n June 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Chicago Freedom Movement convened a summit. This was no ordinary meeting. The Turfmasters First Annual Convention

brought together about 200 members of eight different Chicago gangs — Black, white, Native American, Mexican, and Puerto Rican, including some female affiliates. The all-day meeting aimed to end violence among gangs and to develop their leadership in challenging the city’s segregation and advocating for the community’s needs. It was the culmination of months of efforts by King, staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and local organizers.

This King — who spent countless hours in 1966 working with gang members — is not a King we know. While liberals often decry Republican misuse of Martin Luther King at the holiday, the civil rights leader is still too often rendered as distant from and even critical of urban youth. The binary still exists in popular history as well as most scholarship that it was only Malcolm X who worked with and appealed to urban youth, particularly criminalized young men — and not also King.

Distorted by respectability politics, even among many progressives, this popular notion of Dr. King comfortably places his work in the past, with little relevance to address the people and struggles we confront today. Most biographies and documentaries place Black urban youth, particularly gang members, as simple antagonists to the civil rights leader by 1966. To reckon with King’s actual work with gang members — and their mutual respect — is to see a King who speaks to our times: a King who listened and worked to cultivate the leadership of young people, even the most criminalized; a King who called out police brutality, housing segregation, school inequality, and job exclusion; and a King who brought in young people as key participants in the Black freedom struggle.

hile many city officials and Black leaders saw gang members only as a problem to be dealt with, King saw them as political actors, with potential for community leadership, and foregrounded the structural violence they and their families faced.

In late May 1963, at a Freedom Fund fund-raiser and rally organized by Mahalia Jackson, King made clear that Chicago was just as segregated as Birmingham.

By the mid-1960s, he was characterizing Chicago’s segregation as a form of “domestic colonialism,” where profit was made from Black immiseration, neighborhood jobs ranging from sanitation to teaching didn’t go to Black people who lived there, the police acted as what he called “‘enforcers’ of the present system of exploitation,” and a group of Black elected officials helped do the machine’s bidding to hide and justify the city’s deep inequality.

Chicago’s segregation and job discrimination were relentless. By 1965, almost one million Black people (basically equal to the entire Black population of Alabama) lived in Chicago, mostly squeezed into two ghettos (the term King and most Black Chicagoans used at the time) on the South Side and West Side. Schools grew so overcrowded that the city put many Black schools on

“double shifts” (a euphemism for reducing the school day by half, so that one group of Black students attended in the morning and another in the afternoon) and bought trailers for extra classrooms. King criticized the police for focusing on control of the Black community, so that they might be “kept in line.”

One study found that Black men in Chicago stood just as far below white men on the occupational ladder in 1961 as they had in 1910.

During the summer of 1969, young Black male Chicagoans had an unemployment rate of 31 percent.

Segregation and job discrimination were central to why gangs proliferated.

Chicago had a history of white gangs dating to the end of the 19th century, including the Hamburg Athletic Club and the

Ragen’s Colts, both of which grew to have enormous political influence in the city. The Hamburg Athletic Club helped ignite Chicago’s 1919 race riot, during which 38 people died, including 23 Black people killed by police and white mobs. Richard J. Daley had joined the club as a teenager, before the riot, and became president in 1924, holding that post for 15 years. He used the leverage and muscle it provided to climb the ranks of Chicago’s Democratic machine, becoming mayor in 1955.

Faced with the violence of white gangs, the city’s relentless segregation, and exclusion from employment, many young Black Chicagoans turned to gangs for protection, community, and participation in the informal economy. The Vice Lords were one of the biggest Black gangs on the West Side, along with the Egyptian Cobras. On the South Side, perhaps the most formidable were the Blackstone Rangers, numbering about 2,000, and the

Disciples. As the number of Black and Latino gangs increased — and grew more political — they became a police obsession.

A robust set of movements in Chicago in the early 1960s had challenged the city’s segregated schools, beaches, housing, and jobs. Their organizing had impressed King, who had traveled to the city to join their struggles. But Daley’s political machine was relentless, and little change had resulted. King and the SCLC

decided to join forces with Chicago’s Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) and base the SCLC’s first Northern campaign in the city to expand that struggle in 1965.

The Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM) faced a devastating blow in October when President Lyndon B. Johnson (at Daley’s behest) stopped the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act against Chicago’s segregated schools. But the CFM doubled down, with the Kings moving to Chicago to challenge the city’s segregation.

King had a lot of contact with Chicago gang members from the start. His first night in town, a group of Vice Lords came by the Kings’ apartment as a show of power. A Vice Lords member, Lawrence Johnson, 

 to Mary Lou Finley, “The great civil rights leader was in Chicago, and in our ’hood, on our turf!”

Johnson and other gang members ended up going to visit the Kings’ apartment repeatedly, often for extended conversation and debate. “We had ideological struggles — well, you could call them respectful arguments,” Johnson said. “You couldn’t help but to fall in love with him, to admire him, want to protect him.”

The CFM sought to build a broad-based movement to challenge

via school boycotts, rent strikes, anti-eviction work, and gang organizing both to prevent violence among gangs and to bring these young people into its organizing against the city’s housing and school segregation.

Many people questioned why King wanted to recruit gang members. The Blackstone Ranger leader Jeff Fort wrote me that King saw “wealth” in the numbers of young people affiliated with street organizations and how organized they were.

King’s goals were twofold, according to Fort: first, to “change how the government was treating his black and poor people,” and second, “to change the violence that black people were inflicting upon themselves.” According to Doris Crenshaw, who had grown up and been active in Montgomery during the bus boycott and then joined the SCLC’s efforts in Chicago, one reason the CFM worked with gangs was because gang members were not afraid. The climate of fear for Black people in Chicago was intense —

Daley’s outsize power and the many levers of punishment he deployed against those who stepped out of line, the hostility of the police, and the sundown towns that dotted the metro area made Chicago feel more brutal and hostile than Montgomery, Crenshaw told me.

City officials, the media, and even some in the SCLC denigrated King’s work with gang members. He stuck with it anyway. Other local civil rights and community leaders said that King spent most Friday nights with gang members, talking to them about Chicago’s corrupt politicians, abusive police, complicit preachers, and the ways they were mistreated by the system.

He also negotiated to keep the peace among rival gangs, underlining their potential for leadership. These discussions were not just about nonviolence but addressed structural racism, political strategy, and the urban political economy of the city. As one young man told him, “You know, I’ve been in the basement all my life, and I’ve been trying to get out of the basement, but I’m still there.”

Fort emphasized how “attentive” a listener King was. He didn’t leave when they challenged him.

Even if they didn’t always agree, two factors garnered respect from a broad swath of gang members, according to Fort: King’s commitment to stand up for

“all those who were oppressed” and the fact that he “stood on it” — that is, he displayed both courage and the ability to back it up.

“A warrior without a gun,” Fort called him.

Coretta Scott King wrote in her memoir that over time, many of these gang members became “very protective” of her husband, explaining, “We never encouraged their protection, though we understood they were always around.”

Daley, other Chicagoans, and journalists reached for cultural explanations to justify the city’s racial inequities and saw punishment as a key way to deal with the problems of Black youth. King took exception to that approach. Behavioral explanations for Black poverty and segregation, he pointed out, “means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.”

Young Black students like Fort were pushed out of school while white teenagers who caused trouble were counseled and given opportunities for redemption. When a white woman asked why Black people hadn’t just cleaned up their neighborhoods, King replied, “That was the job of sanitation.”

King’s many experiences with police abuse over the years — slammed down on a counter, half-nelsoned, choked, kicked, shackled and chained for hours, picked up by his pants and shoved into a police van — also connected him to these young men. Members of the American Civil Liberties Union were invited to the Turfmasters summit to interview young people about police brutality they had experienced for lawsuits against the Chicago Police Department. The conference sought to build a powerful political front both to end violence among gangs, which was leading to dozens of gun deaths of Black youth, and to turn these young people’s energy and vision toward advocating for their community’s needs and enlarging the civil rights struggle.

That Saturday, over coffee and food, participants mapped out the power of nonviolent direct action; the commonalities facing poor Black, Latino, and white Chicagoans; and the united front needed to take on the most powerful political machine in the nation. They created a council comprising committees on housing, health, education, employment, welfare, and recreation, with two members of every gang on each committee.

The young men immediately got to work. The SCLC’s James Orange, who had been working with Chicago gang members for nearly a year, was 

: “Those guys just sat down and started talking about working together. From that period on, we worked with these guys.”

A month after the summit, more than 30,000 Chicagoans braved the 98 degree heat for a rally at Soldier Field, and 5,000 marched afterward to City Hall, tacking the CFM’s demands to the door. Members of the Blackstone Rangers, Disciples, and Vice Lords turned out. Some carried Black Power signs, including ones depicting a gun and the slogans “Freedom Now” and “We Shall Overcome.” After hearing one of King’s lieutenants say “gangfighters” weren’t wanted because “they weren’t going to do nothin’ but disrupt the rally,” they walked out. Many King biographies mention these tensions but rarely what King did next: He invited a handful of gang members to his apartment. A member of the Vice Lords remembered him making it clear that what they had heard did not reflect his own beliefs, telling the group that “he didn’t know who made the statement but he did need us.”

Two days later, on another brutally hot day, the police turned off an open fire hydrant on the West Side, which they rarely did in nearby white neighborhoods. Few pools were available to overheated Black children, and most of Chicago’s beaches were effectively whites-only.

When the hydrant on the West Side was turned back on, the police descended to make an arrest. Some Black Chicagoans responded by throwing rocks and bottles at the police car. The police came out in force, thirty squads deep, beating up and then arresting a half dozen teenagers. The already angry crowd escalated from rocks to Molotov cocktails and smashed store and car windows. A massive police crackdown ensued, with officers using tear gas and wielding machine guns. But the uprising continued.

After hearing what had happened, King and the CFM co-chair Al Raby went down to the police station to help the kids who had been beaten and arrested. That night they held a big meeting with nearly 1,000 restive young people at Shiloh Baptist Church before walking the streets over the following days, trying to prevent further violence. Frustrated by years of Black demands that had produced little change in the city’s segregated schools, slum housing, and brutal policing, more people joined the uprising — and the police bore down. Daley asked the governor to call in the National Guard and tried to blame King, claiming, “Someone has to train these youngsters.” The national media covered the uprising assiduously, much more than the housing issues and desperately overcrowded schools that the movement had been exposing for years.

The Johnson administration, worried about the uprising, sent John Doar, assistant attorney general for civil rights, and Roger Wilkins, director of the federal Community Relations Service, to Chicago. They arrived at King’s apartment around midnight on July 15. They found King sitting on the floor of a hot and stuffy room with a large group of Vice Lords, Roman Saints, and Cobras. Doar and Wilkins were stunned to witness a discussion of the strategies of nonviolence, the gang members’ experiences with the police, and the kinds of injustices taking place in the city continue for the next four hours. The relationship that King and his field staff had been building with these gangs over many months bore fruit when Roman Saints leader Richard “Peanut” Tidwell persuaded some of the other young men to head out into the night to help calm people down. It worked. Young gang members, not the National Guard or Daley, led Chicago out of the uprising, thanks in part to the relationship they had built with King.

But that’s not how it was seen by many Chicagoans and others across the nation. Northern liberals, including many white Chicagoans, wanted to distinguish their own segregation from that of the South and gaslit Black people — and then were shocked when frustration boiled over. Black Chicagoans were largely cast as alienated and angry, the cause of their own problems and unwilling to repudiate violence, erasing years of Chicago’s nonviolent movements and the ways these young men joined the struggle.

t the beginning of the summer, Jerome Huey, a Black 17-year-old from the South Side, had gone to a job interview in Cicero and been lynched by four young white men. The Chicago Freedom Movement decided to launch a series of open housing marches into some of the city’s all-white sundown neighborhoods and picketed real estate agencies in neighborhoods that refused to sell or rent to Black people. According to the 1960 census, only seven of the 100,000 people who lived in the South Side neighborhoods of Gage Park and Marquette Park were nonwhite.

Thousands of white Chicagoans poured out of their homes and attacked the marchers, lobbing rocks and firecrackers, yelling racist epithets. The SCLC’s Andrew Young found the mobs of men, women, and children were bigger and in some ways “far more frightening” than what the SCLC had encountered in the South.

Gang members participated in the marches from the beginning, with many serving as marshals. Members from different gangs were paired so “they got to know each other,” Orange explained. This cross-gang organizing led to a temporary truce in the city. It took only two or three marches before “they saw who the enemy was,” he said.

Even after they were attacked by the white mobs, with “blood flowing from their wounds,” King praised their fortitude, saying, “I saw them continue and not retaliate, not one of them, with violence.” The Rangers started wearing baseball gloves to catch the bottles and rocks being thrown at the marchers.

On Aug. 5, King was hit in the head with a rock the size of a fist. Many others were hurt. Deeply frustrated, Jeff Fort called a meeting of the leaders of the Rangers, known as the Main 21, that evening to discuss the violence and hostility they kept encountering. They were tired of being targets of violence and questioned the efficacy of the protest. On top of that, they had seen themselves as King’s guardians, and he’d gotten hurt. King came to the meeting and listened while they vented about the terrors of the past week’s marches. After listening for a while, according to the Rev. Al Sampson, King posed a question: “If a building was burning down and you had the ability to save it, what would you do?”

The young men grew angry at what seemed like a leading question, Sampson recounted. “Mothafucka don’t fuck with us,” they told King, angry about what they saw as Sunday school sermonizing. “Everybody know you use water to put the goddamn fire out.”

Then King said, “Water is another option, my brothers, ’cause you don’t put out a fire with fire,” and told them that 

 represented the water of “our people, the sustenance of life.”

 were the water. It was their power and their willingness to stand up and challenge the inequalities their communities were facing that would make the difference. Sampson said the next day, these same gang members “were out there catching bricks with us.” Bernard LaFayette of the SCLC, who had spent hundreds of hours over the past year working with gang members alongside Orange and King, explained how these gang members’ work in the marches “brought the best out of them.” The SCLC’s work cultivating their community leadership, he said, “showed the potential of what could happen if people were given some direction and support and the opportunity to do something creative and positive in their communities.” But that’s the opposite of how the Chicago movement was framed by the media at the time and many subsequent historians. The prevailing narrative in most treatments of King and the SCLC’s Chicago campaign is that King and the CFM had lost credibility with urban young people and that was part of why they “failed” in Chicago.

In actuality, the CFM’s work with gangs grew dividends. Determined to carry on their work and with community organizations now wanting to support gang organizing, in 1967 the Blackstone Rangers put on a musical revue, 

, with jazz pianist Oscar Brown. Then with the Woodlawn Organization, they got a grant from the War on Poverty’s Office of Economic Opportunity for job training with gang members. Many young men from the Rangers and Egyptian Cobras journeyed to D.C. after King was assassinated in 1968 to take part in the Poor People’s Campaign. The Rangers had begun to build an alliance with the Black Panthers that the FBI helped disrupt in 1969. Also in 1969, along with the Reverends Jesse Jackson and C. T. Vivian, the Rangers, Disciples, and Lords organized the masses to take on the racism of the city’s construction trades, shutting down numerous federal construction sites until they made a commitment to hiring Black workers (later broken by Daley).

Daley, the Chicago Police Department, and the FBI found the politicization of these gangs threatening and built a massive law enforcement campaign to destroy them. Daley knew from his Hamburg Club experience the political power gangs could amass and abhorred this emerging political power base.

In 1967, the CPD formed the Gang Intelligence Unit, which had Black undercover officers infiltrate gangs, break the truce between the Rangers and Disciples, and push them toward criminal pursuits.

By 1969, gang violence had dropped, in part because of the gangs’ politicization.

But it was then that Daley, the police, and Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan declared a war on gangs. The police were relentless in arresting gang members, sabotaging alliances, and feeding information to the press and sympathetic congressmen. The GIU had tremendous sway with prosecutors and judges, and got high bails set. It also worked with the FBI to sabotage the gangs’ political work and their alliances, seeking to push them back to criminal pursuits. The unit made hundreds and hundreds of arrests, though most didn’t hold up, and spread misinformation to the press and even the U.S. Senate. The Atlantic, in a two-part series on the Rangers in 1969, flagged the role of the Chicago police and the media in hyping a sense of constant fear of the Blackstone Rangers, pointing out, “Much of the information passed on to the press is shown to have no substance upon thorough investigation.” But these police efforts were devastatingly successful.

It is time to reckon with Martin Luther King Jr.’s work with gangs. Too often positioned at odds with Black urban youth, he is regularly name-checked to harangue young activists who push too aggressively against the status quo. 

, young people are scolded, yet King himself was dismissed as unreasonable, treated as un-American, and relentlessly policed. 

, they say, when probably the greatest gift of his leadership was the ways he recognized the power and leadership potential of young people, even the most criminalized. “I have more in common with these young people than with anybody else in this movement,” King said toward the end of his life, as Harry Belafonte recounted in his memoir 

. “I feel their rage. I feel their pain. I feel their frustration. It’s the system that’s the problem and it’s choking the breath out of our lives.”

Hammer&Hope

Jeanne Theoharis

@jeannetheoharis.bsky.social

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The Martin Luther King Jr. We Don’t Know

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