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Marching on: if Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he'd find many black Chicagoans living in conditions similar to those he witnessed here 40 years ago.

Article Excerpt
For much of 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. worked closely with members of Chicago Council of Community Organizations in the Chicago Freedom Movement. His first northern campaign focused on ending slum living conditions and opening housing markets as a way to help African Americans realize America's promise of equal housing, education and social opportunities.

In this and the next three issues, The Chicago Reporter will examine the successes and setbacks of King's campaign, using that struggle as a lens to examine what insight about present-day Chicago can be gleaned from it. Linking chronology and theme, the series will explore issues that King tackled in roughly the same months that he and others addressed 40 years earlier.

This is a story of unfinished business. It is a story of triumphs and setbacks, of lofty goals and earthly accomplishments earned at an agonizingly slow pace, of substantial change and overriding continuity.

It is a story of Chicago in 1966 and 2006. The story started 40 winters ago in North Lawndale on the city's West Side and spread throughout Chicago's neighborhoods. It ends, for now, in many of the same communities where the struggle was first waged.

On Jan. 5, 1966, after months of planning, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Chicago for three days of intensive meetings that marked the formal beginning of his first northern civil rights campaign. He encountered a city deeply divided by race and class. The city's poorest 10 neighborhoods all had a majority black population. In 1960, South Side communities like Oakland and Grand Boulevard had some of the highest rates of unemployed male workers as well as close to...