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“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.

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.

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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

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

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.

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 black communities and its afflictions.

There remains scarcely little documentation of the political aftermath for black

Chicagoans of the Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM) of 1966. The Chicago Movement was a

3 civil rights campaign sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) that held marches, protests and boycotts to demand policy and legislative changes to address city’s overwhelming segregation its housing and schools. Most historiographies written about Chicago’s political history have narrowed their focus on mainstream civil rights organizations known as the Big Five, which include the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), the UL, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the SCLC. One of the most distinguished examples is Fire on the Prairie: Chicago's Harold

Washington and the Politics of Race by Gary Rivlin which chronicled how Washington’s campaign and its aftermath changed the political landscape for Black Americans around the country. More recently, historians have pressed further into the organizing efforts of black

Chicagoans after the CFM. Professor Jeffrey Helgeson’s Crucibles of Black Empowerment provides one of most thorough examinations of black political organizing in Chicago from the

1940s to the 1980s. He explores how the black power ideology affected grassroots political organizing, but it is not his single focus. Beyond these readings, the questions remain about this period. What are the deeper intricacies and layers to the black power movement in Chicago?

What political recourse of black Chicagoans who endorsed black power ideology was available to pursue? While these books certainly touch on the influence of the Black Power Movement in the city after the CFM and during the years leading up to the 1983 mayoral election, it is not their sole interest. Looking for information on the efforts of black power advocates to secure political power in the city after CFM of 1967 and the death of Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred

Hampton in 1969 becomes much more difficult.

Through organizations and private institutional efforts, black power activists in Chicago continued to work toward black political and class solidarity in the city which dramatically aided black candidates. After the end of the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, black Chicagoans did not sit idle, instead they ran. They ran for school boards, clerk positions and for city council.

Within black power circles this meant using the political capital that had been established during the time of Fred Hampton and the Chicago Freedom Movement. Rather than rival movements overtaking one another, black power advocates were standing shoulder to shoulder with traditional non-violent civil rights activists during the CFM. When the CFM folded, these black power advocates scattered to other organizations across the city to work on the issues most important to them, their families and their communities. This project will focus on four organizations: the Chicago Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, The Illinois Black

Panther Party, the Chicago Citizens Schools Committee, and the Original Rainbow Coalition. In

1969, when black power organizations and civil rights were growing in power and visibility, the issues that dominated civil rights politics in Chicago were housing and school segregation, police brutality, economic poverty and political indifference to black life. Each of these groups focuses on at least one of these issues and through them black power activists were able to develop new political strategies to address these maladies. Moreover, each contributed to providing support to public officials who vowed to take actions where other black or white political incumbents had not. Through these groups, a clearer picture of the broader scope of black power political activism comes into focus. Each of these organizations spans a period of the Chicago Freedom

Movement to the election of Harold Washington in 1983.

This was not a political movement that succeeded in day. Instead, the election of multiple black candidates into Chicago’s seats of power was only possible through voter drives, rallies,

5 organizing and picketing and marching. The activist spirit that had developed in the city in the

1960s did not die with Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King Jr, instead it was redirected and channeled through the various communities those two hoped to inspire. Further, while the focus, and in many cases leadership, of black power and civil rights groups in Chicago had been primarily male dominated, it was black women who did the work to move the Chicago freedom struggle for black Americans to its next phase.

In the first chapter of this historical examination, the Chicago Freedom and the Chicago-

Area Friends of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee will serve as the beginning point in the transformation of Chicago politics. In the height of the Chicago campaign for open housing and schools, it will be helpful to dive fully into the conditions the CFM was confronted with and the activist movement that was organized to face it. The CAFSNCC had been instrumental in helping to make the Chicago Public Schools boycott of 1963 possible. When the boycott failed to make the actual material and structural gains of reorganizing Chicago’s overcrowded and dilapidating school system, the CAFSNCC assisted the SCLC and the CCCO in the plan, coordinating and enacting of marches and boycotts that shaped the direction of the city for years to come. A focus on the CAFSNCC highlights the day to day actions and activities of black power advocates in organizing political and social power within the city’s black neighborhoods. By examining how these community activists and leaders interacted and worked with another cooperatively, a much more in-depth example of how black power operated along individual lines for black Chicagoans emerges. Putting the work of the CAFSNCC within the confines of the CFM over the course of several years will also help frame the shifting political attitudes of black residents long after the CFM and CAFSNCC’s demise.

The Chicago Freedom Movement is ground-zero of black power political activism that would only take on new dimensions and pathways after 1967. The CFM is a profoundly important moment in the civil rights and black power movements in Chicago during the 1960s.

Thankfully, there are more chronicles of CFM history being published today. In the compilation text, The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the

North (2016), activists from the movement and historians share several viewpoints that will help this thesis examine the campaign’s impact and legacy. James R. Ralph Jr’s Northern Protest:

Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (1993) also provides this study with critical insight on Dr. King’s time in Chicago and the work activists there accomplished with him. Young white leftists, in the aftermath of the violence of the 1968 Democratic National

Convention, began adopting more militant tactics of groups like the Black Panther party and the

Us Organization nationally. Concurrently, the remnants of the CAFSNCC would start toward a new more progressive and militant stance to deal with the frustration meted out by the Chicago

Democratic stronghold. The CFM brought boiling tensions divisions within the CCCO to the surface. However, as historian Peniel E. Joseph points out, like most black power and civil rights groups, the work done by the CCCO-umbrella of organizations was largely cooperative and peaceful. What the CFM tells history about this period in the Civil Rights Movement that is important is how. For all its losses and successes, it was able to create a multi-racial, multi-class, pluralist arm of northern black liberation activists with the skills, strategy and sheer force of numbers through mobilizing around vital issues that could seize control of a city. The

CAFSNCC played a part in this movement by keeping schools and desegregation efforts within them on equal footing with the protest’s demands for open housing.

Members of the CAFSNCC became hardened veterans of the Civil Rights Movement in

Chicago and their expertise would help animate the political activity of the city’s black power wing. Through coordinating actions of the 1963 school boycott and helping to spread information and recruit new members into the open housing campaign in the Chicago Freedom

Movement, the CAFSNCC members became well skilled in the politics of the city’s black communities. Harold Washington would count on this collective knowledge and community organizing in both his mayoral runs and his bid for a U.S. Congressional seat. But looking past

Washington, this level of support was crucial for the many aldermen and women who would become the backbone of Washington’s time in office during what would then be nicknamed the

Council Wars.3 The political careers of these aldermen depended on the black communities that elected them and that they would not always serve in the best interests of those neighborhoods.

This level of disenchantment within the CAFSNCC and the failures of the CFM would eventually lead to its collapse, but the time of the CAFSNCC would be invaluable to the black power movement that would emerge in its wake.

The second chapter of this thesis examines the Illinois Black Panther Party, its membership, politics, demise and its legacy on black political activity. Many former CAFSNCC veterans would eventually become Panthers, including Bob Brown and Bobby Rush, signaling a shift in their political orthodoxy and personal ideologies. Further, the reappearance of members from older political action groups in the Chicago Civil Rights Movement establishes a pattern of activism among Chicago’s black body politic that will continue through the 1970s. The IBPP was a group that came into being while tapping into the frustrations of black Chicagoans in the inner cities of the south and west sides; which were that the group heavily recruited new

3 Shipp, E.R. Chicago Council Wars Drag Into Intermission. The New York Times. July 14, 1984

8 members.4 After the CFM, there was much infighting within the mainstream civil rights groups as whether the efforts had been a success. Mainstream media settled on the story of the CFM being a colossal defeat. What was most apparent to members of Chicago’s predominately black community is that nothing for them was likely to change. The IBPP picked up on these sentiments and acted accordingly to present black citizens with a new plan of attack.

Any new attempt to dismantle racism in the United States would have to be multi-racial and class-conscious in the IBPP’s eyes. A class-conscious approach that critiqued capitalism and intertwined its impact on black communities with racism became a central message to the

Chicago panthers. No one was more gifted to deliver that message, in that time and place, than the IBPP chairman Fred Hampton. For the purposes of this paper, Hampton and the other members of the IBPP serve as an important moment where black power advocates in the city were politically at their height and how their perspectives evolved up to and after Hampton’s death. The IBPP remains one of the most vocal and visible black power organizations in the city of Chicago and inspire a broad, pluralist coalition of racial and economic groups to join forces during the 1970s. Much like the CAFSNCC, this group would be the foundation for many

African Americans who ran for political office in the city before, during and after the administration of Harold Washington. Unlike the CFASNCC, the IBPP cut across racial, political, and gender divisions to that would finally elect Washington mayor in 1983.

Chapter three of this study investigates the Chicago Citizens Schools Committee (CCSC) and their work to elect political candidates while also keeping school desegregation at the forefront of city politics. Since the school boycott of 1963, school desegregation activists worked feverishly to continue to keep the issue at the front of civil rights concerns. The CFM allowed

4 Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics of Chicago. Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina Press. 2013.

9 these activists to do this not only with more press but armed with scores of supporting organizations across the city. One such group in this fight was the Chicago Citizens Schools

Committee. The CCSC’s history dates back to the 1940s. They acted as a partner and check on

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Public Schools Teachers Union. Largely, the

CCSC was run by a concentration of women who organized marches, pickets and voting drives in the name of candidates that supported teachers in the Chicago area. While the CCSC’s membership was comprised of mostly white women during the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the organization began to diversify by the early 1960s.

Toward the end of the 1960s, black women in the CCSC worked on behalf of black candidates running for school board positions and in city-wide elections. With the radical bent of the organization established over decades of activist work, due in no small part, to its well- respected leader Mary Herrick, a white former Chicago schoolteacher. However, it was African

Americans inside of the CCSC that drove a lot of its most radical activist activities and that pushed the group to support more women candidates of color for elected office. Historian Ann

Knuper and her book The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism (2006) along with historian Margret Garb’s Freedom’s Ballot (2014) helps provide much of the historical context on Chicago schools and black women in the city who fought to desegregate them. The CCSC will serve as an example of black power activists within organizations that did not identify with a black power focus working as a political force for change. Black power activists were broad based and worked in several civil rights groups that would be easily be classified being associated with black power. Within these groups, black power activists demonstrated their power for organizing and mobilizing communities around specific causes and issues. This community involvement paid massive dividends at the polls. The CCSC will provide this study

10 with evidence of black power activists in the school desegregation efforts of the city and how they engaged with voters across racial and economic lines through an issue that united many parents and students across the nation: equal access to quality public education.

The fourth chapter of this thesis deals with the period closest to the election of Harold

Washington and the politics of the Rainbow Coalition and Jesse Jackson’s Operation

Breadbasket group. While reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH coalition is widely known given the national profile it built during Jackson’s presidential bids, less is known about the coalition that inspired it. The original Rainbow Coalition functioned as a bridge of organizations fighting to end racism, sexism, homophobia, and capitalist exploitation of black neighborhoods.

The coalition was made up of several different groups of various racial and economic backgrounds. Groups participating in this umbrella movement were the IBPP, the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, and Rising Up Angry. Black power activists functioned in this network to build a larger voter base that spanned beyond Chicago majority black enclaves in the south and west sides of the city. This study focuses on black power activists built and maintained coalitions with like-minded activists from unexpected places. Washington, at the end of the 1977 mayoral primary, knew that a strong community of black voters would be one of his greatest strengths, but that it alone would not be enough to put him in City Hall. Likewise, Washington was the candidate that highlighted many politics that members of the various Rainbow Coalition groups sought in political operators.

The politics of the Rainbow Coalition were based on the IBPP’s community control doctrine; offering a fitting platform for black politicians to capitalize upon. The ORC anti- capitalist message and demand for more benefits to alleviate poverty, joblessness, homelessness and cover the uninsured resonated with the larger youth movement politics of the New Left. In

11 the early 1970s, all groups in the ORC knew the importance of the ballot box and encouraged their members to register to vote and to help members in their various communities to do the same. It is this political activism that made the ORC a powerful political force. The IBPP were the inspiration of the ORC. There is also a lack of work emphasizing the importance of the ORC and sometimes it often overlooked. To situate this history, this thesis will rely on work by authors such as writers Amy Sonnie and Tracy James with their book: Hillbilly Nationalists,

Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (2011) and activists who participated in the ORC itself. How the IBPP’s example manifested into political action will be the area that this study seeks to examine and measure the impact thereof. Even after the IBPP’s demise, the political work, registering voters, giving out information on issues relevant to their supporters, continued for many of their former members. How these actions translated into work across communities, how black politicians were able to take advantage of it and how Washington, and the black aldermen that supported him, built up his progressive coalition is worth a considerable amount of focus.

Chapter four also briefly examines Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow PUSH group to see how black power advocates interacted with and affected its politics. Jesse Jackson became a powerful political figure during the Harold Washington administration and Washington credits

Jackson with helping him get elected. Further, given Jackson’s own political rise that enabled him to run for the U.S. presidency, it would be remiss not to investigate the development of his political ideas and actions during the 1970s.The ORC gave Jackson ideas for what type of organization he would eventually go on to create. Black power activists were in the thick of

Jackson’s political future and they were affected by his movement just as he was by theirs.

In the epilogue, the examination of each of these organizations will culminate in an evaluation of the stakes Chicago activists face today. What is the legacy of black power in the city of Chicago beyond the speeches, photographs, incendiary quotes and interviews? How did a city largely under control of a powerful political regime that largely marginalized the voices of black Chicagoans, women, LGBTQ, and poor Chicagoans finally after many decades begin to open their doors to them? It will become evident that these citizens did not have the way opened for them; they had to assert and insert their way into the halls of political power. This study will hopefully reconfirm the lessons that historian Thomas Sugrue took away in his landmark work

Sweet land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008). Sugrue argues that coalitions matter and who controls the government matters. It is a long lesson of the

Civil Rights and Black Power Movement. Winning the city’s highest public office was not only important as a symbolic victory. Black citizens, and many others, depended on the city government as a means to survive and prosper. Their homes, jobs, safety and enfranchisement all needed the city to step in and fix the problems they themselves were unable to fix alone. Too often in the city’s history, City Hall stood as a barrier to that very end. Overcrowded schools, high black unemployment, police brutality, and political corruption were all issues of great importance during the 1960s and 70s in Chicago. The city government has at times blatantly implicated into the blight of systemic racism and sexism that endangered its citizens’ lives. Black

Power advocates, like their compatriots in other movements, knew that this relationship black

Chicagoans had to their city government was unacceptable.

The history of the struggle for black power and political power will be shown in the efforts of those people in the communities whose everyday work helped change the political landscape and serve as a model of a broader movement throughout the nation. Notable figures

13 such Harold Washington and Fred Hampton will be points of focus in this work. However, as they themselves were aware, the success of their campaigns for political office or for class solidarity in activism lived and died among the people. The black enclaves in the city’s south and west, that had been dismissively derided by their own government, proved to be the key to that political machine’s undoing. If Chicago is to sustain its rich cultural legacy of Black Americans contribution, ingenuity and genius, it must fulfill the promise of equal representation that its own citizens called upon it to do before. The current trend of the city’s history, which reflects a larger national habit, suggests the city continues to fail to live up to this work. In telling this history, the power of everyday black Americans is crystalized. The city of Chicago is faced with a choice to over whether to suppress this power or to utilize it to the betterment of all its citizens. The decision that it makes not only denotes its future, but also serves a bellwether to the United

States endurance to the pluralist democratic principles for which it should stand. However, as it will soon be shown, it rarely rests upon.

In a speech at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1982, candidate

Washington made the following remarks: “There’s a lot of people in Chicago, I wouldn’t be surprised if we registered 175,000 to 200,000 people, that’s good enough within itself; it sends out all kinds of signals but the main signal it sends out is this: in politics if you can’t be it, be a threat.”5 The Black Power Movement in Chicago just a decade earlier embodies this philosophy in its every component. Washington’s statement built upon Black Power’s foundation, and his historic win as Chicago’s first African Americans mayor in 1983 revealed how being a threat transformed into winning electoral office.

5 Washington, Harold. Harold Washington University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign speech. Afro American Studies Department lecture. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. September 1982.

Chapter 1: Chicago Area Friends of SNCC and the CFM

The Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM) was a civil right campaign in 1966 that called for open-housing in the city of Chicago. It was also the SCLC and Martin Luther King Jr’s first major civil rights protest movement in a northern city. The campaign ended in a compromise and black Chicagoans had had enough. In the aftermath CFM, the failure of the compromise, also known as the Summit Agreement, left many black citizens of the city angry and looking for a new political direction after conventional approaches had continually proven disappointing. The compromise was a byproduct of the summit agreement reached by the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) and the City of Chicago on August 26, 1966. There was a good deal of constructive parts to the deal. First the agreement stipulated:

It is further declared to be the policy of the City of Chicago that no owner, lessee, sublease, assignee, managing agent, or other person, firm or corporation having the right to sell, rent or lease any housing accommodation, within the City of Chicago, or any agent of any of these, should refuse to sell, rent, lease or otherwise deny or withhold from any person or group of persons such housing accommodations because of the race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry of such person or persons or discriminate against any person because of his race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry in the terms, conditions, or privileges of the sale, rental on lease of any housing accommodation or in the furnishing of facilities or services in connection therewith.6

Additionally, the city promised to use the Department of Renewal to search out the possible housing options available to families and individuals looking for housing relief. The agreement also noted the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) should dedicate itself to the task of open housing in the city for all its citizens. The Summit Agreement states that the CHA would: “In the

6 Ayers. Thomas G. Agreement of the Subcommittee to the Conference on Fair Housing Convened by the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race. City of Chicago. August 26, 1966. (Ayers)

15 future, it will seek scattered sites for public housing and will limit the height of new public housing structures in high density areas to eight stories, with housing for families with children limited to the first two stories. Wherever possible, smaller units will be built.”7 Any violations to the agreement could be reported by department employees to the Chicago Commission on

Human Relations or the State Department of Registration and Education through the Director of

Relocation who would instruct the accusers to their next legal recourse. Some activists involved in the CFM were pleased with this outcome like Ed Marciniak, Executive director of the Chicago

Commission on Human Rights, who praised the agreement, saying “it was a first step.”8

The overwhelming consensus among of the city’s press, CFM activists, and later historians was the agreement was a resounding disappointment. According to John McKnight of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, his reaction to the agreement was quite cynical. “I thought it was a very weak agreement. It all depended on process. It was to set up mechanisms to try to reach something with best efforts, good faith—something Dr. King was given to accept, incidentally. It was actually almost unbelievable to me that the major outcome would be an agreement to create an organization to try to do something about the problem.”9 Bob Lucas of

Chicago Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) was just as dramatically displeased with the agreement. “At CORE we had more troops in the movement in Chicago than any other group at that time. And I wasn’t invited [to the meeting]. I didn’t really feel too badly about it then, because I understood why they didn’t invite me: mainly because they didn’t believe—and they were right—that I would go along with any compromise.”10 Although both sides of these camps had their own agendas to promote each continued to align and work toward their ultimate goal of

7 Ibid. 8 Edward Marciniak, interview by James Ralph, Chicago, July 5, 1991. 9 John McKnight, interview by James Ralph, Evanston, Illinois, August 19, 1986. 10 Lucas, Bob. Robert Lucas, interview by Pam Smith and Mary Lou Finley. November 3, 2010.

16 open housing and desegregated schooling for all Chicagoans. Bob Lucas does highlight the overwhelming frustration experienced by black Chicago centers on being locked out of the meetings that greatly affected their lives. For them, this had to change. It was fortunate that change had already been in the making on the streets of the city for years.

The Chicago-Area Friends of SNCC (CAFSNCC) laid the groundwork for future black power activists in the city. The charge for progressive change in Chicago’s schools and communities has always been an enterprise for students. The student movement in the city would play dramatic role in the years prior to the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. Originally,

CAFSNCC formed to support the efforts to dismantle apartheid in the southern United States.

Founded January 1963, the group provided financial support to SNCC workers in the south as well as organizing food and clothing drives and recruit new members into the national branch.11

Through the nascent group, Black Chicagoans could show their support and solidarity with those fighting Jim Crow laws. Chicago carried a strong connection with southern civil rights activists.

Former CAFSNCC member and activist Fannie Rushing talks about the tether Chicago shared with the south through the Great Migration. “The fact that in Chicago there were so many people like my family, who had migrated North from Mississippi, it was relatively easy to begin to do support work for people who had been kicked off the plantations for attempting to register to vote. It was relatively easy to collect food and clothes and money to send South. That is really how things got started with the Chicago Area Friends of SNCC.”12 But it didn’t take long for the attention of CAFSNCC members to focus on issues closer to their own streets. The Chicago school system and the housing segregation that plagued the city from the great expansions of the

11 The American Folk Life Center. Chicago SNCC history project archives. Washington DC. The Library of Congress. May 15, 2015. 12 Rushing, Fannie. Chicago SNCC and the Black Freedom Struggle. OAH Magazine of History, Volume 26, Issue 1. January 1, 2012. Pg. 55- 57.

17 city’s black community after the first Great Migration continued to hurt its residents. Black

Chicagoans would increasingly begin to express their frustration with Chicago Schools

Superintendent Benjamin Willis, who black Chicagoans had become convinced was working in earnest to keep black students out of white schools.13 The CAFSNCC would gradually become involved in the desegregation fights within the city’s schools, employment and housings markets.

The work of the CAFSNCC that changed the direction of Chicago politics started as a means pressure the only six city council black aldermen through its use of student protest power.

These council men were called the silent six due to their perennial support for all of mayor

Daley’s political agenda. The CFANSNCC, like other Friends of SNCC groups of their time, relied heavily on student activists from local colleges and universities within their local area to facilitate the work of the chapter. “Nearly all of SNCC's budget comes from individual contributions gathered by Friends of SNCC groups and Northern student groups. Because of our always expanding activities, this year's budget is a great deal higher than last year's, and the figure does not include the separate funds we are trying to raise for operation of the massive

Mississippi Summer Project. The success of our activities depends to a great extent on the fund- raising activities of Northern supporters throughout the year.”14 This was one of many examples of the Northern and Southern civil rights activists cooperating and depending on each other for monetary, membership and institutional support. However, this was a mostly asymmetrical relationship that funneled help and resources to the fight in the South. Not the other way around.

While northern SNCC members could rely on their southern counterparts for support with tactics and strategy, they were largely own their own when it came to confronting systemic racism in

13 Ibid. 14 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. SNCC: How you can help Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee pamphlet. Atlanta. SNCC. 1964.

18 their communities, towns and cities. In Chicago, the picture for black residents looked particularly unhealthy in the early 1960s. Journalist, and biographer of the Chicago Defender,

Ethan Michaeli describes the current predicament facing Chicago Public Schools right at the time the CAFSNCC came into exist. Michaeli explains “Instead of allowing black students to take up the plethora of empty seats in those buildings designated for whites, CPS superintendent

Benjamin Willis instituted shifts in the black schools that required some youths to attend class early in the morning and others in the late afternoon. When that obtuse policy failed to alleviate the overcrowding, the superintendent ordered the deployment of mobile classrooms – cheaply constructed, poorly insulated trailers that activists promptly labeled ‘Willis Wagons.”15 Under these conditions, students, parents and teachers across the city organized to challenge the entrenched racism present in Chicago schools and in their superintendent. These groups looked for any organization that might be able to aid them in their attempt to correct this problem. The

CAFSNCC were eager to accept the invitation.

The making of the Chicago School boycott of 1963 was due to the efforts of the

CAFSNCC and was built out of a collaboration of the CCCO that would eventually help plan the

Chicago Freedom Movement three years later. The CAFSNCC, while engaging in its support work for southern organizations against Jim Crow, moved to assist activists in the fight to desegregate Chicago Public Schools. CAFSNCC members Fannie Rushing, Sylvia Fischer, Bob

Zellner and others met with concerned individuals across the city to plan the best approach possible that might publicize the plight of black Chicago students.16 Students and civil rights groups decided upon a massive school boycott to be held on October 22, 1963. That date was

15 Michaeli, Ethan. The Defender: How the legendary Black Newspaper Changed America. New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 2016. Pg. 377 – 378. 16 The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC. Urgent Appeal to All Freedom Fighters. Chicago. The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC, 1963.

19 dubbed Freedom Day by black students. On that day, over 200,000 students stayed home from school and marched to the office of superintendent Willis to demand his removal. Speaking to the Chicago Defender, Urban League executive Edwin Berry noted: “If the Chicago School

Board knuckles under to the superintendent again, our only hope is Mayor Daley will exercise extraordinary care in the selection of three or four vacancies on the school board which are to occur this years.”17 The march was unsuccessful in its goal of ousting Benjamin Willis, who did not resign until 1966. For its part, the CAFSNCC organized Freedom Schools for students to attend on the 22nd that taught classes on African American history.18 The Freedom Schools set the foundation for the campaign by black students and parents to incorporate more black studies into school curriculum which reflected a trend that was appearing nationally thanks to the black power movement.

In the aftermath of the school boycott, the CAFSNCC eventually settled on a boycott campaign that would detour shoppers from supporting businesses in downtown Chicago. The

CAFSNCC built bridges with other civil rights organizations that included the NACCP, the

Chicago Urban League and the national SNCC headquarters for support of the boycott and march. It would be up to students and Chicagoans in the city to do the work of supporting the march. “Downtown merchants and business leaders helped keep Willis in power. Some of them publicized their actions. Others reportedly worked from behind the scenes. Why should you spend your dollars in their stores, shops, restaurants, and theaters.”19 This was the question put before Chicagoans by one of the bulletins of the CAFSNCC before the planned boycott. The

17 Berry, Edwin C. Church, Civic Groups Support School Boycott, Blast Willis. Chicago. The Chicago Defender Vol. VIII No. 144. October 21, 1963. 18 Chicago SNCC History Project (Box 3, Folder 8), Chicago Public Library, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature. 19 The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC. Don’t Stop Downtown Until Willis Goes. Chicago. The Chicago Sun Times Records. The Newberry Library. 1963.

CAFSNCC also in needed volunteers to help their work during the march. Students answered this call. “The CAF-SNCC has issued a call for volunteer help to make the boycott a success. It has asked college students to spend their Christmas vacation in Chicago working on the STOP!

Don’t Shop campaign.”20 The CAFSNCC’s black studies classes and the Boycott itself demonstrated the political power of the CAFSNCC from its early age. Within three years they would help oust political powerful civil servant and won the attention of voters and civil rights organizations in the city. The CAFSNCC would not be content to rest on its laurels after the

1963 school boycott. Chicago public schools remained deeply segregated after the march. In response, the CAFSNCC began preparing for Freedom Day 2.

Efforts to organize a second school boycott in 1965 were met with sterner resistance from city and state officials, but it laid a path to making schools one of the key issues of the 1966

Freedom Movement. In 1963, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) formed as an umbrella organization of many disparate civil rights groups across the city of

Chicago. The goal of the CCCO was to combine their work to achieve policy and legislative changes with one unified voice. The CCCO helped spearhead the 1963 boycott and brought the

CAFSNCC into its fold. Making formal connections among the groups involved in the CCCO allowed the CAFSNCC to operate in cooperation with a larger number of activists in common cause. After seeing little change in the overcrowding and segregated school system, the CCCO and CAFSNCC decided to work toward a second massive boycott in 1965. When the city learned of plans for a second boycott, they worked quickly to place an injunction against these groups to keep them from promoting or participating in any repeat of the 1963 march.21 The injunction was

20 The Student Voice. Friends Ask Help For Chicago Boycott. The Student Voice Inc, Vol. 4 No 8. December 16, 1963. 21 Board of Education of the City of Chicago v. Chicago Branch, NAACP. U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, RG 21, National Archives Great Lakes Region. (IL. June 10 – 11 1965.)

21 granted. However, the ploy to failed to deter students. Estimates of the second Chicago school boycott ranged from about over 100,000 students in June of 1965. Parents and students keep the pressure on school individuals by calling for the ouster of principals and administrators that they felt perpetuated the crisis in the school system.22 While the plan was to challenge the renewal of superintendent Willis’ contract, the 65 boycott, like the one two years before it failed, to produce immediate changes in the school segregation that activists hoped would follow. Dr. Rushing talks about the coalition and planning of Freedom Day 2 in her prepared remarks to the Chicago

SNCC History Project decades later. According to Dr. Rushing:

February of 1964 culminated in Freedom Day 2. And if there was a strong coalition that produced Freedom Day 1 by Freedom Day 2 all of the coalition had begun to organize itself around very, very different issues as the city made it very, very, very clear that if we were going to continue to take kids out of school, if we were going to continue this fight, they were going to do everything they could to destroy the movement. Now not as many students stayed out on Freedom Day 2 but Freedom Day 2 is extremely important because it because it represents this continuation process. It represented that people were not prepared to stop struggling until they achieved their objectives.23

Dr. Fanning speaks about the resilience of Black Chicagoans and how they refuse to turn away from their objectives due to setbacks of any kind. Frustrated, but undeterred, black Chicagoans carried on their desegregation fight into 1966 and the Chicago Freedom Movement.

The Chicago Freedom Movement provided the CAFSNCC with a larger platform to publicize the problems facing black students in the city and to put more pressure on black alderman on the city council. Back in the early 1960s, there were six black aldermen on the

22 Danns, Dionne. Chicago High School Students' Movement for Quality Public Education, 1966-1971. The Journal of African American History Vol. 88 No. 2. Spring 2003. 23 Rushing, Fannie. Chicago SNCC History Project: Lessons Learned from 1963 Boycott. Chicago. Chicago Public Library, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature. October 23, 2013.

Chicago city council who functioned as firm allies to the Daley administration and thus the

Chicago machine.24 These constituents of these aldermen coined the term as none of these men ever criticized mayor Daley and publicly derided Dr. King for bring outside hostility into the city.25 It were these alderman that the CCCO sought to target through political action campaigns and publicized school boycotts. After Freedom Day one and two, the CCCO were looking to bring in further pressure to make City Hall and the aldermen of the council take some serious steps at reform. When that failed, eight independent black candidates announced their campaigns to replace the “silent six” and others on the city council. Of these candidates, Charlie Crew representing the 17th Ward, only one was able to win their election.26 All of the silent six politicians remained in power. However, the boycotts and the subsequent message had been made official to the city. Independent black political power, not loyal to the Daley administration, began to take form.

The SCLC and MLK had been scouting northern cities to begin a northern campaign for civil rights. King and SCLC selected Chicago due to their good working relationship with members of the CCCO. Northern and Southern communities shared many of the same problems.

Segregation ran rampant in schools and across neighborhoods. When the SCLC began its efforts in conjunction with the CCCO to push real estate agencies and the mayor’s office on issues of integration, the CAFSNCC were grateful to have the help. The silent six black aldermen of the city council would be even more pressed to explain their voting records defending Daley with

King now in their city forcing issues to the forefront that had not been spotlighted in such ways

24 Fremon, David. Chicago's city council: Wolves or sheep? Dekab. Northern Illinois University Press. September 1991. 25 Camper, John; Lipinski, Ann Marie. The Silent Mayoralty Eugene Sawyer`s Critics Say He`s Not Forceful Enough His Backers Say He`s Just Quietly Effective. The Chicago Tribune. December 11th, 1988. 26 Karwath, Rob. Flamboyant And `Visionary,` State Sen. Charles Chew, 63. The Chicago Tribune. July 04, 1986.

23 before. During the CFM, alderman Charlie Chew and Richard Newhouse both met with King during their election campaigns. Both won seats to the Illinois state senate.27 The Chicago

Freedom Movement affected politics on the ground in the city even while it faced an impasse on its main objectives. The biggest beneficiaries of the work and publicity brought by the CFM tended to be black independent politicians who found more voters receptive to their platforms.

The Chicago Freedom Movement highlighted the strengths of the CCCO and the

CAFSNCC to organize an effort campaign for integration in the north. Through strategic marches and boycotts, the SCLC and the CCCO planned to highlight the inequalities that made up Black Chicagoans’ daily reality. With the profile that Dr. King brought into the northern campaign, activists hoped that the nation would no longer turn a blind eye to the de facto segregation that infiltrated every aspect of life in Chicago. However, these hopes would ultimately be premature. The protesters would meet a fierce torrent of violence as they marched from white Chicagoans, who by a variety of means both violent and non-violent had successful kept their neighborhoods separate by race for decades. Moreover, it was not the police who actively overplaying their hand by attacking protestors like their counterparts in the south had done in fatal error to their social order. The city of Chicago had learned the lessons of

Birmingham, Albany and Selma. Mayor Daley keep the police strictly in line to not harm protestors while the cameras kept rolling. The police quickly restrained violent civilians who attacked marchers with slurs, rocks, and most other objects that came into their hands. With the resignation of Willis that same year, the profile of the CAFSNCC elevated them to a higher position of provenience in the CCCO. However, with the slow response from the city government and real estate brokers to negotiate in good faith on the issue of housing segregation,

27 Ralph, James R. The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington. University Press of Kentucky. Pg. 264

24 the CAFSNCC would find itself in self-elevation mode with one of its most reliable, and critical membership bloc, the student movement.

The CAFSNCC would be instrumental in keeping the issue of school segregation at the forefront of the Chicago Freedom Movement, but the larger issues that were facing the national

SNCC organization would also start to affect the Chicago chapter. In 1966, SNCC experienced an identity crisis. The organization would increasingly play host to young people who begun to lose patience in the long battle against systemic racism and discrimination that had shown little sign of abetting. With Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power during the March Against Fear,

SNCC in 1966 as an organization was beginning to transform itself. What would emerge in the aftermath of that recreation was the subject of intensive debate among originalists and the new militant wing of the group. “Again the focus on ‘black power’ rather than protest shifts the emphasis away from the defensive attitude to a forward looking program. Probably the best measure of its validity is the volume of shrill and distorted diatribe that has been issuing the press and other communications media ever since it was enunciated.”28 In Chicago, this organizational identity crisis manifested in the Chicago Freedom Movement through black power advocates expressing frustration with the campaign’s lack of progress.

The CAFSNCC began a sounding office for the ideological split existing within the larger SNCC operation, but it remained committed to keeping school desegregation and support for black independent politicians. The several issues facing the CAFSNCC during the restructuring of the national headquarters that included non-violent demonstration, support for national Democratic candidates, and the issue of white members. In her interview with the

28 Montgomery--SNCC: Circulars, newsletters, program outlines, incidents, 1963-1966 (Lucile Montgomery Papers, 1963-1967; Historical Society Library Microforms Room, Micro 44, Reel 3, Segment 48)

Library of Congress, Dr. Gwendolyn Simmons, former SNCC member, recalls the debate over white membership in way that echoes the sentiments of other followers.

So, another important point is that after Mississippi Summer, uh, the racial composition of SNCC changed, because so many of the white volunteers wanted to commit their lives to fulltime. And so the organization expanded, and the numbers changed in terms of the ratio. Now, the Atlanta office, the national headquarters, had, uh, a significant number of whites. And one of the problems that fed the feeling that whites needed to go and organize in the white community was that we would have to go there and often ask for resources and justify them to white members. And so, we’d say, “Well, wait a minute, is this a black organization or what?” You know?29

For its part, the CAFSNCC continued their work with the CCCO and the SCLC toward keeping the pressure on City Hall and the city council to make good on desegregation. But the debate continued to re-appear in the borders of the Windy City. SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael remained relatively withdrawn from the CFM since SNCC only had an Friends of office there.

However, he kept his attention keenly drawn to the city. In the aftermath of the CFM,

Carmichael raised doubts about the exercise and used it as an excuse to note the failures of non- violent organizing to address the entrenched systemic racism that kept the city deeply segregated.

His comments, along with Floyd Mckissick the chairman of CORE, would provide the talking points that would shape much of the radical thinking in Chicago’s black power wing around

1967 onward.

On the other hand, SCLC’s Chicago project program exactly the opposite of ours: integration and something they called ‘open housing.’ The tactic: nonviolent marches into the surrounding ‘white ethnic’ suburbs, presumably to ‘open’ them up so inner-city blacks can move in? Hey, there are people already living there.

29 Simmons, Gwendolyn. Interview with Gwendolyn Simmons. Gainesville. Civil Rights History Project. Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History & Culture and the Library of Congress. September 14th, 2011.

Aye-yai-yai. I thought. Right issue, wrong approach, wrong strategy, wrong solution. I didn’t see what good could result, but honestly? I never, never expected the size and ferocity of the white response. It was ugly and you know very sad. Because it didn’t really have to happen at all.30

Chicago black power activists understood well this sentiment before and after the compromise summit in the summer of 1966. The Summit Agreement, the compromised reached by the city of

Chicago, SCLC and the CCCO, reached in August of 1966 confirmed the suspicions of the groups in the CCCO like Chicago CORE and the West Side Organization. The agreement promised no specific policies to be amended that would dismantle segregation or achieve open housing.31 It only stated that the matter would be investigated in the future. This led Bob Lucas and CORE to carry out the Cicero march that proved one of the more violent marches of the campaign. The march had been a point of contention within factions of the CFM especially after the murder of Chicago teen Jerome Huey by a white mob a little earlier.32 The CAFSNCC became caught in the middle of this compromise and its members would have to make a choice.

The end of the CAFSNCC would herald the beginning of a black power movement for independent black political power in Chicago. In the aftermath of the CFM, more black politicians who wanted to declare their independence from mayor Daley emerged to run for public office. Al Raby, one of the leading members of the CCCO, continued to head the organization after 1966 and plan protests that followed in the subsequent years. He would quietly work in the organization to help elect independent black politicians to office.33 This work would

30 Carmichael, Stokely. Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: the Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael {Kwame Ture}. New York. Scribner. 2003. pp. 537-538 31 Ayers. Thomas G. Agreement of the Subcommittee to the Conference on Fair Housing Convened by the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race. City of Chicago. August 26, 1966. 32 Gutowski, Christy. Black Chicago teen's death fueled Cicero march during 1966 protests. The Chicago Tribune. September 2, 2016. 33 Ralph, James R. The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington. University Press of Kentucky. Pg. 268

27 paid off when Raby began to work with Harold Washington and served as his campaign manager as well as within his administration after 1983. The CAFSNCC also helped shape the formative years of Congressman Bob Rush who later left the group to join the IBPP in 1968. Other veterans of CFM included Gus Savage who began running for a U.S. house seat as early as

1968.34 Savage, a controversial figure, embodied many of the Black Power Movement’s worst stereotypes as accusations of fraud, sexual assault, and charges of anti-Semitism plagued him throughout his short tenure as a Congressman after his election in 1980.35 Savage had also been a longtime advocate of open housing in Chicago and ran as a black independent candidate. The first African American woman elected to the Chicago city council was CCCO activist and lawyer

Anna Langford. Langford was elected alderwoman in 1971. While her service was shortlived, she would return to serve on the council again in 1983.36 Langford had unsuccessfully run for a council seat as early as 1966. She met briefly with Dr. King to the Cicero march. It seemed seizing political power for black neighborhoods to defy the Daley machine had been on her mind after the summit agreement.37 Other candidates such as Dorothy Tillman involved herself in

Chicago politics after the CFM. Ms. Tilman won a city alderwoman position in 1985. All these veterans of the CAFSNCC and CFM movement carried one common trait that aligned them which was resistance to the Daley and the Democratic machine.

The demise of the CAFSNCC occurred in the shadow of the national headquarters, but also foreshadowed the ground being won by black power faction from outside and within

Chicago. The CAFSNCC was short-lived as a civil rights group, only lasting five years. Its

34 Pearson, Rick. Pratt, Gregory. Gus Savage, controversial former congressman, dies at 90. The Chicago Tribune. October 13, 2015th. 35 Ibid. 36 Gorner, Jeremy. Black City Council pioneer Anna Langford dies. The Chicago Tribune. September 18th, 2008. 37 Ralph, James R. The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington. University Press of Kentucky. Pg. 268.

28 collapse mirrored the collapse of the national organization as funding and controversy shuttled the Chicago chapter in 1968. The non-violent and self-defense factions within the SNCC organization grew more and more apparent by 1966 and 1967. But during that time, largely due to the fierce black student movement in Chicago, it accomplished a great deal during its brief appearance. In helping to ouster Benjamin Willis through school and economical boycotts, the

CAFSNCC proved it was a vital organizing group. In helping to center schools in the CFM, they helped to embody the frustration that would come to occupy much of protest actions of the movement. And through cognitive liberation experienced by many of its members, in the last years more independent black candidates begin running for office.

The legacy of CASNCC demonstrated the impatient of Chicago’s young black students and their older supporters could begin a wave of political upheaval in the city. As some of its members would gravitate toward black power organizations others would work within mainstream civil rights institutions to make black power ideology more mainstream to their operating directives. As professor Jeffrey Helgeson notes about the end of the CFM: “As an open confrontation with the machine, the CFM helped create a great deal of potential political energy.

But at the end of the movement it was clear that to bring that latent energy to the surface would require overcoming widespread doubt among black Chicagoans.”38 There was much doubt among Black Chicagoans after the summit compromise of the CFM. With doubt hardened among black residents of the city who did not believe that traditional mainstream civil rights were equipped to handle de facto segregation, black power ideology manifested as a welcome alternative to confronting the city’s racist politic state. In this atmosphere, the time of a

38 Helgeson, Jeffrey. Crucibles of Black Empowerment. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Pg. 189.

29 prominent black power group like the Black Panthers to emerge in the city could not have been better scheduled.

Chapter 2: I am the proletariat: The Illinois Black Panther Party and Chicago’s black political consciousness

“Ain’t nothing but a northern lynching”39 said an elderly woman touring the apartment of

Fred Hampton after a raid left the Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman and fellow IBPP member Mark Clark dead. A 21-year-old Fred Hampton served as the charismatic leader of the

IBPP. He speeches riveted and captivated audiences across the nation. His was a beloved figure of the Chicago’s black west and south side communities. During his brief tenure with the IBPP,

Hampton established working relationships with activists across multiple communities. His legacy that followed his murder laid the foundation for black political power in the city for generations to come.

As an idealistic and charismatic leader of Chicago’s the West Suburban Youth Chapter of the NAACP, Fred Hampton began to take flight. He had been a believer of integration and non- violent civil disobedience for much of his youth in the NAACP during the early 1960s. This all changed when he heard Black Panther Party for Self-Defense member Lennie Eggleston of the

Oakland chapter give a lecture. After an introduction by Joan Elbert and several conversations with Eggleston, Hampton became a new black power convert. Originally considering himself a black nationalist, an ideology that promotes political philosophy geared toward the uplift through political and economic control of the black community, Hampton infused class politics in his core political beliefs after his talks with Eggleston. He agreed with Eggleston that a multi-racial, class conscious coalition would be the only thing that could challenge an imperialist, racist and capitalist regime that the United States government represented. His political beliefs would have

39 Hass, Jeffrey. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. Chicago. Chicago Review Press. 2011. Pg. 43

31 a sizeable impact on the direction of black power ideology and political thought in the black community throughout Chicago before and after his murder.

The Illinois Black Panther Party was created through the combination of disparate political ideologies and approaches. After Hampton moved further toward leftist black power and economic solidarity politics, he became interested in joining the Black Panther Party.

However, in 1967 there was no official party, which the consent of the Oakland branch, to join.

Originally, two unofficial Black Panther Parties vied for official recognition on Chicago’s West and South Sides. The South Side faction was led by two former SNCC members, Bobby Rush and Bob Brown, who had become disheartened by the failures of Chicago Freedom Movement.

In East Garfield, on the West Side, Jewel Cook and Drew Ferguson headed the local unofficial chapter of the Black Panther Party. Rush and Brown met Hampton at the Afro-Arts Theater in

1968 and they were immediately taken with him. After some conversation, Hampton left the

West Suburban NAACP to join the South Side faction.

West and South Side BPP organizations argued vociferously to a claim for legitimacy as the official Black Panther Party of Chicago. Ultimately, the South Side faction won recognition from the Oakland Chapter after assisting in the release of the two Panthers from the Chicago jail on the baseless claim of a plane high-jacking. Shortly thereafter, the West Side faction merged with the South Side faction to form the official Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in

1968. Members of the IBPP included Bob Brown, Jewel Cook, Henry English, Drew Ferguson,

Fred Hampton, Bobby Rush, Marion Stamps, and Rufus Walls. The civil rights and black power credentials of this group was quite diverse and included former members of the Deacons for

Defense, SNCC, the Urban League and the Young Lords. Former members of the West

Suburban NAACP like Joan Lombard also followed Hampton into the IBPP.

The organizational makeup of the IBPP was crucial not only to commanding influence, but also creating a space for black Chicagoans who felt left out of the broader Civil Rights groups in the city. The leadership of the IBPP was divided among the central staff of the chapter.

Fred Hampton was selected as the Chairman for his oratory and public relation acumen. Bobby

Rush served as the Minister of Defense. Dianne Dunn was appointed Minister of Labor. Rufus

Walls served as Minister of Information and Iris Shinn served as Minister of Communication.

Christina May took up the position as Minister of Culture. This organizational structure allowed the IBPP to carry out its duties and edicts smoothly and efficiently. While Hampton and Rush gained notoriety, the rank and file members of the organization that kept the IBPP functioning all times. The Panthers on the ground that carried out the grassroots efforts to provide food, health care, education, and assistance to the elderly within the black communities of the city. Hampton provided the political message and direction of the group and the Panthers on the street brought it to larger awareness among black Chicagoans. Much like the NOI, the IBPP had sought to recruit from the lumpenproletariat as Oakland Chairman Huey P. Newton had suggested. “As the ruling circle continue to build their technocracy, more and more of the proletariat will become unemployable, become lumpen, until they have become the popular class, the revolutionary class.”40 He wanted recruits from among former convicts, hustlers, bindle-stiffs and other brothers and sisters who were dismissed by the class racism wielded in the mainstream civil rights organization. In short, Newton wanted the black activists who didn’t fit the conventional narrative. The IBPP followed suit. One of the defining aspects of the IBPP was the role women played in high ranking posts within the central command. The inclusion of women in these roles

40 Newton, Huey P. Epps, Garrett. Huey Newton Speaks at Boston College, Presents Theory of 'Intercommunalism. The Harvard Crimson. November 19, 1970.

33 would spur growth among the IBPP’s influence in a way that even the Oakland Party could not match.

With women centering themselves into the top posts within the IBPP, the organization greatly expanded and spread their message in a way that other groups were not able to emulate.

Women in the IBPP worked tirelessly putting up fliers, making brochures, pinning leaflets, writing IBPP materials to make the message one that Black Chicagoans would be able to hear judge for themselves. Women in the IBPP made use of social organization, business connections and community events to put the platform their organization into the ear of their neighbors, friends, families and strangers. Religious institutions were one of the mobilizing places for the dissemination of black nationalist thought as women used churches, mosques and other places of worship as a place to converse over politics. This has long been a tradition through Black

American history. And while many, churches in the Chicago area were formally committed to other civil rights organizations like the Urban League, the NAACP or SCLC, they still proved remarkedly valuable for members of the IBPP to get their message into the community.

However, it had been a long tradition of civil rights groups to recruit this way, as Malcolm X was known to call “fishing” in his Autobiography and elsewhere.41 But the skill of the IBPP members was to actively engage with people they already knew and work to build out their numbers from there. The successful introduction of the IBPP message was in no small part due to the work of their Minister of Communications Iris Shinn.

Iris Shinn’s work on the behalf of the IBPP proved effective at both alerting the public of the group’s politics, engaging the press, and preparing the statement for members. Hampton as the IBPP chairman captivated audiences with his skillful oratory, his natural charisma, and

41 Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Random House Publishing Group. New York. 1964. Pg. 223

34 probing intellect. But the operation of the IBPP and its communication to the public cannot rest solely on the work of one man alone. It was, in case, Ms. Shinn whose work as the Minister of

Communication saw the organization flourish. Shinn with clarity and detail explained the class politics that infused much of the Panther’s rhetoric across the nation. However, sprawling speeches of Marxism and calls for Socialism, typically the favorite of Hampton’s ideological beliefs fell flat on the ears of many of the IBPP’s intended audience. Shinn masterfully reworked the IBPP platform into language that could have wider appeal for mainstream black audiences.

The lumpenproletariat that was the chief interest of Huey P. Newton to induct into his movement were drawn to men like Hampton, whose fiery and impassioned speeches spoke to their circumstances in a way few other could.42 As Minister of Communications in the IBPP, it was

Shinn’s job to make sure that Hampton’s message passed on to other Black Chicagoans after the speeches were finished and to ensure that they sustained momentum to turn into viable political action. Shinn was also outspoken on the role of women in the Black Panther Party and the Black

Power Movement. She made it clear to wide audiences in Chicago that women would stand with men in the movement and provide aid as it was needed.43 In carrying out these messages to women in the south and west sides of Chicago’s neighborhoods and by operating in her role visibly in the community, women like Shinn helped to reassure others that they could find a place in the IBPP to express their voice and concerns. How these gender dynamics worked in operation is not a cleanly settled issue. Like many black power groups in the nation, sexism remained present in the IBPP. Fighting gendered roles and positions within the group was a daily

42 Newton, Huey P. The Huey P. Newton Reader. Seven Stories Press. New York. 2002 43 Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 2013. Pg. 101

35 task that IBPP women faced daily. Nonetheless, women still sought to utilize the IBPP to make their own political issues core to the interests of the Illinois chapter itself.

The politics of the IBPP rested on the concern with racial coalition, class solidarity and a refutation of capitalism to liberate Black people around the world. Just as their national founding organization, the Oakland Black Panther chapter, made clear, the IBPP deeply rooted its rhetoric socialist and Marxist economic principles. The class consciousness of the Panthers was instrumental to their platform and what they identified as key to oppression of black people who languished in city ghettos. “We say we not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism but with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.”44 The IBPP put their politics into action by launching a variety of community programs that concentrated on health-care, food and education. For the

Panthers, connecting capitalism with racial oppression was an essential part of their political doctrine. Only by helping other black people realize this message did the Panthers believe they could begin to address the true systemic violence and injury that the government inflicted.

Through these programs the IBPP showed the community what they were about.

The Free Breakfast Program helped forge bridges and bonds among the IBPP and Black

Chicagoans that could manifest through politics. Like their Oakland counterparts, the IBPP started a breakfast program that targeted kids and those in need in Chicago’s Black communities.

The program proved immensely popular among residents. Black Chicagoans supported the work done by the Free Breakfast program that helped families and individuals in dire need. For some

44 Hampton, Fred. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, Appellee, v. FRED HAMPTON. State of Illinois. 1969.

36 of these children, the Panthers’ provided meals and the meals that they received at school would be the only food that they would receive at all. The Panthers believed that no child should have to starve in a country as rich as the United States. The fact that many Black children went hungry in Chicago was damning evidence that capitalism had failed them.

The IBPP wanted to offer an alternative to the narrative of Black capitalism and materialism that had been offered in the past. The communities that the IBPP served took notice.

During breakfast service, the IBPP would speak with parents, students and volunteers about the politics they exercised and how the current system, of American government, had never worked in their best interest. Sometimes the connection built through the Breakfast programs turned eager young people, with a thirst for activism, into fresh new recruits for the cause. Other times these political chats were exactly that: chat. However, the IBPP strove to put these issues on the minds of the Black people in the community. The issue of poverty and hunger were always on the minds of black voters in the city. The IBPP merely provided a new perspective for these voters to engage with on those topics in a way few other groups had been able to accomplish.

The breakfast program, despite its stark popularity, was not the only program that the

IBPP sought to use to put their politics into action. The free clinic established by the IBPP made the politics of health care a more central concern to those in the Chicago’s Black community.

The free clinics primarily served the elderly and children on the city’s West side. The IBPP also encouraged blood drives and created a means for parents to have doctors visit their homes. The

IBPP additionally provided testing and treatment for Sickle Cell Anemia. Access to quality health care was a real issue deeply important to Black Chicagoans. Further, many of the residents that frequented these free health clinics had been subject to discrimination in other hospitals though police harassment, frustrating waiting times or general lack of service and concern by

37 their doctors and hospital staffs.45 The IBPP made the issue of health care into a matter of political concern. Elderly voters that used the clinics were another key demographic for the IBPP to connection with to give their political efforts real sense of actual power that could affect systemic change.

One of the reasons that the IBPP connected swimmingly with the residents in Chicago’s

Black community was due to many of their members coming from those areas. As unofficial chapters on the West and South sides chased official recognition, they were already building roots in their respective communities and their people. The Black voters that the IBPP influenced found a more responsive audience because they already knew many of the messengers of that political cause. Hampton through his voice and work was just one means that established trust between the Illinois Panthers and Black Chicagoans. The connections other members brought to the community, through family and friends, only further solidified the trust that was put in them.

Black Panthers used community ties to spread the message of racial and class solidarity would later use those connections to further their political beliefs. Toward the beginning of the

1970s, the new platform of the Black Panthers was to secure political power by getting their members elected to public office within their communities. After Hampton’s death in 1969 and

Newton’s order that shuttered all black panther chapters nationally except for the Oakland office.

Historian Peniel Joseph explains the thinking behind Newton’s decision: While calling themselves revolutionaries, the group had turned corners going from open confrontation with authorities to a strategy of community empowerment, by consolidating local strength as power brokers within Oakland’s municipal politics.”46 This decision had a two-fold impact on the IBPP.

45 Wall, Barbara Mann. American Catholic Hospitals: A Century of Changing Markets and Missions. New Brunswick. Rutgers University Press. 2011. Pg. 80 46 Joseph, Peniel E. Waiting Til The Midnight Hour. Henry Holt and Company, LLC. New York. 2006. Pg. 277 - 278

The organization of the IBPP had been shattered by Hampton’s murder. The decision from

Oakland effectively put the final nail in the IBPP’s coffin. However, the death of the group was not to be the demise of the movement. Taking its cue from Oakland, former Black Panthers in

Chicago pursued electoral politics to consolidate political power and adhere to the panthers’ primary philosophy of intercommunalism. One of these black panthers was Yvonne King.

Yvonne King established herself as a committed Black Panther who used the connections and work of the party to run for political office and support the campaigns of other African

American electoral candidates. King served as a field secretary after joining the IBPP in 1969.

She was a bold activist in the IBPP helping with the organization’s community service programs and with other related Panther duties. “It wasn't merely an adventure for me. I didn't view it as that. I recognized the work they were doing was important. There was discrimination going on throughout the country, racism. I was attracted by the Party's boldness and assertiveness, and the fact that they were organized stood out to me. They caught the imagination of the people, including me. It was phenomenal; even today, and in retrospect, it remains that way.”47 After her time ended with the Panther in 1972, King took it upon herself to use politics to continue to follow in the goals set out by the party. That same year, King entered the election for Chicago’s model cities board elections. King credits the IBPP with her helping her to decide to run for public office.

I think that when you don't have an organization, when you're looking to participate in electoral politics, then you may be more open to compromise. If you have an organization, you will follow that line within the organization. In terms of analyzing positions by other groups, by individual candidates, I think that I draw a great deal from my experience in the Party. I try to consider objective

47 King, Yvonne. A Panther in Africa. PBS POV interview. September 21, 2004.

conditions, to look at people's role in the community, rather than just what they say.48

The IBPP helped shape and influence the thinking of many other members along the lines of the same thinking that King alludes to in her statement. King’s political activism did not cease here.

After the election of 1972, she would go on to be a supporter of the Harold Washington campaign for mayor. As described by Jakobi Williams in From the Bullet to the Ballot: and several other former panthers such as Yvonne King, who provided community sensitive legal guidance for the Task Force for Black Political Empowerment, a group organized outside the formal campaign structure to advance the struggle for political reform (symbolized by Harold

Washington’s campaign in a manner consistent with the broader goals of the movement.”49 The work performed by King during her own campaign and with the Washington campaign highlights how the activist work of the IBPP extended not only within neighborhoods but into the public office of the city. King was not the only Illinois Black Panther to pursue elected office. Perhaps the most one of the most well-known panthers also experienced some of the most success.

Bobby Rush’s activist roots in Chicago and multi-organizational experience with various civil rights and black power groups made him an ideal candidate to enter electoral politics.

Originally hailing from Albany Georgia, Bobby Rush launch himself into civil rights work as a youth. He served as the minister of Defense for the IBPP and as a confidant for Fred Hampton.

Rush’s career as a Chicago activist spans several decades. Like many of his comrades in the

IBPP, his roots reach back to the CAFSNCC. He did his work in the community on Chicago’s south side. Rush remembers why he joined the Black Panther party as thus: “I was a member of

48 Ibid 49 Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 2013. Pg. 197

40 the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Chicago chapter, along with, uh, Bob

Brown, and, uh, we were very close to Stokely at the time. And Stokely wanted to get a base of, of power on the central committee. And, uh, he asked us to come out and to form a chapter of the

Panthers here in Chicago.”50 Rush was rebuked in his initial efforts. He was ultimately successful after helping the Oakland chapter secure the release of two panthers who had been arrested in

Chicago at O’Hare airport.51 Serving as the IBPP Minister of Defense, Rush kept in line with the traditional principles of Black Panther rhetoric. He supported armed self-defense, intercommunalism, racial and class solidarity. Rush explains “it evolved into components of socialist philosophy and then it ultimately evolved into what we call revolutionary inter communalist, which was another, component of a number of different philosophies and ideologies and things like that.”52 Working with Hampton, Rush’s profile in the Chicago only continued rise among both white and Black Chicagoans.

The murder of Fred Hampton and the shuttering of the Illinois chapter of the Black

Panthers only drove Rush into entering politics. Even after Stokely Carmichael’s split with the group, Rush remained a steadfast believer in the party and its politics. When the raid on Fred

Hampton’s apartment occurred in December of 1969, his commitment to the panthers was only became stronger. “Murder, the pigs murdered our chairman Fred Hampton while he lied in bed.”53 Only adding further fuel to his already livid condemnation of the Chicago Police

Department, the CPD also raided Rush’s apartment in the same month only recover firearms, marijuana, and revolutionist reading materials.54 The raid on Rush’s apartment was apart the

50 Rush, Bobby. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. October 20, 1988. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid 53 Rush, Bobby. CBS Evening News Interview. Interviewer: Bill Plante. December 4, 1969. 54 Ibid

41 same operation to dismantle the panthers formulated by the CPD. The subsequent investigation of Hampton’s murder and the continued harassment of IBPP members by law enforcement all helped confirm to impact on Rush’s belief’s the structural changes within the government would need to be implemented.

Well, I think that, that the police, they made a concentrated effort, and I'm not just, when I say, I'm not j--just talking about your local cop, okay? I'm talking about those guys who provide the foundation and the, and the, and the theoretical basis for police actions, okay? I mean, in the hierarchy, the, the Justice Department and, and various other police agencies, they concentrated on the Panther Party because I think the Panther Party, for two reasons. One is that the Panther Party developed a rationale that was acceptable by a lot of, of, of Black and progressive White folks in regards to what needed to be done, okay? And two, the second reason, rather, is that I think that the Panther Party allowed itself, because of the rhetoric that we were espousing, allowed itself to become a victim of, of, of police attacks and things like that.55

Rush had a mind set on systemic change to the city government to liberate all poor people and he say a means to accomplish this through the Original Rainbow Coalition. A multiracial and class expansive group of voters and activists dedicated to the cause of liberation for all Americans.

“And what we were trying to do was trying to organize, um, Blacks, particularly in the Panther party, we were trying to coalesce with other organizations that was trying to organize, uh, natural allies of the Panther party and the Black community, and to, a, a community and a political vehicle and a political force that would be able to bring about fundamental changes in the lives of, in the quality of lives in, in, in the overall Black community.”56

Bobby Rush and the IBPP built the needed allies for a political campaign years before he even dreamed of seeking political office. Rush helped to recruit members from black Chicago

55 Rush, Bobby. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. October 20, 1988. 56 Ibid

42 gangs into the IBPP and in doing this he was also making allies in the community who wanted to stymie gang violence. Professor Williams surmised that the Chicago Panthers were able to effectively recruit from black street gangs because they also wanted access to political power. It was reasoned that by forming a united front they would be most successful in achieving this goal.57

These community connections are vital for understanding the foundations of the IBPP’s political legacy in Chicago. The intercommunal programs of the IBPP were eventually adopted by the other gangs in the city. “Despite the divisive action taken by local and federal law enforcement, the IBPP influenced most Chicago gangs, directly or indirectly, to transform into political entities. For example, the Young Comancheros of the south suburb of Chicago Heights became politically active and adopted Panther community service methodology.”58 Moreover, as the IBPP their work with gang leaders eventually garnered success and the Black Stone Rangers and the Black Disciples were able to announce a truce in July of 1969 because of their work with the Panthers as mediators. However, it was not the black communities of Chicago’s west and south sides alone that was noticing the IBPP’s work. Federal and local law enforcement were keeping a close tab on the activities of the IBPP and its charismatic young chairman.

Before and after Fred Hampton’s assassination, the FBI and the Chicago Police

Department were engaged in a covert offense to contain, neutralize and minimize the impact of the IBPP could have politically had before its demise. The surveillance of the IBPP dates back as far as the organization’s existence. The FBI had been tracking the Oakland chapter of the Black

Panther Party for self-defense for years and later began monitoring splinter organizations that

57 Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 2013. Pg. 160-161 58 Ibid. Pg. 162

43 arose across the nation. During the late 1960s, the Oakland Black Panthers carried on a dispute over tactics, territory and personal grievances with the US organization.59 According to one FBI memorandum published in 1968: “In order fully capitalize on the BPP and US differences as well as to exploit all avenues to create further dissension in the ranks of the BPP, recipient offices are instructed to submit imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measure aimed at crippling the BPP.”60 More sinister than this, memos from the bureau would suggest that the

FBI attempted to have Fred Hampton assassinated once before his later execution in 1969. A letter sent to then leader of the black gang Chicago Stone Rangers Jeff Font claims the IBPP had put a hit on him. The FBI explains the situation as such in another memorandum from the

Chicago branch to the FBI Director. “In the Chicago letter of December 16, 1968, a suggestion was made that an anonymous letter to be sent JEFF FORT, leader of the Blackstone Rangers, advising him of BPP efforts to discredit him, and in effect to ‘take over’ the Rangers.”61 What these counterintelligence operations clues in upon is not only how the political impact of the

IBPP was negated by the U.S. government, but also that federal, state and local law enforcement saw potential alliance and coalition building by the IBPP as an exigent threat.

The fear exhibited by law enforcement toward the IBPP’s political influence and intercommunal philosophy would be the group’s biggest injury when it resulted in Hampton’s murder. The FBI and the Chicago police department worked in conjunction with the FBI to dismantle the IBPP through the eventual raid on December 4th, 1969. On that morning at 5 am,

CPD officers raided the home of Fred Hampton while he and eight other people slept inside. By

59 Ngozi-Brown, Scot. The Us Organization, Maulana Karenga, and Conflict with the Black Panther Party: A Critique of Sectarian Influences on Historical Discourse. Journal of Black Studies, Volume 28, Issue 2 (Nov. 1997), 157-170 60 United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Counter Intelligence: A Documentary Look At America’s Secret Police: Volume One - The FBI’s Counterintelligence Operations Against Black Puerto Rican, Native American, and Chicano/Mexicano Movements.Chicago. National Lawyers Guild. Chicago. November 11, 1968. Pg. 23 61 Ibid. 1969. Pg. 40

44 the end of the raid, police had fired 89 to 99 shots into the apartment, leaving Fred Hampton and fellow IBPP member Mark Clark dead.62 From the beginning the raid was marred by controversy. At the time the FBI was privately claiming credit for the success of the raid. “A detailed inventory of the weapons and also a detailed floor plan of the apartment were furnished to authorities. In addition, the identities of BPP members utilizing the apartment at the above address was furnished. This information was not available from any other source and subsequently proved to be of tremendous value in that it subsequently saved injury and possible death.”63 This memo reflects another sign to which the federal government were convinced that the coalition-building being attempted by the IBPP were a serious concern. After details of the raid were known, the memo confirms that the neutralization of Hampton was a celebratory outcome.

The further investigation of Hampton’s death and the December raid revealed another point of how black power politics affected the electoral mood of black Chicagoans. Cook County

State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan learned that the political consequences of his work to fulminate and dismantle the IBPP would have. A rising Democrat in Chicago politics, Hanrahan oversaw the raid of Hampton’s apartment. Despite numerous questions from citizens, Hanrahan remained defiant. “Inflammatory statements and false charges have been made by the Black

Panther Party and others, despite the fact the speakers had no reliable knowledge about the occurrence.”64 Still questions dogged the investigation. The attorneys for Hampton and the

62 Grossman, Ron. Fatal Black Panther raid in Chicago set off sizable aftershocks. The Chicago Tribune. Chicago. December 4th, 2014. 63 United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Re: Bureau Airtel 12/8/69 and Chicago Letter 11/24/69 - Counter Intelligence: A Documentary Look At America’s Secret Police: Volume One - The FBI’s Counterintelligence Operations Against Black Puerto Rican, Native American, and Chicano/Mexicano Movements.Chicago. National Lawyers Guild. Chicago. December 11th, 1969. Pg. 44 64 Edward, Hanrahan. Illinois State Attorney General Edward V Hanrahan speaks on Fred Hampton's murder in Chicago. CBS Chicago News. December 1969.

45 panthers systematically dismantled the state’s case against members of the IBPP after the raid.

Eventually, Hanrahan and several officers were indicted for conspiracy and evidence tampering.

In a bit of irony, Hanrahan would see his electoral dreams of higher office come crashing down in his 1972 re-election campaign when he lost his seat to the mass turn of black voters who turned against him.65

The Hanrahan electoral loss revealed a weakness in the armor of the Democratic Machine under Richard Daley and proved that Black Chicagoans remained a vital component to any successful electoral campaign in the city. Additionally, the Hampton investigation also served as a boost for Republican candidates in a city that overwhelmingly supported Democrats. The loss of the Illinois State’s Attorney office to a Republican after Black voters and mayor Daley abandoned him simply adds another component to this electoral power-dynamic.66 The raid carried out against the IBPP had a wide range of political ramifications for the Chicago Police,

Chicago politics and the IBPP members.

The Defense Minister of the IBPP, Bobby Rush, used his regret and anger of the murder of the chairman to enter politics and form alliances. Rush would be among the sixteen-Black city alderman who would spring himself into an alderman position on the strength of black voters and joining with the campaign of Harold Washington. “It’s the same thing and that’s the same thing that attracted me to Huey, attracted me to Harold, and attracted me to Fred and others”67 Rush said to Julian Bond reflecting on his working relationship with the elder statesman Washington.

During his time in office, Rush was an invaluable ally to Mayor Washington, helping him to put

65 Napolitano. Jo. Edward Hanrahan, Prosecutor Tied to ’69 Panthers Raid, Dies at 88. The New York Times. New York. June 11, 2009. 66 Grossman, Ron. Fatal Black Panther raid in Chicago set off sizable aftershocks. The Chicago Tribune. Chicago. December 4th, 2014. 67 Rush, Bobby. Black Leaders on Leadership: Conversations with Julian Bond. Palgrave Macmillan. New York. 2014. Pg. 107

46 his legislative agenda into policy. This political ambition would eventually compel the alderman to launch a successful congressional campaign the same year Washington would win the city hall in 1983. Reflecting on the Black Power Movement’s impact on his political aspirations, Rush notes the how the events after the IBPP’s demise, including the 1972 Gary Convention, the first and largest political forum of black power and civil rights activists, shifted focus toward elections. According to Rush: “Well, you had people from Imamu Baraka to Bobby Seale to

Richard Gordon Hatcher, to Mary Hatcher, to religious leaders, educational leaders. I mean, you had a broad spectrum of political leadership that I think that, to--together for the first time and consented, uh, gave, gave their consent to the fact that pursuing electoral politics was a legitimate option that the Black community should, should investigate in, should involve themselves in. And it, it raised electoral politics to a level whereby you had activists from the sixties actually involve themselves in electoral politics.”68 While Congressman Rush might have been the most prolific member of the IBPP to enter politics, he was not alone. Women in the

IBPP also began to make their political interests known on a larger stage.

Fierce, intelligent, erudite, and strategic, Marion Stamps challenged power structures, city councils and authority. She defied mayors and helped get them elected. She was born in

Jackson Mississippi and was involved in the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. She moved to

Chicago in 1963 and lived in the Cabrini-Green housing project. According to the Chicago

Tribune: “Miss Stamps' career as a community activist began in 1969, when she was a resident of Cabrini-Green. But, even after later moving her family out to a federally subsidized town home nearby, she continued to battle for those who remained.”69 Ms. Stamps saw the

68 Rush, Bobby. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. October 20, 1988. 69 Hill, James. Reardon, Patrick T. Marion Stamps, Cabrini Activist Even After Moving From Cha, She Kept Fighting For Others. Chicago Tribune. August 29, 1996.

47 overcrowded conditions of the Cabrini-Green Housing towers and committed herself to be an advocate for tenants’ rights. One of the first steps she took to accomplish this goal was to join the

IBPP. “I guess my first real experience in the movement came out of being involved in the Black

Panther Party. Ah, I remember once having gone to the headquarters and, and taking my children, how excited I was in meeting Fred Hampton and really getting a real feel about what the Ten Point Platform was all about.”70 As an Illinois Black Panther, Stamps ran the children’s breakfast program in the north side. Like many of her compatriots in the IBPP, Stamps was building connects in the neighborhood and strengthening relationship with ordinary citizens and leaders in the city that would be beneficial to her political work. She was fully aware of what this meant in terms of electoral power and position. Commenting on the political capital her community wielded post-IBPP, Stamps is resolute: “Ah, public housing in Chicago has been used as the one political arena that every politician, uh, depends on because it's a concentrated area of votes, it's a concentrated Black votes. If you take all of the public housing in Chicago and put them together, then we would then become the second largest city in the state next to

Springfield. So we control at all times anywhere from, from 200-250,000 votes.”71 The Black community that politicians could not take for fools without serious consequences in Stamps’ view. Further, her contentious relationship with the leadership of the Chicago city government pushed her toward supporting a black candidate for mayor. She believed a time came to stop dealing with white people as they would never respect public housing tenants. Stamps and her comrades put their support in Washington as part of a greater plan to implement community control over black neighborhoods. They devised a plan to put black power ideology into action

70 Stamps, Marion. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. June 3, 1989. 71 Ibid.

48 through a black mayor. “So we had to figure out what the plan was, and we just began to devise the plan and we moved on the plan. And because we moved on the plan we got what we wanted.

And, and, and that's what that whole Harold Washington piece was about. Had nothing to do with the man, it was the plan.”72 The perceived disrespect of the power structure under the Daley and Byrne administrations had squandered whatever patience activists like Ms. Stamps had left.

Using her experience in the Black Panthers and within Black Power circles, Stamps became a valuable ally for the Harold Washington mayoral campaign. “Um, I was very, very involved in Mayor Washington's campaign even before Mayor Washington decided that he wanted to become the mayor, okay. Ah, part of it came out of the whole voter's regist-- registration drive that we launched, some of it came out of the just the grass root day to day kind of issues that we, we were confronted in terms of, of the existing administration.”73 Stamps helped organize voter registration drives in her neighborhood to get more Black Chicagoans to the polls. She would go talk with neighbors, friends, and people on the street about the necessity of a black man occupying the mayor’s office in Chicago. It was her belief that the power rested in the black neighborhoods that were often neglected by the Chicago Democratic machine. “And we understand that politics can, if you got the right folks in place, make things better. So my whole role in Mayor Washington's campaign was to make sure that we get a Black man elected mayor. I wasn't as much, um, concerned about whether or not the Black man was Harold

Washington or Lu Palmer or Jesse Jackson, you know, or some brother from the 'hood because we had the votes.”74 But Stamps knew that the black voters in these neighborhoods had ties to that political machine that ran deep and getting those voters to swing toward a relatively

72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid

49 unknown candidate. “The one thing about Harold's campaign is that it, it took a lot out of, out of us, okay, because the campaign divided, it divided mothers and daughters, it divided fathers and sons, aunts and uncles because a lot of Black people, particularly middle class Black people okay, they made it because of the regular Democratic party and their alliances to the regular

Democratic--to the machine okay.”75 It would take strong voices within those community to sedate fears over supporting the wrong candidate. Stamps found that as a former black panther and an ardent believer in black power, she was able to fulfill that role.

Stamps did not only wield political power useful to campaigns, but she also used it to hold politicians in check once they had been invested with power. Even after the election of

Harold Washington as mayor in 1983, Stamps remained a fierce critic of city government to live up to its responsibilities. With a bullhorn and with signs, Stamps followed politicians to news conferences, community talks, and gatherings to make sure the voice of her tenants and neighbors were being heard. “In 1983, Mayor Harold Washington was upset at her attempts to organize a rent strike by CHA residents over complaints of poor maintenance. And, two years ago, Mayor Richard M. Daley skipped his own news conference on jobs creation to avoid facing the bullhorn-toting activist.”76 Despite helping him during the campaign, Marion openly challenged mayor Washington on issues of housing and the rights of renters. She saw it as a duty to speak truth to power. Her commitment to the residents of the Cabrini-Green housing projects and black Chicagoans across the city is what illuminated her light as an activist for many others.

“Ah, it is our responsibility to see to it that our people have a decent place to live, decent food to eat and quality health care, not the system." So that frightened a lot of people. I, I mean they

75 Ibid 76 Hill, James. Reardon, Patrick T. Marion Stamps, Cabrini Activist Even After Moving From Cha, She Kept Fighting For Others. Chicago Tribune. August 29, 1996.

50 didn't think that it could happen, they didn't think that it was right. they didn't believe that this is what democracy was all about. But in fact the Black Panther Party practiced democracy in the

American way better than the Americans did it.”77

The life of Marion Stamps, as a housing rights organizer and as a Black Panther, starkly demonstrated what the work of black power activists could do for campaigns and politicians.

Stamps was just one of many young activists in the IBPP who engaged in this critical politics work in her community. Not content to merely support politicians, Stamps would try to use her own experience to launch a bid for political office in 1995 for the 27th ward for alderman. She came up short in that race. It would capstone a career of activism that helped create scores of new black voters, a boycott of ChicagoFest and help elect the city’s first and only black mayor.

The legacy of the IBPP run deep in Chicago politics long after the organization’s collapse and demise in 1973. The members of the IBPP proved that community interaction campaigns could produce voters sympathetic to their causes and beliefs. The disaster re-election bid of

Hanrahan, the political rise of Bobby Rush and the community mobilization of members like

Marion Stamps all point to the important political work done by the group in the 1970s after

Chairman Hampton’s death. Harold Washington, in contact with former members of the IBPP like Rush and Stamps, relied strongly on their organization skills, contacts, and knowledge to form the bedrock of his campaign. In the case of Rush, his first failed foray into politics in the alderman race of 1973 only mirrored the political climb toward city hall that Washington had been building since 1977. Further, the community programs of the IBPP like the Children’s

Breakfast programs and the community health clinics engaged black voters in the city with the issues that were not being satisfactorily met by the current Chicago administrations.

77 Stamps, Marion. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. June 3, 1989.

The IBPP would has stand as a beacon of inspiration for other groups across the city and help to reinforce the necessity of coalition building to its various comrades in struggle. The work of the IBPP crossed racial, economic and social boundaries in ways that other more mainstream civil rights organizations could only hope to achieve. Through the creation of the original

Rainbow Coalition, the working relationship the IBPP established with other racial, political, social and economic similar activist groups, the IBPP created a model of community service and action that was later adapted by other groups including the Young Lords and Young Patriots.

According to Dr. Jakobi Williams: “Harold Washington did not necessarily have to state his campaign was part of the original Rainbow Coalition (even though the title was a central advertisement of his campaign); his connection to the IBPP-inspired groups was understood by his supporters because of the activists and organizers who worked diligently for Washington.”78

The IBPP wrote a chapter of Chicago politics in the 1970s that allowed more African

Americans into public office than ever before. Through voter registration drives, community service work, coalition building and by running their own campaigns, the IBPP demonstrated that they could dismantle the political hold that the Chicago Democratic party had held on the city’s offices of power. The IBPP also showed how black power was central to altering these political currents. While coming up short in most their early election forays, members of the

IBPP did eventually succeed in securing public office, not just for themselves, but for others as well. The newly empowered black aldermen of the city at the beginning of the Washington administration had not merely been borne of the IBPP but had its members as their colleagues.

Black power’s political reach is embodied throughout Chicago politics in since the 1960s. The

IBPP represents the most visible element of black power ideology manifested in government.

78 Williams. Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 2013. Pg. 198-199

Moreover, the IBPP turned a new generation of young black people into active leaders in their own community. The IBPP charted the course along which future black politicians would follow to power.

Chapter 3: The Chicago Citizens Schools Committee and the new class of black leaders

During the 1963 Chicago School Boycott, students marched through downtown Chicago and shut down dozens of schools. On October 22nd, the students who participated in the boycott called the date “Freedom Day.”79 On that day, students demonstrated how the classroom held much of the untapped power of the Chicago Civil Rights Movement. The political power of students helped shift social movement campaigns in terms of strategies, resources and aims.

While students had many organizations to choose from to exercise their power from, parents also operated their own groups to work with Chicago Public Schools or to hold them accountable.

One of these such organization was called the Citizens Schools Committee (CSC). As a collective of many different groups of actively-involved parents and citizens, the CSC worked with CPS to address problems facing students. In the 1940s, in the CSC’s nascent years, they coordinated their strength toward combating segregation in Chicago schools. Dr. Anne Knupfer in her book The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism describes the CSC in the earliest formation. “Black and white teachers, parents, and interested citizens established (CSC) in 1933, documenting school inequalities and protesting at school board meetings. Their efforts met with varied success; more often than not, direct protests were sometimes most effective.”80

Almost two decades later, they found themselves mired in the trenches of that same battle. As the

1960s moved onward, black power advocates pushed the CSC toward embracing its own leftist politics. Black power advocates in later the civil rights movement of the 1960s would recognize the CSC as a useful ally due to its long history of struggle on behalf of black and brown students. The CSC, unlike the Chicago-Area Friends of SNCC, IBPP, and original

79 Quinn, Gordon. 63 Boycott. 2018 Kartemquin Educational Films. 2017. 80 Knupfer, Anne Meis. The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism. Urbana and Chicago. University of Illinois Press. 2006. Page 8.

Rainbow Coalition, was the longest surviving group whose legacy would ultimately span four decades. In that time, the CSC mainly comprised of women, focused their work on the city’s overcrowded public schools. They knew full and well the reason for much of the city’s overcrowded schools was segregation. “The push for school desegregation in Chicago came from the aggrieved parents. Women, activists, working through groups such as the Citizens’

School Committee, founded in the 1930s, had long challenged classroom overcrowding and inferior education in the city’s public schools.”81 In this spirit, the CSC were indeed following in the work of a great movement done by black activists across the city to secure equal access to quality education with no regard for race or zip code. The students themselves were also instrumentally important in galvanizing their elders in this fight. “College students face a period of sharp struggle. There must be no hesitancy or weakening. Only b [sic] aggressive and united protest can we deter the attempts to ‘gag’ political opinion.”82 Statements like these from Crane

College Students echoed much of the work that the CSC would try to engage.

The CSC and other civil rights organizations worked in tandem with the CPS to press for changes in classroom and school. Parents were frustrated with the lack of progress that the CPS had made in addressing the blight that afflicted many of the city’s predominately black schools.

Wading through this frustration, Black Chicagoans engaged in many unorthodox measures to try to solve their issues with the CPS, using both protest and litigation. But despite years of demonstrating the problem was overwhelming in the city in the years leading to the Chicago school boycott of 1963. “In April of 1958, The Crisis published ‘De facto Segregation in

Chicago Public Schools,’ which was an except from the Chicago Branch of the NAACP’s

81 Sugrue, Thomas. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. Random House. New York. 2008. Page. 452 82 An Open Letter of Students of Crane College. Citizens Schools Committee Collection, Box # 30. Folder 30-1. Chicago History Museum. December 9, 1947.

55 statement to the Chicago Board of Education meeting in December of 1957. The report estimated that 91 percent of Chicago’s elementary schools and 71 percent of the high schools were de facto segregated.”83 These numbers were largely a reflection of housing segregation and policy decisions as Ms. Danns elaborates upon.

Constantly facing financing issues, The CSC largely spent its efforts trying to work with teachers and their union, CPSTU, to see if it could effective more change by working inside the school system and building coalitions. The purpose of the CSC was often spelled out in their literature that was distributed widely among the public in Chicago. “The purpose of the Citizens

Schools Committee is to stimulate that interest and to encourage and furnish needed support for the elementary and high schools and for the City Junior College. As an independent monitor of public education in Chicago, from pre-kindergarten through Junior College, the Citizens School

Committee closely follows and carefully reports significant developments.”84 The CSC with such proclamations introduced itself as a friend to the CPS but made no confusion in declaring its immediate concern was to the welfare of Chicago students. Thankfully, the CSC appeared to have a solid understanding of the problems CPS faced.

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ENROLLMENT is bursting at the seams of even the newer schools (and church basements) of the most recent developments, as well as established cities. CLASSES ARE GETTING LARGER; meeting gyms and libraries; always with fewer teachers. WE ALL READ 10 YEARS AGO that this was going to happen. WE READ TODAY that it is about to surge into the high schools, Chicago is no exception. The Citizens Schools Committee of Chicago aware of these problems as well as proposed solutions and even arguments of the “tax-conscious” against them, serves as a forum for informed discussion, and as a

83 Danns, Dionne. Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965–1985. Basingstoke, United Kingdom. January 2014. Pg. 12 84 Citizens Schools Committee. Citizens Schools Committee brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #25. Folder 25-2. Chicago History Museum. 1967.

responsible legislative instrument to implement passage of necessary bills.85

While the CSC did identify and act on problems it saw facing public school students, it did not believe that all students in CPS faced problems at the same proportions. The CSC knew it would have to combat issues on race and segregation to effectively carry on the fight for equality in

CPS.

The CSC built coalition with civil rights organizations and black leaders across the city in its efforts to help desegregate CPS. CSC worked with the Chicago Urban League, the Chicago branch of the NAACP, black politicians and parents to form a working alliance against problems of racism and discriminatory policies that were awash in Chicago schools. These groups in turn held joint meetings and strategy sessions on the issue of race in education. CSC also took documents from these groups and individuals and spread them among its members. “In all matters the league will keep on working through interracial cooperation. We believe, as deeply as ever, that this is both the practical way and the moral way. We want results. We want progress to come a lot faster and in massive doses. And we know the best way to get those results is through recruiting and harnessing ALL the power that we can enlist.”86 These alliances established by the CSC did not spring up immediately. It was through the concentrated efforts and work of black power activists and community leaders and many other black Chicagoans who pushed the CSC toward embracing more black liberation politics in its operations. To explore how the CSC slowly transformed toward black-conscious politics, it will be necessary to examine early parts of the organization’s history especially surrounding the Chicago segregation

85 Citizens Schools Committee. Public Schools Belong to All of US brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. 1967. 86 Berry, Edwin C. An approach to the new era in race relations. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #26. Folder 26-2. Chicago History Museum. 1969

57 and its subsequent years of activist work in Chicago during that decade of the Civil Rights and

Black Power Movement.

The CSC has long been active as a political organizing force around the issues of schools and education. In the mission statement that guided the CSC through decades of policy shifts surrounding CPS, the CSC would often venture into the political contests to promote, support, or publicize certain candidates and policies for public office. The influence of the CSC only grew over the years and well into the Chicago Freedom Movement of the mid-1960s. “It publishes the voting records and current positions on school problems of all candidates for the public offices concerned with schools: these candidates are invited to express their opinions to the public both before the primaries and during the election.”87 The political nature of the organization also opened doors for the group to work with the city of Chicago and its various officeholders. “The committee also participates in the selection of good nominees for the Chicago Board of

Education by serving as a member of the Mayor’s advisory committee for School Board

Nominations.”88 With that influence in hand, the CSC was an organization of chief interest to politicians and parents alike. However, while the CSC worked with CPS and CTU, their politics did not always adequately satisfy the concerns of black parents and educators in the city. Their demands for specific curriculum and for the city to address racism within the CPS and CTU often fell on deaf ears. The CSC by contrast tried to remain an ally to these concerned groups.

CSC moved to include more conferences on racism and promote the interests of black educators in the city. The Education vs Racism conference is one example of the CSC trying to embrace a more diverse form of representation in its activities. It promoted black history as a

87 Citizens Schools Committee. Public Schools Belong to All of US brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. 1967. 88 Ibid.

58 nascent curriculum for Chicago schools to explore. “The ‘New Scholarship’ will be presented by distinguished historians like John Hope Franklin. The scholarship exposes and corrects the distortions of the American experience from slavery to reconstruction to today’s civil rights struggle.”89 But for all the efforts to provide more learning plans that were culturally relevant to the students that they served, CPS were still failing to provide essentials needed for quality education: desegregation, adequate funding and resources. In this respect the political arm of the

CSC would be most useful to black parents and educators. It is here black power activists once again use their collective action power to influence and shape Chicago politics.

After the Chicago school boycott of 1963 and the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1966, the CSC pushed for more black Chicagoans to run for public office in the city while also creating ties to black politicians. The coalitions built by the CSC with civil rights groups eventually create momentum for black Chicagoans looking to enter politics. Brenetta M. Howell was just one

African American woman who was endorsed by the CSC after the CFM had shaken up city politics. “For representative in Congress who speaks for West Side residents NOT the absentee machine.”90 The work the CSC did publicizing the Howell campaign was important for several reasons. First, it was a direct challenge to the political alliance that existed between the Chicago

Democratic party. The Chicago Democratic Party still held the reigns over most of the city’s public offices. By promoting an independent candidate like Howell, the CSC risked alienating relationships that could jeopardize their legislative agenda regarding CPS. Additionally, Howell was a leftist candidate whose politics on race, gender and the economy went beyond the preferences of her moderate opponents in her election bid. Although Howell lost, the CSC had

89 Citizens Schools Committee. Education vs Racism: A conference on Negro History. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-3. Chicago History Museum. 1964. 90 Citizens Schools Committee. Brenetta M. Howell political poster. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #25. Folder 25-2. Chicago History Museum. 1970.

59 proven that it would support candidates it believed would have the greatest benefit to Chicago children. With organizations like the Urban League and the Chicago African American Teachers

Association at their side, the CSC had now become an instrument through which black power candidates could find their voice.

The relationship build by the CSC would allow newer black politicians to gain entry to centers of power and influence that had previously been blocked to them. During the late 1960s under the leadership of Mary Herrick, the organization-built ties with black politicians. Some of the relationships the CSC was able to establish was due to the personal popularity of Herrick herself. “For the thousandth time, but perhaps for the first time to you, I was to say I am extremely proud of my former high school teacher, Mary Herrick”91 wrote Harold Washington to

Herrick in 1971. Herrick established relationships with many different powerbrokers through the city. Such access granted Ms. Herrick and by extension the CSC more of a voice within Chicago political circles. Herrick shared communications with Illinois Assemblyman Robert Mann, who released copies of his speeches to her.92 “I want you to know how much I appreciate your help.

Your encouragement and support mean a great deal to me and I I’m truly grateful”93 wrote Abner

J. Mikva to Herrick in 1972 identifying her political clout in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Illinois’ 2nd district. Herrick represented the CSC political reach and influence through her range of contacts and personal relationships. Under her leadership the CSC was a political identity that held considerable weight on the issues of education and schools. However, despite

91 Washington, Harold. Letter to Mary Herrick. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-3. Chicago History Museum. June 9th, 1971. 92 Mann, Robert. Extremism speech. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. March 11th, 1965. 93 Mikva, Abner J. Letter from Abner J. Mikva. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. August 18th, 1972.

60 having such a wide network of political agents, the problems with Chicago schools persisted and students along with parents grew restless.

Students and parents used the CSC to vent their frustrations with CPS and promote their political demands to larger audiences. Black parents around the city of Chicago were perennially upset by stalled efforts and lip-service by CPS and City Hall to confront school segregation, curriculum that failed to acknowledge African American contribution and a lack of resources for black students. “The fact is the account in American textbooks of Negro and their contributions to society has never been complete or well-balanced”94 stated a report from the American

Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO. A subsequent report from the University of California at

Berkeley supported these conclusions.95 Further, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther

King Jr in 1968, the Chicago African American Teachers Association began pressuring the CPS for more materials honoring the civil rights leader or possibly a holiday to commemorate his legacy.96 Keeping to its traditional role, the CSC played moderator to these tension factions between the CPS, students and parents. Coming full circle, it was Mary Herrick’s old political ally, Congressman Mikva that would begin talks with the CAATA about sponsoring a bill in honor of Dr. King.97 On the issue of school segregation, the CSC helped to promote literature to combat resistance to bussing and the remapping of school district lines by combining suburban and urban school zone.98 CSC had traditionally been an organization that supported candidates and issues that had strong support from the Chicago Democratic Party. The work of black power

94 American Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO. The Negro in Modern America History Textbooks. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-1. Chicago History Museum. 1966. 95 Ibid. 96 Burke, Edward. The Chicago African Americans Teachers Association Letter. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #26. Folder 26-3. Chicago History Museum. 1969. 97 Ibid. 98 Trachtenberg, Stephen. The Federal Government and School Desegregation: Changing Education – A Journal of the American Federation of Teachers. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-3. Chicago History Museum. 1966.

61 advocates, black parents and students helped to push the CSC to endorse more independent candidates. This shift in political backing by the CSC, viewed in the endorsement of Brenetta M.

Howell and others, came at a crucial time when more African Americans began seeking office in the city of Chicago during the 1970s. Additionally, through the work of Dorothy Tillman who had working with white parents to form an alliance against school busing efforts provided a glimpse of this dynamic. A long-time school activist, Tillman would eventually become an independent black alderwoman and embody the politics that the CSC would later support. In her words, alderwoman Tillman describes her entrance into politics based in the fight over schools.

And the school was failing, and I got involved in the school struggle. And then we organized all of these schools all over the city, and. And the demand got pretty high, and we couldn't get the, the elected officials to deal with the educational question. And we decided we had to run, run some people. And I couldn't get anybody to run against Kinnard. Everybody was scared, and I was like forced into it. That's how I did it. I lost by a hundred and something votes. Fine, but the I was--then turned around and appointed by Harold Washington after he went to jail. So I really didn't want to. I did it reluctantly. I just couldn't find anybody else to do it.99

Tillman was a veteran of the civil rights movement in the south and Chicago whose support for reparations put her politics closer to black power many of her compatriots of the CFM.100

Tillman and Howell both demonstrate cases of black women redirecting civil rights organizations from the inside out.

The conversation around black power as a movement and as a political philosophy was becoming a part of the debate around Chicago schools in part to the efforts by both students and black power activists. One of the greatest legacies of the Black Power Movement is the impact it

99 Tillman, Dorothy. The Honorable Dorothy Tillman (The HistoryMakers A2002.178), interviewed by Adele Hodge, September 5, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 5, Dorothy Tillman describes her decision to run for alderman in Chicago, Illinois. 100 Ibid.

62 had on the United States educational system. While the Black Student Movement on college campuses is most often what appears in the news and archives, it also had a lingering impact on elementary and high schools. In time it compelled more traditional civil rights organizations like the Urban League and the CSC to address the issue of black empowerment and political control over their own communities and their schools. The Chicago Urban League provides some of the starkest language of how they navigated the Black Power Movement era in the city during the height of its popularity. The Urban League championed their efforts to register voters, support black businesses, reduce black unemployment and decrease black poverty also added to black power collectively. “We believe whatever the connotations the concept of Black power may have been given, the nation cannot truly be healthy so long as a major segment of its people is powerless. Therefore, the imbalance in power is imperative and must be seen as beneficial to the entire community.”101

While still a far cry from the leftist, anti-capitalist ideology embodied in the IBPP, the Chicago

Urban League was making it plain to the city that it had understood the mood of the city’s Black

Chicagoans who supported black power as a political construction. The CUL’s position is worthy to appreciate regarding its relationship with working partners in the CSC. The CSC remained an insider organization trying to work with the city and CTU to make progress on the issues affecting Chicago schools. With the CUL moving toward supporting more independent black candidates, the CSC was put in the position of having to choose where its positions would settle.

Moreover, black teachers, parents and students often found themselves in opposition to the direction of leadership in both the CTU and CPS. In these cases, the CSC tried to remain neutral,

101 Berry, Edwin C. An approach to the new era in race relations. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #26. Folder 26-2. Chicago History Museum. 1969

63 but pressure upon the organization still impacted what candidates they would support and the issues it would prioritize during election season.

As the 1960s closed, the CSC’s endorsement remained a political advantage sought by new candidates seeking political office. The CSC enjoyed a prominent reputation in the city due to its ties with politicians, parents and journalists. “This organization, which has served the cause of good education for more than a third of a century is deserving of the support and encouragement of the Chicago citizenry, its businesses and professional interests. In the Citizens

Schools Committee effective education has a strong ally. I trust that its guardian role on behalf of better schools will never be diminished.”102 The major Chicago newspapers were also passing regular affirmations of the CSC effectiveness toward educating the public about the state of CPS.

“The Havighurst survey of the public schools of Chicago has been a floodlight on the need for citizens to take an active part of the public schools. If an organization did not exist to fill this purpose one would now have to be created. But one does exist – the Citizens Schools

Committee. Enrollment in the Citizens Schools Committee is an investment in Chicago and its schools.”103 With such an extensive profile, it proved impossible for the CSC to used for the political aspirations of those both within and outside of Chicago city government.

It was also not lost upon the CSC, that the problems faced by children in the CPS stemmed from larger problems of segregation in housing and employment across the city. As such, the CSC had to become politically active in arenas connected to larger epidemic of systemic racism in the city. Politically, this work for the CSC would revolve around the

102 Hunt, Harold C. Letter from Herold C. Hunt, Eliot Professor of Education, Harvard University. Citizens Schools Committee. Citizens Schools Committee brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #25. Folder 25-2. Chicago History Museum. 1967. 103 Chicago Sun-Times editorial. Citizens Schools Committee brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #25. Folder 25-2. Chicago History Museum. November 19, 1964.

64 promotion of specific candidates and campaign issues that the organization believed relate to school desegregation and equitable outcomes for students across racial categories. This manifested in 1966 with the CSC’s efforts to defeat the Blue Ballot Revenue Amendment.104 The

CSC promoted black candidates for school board and other public office positions. The CSC would also hold special conferences and debate forums for candidates up for specific positions in hotly contested races. This sometimes meant that the CSC made tough choices between candidates backed by a majority of black parents and with the selected candidates of the Chicago

Teacher’s Union or the CPS. True to the wishes of the black power community, the CSC tended to promote independent candidates who were favored by black parents and students.105 The teachers in these races for school board were also likely to campaign in favor of more control of schools by parents and access to greater resources that would allow students to avoid bussing to other schools and prevent school closures. “WE ARE GOING TO NEED STRONG

LEADERSHIP NATIONALLY AND LOCALLY. FOR THIS REASON WE UNITE TO

SUPPORT AND VOTE THE INDEPENDENT TEACHERS COMMITTEE SLATE.”106 The independent teachers slate was made up a majority of members of black teachers, administrators and citizens. In putting them in the spotlight in the community, the CSC was again contributing to the work done several black power organizations also trying to build community power through electoral politics. What was unique about the CSC was that it was one organization during this work that was primarily made up of women of various interracial backgrounds.

104 Citizens Schools Committee. Vote No Blue Ballot Revenue Amendment. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-2. Chicago History Museum. August 11, 1966. 105 Citizens Schools Committee. Independent Teachers Committee Platform. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. 1966. 106 Ibid.

The work of the CSC in support of black politicians was most prevalent during the late

1960s, but as deindustrialization, law and order and conservative New Federalism began to take more prominence, the influence of the CSC waned. The CSC was always in a state of financial life support. Even with the allies that it made in federal government, among Chicago politicians and members in the state legislature, the CSC was still always campaigning for monetary support to fund its political and educational work. It therefore became necessary to for the CSC to rely on a variety of means to keep themselves afloat. By the 1970s, the CSC had outlasted the IBPP and the CAFSNCC by looking to the same communities those groups did most of their work with and who comprised their membership. As such, the CSC was known among black community activists, civically engaged community members as well among the black politicians that the

CSC had already established working relationships. The CSC had provided a constructive entrance for black power activists where had not ventured much before with schools. It was also through connecting the Black Power Movement with the student movement that Chicago black power activists were able to recruit most of their stalwart members.

The CSC enabled students to take the reigns of the black power and civil rights movement in the city of Chicago when other leadership options had been denied to them. Student activism had always been a key part of the CSC political and operating power since its inception, but by the 1960s student organizing power had become a bedrock to the organization’s ability to recruit, secure funding and raise public awareness for issues and candidates on the topics of education and the CPS. Part of the push for the CSC to endorse more independent candidates was due to the efforts of students who grew suspicious of the two-party system that they were told were their only choices. “Nor can we take seriously the mock fight between political parties, for the differences between them are rapidly disappearing and their struggle is descending

66 rapidly to the level of a dog fighting over a bone.”107Student disenchantment like the kind portrayed in this leaflet was a direct result of years of governmental backlog and unfulfilled promises to fix the problems plaguing Chicago schools. But while some students did withdraw from participating in politics, far greater number of students did get involved in the political process and the CSC was one of the instruments that used. What the CSC could make up in terms of financial resources it could produce double in terms of student, teacher and parental volunteerism and involvement. The CSC would continue its work into the 1980s when the organization was shuttled due to a lack of funding support.

The legacy of the CSC begins and ends in its serve to Black Chicagoans as a political organizing force and in the battle to elect more candidates to office who were representative of a larger portion of the city. The CSC is a useful apparatus to measure the relationship between the

Black Power Movement and racial liberation. In many ways these two dynamics play off each other. Professor Jeffrey Helgeson refers to this long-standing relationship in his book Crucibles of Black Empowerment. He posits that “Black Power in Chicago, therefore, intensified a preexisting conflict between the sense that Chicago had failed black people, especially working class black people, and the idea that the institutions of the city could be reformed to deliver greater equality for all. Black power did not displace liberalism.; it created a broader popular base and new arguments about the city’s political economy that, together, reshaped a longstanding commitment to building a more open city.”108 Professor Helgeson is precisely correct in his analysis here as it relates to the Black Power Movement and the work of the CSC.

In their support for independent black candidates during the late 1960s the CSC was branching

107 Citizens Schools Committee. Just Don’t Do It. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-2. Chicago History Museum. 1965. 108 Helgeson, Jeffrey. Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. 2014. Pg. 239

67 into that connection between racial liberalism and Black Power alternatives that Dr. Helgeson is discussing. Furthermore, by informing black parents and students, the CSC was increasing the political power that these individuals brought into the elections of the 1970s and 1980s that would eventually produce a greater amount of black alderman in the city council along the city’s first black mayor.

CSC was a radical organization at the time of its founding in the 1930s that became a key player in the increase of black political power after the 1960s. Spurred into certain political fights and into endorsing candidates by black power advocates among parents and students, the CSC had been a quiet partner in the Black Power Movement without much notice from the mainstream public. The interracial character of the organization also kept them in the spirit of a coalition building that the IBPP and various other black power advocates had been promoting at the time of the movement’s peak.

Chapter 4: The Original Rainbow Coalition and Operation Breadbasket

The Illinois Black Panther Party built the coalition, beginning in 1973, that won Harold

Washington City Hall in 1983. In 1968, young people from a multitude of racial, ethnic, queer and class backgrounds were looking for models to engage community activism and fulfill the other needs of their neighborhoods. Coming off one of the heels of the Chicago uprising the day after MLK’s assassination, the Original Rainbow Coalition (ORC) was founded in 1968. The group membership comprised of the IBPP, the Chicago Young Lords (YL), a group of Puerto

Rican activists, the Young Patriots (YPO), working class ethnic whites, and Rising Up Angry

(RUA), a group of young white greasers, students and activists from Chicago’s North Side. Fred

Hampton and the IBBP provided the model that these men and women were looking for across the city. Putting the IBPP at its center professor Jakobi Williams remarks about the origins of the

ORC in detail. “The Rainbow Coalition came out of the North Side of Chicago. Initially, it was set up via alliance with the YPO as a result of Bob Lee’s interactions with the group. Fred

Hampton then Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez and the Young Lords to join the organization. Shortly thereafter, RUA came into the fold. The rainbow became the symbol of the group because it epitomized the unity of different colors, which was the message the organization wanted to convey.”109 In terms of Chicago politics, the ORC would prove essential to the ascendency of

Harold Washington and black alderman across the city. It would also demonstrate in no small manner the collective power of the Chicago Black Power Movement to forge political alliances and to overcome racial and class tensions in ways that other civil rights groups coveted.

Coalition building with other politically leftist organizations had always been a priority of the national Black Panther Party. The Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-

109 Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Page 129.

Defense established a long history of connecting with groups in the Chicano Movement,

Women’s liberations movement, the Asian American movement, the anti-war and anti-poverty movements, especially during the Free Huey campaign of the late 1960s.110 The Black Panther

Party thought that the best way that supporters of black power movement could help was to spread education and recruit members in their own communities to help dismantle white supremacist structures. This was just one of the conversations that Stokely Carmichael and Carl

Oglesby of the Students for Democratic Society shared in Copenhagen.111 Chairman Huey P.

Newton himself would perennially try to connect the struggle for black liberation in the United

States with the efforts of decolonization around in the Third World. According to Hampton, the

BPP was a party interested in freeing people from slavery. He saw such slavery in the poor’s subservience to private and corporate ownership of capital goods. However, he did not believe the liberation of black people alone would be enough, or even possible, unless they turned their movement into a global struggle against capitalism. Black Panther party members needed to assume the role of administrators to the needs of all people.112 For Newton, it was vital to tie the struggle for Black Power and liberation to the global struggles against white imperialism around the world to give African Americans an attachment to the activist work of people of color everywhere.

The Illinois Black Panthers continued the work of outreach and coalition-building by capitalizing on the enthusiasm of Chicago’s youth for an interracial movement alliance against oppression. The ORC rose in the aftermath of the 1968 Chicago Democratic National

Convention and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College students in the city were

110 Joseph, Peniel E. Waiting Til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York. Henry Holt and Company. 2006. Page 266. 111 Ibid. Pg 249. 112 Newton. Huey P. The Genius of Huey P. Newton. Awesome Records. 1993. Pg. 34.

70 exploring many different possible avenues for protest and direct action to achieve a dream of revolutionary change. The Students for a Democratic Society was one of the most visible wings of the New-Left popular movement of this period. Tom Hayden, one of the Chicago seven and prominent leaders in the student anti-war movement was a fervent supporter of the Black Panther

Party. He even went as far to speak at one of their rallies on May 1st, 1970.113 Other groups across racial, class, gender, and LGBTQ in the city grew aware of the work the IBPP were doing and tried to emulate them. In Gordon Mantler’s book Power to the Poor, he quotes an interview with unionist Charles Cheng who was familiar with the movement: “Charles Cheng, who worked for the Washington, D.C., teachers union, saw the Chicago alliance’s roots squarely in the

Washington campaign. “We do see Orientals, and Puerto Ricans, and blacks these days doing things together,” Cheng said in 1969. “The Panthers are an example—what is it, the Patriots, a southern white group who had formed an alliance. If you carefully read the Poor People’s

Campaign you’ll see that that’s where a lot of this began.”114 Through their service and survival programs, the IBPP and their allies worked toward a common goal to end poverty. This is the foundation of the Poor People’s Campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A campaign that had been prematurely ended with the violent death of Dr. King. In the SCLC and other big six civil rights organizations, members found a cold reception to carrying on King’s anti-poverty work. As former black Panther Kathleen Cleaver explains:

It didn’t disappear, you might forget Martin Luther King was assassinated in April. The Poor People’s Campaign was supposed to go to Washington in April. So the organization that mobilized it was essentially decapitated and thrown into chaos three weeks before it was supposed to happen. Those organization were being –

113 Bass, Paul, Rae, Doug. The Panther and the Bulldog: The Story of May Day 1970. New Haven. Yale Alumni Magazine. July/August. 2006. 114 Mantler, Gordon. Cheng, Charlies. Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Page 232.

as I said once the civil rights were completed, that was it. Government was through with us. They are not interested in restructuring. There has never been any interest in restricting the economy for the benefit of the poor. You talk the bonus army, go back to Shay’s rebellion, this is like the no-no. This is a capitalist society.115

The Rainbow Coalition assumed the mantle of the Poor People’s Campaign when the traditional apparatus of cooperation of between the civil rights organizations and politicians became strained after the uprisings of the late 1960s and the death of King. The IBPP and their interracial compatriots were driven to a wider extreme than most civil rights leaders in the nation. The

Rainbow Coalition saw capitalism as the key enemy of poor and marginalized communities, not just in Chicago, but across the nation. While nationally, the Black Panthers were focused on upon building alliances that could support a broader attack upon the structures of capitalism, the

Rainbow Coalition saw the worst manifestations of capitalism present in one collective force: city hall and the Chicago Democratic Party. For all people to prosper in the city, the Daley machine had to be dismantled. Each group within the ORC brought a diverse range of new voters and political actors into Chicago politics. Through these multi-racial and wide ranging of classes,

Harold Washington and black politicians in the city would be able to sweep the elections by

1983 and usher in a new era in Chicago politics.

The activism of the Young Lords combined with the operation strategy of the IBPP build one of the first but crucial elements of the black political power in Chicago. The Chicago Young

Lords club that originally began in the Lincoln Park neighborhood in 1959. Lincoln Park was on

Chicago’s northwest side near Lake Shore Drive and housed a substantially Puerto Rican community following a mass immigration to city during the 1950s into the 1960s. The YLO was founded by Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez and his counterparts included Orlando Davila, Santo

115 Cleaver, Kathleen. The Two Nations of Black America. Frontline interview. PBS. February 10, 1998.

Guzman, Benny Perez, Fermin Perez, Angel Del Rivero, and Joe Vicente. By the 1960s, the

YLO had established itself as a street gang and Jimenez was elected as its leader in 1964. Not hosting a club for political ideology in its outset, there were two issues politically that connected the YLO to the IBPP: urban renewal and police brutality. Learning from the political tactics of the IBPP and student from the SDS, the YLO began to grow a political consciousness. Jimenez describes his own political evolution while he was incarcerated. “And then I’m hearing about the

Black Panther Party on the radio, because we have a loud speaker, in the jail, in the cellhouse, and you know there’s like four tiers and that, and at the same time I’m saying that the Black

Panther Party you know that’s what we need to do, we need something like that in the Puerto

Rican community.”116 As it was, with the uprisings going on all over the city of Chicago during

1968, the YLO could have selected a more politically potent time to enter into activism and look for allies to build coalition with in the city. The city was host to more young people looking for change as much as any time before it.

The Young Lords worked with the IBPP to develop their own political ideology and concentrate on issues that affected their own community while identifying common problems of more universal ills affecting all peoples. The YLO wasted no time in establishing political model in ways that mirrored the Black Panther Party’s rhetoric. The YLO came up with own 13 Point

Plan and Program following the example of the Panthers. “We want self-determination for

Puerto Ricans--Liberation of the Island and inside the United States. For 500 years, first Spain and then United States have colonized our country. Billions of dollars in profits leave our country for the united states every year. In every way we are slaves of the gringo. We want liberation and the Power in the hands of the People, not Puerto Rican exploiters. Que Viva

116 Jimenez, Jose. Interview with Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez. The Grand Rapids People's History Project. March 28th, 2016.

Puerto Rico Libre!”117 The similarities between the platforms of the IBPP and the YLO made political alliance a natural connection since a lot of the specific aims of the two groups matched up easily. This connection was especially significant with the IBPP that shared with the YLO a unique dedication to uprooting and dismantling capitalism through the ousting of the Daley political machine. The platform goes on specify its political concerns. The language of coalition organizing is written into the YLO’s founding document. “The Latin, Black, Indian and Asian people inside the U.S. are colonies fighting for liberation. We know that Washington, wall street and city hall will try to make our nationalism into racism; but Puerto Ricans are of all colors and we resist racism. Millions of poor white people are rising up to demand freedom and we support them. These are the ones in the U.S. that are stepped on by the rules and the government. We each organize our people, but our fights are against the same oppression and we will defeat it together. Power To All Oppressed People!”118 Through the identification of the oppression endured by Black, Latinx, Asian and poor white people, the YLO was setting itself up to be an organization that was firm to the cause of intercommunalism that Huey P. Newton had been trying to establish as the main operating goal of the BPP. The YLO also had their pulse on the sentiments of their community. Puerto Rican Chicagoans also recognized the lack of political representation in their leadership, school boards and city agencies. “Personally, I feel there is not adequate representation of the poor on the Lincoln Park Conservation Community Council. On a board of 15 members, I am the only Latin. There are no black members. The poor of the area deserve better treatment than this. They should have a greater share in the decisions which are affecting their families and lives.”119 Mr. Lyle B. Mayer was just one of chorus of voices that the

117 The Young Lords Organization. YOUNG LORDS PARTY 13 POINT PROGRAM AND PLATFORM. 1969. 118 Ibid 119 Mayer, Lyle B. Lincoln Park Press, vol. 2, no. 2. Chicago. Concerned Citizens Survival Front of Lincoln Park. The Young Lords Collection. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library. March 1969.

Young Lords elevated to draw attention to the racial and class discrimination that they saw rampant in their communities. The support for the YLO in the community prompted the organization into action.

The direct-action campaigns of the YLO eventually set them toward the direction of political participation that reflected the trajectory of the IBPP. The direct-action protest campaign of the YLO were not quiet or restraint. YLO one time took over the 18th district

Chicago avenue police station in the Lincoln Park neighborhood to demand a city response to police brutality against Puerto Rican, brown, black and poor residents.120 The YLO also instituted their own health care center, in the spirit of the IBPP to address the medical crises of the uninsured in their neighborhood. The program was challenged in court by the city of Chicago for operating without licensing and approval of the Chicago Board of Health. “This attempt to close down our health program is another example of how the fascist Daley Machine responds to any program which truely serves and educates the people. The law has been on the books for more than thirty years. In all that times, only the Young Patriot’s Health Service, the Black

Panther Party Health center, and the Emiterio betances Health Program have been indicted.121

These direct challenges through the police and the courts put pressure on the YLO that would eventually shape the direction later. The Daley Machine controlled their community and the

YLO wanted to control for themselves. To achieve that goal, the current administration would have to go.

The YLO joined with the IBPP to elect candidates of color to office while running candidates of their own which broadly benefited black candidates in the lead up to the 1983

120 Ibid. 121 The Young Lords Organization. Y.L.O., vol. 2, no. 7. Chicago. Concerned Citizens Survival Front of Lincoln Park. The Young Lords Collection. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library. 1970. Pg. 004

75 election. Like the other members of the Rainbow Coalition, once the YLO had achieved a political consciousness, they sought to put their politics into action. This meant a two-fold attack through direct-action protest and through politics. Cooperation with the Daley administration was a non-starter and as a result the YLO had get politicians into office with whom they could work with. In their support for low-wage workers at Grant hospital, the YLO, made this point clear. “Taking power is much more easily said than done! We did not have too much experience or education, but we did have an understanding of who the enemy is – Daley and his henchmen, the police, the realtors, Urban Renewal, welfare McKormick, Grant Hospital, etc. We felt that our main job was and still is to educate people as to who their real enemies are and how to move against them.”122 The Latinx community of Lincoln Park needed an alderman that would stand out for their rights against police billy-clubs and to protect their homes from being evacuated and rented to white Chicagoans for cheaper. Jimenez took it upon himself to fill that role. In 1975,

He ran for public office as a candidate for alderman of the 46th ward against incumbent Chris

Cohen. The Chicago Reader did a profile of him that described his mannerisms on the campaign trial. “Perhaps it is the young audience of Anglos that make him uncomfortable. Cha-Cha is at his best when talking informally with the poor – be they Latino, black, or Appalachia white. In a one on one situation, there is something curiously appealing about his low-key approach. He establishes rapport quickly then. ‘I like that guy cause he’s trying even though he’s having a hard time,’ said an out-of-work man with a Kentucky accent.”123 It was not all coincidental that,

Jimenez launched his campaign for alderman at the same time that Bobby Rush began his own for an alderman seat. Much like African Americans in Chicago, Latinx had virtually no presence

122 Ibid. Pg. 005 123 Bridges, Les. Cha-Cha Jimenez: Gang leader on the lam is now politician on the stump. Chicago. The Chicago Reader, vol. 4 no. 18. . The Young Lords Collection. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library. February 7th, 1975.

76 in the Chicago city council. “Based on 1970 census figures, there were nearly 250,000 Latinos in

Chicago. It is likely that figure has jumped considerably since then. That makes Chicago’s Latin community the country’s fourth largest. Only New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio have larger numbers. Despite their numbers there is not a single Latin alderman. Indeed, the huge

Latin minority, ranking second in number only to blacks, has but three elected officials.”124

Those large communities still lacking firm representation on the city council only confirmed for

Rush and Jimenez that something was rotten with Chicago politics and needed to be changed.

Jimenez did not win his seat in 1975.

The actions of the Young Lords were crucial to the consolidation of black political power in the city. Through his political work, Jimenez began to work with Harold Washington and eventually became a supporter of his mayoral campaign. “I believed in Harold Washington’ recalled Jose “Cha-Cha” Jimenez, the one-time Puerto Rican youth gang leader and grassroots activist in Chicago. “His whole theme of neighborhoods first was in line with what we believed in.…It fit right in with our philosophy. So I just started organizing.”125 His trust in Washington was reciprocated as Washington made him the northside Latino precinct coordinator. Jimenez was able to use his contacts in from the Young Lords to provide a Latinx base of support for the

Washington campaign in 1983. By that time, the Young Lords had been systematically eliminated by mass arrests, financial starvation and internal friction in large part due the efforts of the city of Chicago and mayor Daley’s Red Squad. The legacy and political activity of the

YLO made the votes for Washington’s 1983 campaign successful. The YLO hosted block parties, political education classes, and held marches that drew large collections of Chicano,

124 Ibid. 125 Jimenez, Jose Cha-Cha; Mantler, Gordon. Harold Washington and the rise of Latino political power in Chicago. Chicago. El Beisman. February 7th, 2014.

Puerto Rican, and many other Latinx and Hispanic Chicagoans to the awareness of the YLO and their causes.126 Jimenez was also involved in the mass voter registration drives in 1982 and 1983 that registered Latinx and Hispanic voters on Chicago’s northside, especially in the Gold Coast neighborhood after urban renewal through the Daley administration had devastated residency among those groups in Lincoln Park. This bloc of voters would be a crucial aspect of Harold

Washington’s second mayoral campaign. The Young Lords could not accomplish this electoral victory alone. They had to join with a group of disaffected Black Chicagoans through the IBPP and a group of white voters thanks to the other to factions of the Rainbow Coalition. Immigrant whites from other outlying street gangs would serve as another important component of this political alliance. The Young Patriots would follow in the spirit of the Young Lords and the

Black Panthers after finding themselves united with those groups largely upon issues of extra- judicial police action, rising poverty levels and grim health prospects. The optimism of Harold

Washington at the end of his failed 1977 mayoral campaign was about to be reward thanks to the cooperation of these groups during a time of heightened racial tension and violence.

The Young Patriots (YPO) would serve as another essential wing of the Rainbow

Coalition that worked to strengthen the political ascent of black politicians through the program started by the IBPP and black power ideology. The Young Patriots’ membership included white migrants from the Appalachian Mountains of the southeastern United States. The YPO formed after the end of the Students for a Democratic Society’s JOIN Community Union in 1968.127 The

YPO inhabited the Uptown neighborhood in Chicago’s North Side. The Young Patriots were organizing around issues of poverty and class inequality which made their politics align with the

126 Rampart. From Rumble to revolution: The Young Lords; Gangs and Revolution Ramparts, vol. 9, no. 4. Chicago. Rampart Magazine. March 1970. 127 Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Page 131 – 132.

YLO and the IBPP. They are also established a free clinic in their area like their sister organizations in the Rainbow Coalition. The YPO members wore uniforms in the tradition of young greasers and at times fitted their clothing with a confederate flag. Given the highly segregated character of Chicago as a city through racist contracts, blockbusting and housing covenants made Black and Latinx Chicagoan presence in Uptown scarce. However, the political similar between the YPO would eventually align it with the IBPP and YLO.

The YPO’s coalition with the Panthers and Young Lords reflected a solidarity in cause to combating capitalism, fighting racism and depowering the Daley political machine. Much like their compatriots in the Rainbow Coalition, the manifesto of the YPO outlines their political stance using language that’s exact in terms of dialogue. “We believe that all people are entitled to adequate food, clothing, shelter and medical care. We believe businessmen should not make a profit off the things we need to survive.”128 In attacking the hierarchy of class, the YPO echoed the 12-point program. Additionally, the Young Patriots were mindful of the racial prejudice in their own community and sought to stand against it. Racism is a tool of capitalism to make people fight amongst themselves instead of fighting together for their freedom”129 In their manifesto, mirroring the YLO, the influence of black power ideology as defined by the Panthers has an enormous impact on the political focus and activist engagement of their organization.

“Revolutionary solidarity with all oppressed people of this and all other countries and races defeats the divisions created by the narrow interests of cultural nationalism.” This language not only reflects the YPO’s intent to build coalitions, but also hints at the driving force the Black

Panthers were as an architect of their group.

128 The Young Patriots Organization. YOUNG PATRIOTS: 11 point program of the Young Patriots Organization. 1969. 129 Ibid.

The YPO did organizing work to turn disaffected youth and working-class people in their communities into political activists and active voters. Young Patriot member and later vice- presidential candidate, Peggy Terry, explained the working actions of the Young Patriots party in

Chicago. “Paced with this situation and the example of WRDA’s success, the remaining core of community people in JOIN felt the need for reconstituting and re-defining itself. Through a deep and sometimes painful analysis and self examination it was decided to build our organization and movement on the perspective of poor and working people organizing their own people and community.”130 Organizing within their community created social connections and intimate contacts between YPO members and their neighbors that could translate in voting power.

Protests, marches and health clinic outrage facilitated interactions in the Uptown community that made the YPO more recognizable and visible to the community’s eye. By allying with the YLO and the IBPP, they were able to attach their community’s fight against poverty with a wide range of activists across the city who were working toward those same goals. In one example of the community relationships the YPO established deals with the North Side Cooperative Ministry.

The ministry had secretly provided the YPO and others coalition leaders with aid. “Feely and

Port had testified that the ministry was the parent organization of groups such as the Young

Lords, Concerned Citizens Survival Front and the Young Patriots, acted as a funding agent for the various groups, and had given financial support and facilities to the group.”131 The ministry was ultimate brought before a Senate committee to answer accusations of such cooperation due the Rainbow Coalition’s favorable political leanings for Marxist rhetoric and Communism.

Moreover, the testimony linked the North Side ministry with 26 other churches in the Chicago

130 Terry, Peggy. Organizing Poor Whites In Uptown, Chicago Illinois, A history and prospectus of JOIN Community Union. Chicago. JOIN Community Union. 1969 131 North Side Ministry Admits Some Aid Went to Street Gangs. The Chicago Tribune. January 1st, 1971.

80 area that also provided aid to Rainbow Coalition groups.132 That collection of religious institutions again demonstrates just far and wide the ORC’s communal network of supporters reached. It would not be hard to imagine that the Rainbow Coalition to generate this board, multi-racial working-class group of supporters into a coalition of empowered voters.

White ethnic Democratic voters that the YPO specifically sought to organize would be a crucial element to push Harold Washington over the margins in electoral victory. Professor Paul

M. Green, director of the institute for Public Policy and Administration at Governors State

University notes the importance of ethnic whites to the Washington campaign in 1983. “Harold

Washington beat Bernard Epton because Washington ran as a Democrat. The congressman's heavy and near unanimous black support, his strong Hispanic totals and his respectable cut of the lakefront liberal vote would not have been enough to win without the hardcore backing of a measurable number of white ethnic Democrats.”133Each of the voting groups central to

Washington’s electoral prospects were hosts to at least one group of the Rainbow Coalition. The

YPO could deliver the support that he would need to become the city’s first black mayor. In the

1983, election Washington won less wards than his republican opponent Bernard Epton, 22 to

28, but Washington received more votes at times winning wards in landslide victories by over 90 percent.134 Washington’s good electoral fortune also affected other black candidates such as

Cecil Partee as city treasurer, who even enjoyed greater support among ethnic whites that were less likely to support Washington for mayor.135 With white ethnic voters coming around to the

132 Ibid. 133 Green, Paul M. Chicago election: the numbers and the implications. Chicago. Illinois Issues no. 18. Northern Illinois University Libraries. August 1983. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid.

81 idea of supporting a candidate outside the Democratic fold, Washington was able to expand his support beyond wards heavy with Black Chicagoans representation.

It would be years after the ORC and the YLO dissolved after frequent disruption and conflict with the city government before black politicians would found success, but their legacy in the community became enduring. The YPO were constant on the receiving end of blow from a city that didn’t believe they had a right to exist. The YPO found their free clinics closed and their members arrested with regularity for all sorts of violent allegations and charges.136 Even after the assassination of Hampton in 1969, ORC members became galvanized in their outrage and sorrow. That had already show their power at the polls by dismantling the political ambitions of

Hanrahan, but their still unable to overpower the Democratic machine. The campaign of

Washington changed that. The greatest contribution that black power activists, through the IBPP, made to the YPO was to provide with a system of empowerment that they could use and copy in their own neighborhood. These activists also remained completely hands-off within Uptown and other neighborhoods of ORC members as they believed the group should remain leaderless and that groups have complete autonomy over their own neighborhoods and communities.137 While the Young Patriots managed marshal one enclave of white ethnic voters for the new class of

Chicago politicians, there was another group also working to shore up support for white voters in liberal middle class city neighborhoods.

Rising Up Angry (RUA) formed another branch of the ORC and worked to put their liberal politics into action through alliance with black power activists. Rising Up Angry also contained former members of the SDS’ JOIN Community Union and formed shortly after the

Union’s demise in 1968. Under the leadership of Mike Lee, another former JOIN member, the

136 Seek to Link Loop Bomb, Raided Group. Chicago. The Chicago Tribune. March 22, 1970. 137 Newton, Huey P. Seal, Bobby. 12 Point Party Platform. Oakland. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 1966.

82 group took up the name Rising Up Angry to work for progressive politics in white working-class communities. The group was formally founded along with its own newspaper in 1969. They covered the Logan Square neighborhood and largely operating distributing newspapers that informed young people about politics, social issues, the work of activists and organizations in the city.138 Like other members of the ORC, the RUA acknowledged the influence of the IBPP and their service programs on their own organizing efforts. “We were definitely in the people’s radar.

We were making our mark. Internally we had political education meetings on a regular basis, considering plans and actions. Following the lead of the Black Panther Party, we began to develop a series of Serve the People Programs that addressed some of the needs and problems that people in the neighborhoods confronted. A Breakfast for Children’s program was started in the Church of the Holy Covenant at Wilton and Diversey.”139 The RUA wanted to speak to disaffected white youth who disliked the War in Vietnam and objected to the brutal hand of the

Daley administration that held the city, in their view, in a chokehold. Black power ideology had a profound way on the manner through which RUA conducted its political actions. Mike Lee further elaborates on the impact that the IBPP had and why joining the RUA seemed like such a natural fit for their organization: “Rising Up Angry became a real political force for working class people and radicals around the city. Like the Black Panther Party, we organized and involved people in the struggle through “Serve the People” programs.140 Not only did the RUA establish its own health clinic, but also hired volunteer lawyers to provide legal aid to the

138 Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Page 152 - 153 139 James, Michael Gaylord. RISING UP ANGRY HISTORY, 1968-1975. Chicago. Michael Gaylord James: Pictures From the Long Haul exhibit. September 24th, 2015. 140 James, Michael Gaylord. To love we must fight: Serving the people mind, body, and soul, 1969-’76. Chicago. The Rag Blog. April 23, 2014.

83 indigent.141 These services combined with RUA political education classes helped to build another valuable wing of liberal voters who could help in the effort to dismantle Chicago

Democratic machine. However, the service programs were merely one component of the RUA’s efforts to organize liberal whites on the city’s North Side. The RUA also took to the streets to make themselves known to their community and to authorities.

Street protests, marches and sit-in were among the other tools the RUA made use of during their time as a member of the ORC. The RUA were regular protesters of the War and frequently participated in demonstrations against the campaign in Vietnam and the draft. Anti- war activism led the RUA to join in The Days of Rage, the three-day protest that embroiled

Chicago in 1969 that had been organized by a fraction of the SDS called The Weathermen. RUA was also a part of regular picket lines against Jewel grocery stores on behalf of workers. Among its anti-war activities the RUA organized the Stop Our Ships, Save Our Sailors march in Foss

Park of North Chicago.142 All of these demonstrations along with the services of RUA, which also included assistance with the draft, abortions, food stamps, helped make the RUA a maverick of activist strength among young people in Chicago. The RUA newspaper was key to its recruiting and message disseminating power. By positioning its members in high schools and colleges and targeting a younger demographic, they were able to able establish an appeal that other mainstream political groups and organization had not been able to among those same younger demographics. “Some others in the New Left saw them as adventurers whose leather jackets and pointy-toed shoes parodied the working-class kids they sought to organize. But the

RUA organizers were an engaging, enthusiastic bunch who could turn out hundreds at picnics, rallies, and "people's dances." They won converts and friends using working-class or white street

141 Ibid. 142 Ibid.

84 language, symbols, and clothing.143 This trust that the RUA earned among the young Chicagoans in white neighborhoods had rippling political effects that the group was certain not to waste.

Through their newspaper, the RUA made political endorsements and frequently took aim at the political administration in city hall and the Chicago police. Commenting the group’s politics and their services, RUA member Euan Hague wrote that “Promising at these centers and clinics that

“no one is turned away for lack of money,” by the mid-1970s Rising Up Angry was endorsing

Young Lords founder Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez for alderman in 46th Ward, an area that covered what are now the considerably less mean streets of Lakeview and Wrigleyville.”144 The RUA also endorsed other independent candidates that worked to upend the Chicago Democratic machine.145

Although the group was largely disbanded in 1975, members of the RUA embedded themselves within city jobs and activists posts through Chicago. Their work started under the

RUA continued in Chicago electoral politics. Like the YPO and the YLO, the RUA’s underlining message of racial cooperation to undo destructive market outcomes brought on by capitalism was not mirrored in the Washington’s campaign, but it did aspire toward making a more equitable city landscape possible for all citizens. Further, with Bobby Rush running for office in Chicago’s

2nd ward, it was not hard for these activists to use their previous connections started by IBPP Bob

Lee to manifest into political action during the Chicago electoral campaigns of the 1970s and

1980s. The ORC’s ability to merge the white neighborhoods in Uptown and Logan Square, the

Hispanic and Latino neighborhood sections of Lincoln Park and Humboldt Park and the near

143 Zutter, Hank De. Group Efforts: Rising Up Angry and the greasers' revolution. Chicago. The Chicago Reader. September 21, 1989. 144 Hague, Euan. Rising Up Angry. Chicago. Area Chicago Print Issue #07. 68/08. 145 Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013.

85 united support of Black Chicagoans in the south side created a political bulwark unlike any campaign in the city before it. The Democratic machine candidates, like mayor Jane Byrne had more feasible support, but candidates like Harold Washington, nothing short of all these group coalescing together under one umbrella would have made victory a bear Sisyphean feat.

The life span of the ORC was cut short by number of forces that included mayor Richard

Daley’s Red Squad, COINTELPRO, finances and member fractioning, but their work continued in various small pockets of activist. The impact of the ORC would be ongoing as other civil rights activists picked up on the work that they ORC started. Not only would this push forward help elect Washington, several black alderman and city officeholders, but it also helped spark more than one presidential campaign.

Jesse Jackson and the RAINBOW Push Organization inherited a lot of the foundations for political action in the city built by the ORC while reshaping its black power influences and politics. Growing out of the national agenda started under Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor Peoples

Campaign, King created Operation Breadbasket to explore ways to increase economic opportunity and diminish poverty for African Americans across the nation. King put his confidant, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, in charge of the Chicago headquarters shortly after the

Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. Following his suspension from the SCLC after policy disputes with the new executive director Ralph Abernathy, Jackson resigned from the organization in 1971.146 Jackson continues his work in Chicago with a council of ministers and business leaders under a new organization called Operation PUSH. At the time, Jackson did not share the ORC’s primary critique of capitalism being the enemy of people of color or the poor.

One place they did share tension was with the Daley machine. “Last fall he broke with mayor

146 King, Seth S. Jackson Quits Post at S.C.L.C. In Policy Split With Abernathy. The New York Times. December 12, 1971.

Richard Daley in a dispute over the development of lowcost projects within the city. Mr. Jackson tried unsuccessfully to get himself on the ballot as a candidate for mayor. Later, despite his standing in the black community, he failed to get any significant number of Negro votes away from Daley.”147 This wouldn’t last long. From its outset, Operation PUSH (People United Save to Humanity) was built from the beginning to be a political action organization. “In the 1970's,

PUSH expanded into areas of social and political development using direct action campaigns, a weekly radio broadcast, and awards that honored prominent blacks in the U.S. and abroad.

Through Operation PUSH, Rev. Jackson established a platform from which to protect black homeowners, workers and businesses.”148

The Operation PUSH quickly moved to differentiate itself from the ORC with its mission direction focused on black community through entrepreneurship and investment. Jesse Jackson appreciated the title of a Rainbow Coalition and adapted it to his Operation PUSH group during his presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. He did this without accrediting the ORC as the inspiration for the title and would not for years to come.149 Still, there remained many similarities between the Operation PUSH organization and the ORC. Both groups were committed to working across racial and class lines to build a network of activists, clergy members, community leaders to help alleviate the issues of poverty, health care, education, and employment. PUSH also adopted service programs of the IBPP and made their own free breakfast program. In other ways, Operation PUSH shared more commonalities with the Citizen Schools Committee than with the ORC. Both groups endorsed candidates for public office, maintained ties with leaders in city government and business, and they also try to endorse progressive independents for public

147 Ibid. 148 Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Brief History. Rainbow PUSH Coalition website. https://rainbowpush.org/brief-history 149 Williams, Jakobi. The Original Rainbow Coalition: An Example of Universal Identity Politics. Tikkun Magazine. March 17, 2015.

87 office. From early in the life of Operation Breadbasket, Jackson had been using language supportive of coalition building at the same time the IBPP members were putting it into practice.

“The anti-war movement is not a black movement, it is a movement of people who are dissenting against the unjust policies of our country set up abroad. And I think that the rage of the youth, the concern of that coalition will be significant enough to make America adjust or bust.”150

Jackson’s statement demonstrates how integral the rhetoric of the IBPP and the ORC on coalition building had become in the city of Chicago. It also signaled the path that black political organizing would follow in the years to come.

The ORC political operation and community connections would not just benefit the election of Washington and other black politicians in Chicago, it would also help Jackson’s bid for the president in 1984 and 1988. The ORC even after its dissolution across the early 1970s still maintained political contacts throughout their communities. In the lead up to Harold

Washington’s election in 1977, members of the IBPP gathered their comrades to prepare to support his campaign. When that did not prove enough, former members of the ORC called upon their allies again when Washington announced he would only seek the democratic nomination for mayor if there was a massive voter drive in Black Chicagoan communities. ORC members responded with a thunderous roar. Voter registration drives kicked off in 1982 and 1983, which helped usher in newly 180,000 new black voters for the 1983 election.151 The former members of the ORC and their allies were not the only ones working to being other black voters into the electorate. Operation PUSH proved crucial to the success of these massive voter registration drives across the city.

150 Jackson, Jesse. USA Economic Slump. ThamesTV. September 7, 1970. 151 Kelley, Robin G. Into the Fire: African Americans since 1970. Don Mills, Ontario. Oxford University Press. Pg. 581

After the election of Harold Washington in 1983, the political action of Washington’s supporters would not retreat quietly. Another beneficial of the ORC network and community would be Illinois and the nation’s first African American women senator Carol Moseley Braun.

Already an accomplished lawyer and prosecutor by 1977, Ms. Braun left the courts to run for

Illinois’s congressional seat in the 24th district. Riding the same tide that had put many other black politicians into office, she successful won the election and became a congresswoman.

After the Clarence Thomas confirmation hears, Braun looked to unseat Illinois senator Alan

Dixon. “And so the fact that the Senate was 98 percent rich, white, and male, and that there was nobody reflecting the rest of America there who could even explain it to them, what was going on, really infuriated a lot of people. When the vote came, in spite of all the opportunities from the women in my state, Dixon voted to confirm Clarence Thomas”152 former Senator Braun recalled. She recoiled from Dixon’s vote while also reading the swelling support for a potential run for his seat. Braun successfully defeated Dixon 1992 and went on to win the senate seat later that fall.

Senator Braun was a symbol of the greatest results from the ORC and the politically minded spirit of Black Power Movement. As a student during the CFM and the political upheaval happening in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s, Braun received a firsthand education on the power of coalition politics in the city during that period. Senator Braun states:

“Whereas a generation developed in the '60s [1960s]of black politicians who joined with the preacher-led civil rights movement and so they started to come together. And my father had worked in the campaigns of the people early on from Charlie Chew to there were some

152 Braun, Carol Moseley. The Honorable Carol Moseley Braun (The HistoryMakers A2002.024), interviewed by Julieanna L. Richardson, March 19, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 5, story 2, Carol Moseley Braun explains her decision to run for the Senate.

89 others.”153 Within in a year, they began working to put Jesse Jackson on the ballot for the

Democratic nomination for president. “This drive to freedom is not a straight road. It is not an easy road. We’ve come too far to be turned back now. Keep your eyes on the prize. Let nothing or nobody turn you around” Jackson said to an audience on the day of his 1984 presidential campaign announcement.154 In his announcement and throughout his campaign, Jackson stayed true to the underlining principles of the ORC to help working class people across sections of racial and class lines. “And today there are a third less workers at Chrysler than there were at the time of the bailout. Twelve more plants closed – in cities where people need jobs the most, while

Lee Iacocca and the stock holders make record profits. We do not need more trickle down economic policies from Republicans or Democrats!”155 Jackson was trying to build a national coalition of working class people from a disparate range of backgrounds. This was largely the vision that Hampton himself had envisioned for the ORC but did not live long enough to see it brought to fruition. The New York Times write-up on the coalition had also seen the work of the

Jackson campaign in the spirit of building a coalition that could challenge longstanding

Democrats for leadership of their own party. “On the dais with the candidate, in addition to his wife Jacqueline, and their five children and Ms. Chisholm, were 110 aides to the Jackson campaign, a group that he said dramatized the coalition he was building. There Mexican

Americans from the Southwest, American Indians, a representative of the National Farmers

Alliance, a black feminist, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, black members of Congress, black business people and representatives of student groups. More than a dozen

153 Braun, Carol Moseley. The Honorable Carol Moseley Braun (The HistoryMakers A2002.024), interviewed by Julieanna L. Richardson, March 19, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 5, Carol Moseley Braun recounts her political involvement in the 1960s. 154 Jackson, Jesse. Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign Announcement. CNN News Live. November 4, 1983. 155Jackson, Jesse Presidential Campaign Committee. Jackson 1984 Presidential Campaign Flyer. National Museum of African American History and Culture. Memorabilia and Ephemera-Political and Activist Ephemera. 1984.

90 gave their reasons for supporting Mr. Jackson.”156 Trying build a national campaign for a presidential election underlines why assuming the mantle of the ORC had become an important signal of the Jackson campaign. It also signaled to former members what Jackson’s intentions were without having to associate his campaign directly with the legacy of the panthers, which could have potentially cost Jackson white voters and allies. This proved to be both beneficial and costly strategically. This balancing act would prove too much for his campaign to bear which along with many other issues related to funding, Jackson’s anti-Semitic remarks, and the organizational strength of his opponents would undo both of his efforts to win the White House.

The Jackson campaign in 1984 and 1988 did succeed in opening doors. In the primary after of

88, Jackson won a key concession from the Democratic party that would ensure future primaries choose delegates based on proportion of votes in states and congressional districts. The Dukakis-

Jackson accord also diminish the number of super-delegates by half.157 In 2008, then candidate

Barack Obama would use the newly vamped system initiated through the Jackson campaign to win the Democratic nomination. The legacy of the Original Rainbow Coalition created new roadmaps and opened doors decades after its groups were shuttered.

The tragedy of the ORC and the short-lived Washington campaigns is loss of its vision of a new future. Beyond the co-optation experienced through the Jackson campaign and the loss of its anti-capitalist foundations, but the political alliance of a multi-racial, gender-balanced of working people had endured. After winning the Council War, Washington envisioned a dream ticket to spread this ORC principle across state office. With his death, it remained unfilled dream of a coalition who were changing politics at both a local and national level. “Harold Washington had a way with words, and he announced the Dream Ticket, and the dream ticket was comprised

156 Smothers, Ronald. Jackson Declares Formal Candidacy. The New York Times. November 4, 1983. 157 Associated Press. Dukakis-Jackson Accord May Avert Floor Fight. The Los Angeles Times. June 26, 1988.

91 of women and men, black, white, brown, Asian, mean we were everybody. It was the dream ticket representing the whole community, and then, like I said, within a couple of weeks, he was gone, not even that long.”158

158 Bruan, Carol Moseley. Mayor Harold Washington & Another Election. Explorations in Black Leadership interviews by Julian Bond. University of Virginia. May 22, 2014. http://blackleadership.virginia.edu/videos/moseley-braun-carol/cmb10

Epilogue: The People’s Mayor and Their Despair

In 1972 in Gary Indiana mayor Richard Hatcher directed city official to greet delegates to the first National Black Political Convention with care and generosity. The event, called the Gary

Convention for short, played host for the largest and most disparate gathering of black power and civil rights activists than any before it. It was here that a Washington Post editorial claimed that

“black power comes of age.”159 Attendees to the event included the Oakland Black Panther

Party, Shirley Chisholm, Amiri Baraka, Queen Mother Audley Moore, church groups, black socialists, black capitalists, Welfare reform activists, Florynce Flo Kennedy, black journalists,

NOI members, a myriad of black politicians, and artists. Chicago black power and civil rights leaders such as Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson were also in attendance. “What did we do? We went back home and registered people to vote. We were going to run for office. We were going to have an impact. It was all about how do you implement the sixty-five voting rights act? And

Komel was at that convention. A number of mayors were at that convention. They all went back home. Eventually we won. And it’s the only convention of type that we’ve had in America.”160

While there have been several other conventions since 1972 to try to recapture the spirit of the first, the original National Black Political Convention marked a turning point in the Black Power

Movement and in black politics going forward into the 1970s.

The Black Power Movement began shifting its focus to politics and the securement of political office after the 1972 Gary Convention. As has been documented, black politicians began running for office in larger numbers by the 1960s. According to the Washington Post by

159 Washington Post. June 22, 1972. SCLDSC 160 Jackson, Jesse. [In My Lifetime] Rev. Jesse Jackson Remembers the First National Black Political Convention. Ebony Magazine. February 1st, 2007. http://www.ebony.com/news-views/in-my-lifetime-rev-jesse-jackson

2013; “The number of African-American elected officials has also risen dramatically since researchers started tracking it in 1970. Forty-three years ago there were 1,469 black elected officials nationwide, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies; in 2011 there were roughly 10,500 such officials.”161 Moreover, according to the U.S. Census Bureau between 1970 and 2002, the number of black elected officials rose by 7,961 at the state level.162

The rise of black elected officials can be attributed to a number of factors, which should include the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act and the tireless efforts of activists locally and nationally who fought tooth and nail to hold their government officials accountable. However, it would be a grave error to understate the role to which black power advocates played in increasing black political power in cities across the nation.

The Gary Convention and other political action meetings sponsored by black power groups refocused the mission of community control and black nationalism and applied them to their school boards, police departments, city budgets and their city halls. Black Power advocates were making campaigns in major cities around the country including Dick Gregory ran for the

White House as a peace and justice candidate in 1968. Shirley Chisholm made a successful run for Congress in 1969 and later she ran a prolific bid for the presidency in 1972. Oakland Black

Panther chairwoman Elaine Brown made an unsuccessful bid for the city council in 1973 and

1975, showing stronger margins the second time around. By 1970, Newark and Wichita had elected their first black mayors. Coleman Young became the first black mayor of Detroit in

1973. These victories would be followed by mayoral wins in Washington D.C., Waco, Raleigh,

Los Angeles and Atlanta. Doris Davis would be the first black woman elected to a mayor’s

161 Eilperin, Juliet. What’s changed for African Americans since 1963, by the numbers. Washington Post. August 22, 2013. 162 United States Census Bureau. Black Elected Officials by Office, 1970 to 2002, and State 2002. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011.

94 office in the nation when she won her 1973 bid in Compton, California. Even Birmingham,

Alabama, home much terror of the civil rights movement would elect its first black mayor,

Richard Arrington Jr. by 1979. Chicago did not catch up until 1983, but the weakening of the

Democratic machine had already begun.

After the CFM and the work of groups like the CAFSNCC and CCCO, black power activists created a movement for independent black political candidates to assume pubic office through a coalition beyond racial and class demographics. Despite making a strong showing among south side black districts Harold Washington was still unable to capture the almost unanimous black support that would occur during his 1983 run. At that time, Black Chicagoans had put their trust into Chicago’s first female mayor Jane Byrne. In other elections during the

1970s, Black Chicagoans were making strides. Anna Langford and Eugene Sawyer set off a shift in black independent aldermen and women entering the city council by 1971. By the time

Washington was elected in 1983, the balance of the city council had shifted from the silent six to

Washington’s sixteen.163 Mayor Jane Byrne had been elected with strong black support but suffering a steep decline among black Chicagoans on issues that highlighted the black power movement school segregation and police brutality. “Later, in the midst of a skirmish over school desegregation, Mayor Byrne replaced two black board members with whites who were openly opposed to some of the desegregation strategies under consideration. This reopened wounds left from the Byrd affair and set the stage for a bitter racial dispute.”164 The Byrd affair refers to

Byrne’s decision to bypass Manford Byrd for a vacant school superintendent position in favor of a white subordinate.165 She also gave the open police superintendent position to a white long

163 Fremon, David. Chicago Politics: Ward by Ward. Bloomington. University of Indiana Press. 1988. 164 Sheppard Jr, Nathaniel. Top Byrne Appointments Draw Black Disaffection. The New York Times. August 28, 1982. Pg. 400-405 165 Ibid.

95 time department member over a popular black superintendent Sam Nolan.166 Given the Chicago police department’s long history of abuses, particularly, during the CFM and after the Hampton murder, Black Chicagoan voters began looking for all alternatives. These circumstances created a moment in Chicago politics that was perfectly suited for the black political movement to take advantage of for their own designs. Through their grassroots organizing and social networks, former black power advocates in the ORC and the IBPP as well as many other groups saw a perfect opportunity to amass serious power in the city. However, gain elected office did not always realize the gains that these activists had been fighting to achieve.

Once in office, Mayor Washington and the sixteen-black alderman of the city council faced resistance, pushback and stalling to implement their preferred agendas. Harold Washington brought in a new class of black aldermen with him to political power through an alliance of ORC members and civil rights activists. Williams Beavers, Ed Smith, and Bobby Rush all joined

Washington in 1983 as he assumed office looking to break the old way of doing business established by the Daley Democratic machine. But things were rarely this simple. Washington faced sharp scrutiny from allies like Marion Stamps who wanted to hold him accountable for his actions. Even with Chicago’s first black mayor-elect, Stamps’ mission to serve the people of her community never changed. On election night, Stamps recalled “we didn’t go down to the hotel.

We stayed right here in our community, we were in the middle of the street, all night long, throwing up all the leftover literature and newspapers and anything else we could find.”167 For years, Washington with the support of all sixteen black aldermen fought for any policies changes

166 Ibid. 167 Stamps, Marion. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. June 3, 1989.

96 through long, laborious negotiations in what the media dubbed the Council Wars.168 Washington ended winning a triumph in these city council battles after his allies in the council won a slim majority in the 1986 special elections.169 The Original and Jackson branches of the Rainbow

Coalition held strong in support for Washington and even helped him win re-election in 1987. In tragedy, before Chicago could see the Washington administration play out in full, the mayor died of a heart attack in office that same year. He was 65 years old.

Black political power did not always translate to black power or community control.

Segregation in CPS remained high during Washington’s brief time in office and remains highly entrenched today. The Chicago police department’s record of police brutality did not abet during the Washington years, especially the total number of crimes started to go up in Chicago, as it did across the nation.170 Even though African Americans enjoyed more representation in their city government, scandal and corruption impeded stainable progress. William Beavers of the 7th

Ward, and later cook county commissioner, was convicted for tax evasion charges in 2012.

Mariam Humes of the 8th Ward pled guilty to accepting bribes in exchange for political favors in

1989.171 School segregation has remained thoroughly embedded in the school system even after a myriad of reform efforts that have either been blocked or not wholly implemented. According to researchers Dr. Carol Caref and Pavlyn Jankov of the Chicago teachers Union: “In 1971, 85% of all Black students in CPS were in intensely segregated schools, schools where at least 90% of the students were Black. A decade later, in the year the consent decree was signed, the picture was hardly different with 82% of Black students in such schools. In 1989, a decade after the school

168 The Christian Science Monitor. Chicago's Mayor Washington triumphs in `Council Wars'. The Christian Science Monitor. May 1, 1986. 169 Ibid. 170 Chicago Police Department. Chicago Annual Police Report 1986. City of Chicago. 1986. 171 Jensen, Trevor. Marian Humes, 1934 – 2010 Former alderman pleaded guilty in federal Operation Incubator probe. The Chicago Tribune. March 4, 2010.

97 district started desegregation programs, three-fourths of all Black students were in intensely segregated schools. But since then, there has been little movement.”172 Open housing in the city of Chicago remains a goal to considered and not a plan in action. While having ushered a new wave of political power for Black Americans, the Black Power Movement in Chicago could not overcome the deeply fortified structures of systemic racism and patriarchy that is present at every level of government in the United States to this day in 2018.

The collective organizing power demonstrated in Chicago by the CAFSNCC, the IBPP, the CSC and the ORC provide a plan for political activism that when elections. The remarkable rise of black politicians in the city of Chicago is due to nothing short of the actions of hundreds of citizens throughout Chicago neighborhoods registering others to vote, picketing on issues important them, staging boycotts and by creating contacts through service programs. The IBPP provided other groups in the ORC with a model to organize their own neighbors and created a political community across the city that could rally around specific issues and candidates. The

CAFSNCC and CSC illustrated the gains to be harnessed by utilizing students and young activism toward common cause participatory political and social action. It is true that the deaths of mayor Daley in 1977 and the political follies of mayor Jane Byrne created circumstances favorable to the election of Harold Washington in 1983. However, the notable elections of

African Americans to elected office in the city council, state government, and at the federal level points to a momentum that was already building around the nation at a time when some in the

172 Jankov, Pavlyn. Caref, Carol. Segregation and inequality in Chicago Public Schools, transformed and intensified under corporate education reform. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(56). http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.25.2631 This article is part of EPAA/AAPE’s Special Issue on Restructuring and Resisting Education Reforms in Chicago’s Public Schools, guest edited by Dr. Federico Waitoller and Rhoda R. Gutierrez. 2017.

98 media and in academia were pointing to the end of the 1960s as the decline period of the Civil

Rights Movement.

The Black Power Movement in Chicago also provided a lesson on the necessity of coalitions. Who is in control of governmental institutions have serious and grave consequence on the lives of a country. In the ORC, the emphasis placed on mutual tolerance and cooperation and how it can have major benefits for communities and organizations that practiced it. The Illinois

Black Panther Party created a service program model that was adapted across the whole of

Chicago. It became so popular and effective that the program was copied by the city of Chicago and traditional civil rights programs like Operation PUSH.173 These coalitions helped

Washington secure office in 1983 and formed the basis of Jackson’s presidential campaigns in

1984 and 1988. Decades later, these lessons would also be applied to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Even with unanimous black support, Washington would not have been able to secure his mayoral win without strong vote showing from Hispanic, Latinx, young and immigrant voters. The ORC incorporated all these groups and worked tirelessly across the city to win the primary and the general election.

Symbolic representation in government is important, but it not enough to undo structures of social control that govern and damage the lives of citizens. The legacy of Harold Washington is widely celebrated in the city of Chicago today. The late mayor’s picture adorns City Hall. His name is name is enshrined on the city’s largest public library. But a lot of the work Washington wanted to accomplish with his Rainbow Cabinet was stymied by an intransigent council and then cut short by his death. Chicago largely returned to return to machine-based politics as his allies, in ways reflecting the Black Power Movement nationally, fractured due to multiple issues and

173 Williams, Jakobi. From Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Pg. 196.

99 agendas demanding attention. Much like President Obama, the work of Washington remains unfinished, but his memory as a public servant continues as an inspiration. But these symbols while carrying real power for inspiration among the populace, are by themselves not enough to continue the mission of the black power activists that help forge them. The electoral victories of black politicians in Chicago prove that it is no longer enough to have the only scale for victory measured by inviting more people into broken systems. Real change to dismantle racist policies that create inequality across spectrums will require a reexamination of where the bar for victory is set.

The Black Power Movement in Chicago is often framed through the lives of Fred

Hampton and Harold Washington, but it carries not only a plan for political ascendency, but a cautionary tale about how Black Americans can represent themselves as citizens in a post-

Obama era. Outside the victories of Washington, there are dozens of black Chicagoans fighting and winning control of their communities. Beyond the rhetoric poetry of Fred Hampton there were panthers like Bob Lee building independent political communities that spread to new neighborhoods. Beyond the men who try to build a movement within patriarchal and heteronormative frames are women like Anna Langford, Yvonne King, and Marion Stamps who redefined black power into something that worked for own visions of liberation. In birth of the

Chicago black power political movement and its subsequent failure to undo generations of institutional discrimination reveals the Civil Rights Movement in a new phase that demands serious study and consideration. Black power advocates there have shown again and again in their struggle the clues to build sustainable democracy and the forces, external and internally, to end it. How the public choses to heed or ignore that lesson will ultimately decide if American democracy can endure.

100

Bibliography

Introduction:

1. Joravsky, Ben. The Lost Harold Washington Files. The Chicago Reader. November 30, 2017.

2. Ibid.

3. Shipp, E.R. Chicago Council Wars Drag Into Intermission. The New York Times. July 14, 1984.

4. Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics of Chicago. Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina Press. 2013.

5. Washington, Harold. Harold Washington University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign speech. Afro American Studies Department lecture. University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign. September 1982.

Chapter 1:

1. Ayers. Thomas G. Agreement of the Subcommittee to the Conference on Fair Housing Convened by the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race. City of Chicago. August 26, 1966.

2. Ibid.

3. Edward Marciniak, interview by James Ralph, Chicago, July 5, 1991

4. John McKnight, interview by James Ralph, Evanston, Illinois, August 19, 1986.

5. Lucas, Bob. Robert Lucas, interview by Pam Smith and Mary Lou Finley. November 3, 2010

6. The American Folk Life Center. Chicago SNCC history project archives. Washington DC. The Library of Congress. May 15, 2015.

7. Rushing, Fannie. Chicago SNCC and the Black Freedom Struggle. OAH Magazine of History, Volume 26, Issue 1. January 1, 2012. Pg. 55- 57.

8. Ibid.

101

9. Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. SNCC: How you can help Student Non- Violent Coordinating Committee pamphlet. Atlanta. SNCC. 1964

10. Michaeli, Ethan. The Defender: How the legendary Black Newspaper Changed America. New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 2016. Pg. 377 – 378.

11. The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC. Urgent Appeal to All Freedom Fighters. Chicago. The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC. 1963.

12. Berry, Edwin C. Church, Civic Groups Support School Boycott, Blast Willis. Chicago. The Chicago Defender Vol. VIII No. 144. October 21, 1963.

13. Chicago SNCC History Project (Box 3, Folder 8), Chicago Public Library, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature.

14. The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC. Don’t Stop Downtown Until Willis Goes. Chicago. The Chicago Sun Times Records. The Newberry Library. 1963.

15. The Student Voice. Friends Ask Help for Chicago Boycott. The Student Voice Inc, Vol. 4 No 8. December 16, 1963.

16. Board of Education of the City of Chicago v. Chicago Branch, NAACP. U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, RG 21, National Archives Great Lakes Region. (IL. June 10 – 11 1965.)

17. Danns, Dionne. Chicago High School Students' Movement for Quality Public Education, 1966-1971. The Journal of African American History Vol. 88 No. 2. Spring 2003.

18. Rushing, Fannie. Chicago SNCC History Project: Lessons Learned from 1963 Boycott. Chicago. Chicago Public Library, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature. October 23, 2013.

19. Fremon, David. Chicago's city council: Wolves or sheep? Dekab. Northern Illinois University Press. September 1991.

20. Camper, John; Lipinski, Ann Marie. The Silent Mayoralty Eugene Sawyer`s Critics Say He`s Not Forceful Enough His Backers Say He`s Just Quietly Effective. The Chicago Tribune. December 11th, 1988.

21. Karwath, Rob. Flamboyant And `Visionary, ` State Sen. Charles Chew, 63. The Chicago Tribune. July 04, 1986.

22. Ralph, James R. The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington. University Press of Kentucky. Pg. 264

102

23. Montgomery--SNCC: Circulars, newsletters, program outlines, incidents, 1963-1966 (Lucile Montgomery Papers, 1963-1967; Historical Society Library Microforms Room, Micro 44, Reel 3, Segment 48)

24. Simmons, Gwendolyn. Interview with Gwendolyn Simmons. Gainesville. Civil Rights History Project. Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History & Culture and the Library of Congress. September 14th, 2011.

25. Carmichael, Stokely. Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael {Kwame Ture}. New York. Scribner. 2003. pp. 537-538

26. Ayers. Thomas G. Agreement of the Subcommittee to the Conference on Fair Housing Convened by the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race. City of Chicago. August 26, 1966.

27. Gutowski, Christy. Black Chicago teen's death fueled Cicero march during 1966 protests. The Chicago Tribune. September 2, 2016.

28. Ralph, James R. The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington. University Press of Kentucky. 1993. Pg. 268

29. Pearson, Rick. Pratt, Gregory. Gus Savage, controversial former congressman, dies at 90. The Chicago Tribune. October 13, 2015.

30. Ibid.

31. Gorner, Jeremy. Black City Council pioneer Anna Langford dies. The Chicago Tribune. September 18th, 2008.

32. Ralph, James R. The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington. University Press of Kentucky. Pg. 268.

33. Helgeson, Jeffrey. Crucibles of Black Empowerment. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Pg. 189.

Chapter 2:

1. Hass, Jeffrey. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. Chicago. Chicago Review Press. 2011. Pg. 43

2. Newton, Huey P. Epps, Garrett. Huey Newton Speaks at Boston College, Presents Theory of 'Intercommunalism. The Harvard Crimson. November 19, 1970.

3. Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Random House Publishing Group. New York. 1964. Pg. 223.

103

4. Newton, Huey P. The Huey P. Newton Reader. Seven Stories Press. New York. 2002.

5. Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 2013. Pg. 101

6. Wall, Barbara Mann. American Catholic Hospitals: A Century of Changing Markets and Missions. New Brunswick. Rutgers University Press. 2011. Pg. 80

7. Hampton, Fred. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, Appellee, v. FRED HAMPTON. State of Illinois. 1969.

8. Joseph, Peniel E. Waiting Til The Midnight Hour. Henry Holt and Company, LLC. New York. 2006. Pg. 277 – 278.

9. King, Yvonne. A Panther in Africa. PBS POV interview. September 21, 2004.

10. Ibid.

11. Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 2013. Pg. 197.

12. Rush, Bobby. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. October 20, 1988.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Rush, Bobby. CBS Evening News Interview. Interviewer: Bill Plante. December 4, 1969.

16. Ibid

17. Rush, Bobby. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. October 20, 1988.

18. Ibid.

19. Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 2013. Pg. 160-161

20. Ibid. Pg. 162.

104

21. Ngozi-Brown, Scot. The Us Organization, Maulana Karenga, and Conflict with the Black Panther Party: A Critique of Sectarian Influences on Historical Discourse. Journal of Black Studies, Volume 28, Issue 2 (Nov. 1997), 157-170

22. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Counter Intelligence: A Documentary Look At America’s Secret Police: Volume One - The FBI’s Counterintelligence Operations Against Black Puerto Rican, Native American, and Chicano/Mexicano Movements.Chicago. National Lawyers Guild. Chicago. November 11, 1968. Pg. 23

23. Ibid. 1969. Pg. 40.

24. Grossman, Ron. Fatal Black Panther raid in Chicago set off sizable aftershocks. The Chicago Tribune. Chicago. December 4th, 2014.

25. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Re: Bureau Airtel 12/8/69 and Chicago Letter 11/24/69 - Counter Intelligence: A Documentary Look At America’s Secret Police: Volume One - The FBI’s Counterintelligence Operations Against Black Puerto Rican, Native American, and Chicano/Mexicano Movements.Chicago. National Lawyers Guild. Chicago. December 11th, 1969. Pg. 44.

26. Edward, Hanrahan. Illinois State Attorney General Edward V Hanrahan speaks on Fred Hampton's murder in Chicago. CBS Chicago News. December 1969.

27. Napolitano. Jo. Edward Hanrahan, Prosecutor Tied to ’69 Panthers Raid, Dies at 88. The New York Times. New York. June 11, 2009.

28. Grossman, Ron. Fatal Black Panther raid in Chicago set off sizable aftershocks. The Chicago Tribune. Chicago. December 4th, 2014.

29. Rush, Bobby. Black Leaders on Leadership: Conversations with Julian Bond. Palgrave Macmillan. New York. 2014. Pg. 107.

30. Rush, Bobby. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. October 20, 1988.

31. Hill, James. Reardon, Patrick T. Marion Stamps, Cabrini Activist Even After Moving From Cha, She Kept Fighting For Others. Chicago Tribune. August 29, 1996.

32. Stamps, Marion. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II: Marion Stamps. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. June 3, 1989.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

105

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Hill, James. Reardon, Patrick T. Marion Stamps, Cabrini Activist Even After Moving From Cha, She Kept Fighting For Others. Chicago Tribune. August 29, 1996.

39. Stamps, Marion. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II: Marion Stamps. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. June 3, 1989.

40. Williams. Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalit.ion Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 2013. Pg. 198-199.

Chapter 3:

1. Quinn, Gordon. 63 Boycott. 2018 Kartemquin Educational Films. 2017.

2. Knupfer, Anne Meis. The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism. Urbana and Chicago. University of Illinois Press. 2006. Page 8.

3. Sugrue, Thomas. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. Random House. New York. 2008. Page. 452.

4. An Open Letter of Students of Crane College. Citizens Schools Committee Collection, Box # 30. Folder 30-1. Chicago History Museum. December 9, 1947.

5. Danns, Dionne. Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965–1985. Basingstoke, United Kingdom. January 2014. Pg. 12.

6. Citizens Schools Committee. Citizens Schools Committee brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #25. Folder 25-2. Chicago History Museum. 1967.

7. Citizens Schools Committee. Public Schools Belong to All of US brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. 1967.

8. Berry, Edwin C. An approach to the new era in race relations. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #26. Folder 26-2. Chicago History Museum. 1969.

9. Citizens Schools Committee. Public Schools Belong to All of US brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. 1967.

10. Ibid.

106

11. Citizens Schools Committee. Education vs Racism: A conference on Negro History. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-3. Chicago History Museum. 1964.

12. Citizens Schools Committee. Brenetta M. Howell political poster. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #25. Folder 25-2. Chicago History Museum. 1970.

13. Washington, Harold. Letter to Mary Herrick. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-3. Chicago History Museum. June 9th, 1971.

14. Mann, Robert. Extremism speech. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. March 11th, 1965.

15. Mikva, Abner J. Letter from Abner J. Mikva. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. August 18th, 1972.

16. American Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO. The Negro in Modern America History Textbooks. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-1. Chicago History Museum. 1966.

17. Ibid.

18. Burke, Edward. The Chicago African Americans Teachers Association Letter. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #26. Folder 26-3. Chicago History Museum. 1969.

19. Ibid.

20. Trachtenberg, Stephen. The Federal Government and School Desegregation: Changing Education – A Journal of the American Federation of Teachers. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-3. Chicago History Museum. 1966.

21. Tillman, Dorothy. The Honorable Dorothy Tillman (The HistoryMakers A2002.178), interviewed by Adele Hodge, September 5, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 5, Dorothy Tillman describes her decision to run for alderman in Chicago, Illinois.

22. Ibid.

23. Berry, Edwin C. An approach to the new era in race relations. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #26. Folder 26-2. Chicago History Museum. 1969.

24. Hunt, Harold C. Letter from Herold C. Hunt, Eliot Professor of Education, Harvard University. Citizens Schools Committee. Citizens Schools Committee brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #25. Folder 25-2. Chicago History Museum. 1967.

107

25. Chicago Sun-Times editorial. Citizens Schools Committee brochure. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #25. Folder 25-2. Chicago History Museum. November 19, 1964.

26. Citizens Schools Committee. Vote No Blue Ballot Revenue Amendment. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-2. Chicago History Museum. August 11, 1966.

27. Citizens Schools Committee. Independent Teachers Committee Platform. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #30. Folder 30-3. Chicago History Museum. 1966.

28. Ibid.

29. Citizens Schools Committee. Just Don’t Do It. Citizens Schools Committee collection. Box #24. Folder 24-2. Chicago History Museum. 1965.

30. Helgeson, Jeffrey. Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. 2014. Pg. 239.

Chapter 4:

1. Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Page 129.

2. Joseph, Peniel E. Waiting Til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York. Henry Holt and Company. 2006. Page 266.

3. Ibid. Pg. 249.

4. Newton. Huey P. The Genius of Huey P. Newton. Awesome Records. 1993. Pg. 34.

5. Bass, Paul, Rae, Doug. The Panther and the Bulldog: The Story of May Day 1970. New Haven. Yale Alumni Magazine. July/August. 2006.

6. Mantler, Gordon. Cheng, Charlies. Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Page 232.

7. Cleaver, Kathleen. The Two Nations of Black America. Frontline interview, PBS. February 10, 1998.

8. Jimenez, Jose. Interview with Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez. The Grand Rapids People's History Project. March 28th, 2016

108

9. The Young Lords Organization. YOUNG LORDS PARTY 13 POINT PROGRAM AND PLATFORM. 1969.

10. Ibid.

11. Mayer, Lyle B. Lincoln Park Press, vol. 2, no. 2. Chicago. Concerned Citizens Survival Front of Lincoln Park. The Young Lords Collection. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library. March 1969.

12. Ibid.

13. The Young Lords Organization. Y.L.O., vol. 2, no. 7. Chicago. Concerned Citizens Survival Front of Lincoln Park. The Young Lords Collection. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library. 1970. Pg. 004.

14. Ibid. Pg. 005.

15. Bridges, Les. Cha-Cha Jimenez: Gang leader on the lam is now politician on the stump. Chicago. The Chicago Reader, vol. 4 no. 18. The Young Lords Collection. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library. February 7th, 1975.

16. Ibid.

17. Jimenez, Jose Cha-Cha; Mantler, Gordon. Harold Washington and the rise of Latino political power in Chicago. Chicago. El Beisman. February 7th, 2014.

18. Rampart. From Rumble to revolution: The Young Lords; Gangs and Revolution Ramparts, vol. 9, no. 4. Chicago. Rampart Magazine. March 1970.

19. Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Page 131 – 132.

20. The Young Patriots Organization. YOUNG PATRIOTS: 11 point program of the Young Patriots Organization. 1969.

21. Ibid.

22. Terry, Peggy. Organizing Poor Whites In Uptown, Chicago Illinois, A history and prospectus of JOIN Community Union. Chicago. JOIN Community Union. 1969.

23. North Side Ministry Admits Some Aid Went to Street Gangs. The Chicago Tribune. January 1st, 1971.

24. Ibid.

109

25. Green, Paul M. Chicago election: the numbers and the implications. Chicago. Illinois Issues no. 18. Northern Illinois University Libraries. August 1983.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Seek to Link Loop Bomb, Raided Group. Chicago. The Chicago Tribune. March 22, 1970.

29. Newton, Huey P. Seal, Bobby. 12 Point Party Platform. Oakland. The Black Panther Party of Self-Defense. 1966.

30. Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Page 152 – 153.

31. James, Michael Gaylord. RISING UP ANGRY HISTORY, 1968-1975. Chicago. Michael Gaylord James: Pictures From the Long Haul exhibit. September 24th, 2015.

32. James, Michael Gaylord. To love we must fight: Serving the people mind, body, and soul, 1969-’76. Chicago. The Rag Blog. April 23, 2014.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Zutter, Hank De. Group Efforts: Rising Up Angry and the greasers' revolution. Chicago. The Chicago Reader. September 21, 1989.

36. Hague, Euan. Rising Up Angry. Chicago. Area Chicago Print Issue #07. 1968. Pg. 08.

37. Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013.

38. King, Seth S. Jackson Quits Post at S.C.L.C. In Policy Split With Abernathy. The New York Times. December 12, 1971.

39. Ibid.

40. Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Brief History. Rainbow PUSH Coalition website. https://rainbowpush.org/brief-history

41. Williams, Jakobi. The Original Rainbow Coalition: An Example of Universal Identity Politics. Tikkun Magazine. March 17, 2015.

110

42. Jackson, Jesse. USA Economic Slump. ThamesTV. September 7, 1970.

43. Kelley, Robin G. Into the Fire: African Americans since 1970. Don Mills, Ontario. Oxford University Press. Pg. 581.

44. Braun, Carol Moseley. The Honorable Carol Moseley Braun (The HistoryMakers A2002.024), interviewed by Julieanna L. Richardson, March 19, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 5, story 2, Carol Moseley Braun explains her decision to run for the Senate.

45. Braun, Carol Moseley. The Honorable Carol Moseley Braun (The HistoryMakers A2002.024), interviewed by Julieanna L. Richardson, March 19, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 5, Carol Moseley Braun recounts her political involvement in the 1960s.

46. Jackson, Jesse. Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign Announcement. CNN News Live. November 4, 1983.

47. Jackson, Jesse Presidential Campaign Committee. Jackson 1984 Presidential Campaign Flyer. National Museum of African American History and Culture. Memorabilia and Ephemera-Political and Activist Ephemera. 1984.

48. Smothers, Ronald. Jackson Declares Formal Candidacy. The New York Times. November 4, 1983.

49. Associated Press. Dukakis-Jackson Accord May Avert Floor Fight. The Los Angeles Times. June 26, 1988.

50. Bruan, Carol Moseley. Mayor Harold Washington & Another Election. Explorations in Black Leadership interviews by Julian Bond. University of Virginia. May 22, 2014. http://blackleadership.virginia.edu/videos/moseley-braun-carol/cmb10

Chapter 5:

1. Washington Post. June 22, 1972. SCLDSC.

2. Jackson, Jesse. [In My Lifetime] Rev. Jesse Jackson Remembers the First National Black Political Convention. Ebony Magazine. February 1st, 2007. http://www.ebony.com/news- views/in-my-lifetime-rev-jesse-jackson

3. Eilperin, Juliet. What’s changed for African Americans since 1963, by the numbers. Washington Post. August 22, 2013.

4. United States Census Bureau. Black Elected Officials by Office, 1970 to 2002, and State 2002. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011.

111

5. Fremon, David. Chicago Politics: Ward by Ward. Bloomington. University of Indiana Press. 1988.

6. Sheppard Jr, Nathaniel. Top Byrne Appointments Draw Black Disaffection. The New York Times. August 28, 1982. Pg. 400-405.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Stamps, Marion. Eyes on The Prize Interviews II. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. June 3, 1989.

10. The Christian Science Monitor. Chicago's Mayor Washington triumphs in `Council Wars'. The Christian Science Monitor. May 1, 1986.

11. Ibid.

12. Chicago Police Department. Chicago Annual Police Report 1986. City of Chicago. 1986.

13. Jensen, Trevor. Marian Humes, 1934 – 2010 Former alderman pleaded guilty in federal Operation Incubator probe. The Chicago Tribune. March 4, 2010.

14. Jankov, Pavlyn. Caref, Carol. Segregation and inequality in Chicago Public Schools, transformed and intensified under corporate education reform. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(56). http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.25.2631 This article is part of EPAA/AAPE’s Special Issue on Restructuring and Resisting Education Reforms in Chicago’s Public Schools, guest edited by Dr. Federico Waitoller and Rhoda R. Gutierrez. 2017.

15. Williams, Jakobi. From Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Pg. 196.

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