Remembering Dr. King

Chicago, Chicago, that racist town.
Chicago, where some of the whites who seemed horrified when Black
protesters were met with dogs and fire hoses in the South joined
rioting white mobs when Blacks tried to move into their neighborhoods.

Officially, Chicago schools were integrated. Actually, because children
went to neighborhood schools, Black schools were overcrowded, many
operating on double shifts, while hundreds of classrooms in white schools
stood empty. Civil Rights leaders and neighborhood organizers led protests
against the inadequate education of Black children all through the early 1960's,
demanding reform of the school system, the ouster of Chicago School
Superintendent Benjamin Willis and the trailer classrooms he'd ordered used
for the Black schools, calling the trailers "Willis Wagons".

But the schools would not be integrated until the neighborhoods were
integrated. Blacks were penned up in the large ghettos on the south and
west sides, and kept there through the collusion of real estate agents,
landlords, and the Chicago City Government which was run by the
Democratic Machine with Mayor Richard J. Daley at the helm. The slum
housing in the ghettos was profitable. Apartments were carved up and rents
doubled. With building inspectors paid off, buildings need not be maintained,
but could be milked until they collapsed or burned.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., announced the campaign for open housing in
Chicago when he spoke to a crowd of about 50,000 at a 1966 rally at
Soldier's Field, then he led thousands of us to City Hall where he posted
a list of demands to the door, an action reminiscent of that of an earlier
Martin Luther. I remember the little Black school children racing along
the sidewalks and threading through the marchers in the streets, and the
songs we sang as we marched: "Go tell Mayor Daley, we shall not be
moved.."

Dr. King and some of his aides had moved into a slum apartment on the
West Side to call attention to the shameful living conditions of the majority
of Chicago Blacks. Daley continued to proclaim there was no segregation
in Chicago, that the "minorities" lived where they lived because they wanted
to, but building inspectors, who usually winked at violations while accepting
payoffs, cracked down on the owner of the building Dr. King occupied, and
repairs began on that building.

Dick Gregory, who had been involved in some of the protests against Willis
and school segregation, led small daily marches all that summer after the big
rally and march to City Hall. I was working part-time. My children were with
their father. Three or four days a week I would hop on a bus or el after calling
someone to learn where to go that day.

Gregory was performing in San Francisco, flying back home every night to his
family, then out to walk with us every day. While we assembled, waiting a few
minutes for stragglers, he told us jokes. We were getting free what patrons of
the hungry i had to pay to hear. I only remember something about one joke; it
had to do with aliens coming to earth, seeing people putting gas hose nozzles
into their cars and believing that must be the way earthlings had sex.

After the jokes, we would start walking, sometimes 30 or 40 of us, sometimes
as many as 75, always on the sidewalks, for we had no permit for use of the
streets. There were always two or three nuns in their black habits near the
head of the march and some white men from protestant churches, but most of
the marchers on the days I went were Black. One older man carried one child
and led another, grandchildren he watched while his daughter worked. By the
end of the day, several others would have taken turns carrying the small
children. We carried signs and sang freedom songs, threading our way through
all-white northside neighborhoods or walking around in the Loop, stopping
traffic when we streamed across the streets when the light turned green, but
intent on staying together, we continued to walk across after it turned red.

There were always some of "Chicago's finest" along, sometimes accompanying
us on their motorcycles, or keeping pace on the sidewalk across the street from
us. Plainclothesmen, members of Chicago's infamous Red Squad, or Police
Intelligence, shadowed us, parking nearby, then driving past to park just ahead
of us.

One day, when the police were especially harassing, Gregory moved quickly
down the line of marchers handing out quarters. Then he led the way into a
subway station. We rode for a few blocks, then resumed peacefully walking
the sidewalks with no policemen herding us along.

I wasn't along the day they marched through Mayor Daley's neighborhood,
Bridgeport. We never knew to where we would march, only the place we
would meet, so that was not what kept me away. Daley's white neighbors,
many of whom were on the city payroll, threw eggs and stones. Like Daley,
most were Catholic, but that did not keep them from splattering a priest with
eggs and saliva. I was told later about the song Daley's neighbors sang:
Oh, I'd love to be an Alabama trooper,
That is what I'd really like to be,
For if I were an Alabama trooper,
I could shoot a nigger legally.

I had to be told about what happened. Reporters did not report the mob
action, there were no scenes of angry folks in Bridgeport on the evening
news.

There was more violence when Dr. King led us, a much larger group than
had daily followed Dick Gregory, into the all-white working-class community
of Gage Park. Dr. King was hit in the head by a rock. Crowds of jeering
whites called insults and threw more stones and bottles. Policemen held them
back and the marchers stayed together while we walked out.

Later that year I needed to find another apartment, but was having no luck.
I would grab the daily paper and turn to the classifieds, but every place
I called I was told the apartment had been rented.

I was making another futile call from work when my co-worker at the desk
behind me overheard.

"Let me try," she said, holding out her hand for the ad. She was given
an appointment to look at the apartment that I had been told was no longer
available.

"It's your southern accent," she said. "They think you're Black." She was
Jewish.

Shortly after Dr. King was assassinated and the Black riot-rebellions that
followed, Congress passed a watered-down version of an open housing bill
that it had been sitting on for a long time. And the Chicago City Council
voted to name a street Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive.

But the Chicago Democratic Machine and the real estate interests- the two
intertwined and overlapping and sharing power- won on the final count.
Federal money was used for massive "urban renewal" programs that
demolished affordable apartments and gentrified neighborhoods where
only a few Black professionals and no white working-class folks could live.

When I was in Chicago two years ago, Cabrini-Green, that notorious
vertical ghetto, had been reduced to rubble. There had been rumors for
years about how real estate interests coveted the land just west of the
Loop for rich suburbanites who wanted to move back into the city.

There are Plans to tear down all 53 housing projects, displacing some
40,000 people, mostly Black, by 2009. The condominium craze that
began more than 30 years ago resulted in many of the affordable
apartments formerly occupied by working-class families being
converted into expensive housing that was for sale, not for rent.

Townhouses selling for $500,000 to $700,000 have been erected near
Cabrini-Green, with plans to build more. A few units with subsidized rents
(and with formidable requirements and restrictions for [potential renters)
were built, but not enough to house the thousands of displaced families.
Some reports indicate that many have migrated to other segregated areas,
to neighborhoods that are 90 percent or more Black. Nobody seems to
know how or where the rest are going to live.