Cities: Clouter with Conscience

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In his inimitably bland fashion, Daley vowed a cleanup, sent off to the University of California for Criminology Professor Orlando W. Wilson. He named Wilson superintendent of police, pledged him a free hand, saw to it that the department got more than $15 million in extra funds and more than 2,000 additional men. Wilson's reorganization gives Chicagoans better police service than they have ever had before. He has raised department morale, giving the city's citizens reasonable assurance that their cops will not turn out to be robbers. With such achievements, it makes little difference that Wilson has yet to catch a real live mobster; he finds only dead people on office floors, like Alderman Lewis, or dead in car trunks or sewers.

"It Took Guts." Much of Daley's time is consumed by Chicago's explosive race problem. The city's Negro population, always sizable, began to mushroom in the early '50s. From the South came waves of Negro families seeking jobs, housing or welfare handouts. They flooded the South and West Sides like the waters from a broken dam. White families hast ily moved away—usually to the suburbs—leaving the Negro tide to lap up neighborhood after neighborhood.

The effect of the Negro migration on Chicago has been overwhelming. In 1950 Negroes comprised 13.6% of the city's population; they now make up 25.8% of the total.* The Negro segment of the school population has swelled to 48% of the elementary school pupils, 34% of the high schoolers. Negroes represent 65% of Chicago's jail inmates, 42% of the unemployed, 90% of those getting aid to dependent children, 50% of the school dropouts. Against such staggering statistics, Mayor Daley has made urban renewal and slum clearance his priority program. On the Near North Side, on the West, on the South Side, the city has built, or is planning, 27 housing projects covering 19 sq. mi. of blight. So far, $900 million has been committed to the program; 40,000 dilapidated buildings have been torn down or refurbished, leaving 24,000 more for Daley's bulldozers.

In his massive effort, Daley has encountered formidable opposition. Many Negroes who refer to urban renewal as "Negro removal," mutter that "Dick Daley may be the last white Mayor of Chicago." Daley's own Roman Catholic Church mounted campaigns against many of his projects. The apparent reason: Daley's programs remove Negroes from their ghettos, send them into white neighborhoods, send white residents fleeing, and leave Catholic parish houses and churches bereft of their congregations—and contributions. Nonetheless, Daley has continued to fight for his program. Recalls Banker David Kennedy of Daley's difficulties in promoting the Hyde Park-Kenwood Project near the University of Chicago campus: "There was tremendous political opposition, and very strong opposition from the Catholic Church. The church attacked the whole thing. But Daley hand-carried the proposal through the commissioners and pushed it through." Agrees University of Chicago Chancellor George Beadle: "It took guts."