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The American
Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) refers to a set of events and reform
movements in the United States aimed at abolishing public and
private acts of racial discrimination against African
Americans; this article covers the phase of the movement between 1954 and 1968, particularly in the South. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted roughly
from 1966 to 1975, enlarged and gradually eclipsed the aims of the Civil Rights
Movement to include racial dignity, economic
and political
self-sufficiency,
and freedom from white authority. Several scholars refer to the Civil Rights
Movement as the Second Reconstruction, a name that alludes
to the Reconstruction after the Civil War.
In the last decade of the 19th century,
Democratic-controlled
states, mainly in the South, passed racially discriminatory laws. In the South, but
also elsewhere in the United States, racial violence
aimed at African Americans mushroomed. This period is sometimes referred to as
"the nadir of American race relations."
Elected, appointed, or hired government authorities began to require or permit
discrimination, specifically in the states of Texas, Louisiana,
Mississippi,
Alabama,
Georgia, Florida,
South
Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia,
Arkansas,
Tennessee,
Oklahoma,
and Kansas.
Required or permitted acts of discrimination against African Americans fell
mainly into four categories: (1) racial segregation – upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
in 1896 - which was legally mandated by southern states and by many local
governments outside the south; (2) voter suppression or disfranchisement
in the southern states; (3) denial of economic opportunity or resources
nationwide, and (4) private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed
at African Americans, which were often encouraged and seldom hindered by
government authorities. The combination in the southern states of overtly
racial laws, public and private acts of discrimination, marginal economic
opportunity, and racial violence became known as "Jim Crow".
The Southern "Jim Crow" regime remained almost entirely intact into
the early 1950s, and contributed to the Great Migration, a steady
northward flow of African Americans from the World War I
era onwards. The situation for African Americans outside the South was usually
somewhat better, though not always appreciably so.
The Civil Rights Movement prior to 1955
confronted discrimination against African Americans with a variety of
strategies. These included litigation and lobbying efforts by traditional organizations such as the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The crowning achievement of
these efforts was the legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
which overturned the "separate but equal" legal doctrine derived
from Plessy and made segregation legally
impermissible, but provided few practical remedies.
Private citizens, simultaneously
invigorated by the victory of Brown but frustrated by its lack of
immediate practical effect, increasingly rejected gradualist, legalistic
approaches as the primary tool to bring about desegregation
in the face of "massive resistance" by proponents of racial segregation and voter
suppression. In defiance, they adopted a combined strategy of direct action
with nonviolent
resistance known as civil disobedience. Acts of civil disobedience
produced crisis situations between practitioners and government authorities.
The authorities of federal, state, and local governments often had to respond
immediately to crisis situations, and the results were often in the
practitioner's favor. Some of the forms of civil disobedience employed included
boycotts,
beginning with the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956) in
Alabama; "sit-ins"
such as the influential Greensboro sit-in (1960) in North Carolina; and
marches,
such the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in
Alabama.
Noted legislative achievements
during this phase of the Civil Rights Movement were passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (minor in its
effects, but the first anti-discriminatory federal legislation since
Reconstruction), the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned
discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that restored
voting rights, the Immigration
and Nationality Services Act of 1965 that dramatically changed U.S.
immigration policy, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that banned
discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
Key
Events
Main article: Timeline of the American Civil Rights
Movement
Brown v. Board of Education, 1954
On May 17,
1954, the United States
Supreme Court handed down its decision regarding the case called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
(Topeka being a city in Kansas), in which the plaintiffs
charged that the education of black children in separate public schools from
their white counterparts was unconstitutional. The unanimous opinion of the
Court stated that the "segregation of white and colored children in public
schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is
greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the
races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group." Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896), which had established the segregationist "separate but equal" standard in general,
and Cumming v. Richmond County Board of
Education (1899), which had applied that standard to schools,
were ruled unconstitutional. The following year, in the case known as Brown II, the Court ordered segregation
to be phased out over time, "with all deliberate speed".
The Murder of Emmett Till, 1955
Main article: Emmett Till
Murders of African-Americans at
the hands of whites were still common in the 1950s and still unpunished
in large areas of the South. The murder of Emmett Till,
a teenage boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955 was different,
however: the age of the boy, the nature of his crime—allegedly whistling at a
white woman in a store—and his mother's decision to have the casket open at his
funeral, showing the beating that had been inflicted on her son by his two
white abductors before he was shot and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River on August 28
all made what might otherwise have been a routine statistic into a cause
célèbre. As many as 50,000 people may have viewed his body at the funeral
home in Chicago and many thousands more were exposed to the evidence of his
murder when a photograph of his corpse was published in Jet Magazine.
The two murderers were arrested
the day after Till's disappearance. They were acquitted a month later after the
jury of all white men
deliberated for sixty-seven minutes. The murder and subsequent acquittal
galvanized opinion in the North in the same way that the long campaign to free the
"Scottsboro Boys" had in the 1930s. After being
acquitted, the two murderers went on record as saying they were guilty; they
remained free under the basis of double
jeopardy.
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956
Main articles: Rosa Parks
and Montgomery Bus Boycott
On December 1,
1955, Rosa Parks
(the "mother of the Civil Rights Movement") refused to get up out of
her seat on a public bus to make room for white passengers. Parks was arrested,
tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance.
After word of this incident reached the black community, 50 African-American
leaders gathered and organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott to protest the
segregation of blacks and whites on public buses. The boycott lasted for 382
days (1956 was a leap year), until the local ordinance segregating African-Americans
and whites on public buses was lifted.
Mass action replacing litigation
That strategy, however, shifted
after Brown to "direct action"—primarily bus boycotts,
sit-ins,
freedom rides,
and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance and
civil disobedience—from 1955
to 1965.
In part this was the unintended result of the local authorities' attempt to
outlaw and harass the mainstream civil rights organizations throughout the Deep South.
The State of Alabama had effectively barred the NAACP from operating in
Alabama in 1956
by requiring it to give the state a list of its members, then enjoining it from
operating within the state when it failed to do so. While the United States
Supreme Court ultimately reversed the order, for a few years in the mid-1950s
the NAACP was unable to operate. In its place, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth began ACMHR, Alabama Christian Movemement for Human Rights in June 1956. (BCRI)
Churches and local grassroots
organizations stepped in to fill the gap, and brought with them a much more
energetic and broad-based style than the more legalistic approach of groups
such as the NAACP.
The most important step forward
was in Montgomery, Alabama, where longtime NAACP
activists Rosa Parks
and Edgar Nixon
prevailed on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott of
The leaders of the Montgomery
Improvement Association, Dr. King and Rev. John Duffy,
joined with other church leaders who had led similar boycott efforts, such as
Rev. C. K. Steele of Tallahassee and Rev. T. J. Jemison
of Baton Rouge, and other activists, such as Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker,
A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin
and Stanley Levison to
form the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference in 1957. The SCLC, with its headquarters in Atlanta,
Georgia, did not attempt to create a network of chapters, the way
the NAACP did, but offered training and other assistance for local efforts to
fight segregation, while raising funds, mostly from northern sources, to
support these campaigns. It made non-violence
both its central tenet and its primary method of confronting racism.
In 1957, Septima Clarke, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, with the help of the Highlander Folk School
began the first Citizenship Schools in South
Carolina's Sea Islands, to teach literacy to allow blacks
to pass voting tests. The program was an enormous success, tripling the number
of black voters on St. John Island. The program was taken over by
the SCLC and duplicated elsewhere.
Prison
reform
Mississippi State Penitentiary
at Parchman, then
known as Parchman Farm is known for the part it
played in the United States Civil Rights Movement. In the spring of
1961, Freedom Riders (civil rights workers) came to
the American
South to test the desegregation
of public facilities. By the end of June, 163 Freedom Riders had been convicted
in Jackson, Mississippi. Many were jailed in Parchman.
In 1970 the Civil Rights lawyer
Roy Haber began taking statements from inmates, which eventually ran to fifty
pages of details of murders,
rapes, beatings and other abuses suffered by the
inmates from 1969 to 1971 at Mississippi State Penitentiary. In a landmark case
known as Gates v. Collier (1972) four inmates
represented by Haber sued the superintendent of Parchman
Farm for violation of their rights under the United States Constitution. Federal Judge
William C. Keady found in favor of the inmates,
writing that Parchman Farm violated the civil rights
of the inmates by inflicting cruel and unusual punishment. He ordered
an immediate end to all unconstitutional conditions and practices. Racial segregation of inmates was abolished.
And the trustee system, which allow certain inmates to
have power and control over others, was also abolished.
The prison was renovated
in 1972 after the scathing ruling by Judge Keady in
which he wrote that the prison was an affront to 'modern standards of decency'.
Among other reforms, the accommodation was made fit for human habitation and
the system of 'trusties' (where lifers
were armed with rifles and set to guard other inmates) was abolished. [1]
Prison racism however was not
limited to the southern U.S. In integrated correctional facilities in northern
and western states, Blacks represented a disproportionate percentage of the
prisoners and were often treated as second class citizens at the hands of
several all white correctional officer staffs. Blacks also represented a
disproportionate number of death row inmates. As a result, Black Power
found a development inside of prison walls where gangs such as the Black Guerilla Family formed as a means of
depowering the prison system by organizing the Black inmates to take militant
action. Eldridge Cleaver's book Soul on Ice
was written off of experiences in California correctional facilities fueling
black militancy.
The extent at which racism
occurred in the northern and western states' correctional facilities was made
most apparent however occurred in September 1971 during the Attica prison riot in upstate New York.
The aftermath of the prison riots and the conditions in segregated facilities
called for reform in the penal system which to this day has not fully been
accomplished.
Desegregating Little Rock, 1957
Main article: Little Rock
Nine
Following the Supreme Court's
decision in Brown, the Little Rock, Arkansas school board voted
in 1957
to integrate the school system. The NAACP had chosen to press for integration
in Little Rock, rather than in the Deep South, because Arkansas was considered
a relatively progressive southern state. A crisis erupted, however, when Governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus called out
the National Guard on September 4
to prevent the nine African-American students who had sued for the right to
attend an integrated school from attending Little Rock's Central High School.
The nine students had been chosen to attend Central High because of their
excellent grades. On the first day of school, only one of the nine students
showed up because she did not receive the phone call about the danger of going
to school. She was harassed by whites outside the school and the police had to
take her away in a patrol car to protect her. Afterwards, the nine students had
to carpool to school and be escorted by military personnel in jeeps.
Faubus himself was not a dyed-in-the-wool
segregationist, but he had received significant pressure from the more
conservative wing of the Arkansas Democratic Party, which controlled politics
in that state at the time, after he had indicated the previous year that he
would investigate bringing Arkansas into compliance with the Brown
decision. Faubus took his stand against integration
and against the federal court order that required it.
Faubus's order set him on a collision course with
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was determined
to enforce the orders of the Federal courts, even though critics charged he was
lukewarm, at best, on the goal of desegregation of public schools. Eisenhower
federalized the National Guard and ordered them to return to their barracks.
Eisenhower then deployed elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to
protect the students.
The
students were able to attend high school, although they had to pass through a
gauntlet of spitting, jeering whites to arrive at school on their first day and
to put up with harassment from fellow students for the rest of the year.
Although federal troops escorted the students between classes, the students
were still teased and even attacked by white students when the soldiers weren't
around. One of the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown,
was expelled for dumping a bowl of chili on the head of a white student who was
harassing her in the school lunch line, among other incidents.
Only
one of the Little Rock Nine, Ernest Green, got the chance to graduate; after
the
[edit] Sit-ins and freedom rides
[edit] Sit-ins
Main article: Greensboro
Four
The
Civil Rights Movement received an infusion of energy when students in Greensboro, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta,
Georgia, began to "sit-in" at lunch counters in a few
local stores to protest those establishments' refusal to desegregate.
Protesters were encouraged to dress up, sit quietly, and occupy every other
stool so potential white sympathizers could join in. Many of these sit-ins
resulted in authority figures physically and brutally escorting them from the
lunch facility.
The
technique was not new—the Congress of Racial Equality had used it to
protest segregation in the Midwest in the 1940s—but it brought national
attention to the movement in 1960. The success of the Greensboro sit-in led to
a rash of student campaigns throughout the South. Probably the best organized
and disciplined of these, and the most immediately effective, was in Nashville, Tennessee. By the end of 1960
the sit-ins had spread to every southern and border state and even to Nevada, Illinois,
and Ohio.
Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but also on parks, beaches,
libraries, theaters, museums, and other public places. When they were arrested,
student demonstrators made "jail-no-bail" pledges to call attention
to their cause and to reverse the cost of protest, putting the financial burden
of jail space and food on the jailers.
Freedom Rides
Main article: Freedom
Riders
The
activists who had led these sit-ins formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee in 1960 to take these tactics of nonviolent confrontation
further. Their first campaign, in 1961, was conducting freedom rides,
in which activists traveled by bus through the deep
South to desegregate these companies' bus terminals, as required by federal
law. CORE's leader, James Farmer, supported the freedom rides, but backed out
at the last minute.
That
proved to be an enormously dangerous mission. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed,
forcing its passengers to flee for their lives. In Birmingham, where an FBI
informant reported that Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull"
Connor had encouraged the Ku Klux Klan to attack an incoming group of
freedom riders "until it looked like a bulldog had got a hold of
them," the riders were severely beaten. In eerily quiet Montgomery, a mob charged another bus load of
riders, knocking John Lewis unconscious
with a crate and smashing Life
photographer Don Urbrock in the
face with his own camera. A dozen men surrounded Jim Zwerg, a white
student from Fisk University, and beat him in the face with a
suitcase, knocking out his teeth.
The
freedom riders did not fare much better in jail, where they were crammed into
tiny, filthy cells and sporadically beaten. In Jackson, Mississippi, some male prisoners
were forced to do hard labor in 100-degree heat. Others were transferred to Mississippi State Penitentiary
at Parchman, where
their food was deliberately oversalted and their
mattresses were removed. Sometimes the men were suspended by "wrist
breakers" from the walls. Typically, the windows of their cells were shut
tight on hot days, making it hard for them to breathe.
The
student movement involved such celebrated figures as John Lewis, the
single-minded activist who "kept on" despite many beatings and
harassments; James Lawson, the revered "guru" of
nonviolent theory and tactics; Diane Nash, an articulate and intrepid public
champion of justice; Bob Moses, pioneer of voting registration in
Mississippi the most rural—and most dangerous—part of the South; and James Bevel,
a fiery preacher and charismatic organizer and facilitator.
Other prominent student activists included Charles McDew; Bernard Lafayette; Charles Jones; Lonnie King; Julian Bond
(associated with Atlanta University); Hosea
Williams (associated with Brown Chapel); and Stokely Carmichael,
who later changed his name to Kwame Ture.
Organizing in Mississippi
In 1962 Robert Moses, SNCC's
representative in Mississippi, brought together the civil rights organizations
in the state—SNCC, the NAACP, and CORE—to form COFO, the Council of Federated
Organizations. Mississippi was the most dangerous of all the southern states,
yet Moses, Medgar Evers
of the NAACP, and local activists embarked on door-to-door voter education
projects in rural Mississippi, while trying to recruit students to their cause.
Evers was murdered the following year.
James Meredith walking to class accompanied by
U.S. marshals
While
COFO was working at the grassroots level in Mississippi, Clyde Kennard
attempted to enter the University of Southern Mississippi.
He was deemed a racial agitator by the Mississippi State Sovereignty
Commission, convicted of a crime he didn't commit, and sentenced to
seven years in jail. He served three, and then was freed, but only because he
had intestinal cancer and the government of Mississippi didn't want him to die
in prison. Two years later, James
Meredith was successfully suing for admission to the University of Mississippi. He won that
lawsuit in September, 1962, and attempted to enter the campus on September 20, on
September 25, and again September 26, 1962, only to be blocked by Mississippi Governor Ross R.
Barnett, who proclaimed that "no school will be integrated in
Mississippi while I am your Governor". After the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
held both Barnett and Lieutenant Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr. in contempt, with
fines of more than $10,000 for each day they refused to allow Meredith to
enroll, Meredith, escorted by a force of U.S. Marshals, entered the campus on
September 30, 1962.
White
students and other whites began rioting that evening, throwing rocks at the
U.S. Marshals guarding Meredith at Lyceum Hall, then
firing on the marshals. Two persons, including a French journalist, were
killed, 28 marshals suffered gunshot wounds and 160 others were injured. After
the Mississippi Highway Patrol withdrew from the campus, President Kennedy sent
the regular Army to the campus to quell the uprising.
Meredith was able to begin classes the following day, after the troops arrived.
The Albany 1961-1967
Main article: Albany
Movement
The
SCLC, which had been criticized along with other mainstream civil rights
organizations by some student activists for its failure to participate more
fully in the freedom rides, committed much of its prestige and resources to a
desegregation campaign in Albany,
Georgia, in November 1961. King, who had been criticized personally
by some SNCC activists for his distance from the dangers that local organizers
faced—and given the derisive nickname "De Lawd"
as a result—intervened personally to assist the campaign led by both SNCC
organizers and local leaders.
The
campaign was a failure due to the canny tactics of Laurie Pritchett, the local
police chief, who successfully contained the movement without the sort of
violent attacks on demonstrators that inflamed national opinion, and divisions
within the black community. Prichett also contacted
every prison and jail within 60 miles of Albany and arranged for arrested
demonstrators to be taken to one of these jails, allowing plenty of room to
remain in his jail. In addition to these arrangements, Prichett
also foresaw King's presence as a danger, and forced his release to avoid
King's rallying the black community. King left in 1962 without achieving any
dramatic victories. The local movement, however, continued the struggle and
obtained significant gains in the next few years.
The Birmingham 1963-1964
Main article: Birmingham campaign
The
Albany movement proved to be an important education for the SCLC, however, when
it undertook the Birmingham campaign in 1963. The campaign focused
on one concrete goal—the desegregation of Birmingham's downtown
merchants—rather than total desegregation, as in Albany. It was also helped by
the brutal response of local authorities, in particular Eugene "Bull" Connor,
the Commissioner of Public Safety who had lost a recent election for mayor to a
less rabidly segregationist candidate, but refused to accept the new mayor's
authority.
The
campaign used a variety of nonviolent methods of confrontation, including
sit-ins, kneel-ins at local churches, and a march to the county building to
mark the beginning of a drive to register voters. The City, however, obtained
an injunction
barring all such protests. Convinced that the order was unconstitutional, the
campaign defied it and prepared for mass arrests of its supporters. King
elected to be among those arrested on April 12,
1963.
While
in jail, King wrote his famous (April 16) Letter from Birmingham Jail on the margins
of a newspaper, since he had not been allowed any writing paper while held in
solitary confinement by jail authorities..Supporters pressured the Kennedy
administration to intervene to obtain his release or better conditions. King
eventually was allowed to call his wife, who was recuperating at home after the
birth of their fourth child, and was released on April 19.
The
campaign, however, was faltering at this time, as the movement was running out
of demonstrators willing to risk arrest. SCLC organizers came up with a bold
and controversial alternative, calling on high school students to take part in
the demonstrators. When more than a thousand students left school on May 2 to join
the demonstrations in what would come to be called the Children's Crusade, more
than six hundred ended up in jail. This was newsworthy but with this first
encounter the police acted with restraint. On the next day however another
thousand students gathered at the church and Bull Connor unleashed police dogs
on them, then turned the city's fire hoses, set at a level that would peel bark
off a tree or separate bricks from mortar, on the children. Television cameras
broadcast the scenes of fire hoses knocking down schoolchildren and dogs
attacking individual demonstrators, with no means of protecting themselves, to
the nation.
Widespread
public outrage forced the Kennedy administration to intervene more forcefully
in the negotiations between the white business community and the SCLC. On May 10,
the parties announced an agreement to desegregate the lunch counters and other
public accommodations downtown, to create a committee to eliminate
discriminatory hiring practices, to arrange for the release of jailed
protesters, and to establish regular means of communication between black and
white leaders.
Not
everyone in the black community approved of the agreement—Fred Shuttlesworth was particularly critical, since he had
accumulated a great deal of skepticism about the good faith of Birmingham's
power structure from his experience in dealing with them. The reaction from
parts of the white community was even more violent. The Gaston
Motel, which housed the SCLC's unofficial headquarters, was bombed, as was the
home of King's brother, the Reverend A. D. King. Kennedy prepared to
federalize the Alabama National Guard, but did not follow
through. Four months later, on September 15,
Ku Klux Klan
members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
(see 16th Street Baptist Church bombing)
in Birmingham, killing four young girls.
Other
events of the summer of 1963:
On June 11,
1963, George
Wallace, Governor of Alabama, attempted to block the integration of the University of Alabama. President John F.
Kennedy sent enough force to make Governor Wallace step aside,
allowing the enrollment of two black students. That evening, JFK addressed the
nation on TV and radio with a historic civil rights speech.[2] The next day Medgar
Evers was murdered in Mississippi.[3] The next week as promised, on June 19,
1963, JFK submitted his
Civil Rights bill to Congress.[4]
The Kennedy Administration, 1960-63
Kennedy speaking to a Civil Rights crowd in front of the Justice Department building,
June 1963.
President
John F.
Kennedy's record of voting on issues of racial discrimination had
been, during the years preceding his election to the presidency, scant at best.
Kennedy openly confessed to his closest advisors that during the first months
of his presidency his knowledge of the civil rights movement was
"lacking".
For
the first two years of the Kennedy administration attitudes to both the President and Attorney-General,
Robert F. Kennedy, were mixed. On the one hand,
many viewed the administration with suspicion; a well of historical cynicism
toward white liberal politics had left a sense of uneasy disdain toward any
white politician who claimed to share the concerns for freedom held by
African-Americans, and yet there was also a strong sense that in the Kennedys
there was a new age of political dialogue to be experienced.
There
was a certain naivete on the part of the Kennedy
brothers, best demonstrated in Robert Kennedy's declaration in 1962 that, "the
Irish were not wanted here. Now an Irish Catholic is President of the United
States. There is no question about it, in the next forty years a Negro can
achieve the same position."[5]
Although
it has become common place to assert the phrase "The Kennedy
Administration" or even, "President Kennedy" when discussing the
legislative and executive support of the Civil Rights movement, between 1960
and 1963, a great many of the initiatives which occurred during President
Kennedy's tenure were as a result of the passion and determination of an
emboldened Robert Kennedy, who through his rapid education in the realities of
Southern racism, underwent a thorough conversion of purpose as
Attorney-General. Asked in an interview in May 1962, "What do you see as
the big problem ahead for you, is it Crime or Internal Security?" Robert
Kennedy replied, "Civil Rights."[6] The President came to share his brother's
sense of urgency on the matters at hand to such an extent that it was at the
Attorney-General's insistence that his made his famous address to the nation.[7].
During
the attack and burning, by a vast white mob, of the First Baptist Church in
Montgomery Alabama, at which King was in attendance with protestors, the
Attorney-General telephoned King to ask his assurance that they would not leave
the building until the US Marshalls and National Guard had secured the area.
King proceded to berate
Kennedy for "allowing the situation to continue". King later publicly
thanked Robert Kennedy for his commanding of the force despatched
to break up an attack which might otherwise have ended King's life. The
relationship between the two men was to undergo great change over the years
that they would know each other - from a position of mutual suspicion to one of
shared aspirations. For Dr King, Robert Kennedy initially represented the
'softly softly' approach that in former years had disabled the movement of
blacks against oppression in the US. For Robert Kennedy, King initially
represented what was then considered the unrealistic militancy which many in
the white-liberal camp had regarded as the cause of so little governmental
progress.
King
regarded much of the efforts of the Kennedys as an attempt to control the
movement; to siphon off its energies. Yet in time he came to find the efforts
of the brothers to be not only helpful but crucial. It was at Robert Kennedy's
constant insistence, through conversations with King and others,
that King came to recognise the fundamental
nature of electoral reform and suffrage - the need for black Americans to
actively engage not only protest but political dialogue at the higest levels. In time the President gained King's respect,
and the trust of the movement, via the frank dialogue and efforts of the
Attorney-General. Robert Kennedy became very much his brother's key advisor on
matters of racial equality - the President regarding the issue of civil rights
to be the function of the Attorney-General's office and not the sole policy
agenda of the executive branch.
With a
very slim majority in Congress, the President's ability to press ahead with
legislation relied very much on a balancing game with the Senators and
Congressmen of the South. Indeed, without the support of Vice-President
Johnson, many of the Attorney-General's programs would not have progressed at
all.
Frustration
at the slow pace of political change came, by late 1962, to be balanced by the
movement's strong support for legislative initiatives - housing rights,
administrative representation across all US Government departments, safe
conditions at the ballot box, pressure on the courts to prosecute racist
criminals. To which end King was to remark, by the end of the year, "This
administration has reached out more creatively than its predecessors to blaze
new trails [in voting rights and government appointments]. Its vigorous young
men have launched imaginative and bold forays and displayed a certain elan in the attention they give to civil rights
issues."[8]
From
squaring off against Governor George
Wallace to "tearing into" Vice-President Johnson
(for failing to desegregate areas of the administration) to threatening corrupt
white Southern judges with disbarment, to desegregating interstate transport,
Robert Kennedy came to be consumed by the Civil Rights movement to such an
extent that he was to carry it forward into his own bid for the Presidency in
1968. On the night of Governor Wallace's capitulation, President gave an
address to the nation which marked the changing tide, an address which was to
become a landmark for the change in political policy which ensued. In it President Kennedy spoke of the need to act decisively
and to act now:
"We
preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom
here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to
each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we
have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste
system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes? Now the
time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham
and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or State or
legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them."[[1]].
Assassination
was to cut short the life and careers of both of the Kennedy brothers and that
of Martin Luther King, Jr. But not before the essential groundwork of the Civil
Rights Act 1964 had been initiated, and a greater sense of the dire need for
political and administrative reform had been driven home on Capitol Hill by the
combined efforts of the Kennedy administration together with Dr King.
After
the Assassination of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy undertook a 1966 tour of
South Africa in which he championed the cause of the anti-Apartheid movement.
The tour was greeted with international praise at a time when few politicians
dared to entangle themselves in the dirty politics of racist South Africa.
Kennedy spoke out against the oppression of the native population and was
welcomed by the black population as though a visiting head of state. In an
interview with LOOK Magazone he had this to say:
"At
the University of Natal in Durban, I was told the church to which most of the
white population belongs teaches apartheid as a moral necessity. A questioner
declared that few churches allow black Africans to pray with the white because
the Bible says that is the way it should be, because God created Negroes to
serve. "But suppose God is black", I replied. "What if
we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior,
and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our
response?" There was no answer. Only silence."[9]
The March on Washington
Main article: March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom
.
Philip Randolph had planned a March on Washington in 1941 in support of demands
for elimination of employment discrimination in defense industries; he called
off the march when the Roosevelt administration met the demand by
issuing Executive Order 8802 barring racial
discrimination and creating an agency to oversee compliance with the Order.
Randolph
and Bayard Rustin were the chief planners of the second March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom, which they proposed in 1962. The Kennedy
administration applied great pressure on Randolph and King to call it off, but
without success. The march was held on August 28,
1963.
Unlike
the planned 1941 march, for which Randolph included only black-led
organizations in the planning, the 1963 march was a collaborative effort of all
of the major civil rights organizations, the more progressive wing of the labor
movement, and other liberal organizations. The march had six official goals:
"meaningful civil rights laws, a massive federal works program, full and
fair employment, decent housing, the right to vote, and adequate integrated
education." Of these, the March's real focus was on passage of the civil
rights law that the Kennedy administration had proposed after the upheavals in
Birmingham.
The
march was a success, although not without controversy. More than 200,000
demonstrators gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered
his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. While many
speakers applauded the Kennedy Administration for the (largely ineffective)
efforts it had made toward obtaining new, more effective civil rights
legislation protecting the right to vote and outlawing segregation, John Lewis
of SNCC took the Administration to task for how little it had done to protect
southern blacks and civil rights workers under attack in the Deep South. While
he toned down his comments under pressure from others in the movement, his
words still stung:
We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of,
for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here—for they have no money
for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages…or no wages
at all. In good conscience, we cannot support the administration's civil rights
bill.
This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs
and fire hoses when engaging in peaceful demonstrations. This bill will not
protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a
police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been
arrested on trumped-up charges like those in Americus, Georgia, where four
young men are in jail, facing a death penalty, for engaging in peaceful
protest.
I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is
a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets
and put it in the courts. Listen Mr. Kennedy, the black masses are on the march
for jobs and for freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won't
be a 'cooling-off period'.
After
the march, King and other civil rights leaders met with President Kennedy at
the White House. While the Kennedy administration appeared to be sincerely
committed to passing the bill, it was not clear that it had the votes to do it.
But when President Kennedy was assassinated November 22,
1963,[4] the new President Lyndon Johnson decided to and did use his power
in Congress to bring about much of JFK's legislative agenda in 1964 and 1965 much to the public's
approval.
Mississippi
Main article: Freedom
Summer
COFO
brought more than a hundred college students, many from outside the state, to
Mississippi in the summer of 1964 ("Freedom
Summer") to join with local activists to register voters, teach
in "Freedom Schools" and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
The work was as dangerous as ever: three civil rights workers, James Chaney,
a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two white
volunteers, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College anthropology student; and Michael Schwerner, a social worker from Manhattan's
Lower East
Side, were murdered by members of the Klan, some of them members of
the Neshoba
County sheriff's department, on June 21,
1964.
The
national uproar caused by their disappearance forced the Federal Bureau of Investigation
to investigate, even though President Johnson
had to use indirect threats of political reprisals against J. Edgar
Hoover to force him to do so. After paying at least one participant
in the crime for details about the murders, the FBI found their bodies on August 4
in an earthen dam outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman had been shot once; Chaney, the lone
African-American, had been savagely beaten and shot three times. The FBI also
discovered in the course of its investigation the bodies of a number of other
Mississippi blacks whose disappearances had been reported over the past several
years without attracting any attention outside their local communities.
The
disappearance of these three activists remained in the public eye for the month
and-a-half until their bodies were found. Johnson used the outrage over their
deaths and his formidable political skills to bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2, which bars discrimination
in public accommodations, employment and education. It also had a section about
voting, but voting was addressed more substantially by the Voting Rights Act of 1965
Johnson
signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6.
The 1965 Act suspended poll taxes, literacy tests and other voter tests and
authorized federal supervision of voter registration in states and individual
voting districts where such tests were being used. African-Americans who had
been barred from registering to vote finally had an alternative to the courts.
If voting discrimination occurred, the 1965 Act authorized the Attorney General of the United States
to send federal examiners to replace local registrars. Johnson reportedly
stated to associates that signing the bill had lost the South for the
Democratic Party for the foreseeable future.
The
Act, however, had an immediate and positive impact for African-Americans.
Within months of its passage on August 6, 1965, one quarter of a million new
black voters had been registered, one third by federal examiners. Within four
years, voter registration in the South had more than doubled. In 1965, Mississippi
had the highest black voter turnout—74%—and led the nation in the number of
black public officials elected. In 1969, Tennessee had a 92.1% turnout; Arkansas,
77.9%; and Texas,
73.1%.
Several
Whites who opposed the voting rights act paid an immediate price as well. Sheriff Jim Clark of Alabama
who was infamous for using fire hoses and cattle prods to counteract civil
rights marches was up for reelection in 1966. Taking off the
notorious "Never" pin on his uniform to get the Black portion of the
vote, he was unsuccessful. At the election poll, he lost as Blacks voted for
the sake of just taking him out of office by any means possible.
Blacks
winning the right to vote changed the political landscape of the South forever.
When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, barely 100 African-Americans held
elective office in the U.S.; by 1989, there were more than 7,200, including more than 4,800 in
the South. Nearly every Black Belt county in Alabama had a black
sheriff, and southern blacks held top positions within city, county, and state
governments. Atlanta had a black mayor, Andrew Young,
as did Jackson,
Race
riots, 1963-1970
Throughout
the Civil Rights Movement, many acts were signed into legislation guaranteeing
equality for black citizens. Enforcement of these acts, especially in Northern
cities was another issue altogether. After World War II,
more than half of the country's black population lived in Northern and Western
cities rather than Southern rural areas. Coming to these cities for better job
opportunities and a lack of legal segregation, blacks often did not receive the
lifestyle that they had come for.
While
blacks were free from segregation and terror at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan,
other problems often presided. Urban black neighborhoods were in fact amongst
the worst and poorest in any major city. These neighborhoods were ghettos
rampant with unemployment and crime. Blacks rarely owned any neighborhood
stores or businesses, and often worked menial or blue-collar jobs for a
fraction of the pay that their white co-workers received. Blacks often made
only enough money to live in the most dilapidated housing or public housing.
Blacks often also were eligible for welfare, being unable to find a well
paying job. The use of illegal drugs such as cocaine
and heroin
was out of control in black neighborhoods before large-scale numbers of whites
ever began experimenting with them. Liquor stores were also in abundance,
adding to the lack of opportunity for blacks that was
in place. Blacks attended schools that were often the worst academically in the
city and had very few white students inside of them. Worst of all, black
neighborhoods were subject to police problems that white neighborhoods were not
at all accustomed to dealing with. The police forces in America were set up
with the motto "To Protect and Serve." Rarely did this occur in any
black neighborhoods. Rather, many Blacks felt police only existed to
"Patrol and Control." The racial makeup of the police departments,
usually largely white, was a huge factor here. Up until 1970, no urban police
force in America was greater than 10% black, and in most black neighborhoods,
blacks accounted for less than 5% of the police on patrol. Arrests merely for
being black were common, and as a result of racist police harassment and all
the other listed factors causing a poor living standard, rioting eventually
broke out.
One of
the first major race riots took place in Harlem, New York,
in the summer of 1964.
A white Irish-American police officer named Thomas Gilligan shot a 15-year-old
black named James Powell for allegedly charging at him with a knife. In fact,
Powell was unarmed and as a result, an angry mob approached the precinct
station house and demanded Gilligan's suspension. When it was refused, many
local stores were ransacked. Even though this precinct had promoted the NYPD's first black station commander, the
neighborhood people were tired of the inequalities in place, and were so
enraged that they looted and burned anything that was not black-owned in the
neighborhood. This riot later spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant, the main black neighborhood
in Brooklyn,
and during that same summer, riots broke out also in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for similar
reasons.
The
following year, 1965
President Johnson signed the Voting Rights
Act, but conditions for blacks had not improved for several
neighborhoods. This time, in the South Central Los Angeles
neighborhood of Watts,
another riot broke out. Watts, like Harlem, was subject to impoverished living
conditions where unemployment and drugs were rampant and the neighborhood was
subject to the patrol of a largely white police department. The police, who
were arresting a young man for drunk driving, argued with the suspect's mother
before onlookers. The result was a massive destruction of property which lasted
six days. Thirty-four people were killed and property valued at about $30
million was destroyed, making the Watts riot one of the worst in American
history.
With
black militancy on the rise, several acts of anger were now directed at the
police. Black residents growing tired of police brutality continued to riot and
even began to join groups such as the Black Panthers
solely to rid their neighborhoods of oppressive white police officers. Now,
blacks had not only began rioting but also began murdering white police who
were believed to be racist and brutal, while shouting words such as "honky" and
"pig" towards the officers.
Rioting
continued through 1966
and 1967
in cities such as Atlanta, San Francisco,
Oakland, Baltimore, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati,
Columbus, Newark, Chicago,
New York City
(specifically in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx)]], and worst of all in Detroit. In Detroit, several blacks had
previously received jobs in automobile assembly lines, so a comfortable black
middle class was living well. However, all the blacks who had not moved upward
were living in even worse conditions subject to the same problems as blacks in
Watts and Harlem. When white police officers murdered a black pimp and brutally
shut down an illegal bar on a liquor raid, black residents got extremely
angered and began a new riot. The Detroit riot was so bad that it was one of
the first major cities where whites began to leave in a sense of "white flight"
because the riot seemed threatening enough to burn down white neighborhoods as
well. Cities such as Detroit, Newark, and Baltimore now have a less than 40%
White population as a result of these riots. To this day, these cities contain
some of the worst living conditions for blacks anywhere in America.
Fresh
rioting broke out in April 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered by
alleged white supremacist, James Earl Ray. This time a riot broke out in
every major city at once, but the cities that were burned the worst include
Chicago, Cleveland,
and Washington, D.C. As a result of the numerous
riots, President Johnson had created the National
Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1967. The commission's
final report called for major reforms in employment and public assistance sent
to black communities everywhere, saying that the United States was moving
toward separate white and black societies.
Affirmative Action helped in the hiring process
of more black police officers in every major city, and as a result, blacks make
up a majority of the police departments in cities such as Baltimore,
Washington, New Orleans, Atlanta, Newark, and Detroit. While many are glad at
this development, many criticize the hiring of these officers as a method of
appeasement and covering up racism at the hands of the police departments.
Employment discrimination in modern times is less of a problem but still at
times happens. Illegal drugs are still rampant in black neighborhoods, but
statistics now show that whites are as likely if not more so
to experiment than blacks. Overall, improvements have been made in every
city affected by these riots, but work is still to be done so that inequality
can one day maybe disappear completely.
[edit] Black power, 1966
Main article: Black Power
At the
same time King was finding himself at odds with factions of the Democratic Party,
he was facing challenges from within the Civil Rights Movement to the two key
tenets upon which the movement had been based: integration and non-violence.
Black activists within SNCC and CORE had chafed for some time at the influence
wielded by white advisors to civil rights organizations and the
disproportionate attention that was given to the deaths of white civil rights
workers while black workers' deaths often went virtually unnoticed. Stokely Carmichael, who became the leader of SNCC in 1966,
was one of the earliest and most articulate spokespersons for what became known
as the "Black Power" movement after he used that
slogan, coined by activist and organizer Willie Ricks,
in Greenwood, Mississippi on June 17,
1966.
In 1966 SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael also took Black Power to another level.
He urged African American communities to confront the
white supremacist group known as the Ku Klux Klan
armed and ready for battle because he felt it was the only way to ever rid the
communities of the terror caused by the Klan. Listening to this, several Blacks
confronted the Ku Klux Klan armed and as a result the Klan
stopped terrorizing their communities.
Several
people engaging in the Black Power movement started to gain more of a sense in
Black pride and identity as well. In gaining more of a sense of a cultural
identity, several Blacks demanded that Whites no longer refer to them as
"Negroes" but as "Afro-Americans." Up
until the mid-1960s, Blacks had dressed similarly to whites and combed their
hair straight. As a part of gaining a unique identity, Blacks now
started to wear loosely fit Dashikis which were a multi-colored
African clothing and had started to grow their hair out as a natural Afro. The Afro, sometimes nicknamed
the "'fro," remained a popular black hairstyle until the late 1970s.
Black
Power was made most public however by the Black Panther Party which founded in Oakland, California in 1966. This group followed
ideology stated by Malcolm X and the Nation of
Islam using a "by-any-means necessary" approach to
stopping inequality. They sought to rid African
American neighborhoods of Police
Brutality and had a ten-point plan amongst other things. Their dress
code consisted of leather jackets, berets, light blue shirts, and an Afro hairstyle. They are
best remembered for setting up free breakfast programs, referring to white
police officers as "pigs", displaying shotguns and a black power
fist, and often using the statement of "Power to the people."
Black
Power was taken to another level inside of prison walls. In 1966, George Jackson formed the Black Guerilla Family in the California
prison of San Quentin.
The goal of this group was to overthrow the White ran government in America and
the prison system in general. This group also preaches the general hatred of
Whites and Jews everywhere. In 1970, this group displayed their ruthlessness after a White
prison guard was found not guilty for shooting three black prisoners from the
prison tower. The guard was found murdered in pieces and a message of how
serious the group is was heard throughout the whole prison. This group also
masterminded the 1971
Attica riot in New York
which led to a takeover of the Attica prison. To this day, the Black Guerilla Family
is one of the most feared and infamous advocates of Black Power behind prison
walls.
Also
in 1968,
Tommie Smith
and John Carlos,
while being awarded the gold and bronze medals, respectively, at the 1968 Summer Olympics, donned human rights
badges and each raised a black-gloved Black Power salute during their podium
ceremony. Incidentally, it was the suggestion of white silver medalist, Peter Norman
of Australia,
for Smith and Carlos to each wear one black glove. Smith and Carlos were
immediately ejected from the games by the USOC, and later the IOC issued a permanent
lifetime ban for the two. However, the Black Power movement had now been given
a stage on live, international television.
King
was not comfortable with the "Black Power" slogan, which sounded too
much like black nationalism to his ears. SNCC
activists, in the meantime, began embracing the "right to
self-defense" in response to attacks from white authorities, and booed
King for continuing to advocate non-violence. When King was murdered in 1968, Stokely
Carmichael stated that Whites murdered the one person who would prevent rampant
rioting and burning of major cities down and that Blacks
would now burn every major city to the ground. In every major city from Boston to San Francisco,
racial riots broke out in the Black community following King's death and as a
result, "White Flight" occurred from several cities leaving Blacks in
a dilapidated and nearly unrepairable city.
Memphis
Main article: Poor People's Campaign
Rev.
James Lawson invited King to Memphis, Tennessee, in March, 1968, to support
a strike by sanitation
workers who had launched a campaign for union
representation after two workers accidentally were killed on the job. A day
after delivering his famous "Mountaintop" sermon at Lawson's church,
King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Riots broke out in over 110 cities across the United
States in the days that followed, notably in Chicago, Baltimore, and in Washington, D.C.
Rev.
Ralph Abernathy succeeded King as the head of the SCLC and attempted to carry
forth King's plan for a Poor People's March, which would have united
blacks and whites to campaign for fundamental changes in American society and
economic structure. The march went forward under Abernathy's plainspoken
leadership, but is widely regarded as a failure.