Martin Luther King Jr.

In early April 1965 one of Martin Luther King's chief lieutenants, James Bevel, came to Chicago for a weekend of speeches, workshops on nonviolence, and fund raising. The triumphant march from Selma to Montgomery , Alabama , had occurred less than two weeks earlier, and as a key strategist of the Selma campaign, Bevel was greeted as a hero everywhere he went. By Sunday, as he awaited his turn to speak at a rally at Northwestern University , he was an exhausted conqueror. Yet he perked up when Studs Terkel, the event's emcee, introduced him. Known as one of the movement's most dynamic orators, Bevel rose to his reputation. In a piercing, tense voice, he transfixed the large crowd, surprising it by talking more about racism in the North than about racism in the South. He even predicted that 'the nonviolent movement in a few days, in a few weeks, in a few years will call on Chicago to address itself on the racist attitude that is denying Negroes the right to live in adequate housing." "We're going to have a movement in Chicago ," Bevel declared. "We plan to close [ Chicago ] down."

It was a prophetic speech. In less than five months, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young, encouraged by Bevel, announced that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had selected Chicago as the target of its first northern campaign. From late 1965 to mid-1967, King and SCLC teamed up with Al Raby and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), a federation of local civil rights groups, to form the Chicago Freedom Movement, an enterprise determined to root out racial injustice, particularly housing discrimination, in Chicago, to improve the quality of life for the city's black residents, and to prod the nation as a whole to combat urban ills.

The Chicago Freedom Movement also represented a decisive juncture in the civil rights revolution. As Bevel suggested to his Northwestern audience, the civil rights movement after the Selma crusade was about to enter a new phase, to shift its focus from the South to the North and from an attack on state-sanctioned denials of basic political and civil rights to an assault on social and economic inequities. The sweep of southern civil rights successes and the depth of despair in the northern ghettoes compelled Martin Luther King and SCLC to extend their civil rights ministry north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Through protest in Chicago , Martin Luther King and his allies had hoped to usher in a more generous, more equitable era for both blacks and whites. But they could not overcome the powerful forces and impulses dividing the races. The story of the Chicago Freedom Movement is one that speaks directly to our own time.

Nor was Chicago without some notable examples of collective action in the 1950s. In 1955 blacks picketed Chicago's City Hall to protest official inaction on the Trumbull Homes riots, in which angry whites attacked blacks who had just moved into a public housing complex located in an all-white South Side neighborhood. In the summer of 1960 thousands of marchers, led by Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph, descended upon the Republican National Convention in Chicago to demand a strong civil rights platform.