Feature Image: Main Entrance, Metropolitan Tower (1924), 310 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, was designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White. December 2015. 4.89 mb DSC_0963 (1). Author’s photograph.
Metropolitan Tower’s main entrance is more than an architectural detail: it is a surviving gateway to one of Chicago’s most significant early skyscrapers, a building that embodied the ambitions, craftsmanship, and corporate prestige of the 1920s while reflecting the evolution of Michigan Avenue and modern Chicago.
Located at 310 South Michigan Avenue on the southwest corner of Jackson Boulevard, Metropolitan Tower originally served as corporate headquarters for S.W. Straus and Co., a banking and investment firm. The building was erected in 1924 by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White in their signature classical style. The architectural firm was one of the largest in the first half of the twentieth century and went on to build Chicago’s Civic Opera Building in 1929. Founded in 1912, the firm was the successor to D. H. Burnham & Co. by way of partner, Ernest R. Graham (1868-1936), and Burnham’s sons, Hubert and Daniel Jr. Five years later the Burnhams left to form their own firm (Burnham Brothers) and Graham partnered with others of the firm’s members: William Peirce Anderson (1870-1924), Edward Mathias Probst (1870-1942), and Howard Judson White (1870-1936). No expense was spared for the Straus Building’s interior, though of the original lobby’s opulence all that remains are the elaborate bronze elevator doors. The entrance’s coffered bronze doors by Italian sculptor Leo Lentelli (1879-1961) were destroyed. see – Saliga, Pauline A., editor, The Sky’s The Limit A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers, Rizzoli New York, 1990, p. 117.
The Metropolitan Tower was built in 1924 as the headquarters of S.W. Straus & Co. and designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, successors to the Burnham architectural tradition.
Ernest R. Graham (1868-1936).
William Peirce Anderson (1870-1924).
Edward Mathias Probst (1870-1942).
Howard Judson White (1870-1936).
The elaborate entrance and lobby originally featured exceptional decorative work, including bronze doors created by sculptor Leo Lentelli, although many original elements have been lost.
Leo Lentelli (1879-1961). The Italian sculptor created the original main entrance doors for Metropolitan Tower that were later destroyed. Public Domain.
The 30-floor classical-style Straus Building was renamed over the years for other of its famous inhabitants including Continental National Insurance Co. and Britannica Center for Encyclopedia Britannica. Metropolitan Tower was the first building in Chicago that took advantage of the new 1923 zoning ordinance for skyscrapers that allowed buildings taller than 260 feet (30 or more floors) with the necessary setbacks. Metropolitan Tower’s required setbacks begin at the 21st floor on which sits a nine-story tower until there is a second setback and then the final two stories. Crowned by a stepped pyramid and possessed of a powerful beacon that opened in 1924, the building is Chicago’s first Michigan Avenue skyscraper.
Metropolitan Tower was the first skyscraper on Michigan Avenue and one of the earliest buildings to take advantage of Chicago’s new 1923 zoning regulations permitting greater height through setbacks. Its distinctive stepped crown, beacon, and symbolic ornamentation made it a recognizable feature of the Chicago skyline.
Unused for years, the building’s 1,500-pound carillon bells were restored in 1979 for Pope John Paul II’s visit to Chicago. Just steps from Metropolitan Tower, the papal visit included an outdoor mass in Grant Park on October 5, 1979, which attracted over one million attendees, the largest gathering ever in Grant Park history up to that time. see – CBS Chicago Vault: Pope John Paul II enthralls Chicagoans on 1979 visit – CBS Chicago – retrieved March 18, 2026.
At one time, the thirtieth floor was the Straus Tower Observatory, which was open to the public for viewing the city in all four directions. see – Home | Metropolitan Tower – retrieved February 24, 2026. Home to the Continental National Insurance Company soon after it was built, this iconic skyscraper is located within Chicago’s Landmark Historic Michigan Boulevard District. The glass “beehive” supported by four bison figures at the top of the building held the blue light of a four-direction beacon. The ensemble, symbolizing industry, strength, and thrift, saw its beacon, signifying global reach, permanently shut down in 1934 following the financial failure of the S.W. Straus and Company during the Great Depression. The building was converted to residential condominiums in 2007. see – Metropolitan Tower | Powered by Baird & Warner– retrieved February 24, 2026; AIA Guide to Chicago, 2nd Edition, Alice Sinkevitch, Harcourt, Inc., Orlando, 2004, page 42.
The building was constructed in a classical style and represented the high quality and prestige associated with major Chicago commercial architecture of the 1920s. Over time, the building adapted to changing uses and occupants, including Encyclopedia Britannica and residential condominiums, demonstrating its continued relevance and preservation.
FEATURE IMAGE: On March 3, 1934, John Dillinger (left in a mug shot) used the second floor of this three-flat building on Chicago’s north side as his first hide out after he and another criminal, murderer Henry Youngblood, drove directly here from a jail in Crown Point, Indiana following their break-out. In January 1934 Dillinger had been extradited to Indiana from Arizona. Public domain. Author’s photograph. May 2014.
In the Great Depression many banks had failed wiping out entire savings of millions of ordinary Americans. Banks that stayed open saw their primary business becoming foreclosures on ordinary American’s homes, farms, and businesses. And the economy was not improving. Bank robberies were viewed by some as a sort of just retribution in desperate times or even sometimes more favorably since bank robberies could involve the destruction of bank records, including mortgages, so that the bank could not as easily foreclose. There was a myth of the glamorous getaway involving handsome celebrity robbers. Such was the story of John Dillinger (1903-1934) with his gangs including Harry “Pete” Pierpont, Lester “Baby Face Nelson” Gillis, John “Red” Hamilton, and Homer Van Meter and their girlfriends. John Dillinger, declared Public Enemy No. 1 by the FBI in June 1934, epitomized the early 1930’s Depression-era bank robber in America as he terrorized the Midwest following his release from jail from September 1933 until July 1934. In this period other robbers included “Pretty Boy” Floyd, “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde who died in a hail of gunfire in May 1934 as these territorial and nomadic robbers’ crime sprees were splashed across newspaper headlines that the public consumed like that week’s latest movie serial.
FBI photograph of the Biograph Theater in 1934 shortly after the shooting of Public Enemy No.1, John Dillinger. Public Domain
New federal anticrime laws targeted interstate criminals that made bank robbery, the transport of stolen goods or the flight of a felon over state lines, a federal crime and came under the jurisdiction of the FBI. That is where this three-flat in Chicago enters criminal and criminal law history. About midway between Lake Michigan and Wrigley Field in Chicago sits John Dillinger’s Hideout, a red brick three-flat at 3512 N. Halsted in the Uptown neighborhood. After his Indiana jail break on Saturday, March 3, 1934, John Dillinger, with murderer Henry Youngblood, headed directly to Chicago and hid out for one night in this building. Dillinger stayed on the second floor of an apartment owned by Frances “Patsy” Frechette, the half-sister of Dillinger’s girlfriend, Evelyn “Billie” Frechette (1907-1969). This break out gave FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover his first big chance to apply federal anticrime laws after Dillinger broke out of the “escape-proof” jail in Crown Point, Indiana, having used a fake gun, stole Sheriff Lillian Holley’s car and drove the 50 miles or so across state lines to this building in Chicago, Illinois. Dillinger violated the Dyer Act and put himself in the jurisdictional sights of the FBI. On March 7, 1934, Hoover mounted a special operation to capture Dillinger, dead or alive, that would come to a successful, and bloody, conclusion on the evening of July 22, 1934, outside the Biograph Theater, about a mile and half straight south from this site. On a swelteringly hot night, Dillinger went to the air-conditioned movies and, having been set up there by the “Woman in Red,” would find himself hours later chilling in a morgue.
John Dillinger mug shot. Public domain.
Dillinger started early in a life of crime so that when he was 21 years old, he was serving what would be a nine-year sentence in an Indiana prison for robbery. Originally from Mooresville, Indiana, near Indianapolis, Dillinger and Chicago were paired for much of his adult criminal life. He joined the US Navy in Chicago in 1923 to escape an auto theft rap in Indiana. But 6 months later Dillinger gave up the ship, the USS Utah, and was dishonorably discharged. He was behind bars for that nine-year sentence for robbery starting in fall of 1924. When he was paroled in 1933, the ex-con turned to a life of violence as a bank robber. During his final 10-month crime spree Dillinger and his gang killed at least 10 people including a sheriff during one of their three jail breaks, and wounded seven more.
John Dillinger (left) with navy buds. Public domain.
To go from this hideout on March 3, 1934, to Dillinger’s death on July 22, 1934, was nearly half of Dillinger’s final 10-month episodic crime spree. In late January 1934 Dillinger and Billie and most of his gang was in Tucson, Arizona, with Dillinger checking escape routes to Mexico. Some of the gang was on the lam from a bank robbery in East Chicago, Indiana. Caught by local police, Dillinger was extradited by airplane to Indiana via Chicago and jailed in Crown Point, Indiana. It was there that he first hired Louis P. Piquett, a Chicago attorney known for close ties to the Chicago mob. Billie Frechette visited Dillinger at Crown Point in mid-February 1934. But, on March 3, 1934, Dillinger broke out of the jail and remained free until his death in late July 1934 at the hands of law enforcement.
3512 North Halsted, Chicago. Author’s photograph. May 2014.
There are many hideouts for Dillinger and his gang as they were highly peripatetic. But this hideout is significant since it is the first hideout for Dillinger on his final way to capture and death as Public Enemy No. 1 but also an American folk anti-hero. Dillinger arrived at the apartment of Patsy Frechette to hide out and reunite with Billie after crossing the state line in the stolen sheriff’s car. Dillinger was here for a significant rendezvous and transition though for too short a time for any law enforcement raid occurring at this specific address during his stay. The hideout is just steps – a literal 3-minute walk – from the long-established (1872) 42nd Precinct “Town Hall” police station. Instead, the FBI’s first major violent confrontation with the Dillinger gang following his escape took place weeks later at the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin in April 1934.
The next day, March 4, 1934, Dillinger set out for Minneapolis with Billie and rented an apartment (the Indiana sheriff’s stolen car was ditched in Edgewater) at Lincoln Court Apartments, Unit 303, at 95 Lexington Parkway in St Paul. On March 6, 1934, escaped con man Dillinger driving a 1934 Packard robbed a bank in Sioux Falls, North Dakota with gang members Homer Van Meter, Eddie Green, Tommy Carroll, and Baby Face Nelson. In the robbery a policeman was wounded and the gang took almost $50,000 ($1.2 million in 2026). One week later, on March 13, 1934, Dillinger, driving a Buick, robbed a bank in Mason City, Iowa, with the same gang members plus John Hamilton. Taking $52,000 in cash ($1.25 million today), a bystander was wounded as was Dillinger and Hamilton who returned to St. Paul for medical attention. That same day (March 14, 1934), Henry Youngblood, the murderer who escaped prison with Dillinger less than two weeks before, was shot and killed by law enforcement in Michigan. A deputy sheriff was killed in the capture.
Two days later, March 16, 1934, Dillinger and Billie return to Chicago. Days later he and Billie are back in St. Paul living together in the apartment under an alias (rent is $60 a month – about $1440 today). The criminal bank robber Dillinger drove to Ohio to see if he could spring from jail his mentor and partner Harry Pierpoint who had an impending death sentence but Pierpont, on October 17, 1934, was executed in the electric chair. On March 30, 1934, Dillinger was back in St. Paul with Billie and his gang members with girlfriends. At the same time, the FBI was tipped off as to Dillinger’s whereabouts and when three agents arrived at the apartment to investigate on March 31, 1934, Dillinger and Billie escaped though Dillinger was wounded in the leg. He sought medical attention across town in Minneapolis where he recovered during the next week though Eddie Green was shot and mortally wounded. The FBI, hot on Dillinger’s trail, raided the house of Dillinger’s half-brother Hubert in Indianapolis after Dillinger and Billie bought a car there with hot money and listed Hubert’s address as theirs. On Monday, April 9, 1934, Dillinger and Billie were back in Chicago where Billie was arrested at 416 North State as Dillinger escaped. Billie was held on a $60,000 bond ($1.44 million today) in response to the pair’s fleeing that shootout with law enforcement in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her trial in May 1934 resulted in a conviction. By Friday, April 13, 1934, Dillinger with Homer Van Meter had robbed a police supply station in Warsaw, Indiana, and stole firearms (Dillinger was partial to .38 revolvers throughout his career) and bulletproof vests.
Billie Frechette (1907-1969) was born on a Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. After her arrest she was tried and convicted of violating a federal law of harboring a criminal and served a two-year prison sentence without parole in a federal pen in Milan, Michigan. Public domain.
FBI wanted poster for Billie Frechette. Public Domain.
The next day Dillinger and Van Meter were in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where they broke into a tourist camp and stayed in a cabin for a few days. Dillinger then drove to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan with John Hamilton. Meanwhile Homer Van Meter, Marie Comforti, and Pat Reilly arrived at Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish, Wisconsin where that evening of Friday, April 20, 1934, Dillinger, Hamilton, and others arrived for a three-day paid stay. The lodge was owned and built in 1929 by a Dillinger friend. The proprietor’s wife, hoping to secure the FBI’s $10,000 reward for Dillinger’s capture (about $250,000 today), tipped off law enforcement on many fronts after an elaborate feint of trust/ mistrust among the lodge’s owners and Dillinger’s gang. The G-men immediately chartered two airplanes full of agents from St. Paul and Chicago to Rhinelander Airport. Agents in communities surrounding the lodge were summoned to assist in the raid. There were complications: the weather was bad (snow and ice), and the agents on arrival found they had only one car when they needed 6 or 7. Meanwhile Dillinger announced he changed plans and was leaving the Lodge early. After renting cars agents arrived by nightfall of April 22, 1934, and surrounded the lodge on foot. The agents were protected by bulletproof vests and armed with machine guns, revolvers, and tear gas.
Little Bohemia Lodge where the FBI bungled the capture of Dillinger on April 22, 1934, and killed an innocent guest. It was a human and public relations disaster for the newly minted federal law enforcement group. Built in 1929, bullet holes can still be seen from that night in the northern Wisconsin lodge building today. “Little Bohemia Lodge” by nanaze is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Inside the Lodge, it was Sunday night and the bar was busy with patrons. John Morris and Eugene Boiseneau, two young CCC workers, and a gas station attendant named John Hoffman had just finished their Sunday dinner and were about to leave. The snow in the night obscured everyone’s vision and when they approached the exit of the lodge they were ordered to halt by the FBI who thought they were Dillinger and his gang. The FBI soon opened fire. Their bullets pierced the car’s steel and hit its three occupants – wounding Morris and Hoffman and killing Boiseneau.
Mug shot of Lester Gillis, aka “Baby Face” Nelson. On July 22, 1934, Dillinger was ambushed and killed by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater in Lincoln Park, Chicago. The next day the FBI announced that “Pretty Boy” Floyd was now Public Enemy No. 1. On October 22, 1934, Floyd was killed in a shootout with agents including Melvin Purvis. Subsequently, J. Edgar Hoover announced that Nelson was now Public Enemy No. 1. Unlike Dillinger who could be polite, the owners of the Little Bohemia Lodge thought Nelson was a “psychopath.” He died from gunshot wounds sustained in a fierce shootout with FBI agents on November 27, 1934, near Barrington, Illinois, though he managed to kill both agents. Fleeing, Nelson died in a safe house in Wilmette, Illinois.Public domain.
This gunfire alerted Dillinger inside the lodge playing cards to law enforcement’s presence. Agents then surrounded the Little Bohemia Lodge and opened fire with a hailstorm of bullets believing Dillinger and his gang inside. But Dillinger, Homer Van Meter, John Red Hamilton and Tommy Carroll escaped as did Baby Face Nelson who killed one agent and left the proprietor and wife with their other guests to suffer the carnage. The FBI left emptyhanded but for some of the gang’s girlfriends who surrendered without incident.
Head of the FBI case in Chicago to get Dillinger and his gang dead or alive was Melvin Purvis. Public domain.
Later that day (April 23, 1934), Dillinger, Van Meter and Hamilton engaged in a gun battle with police in Hastings, Minnesota, near St. Paul. When Hamilton was wounded Dillinger drove back to Chicago but failed to get him medical attention so that, a few days later, Hamilton died in Aurora, Illinois, and was buried by Dillinger and others in a gravel pit near Oswego, Illinois. The getaway car Dillinger stole in Wisconsin that night after escaping the lodge was found blood stained in Chicago at 3333 North Leavitt on May 2, 1934. The raid, led by FBI chief in Chicago Melvin Purvis (1903-1960), who liked publicity, was heavily criticized in the press for the agents’ brutal methods and stupidity and was one of the worst public relations fiascos in FBI history.
John “Red’ Hamilton. Mug shot. Public domain.
With the FBI in hot pursuit of Dillinger and his gang, episodes of violence occurred between law enforcement and gang members and other criminals throughout the Chicago area where people were killed. Dillinger, who had become an internationally known superstar criminal, had been thinking about getting plastic surgery to conceal his identity. His legal counsel, Louis P. Piquett, put Dillinger in touch with an off-the-books operating room by way of James Probasco, another of Piquett’s clients. The surgery price was high and almost all profit for Probasco: $80,000 cash (about $2 million today). Probasco recruited Dr. William Loeser, a German immigrant who fled to Mexico to escape serving time for violating the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act of 1914 and developed a procedure to remove fingerprints. He was assisted by Dr. Harold Cassidy. Dillinger moved into Probasco’s home on Chicago’s north Crawford Road (now Pulaski Road) on May 27, 1934. The surgery took place the next day, with Dillinger opting to receive a general anesthetic. But a glitch in its application (Dillinger was swallowing his own tongue) made him choose a local anesthetic. For the next several hours, the doctors removed a mole from his forehead, dimple from his cheek, and changed the shape of his face and erased seams in his cheeks. They employed Loeser’s acid method to burn off Dillinger’s fingerprints.
Tavern owner James Probasco’s house at 2509 N. Crawford Road in Chicago where Dillinger underwent plastic surgery on May 28, 1934. Public domain.
The surgery, however, was more cosmetic than plastic so that Dillinger was still completely recognizable and his fingerprints remained after he recovered. James Probasco, four days after Dillinger’s death, on July 26, 1934, was brought under questioning for this episode by the FBI at the Bankers’ Building in downtown Chicago. Mysteriously, a window was open and Probasco leapt to his death falling onto the pavement. Attorney Louis Piquett went on trial for harboring a fugitive (Dillinger) but was found not guilty. In 1936, Piquett was retried for the same charge regarding Homer van Meter. Found guilty he served two years in prison, was fined $10,000, and disbarred in Illinois. In 1950, Piquett was pardoned by President Truman. Dr. Loeser was sentenced to one day in prison but had to serve 18 months for the Harrison narcotics case from which he fled. Dr. Cassidy received probation, served honorably in the army medical corps in World War II, but in 1946 had a breakdown and committed suicide.
“All My Life I wanted to be a bank robber. Carry a gun and wear a mask. Now that it’s happened, I guess I’m just the best bank robber they ever had. And I am sure happy.” – John Dillinger. On the alley wall in Chicago near the Biograph Theater where the bank robber was captured, dead, by law enforcement.
On June 22, 1934, the same day Dillinger was officially named Public Enemy No. 1, the high-profile criminal celebrated his 31st birthday with his new girlfriend, 26-year-old Polly Hamilton (1908-1969) at the French Casino nightclub in The Rainbo [sic] Building, 4812-4836 North Clark Street, in Chicago’s Uptown. A former employee and friend of brothel madam Anna Sage (1889-1947), Polly Hamilton met Dillinger at a Chicago nightclub in early June 1934 when she was working as a waitress and prostitute.
Polly Hamilton. Fair use.
The Rainbo, like many entertainment venues, struggled during the Great Depression. For a few months in 1934, the second year of the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago, the Rainbo Casino reopened as the “French Casino” (the building was demolished in 2003). A few days later (June 26, 1934), as Dillinger was watching the Chicago Cubs beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in Wrigley Field, his gang members, as informants increasingly came forward, were being squeezed around the city and in the Midwest by law enforcement, whether by being killed, or captured and tried. On June 30, 1934, Dillinger, driving a Hudson, with Van Meter, Baby Face Nelson and John Paul Chase pulled off their last bank heist in South Bend, Indiana, stealing $30,000 (over $700,000 today). One police officer was killed in the melée as a bank cashier, vice president, a bystander and a motorist, as well as Van Meter, were wounded.
In July Dillinger began the month discussing Billie’s appeal, going to the movies, and attending the Chicago Century of Progress. On July 22, 1934, Anna Sage (the “Woman in Red”) contacted FBI head Melvin Purvis at 5:30 p.m. to inform him that Dillinger and their mutual friend, Polly Hamilton would be going to the movies that evening either at the Biograph Theater at 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue in Lincoln Park or at the palatial Marbro Theatre at 4110 W. Madison Street in West Garfield Park (the theater was demolished in 1964 and in 2026 its site remains an empty parking lot).
Anna Sage, “the woman in red” who set up John Dillinger to be shot outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934. Public domain.
At 8.15 p.m. Dillinger arrived at the Biograph Theater wearing a straw hat, white shirt, gray tie, white canvas shoes and gray trousers with Sage and Polly. When they entered the Biograph Theater to see “Manhattan Melodrama” with Clark Gable, 15 federal agents (according to the next day’s headline in the Altoona Tribune), including five East Chicago officers, descended on the area and staked it out. A little after 10:30 p.m. when the show emptied out, Sage, who was dressed in a bright orange-red dress, alerted officers to Dillinger’s identity in the crowd. Ambushed and shot without warning, Dillinger was killed instantly when two shots hit the face, one bullet exiting beneath the right eye. Witnesses described Dillinger being shot at very close range. The event caused a spectacle, with many onlookers dipping handkerchiefs and scraps of newspaper in his blood.
Dillinger’s body after the shooting was transported to Alexian Brothers Hospital at West Belden and North Racine Avenues (above). It then went to the Cook County morgue at West Polk and South Wood streets where large crowds gathered. There, an impromptupublic display of the body took place, where thousands of the general public shambled by. A plaster death mask was made of the dead criminal at the morgue. See – Medical – Hospitals – Chicago History In Postcards – retrieved Jan. 24, 2026. Fair Use.
Dillinger’s remains were taken back to Mooresville, Indiana by Dillinger’s father, half-brother, and their undertaker who came to fetch it out from the crowds. In Indiana, Dillinger was identified by his sister and then buried on July 25, 1934, in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. Anna and Polly had escaped Dillinger’s capture unharmed and relocated temporarily to Detroit. Sage collected the $5,000 reward (about $120,000 today) from the FBI but, two years later, was deported to Romania due to her conviction for operating a brothel where she died on April 25, 1947. Polly Hamilton moved back to Chicago under an assumed name, married, and died in 1969.
FEATURE Image: The many prayer intentions received at the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago are placed at the patron of hopeless cases’ devotional altar in the main sanctuary. These petitions are remembered at the National Shrine’s Masses and devotional prayers throughout the years. June 2018 80% 7.76mb DSC_9191. Author’s photograph.
Chicago’s National Shrine of St. Jude is more than a local religious landmark. It is a place where faith, devotion, and personal transformation intersect, most famously in the life of Danny Thomas, whose prayers to St. Jude here helped inspire a career that ultimately led to the founding of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The shrine stands as a living testament to the powerful role that religious faith and pilgrimage can play in individual lives and broader humanitarian endeavors.
The National Shrine of St. Jude at 3208 E. 91st Street on Chicago’s far southeast side at Our Lady of Guadalupe parish church was canonically established in 1929. Its official decree was promulgated on November 15, 1929, by Chicago Cardinal Archbishop George Mundelein (1872-1939). June 2018 88% 7.72mb DSC_9173. Author’s photograph.
The pastor of the church at the time was Fr. James Tort, a Claretian missionary, who had a deep personal devotion to St. Jude, patron of hopeless cases and those that are almost despaired of. The saint, not to be confused with the traitor, Judas Iscariot, is honored by the church universally as the saint who brings visible and speedy help in most dire circumstances. A portrait of the founder of the Claretians, Spanish priest and bishop, St. Anthony Mary Claret (1807-1870), is one of the artworks that greet visitors into the main sanctuary. The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is over the main altar. The devotional altar to St. Jude is right of the main altar. The altar to St. Jude contains a major relic of the saint: a piece of his bone. June 2018 84% 7.78 DSC_9177. Author’s photograph.
The shrine contains a major relic of St. Jude and serves as an active center of prayer and pilgrimage.
The shrine altar to St. Jude (right). In the darkest days of the Great Depression, Father Tort petitioned St. Jude with a request to help complete the parish church building for the people. In gratitude for the granting of this great favor. Fr. Tort promised to never cease to honor the saint, a true blood relative of Jesus and Mary, by dedicating a shrine altar to him in the church and to do all in his power to spread devotion to him. June 2018 2.29mb DSC_9186 (1). Author’s photograph.
This is one of the stained-glass windows in Chicago’s St. Jude Shrine. It depicts Jude preaching in Persia. Tradition holds that Saint Jude preached the Gospel in Judea, Samaria, Idumaea, Syria, Mesopotamia and Libya. He is also said to have visited Beirut. In addition to being patron of hopeless cases, Jude is patron of vegetarians. That Jude is portrayed holding an image of Jesus Christ has an interesting origin. During Jesus’s public ministry, a king had an incurable condition and was dying in Edessa. He sent a letter asking for Jesus to come. Instead of going himself, Jesus sent Jude. As Jude set out on this journey, Jesus pressed a cloth against His face, and when he gave it back to Jude, it had the Lord’s image on it. When St. Jude then went to the dying king in Edessa, and the king looked at the cloth with Christ’s miraculous impression, he was immediately healed. June 2018 6.47mbDSC_9184 (4). Author’s photograph.
Danny Thomas, struggling to establish himself in show business, learned of the shrine while in Chicago and prayed to St. Jude there for assistance. Soon afterward, Thomas received the career opportunity that launched him to national fame as a comedian, television star, and entertainer.
In 1940 when entertainer Danny Thomas (1912-1991) came to Chicago to do radio commercials, he found early success doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs. When work was finished, often around dawn, Thomas went to 6 a.m. Mass at St. Clement Church. There Thomas learned about Chicago’s National Shrine of St. Jude on the far southeast side. A couple of years earlier, Thomas, starting out in show business in Detroit— and with his first child, Marlo Thomas, on the way— had dedicated himself to St. Jude as the patron of hopeless cases. Soon after visiting and praying at the Chicago shrine, Thomas was offered a stand-up comedy job in New York City at La Martinique at 57 West 57th Street. This job launched his entertainment career into the big time. Following World War II, Thomas was performing for $3,750 a week at New York’s Roxy Theater just off Times Square and was performing in nightclubs across the country as well as offered film roles. In 1953 he starred in his own television show, Make Room for Daddy (later, The Danny Thomas Show). The sitcom ran for 11 consecutive seasons and became more popular with each year. By 1957 it was the no.2 show on television and, when the sitcom ended in 1964, it was in the top ten. PHOTO: “Danny thomas kayrouz” by Hany raymond rahme is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Remembering his promise to give back if he succeeded, Thomas founded St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis in 1962, creating one of the world’s most respected pediatric medical institutions.
The National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago was canonically established in 1929 and became one of the most important centers of devotion to St. Jude in the United States.
Altar of St. Jude, The National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago. St. Jude Thaddeus was one of Jesus’ 12 apostles and. legend has it, that it was Jude who was the groom at the wedding feast of Cana where Jesus performed his first miracle of turning water into wine (John, chapter 2). Matthew states that Jude was one of the “brothers” of Jesus usually interpreted as a blood cousin. St. Jude, pray for us! June 2018 73% 7.89mb DSC_9182. Author’s photograph.
FEATURE Image: February 2018. Village “Art” Theatre, 1548-50 N. Clark Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610. The use of masks had been used in theatre since ancient times. They were usually tied to their dramatic source material and the inherent psychology of the characters. The Landmark Designation Report for the Village Theatre described this polychrome character head with musical instruments as “singing” in honor of the neighboring Germania Club, a German social club with its origins in men’s choral music. The head also wears a Baroque-style “wig” of oak leaves and acorns. In Germany, oak trees are revered, and acorns are a symbol of good luck. A decorative keystone on the theater’s round-arched window also has an acorn ornament. 88% 7.94mb DSC_4799 Author’s photograph.
The Village Art Theatre was more than a neighborhood movie house. It embodied Chicago’s early film culture, immigrant heritage, and evolving urban identity for over a century. Although the building itself was demolished in 2018, the survival of its historic façade highlights both the possibilities and limitations of preserving architectural memory amid redevelopment.
Historical Origins & Opening
Designed by architect Adolphe Woerner (born Stuttgart, Germany 1851- 1926), the Village (Art) Theatre opened as the Germania Theatre on July 29, 1916 and closed in its 91st year in March 2007. The building was erected by German-born Frank Schoeninger exclusively as a movie theater for $75,000 (about $2.2 million in 2025) and leased for an annual $7,000 rent (about $205,000 today) to Herman L. Gumbiner (Germany, 1879- 1952, Santa Monica, Calif.) in a 10-year contract with his company, The Villas Amusement Company (later Gumbiner Theatrical Enterprises).
The Rise of Neighborhood Movie Houses
By 1910, buildings erected solely for the purpose to showcase motion pictures were becoming increasingly popular as the appetite to consume the latest silent motion pictures out of Hollywood was booming everywhere. These neighborhood movie houses, larger than dingy storefront nickelodeons and yet smaller than flamboyantly ornate vaudeville theatres, had movie “palace” touches while fitted conveniently into Chicago’s many local commercial strips.
Scale, Survival, and Target Audience
Nearly all of these first-generation movie theaters in Chicago have been demolished or remodeled for other purposes including those larger-scale theaters developed by major theater operators such as Balaban and Katz, Lubliner and Trinz, and the Marks Brothers. While those palatial theatres could hold between 2,000 and 4,000 movie-goers the Village Theatre, one of the last and best first generation movie houses to survive for so long, originally held 1,000 spectators. Originally named the Germania Theater because it was next door to the Germania Club, it looked to attract affluent club members to its flicks.
The theater reflected the strong German-American presence in the neighborhood through its decorative symbols and association with the neighboring Germania Club.
The Germania Theatre was built in 1916 on Frank Schoeninger’s open land pictured above between the Germania Club (completed in 1889) and his tavern and hotel on the corner of Clark Street and North Avenue. In 1986 the Germania Club, citing the dwindling numbers of members, finally disbanded. Public Domain.
Herman Gumbinger and Expansion to Los Angeles
Herman Gumbinger was a major film exhibitor who was busy in Chicago building his independent theatre chain in the 1910’s, with several new movie house projects and acquisitions throughout the city’s northside primarily. After building Chicago’s first independent movie house chain in the teens, Gumbinger relocated to Los Angeles, California, in 1921 where he built the famous Los Angeles Theatre in the Broadway Historic Theatre District of Downtown L.A. Erected at a cost of over $1.5 million ($31 million today) and designed by renowned movie theatre architect S. Charles Lee (1899-1990) Gumbinger’s theatre premiered Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. Gumbinger Theatrical Enterprises finally dissolved in 1943.
Herman Gumbinger (1879-1956), c. 1924, built Chicago’s first independent movie chain, including what became the Village Art Theatre. By the end of the 1920s, Chicago had more than thirty of these movie palace theaters. Among its holdings, Herman Gubinger and his brothers operated the New Blaine which was renamed and is today the Music Box Theatre. Public Domain.
Neighborhood Context and Architectural Design
The Germania was one of the first-generation movie theatres built at the intersection of three Chicago neighborhoods – Gold Coast to the south and east, Old Town to the north and west and Lincoln Park to the north. An architectural mix of styles including Classical Revival (triangle pediments, pilasters and cornice with dentils fashioned in terra cotta) and Renaissance Revival (rusticated exterior and round-arched windows with keystones), the movie house also incorporated Germanic symbolism in its details reflecting the area’s then prominent ethnic group.
WWI Impact and a Century of Name Changes
During World War One, in a wave of anti-German sentiment, The Germania Club renamed itself the Lincoln Club. It changed its name back in 1921. The Germania Theatre changed its name to the Parkside and never looked back. In 1931 until 1962 it was known as the Gold Coast theatre. Meanwhile, prohibition closed down Frank Schoeninger’s tavern and he left for Wisconsin. In the 1960’s the theatre was updated and renamed the Globe Theatre. In 1967 the building was renamed the Village Theatre after it survived being demolished by the nearby Sandburg Village development.
Sandburg Village is a Chicago urban renewal project consisting of eight high-rise buildings, a mid-rise building and 60 townhomes and artists’ lofts. The development was first occupied In 1963 and completed in 1971. In the early 1960’s the Village Theatre was to be incorporated into the project until its landowner refused to sell. PHOTO: “20190323 08 Carl Sandburg Village (49490506022)” by David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, USA is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
February 2018. The Village Theatre in the last days before its demolition. Its marquee from the 1960’s has been removed. The Village Theatre sat across the street from Latin School of Chicago at North and Clark Streets in Gold Coast/Old Town. In its Landmark Designation Report, the Village Theatre façade is described as having “a symmetrical arrangement, with a central theater entrance and separate entrances to the upstairs offices at opposite ends of the building. Each upper-story entrance has a deeply-recessed alcove lined with brick and white, carved-wood panels. A limestone slab step, inset with hexagonal tiles, is inside each alcove. Each alcove is framed with white terra cotta and brick pilasters on a base of gray terra cotta, made to imitate granite. The pilasters are topped with a triangular, white terra-cotta pediment.” 70% 7.93 mb DSC_4797. Author’s photograph.
Architectural Features and Exterior Appearance
The original two-story façade of red pressed brick and white beige glazed terra cotta decoration competed with a sizeable modern marquee that was removed before its demolition in 2018.
Personal Memories and Moviegoing Experiences
Since after college I was living in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, I saw several films at the Village Theatre before it became a multi-plex in 1991 such as House of Games, Fatal Attraction, Wall Street (1987), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Russia House (1990). In early 1991 the interior of the theater was divided into four screens, and I didn’t stop going to movies there–JFK (1991), Michael Collins (1996), The Red Violin (1999) and more– but not as frequently. Anyway, I moved essentially out of neighborhood in 1995 and sold my condo soon afterwards. The Village Art Theatre in Chicago officially closed as a movie venue in March 2007.
The theater underwent several name changes, including Parkside, Gold Coast, Globe, and finally Village Theatre, adapting to changing audiences and neighborhoods.
Demolition and Modern Condominium Redevelopment
In April 2018, the Village Theatre and neighboring buildings along North Avenue were completely demolished to make way for construction of a condominium building. The ornate Clark Street frontage was stabilized as everything else crumbled to dust around it. The façade was repurposed to serve as the entrance for the new condo development known as Fifteen Fifty on the Park with units priced at opening at $1.625 to $5.85 million.
Beginning in 1969, it became associated with art-house cinema through screenings connected to the Chicago International Film Festival, leading to its “Village Art Theatre” identity. Its run as a core festival venue ended following the October 1989 run.
The Village Theatre took the moniker Village Art Theatre after The Chicago International Film Festival used the Village Theatre as a venue to screen “art house” films starting in 1969.In early 1991, the historic 900-seat single auditorium was completely gutted and divided into four smaller screens. This structural partition broke up the grand theater space, ending its era as a primary, large-format host for the main international film festival tracks. October 2004. PHOTO: “Village Art Theatre” by BWChicago is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
The Village Theatre had at least three distinctive marquees during its history. The first was the original vertical Germania sign, removed almost as soon as it was installed because of anti-German sentiment during World War I. It was followed by a horizontal awning-style marquee, similar to that of Chicago’s Biograph Theater at 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue, installed during the theater’s years as the Gold Coast. The third was the dramatic prow-shaped marquee shown here, paired with steel-and-glass doors and believed to date from the mid-1960s renovations undertaken when the movie house operated as the Globe. PHOTO: “Germania (Parkside, Gold Coast, Globe, Village) Theatre, Chicago, IL” by BWChicago is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Demolished in 2018 for a luxury condominium development, the building’s ornate façade was retained and incorporated into the new project. October 2018. Author’s collection.
The Village Art Theatre was one of Chicago’s earliest purpose-built neighborhood movie palaces, constructed during the rapid growth of motion-picture exhibition. The building’s history captures its full arc as an architectural, cultural, and neighborhood landmark, ending with the forever tension between preservation and redevelopment.
This explanatory article may be periodically updated.
Bessie Coleman, the first licensed Black female aviator, was born on January 26, 1892, in Texas. Her father, who was American Indian, left the family for Oklahoma when she was seven. Bessie stayed in Texas with her mother while her older siblings moved away. In the deeply segregated America of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, racism shaped nearly every aspect of life. Even so, Bessie’s mother encouraged her to excel in school, where Bessie became an avid reader.
Education and Early Work
At 18, Bessie attended what is now Langston University for one semester but lacked the funds to continue. She returned home to work alongside her mother, who labored as a maid and sharecropper.
At 23, ambitious and restless, Bessie moved to Chicago to live with her brothers. She worked menial jobs — manicurist, restaurant server — but found the city’s atmosphere freer than the Jim Crow South.
A New Possibility: France
During World War I, her brothers served in France and returned with stories of a society where women and Black people were treated with more dignity than in the United States. They told her that in France, women even flew airplanes — a revelation that electrified her.
In America, flying was largely a pastime for wealthy white men. Still, Bessie applied to U.S. flight schools and was rejected everywhere.
Support from Robert Abbott
Enter Robert Abbott, the influential Black Chicago newspaper owner of the Chicago Defender. Impressed by her determination, he urged her to go to France to earn her license. The French accepted her application, and Bessie crossed the Atlantic to begin training.
Training in a Dangerous Era
Flying in the 1910s was perilous. Open cockpits had no seat belts, aircraft were fragile, and accidents were common. Despite the risks, Bessie excelled. She became the first Black and American Indian woman to earn a pilot’s license.
She returned to the United States determined to build a career — but she lacked money and access.
Barnstorming Dreams and Barriers
To earn enough to buy her own plane and inspire other women and people of color, Bessie sought work as a stunt pilot. But once again, American flight schools refused to train a Black woman, even one already licensed.
Her dream would require the same persistence that had carried her from Texas to Chicago to France — and back again.
Bessie Coleman’s photo on her first pilot’s license, issued June 15, 1921. Public Domain.
Returning to France for Advanced Training
Bessie returned to France to get the specialized aviation training she still couldn’t access in the United States. Her determination — and the barriers she faced — had not gone unnoticed back home. By the time she returned to America for the second time, now a licensed pilot and trained stunt performer, the press greeted her with mostly positive attention.
1922: A Breakthrough Year
It was 1922, and Bessie was ready to take off. Her longtime supporter Robert Abbott arranged her first major air show in New York City, which immediately set reporters buzzing. Back in Chicago, her adopted home, Bessie began performing in more and more air shows, each one building her reputation.
A Rising Star of the Air Shows
To be a stunt pilot required absolute fearlessness, and Bessie’s daring routines — her figure eights, her loop‑the‑loops — made her a sensation across the country. She wanted to maintain and eventually own her own plane, but she didn’t yet have the money. So she borrowed whatever aircraft she could, determined to keep flying and to keep proving what a Black woman pilot could do.
“Queen Bess” Takes the Roaring Twenties by Storm
While some women performed wing‑walking stunts, none piloted the plane and performed aerial maneuvers the way Bessie did. Her skill, charisma, and courage made her a cultural phenomenon. Americans began calling her “Queen Bess” and “Brave Bess,” names that captured her place in the imagination of the roaring 1920s.
Bessie Coleman and airplane, 1922. Public Domain.
Aviation as Activism
As she was determined to do so, Bessie Coleman was making a difference in the nation. Of all these remarkable things in the air Bessie was known for, none was more significant than what she also achieved on the ground. Bessie Coleman told show promoters and managers that she would not perform at any show whose audience or performers were segregated by race or anything else. “Brave Bess” insisted that for all shows she performed in, there had to be just one gate for all people to walk through. At the time this was a profoundly radical request, particularly south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Speaking, Teaching, and Inspiring
Beyond stunt flying, Bessie lectured at schools and churches, urging young people — especially Black children — to pursue aviation. She saw flight not only as a career but as a path to dignity, opportunity, and pride.
Setbacks and Recovery
Still hoping to buy her own airplane, Bessie finally purchased one in 1923. But during a test flight, she crashed, breaking her leg and several ribs. She spent a year recovering in Chicago, grounded but not defeated.
A Return to the Skies
By 1926, Bessie was ready to fly again. She had no funds for a new aircraft, but a wealthy businessman donated a used plane. It was far from ideal — rickety, temperamental — and she hired a mechanic, William Wills, to get it into working shape.
Wills flew the plane from Texas to Florida for her next show, but along the way he had to make several emergency landings as the engine repeatedly failed. After repairs in Florida, he and Bessie took the plane up for a test flight on April 30, 1926, the day before the show.
The Fatal Flight
They tested the plane as Bessie hunted for locations for her stunts. During the practice run, Bessie leaned out of the open cockpit — without a seatbelt, standard for stunt pilots — to scout locations for her aerial maneuvers. Something went wrong mechanically. The plane lurched, and Bessie fell to her death. Moments later, the aircraft crashed, killing Wills as well. Bessie was 34. Wills was 24.
A Nation Mourns
By the time of her third memorial service in Chicago, more than 20,000 people had paid their respects. At the Chicago service alone, 15,000 mourners gathered as journalist Ida B. Wells read an essay honoring Bessie’s courage and legacy. Bessie Coleman was laid to rest at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, among many of Chicago’s Black notables.
A Legacy That Took Flight
In 1929, Black engineer and aviator William J. Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles, training Black men and women to fly. By the 1930s, groups of Black female stunt pilots — including the Blackbirds — carried her inspiration into the sky.
In 1940, Bessie’s early champion, millionaire newspaper publisher Robert Abbott, was also buried in Lincoln Cemetery, not far from the woman whose dreams he helped launch.
Bessie Coleman, first Black and American Indian licensed aviator, two days before her 31st birthday, January 24, 1923. Public Domain.
SOURCES:
Bessie Coleman Bold Pilot Who Gave Women Wings, Martha London, 2021, Capstone Press, North Mankato, MN.
FEATURE image: At Chicago’s City Hall, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Chicago Freedom Movement leaders, July 10, 1966. Following a speech in front of thousands at Soldier Field and a march downtown, Dr. King presented Mayor Daley with fourteen demands for a racially open city.
August 5, 2016 – by John P. Walsh.
Released on July 4, 1966 The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100in August 1966 and stayed there for three consecutive weeks.1 “Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty, been down, isn’t it a pity, doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city. All around, people looking half dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…”
In Chicago in 1966 Dr. King promised a summer of nonviolence but that didn’t stop a white Chicago policeman from shooting and killing a 21-year-old Puerto Rican on June 10, 1966 and sparking a riot of the victim’s neighbors who looted stores, torched squad cars and assaulted firefighters called out to quell the blazes. A month earlier Stokely Carmichael, elected by a razor-thin margin over John Lewis to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, pronounced a new Black Power movement that ended that organization’s interracial efforts.
While the Chicago Freedom Movement remained staunchly interracial King warned Daley on July 9, 1966 that the mayor’s aloofness towards fundamental improvements for African-Americans in Chicago could lead to more radical black groups making their own demands. Since black Chicagoans were, despite a fair housing ordinance, mostly restricted to the ghetto where landlords charged higher rents to a captive market, King’s allies believed open access to Chicago’s real estate market was necessary to tackle larger problems of slums, unemployment, and underprivileged schools.
Chicago, Illinois, summer 1966 (AP Photo). In the foreground is the Shangri-La with its parking garage and deck at 222 N. State Street. Billed on its matchbooks as “the world’s most romantic restaurant” the Far Eastern/Polynesian themed establishment opened in 1944 and closed in 1968. The 65-story Marina Towers (background) opened in 1963. When completed in 1968 the twin towers were both the tallest residential buildings and the tallest reinforced concrete structures in the world.
Released on July 4, 1966, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1966 and stayed there for three consecutive weeks.
January 2016. Chicago. 2.42mb DSC_0075 (1)Author’s photograph.
The 45‑foot fiberglass “Geronimo” statue at 63rd and Pulaski in Chicago was installed in 1966, and present during the Civil Rights marches led by Dr. King for fair housing and integration. The figure faces east toward predominantly Black neighborhoods such as Englewood, while the area west of it was then largely white and resistant to integration. Originally purchased from an Arizona reservation by the building’s owner, the statue first advertised a tobacco shop before becoming the landmark for an eye care clinic in the West Lawn neighborhood.
Mayor Richard J. Daley views the Chicago skyline in 1966 from atop the new Daley Center. Daley was focused on downtown development in the mid-1960’s and viewed King largely as an outsider with his own political agenda who simplified complex urban social problems for which Chicago was not completely at fault.
Martin Luther King Jr., with Stokely Carmichael in Mississippi in 1966. Although King saw Carmichael as a most promising young leader, in May 1966 Carmichael declared a new Black Power movement that ended the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s interracial efforts. The Chicago Freedom Movement to which King was attached stayed staunchly interracial.
Dr. King exits the tenement apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin on Chicago’s West Side where his family stayed during the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. American Friends Service Committee found that white and black families paid about the same in monthly rent but whites earned half as much more as what blacks earned. They found that for the same money blacks on average lived in about 15% less space (3.35 to 3.95 rooms). King looked to solve these and other socioeconomic discrepancies in his 1966 Chicago sojourn.
1550 S. Hamlin on Chicago’s West Side, the redeveloped site where King and his family stayed during the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. Screenshot October 29, 2018.
Mathias “Paddy” Bauler who in 1955 famously quipped that “Chicago ain’t ready for a reform mayor”2 was still an active Northside Chicago alderman in 1966. To some Chicagoans, Bauler’s colorful quip should have been Mayor Daley’s prevailing opinion towards open housing. In July and August 1966 King’s street marches into the white-only neighborhoods of Gage Park, Marquette Park and Chicago Lawn3 were intended to showcase the Chicago Freedom Movement’s reform message of open housing.
Following a rally at Soldier Field on Sunday, July 10, 1966 where King spoke to thousands of supporters including these words, “we will no longer sit idly by in agonizing deprivation and wait on others to provide our freedom,”4 he then led thousands on a march to City Hall. Marching peacfully three miles from the lakefront into downtown, King posted the Chicago Freedom Movement’s fourteen demands for a racially open city at City Hall. The next day Daley met with King but the pair, who personally respected one another, floundered at an impasse.
King was impatient for direct action but Daley was passive and noncommittal. Afterwards King made clear to Daley that these were 14 demands, not suggestions. From Daley’s viewpoint, King was a public relations disaster for Chicago because he was an outsider articulating simple solutions to complex and not always only local social problems. King indicated an inclination that it was time to march into the neighborhoods.
Sunday, July 10, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a 12-page speech at a rally for civil rights at Soldier Field in Chicago that drew tens of thousands of supporters of open housing, better education and increased employment opportunities for the city’s black community. Photo: the Sun-Times archives.
The crowd and Dr. King at the Chicago Freedom Movement rally on Sunday, July 10, 1966, at Soldier Field. Photograph by Bernard Kleina.
Following a rally for civil rights at Soldier Field in Chicago where Dr. King addressed the crowd on Sunday, July 10, 1966, thousands marched through downtown Chicago to City Hall.
The march ended when the list of demands was nailed to the door of Chicago’s City Hall.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Chicago’s City Hall on July 10, 1966.
King met with a passive and noncommittal Daley in City Hall on Monday, July 11, 1966 (this photo, March 24, 1966). The antagonists met infrequently in 1966 to address The Chicago Freedom Movement’s issues and each time King left with vague, piecemeal promises for change.
On July 14, 1966, three days after the Daley-King meeting, a drifter named Richard Speck tortured, raped, and murdered eight female student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital on the south side of Chicago. Speck, born in an Illinois farm town in 1941, lived in Dallas for the last 15 years and, running from the law there, only arrived into Chicago in April 1966. In the pall of a July heatwave, the serial killer was on the loose in the city for three days – a police sketch plastered everywhere in newspapers and on TV – until he was arrested on July 17, 1966. These gruesome killings were called “The Crime of the Century” and added panic, gloom and a general fear to an already tense city.5
Two weeks later, on August 1, 1966, in Austin, Texas, Charles Whitman, shot 49 victims from the bell tower of the University of Texas, killing 17 – and brought the term “mass shooting” into the American popular discourse.
These violent crimes precipitated ramped-up tension in Chicago and the nation in the hot and muggy summer of 1966. Already gripped by an escalating Vietnam War as well as massive civil rights movements, women’s rights movements, youth counter-cultural movements, and even radical church reform (“Vatican II”) movements, American society was swiftly and increasingly wrapped into a tight fist of revolutionary social change whose resistance to it tended to exacerbate the possibility of what King called “social disaster.”
Violent crimes of mass murderers Richard Speck in Chicago in midJuly 1966 and Charles Whitman in Texas in August 1966 worked to ramp-up tension people felt in Chicago during the long, hot summer of 1966.
Speck’s horrendous crimes came in the same week when Chicago police shot and killed two black Chicagoans, including a pregnant 14-year-old girl, during riots on the predominantly black West Side that Daley blamed on King. King denied any such connection and told Daley that if it wasn’t for the Chicago Freedom Movement’s preaching nonviolence those riots would have mushroomed into another Watts. To King’s way of thinking these disturbances among a swath of the city’s population should serve as the clarion call to Daley to act boldly on behalf of the black community and begin to enact the 14 demands brought to him to make Chicago a racially open city.6
Instead Daley’s response was to mobilize 4,000 members of the National Guard to restore law and order. In the wake of the violence—with police brutality blamed by the police on the rioters—another meeting between Daley and King took place where they agreed on a handful of reforms– (1) to establish a citizen’s advisory committee on police and community relations; (2) that grassroots workers go door to door in riot-affected areas to advise calm; and, (3) a new investment to build more swimming pools in black areas.
King was unimpressed with what he considered Daley’s lackadaisical approach and local media mocked the mayor’s feeble plan.
“Get Ready” by Smokey Robinson was recorded by The Temptations in December 1965 and released in February 1966. It landed at no.1 on the Billboard R&B singles chart and reached no. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. The up-tempo dance number was led by the falsetto of The Temptations’ Eddie Kendricks. Since The Temptations were formed in Detroit, Michigan, in 1961, the male vocal group has proven to be one of rock history’s most enduring groups who are unparalleled in their artistic and commercial success.
For his part, King started “walking,” that is, organizing marches into the city’s largely white neighborhoods adjacent to black ones so to highlight the need for open housing. KIng also re-started talks with Chicago gang members to convince them to forsake violence and join his nonviolent racially integrated movement.7
Since Daley viewed Chicago as having more accomplishments than problems in the area of race relations and that, further, the Mayor publicly considered the outsider King to be a selfish agitator, many white residents of soon-to-be-marched-upon city neighborhoods assumed Daley would take their side.
But Daley’s politics of law and order and incremental social change succeeded in alienating almost everyone. In the Chicago mayoral election in 1967 black voter turnout and support for Daley disappeared and did not return for him in subsequent mayoral contests in 1971 or 1975. Meanwhile, white residents felt the fatal sting of being “betrayed”8 by the city powers as Daley did not stop the marches from going forward.
The north edge of Marquette Park in early 2016. Photograph by author.
The Rev. Martin Luther King and Chicago building janitor Robert DeBose, left, discuss the eviction of families from the building. DeBose contended the families were evicted for not paying rent. fair use.
The first march was on Saturday, July 16, 1966 when a group of 120 demonstrators marched from Englewood into Marquette Park “for a picnic.” The next day, Sunday, July 17, 1966 about 200 marchers, taunted by neighborhood whites, held a prayer vigil outside a Gage Park church. Almost two weeks later, on Thursday, July 28, 1966, protesters began an all-night vigil at 63rd Street and Kedzie Avenue at a realty company that systematically discriminated against black buyers looking to move into Gage Park. The realtors had been reported to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations but nothing happened. White counter demonstrators appeared and with nightfall Chicago police struck a deal for the lawful open housing (or open occupancy) protesters to file into paddy wagons for safe escort back to the ghetto.
Dr. King attended two marches in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966 and, shown here, South Deering on August 21, 1966.
Movement leaders Al Raby (left), James Bevel (second from right) and Jesse Jackson (center) protest in front of the Chicago Real Estate Board in downtown Chicago.
Chicago Lawn white hecklers during a Chicago Freedom Movement march in summer 1966.
Chicago Police in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966. Their presence did not prevent severe rioting by white mobs that day.
On July 30, 1966 about 250 open housing protesters, furious about the recent night’s humiliation, looked to return to the same southwest side intersection. They were met by bottles and rocks thrown by whites so that the protesters retreated again east of Ashland Avenue into Englewood. When demonstrators marched out of Englewood again on July 31, 1966 more than 500 whites met them as the protesters crossed Ashland Avenue on 63rd Street. Armed with cherry bombs, rocks, bricks, and bottles, the surly mob grew to over 4,000 whites where they burned cars and injured around 50 open-occupancy protesters, including a first grade teacher hit by a projectile.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Jesse Jackson in Chicago on August 19, 1966. King holds a Chicago Daily News with a headline that reads “City Seeks To Cut Marches.” (AP Photo/Larry Stoddard) fair use.
On August 2, 1966, Daley met with white homeowner groups from the southwest side. In addition for calling for law and order from blacks and whites, the mayor acknowledged the open housing protesters had a legal right to march. Daley, through an intermediary, sent King modest housing improvement and integration proposals which King rejected and Daley implemented anyway. Daley next sent to an embattled King some local black aldermen who opposed the Chicago Freedom Movement but carried more substantial housing and employment offers from City Hall. The city government hoped that King, who was known to be looking for a way out of Chicago with a tangible victory, might accept a negotiated pact and call an end to the campaign. With these serious talks going on between Daley and King, the late summer marches for open housing continued under an increasingly vicious white backlash.
A white mob attacks a car during the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s August. 5, 1966 march to Marquette Park. Photo by Bernard Kleina.
White rioters encountering Chicago police at a Clark gas station in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966. A Confederate flag is on the right. Photo by Bernard Kleina.
Whites moving east on 63rd Street to confront marchers on the way to Marquette Park on August 5, 1966. The Clark gas station in the background is the site of the photos by Bernard Kleina.
The infrastructure of the former Clark gas station still exists today on 63rd street (July 2018). Screen shot dated October 29, 2018.
The old Clark gas station looking east on 63rd Street at Whipple. Screenshot October 29, 2018.
On Friday, August 5, 1966, Al Raby and Mahalia Jackson led a group of about 500 open occupancy protesters into Marquette Park in south Chicago Lawn. A white mob of over 10,000 had gathered there and verbally abused the marchers and then turned physically violent. King, who up to this point had not participated in these marches, arrived and joined the march on the north side of the park. It was here, between Francisco and Mozart Streets south of Marquette Road that Martin Luther King was struck in the head behind the right ear by a baseball-sized rock and felled to one knee.
The open housing marchers, angry and disgusted, made their way the short distance out of the park and towards 63rd and Kedzie where King dodged a knife thrown at him. The crowd began to shout “Kill him!” as well as other racially charged epithets and about 2,500 whites now started throwing bottles, burned cars, smashed bus windows and clashed with police for the next five hours.
King with (from left) Mahalia Jackson, Jesse Jackson, and Al Raby at the New Friendship Baptist Church at 848 W 71st St in Chicago —the staging point for the 3 and a half miles walk to Marquette Park —on August 4, 1966. Photo: Chicago Tribune.
Marching south down Kedzie Avenue to Marquette Park in Chicago on August 5, 1966. Bourne Chapel is located at 6541 S. Kedzie, just two blocks from the park. Today the funeral home is gone. The yellow-brick building housing Tony’s Barber Shop in 1966 is still there today, though the barber shop business is gone. Photo by Bernard Kleina.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. falls after being struck by a rock from a taunting white mob in Marquette Park in Chicago on August 5, 1966. King would also dodge a knife hurled at him in the park. King soberly reacted by saying: “Oh, I’ve been hit so many times I’m immune to it.”
Vandals overturn a car before the August 5 march in Marquette Park. Photograph by Jim Klepitsch.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with supporters in Marquette Park shortly after someone hurled a rock that hit him in the head. Photo by Bernard Kleina.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s comments on that day’s violence entered the annals of civil rights and American history and marks a failing grade for Chicago: “I’ve been in many demonstrations across the south, but I can say I have never seen – even in Mississippi and Alabama – mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago. I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”9
A permanent memorial to Dr. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement was erected in Marquette Park on August 5, 2016 for the 50th anniversary of the Marquette Park marches. This MLK Living Memorial at 67th Street and Kedzie Avenue includes a bench to contemplate the 300 tiles created by Chicagoans of all ages representing their understanding of “Home” and representations of a diverse community who continue to work to advance Dr. King’s vision of peace and justice.
In Chicago on Sept. 15, 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, characterized an open housing agreement reached with Mayor Richard Daley and civic, business and religious leaders “a one-round victory.” King had named Chicago his first target in the North for racial equality in January 1966.
In 1960 virtually no blacks – only 7 according to that year’s U.S. Census– lived among a white population of 100,000 in Gage Park/Chicago Lawn/Marquette Park areas – cited in American Pharoah: Mayor Richard J. Daley His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, Little Brown and Company, New York, 2000, p. 392. Fifty years after the Marquette Park march in 2016, the surrounding neighborhood of Chicago Lawn is a very different place from the all-white enclave King encountered. Whites now account for just 4.5 percent of the neighborhood’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. African-Americans make up 49 percent and Hispanics 45 percent –http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/mitchell-rev-martin-luther-king-still-bringing-us-together/- retrieved August 5, 2016.
Results of West Side riots – American Pharoah, p. 389; Substance of 14 demands – Ibid., p. 385.
Media mock Daley’s plan and King re-engages gang members– Ibid., 389-391.
Black voter support declines – Black Politics in Chicago, William J. Grimshaw, Loyola University Presas, 1980, p. 25; whites feel “betrayed” – American Pharoah, p. 394.
Chicago public school teacher Al Raby (left) of the CCCO and Edwin “Bill” Berry (right) of the Chicago Urban League inspect the open-housing agreement reached in Chicago in late August 1966 with Ross Beatty (center) of the Chicago Real Estate Board. It contained mostly broad volunteer promises for modest integration in all Chicago neighborhoods by the end of 1967, a mayoral election year. At an August 26, 1966 meeting at a downtown hotel with King and Daley both present — and after city faith leaders promised their resolute support of the agreement — Ross Beatty only tepidly endorsed the plan: “Well,” he confessed, “we’ll do all we can, but I don’t know how I can do it.”
June 19, 2022: Video in Marquette Park in Chicago of the Living Memorial taken during my visit.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Living Memorial is on the north side of Marquette Park in Chicago where the park is bisected by busy Kedzie Avenue. It was near this location that Dr. King, as he led protesters into the park during the historic Chicago Freedom Movement march on August 5, 1966, so to protest for open housing, was struck in the head and felled to the ground by a projectile thrown at him by angry white mobs who had gathered and were throwing bottles, rocks and bricks.
The memorial was dedicated on the 50th anniversary of the march (August 5, 2016). It is composed of a plaza, low seating wall, and three carved brick rectangular obelisks by artists Sonja Henderson and John Pittman Weber. The sculptural reliefs depict Dr. King and other prominent community members who marched with him that day.
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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.
Chicago slums, 1950.
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.
Benjamin C. Willis in 1963.
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.
Mayor Richard Daley leading the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on State Street in 1963.
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.
Rev. Jackson at an Operation Breadbasket event, May 9, 1970. Photo by Chris Holmes.
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.
