The Black Power Movement's Rise to Political Ascendancy In

“If You Can’t Be It, Be A Threat”: The Black Power Movement’s rise to political ascendancy in Chicago Master’s Thesis Presented To The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Department of History Chad Williams, Advisor Abigail Cooper, Advisor In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History by Caleb Smith August 2018 Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without the time and consideration of my advisors Dr. Chad Williams and Dr. Abigail Cooper. I also owe a tremendous debt to Dr. Gregory Childs, Dr. Max Mishler, the Brandeis History department faculty, staff and my fellow graduate student cohort who have all helped me rethink, engage and explore these materials and this era in ways I would never have considered. A great deal of this research is also owed to the wonderful generosity of the staffs at the Chicago History Museum and the Harold Washington Public Library archives. A special note of thank you to the leaders, community organizers and activists in Chicago of the past and to the Chicago students of our current moment holding our leaders accountable today. ii ABSTRACT If You Can’t Be It, Be A Threat: The Black Power Movement’s rise to political ascendancy in Chicago A thesis presented to the Department of History Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts By Caleb Smith This thesis will examine the political work done by Chicago Black Power advocates to elect the largest number of black politicians to the city government in its history during the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing through the lens of four organizations, the Chicago-Area Friends of SNCC, the Illinois Black Panther Party, the Citizens Schools Committee, and the Original Rainbow Coalition, black power activists worked inside and outside of traditional civil rights organizations to launch their political campaigns or to support the candidacies of other black politicians. By engaging in voter drives, political education programs, and by building multi- racial and ethnic coalitions that were grounded in class solidarity, black activists built a powerful voting bloc that created a new black political elite, independent of political party control. The contributions of black power advocates and their allies over the course of a decade dismantled the political domination of the Democratic Party Machine and provided new strategies that future black politicians would follow in electoral politics locally and nationally for decades to come. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………...…………………………...……...ii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………...………...…iii Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………………….v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Chicago Area Friends of SNCC and the CFM………………………………..…….15 Chapter 2: I am the proletariat…………………………………………...……………...………31 Chapter 3: The Chicago Citizens Schools Committee and the new class of black leaders……..54 Chapter 4: The Original Rainbow Coalition and Operation Breadbasket….…………..……….69 Chapter 5: Epilogue………………………………………………………………...……...……93 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..….....…101 iv Abbreviations: CAFSNCC – Chicago Area Friends of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee CCCO – Coordinating Council of Community Organizations CFM – Chicago Freedom Movement CORE – Congress for Racial Equality CPD – Chicago Police Department CPS – Chicago Public Schools CSC – Citizens Schools Committee IBPP – The Illinois Black Panther Party NAACP – National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ORC – The Original Rainbow Coalition RUA – Rising Up Angry SCLC- Southern Christian Leadership Conference SNCC- Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee YLO – Young Lords Organization YPO – Young Patriots Organization v Introduction: The Chicago Freedom Movement and its aftermath On April 19th, 1977, the heartbreak and disappointment well known to Black Chicagoans had returned. The favorite candidate of the city’s majority of black residents, Harold Washington, had failed to secure the Democratic nomination for mayor. Coming in third in the contest, the seasoned Washington, who just launched his first bid for mayor after the sudden death of Richard Daley, appeared to ruminate over what could have been done differently to win the primary. Sharing in the state senator’s disappointment were his many black supporters from the city’s South Side community where he had established a large base of voters. For these voters, almost a decade removed from the Chicago Freedom Movement, the pain from missing a close victory was still bitterly prescient. Black political power in the city of Chicago had only secured a few victories in alderman races and city council seats but had failed to secure a significant victory to establish African Americans as a powerful voice in city politics. At the Washington headquarters that night, feelings of despondency were palpable and shared by nearly all in the room, except possibly Washington himself. Washington told his supporters that night, “For the first time in the history of Chicago, leaders from black, liberal, white, poor white, and Latino communities came together around a program for political reform and social change which addressed itself to the needs of all people who are ignored or stepped on by the Democratic machine.”1 Capturing the momentum of the moment, Washington continued, “For the first time the leaders of the independent voters of Illinois who have often been viewed with suspicion in the black community indicated to people that they are willing to work for the 1 Joravsky, Ben. The Lost Harold Washington Files. The Chicago Reader. November 30, 2017. (Joravsky) 1 election of a black political leader to a major citywide office.”2 Washington was not being bombastic. Instead, he was promoting a close understanding of the city’s history that would soon come roaring in the national consciousness. What could have been a transformational moment for many of the black Chicagoans in that room, and around the city, would shape Chicago’s political future and the direction of the nation at large. This thesis is a study of how the black power movement its interest from community service programs to electoral politics in the city of Chicago from 1963 to 1983. When Chicago students, parents and activists observed the first school boycott in the city’s history in 1963 they were concurrently starting a campaign to gain political power for their communities and families. This paper will argue that the black power movement in Chicago dramatically reshaped electoral politics in the city and launched one of the most successful independent multi-racial political coalitions in the nation by electing the largest number of black politicians in Chicago history. Following in the work of Dr. Peniel Joseph’s Waiting Til The Midnight Hour (2006), Kwame Ture’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), and Jeffrey Ogbar’s Black Power (2005), this thesis looks to uncover a pivotal forgotten piece of civil rights history and challenge frames of the black power movement as a violent, reactionary campaign that ended black liberations work of the 1950s and early 1960s. To the contrary, the history of black power and Chicago politics distinctly shows a continuation of the civil rights movement goes well beyond conventional frames that detail the end of the civil rights movement in the early 1970s. By the end of the 1960s, Chicago was the centermost prime example of the civil rights struggle in the north while also reflecting the shift in black politics nationally. Chicago, around the time of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968 and the Democratic National 2 Ibid. 2 Convention, had become a bedrock of political activism and protest. The city, with one of the nation’s largest African American populations, hosted multiple black political groups from the Black Panthers to the Urban League and the Nation of Islam (NOI). After the Democratic convention, the city displayed the Democratic hold on northern metropolitan city politics at its most vulnerable. In the years following 1968, there would be no better example of the how the black power movement capitalized on the unique political moment for black politics across the nation in the same way that Chicago did. This is one of the most important reasons the politics of Chicago needs to be examined and studied for what it can reveal about this era and how it affected politics nationally for years to come. For the purposes of clarity as it relates to this study, it will be necessary to address a few key points about black power as an ideology and a movement. In this thesis, the term black power ideology will be defined as a philosophy that believes Black Americans should have political and economic control over their homes, schools, banks, and businesses within their own communities. Chicago in the 1960s is a political battleground where Black Chicagoans begin running for public office to take political control over their communities away from white Democratic loyalists of mayor Richard M. Daley and return it to the citizens of those neighborhoods. Black power ideology is a political philosophy and a movement is aimed at galvanizing black people to seek political power to assert control over their lives and communities. During the 1960s campaigns to desegregate schools and housing of Chicago, black power ideology serves as an appealing counter argument to the Daley Administration’s color- blind approach to city’s

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