In 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.
While 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.