The Chicago Freedom Movement

The Chicago Freedom Movement, the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the North, lasted from mid-1965 to early 1967. It represented the alliance of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO). In 1965, SCLC, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., was looking for a site to prove that nonviolent direct action could bring about social change outside of the South. Since 1962, the CCCO, a coalition of local civil rights and community groups, had responded to rising anger over racial inequality, especially in the public schools, in the city of Chicago to build the most sustained local civil rights movement in the North. The activism of the CCCO pulled SCLC to Chicago as did the work of Bernard LaFayette and James Bevel, two veterans of the southern civil rights movement, on the city's west side.

The Chicago Freedom Movement declared its intention to end slums in the city. It organized tenants unions, assumed control of a slum tenement, founded action groups like Operation Breadbasket, and rallied black and white Chicagoans to support its goals. In the early summer of 1966, it focused its attention on housing discrimination. By late July it was staging regular marches into all-white neighborhoods on the city's southwest and northwest sides. The hostile response of white residents and the determination of civil rights activists to continue to crusade for open housing alarmed City Hall and attracted the attention of the national press. In mid-August, high-level negotiations began between city leaders, movement activists, and representatives of the Chicago Real Estate Board. On August 26, after the Chicago Freedom Movement had declared that it would march into Cicero , site of a fierce race riot in 1951, an agreement, consisting of positive steps to open up housing opportunities in metropolitan Chicago , was reached.

The Summit Agreement was the culmination of months of organizing and direct action. It did not, however, satisfy all activists, some of whom, in early September 1966, marched on Cicero . Furthermore, after the open-housing marches, the Chicago Freedom Movement lost its focus and momentum. By early 1967, Martin Luther King and SCLC had decided to train their energies on other targets, thus marking the end of this striking campaign.

The Chicago Freedom Movement helped train a spotlight on housing discrimination and thus shaped national debate that led to the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. And a number of new organizations-such as the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, Operation Breadbasket (later Rainbow/PUSH Coalition), and the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities)-continued to fight against racial injustice.

The first half of "Two Societies, 1965-1968," Eyes on the Prize II (Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1990) offers a fine visual overview of the Chicago Freedom Movement.

Historical Questions for History Fair Students to consider:

Given its significance locally and nationally, the Chicago Freedom Movement deserves to be re-examined, especially on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. Below are some questions (though certainly not all) that could be addressed in research projects:

• Historians have typically labeled the Chicago campaign a defeat for Martin Luther King and civil rights forces. To what extent is this assessment warranted? What was accomplished by the Chicago Freedom Movement? How did the Chicago Freedom Movement shape the subsequent history of the Chicago metropolitan region? What were its national repercussions?
  
  
• The Chicago Freedom Movement involved many of Chicago 's communities. Chicago activists organized, for instance, in East Garfield Park and Lawndale . What was the status of these communities at the onset of Chicago Freedom Movement organizing? How were these communities affected by the Chicago Freedom Movement? Alternatively, there is a need to understand the response of the local communities (such as Chicago Lawn, Jefferson Park , Belmont-Cragin, and Evergreen Park ) where open-housing marches took place. The Local Community Fact Book for 1960 and 1970 offers socio-economic profiles of individual communities in metropolitan Chicago.
  
  
• Martin Luther King, Jr., and his supporters knew that protests did not occur in isolation. The marches in Chicago were covered by local and national newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations. Did local coverage differ substantively from national coverage? If so, how and why? Did the coverage by more specialized outlets (such as the Chicago Defender or the New World, the Catholic newspaper) differ? If so, how and why?
  
  
• The Chicago Freedom Movement placed the issue of equal opportunity in housing squarely before residents in metropolitan Chicago and across the country. How did individual communities throughout greater Chicago respond to the call for fair housing?
  
  
• The Chicago Freedom Movement took place in a pivotal moment in American history. How did this broader context shape the Chicago Freedom Movement, and vice versa? Did the Black Power impulse, for instance, affect the Chicago Freedom Movement? What about the debate over the federal Civil Rights bill of 1966? How did the Chicago Freedom Movement relate to the broadly discussed phenomenon of "white backlash"?

Primary Sources:

Newspapers: The Chicago Public Library (especially the Harold Washington and Carter G. Woodson libraries) and the Chicago History Museum (as does the Daley Library at the University of Illinois/Chicago) house microfilm collections of many of Chicago's newspapers. Many local college and university libraries also have back files of the New York Times and other national newspapers. Remember too that other smaller local newspapers such as the New Crusader, the Southwest News-Herald, the Southtown Economist also covered the Chicago Freedom Movement.

Manuscript Collections: One of the most fascinating ways to examine the past is to consult manuscripts. There are many repositories in metropolitan Chicago that have collections that relate to the Chicago Freedom Movement. The Chicago History Museum possesses the records of Chicago CORE and the Chicago Catholic Interracial Council (two of the leading members of the CCCO), the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities (an outgrowth of the Summit Agreement of August 1966), and the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race (a group that helped broker the Summit Agreement), along with those of many other relevant individuals and organizations. The Special Collections at the Daley Library of the University of Illinois/Chicago houses the papers of the Chicago Urban League and many smaller collections, including materials related to James Bevel's work in Chicago.

Important collections are available in print: David Garrow's edited volume, Chicago 1966 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1989) and Clayborne Carson et al.'s edited volume, The Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights Leader (New York: Penguin, 1991). The FBI's files on Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference are available on microfilm, but they should be used with care.

The website, www.cfm40.org , that has been created as part of Fulfilling the Dream, the Chicago Freedom Movement, Fortieth Anniversary, 1966-2006, commemoration features primary sources as well.

Oral Histories: One way to come to terms with the lived experience of the Chicago Freedom Movement is through oral histories. A researcher could learn a great deal about the Chicago Freedom Movement by speaking with someone who was either involved in the Chicago campaign or who witnessed or was affected by it. Kale Williams of Loyola University's Center for Urban Research and Learning is an excellent contact person.

Existing oral histories can also be consulted. The Chicago History Museum holds a collection that was developed in the 1980s as part of a project sponsored by the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities. Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer's edited volume, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam: 1989) includes some interviews about the Chicago Freedom Movement.

There are also some valuable accounts written by participants. See, for instance, Ralph Abernathy's And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), Coretta Scott King's My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969); Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); Dempsey Travis's An Autobiography of Black Politics (Chicago: Urban Research Press, 1987); and Andrew Young's An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

Selected Bibliography

Anderson, Alan B., and George W. Pickering. Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago. Athens : University of Georgia Press , 1986.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1986.

Hirsch, Arnold. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983

Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1991.

Ling, Peter J. Martin Luther King, Jr. London: Routledge, 2002.

Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

McGreevy, John T. Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Ralph, James, Jr. Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Prepared by James Ralph Jr., Department of History, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, 05753; August 2005