She was a volunteer at Warren Avenue Congregational Church in Chicago during King’s northern campaign. King hung out at the gang’s pool hall and bought his morning paper at Del-Kar.īobbie Raymond, the founder of the Oak Park Housing Center, recalled in a recent phone interview that King’s fair housing efforts in Chicago changed her life and informed her sense of purpose. in North Lawndale in 1966 - as part of his Chicago Campaign against housing segregation - he and his staff had ingratiated themselves with the gang’s leaders, hoping to steer them toward nonviolence. When King moved into the rundown apartment at 1550 S. Muldrow had developed relationships with the Conservative Vice Lords street gang, whose headquarters were nearby.īy 1968, with the help of a white Dartmouth graduate, former Peace Corps volunteer and poverty researcher named David Dawley, the Conservative Vice Lords, seeking legitimacy, had gotten incorporated, started a string of small businesses and secured federal funding for various social outreach initiatives. He had come over that evening during the riots, but the Vice Lords told him, ‘Go home, we’re not going to let nothing happen to your store.'” “It was a Jewish, white-owned drugstore on every corner, from Kedzie to Kostner, and each was torched,” Muldrow said. “My father being a black businessman in the community, the guys respected him for being straight up,” his son and Del-Kar’s current owner, Edwin Muldrow, said during a recent interview. Aub-Lughod in a 2007 book on urban riots.Įdward Muldrow, owner of Del-Kar Pharmacy in North Lawndale, had left his home in Markham to protect his business during the mayhem. By midnight many of the roughly 6,900 National Guardsmen and 5,000 federal troops authorized earlier by President Lyndon Johnson would be patrolling streets in that area as “weary firemen, unable to control the fires, with their hoses on fire or losing water pressure and their trucks running out of fuel, began to give up,” writes Janet L. The rioting was heaviest in the West Side area bordered by Damen, Madison, 16th Street and Kildare. Workers carried guns to their places of employment, whites were “pulled from their cars, from buses, from stores they were trying to close.” West Side streets were “impassable.” “Fear gripped the city,” de Zutter wrote. “Within minutes, Acting Governor Samuel Shapiro, called by the mayor, mobilized the Guard.” The police are “spread much too thin,” de Zutter reports. Daley and requested that he call out the National Guard. They said the whites had killed nonviolence so they must want violence.”īy 2 p.m., the vandalism had started in earnest. One Farragut High junior told de Zutter that “it was a swell march until then,” but that “some of the militant souls decided they wanted more. Saunders, among others, said the police overreacted. Scuffles broke out between the youth and the police, who fired shots into the air, de Zutter reported. Warner Saunders, the director of the Better Boys Foundation and a witness to the demonstration, told Hank de Zutter, who was reporting for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News, that “nonviolence turned into violence” when the police attempted to exert some control over the demonstration somewhere between Garfield Park and Austin High. As they headed toward Austin High to meet likeminded peers, they sang “We Shall Overcome” and chanted “King is dead.” Some stones were thrown, but most of the roughly 1,500 marchers - among them children as young as 7 years old - were peaceful. most of the students who showed up that morning had marched out of the doors and into the streets. School administrators scrambled to plan makeshift memorial assemblies in King’s honor, but by 11 a.m.
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