Discriminatory housing laws and lending policies had contained Chicago's growing black population within a belt of segregated and decaying neighborhoods on the city's near south and west sides.

By the early fifties, that belt was ready to burst.

You had a tremendous influx of people who came during the war and right after the war from the South, you see, because the invention of the cotton picker literally demobilized millions of people, black and white, the hillbillies, and all began to leave the South and come north and they came to the cities where they thought they could find jobs.

For many blacks, the only movement out of the ghetto was up, into the new public housing projects built within the Black Belt.

But over the next decade, others began to move out, braving harsh resistance as they sought better housing in the adjacent white communities to the South and West.

This was the situation Dr. Martin Luther King found when he came to Chicago in late 1965.

He came to link up with the city's civil rights movement and give added thrust to their campaign to break down the barriers that were confining Blacks slums.

The campaign gathered momentum in the summer of 1966.

I do plan to stir up trouble in some of the big cities in our country this summer, but my stirring up trouble will be righteous trouble to bring about nonviolent solution.

There is no doubt about the despair in the Negro community and I don't think we deal with that despair by doing nothing.

We've got to have outlets through which people can channelize their legitimate discontent.

You haven't had, other than only three or four instances, integration.

You have saturation, which is a lot different than integration.

Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley expressed the concerns of many whites in the city who feared racial change.

And certainly there has to be some machinery set up in order that you don't go from just one type of citizen to another.

We shall overcome!

We shall overcome!

The first marches were into Gage Park and Marquette Park.

They began with just individuals, couples, white and black persons, going to real estate offices and asking for services, and when the blacks would be refused, as they were every time, there would be vigils outside the office with signs saying, this office discriminates, and so forth.

When those were set upon by crowds, young men with sticks and clubs, we decided that we'd at least be a moving target, and we turned the vigils into marches and that was followed by on one particular Sunday and in mid- july by really massive counter- attack by a group of white residents most of them of that area and it followed us all the way back through Marquette Park where we had parked our cars this is a terrible thing I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen in Chicago.

The demonstrations that summer ended in mid-August, following a summit meeting between Mayor Daley and Dr. King in the Mayor's City Hall office.

But that did not end the turmoil.

at a massive rally in the loop following the summit, Dr. King pledged to keep the pressure on.

We are ready to come right back and join with you in another massive march just like this one.