Dawson was also leader of the African-American "submachine" within the Cook County Democratic Organization. In the predominantly African-American wards, Dawson acted as his own political boss, handing out patronage and punishing rivals just as leaders of the larger machine did, such as Richard J. Daley. However, Dawson's machine had to continually support the regular machine in order to retain its own clout. He chose to work on city politics from this stance, rather than to conduct open civil rights challenges, and did not support the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago in the 1960s. Dawson undercut the nascent efforts of the Chicago Housing Authority in the early 1950s to integrate Black residents into white neighborhoods because those neighborhoods were outside Dawson's district and, hence, not votes he could deliver to the machine.