And in Chicago, even some participants in the open-housing marches denounced the final "Summit Agreement" as a "sellout." Under the leadership of Robert Lucas, the head of the Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), they staged in early September 1966 their own protest march - not sanctioned by King or his lieutenants - into nearby Cicero, known as a bastion of white hostility toward African Americans. The Cicero demonstration was yet another indication that the coalition that had dismantled the Jim Crow regime in the South was now unraveling. For the last months of his life, King would endure greater criticism from black militants than ever before.

And the Chicago Freedom Movement failed to keep its promise to "end slums." The distress of black Chicagoans still confined today to the West Side and South Side ghettos, including some of the most impoverished places in America, dramatically attests to this failure. Years after the Chicago campaign, one West Side resident admitted, "I'm sure that wasn't [King's] dream - the way things are now." Then she lamented, "Nothing really happened."

Moreover, there has always been some debate within the African-American community about the importance of residential integration. During the summer of 1966, some black Chicagoans - even some of those sympathetic to the movement-wondered whether open-housing marches highlighted "a fundamental issue." As one activist remarked, housing discrimination "was more of a middle-class issue."

Variations on such sentiments can be found today. "I want to live in a black neighborhood," one Chicago alderman recently declared, "and if banks would give us money to fix up the houses we live in, nobody would have to move."

But should the final judgment of the Chicago Freedom Movement be so negative? This campaign, after all, catapulted Jesse Jackson to the forefront of the civil rights movement. As a college student in the early 1960s, he had been a leader of the protests in Greensboro, N.C., and then had joined the Selma protests; but until SCLC came to Chicago, where he was then a seminarian, Jackson was but one more young black activist. His energy and dynamism soon made him indispensable to the Chicago Freedom Movement, and when the marches stopped he remained in Chicago, nurturing Operation Breadbasket. In the early 1970s, Operation Breadbasket, which had been under SCLC's auspices, became Operation PUSH, a Jackson vehicle and the eventual launch pad of Jackson's political career.

The Chicago Freedom Movement also gave birth to the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities. A product of the Summit Agreement in August 1966, the Leadership Council has retained the support of Chicago business leaders and, through litigation and aggressive tactics, has pioneered attacks on housing discrimination. In the words of two housing experts, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, "probably no fair housing group in the country has been more energetic or successful in promoting equal housing opportunities."