As historic events slip over the horizon, household names fade into a query: “Wasn’t he the guy who, uh, did … What was it again?” Al Raby was the guy who brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Chicago. Sixty-five years ago, he went to the Atlanta headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Jesse Jackson later recalled that several cities were then asking for King’s help. But Raby got it by telling King the Chicago activists’ predicament, just like it was. A campaign against the city’s segregated schools was sputtering. Protests were drawing “Nine people and a dog,” Raby told King. Thus it was that King and Raby stood behind a microphone for a news conference at O’Hare International Airport on July 23, 1965. “I don’t know the problems of Chicago personally,” King said, “but I am here to do a job for the community and to see the people.” King had won a Nobel Peace Prize a year earlier for his role in the Civil Rights Movement. In Chicago, Raby took King on a three-day tour of a city where school segregation was in effect through the euphemism of “neighborhood schools.” As neighborhoods were generally racially homogenous, Black children and white children rarely sat in the same classrooms. Their tour showed King the subtle but stubborn reality of northern racism. For Raby, meeting King completed a course correction, as would be recounted in the Tribune’s Sunday magazine on April 17, 1983: “Indeed, Albert A. Raby has been almost everywhere and done everything since he emerged from the obscurity of the Hess Upper Grade Center, a South Side public school where he was an English teacher, to become one of those instantly recognizable names and faces whose personality nevertheless remains hazy and ill defined.” Born in 1933, Raby was raised in the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. His father, a postal clerk, died when Raby was a baby. His mother, a seamstress, got Raby and three siblings through the lean years of the Great Depression before suffering disabling hypertension. He started skipping school, and a teacher ordered Raby to bring his mother to school. Instead, he didn’t return, went to movies and hung out in a pool hall. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., left, and Al Raby, of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, talk at a news conference to outline their plans for civil rights in Chicago at the Palmer House on July 7, 1965. (John Austad/Chicago Tribune) He had only earned his grade school diploma when he was 24. By then, he was long-since tutored in Black history by Carroll Maynard, a photographer with a studio on 63rd Street where Raby worked as a teenager for $7 a day. “He had read Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois,” Raby later recalled for the Tribune magazine profile. They were among the classic Black authors Maynard touted. “He was a proud Black man.” Once Raby answered the studio’s phone and, judging by the voice, told Maynard the caller was white. “Go hang up the phone!” Maynard said. “If there is someone on the phone say so, and I’ll come. But I’m not responding to any man because he’s white!” In 1953, Raby was drafted. An Army officer noting his gift for gab thought he could be a clerk in the public information office. But looking at a typewriter, he himself realized how undereducated he was. “Only then did I realize you had to be able to spell to use the thing,” he later said. Upon being discharged, he got grade school and high school diplomas at Wendell Philips night school and a certificate at Chicago Teachers College. In 1960, he began teaching eighth grade at the Hess School at 3500 W. Douglas Blvd. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stopped for food at Splivens restaurant at 3740 W. 16th St. with his wife, Coretta, not pictured, and Al Raby, left of King, the convener of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), on Jan. 27, 1966, in Chicago. (William Yates/Chicago Tribune) The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stopped for food at Splivens restaurant at 3740 W 16th St. with his wife, Coretta, not pictured, and Al Raby, left, of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), on Jan. 27, 1966. (William Yates/Chicago Tribune)Civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plays pool with his "best stick" in a match with Chicago civil rights leader Al Raby while on an anti-slum campaign on Feb. 17, 1966. The pool hall was located at 3251 W. Madison St. in Chicago, but was destroyed in the rioting after MLK's death in 1968. (Ed Wagner Sr./Chicago's American) Mahalia Jackson, far left, sings "We Shall Overcome" with civil rights leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King, third left, Jesse Jackson, second from right, and Al Raby, right, on Aug. 4, 1966, in Chicago. (Ray Foster/Chicago Tribune photo) Al Raby addresses the crowd at a civil rights rally at Soldier Field on July 10, 1966, in Chicago. (Walter Kale/Chicago Tribune) The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., speaks with Al Raby, center, by his side after meeting with Mayor Richard J. Daley on July 11, 1966, in Chicago. (Frank Fusco/Chicago Tribune) The Rev. Jesse Jackson, left, and Al Raby stand outside a meeting hall at 844 W. 71st St. before Jackson spoke to the marchers on Aug. 1, 1966, in Chicago. (Frank Fusco/Chicago Tribune) Al Raby, second from left, and Dr. Martin Luther King, seated on right, meet with a group of residents of an apartment building, including Ruby Keys, Louis Mitchell and Rosie Townes, at 1321 S. Homan Ave. in Chicago on Feb. 10, 1966. The group had gathered in Mrs. Townes' apartment to talk about the bad living conditions for the Black people in poor neighborhoods of Chicago. Dr. Ralph D. Abernathy is in the background. (Steve Marino/Chicago Tribune) Al Raby, convener of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, from left, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, deputy director of the March on Washington, Aaron Henry, civil rights of Mississippi, and Wendell Smith from WGN, talk at St. John Baptist Church on Oct. 29, 1964, in Chicago. (Bob Rea/Chicago’s American) Al Raby, running in the 24th District, speaks at a Vietnam War protest rally at the Civic Center on Nov. 13, 1969, in Chicago. (James Mayo/Chicago Tribune) Al Raby and his wife, Pat, look over the books on their shelves on July 29, 1968. (Ernie Cox Jr./Chicago’s American) Al Raby takes a phone call to see how the votes are coming in on Nov. 18, 1969, at 1545 E. 55th St. in Chicago. (Bob Fila/Chicago Today) Chicago’s Al Raby on March 15, 1983: union organizer, school teacher, community activist, candidate for alderman, Peace Corps official, manager of Harold Washington’s race for mayor. (Sally Good/Chicago Tribune) Show Caption1 of 13The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stopped for food at Splivens restaurant at 3740 W. 16th St. with his wife, Coretta, not pictured, and Al Raby, left of King, the convener of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), on Jan. 27, 1966, in Chicago. (William Yates/Chicago Tribune) Expand Two years later, he joined Teachers for Integrated Education, a group started by educator Meyer Weinberg to protest the city’s segregated school system. Weinberg recalled Raby confronting Mayor Richard M. Daley as he gave a speech in Grant Park not long after being quoted as saying there were no slums in Chicago. “Al and a couple of others ran down the aisle, shook their fists at the mayor and yelled: ‘There are slums in Chicago!’” Weinberg said. Edwin Berry, head of the Urban League, an old-line Black organization, had mixed feelings about Raby as a budding civil rights leader. “He was very outspoken and very tempestuous,” Berry recalled to a Tribune reporter. “But he tended to grow on you once he got through being an irritant.” In 1966, King returned to Chicago and lived in a third-floor apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. during the eight months of his “Northern Crusade.” “When King demonstrated at City Hall, when he met with Black gang leaders, when he marched through Marquette Park, when bricks and bottles and curses were hurled against him, Al Raby was always right there by his side,” the Tribune noted. At Raby’s direction, the crusade drew a bead on Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis. Willis had refused to move Black students from overcrowded schools to underused schools in white neighborhoods. Instead, he put mobile classrooms in the schoolyards of Black neighborhoods. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., left, and Al Raby, right, clean up garbage from an apartment at 1321 S. Homan Ave. in Chicago on Feb. 23, 1966. Many buildings in the poorer West and South Side communities of Chicago had building code violations, including this one that King visited after residents contacted him and Raby, telling them about the uninhabitable conditions. (Steve Marino/Chicago Tribune) The marches and school walkouts Raby organized through the Coordinating Council of  Community Organizations provoked Mayor Daley to return fire, as the Tribune reported. “I’ve received almost a thousand calls from Negro mothers,” Daley declared, “saying Raby doesn’t represent them.” When Willis resigned in 1966, Raby rejoiced, saying it “marked the removal of a major stumbling block to quality integrated education.” Raby wanted to push on and pressure the federal government to withhold funding for Chicago’s schools and boycotting the schools to demonstrate the Black community’s resolve. That tactic got mixed reviews, as the Tribune announced under a headline: “C.C.C.O. Split Over Al Raby’s Private War.” The story noted that many member groups under the C.C.C.O. umbrella didn’t endorse Raby’s plan, while others hadn’t been consulted. Raby resigned from the C.C.C.O. in September 1967, having previously told an interviewer he was “tired of being used as a sponge to absorb Negro frustrations.” In 1970, he was a delegate to the convention that rewrote the Illinois Constitution. Legendary pool shark Minnesota Fats happened to be in Springfield at the same time and Raby, with skills honed during his aimless youth, took him on. He lost, but not by much, Dawn Clark Netsch, a fellow delegate and subsequently a state senator, recalled in the Tribune magazine piece. As the convention was ending, a delegate from rural Illinois asked Raby what his plans were. “Well, I guess I will go back to Chicago and start scaring white people again,” Raby replied. Al Raby, shown here on March 15, 1983, was a man whose personal history was firmly planted in Chicago’s grassroots. His life’s journey took him from union activism to the civil rights front to the Peace Corps to the successful mayoral campaign of Harold Washington. (Sally Good/Chicago Tribune) He joined Illinois Gov. Dan Walker’s administration, went to Ghana to supervise Peace Corps volunteers posted there. In December 1982, he was back in Chicago as a contentious mayoral race was in progress. “Once back in town, like an old warhorse, he smelled the smoke from the Byrne-Daley-Washington primary election battle, and the adrenaline started flowing,” Robert McClory wrote in the 1983 Tribune magazine story. He said yes to friends who asked if they could suggest that he replace Harold Washington’s campaign manager, Renault Robinson, the founder of the African American League, whose autocratic style was alienating campaign workers. Two days later, Washington offered Raby the job. He accepted, and helped orchestrate the election of Chicago’s first Black mayor. Those who participated in the campaign offered various explanations for Raby’s success in knitting the campaign together. George O’Hare, who handled public relations, attributed it four-square to Raby’s ability to set aside his well-known bad-boy persona. “On a scale of 1 to 10 for holding things together, I’d give Al a 20,” O’Hare said. “He bit his lip on more than one occasion and kept all the marbles in the bag.” Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at [email protected] and [email protected]. Sign up to receive the Vintage Chicago Tribune newsletter at chicagotribune.com/newsletters for more photos and stories from the Tribune’s archives.