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.One such battle was a four-year struggle by blackcommunity groups to desegregate the city s public schools.The Coordinat-ing Council of Community Organizations formed in 1962, Wrst to forcethe Chicago Board of Education to admit to segregation and then to pushfor integration.The council included traditional race advancement orga-nizations like the NAACP and the Urban League, civil rights organiza-tions like the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-ViolentCoordinating Committee, church and professional organizations, andnewly forming community organizations from the south and west sides(Anderson and Pickering 1986, 90, 114).To publicize their opposition tosegregation, the council organized school boycotts and visitations, sit-insat the board of education headquarters, and public seminars.The boardof education Wnally agreed to create a desegregation program in 1963 afterthe council Wled suit against it, and a year later, two reports conWrmed thedisparity in the education of blacks and whites and recommended integra-tion.The school board and the mayor nevertheless bowed to the vehementprotests of the city s white population and voted against the implementa-tion of a mandatory integration program (Kleppner 1985, 50 54).The short-term failure of the school desegregation campaign wasreplicated in the later effort to desegregate Chicago neighborhoods.Hop-ing to revive the moribund civil rights movement and galvanize federal sup-port for fair housing legislation, Martin Luther King Jr.and the SouthernChristian Leadership Conference launched a local desegregation drive,highlighting racial discrimination in Chicago with all-night vigils, marches,and demonstrations.The threat of violence prompted Mayor Daley to agreeto talks with the protesters, but the famed Summit Agreement was fee-ble.It had no deadlines and did not require real estate professionals to com-mit to fair housing practices, and when Daley won a fourth term in 1967with more than four-Wfths of the black vote, the administration felt freeto ignore its commitment (Fairclough 1987).Not surprisingly, civil rightschallenges regarding the construction and placement of public housingprojects met with a similar outcome.In 1966, Dorothy Gautreaux, alongwith three other tenants, Wled suit against the Chicago Housing Author-ity for discrimination in tenant assignment and site selection (Hirsch 1983, 44 WHEN WE WERE COLORED265; Kleppner 1985, 47).The 1969 ruling in favor of the plaintiffs onlyrevived, rather than ended, the conXict over residential segregation.Overthe next Wve years, the city used a number of stalling tactics to prevent thecity council from passing the site approval required by the 1969 ruling.When Wnally compelled to designate some areas for housing, the city juststopped building, so that between 1969 and 1980 a total of 114 new sub-sidized apartments were built an average of slightly more than 10 peryear (Hirsch 1983, 265).The conXicts over desegregation were punctuated by a series of vio-lent confrontations between the city s African American population andits police force.In April 1968, Chicago s black residents rioted after theassassination of Martin Luther King Jr., prompting Daley to issue hisinfamous shoot to kill statement, in which he ordered police to shootarsonists on sight.and to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting anystore (Kleppner 1985, 8).During the same year, Daley s state s attorneyEdward V.Hanrahan created a special gang unit to undermine the activ-ities of the Black Panther party.In 1969 Hanrahan authorized a raid thatled to the deaths of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clarkand wounded several others.While ofWcials claimed to have been shoot-ing in self-defense, subsequent investigations showed that the police hadapparently opened Wre with little provocation and.misrepresented thephysical evidence to whitewash their conduct (Kleppner 1985, 76).Thiswas only one of the more blatant and offensive instances of what was a sus-tained effort on the part of the Daley administration to contain Chicago sblacks, both physically and politically
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