these pages, when he came back, sweating, with the scent of gasoline on his clothes. Climbing into the car, he said, âWe got to go. Right
now
.â
âWeâre not finished,â I said. âWeâre still loading your things.â
âForget them! We got to go
now
.â
Dropping one of the boxes, I climbed in. I cranked the starter as Amy closed the trunk and got in the back, then I eased out into the street. Smith grumbled, âKeep driving,â so I floored the pedal and headed south. In my rearview mirror I saw smoke billowing from his building on Indiana Avenue. Smith grinned.
âChaymââ
âDonât look back.â He stretched out and closed his eyes for the six-hour, three-hundred-mile trip downstate. âMusta been the rioters done that. Gonna try to get some rest.â
Amy kicked off her leather sandals, then curled up in a corner of the backseat, her head pillowed on one of the bags from Smithâs apartment. All the way to Champaign I drove in silence broken only by news reports on the radio. During the night National Guardsmen had clanked into the city like centurions to reinforce local police. The mayorâs office placed blame for the devastation on Kingâs presence in Chicago. Listening to that newscast, I found it easy to conclude there was precious little light in politics, which, I remembered, Henry Adams had called the âsystematic organization of hatreds.â Kingâs efforts in Chicago had pried open a Pandoraâs box of racial paradoxes, not the least being that in the wake of Black Powerâs appeal in the northern ghettos his political approach was unraveling at the seams. Like so many who admired the King of 1963, the piecemeal reformist Daley championed his success in Selma, but along with his six black aldermen who controlled wards on the South and West sides, he would not concede to the anticapitalist King of 1966 that his city was a bastion of bigotry based on economic exploitation. On local television, Rev. Joseph H. Jackson pointed out to the minister that Chicago had problems but was not the Deep South. Furthermore, some said, the objectives of the Movement were hazy. Many blacks wondered if one of the fundamental goalsof freedom should be the chance to live next door to white people in places like Cicero and Hyde Park. To be sure, the SCLC proved housing discrimination by sending black allies to real estate agents, who steered them away from properties they eagerly sold later that same afternoon to whites. But could a family living on $4,000 a year afford a home with a view of Lake Michigan in Winnetka? Kingâs critics dismissed the battle for that sort of integration as bourgeois. And for all the riveting drama of the ministerâs previous campaigns, his desperate bid at sparking a fire of social change in Americaâs second-largest city, and regaining the reins of the Movement from modern-day Zealots eager to pick up the gun, led only that July to men and women foot-weary from marching and fires in the streets that gutted only the black ghetto. The minister traveled by police escort (many derided that) to bars, churches, and meeting halls, begging angry black crowds to replace violence with mass action aimed at disruption, sending the city officials a collective Thoreauvian no to institutionalized inequality.
Yet I wondered if the legal and histrionic tactics of the Movement might one day prove more costly than anyone imagined. One could not hold a referendum for racial justice in America, a vote, becauseâas everyone knewâwhites would surely cast their ballots for, at best, gradual change. And in the South for no change at all. What the nation needed in the early 1960s was to be electrified by having the evils at its core uncovered. The minister was a master at that. And at enlisting the powers of the federal government to accelerate the end of American apartheid. But I wondered: Would the wounds
now
.â
âWeâre not finished,â I said. âWeâre still loading your things.â
âForget them! We got to go
now
.â
Dropping one of the boxes, I climbed in. I cranked the starter as Amy closed the trunk and got in the back, then I eased out into the street. Smith grumbled, âKeep driving,â so I floored the pedal and headed south. In my rearview mirror I saw smoke billowing from his building on Indiana Avenue. Smith grinned.
âChaymââ
âDonât look back.â He stretched out and closed his eyes for the six-hour, three-hundred-mile trip downstate. âMusta been the rioters done that. Gonna try to get some rest.â
Amy kicked off her leather sandals, then curled up in a corner of the backseat, her head pillowed on one of the bags from Smithâs apartment. All the way to Champaign I drove in silence broken only by news reports on the radio. During the night National Guardsmen had clanked into the city like centurions to reinforce local police. The mayorâs office placed blame for the devastation on Kingâs presence in Chicago. Listening to that newscast, I found it easy to conclude there was precious little light in politics, which, I remembered, Henry Adams had called the âsystematic organization of hatreds.â Kingâs efforts in Chicago had pried open a Pandoraâs box of racial paradoxes, not the least being that in the wake of Black Powerâs appeal in the northern ghettos his political approach was unraveling at the seams. Like so many who admired the King of 1963, the piecemeal reformist Daley championed his success in Selma, but along with his six black aldermen who controlled wards on the South and West sides, he would not concede to the anticapitalist King of 1966 that his city was a bastion of bigotry based on economic exploitation. On local television, Rev. Joseph H. Jackson pointed out to the minister that Chicago had problems but was not the Deep South. Furthermore, some said, the objectives of the Movement were hazy. Many blacks wondered if one of the fundamental goalsof freedom should be the chance to live next door to white people in places like Cicero and Hyde Park. To be sure, the SCLC proved housing discrimination by sending black allies to real estate agents, who steered them away from properties they eagerly sold later that same afternoon to whites. But could a family living on $4,000 a year afford a home with a view of Lake Michigan in Winnetka? Kingâs critics dismissed the battle for that sort of integration as bourgeois. And for all the riveting drama of the ministerâs previous campaigns, his desperate bid at sparking a fire of social change in Americaâs second-largest city, and regaining the reins of the Movement from modern-day Zealots eager to pick up the gun, led only that July to men and women foot-weary from marching and fires in the streets that gutted only the black ghetto. The minister traveled by police escort (many derided that) to bars, churches, and meeting halls, begging angry black crowds to replace violence with mass action aimed at disruption, sending the city officials a collective Thoreauvian no to institutionalized inequality.
Yet I wondered if the legal and histrionic tactics of the Movement might one day prove more costly than anyone imagined. One could not hold a referendum for racial justice in America, a vote, becauseâas everyone knewâwhites would surely cast their ballots for, at best, gradual change. And in the South for no change at all. What the nation needed in the early 1960s was to be electrified by having the evils at its core uncovered. The minister was a master at that. And at enlisting the powers of the federal government to accelerate the end of American apartheid. But I wondered: Would the wounds
Similar Books
