DEMANDS

         The Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) was formed in 1962 to protest the segregationist policies of Chicago school superintendent, Benjamin Willis. CCCO reached out to the Chicago Freedom Movement, the SCLC, in an effort to bring new energy and ideas into the organization. Operation Breadbasket was designed to improve economic opportunities for blacks. Other operations were created to deal with school reform, welfare programs, and equal housing opportunities.

          Dr. King lead a march from Soldier Field to City Hall where he posted a list of many demands for the Mayor of Chicago and for other city institutions to follow. The list consisted of demands mainly based off of discriminating practices that the black community insisted were against their political rights as American citizens. Some of the demands were the removal of contracts with firms that do not have a full scale fair employment practice, "A saturation program of increased garbage collection, street cleaning, and building inspection services in the slum properties," the right to own their own property where they choose and to stop having to pay rent, and to integrate all departments of the Chicago Housing Authority and the Chicago Dwelling Association and  all levels of employment.

Questions

How can economic policies (such as discriminatory lending and housing practices) divide a community?

Lending and housing practices will have a huge impact on a city because it makes a physical boundary of where people can and cannot live. Because Chicago limited the Black community to one housing area, they essentially created the physical segregation of the whole city; making the emotional segregation even more prominent. The city literally drew a line where black people and white people lives... separately. The city made it impossible for the two races to integrate because there were specified places where only black people lived and only white people were allowed to live.

How can such practices legitimize the exploitation of one group by another?

Because these two groups were so segregated, people of the opposite race rarely ever entered into the other's "territory"; thus brewing stereotypes and beefs between the two races. If a person of the opposite race went into the other one's town, they would stick out like a sore thumb. It would be even easier to make Black Americans feel as if they were not good enough to live in the white neighborhoods and just emphasize the segregation between the races and separation in the city.