\u201cWe never had liquor,\u201d recalls Charles Smith, drafted \u2014 while barely out of high school \u2014 to serve as chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Chicago, first the North Side branch then citywide.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just because some participants were underage, but a strategic move on Jean\u2019s part to weed out anyone not fully committed to the cause: This was a revolution, she\u2019d stress, not a social club.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one was on drugs that I knew of in the movement. You didn\u2019t do that,\u201d Smith, now 84, said of required discipline during protests, including picketing at the 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago and a wade-in at the unofficially segregated Rainbow Beach on the South Side.<\/p>\n
A major fight was forcing the CBOE to redraw or abolish district boundaries drawn along racial lines, which had created overcrowded Black schools and left underutilized white schools with better resources.<\/p>\n
That was the demand of the sit-in at CBOE headquarters from July 10-18, 1963, a 24-7 occupation that was one of the longest continuous actions of the Civil Rights Movement nationwide. It didn\u2019t remain so idyllic. After being told by CBOE President Clair Roddewig to \u201cstay as long as you like,\u201d our group was forcibly removed by police, one of numerous encounters that, while not as violent as the fire hoses and dogs of Birmingham, Alabama, still made protesting in Chicago dangerous work.<\/p>\n Those actions caught national attention, drawing King to town in 1964 for his two-year-long Chicago Freedom Movement. The invitation came from Al Raby, another activist recruited in our living room, where he arrived to give a member of the group a ride home and left as the newly appointed president of the just-formed Teachers For Integrated Schools, also headquartered in our house.<\/p>\n \u201cWe created Al Raby,\u201d my mother would joke whenever she saw him on the news years afterward. By \u201cwe\u201d she meant a group of women activists who would start organizations and plan actions behind the scenes, then name to lead them a male who authorities didn\u2019t know. The strategy was borrowed from Montgomery, Alabama, on the eve of the 1955 bus boycott, when local organizers tapped an unknown newly arrived minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., as their leader.<\/p>\n In both cases, those new leaders rose to the occasion, King in leading the movement nationwide and Raby in attracting King to Chicago and later, successfully running Harold Washington\u2019s campaign to become the city\u2019s first Black mayor in 1983.<\/p>\n
I remember it like yesterday, as documented in a United Press International newspaper story<\/a> about our protesting overnight:
\u201cTwo Negro children, Glen and Robin Washington, sat at the table, eating cookies,\u201d it read.<\/p>\n