Covering Dr. King in Chicago: Inside the 1966 Fair-Housing Marches

I’ll never forget the hatred in people’s faces.

Features screwed into rictuses of pure venom. Teen-age boys and youths, sure, but middle-aged moms in pedal pushers too. Little kids screaming, cursing – little kids. Of all the moments covering dozens of inner-city riots on Chicago’s West and South Sides during the summers of 1965 and 1966, this one sticks with me as clearly as if it were yesterday.

Why King came north

The occasion: a bright sunny afternoon in a Southwest Side neighborhood known formally as Chicago Lawn but usually called Marquette Park after the big city park sitting in its middle.

At the head of the march: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King chose Marquette Park for this latest open-housing march precisely because he expected such a reaction. Knew the video would be on every TV that night across the nation and around the world.

King knew too that the folks who lived there – working-class white ethnics whose forebears hailed from Poland, Lithuania and the rest of Eastern Europe—were not about to risk their homes, all they had, to let a Black family move in next door.

Open housing was the law though. Dr. King had moved up from Atlanta to campaign for it in my home town in January 1966. He targeted Chicago, then the second-largest city in America, because it was one of the most rigidly segregated cities in America. De facto segregation of course but segregation nonetheless, as rigid as any in Jackson or Birmingham.

Dr. King assumed he could reproduce the historical wins his nonviolent protests had wrought elsewhere. But Chicago isn’t Atlanta. King did not count on a wily foe like Mayor Richard J. Daley. He didn’t expect that Chicago’s Black population might not be as responsive to a message that had galvanized hundreds of thousands of Blacks (and some Whites) in the South. He over-relied on the symbolism of taking up residence in the North Lawndale slum. And he didn’t anticipate the open hatred the Marquette Park march elicited. Dr. King was struck on the forehead by a rock that day, the only time ever. Afterward he told reporters, “I have seen many demonstrations in the South but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”

What the job actually looked like

I was on the street as a reporter for The Associated Press. I’d been named to the so-called AP Racial Task Force, which took me to the infamous Detroit riot of ’67 where some 38 people died as well as a lesser riot in Milwaukee. But Racial Task Force designation meant little that summer. It was all hands on deck nearly every weekend as Chicago’s inner city kept blowing up.

I covered maybe a dozen King marches in those years, standing mere feet from the great man. But far more often I was out on the mean streets of North Lawndale and other beaten-down Black neighborhoods as riot after riot exploded.

Was I scared? Probably not as much as I should have been. I was “armed” with nothing more than a steno pad and a Bic pen, and the overconfidence of a reporter shielded by the First Amendment.

But I hit the ground more than once. Someone smashed the windshield of my ’66 VW Bug convertible while it was parked on S. 43rd St. Someone else smashed the rear window of my rented Dodge Dart during the Detroit riot. Detroit was where someone shot at me (and missed, luckily). Where I lay on my belly underneath a fire engine with the firefighters, watching a frame house burn to the ground in 20 minutes because they thought someone was shooting at them.

At the end of summer ’66, I went to Portland, OR to be with my then-girlfriend Corinne. We were walking through a beautiful bucolic city park, sunny afternoon, birds singing. Something snapped – a twig maybe – and I hit the ground. Nowadays they’d call this PTSD. But I won’t forget the look on Corinne’s face, realizing that what I’d been experiencing wasn’t mere adventure.

The papers called them race riots. They were not. “Property riots” would be more accurate. Black folk on the streets smashing store windows and looting, throwing rocks and pop-bottle gasoline bombs at the cops, getting their heads busted, out of frustration with terrible living conditions they could see no way out of. Some were arrested but far fewer than you might think. There were just too many of them.

Riot duty wasn’t a typical AP reporter’s day. A typical “day” – 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift – was a lot of sitting-around in an office whose slovenliness, the result of 24-hour-a-day use and abuse by a long long line of journalists, had to be seen to be believed. It was typing up two-car crashes from Kewanee in three paragraphs, drinking day-old coffee and shmoozing … punctuated by the occasional drop-everything crisis. I imagine a firefighter’s day is like this. You only slide down the pole now and then, but the adrenaline sure flows when you do.

What I couldn’t put in a 350-word story

My riot days ended in frustration though. I was witnessing behaviors on the streets I couldn’t understand, let alone convey in a 350-word story for the “A” wire.

Corinne, a Ph.D. student and radical feminist, was filling my head with new ways to look at things. I covered an event, the National Conference for New Politics, where speakers were saying the same things Corinne was. And it was 1967, a moment when all of America was being roiled by the same forces as me.

The upshot was that I resigned from The AP, leaving a promising career to spend the rest of my life trying to parse out those things I’d seen and couldn’t explain.

My time as a Ph.D. candidate in political sociology at the University of Chicago was among the unhappiest periods of my life, propelling me back into journalism and relocating from Chicago to the Washington D.C. area, where I still live. But that’s another story for another day.

Why it still matters

In some ways we’ve come a long way since the ’60s. The restrictive covenants, which crammed Chicago’s Blacks into an overcrowded crime-plagued slum called Bronzeville because landlords wouldn’t deal with them anywhere else in the city, were overturned by the Supreme Court in 1948 (Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1), leading gradually but inexorably toward the open housing that Dr. King dreamt of.

Society changed, such that the sight of a mixed couple – taboo when I was growing up – is now common. Blacks still face discrimination daily, including lower pay and workplace harassment, but they now hold jobs their Pullman-porter grandfathers and housemaid grandmothers couldn’t dream of.

Entertainment contributed to the change in public feeling; my personal theory is that the Cosby show on TV, just by showing a happy Black family living the good life with top-tier jobs and well-behaved kids, moved the needle all by itself.

Emmett Till, an early martyr of the civil rights movement, has present-day counterparts in reports of Black citizens being lynched, but … well, there really is no “but” regarding that one.

Still, I know things have largely changed for the better… because I was present when they were largely worse.