ABSTRACT
Chicago is a poor place to demonstrate the validity of nonviolence. The city’s Roman Catholics are scattered in tight ethnic enclaves; they’re neither rich enough to tolerate newcomers nor organized enough to meet the civil rights revolution with anything more destructive than bricks and cherry bombs. The black power schism has created a profound enmity among the lower echelons of Chicago’s black leadership. Chicago’s newspapers are filled with hair-raising stories about vast black gangs on the South Side. Tales of the Mighty Blackstone Rangers, which the Chicago Daily News calls “the biggest, toughest, and best disciplined gang Chicago has produced in a decade,” are filling the copy gap between the last mass murder and the next tax hike. Martin Luther King, Nobel Prize winner, pacifist, agitator, leader, and ex-leader, had faced 5,000 white Chicagoans who wanted to see his throat slit.
