Much has changed in 50 years. Racial boundaries have fallen, or at least shifted dramatically. Today, it is split almost evenly between blacks and Hispanics, with relatively few whites and a small but growing number of families from the Middle East. Institutionalized discriminatory practices like redlining are a thing of the past, and blacks have come to hold positions of power throughout the city and country, including the highest office in the land.
Much has stayed the same, too. Many Chicagoans today see Laquan McDonald—fatally shot by an officer last year, some 30 blocks from the house where King lived—as the supreme symbol of that abuse.
But in many ways he embodied, in both life and death, the whole range of problems that King had hoped to overcome. Born to a year-old mother, McDonald bounced around foster homes before living with his great-grandmother in subsidized housing on the Far West Side; he attended some of the worst public schools in the city, and by the time he was 12, he had plunged into the world of drugs and gangs. Like a politician, Black shakes hands all the way to our table in the back of the restaurant.
An acclaimed civil rights activist, educator, and historian, Black is a walking encyclopedia. Over lunch, Black gives me a history lesson. This influx reshaped the city demographically and socially as much as its skyscrapers altered it physically.
Many whites met these changes with hostility. Chicago was hardly the racial haven Southern blacks had been seeking. Ghettos became the most visible legacy of the Great Migration.
In the s, white real estate agents introduced restrictive covenants, which made it illegal for homeowners in all-white neighborhoods to sell or rent to blacks. Black families began to cluster in a part of the Near South Side that came to be called the Black Belt, later nicknamed Bronzeville. But by midcentury, Black explains, exclusionary real estate practices had turned Bronzeville into a crowded ghetto.
Even after the U. Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants unenforceable, discriminatory schemes to keep blacks out of white areas persisted. The most notorious was redlining, the refusal of banks and insurance firms to issue or insure mortgage loans in predominantly black neighborhoods, which would often get delineated on city maps with a red line.
As the black population grew, the Black Belt eventually loosened, and blacks started pushing into white neighborhoods often paying double the market value for white-owned homes. Many whites sold quickly and left, most often for the suburbs. Many of its graystone blocks had been replaced by the two-mile stretch of bleak concrete towers known as the Robert Taylor Homes or by the eight massive apartment blocks of Stateway Gardens.
I start fumbling for a response, but he stops me. Whatever the underpinnings—racial, economic, or both—this was the status quo King was seeking to upend.
Richard J. Daley controlled virtually every lever of power in the city. Persuade Daley of the rightness of change, Bevel and others argued, and the whole city would change along with him. Change Chicago, and the rest of the country would follow. The task of finding King a place to live fell to his assistant, Bernard Lee. King had expressed a desire to live on the West Side.
Lee and a young secretary named Diana Smith, who had grown up in North Lawndale, posed as a house-hunting couple and, after a week of looking at apartments in and around that neighborhood, settled on the flat at South Hamlin Avenue.
Lee signed the lease before the landlord realized who the real occupant would be. Try reflecting all of that in the minutes! But first we had to define the prize — to decide where we were trying to go and how to get there. Both were tests of our coalition-building ability. Hogan said some of the lessons of the CFM and the civil rights struggles of the 60s are applicable today. The only way they can be defeated is by building a broad-based coalition of the victims and intended victims of that attack.
Martin Luther King Jr. The Du Bois Clubs were a broad-based pro-socialist youth organization named in honor of Dr. Du Bois, African-American sociologist, writer, activist and Communist.
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Vivian, Mahalia Jackson, Al Raby. Through lending discrimination and, in some instances, outright violence and intimidation, African Americans were kept out of the vast majority of predominately or all-white middle class neighborhoods in the city. On January 7, , King and the SCLC announced plans for a Chicago Freedom Movement, a campaign that marked the expansion of their civil rights activities from the South to northern cites.
King and his family moved to a Chicago slum at the end of January to bring attention to housing conditions of tens of thousands of black Chicago residents while CCCO organized mass nonviolent protests in the city. Jesse Jackson. Operation Breadbasket targeted companies and corporations working in African American neighborhoods that nonetheless refused to hire black employees. On August 5, , during a march at Marquette Park, an all-white Chicago neighborhood, to promote open housing, black and white demonstrators were met with intense racially-fueled hostility.
Bottles and bricks were thrown at them. This is part three of a five-part series, original airdate May 13, Chicago News. Chicago School Closings. Illinois Stuns No. October, School boycott.
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