From the Inside

On March 21, 1965, Nancy McKersie and five other members of her Chicago Unitarian church joined the third attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Their presence serves as a reminder of the importance of northerners to the southern civil rights movement, but this story is not unknown, especially given the recent popularity of the movie Selma (2014). Too often in the shadows is the story of what they and their colleagues did for civil rights at home. Indeed, while Nancy was in Selma, her husband Robert (an untenured faculty member in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago) was preparing for another round of direct action against the Chicago Board of Education’s support of a superintendent who had come to symbolize all that was wrong with the city’s schools. The most residentially segregated city in the US, Chicago faced significant racial unrest in light of inequity in education and employment, and as the more publicized fight raged on in the South, an equally important struggle played out there as whites and blacks came together to correct a number of injustices. Robert McKersie played a significant role in the Chicago Freedom Movement, sometimes as an outsider looking in, but more often on the front lines. A Decisive Decade is his insider’s view of the movement, but, even more importantly, it offers his probing and significant assessment of the movement’s tactics as well as its successes and failures. Part memoir and part analysis, the book offers insight into the northern civil rights movement from the perspective of a sometimes-conflicted white liberal.

The Chicago movement spanned the 1960s and focused primarily on gaining opportunities for black Americans in employment and education. Through the struggle for education, activists also dealt indirectly with the residential segregation that caused inequalities in the schools. McKersie chronicles a number of initiatives, but the drive to force the Motorola Corporation to integrate its workforce and the movement to ouster Chicago School Superintendent Benjamin Willis feature prominently.

Much of the book evaluates the Chicago Freedom Movement, a 1965-1967 alliance between the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), but it also tells the lesser-known story of the work that laid the bedrock for that movement. McKersie wants the reader to understand that, while King’s presence was significant and energizing, Chicagoans had built a thriving movement before his arrival, and it was the power of that force that drew King to the city. The CCCO was an umbrella organization that brought community activists from a number of organizations, primarily local churches, together to coordinate local civil rights initiatives. In developing this antecedent, McKersie tells about the work of Alex Poinsett, a black journalist with Ebony and Jet magazines who remained “proud of his ghetto origins” and determined to achieve equality and Timuel Black, a leader of the Chicago chapter of the Negro American Labor Council (NALC).

McKersie met these men through his affiliation with the Unitarian Church and was drawn into their effort to force the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) to pay attention to the place of blacks in the workforce, particularly in the skilled trades. To increase the pool of skilled black labor, they fought for black apprenticeships at Washburne Trade School, and to insure jobs for skilled blacks they pushed employers, most notably Motorola, to hire qualified black workers. They chose Motorola because it was a government contractor who had an established brand name and employed fewer than fifty blacks out of a workforce that exceeded 10,000 people. Though they failed to force the company to make written promises to hire more blacks, they did manage to get key executives to promise to “actively search for and hire more black employees.”

Chicago activists also worked to improve the city’s schools. In this endeavor...