Render unto King

In West Side Chicago, where he has been concentrating his crusade since January, Martin Luther King stood outside a slum tenement and pronounced: "I am hereby assuming trusteeship of this building to make life more livable for the tenants." All that the five families in the building had to do was to hand their rent over to King instead of the landlord, the Negro leader explained, and he would use it to renovate the place and turn the balance over to the owner. Conceding that this might be considered "supralegal," King contended: "We aren't dealing with the legality of it. We are dealing with the morality of it."

It was the economics of it that prompted Landlord John Bender, 81, to get a temporary injunction prohibiting King's takeover. The tenants, in fact, never did pay any rent to King, whose Southern Christian Leadership Conference has spent $1,000 to improve the building in the past month.

In any case, city officials pointed out that the landlord had already been charged with building-code violations. Said Mayor Richard Daley: "There are legal ways and illegal ways of achieving our objectives. None of us would say we should use illegal ways. We have our courts and our legislature."

Chicago's Committee of 100, a moderate but effective interracial civic organization, also condemned the attempted takeover. "Dr. King," it chided, "has advocated that bad laws should be disobeyed. Perhaps in those parts of the South where the law has two faces, one black and one white, this may be appropriate. But in the North, particularly in Chicago, the law has just one face applicable to all. No one is above the law here." Stubbornly, King vowed last week to maintain his stewardship, pending a hearing next month on Landlord Bender's protest.

One magistrate had already made up his mind about the case. Chicago's Judge James B. Parsons, first Negro ever appointed to a federal district bench in the continental U.S., described King's "trusteeship" as "theft." Said Parsons: "The laws of theft are as important to Negroes as they are to anyone else."

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