The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North

Abstract

In 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) shifted their focus above the Mason-Dixon line to Chicago. For the next year, they and their allies spotlighted racial discrimination—in particular, housing inequality—in what they called the Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM). Over five sections and twenty-one chapters The Chicago Freedom Movement attempts to restore to the historical narrative this largely dismissed dimension of the national black freedom movement and to challenge the previous “gloomy assessment[s]” of the CFM as “a failure” (p. 93). The first sections of this encyclopedic volume discuss the prelude to the CFM, narrate its major activities, and assess how it has been remembered. “In Their Own Voices” applies activist and participant oral histories to recount 1966 efforts, including the Union to End Slums tenant organizing effort, a rally at Soldier Field, and open-housing marches in Gage Park and Marquette Park. Christopher Robert Reed's chapter provides an overview of black Chicago history before the CFM, deeming it a “logical” extension of the “long fight for full citizenship rights extending back to abolitionist-era Chicago” (p. 109). James R. Ralph Jr.'s historiographical chapter summarizes scholars' negative portrayals of the CFM, which emphasize the lack of enforceable concessions that it won. Ralph concludes that scholars' renewed attention to black power activism is “unlikely” to “draw greater attention to the Chicago Freedom Movement” due to its “interracialism and nonviolent discipline” (p. 88).