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King's Final Years
As the shadows fell, King looked north. It was the beginning of the end.
By Jonathan Alter
Jan. 9, 2006
Forty years ago this winter, I was an 8-year-old boy growing up on the North Side of Chicago. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had moved into a slum in the impoverished West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale to dramatize the conditions of what were then known as "Northern Negroes." King was scheduled to visit the home of a local politician to raise money for his cash-strapped movement from white "lakefront liberals." But the politician, caught between his personal sympathies for King and his allegiance to Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was no fan of the civil-rights leader, felt uncomfortable hosting the party. So he called up my parents and, to my delight, the event was moved to our house at the last minute. The fund-raising was "disappointing," according to my father's diary, and King spent most of the evening on our telephone. But I got the great man's autograph and we heard him deliver an eloquent talk while standing in front of several dozen guests in our living room. At such events that year, King would sometimes scrawl a reminder to himself: "Ad lib 'We Shall Overcome'."
This all came to mind while reading "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68," the third and final volume of Taylor Branch's magisterial account of the most important social movement of the 20th century, which lasted only 13 years—from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to King's death at age 39 in 1968. It made me think anew about how much has changed for African-Americans living in places like Chicago, and how little. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the unfinished agenda of the 1960s is under discussion again, if not in Washington then at least among the legions of local leaders still trying to better their communities.
Branch's book, to be published this month, shows us King not as a plaster saint but an intuitive, conflicted and harried human being—running late to everything, refereeing among squabbling lieutenants, straying from his wife to the end, even slipping out to catch what one of his traveling aides said was his favorite movie, "The Sound of Music."
But we also see that even after he became world-famous, King had reason to call his movement a civil-rights struggle. Branch conveys in powerful detail the dramatic, chaotic, inspiring and incendiary era, from the triumphant Selma-to-Montgomery march to the passage in 1965 of the landmark Voting Rights Act and little-noticed end to discrimination against the Third World in immigration (which reshaped the face of America); from the pathos of Lyndon Johnson—caught between his breathtaking commitment to fighting injustice and the worsening Vietnam War—to the backlash against liberalism represented by Ronald Reagan's election as governor of California, and finally to King's eerie "I might not get there with you" premonition at the Mason Temple in Memphis on the night before his assassination.
For me, though, the central story of the last act of King's life takes place in Chicago. He lived there on and off for much of 1966, trying to take his movement of nonviolent civil disobedience to the next level. He failed. "It is in Chicago that the grapes of wrath are stored," King said as he launched what he called the "action phase" of his agenda. But the wrath at loose in American society derailed the civil-rights movement and left a generation politically adrift. Branch's research suggests that 1966 was the year the liberal dream began to disintegrate.
King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, came to Chicago at the suggestion of Al Raby, a teacher and community activist who had led demonstrations against the severely segregated school system. The SCLC saw Chicago as "the first significant Northern freedom movement" and the first focused on economic discrimination more than voting rights or public access: "This economic exploitation is crystallized in the SLUM... not unlike the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium." The movement to "end slums" and create an "open city" ran straight into middle-class Chicagoans, all-white trade unions and real-estate agents as racist as anything found in the South.
On Jan. 26, 1966, King, his wife, Coretta, and their four children moved into a third-floor walk-up at 1550 South Hamlin in North Lawndale, by then known as "Slumdale." Once a middle-class Jewish neighborhood, the area had filled up with blacks streaming north after World War II. The entryway of the building on Hamlin was used as a toilet by the neighborhood, and the apartment was tiny. "You had to go through the bedrooms to get to the kitchen," Coretta remembered. The landlord had quickly slapped a coat of paint on the apartment when he learned the identity of his new tenants (originally signed up under a false name), but it didn't help much.
The Northern campaign went into high gear with a rally at Soldier Field and a march to city hall, where King, like Martin Luther before him, nailed his 14 demands (for things like open housing and jobs in all-white industries) to the door. At first, Daley was conciliatory. He claimed that the problems all predated him and that he had already repaired more than 100,000 apartments. When a summer riot broke out in North Lawndale (Coretta told the children to back away from the windows), the mayor sought a truce with token concessions like fire-hydrant nozzles so black kids could cool off. King held all-night talks with gang leaders and Justice Department officials in the same room, but his commitment to nonviolence was belittled by newer "Black Power" leaders like Stokely Carmichael as "too Sunday-school."
The point of the Chicago campaign was to show race as a national problem, and it did so with a bang when King led an integrated group of marchers into the racist enclave of Marquette Park. "I have never in my life seen such hate," said King, who was hit by a rock there. "Not in Mississippi or Alabama." But unlike the battle with Alabama state troopers the year before at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, marches into Marquette Park (and later into the white suburb of Cicero) led to no national catharsis or landmark legislation. Congress defeated a new civil-rights bill that would have banned housing discrimination (it finally passed in 1968). Although Northern authorities—the National Guard and Daley's police—defended the marchers rather than attack them, a backlash against the movement was setting in. "Don't you find," Mike Wallace asked King on CBS News, "that the American people are getting a little bit tired, truly, of the whole civil-rights struggle?"
In 1965, King had shed a tear while watching LBJ proclaim "We shall overcome" on national television. But by mid-1966, Daley skillfully drove a wedge between King and Johnson, who would never meet again. "He [King] is not your friend," the mayor told the president. "He's against you on Vietnam. He's a goddamn faker." Even though he was privately against the war, too, Daley pledged his support for Johnson's escalation. In Chicago he outmaneuvered King by talking moderately but doing little. "Daley cut Martin Luther King's ass off," said Bayard Rustin, a more senior movement leader.
Branch does not see Chicago as a total loss. While the open-housing settlement reached there didn't end segregation, it began a process of change. Moreover, "Chicago nationalized race," Branch writes. "Without it King would be confined to posterity more as a regional figure." But it also marked the effective end to nonviolence as a potent force in the civil-rights movement.
The 40 years since have been a time in the desert for the movement, bereft of strong leadership and the clarity of the fight against Jim Crow segregation. As the country saw in Katrina's wake, Washington long ago moved on from a serious engagement with the problems of poverty. "There has been a hurricane of neglect for the poor in this country for decades," says Richard Townsell, executive director of the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation. Meanwhile, the consequences of family disintegration, which King well understood, have been, if anything, more severe than Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others in the 1960s predicted.
Yet it is simply inaccurate to say that every period since King has been what he called a "valley moment." The Voting Rights Act transformed American politics, and the growth of the black middle class has changed the lives of millions of families. While New Orleans got worse, Chicago got better. Today it's a much healthier city than it was in Boss Daley's time, thanks in part to his son, Richard M. Daley, who has been mayor since 1989, and his predecessor, Harold Washington, the city's first African-American mayor.
While Chicago's public-school system remains troubled and stubbornly segregated, it now boasts several highly successful schools and realistic hope for more. Housing, too, is still largely segregated by neighborhood and is unaffordable for the poor and working class, with long waiting lists for subsidies. But notorious housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green have been mostly torn down and replaced by townhouse-style public housing units, a third of them owned by the residents.
Equally important have been public-private efforts spearheaded by a little-known but influential national nonprofit called the Local Initiative Support Corporation, chaired by former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin. Since 1980, LISC's Chicago affiliate has quietly invested $120 million—and leveraged an additional $2.4 billion—in inner-city development, which has translated into 21,000 units of affordable housing and 4 million square feet of commercial space. They lack the drama of freedom marches, but stronger ties between the corporate world and dedicated community leaders are now the proven routes to urban revival. A drive down Martin Luther King Boulevard on the South Side, a thoroughfare of despair as recently as the 1980s, now yields glimpses of rehabbed million-dollar mansions and thriving retail stores. Ernest Gates, a community leader on the once burned-out near West Side, told me that "things are a lot better here now, though for the poorest of the poor, it's still pretty much the same."
North Lawndale, where King once lived, doesn't look much different than it did 40 years ago. I saw four young men in hooded parkas spread-eagled by police against a wall on Hamlin Avenue in what looked like a drug bust, directly across the street from the onetime King slum, now an empty lot. Nearly 60 percent of those over 18 have had some kind of involvement with the criminal-justice system, with the number much higher among men. More than 40 percent of North Lawndale households have incomes of less than $15,000 a year (compared with 20 percent of all city residents). Fewer than a third have bank accounts. Many residents are still unable to "grow from within," in King's words, by resisting self-destructive behavior and the "gangsta" culture.
But North Lawndale is changing, too. It's still mostly poor and black, but much less densely populated, down two thirds in size since 1960, to 41,000. The first shopping center in four decades was built in 2000, and nonprofit organizations are building a bit of new housing.
Near King's old haunts, I watched ex-convicts sitting at computer screens inside the LISC-backed North Lawndale Employment Network, printing resumes and looking for work. Many have problems with bad debt. "A job alone is not the answer—that was my big 'Aha!' " says Brenda Palms Barber, who runs the nonprofit and is teaching entrepreneurship skills to local residents (including placing beehives on empty lots that yield 4,000 pounds of profitable honey). "It's mental health, general health. The big missing piece is about financial education." A program in Chicago called First Accounts is focusing on a neglected segment of the poor now known as the "unbanked." When they do get accounts, their balances are small, but the vast majority have learned to be creditworthy.
You don't hear much about Martin Luther King in Chicago nowadays. The activists in North Lawndale hope to build a civil-rights museum in his name at 1550 South Hamlin, though they don't have the money for it yet. Few Chicagoans think about the time he spent in their midst, if they remember it at all. In most parts of the country, King is now just a name like Roosevelt or Washington, a holiday on which to do some shopping. And yet books like "At Canaan's Edge" remind us that his challenge to America to "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed" remains a powerful vision in a troubled world, as resonant today as when an 8-year-old boy watched him stand before his fireplace so many years ago.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.