Taylor Branch | Press — The Chicago Sun-Times

Press — The Chicago Sun-Times

How Daley and LBJ disrupted King's dream
BY TOM McNAMEE
January 16, 2006

So this is how it went down: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. never stood a chance in Chicago. Now we know.

When King came to Chicago in 1966, bringing his civil rights movement to the North, he squeezed out only a pathetic sop of a victory: a bland and toothless agreement to do this or that about neighborhood racial segregation.

Down South, King had won huge civil rights gains by going right over the heads of the local yokels and appealing to the White House for help. His Birmingham campaign led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His Selma campaign led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But when King took his show to Chicago, forget it. Nothing would come out of Washington. The fix was in.

Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Lyndon B. Johnson had reached a private understanding: As long as Daley backed Johnson and the war in Vietnam, LBJ wouldn't lift a finger for civil rights in Chicago.

And tough luck for King.

Historians, newspapermen and the average napping City Hall payroller have long understood the obvious -- that LBJ was smart enough not to cross Dick Daley, the most powerful mayor in the nation. But I never understood exactly just how explicit this pact was until a couple of hours ago while reading a new book about King, "At Canaan's Edge". It's the final book in a three-volume biography by Taylor Branch, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the trilogy's first volume.

He's just the president

While digging through an archive of phone conversations Johnson had secretly taped in the Oval Office, Branch discovered a doozy of one between Johnson and Daley, one that reveals Daley as a master of spin and deception.

"King's rally on a week from Sunday was 50 percent Johnson -- 'Johnson's a killer, Johnson's a destroyer of human life, Johnson is a killer in Vietnam,' " Daley warns the president.

The conversation took place on July 19, 1966, right in the middle of a particularly hot Chicago summer when King and his followers were marching through white neighborhoods almost daily, drawing rock-throwing, spitting, screaming crowds.

"He [King] is not your friend," Daley continues. "He's against you on Vietnam. He's a goddam faker."

Johnson tries to squeeze in a word. "What shape have you got King in?" he asks. "Is he about ready to get out?"

"I don't think so," replies Daley, who then reveals his plan to overwhelm King's movement with poverty programs. "We got rodent control, we got insects, we destroyed a thousand slum buildings in six months."

Daley again rips King for attacking Johnson on "the goddam foreign question" -- Vietnam -- and reminds the president who his real friends are.

"You don't run from people who have been your friends," the mayor says. "You stick with them."

And then Daley pledges his entire organization -- the then all-powerful Cook County Democratic Machine -- to support Johnson's Vietnam strategy.

"That's what I've been talking about with our leaders tonight," Daley says. "Eighty of them in the convention, and I told 'em the same thing. I told 'em, 'We don't run. We might be defeated, but we stand with Johnson on Vietnam. We stand for justice for all our people, and we also stand for law and order, and I'll be damned if we let anyone take over themselves the running of the city.' "

So what's Johnson supposed to say? What's he supposed to do? He's just the president, not Mayor Richard J. Daley.

"You're just as right as you can be, Dick," Johnson says. "And I'll support you."

And you have to wonder if King, wherever he was at that moment, was feeling the first twinge of a migraine.

It's the kind of rant that makes headlines: Daley Calls King "a Goddam Faker." When I read that quote in Branch's book, my first thought was that this is the smoking gun, the sure proof that Daley flat-out despised King, though he might flatter the man in public. This was the real Daley.

But when I asked Branch about that an hour or so later, interviewing him on the phone, he warned me about jumping to naive conclusions. One of Daley's great gifts, Branch reminded me, was that he knew how to play people.

"I don't know if Daley hated King that much, but he was certainly pushing the right buttons with Johnson," Branch said. "He was trying to make sure Johnson never undercut him."

Smaller, symbolic victories

What Daley said to Johnson wasn't even true, Branch said. King did oppose the Vietnam War but never blamed Johnson by name.

King went to Chicago knowing from the get-go he'd get no help from Washington, Branch said. He knew that Johnson, war or no war, would never side with him against Daley.

"The overwhelming difference with Chicago was that King did not frame that campaign as a national appeal," Branch said. "In every other campaign before and after, King tried to appeal to the whole country. He appealed to the federal government to help America live up to its ideals. He did it in Birmingham and Selma before Chicago, and he did it with the Poor People's Campaign after Chicago. But he couldn't do it in Chicago."

By that crucial measure, then, King fell on his face in Chicago. But he also succeeded, Branch argues, though in smaller and more symbolic ways.

The summit agreement King hammered out in Chicago pledged the local real estate industry, at least on paper, to end discriminatory practices, and it created the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, the respected fair housing group.

King also demonstrated that his tactics of nonviolent resistance could work in a big, tough and unruly Northern city -- even the street gang members didn't break ranks.

But most importantly, Branch says, the Chicago campaign forced the North to look in the mirror. And what they saw were hate-filled faces.

"King wanted to establish that America's race problem is not simply one of Southern ignorance," Branch said. "After Chicago, the whole nation had to sacrifice a measure of hypocrisy."

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