Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.'s Chicago Connections
By Chuck Sudo in News on Jan 19, 2015 9:40PM
We cannot let this day pass without remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Chicago ties. The civil rights leader, who would have been 86, famously arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1966 to protest the deplorable housing conditions of Chicago’s black neighborhoods and fight for fair housing.
King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was one of several groups that helped found the Chicago Freedom Movement to put an end to housing discrimination. To highlight the housing conditions blacks lived in, King moved his family into a decrepit home in North Lawndale, a move that made national headlines and soured Mayor Richard J. Daley on a man he believed to be an out-of-town interloper.
King would participate in fair housing marches in all-white Gage Park and Belmont-Cragin. Footage exists of the Gage Park march. Residents did not greet King and marchers warmly as they threw rocks and bottles at them.
As former Chicagoisto Prescott Carlson wrote in 2010, King and Daley eventually agreed to the "Summit Agreement"—a roadmap to fair housing in Chicago the Daley administration would immediately ignore.
Chicago still remains the most segregated city in the country.
King also delivered some powerful speeches during his time in Chicago, such as his "street sweeper" speech at New Covenant Baptist Church on April 9,1967.
"What I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; (Go ahead) sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.' If you can’t be a pine on the top of a hill be a scrub in the valley—but be the best little scrub on the side of the hill, be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway just be a trail if you can’t be the sun be a star; it isn’t by size that you win or fail—be the best of whatever you are."And when you do this, when you do this, you’ve mastered the length of life."
Over 60,000 people packed Soldier Field in 1966 to hear King speak. Then there's this speech from 1968 where he spoke to members of the Local 1199 hospital workers and health care employees union, where he pointedly criticizes the war in Vietnam and asks why government can't fight poverty and unemployment with the same zeal they fought Communism.
Besides renaming Grand Boulevard after Dr. King, his Chicago legacy lives on with the MLK Historical District and Fair Housing Center in North Lawndale.