restrictive housing covenants, and the well-to-do professionals who had provided the Black Belt with intellectual and political leadership immediately left for more prosperous neighborhoods. They were replaced by blacks of the Second Great Migration, many of them sharecroppers dispossessed from the Mississippi Delta by cotton-picking machines. Poor, barely literate, and country to the bone, these newcomers needed the jobs and welfare that only a machine could provide. Dawson could get you a nice apartment at one of the brand-new high-rise housing projects or a gig at the post office, sorting mail from midnight to eight.
Mayor Daley, who refused to allow anyone other than Mayor Daley to make decisions in Chicago, did not allow Dawson to choose his people’s aldermen. Instead, he stocked the city council with a cast of docile South Side and West Side mediocrities known as the “Silent Six,” who could be counted on to vote with the Machine, even when the Machine was blocking an open housing law that would have allowed poorer blacks to escape the ghetto. Dawson resisted Daley’s power play, but as it turned out, the Silent Six helped solve a thorny problem for Daley’s Machine and Dawson’s sub-Machine.
“The blacks wanted out of their ghetto,” wrote Bill and Lori Granger in Lords of the Last Machine: The Story of Politics in Chicago. “But how could the Machine encourage this without breaking up the old ethnic neighborhoods that gave it its strength? Nor did black Machine leaders have any interest in breaking up the tight black ghetto. Under Bill Dawson it was a powerful force as well as economically tied to the Dawson machine. Why let the chickens get out of the coop?”
DePriest, Dawson, and Powell all had one trait common to pioneering black politicians: light skin. Down unto Obama, mixed-race politicians have made advances that were later shared by the entire community. Virginia’s Douglas Wilder, the first black governor since Reconstruction, was also light skinned. It’s as though the color barrier can only be breached by someone whose ancestors have already lived on the other side.
“They were considered white,” Timuel Black says of Chicago’s first black congressmen. “They had to be smarter because they had white ancestors. That’s part of the culture of America. That’s true even today. Nobody speaks about it, but they can see it.”
Black Chicago’s fealty to the Machine began to fall apart during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The poor black wards, controlled by Dawson, had provided the votes to put Daley in office and keep him there. One West Side ward, which was run by white precinct captains and white mobsters, voted for Daley 20,300 to 800. City hall rewarded its most loyal supporters with slights. Overcrowded black schools held classes in trailers, while white schools across the color line sat half-empty. The Robert Taylor Homes, the city’s largest housing project, was separated by a highway from Daley’s all-white Bridgeport—a highway placed there to maintain the color line. When black students moved onto Daley’s street, he did nothing to stop the demonstration that drove them out.
Those insults could be borne—things were still worse down South—but when Daley’s police began killing blacks, the community revolted. Daley, who had been seen as an antiwar liberal in the mid-1960s, changed his political persona to match the country’s call for law and order. First, he publicly ordered police officers to “shoot to kill” arsonists during the West Side riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination. The next year, police gunned down Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, the leaders of the local Black Panther Party. The men were shot to death in their beds during an early morning raid that the police and newspapers portrayed as a “wild gun battle.” The killings galvanized Chicago’s black political establishment. Ralph Metcalfe, the Olympic track star who had been a member of the Silent Six before succeeding Dawson in Congress, was transformed into a bitter critic of the mayor. Blacks couldn’t take down Daley, but they did go after his hand-picked Cook County state attorney, Edward Hanrahan, who had plotted the Black Panther raid. Hanrahan was thrown out of office in 1972 by a coalition of inner-city blacks and suburban Republicans. It was the Machine’s first big defeat, but a bigger one was coming. In the winter of 1979, Daley’s successor, Michael Bilandic, dealt with the commuting woes created by a blizzard by ordering L trains to speed past stops in inner city neighborhoods. The snowfall was bad timing for Bilandic. The Democratic primary for mayor