The gang members were out in force. Scores of Blackstone Rangers, Vice Lords and Disciples massed on the city’s South Side, carrying baseball mitts. They understood the assignment.
But this was no ordinary job. They’d been recruited by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and leaders of the Chicago Freedom Movement to be marshals for the open housing marches the movement was holding into Chicago’s sundown neighborhoods. Well acquainted with the violence of the city’s streets, the members of these organizations were charged with a different task — to march, protect others and take care of people amid white violence. Sixty years ago this month, these brave young Black men provided heroic service to the movement, much like Mississippi sharecroppers two years earlier.
But this is not the history we learn about the Civil Rights Movement. Sewn into prizewinning biographies and documentaries, Chicago’s movement too often appears as a failure. In the dominant narrative, courageous Black Southerners, led by King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with the help of Northern liberals and the media, marched, sat-in, went to jail, faced violence and succeeded in getting passed two landmark pieces of legislation, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. But days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the Watts riots erupted. As the fable goes, King, realizing the problems of the North, led SCLC to build its first Northern campaign in Chicago where it failed due to the lack of clear targets and Black Chicagoans’, particularly Black youths’, rejection of nonviolence. A comfortable narrative perpetuated by most of King’s biographers, this story derived from Northern justifications and media narratives at the time, which framed Chicago’s issues as distinct from Southern segregationism and the result of dysfunctional behaviors of urban Black communities, youth in particular, rather than systemic inequality.
In actuality, Black Chicagoans organized movements alongside their Southern counterparts to expose the city’s relentless segregation in housing, schools and jobs in the early 1960s, and King traveled to support them numerous times. He called Chicago in 1963 “as segregated as Birmingham.” In 1965, while building the Selma campaign, impressed with the movement Black Chicagoans had built to challenge the city’s relentless school segregation, King made the decision for the SCLC to join forces with Chicago’s Coordinating Council of Community Organizations to expand the struggle, kicking off the campaign in July, weeks before Watts erupted.
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When President Lyndon B. Johnson intervened to stop enforcement of the Civil Rights Act against Chicago’s segregated schools in October 1965, King and the Chicago Freedom Movement doubled down. In January 1966, the Kings moved into a slum apartment on the city’s West Side to help expose what they termed “domestic colonialism.” Black Chicagoans were contained into two huge ghettos with massively overcrowded schools, scores of housing code violations, and a host of businesses and politicians, including a Black overseer class, who profited from this segregation with the police acting as “enforcers.” One-third of the city’s population was hemmed into one-fifth of the city’s land. The Freedom Movement organized school boycotts and tenant unions, picketed businesses that didn’t employ Black people, blocked construction of apartheid infrastructure and engaged in rent strikes.
Vintage baiduhai: When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. moved to the city
King, alongside SCLC organizers, spent months working with gang members. According to Blackstone Ranger leader Jeff Fort, King saw a wealth in street organizations and their potential for leadership. Fort attributed the respect King came to garner from many gang members to two factors: King cared about the fate of “all oppressed people” and he “stood on it.” He didn’t just have “a smart tongue” but the courage to back it up — a “warrior without a gun,” Fort called him. As Vice Lord Lawrence Johnson explained, “You couldn’t help but fall in love with him.” King stressed how behavioral explanations for Black poverty and segregation “means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.” Black students like Fort were pushed out of school while white teenagers were given opportunities for redemption.
Then on May 25, 1966, Jerome Huey, a 17-year old Black teenager, went for a job interview in Cicero. On his way back, he was brutally attacked by four young white men. Eleven years after the brutal lynching of 14-year old Emmett Till in Mississippi, Huey met the same fate at the hands of Northern racists just over a mile from the Kings’ Chicago apartment. Huey, like Till, was beaten so badly he was nearly unrecognizable to his family. Yet, Huey’s lynching was ignored by the mainstream press and politicians — and is all but unknown today. As SCLC’s Ralph Abernathy observed, “When you attacked Mississippi, New Yorkers and San Franciscans felt good about themselves. When you attacked Chicago, everybody felt uncomfortable. So the press backed off.”
But this lynching in a city of 1 million Black people, where politicians professed ideals of racial equality while taking scores of measures to keep the city segregated, was a breaking point for Chicago freedom activists. The movement responded with a campaign to expose the many sundown neighborhoods that dotted the city, where Black people could work but weren’t safe at night and real estate agents blocked Black renters and buyers.
In July, an extraordinarily disciplined nonviolent movement brought together public housing mothers, teachers, clergy, postal workers, high school students, musicians and gang members. For a month, they marched nearly daily into the city’s sundown neighborhoods including Gage Park, Marquette Park, Belmont Cragin, Jefferson Park and the mayor’s own Bridgeport, to confront racist real estate agents and homeowners and expose the city’s role in creating and maintaining segregation in America’s second-largest city. The movement included Puerto Rican activists from Humboldt Park and working-class whites from Uptown, the beginnings of a rainbow coalition. Gang members were key to the efforts.
Thousands of white Chicagoans attacked them with bottles, firecrackers, cherry bombs and rocks. They waved Confederate flags and swastikas, shouted nasty racial epithets and overturned cars with Black drivers. Gang members marched, often alongside members of other gangs, catching bricks and bottles with their hands and gloves, getting bloodied, shielding people and carrying the wounded to safety, determinedly nonviolent in a campaign to expose the city’s rigid segregation. As even the United Press International noted, the injuries to demonstrators would have been much worse without these gang members’ efforts.
This avalanche of white violence was “worse” than what SCLC had encountered in the South, according to Andrew Young. King later highlighted, “while bottles were flying from the sidelines … I saw (gang members’) noses being broken and blood flowing from their wounds and I saw them continue and not retaliate, not one of them, with violence.”
On Aug. 5, King was hit with a rock the size of a fist, splitting his head. That night, Fort called a meeting of gang leadership. Fed up with being the targets of such brutal violence for so many days, they questioned the value of the marches. On top of it all, they had seen themselves as King’s protectors, and he had gotten injured. King came to the meeting and listened while they vented about the week’s horrors. According to the Rev. Al Sampson, who also attended, King then asked a question: “If a building was burning down and you had the ability to save it, what would you do?”
The young men were annoyed with the question. King asked again.
They grew angrier with what seemed like a leading question. “Mothaf— don’t f— with us,” they told King. “Everybody know you use water to put the goddamn fire out.”
King asked again. They pushed back, completely fed up.
Then King responded, “Water is an option, my brothers, ’cause you don’t put out a fire with fire.” And then he told them that they represented the water of “our people, the sustenance of life.”
They were the water. It wasn’t just about the tactic. It was these young people’s power, their leadership, their refusal to accept the kinds of inequalities their communities were subjected to and brave willingness to stand up. In the following days, more Blackstone Rangers “were out there catching bricks with us,” according to Sampson.
Faced with massive white violence against peaceful Black marchers who dared walk into these white neighborhoods, President Johnson remained silent. In fact, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the UAW, the Catholic archbishop and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins blamed the marchers for inciting trouble. The national media did too. Nearly unanimously, newspapers like the baiduhai, Los Angeles Times and The New York Times called white people who threw bricks and bottles and attacked Black motorists “hecklers” while Chicago’s segregation was put in quotation marks and called “alleged.” When Southern politicians declared the movement “outside agitators” and the source of the problem, the national media pushed back. But in Chicago, the media joined the chorus of condemnation.
Johnson had a new civil rights bill before Congress that among other things banned housing discrimination. The year before Johnson had used the violence on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to galvanize national attention to voting rights and helped get passed the Voting Rights Act. But with Northern white violence, the president remained silent.
There is a reason we get this history wrong. This is not a tale of urban young people who refused nonviolence nor a naive King who failed to have clear targets. Rather this history reveals a United States and its media that allowed Northern hate and segregation to stand, more comfortable to blame the problem on young Black people.
The marches, according to SCLC’s Bernard Lafayette Jr., “brought the best out of (these gang members) .… This showed the potential of what could happen if people were given some direction and support and the opportunity to do something creative and positive in their communities.” Over the next years, gang organizing continued to grow. The Blackstone Rangers received an Office of Economic Opportunity grant to run a job training program, performed a musical with jazz pianist Oscar Brown and formed truces. In 1969, a confederation of Vice Lords, Disciples and Blackstone Rangers helped organize protests of racially exclusive construction unions, shutting down numerous federal construction sites to demand jobs also go to Black construction workers.
But Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Chicago Police Department, the U.S. Senate and the FBI didn’t like the political turn of the city’s Black gangs and took steps to sabotage them. In 1968, the Senate held a public hearing to smear the Blackstone Rangers’ community work, while the FBI and CPD took numerous steps to turn the gangs back to fighting each other.
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Reckoning with this more accurate Chicago story changes our understanding of who propelled the Civil Rights Movement and who stood in its way, revealing gang members as nonviolent protectors of people while Northern liberal politicians and many journalists acted as shields for the city’s segregation. The distorted framing of the Chicago movement, organizer Al Raby observed, made it seem like “there was not a solution” to the city’s deep inequalities, placing the blame on Chicago’s Black communities.
Today King is often rolled out to chastise contemporary youth movements for ‘not doing it the right way,’ when the actual King worked alongside a broad base of Chicagoans. He saw the leadership potential of the most criminalized young men. It is high time we recognize the stakes of not knowing this history and the long convenience of blaming young people in the most disadvantaged parts of our society for the failures of the nation.
Jeanne Theoharis is distinguished professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Erik Wallenberg is a worker-owner at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago and historian at the Miami Center for Racial Justice. Their book, “People Get Ready: A History of the Chicago Freedom Struggle,” will be out in May 2027 from Haymarket Books.
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