Home truths: Dr. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement - Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement of the 1960s

upon Friday evening, August 5, 1966 Martin Luther King Jr was tired and torn by dint of competing emotions. He had stripped not on the jacket of his gray suit and remov his r and gray tie and was now sitting - recovering - upon an old couch in a residence on Chicago's South Side. Just hours earlier he had witnessed thousands of angry whites from heavily ethnic, middle-income neighborhoods heckle, rail and assault his Chicago Freedom motion followers, despite police protection, upon a march protesting housing discrimination upon Chicago's southwest side. King himself had been unrelentinged by a rock that struck his head. "Frankly, I have not ever seen as much hatred and hostility upon the part of so many people" he said slowly "To my mind those nation represent the most tragic expression of man's inhumanity to man."

While King lamented the racial intolerance that suffused Chicago's white neighborhoods, he also sens - with a great deal of relief - that the Chicago crusade was beginning to reach its potential. Since the fall of 1965 King's Southern Christian Leadership conversation (SCLC) lieutenants and field staffers, in league with their Chicago allies, had searched for a strategy to extreme point racial injustice in the Windy City. Early in the campaign, they focused upon developing community organizations, especially in the newer black ghetto upon Chicago's West Side. Jesse Jackson, meanwhile, had brought local clergymen together to form a chapter of Operation Breadbasket with the mission to advance economic opportunities for black Chicagoans.

quite through the fall and winter, the Chicago Freedom change claimed modest victories, but the North was foreign terrain for the SCLC which had toiled for nearly a decade upon Southern soil. The obstacles to lucky insurgency in this huge, sprawling and composite city were formidable, and the spark for a actually electrifying campaign remained elusive.

Although King and his allies sought to recruit a "coalition of conscience" to support a program of democratic and social renewal, many influential Chicagoans were skeptical - and plane critical - of that effort. The Rev Joseph H Jackson, the famed pastor of the historic Olivet Baptist meeting-house on Chicago's South Side and the president of the National Baptist Convention, the largest African-American religious association, was individual of the sharpest detractors. The older Jackson (who was not related to Jesse Jackson) had already squared not on against King and other activist ministers. For years, he had warned against the inevitable harmful repercussions of civil disobedience, and now he lamented that King had brought his crusade to Chicago, Jackson's hometown.

In the summer of 1966 Jackson smooth debated King in a rare meeting between the two prominent clergymen upon a local television program. While Jackson acknowledged that Chicago was not a paradise for blacks, he refused. to label it an immoral society and doubted whether attests - "a continuous dramatization" - of the city's failings would "help us solve" its problems

The Rev Jackson of Olivet was not the solitary important black Chicagoan who was moderately cold toward the Chicago Freedom motion Six of the city's African-American aldermen, who exhibited wards on both the southerly and the West sides, wanted no part of this campaign. They had favored under the current rules, and they - like a certain quantity of black Chicagoans - preferred familiar ways to radical change. Indeed, when novels broke that King and the SCLC had targeted Chicago as the site of its first Northern campaign, Ralph Metcalfe, the former Olympic sprinter and a leading black alderman, stated, "We have endowed leadership in Chicago and all things necessary to work without our city's own destiny."

Metcalfe's words endorsed the view of Chicago's chief politician, Mayor Richard J Daley. Hailed as America's greatest in quantity powerful mayor and known as a confidant of Democratic presidents, Daley presided above a potent political apparatus, which virtually controll the black wards, and he simply loathed the arrival of outsiders who were certain, in his mind, to stir up confuse within his city. Daley himself had praised King for his successe in the southern but he saw no reason for the Nobel Peace Prize winner to ally himself with Chicago civil rights agitators who for month now had displayed no honor for the efforts of his regime to make Chicago a better residence for its citizens.

King and his supporters, however, were convinced of the necessity of nonviolent asseverates There was a need, asserted Al Raby, a. Chicago schoolteacher and the co-leader of the Chicago Freedom change for "a constant pricking of the conscience." And as King told the Rev Joseph Jackson, social change did not follow from "sitting around having nice conversations."

Their faculty of perception of urgency heightened with the rise of the black power impulse after the shooting of James Meredith in Mississippi in June 1966 and with the eruption of a riot upon Chicago's West Side one month later. It present the appearanceed to King and his lieutenants that the greatest in quantity basic assumptions of their crusade - nonviolence and interracialism - were being challenged in the African-American community. The nonviolent civil rights change needed to prove its relevance in this fresh era, especially to Northern blacks.