Poor Power: Exploring Chicago's Interracial Activism in an Age of Limits

Long considered one of the most balkanized cities in the United States, the Chicago of the 1970s has been portrayed as a model for the rise of modern identity politics.  Historical accounts and public memories recount a factionalized decade bookended by the 1969 death of charismatic Black Panther leader Fred Hampton – along with the subsequent decline of his nascent Rainbow Coalition – and the surprising triumph of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor fourteen years later.  Yet an examination of the city’s neighborhood activism offers a far more complex picture of Chicago politics – one which reflects both the continued dynamic potential of inter-racial coalition-building as well as the obstacles to such collaboration in an age of limits.          

Using oral histories, mainstream and underground periodicals, and archival records, this paper traces attempts by an array of Chicago activists to build lasting coalitions around jobs, welfare rights, health care, and housing.  Well into the 1970s, activists as diverse as Obed Lopez of the Latin American Defense Organization (LADO), C.T. Vivian of the Coalition for United Community Action (CUCA), and Peggy Terry of JOIN Community Union reached across racial, ethnic, gender, and neighborhood lines to find common ground.  Cooperative efforts were made to humanize local welfare offices, stem urban renewal, and expand job opportunities in the building trades.  Yet while moments of real collaboration occurred, sustaining it often proved difficult.  Ethnically and racially based neighborhood groups continued to underscore longstanding divisions – as did the groups’ competing social constructions of their own poverty.  And, if anything, Mayor Richard Daley’s powerful political machine and security apparatus, including the infamous Chicago Red Squad, reinforced these tendencies.  Therefore, the story of Chicago’s grassroots organizing suggests a tale less about declension and “nightmares,” and one of pragmatic solutions in a period of transition.