The Whirlwind is Our Commonwealth: Dissent and Coalition in Post-65 Chicago

• In Event: Remembering the 1960s

Abstract

This paper investigates the emergence of “coalition” as a conceptual framework for organizing dissent in Chicago social movements after 1965. Analysis will focus on organizational discourses related to the planning and enactment of tenant organizing and open housing campaigns during the Chicago Freedom Movement. A collaboration between Chicago’s Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Freedom Movement constituted the latter organization’s first major campaign in a northern city and the former organization's latest attempt to “keep this movement going”--as one CCCO leader put it--after years of mobilizing against the discriminatory policies of Chicago Public Schools.

Formally launched in January 1966, the Chicago Freedom Movement sought to develop a multi-faceted, total assault on those “forces dedicated to the creation and maintenance of slums.” As such, the CCCO-SCLC project is generally regarded in scholarship as a failure--or, at best, a stalemate. While recent work has sought to rethink the campaign’s broader, long term consequence for both local and national movements--e.g. laying the organizational groundwork for the Harold Washington mayorality, putting tenant unions on the national agenda--this paper will focus on the ways in which the very process of imagining (and reimagining) the project of Chicago Freedom Movement negotiated in situ what Richard Iton describes as “the remaking of the racial architecture” after 1965.

The concept of “coalition,” I will argue, is central to this negotiation. Across meeting minutes, memoranda, newsletters, correspondence, and speeches, calls for “coalition” answered the increasingly complex task of articulating political demands to organizational arrangements in the Chicago campaign: coalitions of “organizations” and “groups,” of “social forces,” of “conscience.” Moreover, these coalitional forms were decidedly emergent at the time of the Chicago Freedom Movement. No longer merely a nod to electoral party disingenuity--to the “same old coalition” of Dixiecrat and Republican intransigence on civil rights legislation--“coalition” was now an attractive, pliable framework for thinking shared resistance within and across differential relations of power. In this the Chicago Freedom Movement’s vision and revision of mass dissent signaled a broader shift in the political imaginary: a conjunctural remapping of the conditions of collective identification and action in which, as Gwendolyn Brooks notes in After Mecca, “the whirlwind is our commonwealth.”

Author

• David Miguel Molina, Northwestern University