Chicago -- "There she is," gushes one travel writer about Chicago, "rising suddenly like a gleaming, soaring fantasy -- a luminous shine of sheened metal, marble and glass towers, topped by exotic extravagances of domes, turrets, obelisks and spires."
Somewhere, over the rainbow, there is a city called Chicago that is like this. But from the ghettos of the west and south that city is a distant mirage. In the ghettos normal life has atrophied. Millions of black people live among abandoned apartment buildings with gaping windows and rat-infested doorways. Drug gangs stand fearlessly on street corners, marketing crack and heroin, taking shots at encroaching rivals. Broken families, alienated children, random violence offer young people little prospect of useful employment, other than the one proffered by the gang leaders.
In 1966, straight out of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, I moved into the heart of the west-side ghetto, with my wife and month-old baby, to work as a field organizer for Martin Luther King. Those were exciting times; we really thought that if King could desegregate the lunch counters in Birmingham and win the vote in Selma, there was nothing he might not do in Chicago.
The campaign was to "end the slums." Not only did it seem miserably to fail, it appeared to trigger a rise in a more militant form of black politics. Stokely Carmichael's call for "black power" sent shivers and tremors through the backbone of white society, and the confrontationalist Black Panthers were founded.
One may well wonder what good came out of King's Chicago sojourn. The evidence is everywhere.
In the heart of the ghetto are the offices and home of Dorothy Tillman, now a city alderman, whom I remember as a 17-year-old hothead on King's staff. She overwhelmed with booming voice and girlish charm any slum landlord who dared to cross her path. Today in parts of her district many of the streets are being regularly cleaned and swept, trees planted, abandoned cars towed away, and a black middle class is slowly but steadily moving in.
Jesse Jackson, then a young preacher on King's staff, named his son after me, or so he says -- there weren't many Jonathans in America in 1966. He stayed on and developed Operation Breadbasket, a self-help economic empowerment organization that still thrives under the leadership of Rev. Mrs. Willy Barrow, a diminutive but formidable preacher.
There are others who were too young to work for King, but who were inspired by his year in Chicago. Aurie Pennick runs the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities. One of
its successes, which King tried but failed to achieve with his marches, is to have opened up three or four of the nicer suburbs to black families, without precipitating white flight. Oak Park, for instance, where Ernest Hemingway grew up and Frank Lloyd Wright had his home and practice, now is a stable community with 20 percent black residents.
I leave Chicago this time with no more joy than I did 29 years ago. The contrasts are still too stark, the progress too limited and uneven. And the current mean debate in Congress threatens to make things worse. Young woman with children on welfare are to be thrown to the wolves, penniless. How anyone intelligent can think such a move could improve the poverty situation is beyond belief. But then, if the Newt Gingriches of America had not been pretty dominant in American politics over the last hundred years, the Chicago ghetto would never have been allowed to deteriorate like this in the first place.
B6 Jonathan Power writes a column on the Third World.