Reflecting On MLK’s March On Marquette Park 60 Years Later

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Martin Luther King Jr.** (0:41)
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.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (1:06)
Stick around till the end of the episode to get a rundown of the top local stories of the day. But first, we're marking a significant anniversary in the fight for justice and equality. Sixty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and a coalition of Chicagoans marched from Marquette Park on the city's south side, demanding an end to segregation and housing discrimination.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:27)
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr movement staged a number of marches into the Marquette Park neighborhood of Chicago to protest racial discrimination in that area.

**Martin Luther King Jr.** (1:37)
Now is the time to get rid of the slums and ghettos of Chicago. Now is the time to make justice a reality all over this nation. Now is the time.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:48)
The issue in Marquette Park is the right to use that park facility.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:52)
To hell with that. It's a white facility.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:54)
That's what we want it as.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:54)
Neighborhood people throwing rocks, slurs, and a rock hit Dr. King in the back of the neck.

**SPEAKER_7** (2:00)
It helped to unleash forces for change that would not have moved as rapidly as they did had it not been for that summer.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (2:09)
What was meant to be a peaceful demonstration was met with violent resistance from a white mob. Dozens of marchers were injured. So was Dr. King.
So last weekend, Chicagoans recreated the route. Hundreds of people, including Mayor Brandon Johnson, marched into the park and reflected on that legacy. So in this episode of The Pod, we'll check in with a pair of local organizers who recreated that march step by step. We'll hear how it went and we'll dig into what the road ahead in the fight for racial justice looks like.
At the table was Rami Nashashibi, Executive Director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network or IMAN, and Jacqulyn Hamilton, Deputy Director of the Chicago Freedom School. Rami started off by reminding us just what happened at Marquette Park back on August 5th, 1966 Here he is.

**Rami Nashashibi** (2:55)
First to start off, thank you for having this conversation. I do think this is part of the chapter of the larger civil rights and in some way, human rights struggle that often gets so overlooked. I think that summer, the Chicago Freedom Movement was staging a series of marches, a series including a major convening of organizers and soldier field. The month earlier, they had thousands that marched into City Hall that pinned 14 demands on the mayor's door. There was a series of activations that were happening, trying to bring attention to the cities in the north, that the civil rights movement that often got confined to conversations of the south, really in this moment was about what the future of America and the soul of America was going to look like based on how segregation, basic accommodations were going to fall out in the north. So on August 5th, the Chicago Freedom Movement organizers, King had selected Marquette Park to really highlight in many very real ways, how egregious redlining, restricted covenants and the forms of segregation in the city had become by staging this march.
It was in fact, when it goes on, King to say he had never encountered such hatred and hostility anywhere in America as he did on that day.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (4:23)
This mirrors the issues that were at the center of the Chicago Freedom Movement's work here in the city.

**Rami Nashashibi** (4:28)
Absolutely. At that point, they were certainly there to highlight how endemic restricted covenants, segregation, and of course also the almost psychotic fear of proximity to blackness had been weaponized so that realtors were making extraordinary profit over weaponizing fear, and that the minute a black family would move into a white ethnic class, white ethnic working class neighborhood, that the value of their property, that their in fact entire quality of life would be jeopardized.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (5:03)
Jacqulyn, we're going to talk about some of the folks who walked alongside Dr. King in a moment, but I want you to tell us first about the people who came out to attack him, right? Who were the counter protesters?