At Canaan's Edge (71 page)

To begin the new stage of nonviolent witness, fifty volunteers set up Friday outside F. H. Halvorsen Realty at the corner of Kedzie Avenue and South 63rd Street, but hecklers ten times their number gathered with such menace that Bevel aborted the vigil before midnight. He accepted an offer to leave in police vans, which touched off marathon debates with Al Raby about whether the ground for nonviolent witness had been abandoned or insufficiently prepared. Some workers stayed up to paint signs such as “All God's Children Need a Place to Live,” making sure their message would reach adversaries and the public alike, while others summoned reinforcements with extra warnings that this was no training exercise.

A column of 250 left New Friendship Baptist Church at ten o'clock on Saturday morning, July 30. They walked west from Halsted Avenue for twenty-four blocks along South 71st Street, turned north at Kedzie through a golf course, and emerged from pastoral Marquette Park at 67th Street, where several hundred angry white residents chanted, “Nigger go home!” Chicago police officers with nightsticks cordoned the route toward 63rd Street, but eggs, bottles, and rocks flew over them to strike the marchers with such force that Bevel and Raby turned back in pell-mell retreat without reaching Halvorsen Realty, one of twenty-three firms in the area that had refused to show properties to black or integrated test groups. New leadership arguments complicated the aftermath. Should the movement complain about lax police protection, at the risk of diluting its witness, or steel supporters to “receive” blows that dramatized the depth of hatred at the color line? Organizers mobilized to try again rather than surrender to violence.

Sunday afternoon, a caravan of automobiles parked under police guard at the foot of Marquette Park to facilitate the return trip. An escort of some two hundred officers in riot helmets guided 550 people up Kedzie into a waiting crescendo of neighborhood fury. The previous day's rocks escalated to cherry bombs and bricks. Some errant missiles went through store windows, but others felled victims. Sister Mary Angelica, a first-grade teacher at Sacred Heart School, went down unconscious and bleeding to cheers of “We got another one,” as movement marshals pushed through with her to a police cruiser bound for Holy Cross Hospital. Older residents aimed special venom at “white niggers”—roughly half the marchers—and pelted the police escorts as traitors. Chants of “white power” gave way to mob cries of “Burn them like Jews!” When a captain persuaded Raby to turn west for the shelter of a narrow tree-lined street, teenagers dashed through alleys for flank attacks, opened fire hydrants to drench the confined lines, and swarmed ahead to mass four thousand strong. A radio alarm from the Eighth District rallied police units citywide, but forty marchers and two officers had been carried off to the hospital when the besieged lines recrossed Marquette Park. Before Bevel and Raby could decide whether to risk dispersing to the parked cars, teenagers fanned out to slit tires, smash windows, and roll over vehicles bearing the telltale “End Slums” stickers. Dodging officers in pursuit, they set a dozen cars ablaze with Molotov cocktails and pushed two others into a pond on the golf course. Andrew Young saw the taillights of his rented Ford at the water line. Jesse Jackson said he had been hit three times but waved off questions about what happened. “I don't know,” he told reporters blankly on the forced return walk. Some of the dazed and weary joined a chorus of “We Shall Overcome” raised by supporters waiting at the Ashland Avenue color line.

The shock of Southern-style hate images, which made front pages everywhere, put Chicago's leaders under severe stress. Rabbi Robert J. Marx regretted his role as a community observer for the Chicago Federation of thirty-three Reform Jewish congregations, saying he had seen in the raging fears of ordinary parents and children “how the concentration camp could have occurred and how man's hatred could lead them to kill.” Marx wrote a pained confession about the difficulty of being a prophet close to home. “I was on the wrong side of the street. I should have been with the marchers.” The august
Chicago Tribune,
on the other hand, identified with the rampage of those “baited into a near-riot last weekend,” and drew battle lines against “the imported prophets of ‘nonviolence' who are seeking to incite trouble with marches into white neighborhoods.” Mayor Daley, caught in the middle, told neighborhood representatives from Chicago Lawn and Gage Park that community violence would only backfire against their worthy goal to end the unrest. His pleas for restraint—to let the marchers deplete their energy and go away—struck local leaders as mealy-mouthed bunk unworthy of America's strongest mayor. Many of them found it especially galling that Daley's police officers, widely known to them by their first names, were arresting the young white defenders rather than the uninvited strangers.

The mayor sent his black alderman to meet with Raby and King for the first time, creating a muffled fanfare that he was probing toward a settlement. Within the movement, daily housing tests in other areas stoked expectations that peaked Thursday night in a mass meeting of 1,700 people. “If there is any doubt in anybody's mind concerning whether we have a movement here in Chicago,” King told a live radio audience from New Friendship, “you ought to be in this church tonight!” Announcing that he would lead the next day's showdown personally—“My place is in Gage Park”—King addressed ethnic friction within the movement. Even if Jews or Catholics should reject his help, he pledged, “I would still take a stand against bigotry.” By the same token, he urged new white allies to uphold their principles in spite of distrust from unfamiliar, frustrated black people. “You ought to stand up and say, ‘I'm free and this is a free country and I believe in justice,'” King urged, “‘and I'm gonna be in the movement whether you want me or not.'” He acknowledged fatigue with a watchword of tenacity. “I
still
have faith in the future,” he said. “My brothers and sisters, I
still
can sing ‘We Shall Overcome.'”

On Friday afternoon, August 5, specially trained vanguards of twenty went ahead to establish picket lines outside Halvorsen and three other real estate companies along Kedzie. A huge body of 960 Chicago police deployed in riot helmets between the assembling march lines and some five thousand residents who had descended in advance to the northern edge of Marquette Park. Young men carried Confederate flags or crude handmade signs such as, “The Only Way to End Niggers Is Exterminate.” Noise built impatiently for the arrival of King, who was late as usual. No sooner did he emerge from a car at five o'clock than a perversely hostile chant broke out, “We want King! We want King!” Officers held the crowd back beyond the range of bricks but not rocks or cherry bombs, and screams answered the first explosions. Densely packed marchers moved forward awkwardly, some with bent arms shielding their heads. A palm-sized rock soon staggered King to the pavement, his chin propped on his left knee, which raised both shrieks of triumph and cries of fear. Pulled up to his feet, he flinched from a bang above the roar of voices. Officers and aides asked if he was all right. “I think so,” said King, swaying slightly just before the gunlike report of another cherry bomb made him duck again. He straightened up with a glazed stare, a lump swelling behind his right ear.

As the embattled columns moved slowly through Chicago Lawn toward Gage Park, families of mostly Italian, Lithuanian, and Polish origin emerged on bungalow porches to aim special abuse at vested Catholic clergy. One middle-aged woman ran alongside the black cleric George Clements until she collapsed, screaming, “You dirty nigger priest!” Marshals secluded Clements in one of the escort cars, which became a prime target for rocks. Back in the ranks, Rabbi Marx was struck by a rock as he kept his pledge to join some six hundred marchers. Up front, blood streamed from the broken nose of a volunteer bodyguard who shielded King with Raby, Lafayette, and Jesse Jackson. Ahead, a phalanx of seventy-five officers cleared a path through teenagers, one of whom retreated with the sign, “King Would Look Good with a Knife in His Back.” A knife that fell short pierced the shoulder of a heckler, who was hauled away among thirty casualties. King paused only briefly to salute and absorb steadfast pickets at the four real estate offices, curtailing ceremonies because of intensified bombardment in the commercial district.

By seven o'clock, when the three-mile march reentered Marquette Park under remorseless pursuit, Deputy Police Chief Robert Lynskey waited with a fleet of transit buses to speed evacuation and extra police to meet a new threat. “There are at least twenty-five hundred people up there,” he said, pointing to a knoll in the open park space. While nimble teenagers chased the buses—an undercover officer in one reported broken windows and injuries from flying glass—angry adults just home from work ran down to attack through gaps in the police line. Women poured sugar into gas tanks. Men set more vehicles on fire. A small group wrenched Father George Clements from his escort car and beat him until police intervened. A larger group of one hundred surrounded and pummeled six isolated officers until emergency help arrived. “The reinforcements came running, firing pistols in the air,” observed
New York Times
correspondent Gene Roberts, “and pummeling and clubbing whites with their nightsticks. ‘You nigger-loving S.O.B.'s,' said a middle-aged man in a green Ivy League style suit. ‘I'll never vote for Mayor Daley again.'”

Deprived of marchers, swirling bands stoned police cars until midnight while King consoled a stunned and disoriented crowd that filled New Friendship. He said it was a sad day for Chicago when people called nuns bitches. He explained again how he believed disciplined courage could bring social sickness into healing light, earned cheers with drumbeat vows that violence would not stop the movement, and endorsed plans to march in twenty neighborhoods like Gage Park. Dripping with perspiration, King left the church to face news cameras about the day of mayhem. “I have never in my life seen such hate,” he said. “Not in Mississippi or Alabama. This is a terrible thing.”

K
ING PREACHED
at Ebenezer on his way to the tenth annual convention of SCLC. One year after the triumphant celebration in Birmingham, when the Selma movement had melted national indecision about voting rights, a pervasive climate of violence paralyzed and even hardened the response to the Chicago marches. He marveled that gang marshals had batted down incoming missiles and insults on the marches with a uniform forbearance conceded by astonished police officers who despised them as thugs. “I saw their noses being broken and blood flowing from their wounds,” King remarked, “and I saw them continue and not retaliate—not one of them—with violence.” He hesitated to publicize the miracle reform, however, because the gang pact was unstable at best. A Vice Lord nicknamed “Duck” already threatened to shoot Bevel for over-praising his commitment to nonviolence. Tempers sizzled in church between rivals who had fortified themselves with alcohol to endure white attackers, and multiple strains closed New Friendship Baptist to future use by the civil rights coalition.

Lurid details of extraneous horror seeped from the arraignment of Richard Speck for the July 14 serial murder of eight nurses. In hiding, the twenty-four-year-old Dallas drifter had tried to commit suicide at a Chicago Loop flophouse that rented “fireproof” cubicles covered with chicken wire for ninety cents a night. Conflicted nurses at Cook County Hospital helped save his life for trial, but the first court appearance on August 1 eerily overlapped a landmark of terror on live television. From the high observation deck of a university tower in Austin, Texas, barricaded sniper Charles Whitman killed fourteen and wounded thirty-one random pedestrians before officers killed him. Stupefied viewers learned that the young ex-Marine left frank notes—“I don't really understand myself these days”—about murdering his wife and mother just beforehand to spare them the embarrassment of his plans. Four days later, a teenager said he shot a night watchman “to have fun like the guys in Chicago and Austin.” White Americans recoiled from a monstrous contagion among themselves. Crime statisticians soon added a new category for mass murder, and police departments invented SWAT teams. The news from Texas eclipsed Speck's “crime of the century” as well as the first White House family wedding since the era of Theodore Roosevelt.

On Monday, August 8, two days after Luci Johnson's marriage, King answered questions at an airport press conference about why his convention was in Mississippi if racial hatred was worse in Chicago. He described regional differences as subtle but important, arguing that Southern brutality “came in many instances from the policemen themselves,” whereas the Chicago police “are doing a good job of seeking to restrain the violence.” It was a relief in some respects for him to return to the clarity of outspoken segregationists. By tradition, Mississippi politicians had just launched the election season at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, where Deputy Cecil Price remained indicted, with every candidate jockeying to impress outdoor crowds. Governor Paul Johnson inveighed against “a dark and ominous cloud” unlike any normal political slogan—“Don't be fooled!”—calling black power “a storm that contains the thunder of terror…and harbors the seeds of a hurricane of hate and hostility that can sweep sanity aside.” State Auditor Hamp King welcomed a pendulum of change “back our way, away from the colored madness.” U.S. Senator James Eastland quoted J. Edgar Hoover that civil rights groups were “nothing but a hatchery for Communists,” heaped wry praise on the Yankee mayor of Chicago—“He said no, we're not gonna give you nothin'!”—and won his usual prize for foot-stomping laughter and acclaim with a caricature of the Meredith march. “I flew over the scene at 3,500 feet,” Eastland shouted, “and the marchers smelled up that high.”