And so, in July 1966, Chicago activists, led by veterans of Southern demonstrations, began testing real estate firms for discriminatory practices. After their suspicions had proved correct, they mounted marches into white neighborhoods to protest unfair black exclusion and to spur corrective measures. By early August, King could legitimately claim that there was "a good nonviolent fight in Chicago."

The demonstrations persisted through the month of August as insurgents, black and white, warded off hostile whites during forays into Chicago's southwest and northwest sides and into nearby suburbs. The zeal for social justice was intense. "We march," one activist noted, "we return home emotionally drained, from some inner reservoirs replenish our strength, and go back."

The discipline of the marchers was impressive. Even gang members, who often served as march marshals, toed the nonviolent line. "I saw their noses being broken and blood flowing from their wounds; and I saw them continue and not retaliate, not one of them, with violence," King later marveled.

In the end, this most important sustained episode of Northern civil rights protest of the 1960s led to a series of meetings between city officials, including Mayor Daley, civil rights activists, real estate agents, and business and religious leaders that produced a program to promote equal housing opportunity. King hailed this development as the "most significant and far-reaching victory that has ever come about in a Northern community on the whole question of open housing."

Most observers, however, have not been so generous in their assessment of the Chicago Freedom Movement. In a little-known but remarkable book, Unholy Shadows and Freedom's Holy Light, the Rev. Joseph Jackson claimed that it was "most fortunate for Chicago and for the United States of America that the campaign of 1966 ... failed in Chicago." Otherwise, Jackson argued, "the rule of law would have ended in this city, and the headquarters would have been shifted from City Hall to private offices, hotel rooms and streets or wherever the visiting diplomats elected to assemble."

As an old King opponent, Jackson overstated the case, but many historians agreed with his premise that King's campaign had failed. In the mid-1970s, one commentator, Godfrey Hodgson, in his influential history of modern America, dismissed the Chicago campaign as a rout. More recently, historian Adam Fairclough labeled the Chicago initiative a "defeat" for King and the civil rights movement.

Evidence abounds to support such an interpretation. The Chicago campaign did not give the nonviolent movement the lift that King and his supporters had hoped. Unlike the Selma, Ala., protests a year earlier, the Chicago marches did not inspire sweeping federal legislation. Indeed, in September 1966 Congress failed to endorse a civil rights bill, which included a fair-housing measure, for the first time during the Second Reconstruction.