Friday, August 25, 2006
The Chicago freedom movement at 40
Posted by Harold Henderson on Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 7:39 AM
Around this time in 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard J. Daley sat opposite one another at the negotiating table. King wanted fair housing in Chicago; Daley wanted the black leader's nonviolent demonstrations to end, as the hatred displayed by southwest-side whites was tarnishing the city's image.
In their book on Daley, American Pharaoh, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor quote the mayor's top housing advisor, James Downs, who reported on the meeting of the two leaders:
"I could just see the mayor decide at that moment how he was going to handle King, that he was going to lie to him. I could just see the moment in which he decided the only way he could get rid of the guy was to tell him a whole lot of lies."
The "summit agreement" both sides agreed to was vague and toothless. Its one lasting product was the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, which did yeoman work for racial integration before closing its doors June 2 of this year for lack of funding. (Fragments of its Web site continue a ghostly afterlife in Google caches, for the moment.)
The newsletter Poverty & Race devoted a special issue to King's sortie against northern prejudice. Contributors include James Ralph, Jr., Middlebury College history professor and author of the book Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement. Ralph does his best to make the difficult case that King's ambitious campaign was moderately successful, at least in the long view.
Former Chicago alderman and political scientist Dick Simpson describes Chicago's racial progress since 1966 as "slow but steady," but his honesty overcomes his optimism: "It may not seem like much to have gone from a segregation index of 94 percent to 86 percent." Considering that the movement's motto was "End the Slums," no, it doesn't. Simpson concludes realistically that Chicago is now governed by "a White/Latino coalition . . . although Latinos are distinctly the junior partners in the arrangement."
The national scene looks little better. The latest issue of In These Times asks, "How can the cultural force of hip-hop be directed to affect social change?" The answer that Glen Ford's article suggests is, nobody knows.
FYI: Audio interviews from participants and other experts on WBEZ's 848 here.
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I add, King's campaign was successful in at least one respect. Billions upon billions of dollars have been spent on social engineering demanding that the state decide where people live, rather than citizens using their own free will to make informed choices. We are currently living in a state where our Governor can demand that Kenilworth and Winnetka housing be affordable to all, and the State Senate approves his demands by an overwhelming majority, despite the absurdity of the decree. The Statist movement of the 1960's effectively destroyed middle class housing, and the liberal values of living where the individual choses, rather than the state choses. We are left in a bizzare housing situation today where "condos and crackhouses" haunt Chicago (and Evanston, and Oak Park) and the vast majority is left subsizing both. JBP
Ahhh...that would explain why you're living in Grant Park, making random false statements about legislative action. It all makes sense now.
Actually, no, I am neither living in Grant Park, nor making false statements about legislative action. However, like the vast majority of property owners without clout, I paying massive property taxes to an irresponsible State to fund their botched social engineering projects. JBP
Let's stick to the point of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Do you think that a property owner has the right to refuse to rent or sell to someone because of their skin color? Yes or no?
actually, nobody's taken away JBP's "free will," whatever that tendentiously implies: he can still "choose" to live in kenilworth or not, evanston or not, east chicago heights or not, west lawndale or not, sauk village or not ... it's just that none of these places any longer meet his exceptionally "high" (to put it as kindly as i can) fantasy standards too bad ... i think it's what we call "growing up," understanding that the world doesn't necessarily enable the demands we inflict on it, our rapacious DNA remaking it constantly in its own image--or at least trying to ... for which, in the larger "social engineering" sense, we probably ought to be thankful--that the world's still capable of fighting back incidentally, JBP's ability to "own" property at all (another fantastic notion!) is itself the result of yet another "social engineering" project of many centuries duration--legality skews in his favor, which it obviously doesn't have to, nothing "natural" or given about it at all so: whose interests does it serve?--a grand historical enigma ... but i'm sure he's happy to be on the still-more-or-less "winning" side--unless, of course, he'd prefer to switch?
Harold, I am in favor of property owners negotiating primarily on monetary terms with buyers. An owner would probably gets more money if he increased his criteria to a larger pool of potential buyers. I personnaly prefer selling property to the highest bidder, so I would get more money. Pat: I don't want the following people telling me where to live. 1) Rod Blagoevich 2) Jan Schakowsky 3) Julie Hamos 4) Jeff Schoenberg 5) Beth Coulson I do want the following people to tell me where to live: 1) My family Such a fantastic life I lead! We should all have such fantastic notions. JBP
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