THE CHICAGO AREA FRIENDS OF SNCC, THE COORDINATING COUNCIL OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS, AND THE CHICAGO STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM DURING THE 1960's Travis Wright A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS May 2019 Committee: Nicole Jackson, Advisor Rebecca Mancuso ii ABSTRACT Nicole Jackson, Advisor This project deals with the Black struggle for civil and human rights in Chicago during the 1960s. Because much of the scholarship dealing with Black Chicago focuses on the Chicago Freedom Movement, an actual event led by King and SCLC between 1965 and 1967, this project places emphasis primarily on the years prior to its inception. There are two groups that emerged during the Chicago campaign that are the center of this project: The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations. The CAFOS, heavily influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was founded in 1962 to raise money and collect resources for SNCC workers in the South. However, they would eventually go on to begin their own battle against racism and discrimination in Chicago. The Council on the other hand, was a coalition of influential civil rights organizations that established a strong united front against existing white power structures in the city, namely the administrations of Mayor Richard Daley and Superintendent Benjamin Willis. I argue that there was a strong local movement taking place in Chicago prior to the CFM; a movement that has frequently been overshadowed if not erased. By looking more closely at the early Chicago movement and organizations such as CAFOS and the Council, it is clear that Chicago was a place of complex racial and political insurgency. These organizations laid the ground work for the CFM. These instances of activism in Chicago during the early 1960s reveal how issues of race affected those in the Midwest while also demonstrating the various ways in which Midwesterners and urban, Black citizens reacted to and engaged in the ongoing struggle for freedom. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe an enormous amount of gratitude to my mentor and thesis advisor, Dr. Nicole Jackson, whose guidance, support, and patience made this project possible. It is because of her that I am a better writer, thinker, and historian. I would also like to thank Dr. Rebecca Mancuso for agreeing to serve as a member on my thesis committee and for her invaluable feedback and guidance throughout this lengthy and difficult process; her comments and suggestions have also shaped this project and my growth as a scholar. I also owe thanks to Drs. Ruth Herndon and Benjamin Greene for creating a thesis writers group to read over the earliest drafts of this project while continuously offering their support and encouragement throughout the research and writing process. Relatedly, I thank my peers Rebekah Brown, John Stawicki, and especially Robert Carlock for constantly reading over my work and providing helpful comments and suggestions. Your support and friendship has been a tremendous source of comfort and encouragement as I navigated through the master’s program and completed this thesis. There are many others at Bowling Green State University that contributed to this project: Drs. Thomas Edge, Michaela Walsh, and Rebecca Kinney to name a few. I am particularly grateful to the History Department for funding my research trips and giving me endless support. I am thankful and proud to be a member of this program and department. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family for being patient and allowing me the space I needed to complete this project in its final stages. Nick – thank you for being my partner in life and my best friend. Your love and support has meant everything to me. A special thank you to my parents Anita and Travis Wright for being my biggest fans and believing in me. This achievement is just as much yours as it is mine. Thank you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ..... ....................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE: RACE AND BLACK EDUCATION: STUDENT ACTIVISM IN CHICAGO DURING THE SIXTIES ................................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER TWO: THE CHICAGO AREA FRIENDS OF SNCC .................................... 28 Founding & “Food and Funds for Freedom” Campaign .......................................... 28 Women & CAFOS ................................................................................................. 39 CHAPTER THREE: THE COORDINATING COUNCIL OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS, AND THE DECLINE OF THE CHICAGO MOVEMENT .............. 48 1965 and Beyond – The Dissolution of the Chicago Movement.............................. 55 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 64 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 70 1 INTRODUCTION “Long before Dr. King and SCLC came north, Jim Crow was here, having followed the Great Migration of black folks during World War I, with an evolving color line in housing, schools, jobs, and politics.”1 In July of 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) arrived in Chicago to begin the Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM) - an ambitious campaign geared towards challenging racist and discriminatory housing policies, poverty, police brutality, and issues related to de facto segregation.2 This aggressive campaign for racial justice has resonated with many Americans as one of the major battles of the modern Civil Rights Movement and has largely dominated the narrative of Chicago’s struggle for freedom, especially during the 1960s. A topic that has garnered considerably less attention is the local movement that shaped the national CFM. The conduit between the lesser known local movement during the early sixties and the national CFM is the center of this project. This thesis examines the Black struggle for civil and human rights in Chicago during the 1960s. Because most of the scholarship dealing with Black Chicago during this period focuses on the CFM, an “enterprise determined to root out racial injustice, particularly housing discrimination in Chicago to improve the quality of life for the city’s Black residents, and to prod the nation as a whole to combat urban ills,” this project emphasizes the years prior to 1965.3 I began this project with a number of questions that guided my research. First, much of Chicago’s Black history tends to deal with the Great Migration and the CFM, but what was 1 Martin Deppe, Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966-1971 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017) 2. 2 Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM) is used when referring to housing and slums campaign led by SCLC between 1965 and 1967. I use “Chicago Movement,” or “Chicago struggle” when referring to the local, Chicago Civil Rights Movement as a whole. 3 James Ralph, Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) 1. 2 taking place between these two monumental events, particularly during the early 1960s? I wanted to know what racial inequality and discrimination in Chicago looked like, and how did local, Black Chicagoans organize themselves to combat racial inequality and injustice? Next, I considered the role women and young people – primarily high school and college students – played in the burgeoning protest environment that was unfolding at the start of the decade. Finally, I wanted to explore the ways in which the local struggle in Chicago shaped the national CFM. By 1965, King and the SCLC were looking for ways to geographically expand the movement. Wide scale protests in southern cities like Birmingham and Selma were influential factors resulting in the passage of Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively. Following the passage of these laws, the emphasis of the movement was human and economic rights opposed to just civil rights. These issues were customary in northern and urban cities, which ultimately prodded King’s decision to shift north. The SCLC had considered a number of cities where they could test the limits of nonviolent direct action. Places like Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York City were all considered given their long histories of Black activism.4 However, many established leaders in those cities were reluctant to work with King and SCLC, fearing their local movements might be taken over by such nationally prominent leaders. In other spaces, local leaders rejected King’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, especially as Black Power politics emerged during the second half of the decade.5 In the end, King and the SCLC decided on Chicago because there was a strong local movement already taking shape there. 4 Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) 174. 5 Ibid. 174-177. 3 Chicago was a pragmatic location for the first major, northern battle of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Race relations in Chicago were tense, and in some cases, proved to be just as volatile as those in the deep south.6 Prior to King’s arrival, there was already a strong civil rights insurgency taking place that the SCLC would