CHICAGO ORGANIZING:
Tough, Cat-Clawing, Bloody
Chicago organizing is tough -- in any era -- just plain damn tough: a
cat-clawing fight on all sides. This is an extended note on our work on the
bloody South/Southwest side of Chicago during the unusually turbulent era,
1969 into 1973. This was the most volatile piece of urban frontier in the
country at that point.
In the spring of 1969, I came to Chicago to become the first Southside
Director of the Chicago Commons Association. This was one of the city's
oldest and largest private social service organizations, founded in the
1890s by Dr. Graham Taylor, a colleague of Jane Addams and William
Mackintire Salter. Graham Taylor's daughter, Lea Taylor [Miss Taylor] -- a
major figure in American social work -- was still active, in her eighties,
in Commons affairs and was an old friend of my parents. She and a
colleague, Dr. Arthur Hillman of Roosevelt University and a socialist, were
instrumental in my joining the staff of the Chicago Commons Association --
very much because of my background in effective grassroots community
organization in dangerous and challenging settings.
Our Southside Area was brand-new: whatever we wanted to make it. I
developed a first-rate core staff of mostly younger people: among them, Jim
Richardson and Marshall Klein -- themselves trained organizers; Emily
Garcia; Jesse Howard and Geraldine Howard; and an old Tougaloo/Jackson
Movement friend and colleague, Betty Anne Poole. Later we were able to hire
significant numbers of community people on various arrangements. We
operated out of a network of store-front offices: our main base and several
satellites.
Our geographic sweep was an immense piece of turf on the South/Southwest
side: from about 28th Street southward down to 63d and then from the Penn
Central railroad tracks [and sometimes the Dan Ryan Expressway] on the east
all the way westward to South Ashland Avenue and eventually far to the west
of even that. [It included the old stockyards, among other landmarks.]
Much of this was changing racially as large numbers of white people moved
out and very large number of non-whites moved in. Our program focus -- the
grassroots community organization of low-income people, and also related
advocate services -- involved primarily Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos,
some Native Americans, and some Anglos who stayed behind and worked with us.
We began to systematically organize multi-issue block clubs and single-issue
action organizations: very hard, tedious, super-dangerous work.
The Richard Daley machine -- which sought to cut off many city services in areas
that became predominately non-white and which quite rightly saw our work as
a major threat on all fronts -- was consistently and often viciously
hostile. This was reflected by most police [but not all] and by other city
officials. Hostile white gangs -- the White Berets and spin-offs from the
American Nazi Party -- functioned as venomously racist guerilla fighters on
our borders. Real estate outfits were predatory on a multi-faceted basis:
sowing all kinds of racial distrust and hate to maneuver the
over-and-over-again sale of homes. Schools were consistently tense and
forbidding and dangerous.
We got along well with most minority youth gangs on our turf and one, the
Disciples, took it upon itself to provide us with protection. Violence
pervaded that whole urban region. I and my entire staff and our local
leaders were subjected to constant death threats from white racists and
their public sector allies, our offices were set afire, there were attempted
police frame-ups. Red-baiting was common, especially against me.
In the Labor Day period, 1971, after a summer of constant and oft-deadly
white violence against Black and Puerto Rican people, two young whites were
shot and killed. Immediately, the whole South/Southwest side moved to the
very brink of what could have been Chicago's bloodiest racial riot in
history. White advocates of hatred from all over the Chicago metropolitan
area and environs poured into the setting to incite violence; on our side, there were
understandably fed-up people who were moving very close to violent
retaliation. But, by that time, we had an extensive network of block-clubs
and other groups throughout our entire area -- with vigorously committed local
leadership -- and good close working relationships with a number of younger
social-justice Catholic clergy in the white areas. Acting on our demand,
and with the prodding of a very decent police unit -- the Human Relations
Section of Chicago PD [understaffed and always referred to by mainline
Chicago cops as "the Black mafia" -- it was predominately Black but
interracial] -- top police officials in Chicago pulled out all the local
[hostile] police units from our smoldering turf and sent in huge numbers of
police from other parts of the city.
All of us -- staff, community leaders, grassroots people -- were in the field.
And we worked around the clock.
A hideously bloody catastrophe in that whole area was averted. And we
kept
right on organizing and fighting. I have always believed that that was one
of the most significant accomplishments in which I've been privileged to
play a substantive role: the Right to the Edge of Armageddon, Labor Day, '71.
All told, we helped a vast number of people overcome the most profound
inter-personal alienation, fear, and apathetic futility to organize almost
300 multi-issue block clubs and related groups in two large umbrella
organizations. We dealt with ever increasing effectiveness and success on a
wide variety of problems: civic services, education, employment, housing,
health, police/community relations, welfare -- and race. We made enduring
peace between minority youth gangs -- and we defeated a Daley alderman,
installing a Black woman independent.
By 1972 and 1973, our community organizations were well established, alert
and resistant to attacks -- and inoculated against that age-old Chicago
organizational disease: co-optation by machine politics.
The solid work of all of this in that turbulent and sanguinary setting lives
on to this day.
I left at the end of the Summer of 1973, always on our own Romany Trail.
The basic records of this critical campaign are in my possession -- with
copies in my collected papers at State Historical Society of Wisconsin and
Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Jim Richardson left in '72. I've always appreciated this comment from him:
It helps to be psychic. Around 1964, a Southern Movement colleague, J.V. Henry, commented cordially to me, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be burned as a witch."
Well, anyway. . .