Flashback:
THE HATETHAT DR MARTIN LUTHER EXPERIENCED IS NOW IN THE COURTS POLICE DEPARTMENT AND CITY HALL PERSONS OF COLOR ARE WORSE OFF NOW BECAUSE HOUSE NIGGERS ARE AT THE HELM POWERLESS.50 years ago: MLK's march in Marquette Park turned violent, exposed hate
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped out of a car in Marquette Park on Aug. 5, 1966, he was met by a crowd in an ugly mood. That was nothing new for King. During his civil rights crusade, he'd often faced Southern mobs. The year before, police and sheriff's deputies brutally attacked a march he'd organized in Selma, Ala. But he saw something even more menacing in the faces of the 700 white protesters who confronted him on Chicago's Southwest Side, on that August day 50 years ago.
"I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen here in Chicago," King told reporters afterward.
King and hundreds of demonstrators had scarcely set out on a march to promote open housing when he was struck by a rock. "The blow knocked King to one knee and he thrust out an arm to break the fall," the Tribune reported. "He remained in this kneeling position, head bent, for a few seconds until his head cleared." Aides and bodyguards closed in around King, holding placards aloft to shield him from the missiles that followed.
King and the demonstrators had hoped to reach a real estate office on nearby 63rd Street, intending to demand that properties be rented and sold on a nondiscriminatory basis in the all-white Chicago Lawn neighborhood. Only a few of them made it before a riot broke out. At least 30 people were injured, some by a hail of bricks and bottles accompanied by racial epithets. Some counterdemonstrators were clubbed by baton-wielding police officers. More than 40 people were arrested when a crowd of whites blocked adjoining streets and cursed the police, several of whom were hurt.
To some, the incident might have seemed a setback for King, the prophet of nonviolence. King saw it as all in a day's work.
"I have to do this — to expose myself — to bring this hate into the open," he said upon recovering from his injury.
King had come to Chicago to open a new front in the battle for racial justice. He had enlisted in that struggle during a 1955 boycott in Montgomery, Ala., of the public transportation system by blacks no longer willing to move to the back of the bus. King's powerful oratory made him the head of the emerging civil rights movement, and in the years that followed he campaigned against legally mandated segregation and for access to the ballot box denied to Southern blacks. By 1966, victory was in sight, if but dimly on the horizon. When Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson marked the historic occasion by handing King a pen with which he'd signed the legislation.
Yet to that point, the civil rights movement had scarcely been felt in the ghettos of Northern cities. Blacks had flocked to cities like Chicago hoping to escape Southern segregation, only to find that Jim Crow had followed them. By custom — sometimes enforced by violence — African-Americans were confined to inner city neighborhoods with rundown housing and overcrowded schools.
To publicize their plight, King moved into a shabby third-floor apartment on Chicago's West Side on Jan. 26, 1966. "We don't have wall-to-wall carpeting to worry about," he said of his new neighbors' living conditions. "But we have wall-to-wall rats and roaches."
The North Lawndale neighborhood, where King would maintain a symbolic presence for much of the year, had once been home to Jews, Czechs and Poles. But when blacks joined them, the older inhabitants left. Much the same occurred across the city, as the line separating black and white Chicago wasn't erased. It just moved a few blocks at a time. In its wake, it left blacks frustrated for having failed to escape segregation.
Among them was Percy Wilson, a construction worker who lived with his wife and children in a slum apartment in Lawndale. "I feel I live in a hog pen," Wilson told the Tribune in July 1966. "Sometimes I think I was better off in Mississippi."
King diagnosed the malady in a speech at Chicago's International Amphitheater on March 12. According to the Tribune's report, he urged blacks "to come forth out of your slum shock." And as action is a remedy for passive acceptance, he and his associates organized marches into all-white neighborhoods, producing headlines such as: "Crowds jeer at marchers on N.W. Side" and "King appears at 63D-Halsted boycott rally."
That intersection marked a shopping area that once was second only to the Loop. But when the city proposed replacing 297 buildings with a modern shopping center, black residents saw its purpose as creating "a no-Negro buffer zone."
Taking up their cause put King on a collision course with Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was leery of King. The destination of one open-housing march was Daley's home in the Bridgeport neighborhood. He was outraged at King's condemnation of the public schools. In some overcrowded schools, black children were taught in portable classrooms rather than allowing them to transfer to schools in white neighborhoods.
"It's criminal to have our children have the kind of education they are getting," King said. "There may be another Plato or Einstein in a Chicago school."
King also had black critics, including Dr. J. H. Jackson, a Chicago clergyman and president of the National Baptist Convention, a major black denomination. When three nights of rioting broke out on the West Side in July, Jackson joined Daley in blaming King for preaching civil disobedience. Neither noted that King repeatedly disavowed the Black Power Movement's embrace of violence.
On Oct. 6, Jackson pronounced King's Chicago demonstrations a failure. "Not one definite thing was accomplished," he said. In fact, Chicago was as segregated as when he had arrived. Yet perhaps it was during his stay here that a seed was sown that would ripen into a movement that eventually elected Chicago's first black mayor in 1983 and blossomed into the election of another black man from Chicago as president of the United States in 2008.
Accordingly, the 50th anniversary of King's march will be celebrated with various events in Marquette Park. Yet in a real sense, it's marked there daily in nearby streets where blacks and Latinos live in well-kept homes on blocks that King's opponents thought were destined to be slums if minorities moved there. On summer evenings, black, brown and white people shoot baskets in Marquette Park, and every layup and 3-pointer redeems a promise King made at a rally on the eve of his 1966 march.
"We are bound for the promised land," King told the crowd. "We will taste the honey of equality."
The Martin Luther King Jr. Living Memorial Project is planning events at Marquette Park to commemorate the 1966 march. More information is available at www.mlkmemorialchicago.org.
rgrossman@chicagotribune.com
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