The Chicago Freedom Movement was the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the Northern United States, lasted from mid-1965 to August 1966, and is largely credited with inspiring the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
[3][4] During World War I, tens of thousands of African Americans moved to Chicago as part of the many destinations in the Great Migration to urban and industrial centers in the Northeast and Midwest in search of jobs, and to escape the Jim Crow laws and racial violence in the rural South.
Large numbers of black migrants to the city resided in the South Side area near the established Irish and German American communities as well as neighborhoods of many recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
As a result, social and racial tensions in the city intensified, as native-born residents, migrants and immigrants fiercely competed for jobs and limited housing due to overcrowding.
[5] In the 1920s, the Chicago Real Estate Board established a racially restrictive covenant policy in response to the rapid influx of southern black migrants who were allegedly feared in bringing down property values of white neighborhoods.
The riots were one of the events that helped convince King and some other civil rights activists to join the ongoing Chicago Freedom Movement in combating the widespread de facto segregated conditions across the country.
[11] The Chicago Freedom Movement represented the alliance of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO).
It organized tenants' unions, held rent strikes, assumed control of a slum tenement, founded action groups like Operation Breadbasket and rallied black and white Chicagoans to support its goals.
According to a UPI news story that ran the next day, "About 35,000 persons jammed Chicago's Soldier Field for Dr. King's first giant 'freedom rally' since bringing his civil rights organizing tactics to the city..."[13] Other guests included Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Peter, Paul and Mary.
By late July the Chicago Freedom Movement was staging regular rallies outside of Real Estate offices and marches into all-white neighborhoods on the city's southwest and northwest sides.
The hostile and sometimes violent response of local whites,[14] and the determination of civil rights activists to continue to crusade for an open housing law, alarmed City Hall and attracted the attention of the national press.