At Canaan's Edge (72 page)

With Coretta, King returned Monday night to Rankin County Airport. He went personally to draw along his Jackson police escort and provide what assurance he could for the keynote speaker, Edward Kennedy. The three of them drove back through hate leaflets and nails strewn on the roadway, declining to stop when flat tires stranded two police cruisers and several reporters from their convoy. (FBI agents estimated three hundred pounds of “what appeared to be 1¾" roofing nails,” and advised headquarters that Kennedy arrived safely at the King Edward Hotel despite nails in all four tires.) King tinkered hurriedly with his introduction of “a young man on the way up,” though Kennedy at thirty-four was only three years his junior. He praised his precocious legislative skill, noting how “this freshman senator earned the respect of his colleagues,” then presented Kennedy like a baptismal candidate as “the ninth child, the fourth and youngest son of proud parents.” Nearly a thousand SCLC delegates in the emotion-charged banquet hall erupted for one who dared to come among them looking so much like the revered, assassinated President. They stood to cheer when Kennedy asked why the nation would spend upward of $2 billion per month to make war in South Vietnam and not make “the same kind of effort for the twenty million people of the Negro race right here in America, whose freedom and future are also at stake?” They stood again when he cautioned against separatism: “If you isolate yourselves, you will be crippling your effectiveness in what is basically not a white or Negro cause, but an American cause.” The Kings rushed Kennedy back for a late-night departure that minimized the risk of his first visit to Mississippi.

A high fever sent King to bed for most of the convention with what Abernathy called “his virus, the one he always got during the tensest moment in a campaign.” He complained of depletion until Stanley Levison mollified him with rosy predictions for mail solicitations and a new book contract. (“We're at a real turn in the movement,” Levison said on a wiretapped line. “A lot of people are confused…this is the time when a book can be useful.”) King sent Andrew Young in his stead to deliver a downbeat president's address, which acknowledged a broad shift of interest from race to Vietnam and claimed grim success already for one of the prime objectives of a Northern movement: to break down persistent illusions that race was a regional rather than national issue. “Chicago has proven that not long can one section of this nation wallow in pious condemnation of another,” Young declared, “while it practices worse atrocities against its black citizens.”

In King's absence, the delegates passed a resolution to support a guaranteed income base for all Americans. They ratified Al Lowenstein and Charles Morgan as the first two white board members, and bid farewell to staff members departing from movement fatigue. Among them, King apologized to the fastidious program director Randy Blackwell for SCLC's “non-existent structural and organizational foundations” to manage the avalanche of daily crises across the South. A youth group in Jackson was petitioning SCLC for help with city swimming pools still closed to evade the civil rights law, and Hosea Williams, who risked his life to integrate Grenada's public library, left Blackwell a trail of browbeaten colleagues, bail bills, and complaints from rental companies about cars he had lost, wrecked, or abandoned.
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King nearly always tolerated backwash from his quarrelsome, headstrong lieutenants as the price of creative tension essential to a movement—and teased Andrew Young for being so “normal” that he would teach people to adjust to segregation—but the unruly competition exacted a toll. On his sickbed, King learned that his latest staff prodigy had committed him impulsively to a suicidal march.

Jesse Jackson idolized, imitated, and almost literally absorbed King. On his first staff trip to Atlanta, lodged in King's home for lack of money, he had explored tirelessly the nexus between theology and movement politics, nearly always answering his own questions before the nonplussed host could reply. Andrew Young among others resented but admired his urge to take charge, which was vital and irrepressible like a wonder of nature. Jackson churned out sermons and strategy papers for the Chicago movement framed in King's grand language, and he synthesized the tactical flair of nonviolent mentors Lafayette and Bevel, especially Bevel's gift for poetic flights of imagination. In the aftershock of Gage Park, Jackson cut through backroom disagreements about whether to continue or suspend the marches. He plumbed layers of historical degradation before a mass meeting at Warren Avenue Congregational Church. “I have counted up the cost,” Jackson solemnly concluded. “My life. Bevel's life. Even Dr. King's life. Over and against the generation and the continuation of a kind of sin that's going to internally disrupt this country and possibly the world.” He spread his arms in surrender. “I counted the cost!” Jackson shouted. “I'm going to Cicero!”

Apoplexy flashed through Chicago. Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie announced that the response of his suburban jurisdiction “would make Gage Park look like a tea party.” In May, teenager Jerome Huey had been beaten to death on a Cicero street when his job interviews extended past dusk. While movement leaders gritted their teeth over the freelance outburst, Bevel gamely supported Jackson in public. “They can buy tanks and they can arm every child,” he declared, “but we are going to Cicero.”

H
OWLS AGAINST
the daily vigils put Cicero in abeyance, and a month's upheaval since the Soldier Field rally buckled major figures on all sides. On August 10, “with a heavy heart,” Archbishop Cody of Chicago called for a moratorium on demonstrations to prevent loss of life. His edict exonerated the marchers—“They have not been guilty of violence and lawlessness, others have”—repeated his seminal blessing for their “Open City” principles, and went so far as to confess a contravention of moral order. “It is truly sad, indeed deplorable, that the citizens should ever have to be asked to suspend the exercise of their rights because of the evil doing of others,” the archbishop declared. “However, in my opinion and in the opinion of many men of goodwill, such is the situation in which we now find ourselves.”

Chicagoans debated whether Cody had defected from the movement, come to his senses, or succumbed to a runaway revolt in his diocese. Intermediaries crisscrossed the city with feelers toward settlement. Walter Reuther among others relayed proposals to King and Al Raby in Mississippi. Mayor Daley welcomed Cody's stand but pursued multiple avenues toward relief. With every neighborhood march, his subordinates were reporting wholesale erosion of support for the fall reelection of Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, a prominent supporter of President Johnson's open housing bill. Challenger Charles Percy had safely endorsed one item from the list King taped to City Hall—replacement of the “absentee” Democratic precinct captains assigned to black neighborhoods—which infuriated the mayor as cross-party tampering by a Republican. Beyond the Douglas-Percy contest, continued marches so threatened his political base that Daley himself initiated peace talks. When the president of the Chicago Real Estate Board stalled a request to convene them, fearing correctly that the mayor sought to sidestep the public spotlight, Daley enlisted the prestigious Chicago Conference on Religion and Race. Named for the ecumenical assembly in January of 1963, at which King met Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the CCRR was the home chapter of the commission formed since by the National Council of Churches. Rev. Robert Spike, ex-director of the parent group, had relocated from New York just in time to be drafted with pillars of the local clergy.

Paradoxically, the prospect of talks heightened tension. The American Nazi Party warned of race betrayal at a Chicago rally, spawning a mob that attacked police officers. Newspapers and some marchers bridled at continued demonstrations now that civilized compromise lay within reach, while others discerned plots to puncture the movement with false hope. Seven hundred people with eight hundred police guards entered the Bogan neighborhood on August 12, when, by coincidence, John Lennon was apologizing downtown for long-ago remarks about Jesus before an evening concert to begin the Beatles' last American tour.
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Twelve hundred people survived simultaneous marches two days later into three different neighborhoods, led by Raby, Bevel, and Jesse Jackson. On Tuesday, August 16, vigils drew hostile crowds to six real estate offices in Jefferson Park, and pickets formed at selected sites throughout the Chicago Loop. “We are here,” read signs outside an imposing structure at Dearborn and Madison, “because the Savings and Loan Associations refuse to loan money to Negroes who wish to buy beyond the ghetto.” Most bystanders shunned, but some spontaneously joined, the teaching demonstrations about broad institutional resistance.

Summit negotiators filed Wednesday morning into the Cathedral House of St. James Church, Chicago's oldest Episcopal congregation(1857). Sealed from the press, forged by public crisis, the biracial mix of potentates, Quakers, and shop stewards was scarcely imaginable before nor likely ever again. Men occupied all fifty-six seats around a giant horseshoe of tables. Ben Heineman of the Chicago North West Railroad, who had chaired the White House Conference in June, presided by request of the CCRR clergy. Clark Stayman, president of the Chicago Mortgage Bankers Association, said his members accepted the movement's guidelines for equal housing loans. Mayor Daley agreed to each of the six demands that required city action, centering on enforcement of the dead-letter fair housing ordinance of 1963.

Soaring hope collided with the Chicago Real Estate Board, whose executives said their members acted merely as agents for property owners, and could no more betray their clients by showing listings to black people than Martin Luther King could endorse segregation. “You can accuse us as though we created that bigotry until the end of the world,” said Arthur Mohl, “but we are not the creators. We are the mirror.” King objected that the real estate industry had spent $5 million to repeal California's fair housing law by Proposition 14. Only the day before, he added, Attorney General Katzenbach had told him that lobbying expenditures to kill the federal housing bill could cure the slums of a major city. “Now don't tell me you're neutral,” King said sharply. “Leadership has got to say that the time for change has come.”

Industry spokesmen deflected pressure by casting doubt on Mayor Daley's promise that the Chicago Housing Authority would disperse public housing units outside the ghetto. CHA director Charles Swibel, while emphasizing his loyal commitment to initiate the process, described so many obstacles to the necessary site approvals that he foresaw a need for more ghetto high-rises in the meantime. His equivocation prompted Al Raby to move for summary dismissal, but Daley secured a recess. Aides leaked to reporters a terse sentence from his ensuing phone call to president Ross Beatty of the Chicago Real Estate Board: “In the interest of the City of Chicago, you cannot come back here this afternoon with a negative answer.”

When they reconvened, Beatty's discourse turned hushed expectation to puzzlement. “We've heard your statement,” Raby responded, “but we're not sure what you're saying.” On cross-examination, Beatty clarified that his board refused to modify established positions, such as the Real Estate Board's legal attack on the 1963 ordinance, but indicated a willingness to “withdraw all opposition to the philosophy of open occupancy at the state level—provided it is applicable to owners as well as to brokers.” Bevel dismissed the maze of qualification. “The question is whether Negroes are going to be served in your office tomorrow morning,” he said. Arguments shifted erratically. Jesse Jackson pressed the real estate executives to seek King's “theological level.” Mayor Daley asked again why the movement picked Chicago. Rev. Spike complimented the “profound” change in Beatty's stance. Charles Hayes of the United Packinghouse Workers cautioned Spike: “If I as a union negotiator ever came back to my men and said to them, ‘I got the company to agree that philosophically they were in support of seniority,' I'd be laughed out of court.”

By evening, King implored exhausted negotiators to let a delegated subcommittee advance the day's “constructive and creative” start, understanding that marches would continue. “Let me say that if you are tired of demonstrations, I am tired of demonstrating,” he asserted. “I am tired of the threat of death. I want to live.” He said marches no more created the problem than a doctor caused a cancer by finding it. “I hope we are here to discuss how to make Chicago a great open city, and not how to end marches,” he continued. “We've got to have massive changes. Now, gentlemen, you know we don't have much. We don't have much money.” He reviewed the grim shortages of training and advantage among movement people. “We have only our bodies,” said King, “and you are asking us to give up the one thing we have when you say, ‘Don't march.' We want to be visible…. If we hadn't marched, I don't think we'd be here today. No one here has talked about the beauty of our marches, the love of our marches, the hatred we're absorbing.” A skeptical delegate asked how more talks could resolve the impasse, and Chairman Heineman gaveled adjournment with stolid ambiguity. “The purpose of the subcommittee,” he declared, “is to come back with proposals designed to provide an open city.”

News outlets considered the summit a failure, quoting Mayor Daley's bitter regret that “there does not seem to be a cessation of the marches.” In seclusion, King appraised Daley as a decent man, fixated on control, “about my son's age in understanding the race problem.” Thursday night, he exhorted a mass meeting at Mount Hope Baptist Church to prepare overnight for marches and reprisals. Bevel tweaked the mayor by vowing to keep up the neighborhood demonstrations “until every white person out there joins the Republican Party.” On Friday, August 19, as movement teams tested racial barriers at one hundred real estate offices, including several in Daley's home area of Bridgeport, the mayor sent lawyers to Chancery Court Judge Cornelius J. Harrington, a political vassal, and obtained within two hours a sweeping injunction to ban more than one demonstration per day, strictly confined between the daylight rush hours. News of the court order interrupted the first session of the summit subcommittee, and prompted an outraged Robert Spike to suggest aborting the talks for breach of faith. Bevel and Raby restrained him with the argument that dramatic action by either side raised the crisis toward resolution. In Birmingham and Selma, crippling injunctions had preceded historic national breakthroughs. In Chicago, announced Raby, “The issue is still justice in housing.”