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The Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., Coalition-Hawaii
The
Civil Rights Movement secured the enactment of national civil rights
legislation, elevated black consciousness and racial pride, and
contributed to the transformation of American social, cultural, and
political life in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Origins: The Reconstruction Era, 1865 to 1890s
Reconstruction
radically altered social, political, and economic relationships in the
South and in the nation. Former slaves participated in civic and political
life throughout the South. Black elected officials served at all levels of
government, from local offices to state legislatures and the United States
Congress. During the early days of Reconstruction, state governments drew
up new constitutions that implemented sweeping democratic reforms,
including, for the first time in the South, a system of universal free
public education. Yet
the meaning of freedom was vigorously contested in private and public life
to the end of the century. Newly enfranchised blacks understood
citizenship to embody constitutionally protected rights, realized through
political participation and ultimately secured by the federal government.
They acted upon an expansive view of the democratic process through their
participation in Republican Party politics and by exploring alliances with
independent groups and, in some cases, the Democratic Party as well. This
vision competed with the Democratic Party's politics of
"redemption," which promised the restoration of white hegemony
and "home rule" for Southern states. As Democrats regained
control of state governments throughout the South, the Ku Klux Klan and
other vigilante groups sought to drive blacks from political life through
a relentless campaign of fraud and violence. Black men continued to vote
in large numbers, often going to the polls in groups, accompanied by
family members. By
the late nineteenth century, however, reconciliation between the North and
the South was nearly complete, and popular "scientific" theories
about race favored white supremacist views. State governments controlled
by Democrats drew up new constitutions and enacted a variety of laws that
dramatically restricted suffrage in the South, virtually barring blacks
from voting and vastly reducing the scope of government. A combination of
municipal ordinances and local and state laws mandating racial segregation
ultimately permeated all spheres of public life. The Supreme Court, in
rulings such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), upheld the South's "new
order," which essentially nullified the constitutional amendments
enacted during Reconstruction. Black
Protest During the Age of Jim Crow, 1900 to 1930s
By
the dawn of the new century, government and politics had become, as one
historian observed, "inaccessible and unaccountable to Americans who
happened to be black." While the rudiments of citizenship expired,
black protest against new laws segregating streetcars spontaneously
erupted in locally organized boycotts in at least 25 Southern cities from
1900 to 1906. Some boycotts lasted as long as two years, but these
protests failed to stem the tide of segregation. Meanwhile, lynching and
other forms of anti-black violence and terrorism reinforced legal
structures of white domination. Black
leaders and intellectuals continued to debate a broad range of political
strategies. There was, for example, the accommodationism and self-help
advanced by Booker T. Washington and others, the civil rights protests
advocated by Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois, and the nationalist and
emigration movements promoted by leaders such as Henry McNeal Turner.
These overlapping and sometimes contradictory approaches revealed the
tensions and challenges inherent in what often was a daunting effort: how
to build and sustain black communities amid the crushing environment of
white racism while envisioning a way forward. Yet
traditions of freedom and citizenship, born in the crucible of
Reconstruction, nurtured communities of resistance. African Americans
continued to create strategies for social and political development
through a separate public sphere. Black community life was dominated in
large part by the church and shaped by other institutions such as
fraternal organizations, schools, and newspapers. The black church focused
the mobilization of community resources to provide educational and welfare
services, leadership training, and organizational networks and served as a
site of mass gatherings and meetings - a place, as Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham has written, "to critique and contest America's racial
domination." The NAACP,
World War I, and the "New Negro" In
1905 W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934), and other black
militants founded the Niagara Movement, an organization committed to
securing full citizenship rights for African Americans. The Niagara
Movement was short-lived but its goals were adopted by the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in New
York in 1909 by an interracial group of reformers and civil rights
activists. White progressives dominated the early leadership of the NAACP.
But the NAACP provided the primary organizational and institutional
foundation from which the black struggle for civil rights was mounted over
the next half century. World
War I and the Great Migration altered the political and social landscape
of black America. Beginning in 1914, wartime industrial opportunities in
the North sparked a massive movement of nearly 1.5 million black
Southerners to Northern urban centers, a migration that continued through
the 1920s. While racial discrimination and segregation restricted black
opportunities in the North, black community life flourished in Northern
cities, where African Americans enjoyed free access to the ballot. As
their numbers increased, the black vote in the urban North gradually
became a factor of national consequence. The
participation of African Americans in World War I, the war that promised
to "make the world safe for democracy," stirred the aspirations
of a new generation determined to "make democracy safe for the
Negro." Returning veterans formed organizations such as the League
for Democracy, which advocated political activism and self-defense, and
joined in establishing new branches of the NAACP throughout the South.
Others, like Charles Hamilton Houston, enrolled in law school, determined
to fight racial injustice through the courts. Whites
responded with a campaign of antiblack violence that erupted in a series
of lynchings and more than 25 race riots throughout the country during the
summer of 1919. The worst riot was in Chicago. In many instances blacks
fought back, in the spirit of Claude McKay's defiant poem "If We Must
Die." Yet state repression, supported by federal surveillance,
effectively quashed the incipient democratic political initiatives spawned
by the war. During
the 1920s the "New Negro" movement stretched the parameters of
racial consciousness and expression. Urban communities nurtured the
outpouring of black cultural, literary, and musical creativity that
flowered in the Harlem Renaissance. Beyond the literary salons and art
galleries, Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association
represented the largest mass black organization in the United States, one
that promoted black economic development and celebrated Africa and racial
pride. While W. E. B. Du Bois and some others dismissed Garvey as little
more than a fool, Charles Houston contended that Garvey surpassed most
race leaders of his time, for he had "made a permanent contribution
in teaching the simple dignity of being black." Despite
cultural and economic changes ushered in by migration and urbanization,
the status of African Americans remained largely unchanged. Some 80
percent of African Americans still lived in the Southern United States in
1930, where they were racially segregated, politically disenfranchised,
and economically marginalized. The fate of nine young black men in the
Scottsboro case of 1931 focused national and international attention on
the fact that blacks in the South were completely beyond the protection of
the law. Charles
Houston and the Legal Campaign for Civil Rights
With
the normal channels of political participation closed to the vast majority
of black Americans, Charles Houston envisioned a unique role for black
lawyers as "social engineers," prepared to "anticipate,
guide, and interpret his group's advancement." Houston, a graduate of
Harvard Law School, joined the faculty of Howard University Law School in
1924. He transformed Howard into a laboratory for the development of civil
rights law and trained a generation of black lawyers to lead the assault
on Jim Crow. When
Houston became chief legal counsel of the NAACP in the early 1930s, he and
former student Thurgood Marshall began laying the groundwork for a
protracted campaign against racial discrimination in education. For
Houston and Marshall, litigation was a slow and deliberate process, tied
to the development of community support and participation. Houston and
Marshall traveled as much as 10,000 mi a year through the South, where
they met with small and large groups, explaining the mechanics of the
legal fight and its relationship to broader community concerns. An
associate recalled that Houston's efforts in the South were fueled by his
confidence in the capacity "within the black community and the Negro
race to bring about change." During the 1930s Houston and Marshall
implemented a major reorientation of the NAACP's program, focusing staff
efforts on the expansion of black membership and the cultivation of local
leadership and branches, especially in the South. In 1934 Houston wrote
Walter White, then executive secretary of the NAACP: "The work of the
next decade will have to be concentrated in the South." The New
Deal and the World War II Era While
the South was the primary arena of the black freedom struggle, the
nationalizing trends of the New Deal and World War II enhanced the
possibilities for a broad legal and political challenge to the segregation
system and made civil rights an issue of consequence throughout the
country. The
1932 presidential election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the depths of the
Great Depression precipitated a sea change in American politics. New Deal
programs and legislation expanded the scope of federal power and redefined
the role of government and politics in American life. Government relief
and job programs, along with the legalization of labor unions, stirred the
expectations of groups long on the margins of national politics -
industrial workers, sharecroppers, and African Americans of all classes. When
Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, racial segregation reigned in the city
of Washington and in the corridors of government. The Republican Party
offered no more than token representation to black Americans, and white
Southerners dominated the Democratic Party. During the 1920s the NAACP had
carved out a presence in the nation's capital through its efforts to gain
support for antilynching legislation; in 1930 an NAACP lobbying campaign
had helped defeat the nomination of John J. Parker, a white Southern
conservative, to the Supreme Court. But there were no secure avenues
through which African Americans could influence or shape government
policy. The
implementation of a national recovery program, however, promised to have
immediate and long-term consequences for black Americans. As more
established black leaders deliberated about how to respond to the flurry
of New Deal legislation, Robert C. Weaver, a doctoral student at Harvard,
and John P. Davis (1905-1973), a new graduate of Harvard Law School, acted
to ensure that black interests were represented. In the summer of 1933 the
two men returned to their hometown of Washington and established an office
on Capitol Hill, where they fought successfully against the racial wage
differential in the first recovery program. Their efforts led to the
establishment of the Joint Committee on Economic Recovery, a group of more
than a dozen black organizations that included the NAACP and the National
Urban League (NUL). The committee lobbied for fair inclusion of African
Americans in government-sponsored programs and publicized incidents and
patterns of racial discrimination. The
NAACP and the black press, along with the Rosenwald Fund, successfully
pressed for the appointment of black government officials to represent
black interests from within the Roosevelt administration. Robert Weaver
and William Hastie were among the first African Americans hired. Shortly
after joining the Interior Department they integrated the lunchroom,
sparking the reversal of the segregationist policies enacted by Woodrow
Wilson. By 1935 black advisers were serving in many cabinet offices and
New Deal agencies and had created an informal network commonly known as
the Black Cabinet. Southern
Blacks and the New Deal The
Democratic rhetoric of the New Deal, along with federal programs,
dovetailed with the NAACP's expanded activity in the South, the growth of
industrial unionism in the region, and pockets of student and Communist
Party activism. Together, these developments revived the expansive view of
citizenship and politics that had informed black and biracial politics in
the Reconstruction era. Despite
their conservative nature, early New Deal programs stirred the stagnant
economic relationships that had persisted in the South since the 1890s.
Federal work relief and credit, along with federal legislation securing
the rights of labor to unionize, implicitly threatened the culture of
dependency that shaped race and class relations in the South. New Deal
initiatives combined with the organizing efforts of a revitalized NAACP
and radical labor groups - such as the International Labor Defense - to
support a renewed interest in politics on the part of the South's
disenfranchised. Early
in 1934 a South Carolina peach grower complained that black women would
not work in the fields while their husbands had jobs with the federal
Civil Works Administration. In Arkansas black and white sharecroppers
organized the Southern Tenant Farmers Union to demand federal enforcement
of guarantees provided by the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment
Administration. Organized groups of black citizens in Georgia and South
Carolina attempted to vote in the Democratic primary that barred blacks in
1934, seeking entry into Roosevelt's party. Peter Epps, an administrator
for the Works Progress Administration in South Carolina, told an
interviewer that blacks "talked more politics since Mister
Roosevelt's been in than ever before." Contemplating
the impact of recent federal programs on black political consciousness, W.
E. B. Du Bois noted that the government was attending to economic matters
and furnishing jobs and food in the provincial South. The question bound
to arise was, "How can this political instrument which is the federal
government be used more widely and efficiently for the well-being of the
mass of people?" New Deal
Political Coalitions: Blacks, Labor, and the Democratic Party The 1936
Election While
blacks were essentially barred from voting in the South, black voters in
the North emerged as a pivotal group in the 1936 presidential campaign.
Following a steady stream of migrations from the South during the 1920s,
blacks in the North came to cast significant numbers of votes in key
industrial states. They had been drifting away from the party of Lincoln,
establishing a tentative allegiance to the Roosevelt administration. Yet
Roosevelt's party was also the party of Southern segregationists. While
the Roosevelt administration had failed to endorse racially sensitive
legislation, such as an anti-lynching bill, it made other gestures that
appealed to black voters. Roosevelt presided over a Democratic National
Convention that, for the first time, opened its doors to the equal
participation of black reporters and the handful of black delegates in
attendance, drawing a howl of protest from Southern delegates. Mary McLeod
Bethune and other members of the Black Cabinet took part in a
sophisticated campaign aimed at black voters. It included an extravagant
multi-city celebration of the 73rd anniversary of the Emancipation
Proclamation. Such actions reinforced the bonds woven by New Deal relief
and jobs, ensuring Roosevelt's sweep of the black vote. "The amazing
switch of this great group of voters is the real political sensation of
the time," wrote a national political analyst. The
basis of Roosevelt's landslide victory in 1936 was a broad, class-based
appeal, one that pledged an activist federal government committed to the
"establishment of a democracy of opportunity for all people."
African Americans, urban ethnic groups, industrial workers, and farmers
responded, creating a new Democratic coalition that eclipsed the singular
dominance of old-line Southern Democrats. For the next three decades the
Democratic Party was a major site of the struggle waged to define a
national policy on civil rights. Race and
the Politics of New Deal Reform The
late 1930s and the early 1940s witnessed the emergence of new
organizations that were dedicated to expanding economic and political
democracy in the South and were prepared to challenge Jim Crow laws. In
1937 a group of black students established the Southern Negro Youth
Congress (SNYC) in Richmond, Virginia, dedicated to organizing black
industrial workers in the South. During the next decade, SNYC grew into a
regional organization based in Birmingham; in addition to supporting the
work of organized labor, SNYC activists sponsored voter education and
registration efforts and leadership training, often through
community-based cultural activities. In
1938 Roosevelt issued the Report on the Economic Conditions of the South,
which identified the region as "the Nation's number one economic
problem." In response to that report several thousand black and white
Southerners met in Birmingham, Alabama, in November 1938 and established
the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). At the founding of the
SCHW, Birmingham police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor
enforced segregated seating in the group's meeting hall. First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt responded by placing her chair on top of the hastily
established line separating the two races. With the endorsement of the
Roosevelt administration and the strong support of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), the SCHW launched a decade-long effort to
expand political participation in the South. Just
weeks after Eleanor Roosevelt's dramatic gesture in Birmingham, the
Supreme Court ruled that Lloyd L. Gaines be admitted to the University of
Missouri Law School, giving the NAACP its first major victory in the
campaign for equal education. Pauli Murray, whose application to the
University of North Carolina had been rejected solely on the grounds of
race, observed that Gaines was the "first major breach in the solid
wall of segregated education since Plessey." It was, she wrote,
"the beginning of the end." World War
II
By
the late 1930s the crusading spirit of the New Deal had been obscured by
mobilization for war and the increasing power of conservatives in
Washington. Still, the war experience broadened the possibilities for
civil rights struggles. On the eve of America's entry into the war,
Osceola McKaine, a South Carolina NAACP organizer, observed: "We are
living in the midst of perhaps the greatest revolution within human
experience. Nothing, no nation, will be as it was when the peace comes ...
There is no such thing as the status quo." The
demographic, economic, and political changes unleashed by the war had
far-reaching consequences for African Americans. As scholar Henry Louis
Gates Jr. has written, World War II "did more to recement black
American culture, which migration had fragmented, than did any single
event or experience." For the nearly 1 million African Americans
serving in the armed forces, the army became "a great cauldron,
mixing the New Negro culture, which had developed since the migration of
the twenties and thirties, and the Old Negro culture, the remnants of
traditional rural black culture in the South." The massive movement
of black Southerners to centers of defense production in the North marked
one of the largest internal migrations in American history. Black
civil rights activism accelerated under the banner of the Double V
campaign, a movement first promoted by the Pittsburgh Courier. Double V
advocates combined the fight against fascism abroad with the struggle for
racial equality and full democracy at home. When the president failed to
respond to black demands for equal inclusion in the war effort, labor
leader A. Philip Randolph promised to lead 10,000 black Americans in a
march on Washington to compel federal action. At the eleventh hour
Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in
defense industries and federal agencies and created the president's Fair
Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to implement the law. It was the
first federal agency since Reconstruction devoted to dealing with racial
discrimination. The NAACP
and the Southern Movement During
the war years, NAACP membership soared to nearly 400,000 nationally, and
the rate of growth in the South surpassed that in all other regions.
Having reported 18,000 members in the late 1930s, the NAACP claimed
156,000 members in the South by the war's end. Ella Baker, Southern field
secretary for the NAACP, reported that the growth in membership brought a
"new surge of identity" among black communities around the
South. Through the organization of local branches and state conferences of
the NAACP, Southern blacks created an infrastructure for sustained
political struggle. In
the spring of 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Allwright
that the all-white Democratic primary was unconstitutional. This ruling
was the culmination of the NAACP's 20-year-long legal battle against the
South's most effective legal means of barring blacks from political
participation. "Once the Supreme Court opened the door in 1944,"
civil rights activist Palmer Weber recalled, "the NAACP charged into
the whole registration and voting area very hard." From
1944 to 1948 the NAACP, along with SNYC, the SCHW, and the CIO Political
Action Committee (CIO-PAC), joined with other local and state groups to
promote voter registration. When South Carolina Democrats continued to bar
blacks from the party, black newspaperman John McCray and NAACP activist
Osceola McKaine organized the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party
(PDP). The PDP sent a delegation to the 1944 Democratic National
Convention in an unsuccessful effort to challenge old-guard Democrats for
failing to open the state party to blacks. That fall the PDP ran its own
slate of candidates. Black veterans, like Medgar Evers and Charles Evers
in Mississippi, often took leading roles in voter registration efforts. In
Birmingham black veterans marched in uniforms to the Jefferson County
Court House to register to vote. Henry
Lee Moon, a journalist and a Southern field organizer for the CIO-PAC,
reported: "Negro groups, sometimes in collaboration with labor and
progressive groups, sometimes alone, are setting up schools to instruct
new voters in the intricacies of registration, marking the ballot, and
manipulating the voting machine." By the late 1940s the total number
of registered black voters in the South approached 1 million; it had been
estimated at 200,000 in 1940. The increases were most striking in South
Carolina, where the number of black voters climbed from 3500 to 50,000,
and in Georgia, where the number rose from 20,000 to 118,000. Southern
whites met growing black political participation with terror and fraud.
There were countless individual acts of violence against blacks who voted,
as well as public campaigns on the parts of candidates like Eugene
Talmadge in Georgia and Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi, inviting whites to
do what was necessary to keep blacks from the polls. In several cases
black veterans were gunned down after voting. Publicly staged acts of
violence against blacks increased during the 1946 primary season and
included the execution-style murders of two black couples in Walton
County, Georgia. There is evidence that Talmadge stole his gubernatorial
win in 1946 and that the Justice Department had enough information to
indict him. But the department chose not to pursue the matter. Postwar
America: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue
Wartime
experience and the growing power of the Northern black vote elevated the
importance of civil rights in national politics. At the war's end,
decolonization movements in Africa and Asia and the beginnings of the cold
war between the United States and the Soviet Union heightened the rhetoric
of freedom, democracy, and self-determination. In 1947, W. E. B. Du Bois
sought unsuccessfully to enlist the United Nations in an international
investigation of racial discrimination in the United States. President
Harry S. Truman responded to the call for civil rights reform by
commissioning a review of racial discrimination, which resulted in a
report that called for sweeping federal action against Jim Crow. Truman
was reluctant to act in the face of strong Southern opposition. But a
close 1948 presidential race in which victory in key Northern states
hinged on the black vote compelled him to endorse a strong civil rights
plank at the Democratic National Convention. Southerners left the
convention in protest and ran their own candidate for president in 1948 on
the States Rights Party ticket. Shortly after the convention, Truman
issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces. The
confident Democratic initiatives of the 1930s and 1940s, however, were
overwhelmed by two postwar political factors: (1) the cold war and the
Truman administration's domestic loyalty-security program, which limited
civil liberties; and (2) the acceleration of white Southern repression of
any challenge to the Jim Crow system. Groups like SNYC and the SCHW became
targets of government investigations. The Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) sought out suspected communists and fellow travelers, while a
revived Ku Klux Klan terrorized blacks attempting to vote in the South and
Southern civic leaders presided over fraudulent elections. Indeed, Charles
Houston wondered why the loudly proclaimed crusade to "lead the world
to democracy" did not extend to the Southern United States. Why were
free and fair elections in Eastern Europe of greater import to the U.S.
government than open elections in Alabama and Mississippi? The Civil
Rights Struggle in the 1950s During
the 1950s the struggle against Jim Crow in the South remained distant from
national issues and concerns. After 1948 the Democratic Party placated its
rebellious Southern wing while its civil rights agenda floundered.
Meanwhile, whites responded to the steady migration of Southern blacks to
Northern cities by extending patterns of racial segregation and black
exclusion in housing, employment, and education. The
foundation of the Civil Rights Movement remained anchored in the
cumulative gains of the NAACP legal campaign and its extensive network of
branches. Southern NAACP leaders, however, faced an emboldened defense of
the racial status quo. In 1951 the Christmas Day assassination of Harry T.
Moore, a leading NAACP organizer in Florida, and his wife inaugurated a
decade of white terrorism and state-sponsored repression that heightened
in the aftermath of the Brown decision. Brown v.
Board of Education On
May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board
of Education that the doctrine of separate but equal as applied to public
education was unconstitutional. Brown marked the culmination of the
NAACP's long legal battle; the Court had effectively reversed its 1896
decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the cornerstone of the segregation system.
By implication, state-mandated racial segregation in all areas of public
life violated the Constitution. However,
the Court issued a separate ruling one year later concerning the
enforcement of this momentous decision. Sympathetic to warnings of
Southern white defiance, the Court allowed for a policy of gradual
implementation that would, the opinion explained, be responsive to local
conditions and problems. While calling for compliance "with all
deliberate speed," the Court reflected the ambivalence of the
justices, executive and congressional leadership, and the vast majority of
Americans about dismantling racial segregation in the South. For most
white Southerners, Brown II was a license to resist. During the next ten
years, less than 1 percent of black children in the South attended
"white" schools. Brown
was a major turning point in the struggle for civil rights, and it marked
the beginning of the most celebrated chapter of the Civil Rights Movement.
The decade that followed saw a heightening interplay between Southern
blacks striving to realize the promise of Brown in the face of
"massive resistance" by Southern whites and the equivocal
response of the federal government, unfolding on an increasingly national
and international stage. Emmett
Till, Montgomery, and the Emergence of Martin Luther King Jr.
In
August 1955, just three months after the court ruled in Brown II,
14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi, for allegedly
whistling at a white woman. Mamie Bradley, Till's mother, brought her
son's body home to Chicago and insisted on an open casket so that all
could see "what they did to my boy." Jet magazine's photograph
of Till's badly mutilated body offered gruesome evidence of the terror
that reigned in Mississippi, and it informed the consciousness of a new
generation of young black people. The widely publicized trial and
acquittal of Till's murderers confirmed what most already knew about the
Southern system of racial injustice. That
December, Rosa Parks, a local NAACP leader in Montgomery, Alabama, refused
to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white man. This action, and the
mobilizing work of the Women's Political Council, sparked a boycott of
Montgomery buses that lasted for 381 days. Local black leaders elected
Martin Luther King Jr., the new 26-year-old minister of the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church, as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA),
the organization that led the boycott and sued to end segregation on the
buses. Hundreds of African Americans, mostly women, walked several miles
to and from work each day; as one woman commented, "My feet is tired,
but my soul is rested." This dignified protest contrasted with the
city's efforts to intimidate the MIA leadership through indictments,
injunction, and the bombing of King's house, and it attracted the
attention of the national and international media. By
the time the Supreme Court struck down segregation on the buses in
December 1956, King had become a seasoned leader and eloquent spokesman of
the emerging nonviolent movement. Early in 1957, King joined with other
activist ministers and civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin and Ella
Baker to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC);
King was elected its president, and Baker became the first executive
director. The SCLC served as an umbrella organization, linking
church-based affiliates throughout the South in the nonviolent struggle
for racial justice and to "redeem the soul of America." The NAACP,
Little Rock, and School Desegregation
The
fight for school integration had few supporters outside the black
community. The NAACP aided parents who petitioned school boards to admit
their children to the all-white schools, in compliance with the Brown
decision, but the organization became the target of an extensive effort
across the South to shut it down. In 1956 Alabama passed a state law
effectively barring the NAACP from operating in that state; South Carolina
barred NAACP members from state employment. Five other states enacted laws
requiring the NAACP to register and to provide lists of members and
contributors. While such state action was often unconstitutional, the
burden was on local NAACP branches to spend scarce resources in fighting
to overturn these laws. In the meantime, the White Citizens Council (WCC),
founded in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in 1956, organized local
businessmen and civic leaders throughout the South. WCC chapters used
economic reprisals and manipulation of the law in an effort to intimidate
and undermine civil rights activists and supporters. Southern
obstructionists met their first major setback in Little Rock, Arkansas. In
1957 a group of local parents, working with NAACP leader Daisy Bates,
succeeded in winning a court order mandating the admission of black
students to Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus employed the
National Guard to block the admission of the nine men and women selected
to attend Central High. The governor's bold defiance of the federal courts
compelled President Eisenhower, who was no supporter of school
integration, to send in army troops and federalize the Arkansas National
Guard in order to ensure peaceful compliance with the court order. After
the school year ended, the governor closed the public schools to avoid
further integration. From
1957 to 1959 public schools in Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, closed rather
than obey desegregation orders. In New Orleans, when public schools
admitted four young black girls to the first grade, whites in the city
rioted. The Right
to Vote The Civil Rights Act of 1957 and Macon County, Alabama
While
federal officials and the U.S. Congress sought to avoid the issue of
racial integration, the Eisenhower administration - recognizing the
possibility of wooing back Northern black voters to the Republican Party -
was sympathetic to extending protection of black voting rights in the
South. In 1957 Attorney General Herbert Brownell introduced legislation
that sought to provide federal protection of basic citizenship rights. The
final bill, the first civil rights bill enacted since 1875, was trimmed to
meet the opposition of Southern Democrats and lacked strong enforcement
provisions. But the Civil Rights Act of 1957 did create a Civil Rights
Division in the Justice Department, authorized to prosecute registrars who
obstructed the right of blacks to vote. The bill also established the
United States Civil Rights Commission as an independent agency charged
with gathering facts about voting rights violations and other civil rights
infringements. In
the fall of 1958, the new Civil Rights Commission sent investigators to
Alabama to gather information on voter discrimination. The Tuskegee Civic
Association (TCA), a black organization established in the early 1940s to
encourage voter registration, shared its extensive records documenting
voter discrimination. As a result, the commission held nationally
televised hearings in Montgomery, and a parade of black witnesses —
farmers, hospital technicians, and Tuskegee professors — described the
deceptive and often bizarre devices used by registrars in Macon County to
keep blacks from registering to vote. While
presenting the case before the Civil Rights Commission and the American
public, TCA founder Charles Gomillion and several associates were also
preparing their suit against the city of Tuskegee for redrawing the
political boundaries of the town so that black voters would be excluded.
In 1960 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the TCA in
Gomillion v. Lightfoot, a case that marked a major step in broadening
federal review of state voting practices. Citizenship
Schools and Black Voter Registration After Brown
Voter
registration and education accelerated in communities around the South
after the Brown decision. In 1957 Septima Clarke (1898-1987), Bernice
Robinson, and Esau Jenkins organized the Citizenship Schools program on
South Carolina's Sea Islands, with the support of Highlander Folk School,
one of the few politically active interracial organizations in the South.
Over the next four years, the number of registered black voters on St.
Johns Island tripled. The program was adapted in communities in Tennessee,
Georgia, and Alabama. In
the mid-1950s in Mississippi, NAACP chapters and the Regional Council of
Negro Leadership began a concerted effort to increase black voter
registration. In 1954, just 4 percent of the state's eligible black
voting-age population were registered. White reprisals were swift. Those
attempting to vote risked losing their job and suffered other forms of
economic intimidation. Leaders were often targets of physical violence. In
1955 George W. Lee, president of the NAACP branch in Belonzi, was gunned
down by a mob of whites. That same year Lamar Smith, a political activist
in Lincoln County, was assassinated in front of the courthouse in broad
daylight. Several other leaders fled the state. Despite the efforts of a
handful of organizers, including Amzie Moore and Medgar Evers, political
activity came to a standstill or was driven completely underground. By
the end of the decade, the momentum for the kind of change that had seemed
possible in the aftermath of Brown and the Montgomery bus boycott seemed
remote in the face of hardening white resistance and the persistence of
unchecked violence. Virginia Durr, a white civil rights activist in
Montgomery, wrote plaintively to a friend in the North: "We have such
a feeling here that we have been abandoned by the rest of the country and
by the government and left to the tender mercies of the Ku Klux Klan and
the White Citizens Council." Direct-Action
Protests of the 1960s
On
February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four freshmen at
Greensboro Agricultural and Technical College (A&T) sat at the
"white" lunch counter in Woolworth's and asked to be served. The
waitress refused; the young men waited, and left at the end of the day.
The next day they were joined by 20 more students from A&T. Some white
students from a local women's college "sat in" with black
students on the third day. By the end of the week, the "sit-ins"
had spread to several other towns in the state, and students began
targeting a broad range of public accommodations. By the end of February,
sit-ins had been staged in towns and cities throughout the South. The
sit-ins inaugurated a direct-action mass protest movement that defied the
racial and political boundaries of cold war America. In April 1960, young
people who had participated in the sit-ins established the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at a meeting convened by veteran
activist Ella Baker. Working with rural Southern blacks, SNCC quickly
became engaged in a movement for more fundamental social change — change
that looked beyond the legalistic and legislative goals of the national
NAACP and its white liberal allies. In particular, SNCC sought to empower
black people at the local level. Escalating
black protest, along with fierce white resistance, invited more extensive
coverage by the national press and tested the resolve of the president to
enforce federal law. In the spring of 1961, the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) initiated a "freedom ride" from Washington to
the Deep South. The interracial group of freedom riders challenged the
newly elected John F. Kennedy and his administration to enforce a 1960
Supreme Court ruling (Boynton v. Virginia) that banned segregation on
interstate transportation. One bus was firebombed outside Birmingham;
another rode into a savage mob assault at the bus station in Montgomery.
In Jackson, riders were arrested, as one historian has noted, "on
charges of traveling 'for the avowed purpose of inflaming public
opinion.'" SNCC and CORE sent a steady flow of reinforcements, who
filled the local and county jails to overflow. Attorney General Robert
Kennedy finally directed the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce
regulations barring segregation in interstate terminals. Mississippi During
the early 1960s, different groups and leaders experimented with a variety
of tactics and strategies. SNCC and CORE organizers carved out a critical
base as they fanned out across the South and established community-based
projects to help support and sustain local organizing efforts around
voting and mass protests against segregation. In
the summer of 1960, Robert P. Moses, a 26-year-old high school teacher
from New York, traveled through Mississippi to recruit people for a SNCC
conference to be held that fall. On the advice of Ella Baker, Moses sought
out Amzie Moore, an NAACP leader in Cleveland, who told Moses about how
white terrorism had crippled voter registration efforts in Mississippi.
With Moore's encouragement, Moses and a team of SNCC workers returned the
following summer prepared to live and organize in what was the poorest and
arguably the most violently racist state in the nation. The
SNCC organizers joined with other civil rights activists in the state,
including members of CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP, and created the Congress
of Federated Organizations (COFO) to unify the efforts of all civil rights
groups operating in Mississippi. Late in 1961 COFO's efforts won financial
support from the newly established Voter Education Project, a
foundation-based organization that Attorney General Robert Kennedy helped
to establish. However, while the Kennedy administration, like the
Eisenhower administration before it, was supportive of voter registration,
it was not prepared to offer federal protection to those who sought to
register — often in the face of violence, economic harassment, and, in
some cases, death. The murder of Herbert Lee in 1961 and the beating and
jailing of other voting rights activists had the desired effect. During
1962 and 1963, less than 4000 black voters were added to the rolls while
394,000 black adults in Mississippi remained unregistered. The
NAACP in Mississippi, under field director Medgar Evers, supported several
desegregation efforts during this period. In 1962 NAACP lawyers secured a
federal court order to gain the admission of the first African American to
the University of Mississippi. Riots engulfed the campus on the eve of
James Meredith's enrollment, claiming two lives and injuring hundreds of
others. The Kenne y administration sent federal troops to restore order,
and federal marshals remained on campus to project Meredith. The
desegregation of Ole Miss encouraged Evers to revive the campaign against
segregation in Jackson. SNCC workers offered training sessions for
sit-ins. In the spring of 1963, students sat in at Woolworth's and
attempted to gain admission to the public library and
"whites-only" public parks, and organized protest marches in
downtown Jackson. The demonstrators were beaten by police and arrested. On
June 12, 1963, as he returned from a strategy meeting, Medgar Evers was
gunned down in the driveway of his house. Martin
Luther King Jr.: Emergence as a National Leader
Martin
Luther King, Jr., with his brilliant ability to articulate the ideals of
the Southern movement to the nation at large, emerged as a national
spokesman of the movement. King's eloquence was joined by his ability to
bring media attention to flash points of peaceful black protesters and
white racists. On occasion, SCLC played a role in orchestrating these
confrontations. Such tactics caused resentment on the part of young
organizers laboring in communities over extended periods of time, beyond
the glare of national attention. Indeed, the intervention of King and SCLC
in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, the site of a major SNCC project, failed to
achieve any concessions and probably undermined some of the organizing
work that had been done. But Albany was a critical training ground for
Birmingham, Alabama, which became a pivotal battleground in the Civil
Rights Movement. Birmingham
In
1963 Birmingham was arguably the most segregated city in the nation and
the most racially violent. During the previous six years, there had been
18 unsolved bombings in black communities, winning it the nickname "Bombingham."
Police Commissioner Bull Connor was prepared to maintain the city's color
line at all costs. On
the invitation of Fred Shuttlesworth, the leading civil rights activist in
the city, King and the SCLC launched Project C (for
"Confrontation") in Birmingham early in the spring of 1963. A
boycott of downtown stores was launched at the peak of the Easter shopping
season, protesting the stores' refusal to hire black clerks, and
demonstrators protested the city's segregation laws in mass marches to
City Hall. Bull Connor secured a federal court order barring the
demonstrations, leading to the arrest of scores of protesters and of King
and several other SCLC leaders. From his cell King penned his famous
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail," in response to a group of
liberal white clergy who criticized the protests as ill-timed and charged
King and his associates with stirring up tensions between the races. In
his letter King distinguished the "type of constructive nonviolent
tension that is necessary for growth ... the type of tension in society
that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to
the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood." With regard
to the timing of the demonstrations, King acknowledged that he had
"yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was 'well-timed' in
view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of
segregation. For years now, I have heard the word 'Wait!' ring in the ear
of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always
meant 'Never.'" Yet
local black business leaders and some clergy were beginning to question
the value of the demonstrations. With the jails full, spirits flagging,
and bail money spent, they began pressuring King to call off the protests.
At this juncture James Bevel, a veteran of the Nashville sit-in movement,
suggested a strategy for reviving the protests: invite children to march.
Bevel reasoned that children had fewer constraints than their parents did.
Moreover, in King's words, exposing young people to the wrath of Connor's
police force would "subpoena the conscience of the nation." On
May 2, children and young adults from age 6 to 18 gathered at the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the movement headquarters, and marched to
downtown Birmingham. The police arrested more than 900 and carried them
off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. On the second day, more than
1000 young people stayed out of school and assembled at the church to
march. In an effort to abort the march, the police turned dogs and fire
hoses on the demonstrators as they left the church. The pressure of the
hoses, which was strong enough to strip the bark off trees, slammed
children to the ground and sent others sailing over parked cars. As
outrage spread through the black community, SCLC organizers struggled to
keep blacks from retaliating. With
more than 2000 people in jail, the marches were still growing larger. The
next major confrontation with the police occurred several days later in
downtown Birmingham. Once again the police turned attack dogs and fire
hoses on the demonstrators. Television coverage of the brutal police
assault on children shocked the nation, while photos and news reports
quickly spread around the world. With
Birmingham on the brink of a full-scale race riot, city businesses began
negotiating with King through a Kennedy administration intermediary. A
tentative agreement to desegregate downtown stores and employ black clerks
sparked a spate of bombings. With federal troops stationed on alert
outside the city, Mayor Albert Boutwell finally ratified the agreement and
repealed the city's segregation laws. In
the aftermath of Birmingham, mass demonstrations spread throughout the
South, involving more than 100,000 people. With Birmingham, the Civil
Rights Movement had irrevocably commanded the attention of the nation and
the world, opening the possibility for decisive legislative action. The Kennedy
Administration and Civil Rights Birmingham
marked a turning point for the Kennedy administration and its relationship
to the Civil Rights Movement. Nearly three years earlier, the election of
John F. Kennedy had raised the hopes of African Americans and their
allies. The youthful Kennedy had actively courted black voters and brought
vitality and a new vision to the presidency after eight years of Dwight
Eisenhower. Yet the new administration faced the legislative reality of a
Southern bloc that dominated key congressional committees whose support
was critical to the success of the president's agenda. The
Justice Department, under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, pursued a more
vigorous effort to enforce voting rights and school desegregation orders
than the previous administration; but the jurisdiction of the Justice
Department was limited. In any event, civil rights was not a priority
issue for the Kennedy administration during its early years, a time when
the cold war loomed large in presidential deliberations. If anything,
Kennedy was most inclined to placate and appease powerful Southern
Democrats. He bowed to the wishes of Senator James Eastland of Mississippi
and other like-minded Southern senators when making appointments to the
federal bench in the South, and appointed a number of arch
segregationists. They stood in contrast to moderate Republican judges like
Frank Johnson and Elbert Tuttle, Eisenhower appointees who actively
enforced civil rights law. By
June 1963, Kennedy was prepared to align himself and his presidency with
the struggle for civil rights. On June 12, the day that Governor George
Wallace attempted, unsuccessfully, to block the entrance of two black
students to the University of Alabama, Kennedy addressed the nation. In a
televised speech he told Americans that they could no longer ask black
citizens to "be content with the counsels of patience and
delay." He pledged that he would urge Congress to act on "the
proposition that race has no place in American life and law." Seven
days later he requested legislation from Congress that would ban
segregation in public facilities, broaden the powers of the Justice
Department to enforce school integration, and extend federal protection of
voting rights. The March
on Washington In
response to the momentous events of the spring, veteran civil rights
leader A. Philip Randolph broadened the agenda of a planned march on the
nation's capital for jobs and equal opportunity. Other civil rights
leaders joined with Randolph to orchestrate a mass gathering in Washington
calling for passage of civil rights legislation, immediate integration of
public schools in the South, and economic opportunity. On
August 28 an estimated quarter of a million people, black and white, from
all parts of the nation assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial in what
was, at that time, the largest peacetime gathering in America. The day
culminated with Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech "I Have a
Dream," in which he looked toward an America of racial harmony and
justice. Writer James Baldwin remembered the feeling: "For a moment
it almost seemed that we stood on a height and could see our
inheritance...." Malcolm X, who observed the march, commented to
Bayard Rustin, "You know, this dream of King's is going to be a
nightmare before it's over." Less
than a month after the March on Washington, the sense of foreboding
articulated by Malcolm X overshadowed the euphoria of that extraordinary
late summer day. On September 15 white terrorists dynamited the basement
of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church during Sunday School,
killing four young girls: Denise McNair and Cynthia Wesley, both 11 years
old, and Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, both 14. Dreading that
the families would blame him for exposing the children to risk, King
returned to Birmingham and presided over the funeral of the movement's
youngest victims. The
Movememt at High Tide: 1964-1965 During
1964 and 1965, the accelerated momentum of the Civil Rights Movement was
fueled by the escalation of organized protest activity in the South,
particularly in Mississippi and Alabama, and by the commitment of
President Lyndon Johnson to enact strong civil rights legislation. Civil
Rights Act of 1964 The
heightened expectations tied to the leadership of John F. Kennedy had been
brutally aborted on November 22, 1963, when the president was assassinated
in Dallas, Texas. Within days of assuming the office of the presidency,
Lyndon Baines Johnson, in an address to a joint session of Congress,
promised that Kennedy's commitment to civil rights would be carried
forward and translated into action. As a Southerner, Johnson did not
underestimate the opposition a strong civil rights bill would meet. But
none knew the workings of the Congress better than this former majority
leader of the U.S. Senate, and as a legislative strategist Johnson had no
equal. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, was struck by the
contrast between Kennedy and Johnson. While Kennedy talked "about the
art of the possible," Wilkins explained, "he didn't really know
what was possible and what wasn't on Capitol Hill." Johnson, in
comparison, "knew exactly what was possible, and how to get it."
Johnson
orchestrated a "no holds barred" campaign for a civil rights
bill, untainted by compromise. He enlisted the help of NAACP lobbyist
Clarence Mitchell and the formative Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
(LCCR), a broad coalition of veteran lobbyists representing labor, church,
and liberal groups. He held press conferences, directly enlisting the
public in this great effort, and brought the full weight of his power and
persuasive abilities to secure the votes of doubtful congressmen and
senators. The civil rights bill passed the House on February 10, 1964,
and, after much arm-twisting and ego stroking, it won Senate approval late
in June. On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the bill into law. The
Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in public facilities and
employment; authorized the attorney general to initiate suits to enforce
school integration; and allowed for the withholding of federal funds to
noncomplying schools. While the legislation was directed specifically at
removing the barriers to equal access and opportunity that affected
African Americans, the law vastly expanded the scope of federal protection
of the rights of women and other minority groups who experienced
discrimination. However, fearful that the issue of voting rights would
sink the legislation, the president and his allies in Congress postponed
action in that arena. Freedom
Summer
In
Mississippi, while efforts to register black voters stalled, the Congress
of Federated Organizations launched Freedom Vote in the fall of 1963. More
than 80,000 blacks participated in this mock election campaign and voted
for unofficial Freedom Party candidates. The Freedom Vote enabled many
black Mississippians who had never before voted to have the experience of
casting a ballot, while demonstrating that despite white claims to the
contrary, blacks were interested in voting. But it was clear that more
aggressive action was needed. Bob Moses recalled that by the end of 1963,
COFO organizers "were exhausted... They were butting up against a
stone wall, [with] no breakthroughs." In
an effort to revive a flagging movement, COFO launched the Summer Project
in 1964, which brought hundreds of student volunteers, mostly white, into
Mississippi to participate in a massive voter registration drive, with the
expectation that the media would follow. White Mississippi prepared as if
they were expecting an invasion. Freedom Summer, as it became known, was
punctuated with violence and terrorism as well as the dramatic growth of
black political participation — from the abduction and murder of three
civil rights workers in June to the establishment of a new party, the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The MFDP sent a full
delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, challenging the
seating of the delegation representing Mississippi's all-white party. The
failure of the MFDP to win its challenge, and the way in which the
president and key liberal Democrats attempted to undermine the challenge,
left many disillusioned with the national Democratic Party. But the MFDP
prepared the way for the expansion of black political enfranchisement in
Mississippi and led to major revisions in the Democratic Party convention
rules. Selma and
the Voting Rights Act of 1965 After
Lyndon Johnson's landslide win over Barry Goldwater in the 1964
presidential election, the Justice Department began preparing to develop
legislation around voting rights. However, the Southern movement ensured
that the issue moved to the top of the president's agenda; the final
battleground was Selma, Alabama. SNCC organizers had been working with the
Dallas County Voters League in Selma for nearly two years when Martin
Luther King Jr. and the SCLC arrived in Selma in January 1965. King began
a series of marches geared at bringing media attention to the violence and
discrimination that barred blacks from the polls. After several police
attacks on marchers and the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson by a police
officer, King planned to lead a march to Montgomery, the state capital,
and petition Governor George Wallace directly. On March 7, as the marchers
attempted to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge, they were clubbed by police
on horseback and driven back across the bridge. The scene flashed across
the country on the nightly news. Bloody Sunday, as it was named, mobilized
public opinion in support of federal legislation, and Johnson acted almost
immediately. The
president introduced a comprehensive voting rights bill to Congress on
March 15 with a speech that was televised across the nation. "Their
cause must be our cause, too," Johnson said. "Because it's not
just Negroes, but it's really all of us who must overcome the crippling
legacy of bigotry and injustice." Borrowing the words of the
movement's anthem, he concluded, "And, we shall overcome." Five
days later, with federal troops and marshals standing by, King led
marchers on the four-day-long march to Montgomery; 25,000 had joined by
the time they reached the capital. On August 6, President Johnson signed
the Voting Rights Act, which provided federal supervision of voter
registration practices, effectively opening up the polls to African
Americans throughout the South for the first time since the end of
Reconstruction. Aftermath
The
enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of
1965 reinforced the guarantees of full citizenship provided for in the
Reconstruction amendments nearly a century earlier, and marked the end of
the Jim Crow system in the South. The desegregation of public facilities
was swiftly implemented, and the rapid increase in black voting had
far-reaching consequences for politics in the South and the nation as
well. With the enforcement powers of the federal government greatly
enhanced, the desegregation of public schools proceeded steadily, though
"white flight" and the proliferation of private schools often
made integration an elusive goal. The
fall of Jim Crow in the South removed the most extreme manifestation of
racial discrimination and inequality, only to reveal deeply entrenched
patterns of racial discrimination woven deep into the fabric of national
life. For African Americans segregated in Northern cities and locked into
poverty, the gains of the Southern movement had little direct relevance.
Five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, black
frustration erupted into nearly a week of rioting in the Watts section of
Los Angeles; urban disturbances and rebellions followed in other cities
over the next three years. In 1968 the National Committee on Civil
Disorders (also known as the Kerner Commission), appointed by the
president, described "a nation moving towards two societies - one
black, one white, separate and unequal." The Civil Rights Movement vastly expanded the parameters of American democracy and the guarantees of citizenship, while also raising new challenges in an ongoing struggle to advance racial and economic justice. Martin Luther King Jr. carried his efforts forward in very different settings: supporting challenges to residential discrimination in Chicago; protesting America's involvement in Viet Nam; aiding striking garbage workers in Memphis; and developing plans for a Poor People's March on Washington, which went forward after his assassination in 1968. At the same time, the call for "Black Power" eclipsed the integrationist thrust of the early 1960s, focusing renewed attention on black political and economic empowerment, while heightened black consciousness and racial pride found expression in the cultural renaissance of the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. |