Slice of history... and part of the present

King's Final Years from NewsWeek

The Northern campaign went into high gear with a rally at Soldier Field and a march to city hall, where King, like Martin Luther before him, nailed his 14 demands (for things like open housing and jobs in all-white industries) to the door. At first, Daley was conciliatory. He claimed that the problems all predated him and that he had already repaired more than 100,000 apartments. When a summer riot broke out in North Lawndale (Coretta told the children to back away from the windows), the mayor sought a truce with token concessions like fire-hydrant nozzles so black kids could cool off. King held all-night talks with gang leaders and Justice Department officials in the same room, but his commitment to nonviolence was belittled by newer "Black Power" leaders like Stokely Carmichael as "too Sunday-school."

The point of the Chicago campaign was to show race as a national problem, and it did so with a bang when King led an integrated group of marchers into the racist enclave of Marquette Park. "I have never in my life seen such hate," said King, who was hit by a rock there. "Not in Mississippi or Alabama." But unlike the battle with Alabama state troopers the year before at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, marches into Marquette Park (and later into the white suburb of Cicero) led to no national catharsis or landmark legislation. Congress defeated a new civil-rights bill that would have banned housing discrimination (it finally passed in 1968). Although Northern authorities—the National Guard and Daley's police—defended the marchers rather than attack them, a backlash against the movement was setting in. "Don't you find," Mike Wallace asked King on CBS News, "that the American people are getting a little bit tired, truly, of the whole civil-rights struggle?"

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Yet it is simply inaccurate to say that every period since King has been what he called a "valley moment." The Voting Rights Act transformed American politics, and the growth of the black middle class has changed the lives of millions of families. While New Orleans got worse, Chicago got better. Today it's a much healthier city than it was in Boss Daley's time, thanks in part to his son, Richard M. Daley, who has been mayor since 1989, and his predecessor, Harold Washington, the city's first African-American mayor.

While Chicago's public-school system remains troubled and stubbornly segregated, it now boasts several highly successful schools and realistic hope for more. Housing, too, is still largely segregated by neighborhood and is unaffordable for the poor and working class, with long waiting lists for subsidies. But notorious housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green have been mostly torn down and replaced by townhouse-style public housing units, a third of them owned by the residents.