FEATURE image: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is joined (from left) by Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, James Forman, Rev. Jesse L. Douglas, and John Lewis at a march for voting rights in Alabama in 1965. King would come to Chicago in January 1966. Fair Use.
By John P. Walsh
The first nonviolent civil rights campaign in the North led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) started in Chicago, Illinois, on January 5, 1966—50 years ago this month.
The multi-pronged campaign was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first major effort outside the South and the first following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. King’s coming to Chicago was greatly influenced by the Watts riots in August 1965 where those deadly six days demonstrated to King and the nation the high cost in human lives and property associated with deep discontentment in the black community over isolating and chronic high unemployment, substandard housing, and inadequate schools.
King’s consideration to come to Chicago in 1966 was further energized by national issues activated by a local focus: in this case, King’s broad support for recent Federal complaints brought by the Chicago Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) alleging segregation in the Chicago public schools. As there was a huge new Federal aid package for those public schools in the nation which desegregated by the start of the 1965-1966 school year, a charge of segregation in a state in the north and in the nation’s second largest city was unexpected, provocative, and dangerous to the natural progression of the status quo.
Led by former schoolteacher Albert Raby (at King’s right), the CCCO brought together a mix of often competing groups — including CORE’s Chicago chapter, the Catholic Interracial Council, and the Urban League. Here, King and Raby face the Chicago press alongside SCLC strategist Bayard Rustin (at King’s left), the coalition’s leadership gathered at a pivotal moment in the city’s civil‑rights fight.
The status quo in Chicago, at least in terms of its politics, was embodied in one man: Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902-1976). King’s intention to come to Chicago instead of to another big northern city was that he figured to find in Mayor Daley a powerful ally to his civil rights movement. Already Daley vocalized agreement in principle with King’s message of open housing and racial justice, but King’s potential challenge to any aspect of the mayor’s absolute political power never gained Daley’s sympathy or recognition.
Many in Chicago’s local civil rights community, however, welcomed Dr. King’s presence in Chicago in 1966. Activists like Dick Gregory (1932-2017) had marched on City Hall — and into the Bridgeport neighborhood to Daley’s home — dozens of times but to no avail in terms of tangible policy changes for blacks in a city where blacks constituted 25% of its population. Perhaps the efforts of Dr.King in Chicago could break the deadlock.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had recently labeled Chicago “the most residentially segregated city in the nation” but Daley chose to see it differently. There was no legal segregation in Chicago and Daley believed it was simply a “city of neighborhoods.” The 63-year-old Daley also felt that if government handouts were not downright un-American then, by 1965, big Federal programs should be administered at the local or city level and not from Washington. Daley’s calculation, a lawyer since 1934, always included his concern for the augmentation and not diminishment of his political power.
Released in late November 1965, Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” surged to no. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1966 and held no. 1 on the R&B chart for five weeks. Co‑written by Wonder at just fifteen, the single marked a turning point — one of the few early‑mid‑1960s hits to reach the Top 40 on both charts and the record that launched the next phase of Wonder’s career heading into the second half of the decade.
1920’s flats in Bridgeport in 2015, the Chicago neighborhood of Mayor Richard J. Daley.
While Daley’s home rule views appealed to some Chicagoans, other Chicago neighborhoods stayed in flux. There had been a longstanding mistrust, for example, between poor West Side residents—most of whom were black and concentrated by the mid1960’s into a vast ghetto—and a largely white Chicago police and fire departments. In the summer of 1965 street riots in West Garfield Park effectively produced the integration of 40 of 132 firehouses where calls for integration had been resisted since the early 1950’s.
The City of Chicago’s contrariness to aspects of President Johnson’s Great Society carried into the office of Chicago’s Education chief Benjamin C. Willis (1901-1988). In October 1965 Willis defied federal mandates for the release of requested materials as well as blocked the use of new national achievement tests in city public schools. This led to Chicago being temporarily denied their part of the massive $1.3 billion federal aid to schools program.
The overall alliance of Mayor Daley and President Johnson was strong in late 1965 so that the federal aid money called into question was restored within the week. Further, the federal official who had challenged the political power structure by citing Daley’s public schools for contempt of Federal segregation mandates was swiftly punished with a demotion.
President Lyndon B. Johnson (r.) meets with Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley in the White House, April 21, 1966. Photograph by Yoichi Okamoto.
It was into this political hothouse that Dr. King decided to build a civil rights campaign for open housing, jobs, and educational opportunity for African-Americans which in October 1965 Daley announced he welcomed with open arms.
Meanwhile Daley was also mobilizing local black and other elected officials in Chicago to establish their own community action programs to co-opt or sideline any of King’s anticipated civil rights initiatives and efforts. This important time when Dr. King came to live and work in Chicago from January to August 1966 and its immediate legacy came to be called the “Chicago Freedom Movement.”
In January 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr. stepped into a cold, worn tenement on Chicago’s West Side to begin the city’s nine‑month campaign, a drive that pushed poverty and racial injustice onto the national stage. As he climbed those narrow stairs into a rundown set of rooms, he was also entering the hard, complex politics of a major northern city ruled by Democratic mayor Richard J. Daley — the man widely known as “Boss.”
It was on Wednesday, January 26, 1966, that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) installed themselves into a West Side apartment in a low-income Chicago neighborhood on the West Side.
At the outset the SCLC and their allies were political outsiders in Chicago and mainly sought an amenable agreement with the established political powers in a city embodied by 63-year-old Richard J. Daley, its mayor since 1955.
In the middle of the cold and brutal Chicago winter King humbly began his campaign by stating that he was looking to study the city’s social conditions.
King wanted to know which nonviolent campaign tactics—whether it was street marches, voter registration drives, rallies, fund raisers, or something else—would be effective to progress the objectives of job creation, open housing, educational opportunity for African-Americans and, by summer of 1966, slum clean-up and a citizen’s review board for police brutality and misconduct.
On January 26, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King moved into a modest apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Avenue on Chicago’s West Side. King’s stay in the tenement was deliberate — a way to spotlight the city’s segregated housing conditions and anchor the campaign to end slums across Chicago. — Chicago Tribune, Feb. 24, 1966
With second‑hand furniture supplied by local shops, Martin and Coretta Scott King sit inside their new Lawndale apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Avenue on their first day in Chicago. King’s move into the tenement in January 1966 drew national attention, spotlighting the harsh conditions of the city’s slum housing and underscoring the urgency of the campaign he came to lead. Photograph by John Tweedle.
Martin Luther King Jr. removes a window frame while helping renovate an apartment at 1321 S. Loman Avenue in Chicago in 1966. His move into a West Side tenement was meant to expose the city’s housing segregation — but the work went further. The SCLC, the CCCO, and the Westside Federation became extralegal “trustees” of the building, with tenants paying rent directly to the SCLC, which used the funds for repairs. Male tenants were hired as laborers and paid King’s proposed minimum wage of $2.00 an hour — well above the federal $1.25 rate in 1966. King told Defender reporter Betty Washington that the experiment offered a glimpse of “the kind of social planning” that could revive degraded urban neighborhoods and bring “new life and new hope” to Chicago’s slums. Photograph by Luigi Mendicino, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 24, 1966.
Coretta Scott King stands inside the Homan Avenue tenement in Chicago in 1966 — the building her husband’s campaign had taken over and begun repairing as part of its push to expose and confront the city’s segregated housing conditions. The apartment was only a five‑minute drive from the Kings’ residence on Hamlin, linking their public experiment in slum rehabilitation to their daily life in Lawndale.
During their 1966 stay on Chicago’s West Side, Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King lived at 1550 S. Hamlin Avenue, just a ten‑minute walk from Stone Temple Baptist Church at 3622 W. Douglas Boulevard. Built in 1926 as a synagogue and converted into a Baptist church in 1954, Stone Temple had already hosted King several times in the 1950s and early 1960s. During his Chicago residency, it became a key base for his civil‑rights and fair‑housing work — efforts that helped pave the way for the Fair Housing Act, signed on April 11, 1968, one week after his assassination. Today, Stone Temple is led by Bishop Derrick M. Fitzpatrick, grandson of the church’s founder, Rev. James Marcellus. PHOTO: “Stone Temple MB Church” by reallyboring is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. see – https://stonetemplegreenteam.org/stone-temple-church – retrieved September 2, 2025.
“Baby Scratch My Back” written and performed by “swamp blues” singer Slim Harpo (1924-1970) was a number one hit playing on the radio in 1966.
As King spoke about a “closed society” in Chicago, the elected political power structure out of the Mayor’s office maintained an omnipotent grip on city services as a vicious circle of poverty in some black neighborhoods was permitted to exist. It was complicated by the Mayor’s public assertions that there “were no ghettos” in Chicago though Black citizens were de facto restricted to living in only certain of Daley’s “city of neighborhoods.”
King’s outsider status—which at first was understood as a mostly useful factor among Chicago’s civil rights activists—also worked to undermine King’s effectiveness in Chicago throughout 1966.
King and his circle were unfamiliar with Chicago’s vast size and complicated demographics. Also, perhaps unexpectedly, opposition to King’s efforts didn’t always fall cleanly along racial lines.
Whether coming from whites or Blacks, resentment to the Atlanta-based minister in Chicago usually always revolved around his being viewed as an interloper and potential power rival.
Dr. Joseph H. Jackson (1905–1990), longtime president of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., and pastor of Chicago’s Olivet Baptist Church, was a fierce opponent of the Chicago Freedom Movement and delivered sharp, public attacks on Dr. King throughout King’s time in the city. Jackson’s stance had already drawn backlash: in 1963, he was booed off the stage — alongside Mayor Richard J. Daley — at an NAACP rally in Grant Park.
Support from Chicago Black ministers, a natural political base for King, was frequently blunted in 1966 by intimidating reminders from City Hall that this or that certain church would be having its building or fire code inspection coming up.
Moreover, big cities across the nation, including Chicago, were looking to receive a huge influx of money out of Washington, D.C. including part of a new $2.3 billion anti-slum program (about 17 billion in 2015 dollars). This huge infusion of money to Chicago was part of programs for infrastructure and social services marking President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society.”
King was politely pressured by city officals to forego what could only be seen as futile and time-wasting efforts of trash drives and meetings so to allow the Chicago mayor and his allies to get down to the serious work of eliminating city slums by, as Daley announced, no later than the end of 1967.
Daley’s home-court advantage and enormous financial support from the Democratic U.S. president and Congress gave Dr. King’s civil rights operation among the poor and dispossessed an appearance of superfluity, if not outright meddling.
Tactically, on every front, Daley tried to match King’s organizational efforts often by simply buying off King’s allies.
When King filled the International Amphitheatre on South Halsted Street with 12,000 Black celebrities and supporters on March 12, 1966 for a rally, Daley led 70,000 marchers and 350,000 spectators down State Street in the St. Patrick’s Day parade a few days later.
After the SCLC took a supra-legal action to seize a dilapidated tenement building, Daley limited his response which left King to deal with all the legal and public relations headaches.
King was not naïve about his own position. He did not want the Chicago Freedom Movement to become politicized. Daley had a mayoral primary in February 1967— he was running unopposed for a fourth four-year term. Some King allies in Chicago wanted an opposition candidate to Boss Daley, something that had never materialized to that point, and coalesce around the Chicago Freedom Movement to run against the mayor.
King refused the idea. Despite the political leeway, Daley worked continuously in 1966 to limit and even sideline King’s efforts in Chicago. King’s hope that the Irish-American big city northern mayor would risk or trade political power for King’s agenda of social justice and civil rights on behalf of the city’s African-Americans —historically a full third of the population —was mostly dashed in 1966.
Daley’s selective embraces of King never offset the mayor’s overall strategy to restrain the civil rights leader’s efficacy in Chicago. At the same time Daley did not want his restraint of King to impact or curb the broad voter support that the Daley administration had.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. discusses fair‑housing conditions with Chicago real‑estate broker Gilbert Balin of G. Balin Inc. As King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference pressed their campaign to end slum housing — soon known as the Chicago Freedom Movement — meetings like this underscored the push to confront discriminatory practices across the city’s real‑estate industry. — Jack Mulcahy, Chicago Tribune, Nov. 3, 1966
Regardless of Daley’s defensive efforts, King did not lose sight of his message of improved housing, education and economic development for African-Americans in Chicago. At this still early juncture of his time in Chicago, KIng carried on with his own civil rights campaign leaving any direct confrontation with Mayor Daley possibly for the future.
One SCLC initiative that scored quick success was a project started in February 1966 headed by Rev. Jesse Jackson (1941-2026) called Operation Breadbasket (renamed by Jackson Operation PUSH after King’s death). Within months there were several hundred new Black hires in Chicago-area businesses by way of this action.
During their nine months in Chicago in 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King lived and worked on the West Side, laying the groundwork for what became the Chicago Freedom Movement. King spent those late‑winter and early‑spring months learning the city and shaping a strategy — from the Hamlin Avenue “trusteeship” experiment to Operation Breadbasket, and from meetings with Black and white civic leaders, including Mayor Richard J. Daley and Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, to efforts to steer gang members toward non‑violence. He moved constantly through community groups across the West Side. Here, he walks with members of the East Garfield Park Community Organization, part of the broad coalition he sought to build. Photograph by John Tweedle. Fair Use.
King’s months-long presence in Chicago in 1966 could also be credited for prompting Mayor Daley to establish new city programs. Daley also hosted various “summits” with clergy, labor and business leaders with the agenda to combat poverty and racism in Chicago.
In August 1966, Daley, with the support of the Chicago Freedom Movement, accepted the departure of public schools Chief Benjamin Willis and the appointment of James F. Redmond, a racial progressive, who served in that capacity until 1975. Still, Daley considered only white men for the post and overlooked two qualified Black candidates.
One thing Dr. King considered a key effort to improve African-American lives in the ghetto was to transform gang members into nonviolent civil rights activists. When a gunfight at a SCLC meeting in May 1966 broke out between Blackstone Rangers and East Side Disciples that ended King’s official initiative in this direction for the present.
Meanwhile, Richard J. Daley continued his downtown redevelopment. In March 1966 Daley announced a $200 million package for mass transit and made sure the Civic Federation — a good government watchdog group — was there to endorse it. In addition to Loop and North Michigan Avenue redevelopment, Daley dedicated in May 1966 the Civic Center, soon to be graced by the iconic Picasso sculpture in 1967.
Now the long, hot days of the Chicago summer were on the doorstep. Many in the city wondered at the start of summer 1966 to what extent Dr. King’s plans might add to the heat.
Dr. King’s 1966 apartment at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue on Chicago’s West Side was damaged during the unrest that followed his assassination on April 4, 1968 and was later demolished. The lot remained vacant for decades until 2011, when the Dr. King Legacy Apartments — designed by Johnson + Lee — were built on the site. The $18‑million, 45‑unit complex includes commercial space along 16th Street, including the new home of the Fair Housing Exhibit Center, linking King’s Chicago work to the ongoing fight for equitable housing.
A painted mural of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Lawndale tenement where he lived and worked in 1966 stands as the centerpiece of the Fair Housing Exhibit Center. Created by nationally renowned Afro‑Indian muralist Paul Collins, the artwork anchors the site’s tribute to King’s Chicago campaign and its legacy in the fight for fair housing.
SOURCES: Martin Luther King, Jr. with profiles of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Lori Meek Schuldt, World Book, Inc., 2007; American Pharaoh, Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, Little, Brown and Company, 2000; At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68, Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006; Civil Rights Digital Library – http://crdl.usg.edu/events/watts_riots/?Welcome. On Tina Allen – http://chicagopublicart.blogspot.com/2013/09/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-bust.html. On the CCCO- – http://www.oxfordaasc.com/public/features/archive/0110/photo_essay.jsp?page=3. On Hamlin trusteeship –http://www.oxfordaasc.com/public/features/archive/0110/photo_essay.jsp?page=6.
The next chapter of the campaign:
This explanatory article may be periodically updated.
Nice article, with a fine overview of this portion of the movement that is often overlooked.
However, your mention of the Dr King Legacy Apartments only mentions the architects Johnson +Lee. They did their job very well but weren’t the catalyst for the development. I couldn’t help but notice the lack of mention of the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation (lead developer and manager) and the coalition of community organizations/groups/churches/etc that raised money and awareness necessary to make the project happen.