The Rev. Jackson of Olivet was not the only important black Chicagoan who was cool toward the Chicago Freedom Movement. Six of the city's African-American aldermen, who represented wards on both the South and the West sides, wanted no part of this campaign. They had prospered under the current rules, and they - like some black Chicagoans - preferred familiar ways to radical change. Indeed, when news broke that King and the SCLC had targeted Chicago as the site of its first Northern campaign, Ralph Metcalfe, the former Olympic sprinter and a leading black alderman, stated, "We have competent leadership in Chicago and all things necessary to work out our city's own destiny."

Metcalfe's words endorsed the view of Chicago's chief politician, Mayor Richard J. Daley. Hailed as America's most powerful mayor and known as a confidant of Democratic presidents, Daley presided over a potent political apparatus, which virtually controlled the black wards, and he simply loathed the arrival of outsiders who were certain, in his mind, to stir up trouble within his city. Daley himself had praised King for his successes in the South, but he saw no reason for the Nobel Peace Prize winner to ally himself with Chicago civil rights agitators who for months now had displayed no respect for the efforts of his regime to make Chicago a better home for its citizens.

King and his supporters, however, were convinced of the necessity of nonviolent protests. There was a need, asserted Al Raby, a. Chicago schoolteacher and the co-leader of the Chicago Freedom Movement, for "a constant pricking of the conscience." And as King told the Rev. Joseph Jackson, social change did not result from "sitting around having nice conversations."

Their sense of urgency heightened with the rise of the black power impulse after the shooting of James Meredith in Mississippi in June 1966 and with the eruption of a riot on Chicago's West Side one month later. It seemed to King and his lieutenants that the most basic assumptions of their crusade - nonviolence and interracialism - were being challenged in the African-American community. The nonviolent civil rights movement needed to prove its relevance in this new era, especially to Northern blacks.

Responding to this pressure, the Chicago Freedom Movement decided to focus on housing segregation, one of the culprits behind the ghetto conditions that plagued so many black Chicagoans. Although some in the community doubted that living among whites was a critical issue, real estate discrimination offered an attractive target for some important reasons: It was neither as subtle nor as elusive as most forms of Northern discrimination. Indeed, it was much like the lunch counter discrimination that had been so triumphantly eliminated by the Southern black protest movement. Specific culprits could easily be fingered. Chicago realtors were the Northern George Wallaces, as one activist put it, standing "in the doorway of thousands of homes being offered for sale or rent" and preventing "Negroes and other minorities from choosing freely where they may live."