the anti-violence program CeaseFire and is an organizer for ACORN, an association of community groups. The issues haven’t changed much since the days of King, he says. Housing, poverty, troubled schools still top the list. “There’s so much violence now,” Hood says. “Everybody has a gun. That’s different.”
There are also signs of progress. Hood points out the new town homes going up a block away from King’s old corner. “But who can afford them?” Hood asks. “Pretty soon they’re going to chase all the poor people out of Chicago. I should say, they’re going to try. We ain’t going anywhere.”
In November, Hood’s 42-year-old cousin was shot and killed as he pumped gas at a filling station not far from where King used to live. Hood organized an anti-violence vigil. “If Dr. King were here, he’d be right in the front of the march,” Hood says before the vigil. “You ask me, ‘Did King die in vain?’ The answer is no. He showed us the way. I have faith just like him. We shall overcome.”
A COUPLE OF weeks after the vigil, on a bright winter morning across town, a white man named James Capraro drives slowly around Marquette Park.
Since 1976, he has been executive director of the Greater Southwest Development Corp., a not-for-profit neighborhood group. It has developed senior-citizen housing, grocery stores, restaurants and other projects to keep the rapidly changing area “competitive for investment” after watching nearby neighborhoods go from working and middle class to struggling class almost overnight. “This neighborhood could have been an impoverished neighborhood, but it isn’t,” he says. “You could say we’ve made it to the pennant. Whether we ever win the World Series, I don’t know.”
Capraro grew up a block and a half from the park and has lived most of his 55 years in the neighborhood, watching it go from all-white to a place where whites are the minority. “We’re not the neighborhood we used to be,” he says. “And we’re not the neighborhood we’re becoming. We are always ceasing to be something and growing into something else.”
In the old days, the area around the park was the move-up-and-out destination for the white working class. Today its bungalows and two-flats are the destination for the black and brown working class. Capraro says the neighborhood’s racial and ethnic mix is roughly 40 percent African-American, 40 percent Hispanic and the rest white and Arab-American. Community meetings have gone from looking like a gathering of the European Union to a session of the United Nations.
He pulls his car to the curb to tell a ghost story. He points to a storefront day-care center across the street from the park. On Aug. 5, 1966, when King came to the park, the building housed a tavern. Capraro watched that day as someone distributed to the angry mob empty bottles from a wooden beer crate. Then people started hurling the bottles at the marchers over the line of police officers.
He saw members of the American Nazi Party running through the mob, encouraging people to throw more. He watched a pretty white teenage girl turn ugly as she jumped on the hood of a black couple’s car stopped at a light and tried to kick out the windshield. “I really felt,” he says, “that I witnessed evil that day.”
But, he says, most people in the neighborhood around the park stayed home. They weren’t evil; they were scared. “They pulled their shades, closed their doors, kept their kids inside. It was like trying to get through Katrina.”
He turns into the park. The wind carries the sound of a flock of honking geese and the songs of seagulls. There’s a black man jogging by and a white woman walking her dog. They pass each other on the path, nodding their heads ever so slightly.
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dterry@tribune.com
