THE
CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (1954-1965)
This is an interactive chapter. You
can read more information about any topic that is underlined. Use the version of the chapter on the webpage
to access hyperlinks that will take you to the additional information.
Brown
v. Board of Education (1954)
For half a decade following Plessy, blacks had little success
challenging the separate but equal doctrine; however, there were successful
court challenges when the facilities afforded to blacks were clearly
inferior. In 1914, the Supreme Court
upheld a challenge to a railway company that provided sleeping cars for white
customers but none for blacks, and in 1941 an interstate carrier was
successfully sued by a black congressman who held a first class ticket but was
forced to move to a black-only car when his train crossed the border from
Illinois to Arkansas. The Court ruled
that his rights were violated because the railway did not provide a first class
car for blacks.
Read more
about Jim Crow America
In addition to segregated public accommodations, the law
in many states also mandated segregated schools. In 1908, Berea
College, a small Christian school
in Kentucky, challenged a state
law that forbade it from teaching black and white students together, but the
Supreme Court upheld the law. In the
1930s, the NAACP
(National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), under the
leadership of Charles Houston, Dean of the Howard
University Law School
in Washington, D.C.,
began a campaign to challenge the legality of school segregation. Rather than directly attacking segregation in
all schools, the NAACP legal team focused on examples that showed both gross
inequality and were less challenging to white fears that the integration of the
schools would lead to the “race-mixing” of young blacks and whites. For this reason, most of the early cases
focused on blacks who had been denied admittance to state-supported graduate
schools. In the first case, a black man,
Lloyd Gaines, had been denied admission to the University of
Missouri Law School solely due to his race.
When he sued for admittance, the state refused but offered to pay his
tuition to an out-of-state law school that accepted blacks. Gaines refused to accept this proposal,
insisting that he be permitted to attend the most prestigious school in his
state. In upholding his challenge, the
Court ruled that Missouri had
violated the equal protection clause because “a privilege has been created for
white law students which is denied to Negroes because
of their race.” In the next major case, Heman
Sweatt had been refused admittance to the University of Texas Law School, and when a state court ordered him to
be admitted, Texas announced
plans to build a separate black law school.
Sweatt sued in federal court, claiming that
the new law school would lack the prestige and experienced faculty of the white
law school. The Supreme Court ordered Sweatt admitted to the white school, noting that: “It is
difficult to believe that one who had a free choice between these law schools
would consider the question close.” At
the same time that the Court heard the Sweatt case,
they also heard a challenge from a man who had been admitted to the University
of Oklahoma’s Graduate School of
Education but was forced to sit alone in the classrooms, library, and cafeteria
in areas roped off with a sign “Reserved for Colored.” In ruling that G.W. McLaurin’s
rights had been violated by this treatment, the Court noted that the
restrictions “impair and inhibit [his] ability to study, to engage in
discussion and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn
his profession.” The decisions in these
cases dealt a powerful blow to the legal position that separate could ever be
equal.
With its successes in higher education cases, the NAACP
and its lead attorney Thurgood
Marshall turned its attention to segregation affecting public school
children. Five separate cases from Kansas,
South Carolina, Virginia,
Delaware, and the District
of Columbia all had reached the Supreme Court by
1952. In each case, lower courts had
ruled that the educational opportunities afforded black students were not
unequal to those provided whites and therefore, under Plessy v. Ferguson, were not in violation of the Fourteenth
Amendment. The NAACP now sought a direct
overrule of Plessy
and a statement that separate facilities were unconstitutional regardless of
their “equality.” Four of the cases were
combined in what became known as Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
A significant obstacle for the NAACP to overcome was the
need to demonstrate the actual damaging effects of segregation on black
children. To do this, Columbia
University psychologist Kenneth
Clark conducted
research with two dolls, identical except for their skin color. Clark’s research
demonstrated that black children raised in segregated environments tended to
attribute positive characteristics to the white doll and negative ones to the
black doll.
A year and a half after hearing initial arguments, in a
unanimous decision, the Court struck down Plessy as it applied to school
segregation. Writing for the Court,
Chief Justice Earl Warren stated that: “Separate educational facilities are
inherently unequal.” Warren
based his conclusion in part on Dr. Clark’s that confirmed that segregation reinforced
a feeling of inferiority among black children.
Warren wrote in the
decision: “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications
solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their
status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way
unlikely to ever be undone.”
Despite the Court’s clear ruling, Southern whites were
determined to resist change. Governor
Herman Talmadge of Georgia
called the decision a “mere scrap of paper,” and Governor James Byrnes of South
Carolina said “Ending segregation would mark the end
of civilization in the South as we have known it.” White Citizen’s Councils were organized in most southern communities to resist
any type of change. These organizations
consisted of leading politicians and businessmen. One of its leaders said that its purpose was “to
make it difficult, if not impossible, for any Negro who advocates desegregation
to find and hold a job, get credit, or renew a mortgage.” As Charles Houston had earlier predicted, the
Court decision would have little immediate impact upon many blacks: “Nobody
needs to explain to a Negro the difference between the law in the book and the
law in action.”
In fact,
there was very little progress for blacks immediately followed the Brown Decision. Southern leaders refused to change, and the
Court allowed delay in implementation.
The president, Dwight Eisenhower, was against any rapid, forced change as
well: “I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision set back progress in the
South at least fifteen years.” In most
areas of the South, blacks were intimidated and afraid to even attempt to exercise
their rights.
The Murder of Emmett Till
(1955)
Challenges to the system,
however, were bound to occur. The first occurred
in one of the most unlikely places, the state of Mississippi. Mississippi
had the reputation as the most racist state in the country. Blacks outnumbered whites until World War II,
and whites were determined to keep them powerless, often resorting to
violence. Blacks were lynched for simple
offenses like stealing food or talking back to a white person. In 1955, two NAACP members were lynched for
trying to register black voters
Emmett Till was a fourteen year
old boy from Chicago who was unfamiliar
with southern segregation. After finishing
eighth grade, Till and his cousin, Wheeler Parker,
went to Money, Mississippi to
visit their great uncle, Mose Wright. There, the two teenagers went to Bryant’s
Grocery and Meat Market where they played checkers outside with other boys. Till had a picture of his classmates and
bragged to the southern black boys that a white girl in the photo was his girlfriend.
Obviously, they didn’t believe him and
dared him to go into the store and talk to the pretty young storekeeper,
Carolyn Bryant. Till took the dare, and went
into the store. What happened next is
not entirely clear as Till allegedly either squeezed Mrs. Bryant’s hand and
said: “How about a date, baby,” whistled at her, or said “Bye Baby” to her as
he left. Aghast, an old black man warned
the children that she would “blow his brains out,” and the boys fled.
Three days later, Carolyn’s husband,
Ron Bryant and brother, J.W. Milam, came to Mose
Wright’s house and took Till away despite Wright’s
pleas. Three days later, Emmett Till’s
body was found in the Tallahatchie River,
tied to a seventy‑five pound cotton gin fan. He had been badly beaten and shot in the
head. The body was so disfigured that Mose Wright could only identify it because of Till’s ring.
Bryant and
Milam were arrested, and the gruesome lynching even horrified white Mississippians,
as the two men originally had trouble getting an attorney to take their case. The murder became a national story when Till’s
mother, Mamie Bradley, ordered the body shipped back
to Chicago for burial. She elected to leave the coffin open,
displaying Till’s badly disfigured face, “so the world could see what they did
to my boy.” A horrifying picture of Till’s corpse was printed in a popular black
magazine. Northerners of both
races called for an end to barbarism in Mississippi
and the swift punishment of Till’s murderers.
These statements soon produced a backlash in Mississippi
as whites condemned criticism of their state as a “communist plot to destroy
southern society.”
The Till
murder trial began on September 19, 1955.
Testifying against a white in court usually meant death for a black person
in Mississippi, but Mose Wright identified Bradley and Milam as the men who had
taken Till away.
It was the first time in Mississippi
history that a black man had accused a white of murder since
Reconstruction. Other blacks testified,
including Till’s mother, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion. After a five day trial, the all-white jury
found Bradley and Milam innocent after deliberating just over an hour. The two men
later admitted the murder to a reporter for a cash payment of $4,000. The Till Case had many repercussions. Northerners could not ignore the violence of
southern segregation, and Wright’s willingness to testify had broken a barrier
for southern blacks.
The Montgomery
Bus Boycott (1955-1956)
Like almost
all aspects of southern life, city buses were segregated in the South. The routine for entering the busses was particularly
humiliating. Blacks paid at the front
and were then required to exit the bus and reenter in the rear. Blacks sat in the rear, whites in the front,
but there was no fixed barrier. As more
whites got on the bus, blacks were expected to give up their seats and move to
the rear. This practice angered blacks
who made up 75% of the bus customers in major southern cities like Montgomery,
Alabama.
A one week boycott by blacks
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
had led to a “first-come-first-served” policy in 1953.
The
local NAACP in Montgomery, led by
Rev. E.D. Nixon, wanted to challenge the legality of bus segregation in the
courts. Nixon was preparing to defend
fifteen year old Claudette Colvin after she was arrested in early 1955 for
refusing to give up her seat to a white person but he dropped his plans when
she was found to be pregnant. Rosa Parks
was arrested for the same
offense on December 1, 1955. Parks was a
forty-two year old seamstress who had previously worked as Nixon’s secretary in
the Montgomery NAACP. After Parks’ arrest,
Nixon and Rev. Ralph Abernathy decided
to organize a one day bus boycott in protest on the date of her trial. 35,000 handbills were distributed at black
churches before the December 5 boycott, and the action proved to be a huge
success as almost none of the 40,000 blacks who regularly rode the buses did so
on that Monday. In light of the boycott’s
overwhelming success, black leaders met that night and agreed to continue the
boycott. They formed the Montgomery
Improvement Association (MIA) to coordinate the boycott and elected Martin
Luther King, Jr. its leader.
King was a twenty-six-year-old minister in his first year at the Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church. New to town, it was thought that King’s
leadership would avoid existing rivalries in the black community. King had a doctorate in theology from Boston
University as well as a reputation
as an excellent public speaker.
The
MIA made three demands: first-come-first-served seating with whites in front
and blacks in the rear, courteous treatment from drivers, and that black
drivers be considered for primarily black routes. These modest demands were rejected by the
Montgomery City Council on December 8, and segregationists fought back against
the boycott. King’s home was bombed on
January 31, as was Nixon’s the next day.
King and eighty-eight others were arrested on February 21 for the
violation of an anti-boycott law. Found
guilty, he immediately appealed the $500 fine.
King’s arrest made the bus boycott a national news event, and the bus
company and city businessmen were soon hurt financially by the boycott. The boycott lasted over a year, as the NAACP
pursued a court decision declaring the bus segregation illegal. This finally occurred when the Supreme Court
ruled on November 13, 1956. The boycott
ended on December 20, 1956 when the buses were integrated. Some violence resulted, as snipers fired at
buses and five black churches were bombed as was Rev. Abernathy’s home. Blacks in other cities, however, saw the
power of the boycott to fight segregation, and Dr. King became a national
figure. Elected the leader of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Dr. King became viewed as the
leader of black’s aspirations to overturn the edifice of Jim Crow. The Montgomery Bus Boycott proved to be an
important turning point in history. For
the first time, large umbers of blacks had worked together to fight racism and
won. In addition, the movement acquired
an articulate spokesman.
Little
Rock (1957)
Little
Rock, Arkansas was one of the
first southern cities to begin desegregating its public schools. The city had a progressive reputation, blacks
served on the police force, one-third of the black population was registered to
vote, and city parks, libraries, public housing, and even some neighborhoods
were integrated. The school board
announced that Central High School, located in a working class area of the
city, would be integrated in the fall of 1957, while a new school, Hall High
School, on the upper-middle class west side would remain all white.
White
opposition to school integration in
Little Rock was led by the Capital Citizens’ Council, and Governor Orval Faubus, who faced re-election every two years, was
nervous about the public reaction to desegregation. In 1956 Faubus, who had been viewed as a
moderate on racial issues, released a poll that showed 85% of the whites
opposed integration and announced his opposition to the plan. The school board began to delay implementation
plans, but the local NAACP chapter, led by Daisy Bates, sued the school board and won.
As
the controversy grew, only 75 black students applied to go to Central
High School. The white school board screened this number
down to 25, attempting to pick students who had the best chance of academic
success. By the fall, threats against
students and their parents reduced the number to nine. After a federal district court reversed a
local court’s decision to delay the integration, Governor Faubus announced that
he would use the state’s national guard to bar blacks
from Central High, warning that “Blood will run in the streets if Negro pupils
should attempt to enter Central High
School.”
School
started on September 4 as an angry crowd assembled outside the school, taunting
black students as the guard refused to allow them to enter. Eight of the students had met at Mrs. Bates’
home and had come to school with a police escort. One student, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth
Eckford, whose family had no phone, had failed to get the message to meet
the others and approached the school alone where she faced the full fury of the
mob who were chanting “Lynch her! Lynch her!”
Eckford was spat upon and cursed at by the mob before she was rescued by
two white bystanders who successfully got her on a city bus.
On
September 10, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit against Faubus for defying
the previous court order. As the
crisis grew, Faubus met with President Eisenhower and asked for a one year
delay. Eisenhower refused and told him
to obey the court which had ordered him to remove the national
guard. On September 23, the nine
black students again attempted to go to school past an angry mob of
whites. The students got inside safely
but were sent home at noon when the
mob grew to thousands. Later that
evening, on national television, President Eisenhower called it “a disgrace.” Little Rock
mayor Woodrow Mann then asked Eisenhower to send in federal troops to prevent
further violence. A day later, Eisenhower
ordered the 101st Airborne Division and the federalized Arkansas National Guard
to Little Rock and went on national
television to explain that: “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the
decisions of our courts.”
The nine
black students rode to school in jeeps and entered school on September 25 with
an army escort. Throughout the year, they
were horribly harassed by their white classmates, and one was eventually
expelled for retaliating to the harassment.
The other eight survived the year, and the lone senior, Ernest Green
graduated with his 601 white classmates.
Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s
public schools in 1958 and was overwhelmingly re-elected with 69% of the
vote. Many whites attended newly opened
private academies in 1958, while almost all blacks spend the year without any
schooling before the Supreme Court ruled that the governor’s closing of the
schools had been unconstitutional. While
the schools reopened on an integrated basis in Little Rock
in 1959, many other southern states closed their schools to avoid any integration. Still, the crisis in Little
Rock had forced the federal government to act
decisively for the first time since Reconstruction in support of enforcing the
law as it applied to civil rights.
The
Development of a Civil Rights Movement (1960-1962)
The
events of 1954-59 had in many ways convinced blacks that they needed to act
assertively to secure their rights. The success
in Montgomery and federal
intervention in Little Rock had
inspired confidence that was felt throughout the country. A comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery
Boycott, helped publicize the event to younger blacks. Although organizations such as the NAACP,
SCLC, and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) sometimes disagreed on tactics,
they generally agreed on two major goals—ending segregation and securing the
right to vote.
On
February 1, 1960, four North Carolina A. & T. students sat at the lunch
counter in the Woolworth store in Greensboro, North
Carolina and refused to leave. As was the custom, the store refused to serve
them and they sat until closing time. They
were not arrested because local law did not require the lunch counters to be
segregated, and even some whites were sympathetic. An elderly white woman students
approached the students and said, “Boys, I am just so proud of you. My only
regret is that you didn’t do this 10 or 15 years ago.”
Within
days, over 300 students were participating in “sit-ins”
in the Greensboro area. In the
segregated states, blacks were free to shop at these chain stores, but could
not eat at the lunch counters. Before
the advent of fast food restaurants, this denied blacks the ability to get a
quick meal in most southern cities. With
the help of the Congress of Racial Equality, the Greensboro
sit-ins soon spread to other southern cities.
The demonstrations had an immediate economic effect. Whites soon gathered to harass the sit-in participants,
and violence sometimes ensued. Shoppers
and customers soon avoided the stores, and civil rights organizations boycotted
chain stores in the North who practiced segregation in the South. Some stores simply closed their lunch
counters, but many reluctantly served black customers.
Sit-ins in Nashville,
Tennessee began on February 18. One
week later students were attacked at a lunch counter, burned with cigarettes,
and yanked off stools and beaten. When
the police arrived, they ignored the white mob and arrested the sit-in
participants. Nonetheless, the sit-ins
continued and the Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals were desegregated. Downtown stores were empty. One white merchant commented, “You could roll
a bowling ball down the street and not hit anybody these days.” The turning point in Nashville
occurred in April after the home of a prominent black attorney was destroyed by
dynamite. 2,500 students and community
members marched on the city hall where Mayor Ben West was confronted by
twenty-two-year old Fisk University
student, Diane Nash. As television
cameras zoomed in, Nash asked the mayor if he believed that discrimination was
wrong. After he replied that he did, the
next day’s headline of the Nashville Tennessean read “Mayor Says
Integrate Counters.”
The
widely publicized success in Nashville inspired more sit-ins and a student movement called the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC, popularly known as “Snick”) was formed to direct the
growing number of sit-ins. In July, the
stores in Greensboro were
desegregated, and by the fall sit-ins had spread to 112 other southern cities.
The
growing sit-in movement occurred in the midst of a hotly contested presidential
election. Neither Vice President Richard
Nixon, the Republican nominee, nor the Democrat, John F. Kennedy, had been
particularly strong advocates of civil rights.
Although a majority of blacks had switched to the Democratic Party
during the 1930s, there were strong misgivings about Kennedy. He had not advocated a rapid implementation
of the Court’s Brown decision and was strongly supported by Alabama’s
segregationist governor, John Patterson.
Jackie Robinson, the most famous black person in the country, actively
campaigned for Nixon.
One event
changed the opinion of many blacks. Martin
Luther King was arrested in Atlanta
on October 19 while participating in a sit-in, and was sentenced to four months
in a rural Georgia
penitentiary. King’s family
feared for his life and were delighted when Kennedy telephoned Mrs. King
to express his sympathy. The candidate’s
brother, Robert Kennedy, later interceded with a local judge to secure Dr. King’s
release on bail. When word of Kennedy’s
phone call became public, many blacks switched their support to him as
pro-Kennedy leaflets were distributed at black churches. Kennedy won a very close election 49.7 to
49.5%, capturing 7% more of the black vote than the Democrats had in the
previous presidential election.
Although
blacks generally viewed Kennedy’s election with optimism and looked forward to
the new administration, there was concern that, without pressure, the new
administration would proceed only cautiously in regard to civil rights. An opportunity to provide this pressure
occurred when the Supreme Court ruled in December of 1960 that discrimination
in interstate travel was illegal.
Despite this ruling, travel on interstate busses in the South remained
segregated, with blacks seated in the rear and whites in the front. In addition, bus terminals had segregated
eating facilities and waiting rooms. James
Farmer, the national director of CORE,
was determined to force the issue of transportation integration through Freedom
Rides where integrated groups of bus riders would travel through the
South. Blacks would sit in the front and
whites in the back of the buses. At rest
stops, blacks would attempt to use the white-only facilities. The plan was not unprecedented. In 1947, CORE had sent integrated groups of
bus riders into the upper South where they were harassed and finally arrested. The first freedom riders left Washington,
D.C. for New Orleans
on May 4, 1961. At first they met no
opposition, but they were attacked by a mob of 200 whites in Annison, Georgia
and a bus was firebombed outside of town.
A second bus was attacked in Birmingham,
Alabama and the riders were badly beaten
while the local police took no action. One
rider, William Barbee, was paralyzed for life.
The
attacks became international news as pictures of the beaten and bloody Freedom
Riders appeared on the front pages of newspapers, pressuring the Kennedy administration
to act to enforce the court decision.
Volunteers from SNCC decided to continue the ride, and ten students went
to Birmingham on May 17 where they
were promptly arrested by the Commissioner of Public Safety, Bull Connor and dumped
at the Tennessee border two days
later. Undaunted, the volunteers returned
immediately to Birmingham
determined to continue the ride. The
Kennedy administration sent John Seigenthaler of the Justice Department to
mediate with Alabama’s Governor,
John Patterson, who reluctantly assured the federal government that he would
provide police protection. Attorney
General Robert Kennedy also put pressure on Greyhound to provide a bus. On May 20, 21 riders left Birmingham. When they arrived in Montgomery,
the police escort disappeared and they were attacked by a mob in the Birmingham
bus station. Again, the riders were badly
beaten, and Seigenthaler was knocked out when he was hit
with a pipe. Kennedy was forced to send
600 federal marshals to Montgomery,
and Governor Patterson reluctantly declared martial law to end the siege. Twenty-seven riders finally left Montgomery
on May 24 and were arrested in Jackson, Mississippi
for “trespassing” in an all-white waiting area.
They were sentenced to sixty days in the state penitentiary. More freedom riders followed during the
summer of 1961. The Freedom Riders
successfully demonstrated the need for federal intervention and the violence
directed against them dramatized their cause to the entire nation. Horrified by the violence, the Kennedy
administration sought to get the movement to shift its emphasis more toward
voting rights and avoid the highly publicized confrontations which inevitably
sparked a violent response.
Birmingham (1963)
Kennedy’s
hopes to avoid bloodshed were soon dashed.
During the spring of 1963, violent confrontations between the police and
demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama
once again captured international attention.
Birmingham was known as the
industrial capital of the South. Forty
percent black, the city had a long history of racial violence, including the
violent assault on the Freedom Riders in 1961.
Singer Nat King Cole had been beaten on stage in 1956, and in the
following year whites seized a black man off the street, took him out in the
countryside, and castrated him. Local
civil rights leader Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had been beaten and his wife stabbed when
he tried to register his children at a white school in 1957. Later, his house was bombed. So many black homes had been destroyed between 1957-1963 that the town acquired the nickname “Bombingham.”
Upon Shuttlesworth’s urging, Birmingham
was targeted by SCLC in 1963 after an effort to integrate Albany,
Georgia had failed in
1961-62. The movement in Albany
had been foiled by the creative and restrained reaction of white leaders. Faced with mass demonstrations, Chief of
Police, Laurie Pritchett, formed a strategy for dealing with the protesters. He had studied the previous events in the
movement and tried to avoid violent confrontations, choosing a strategy of mass
arrests and using surrounding jails to avoid filling up the jails which made
further arrests impossible. He also refused
to allow Dr. King and other prominent leaders to remain in jail, thereby not
allowing them to become martyrs. Despite
President Kennedy’s pleas, city leaders refused to negotiate with black leaders
and southern federal judges refused to allow marches and demonstrations. Civil rights leaders were forced to decide if
they would defy the court orders and reluctantly concluded that they could not
at the same time that they were demanding more vigorous federal intervention to
enforce desegregation rulings. Some
blacks were frustrated and turned to violence, and in the end very little
progress was made.
The major civil rights organizations left, and Dr. King remarked “we got
nothing and the people were left depressed and in despair.”
In Birmingham,
the movement tried to avoid the Albany
mistakes by careful planning and tactics as it greatly needed a victory to
recapture its momentum. President
Kennedy had introduced a civil rights bill to address segregated public
accommodations, but it languished in Congress. In January, the new governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, had been
cheered when he struck a defiant tone in his inauguration speech, proclaiming, “Segregation
now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”
It
was decided to focus on confrontation in the business districts downtown where
protests would have the maximum economic impact. There were signs that some white leaders
wanted to avoid a confrontation. A few
businesses had peacefully integrated the year before and the blatantly racist
police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor had been defeated when he ran for
mayor. Hopeful that progress was being
made, the U.S. Justice Department asked King to cancel the protests, but he
refused, and they began in April of 1963.
Twenty blacks were arrested for picketing a segregated store, and Shuttlesworth
and thirty others were jailed in a demonstration at city hall. When a federal court judge ordered no more
demonstrations, King ignored the court order, led a march on April 12, and was
arrested along with fifty others. The
tactics of the movement were criticized by some blacks, and a group of white
ministers took out a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper, decrying
the protests as “unwise and untimely.”
In solitary confinement and denied writing paper, King wrote a reply in
the margins of the newspaper, which was later published as his famous “Letter
from a Birmingham Jail.”
After
King was released on bond on April 20, the SCLC made the controversial decision
to use children (ages six to eighteen) to engage in mass demonstrations. The rationale was that children were less
open to financial retaliation than adults and would create a more powerful
image if they were subjected to mass arrest.
On May 2, the marches began and 959 children were herded off to Birmingham
Jail. With 1,000 children prepared to
march the next day, Police Commissioner Bull Connor was
determined to put an end to the demonstrations.
The next day he met the marchers with police dogs and fire hoses. The demonstrations were broadcast on
television and viewers recoiled at the sight of children being attacked by dogs
and hit with high pressure streams of water that could knock the bark off of
trees. The demonstrations continued, and
within a few days, 2,000 demonstrators had been jailed. Finally, the Kennedy administration urged Birmingham’s
business leaders to mediate the dispute, and a truce was declared for May 10. Downtown lunch counters would be desegregated,
and promises were issued that blacks would be hired in downtown businesses. Many whites condemned the agreement made by
the business leaders, and King’s brother’s home was bombed as well as the hotel
where King was staying. The bombings triggered
a violent response, and black rioting resulted in the burning of seven downtown
stores. President Kennedy threatened to
send federal troops to Birmingham
if local officials could not preserve order, announcing that the government
would “do whatever must be done to preserve order, protect the lives of its
citizens, and uphold the law of the land.”
A month
later, Kennedy was forced to act when Governor Wallace attempted to defy federal
marshals by standing in the doorway of a university building to prevent two
black students from enrolling in the University
of Alabama. After the students were registered, the
president appeared on national television and urged Congress to pass a new, and
significantly stronger, civil rights act.
In the summer, civil rights groups organized a March on Washington
to draw support for the civil rights bill.
Kennedy was afraid that the march would hurt the bill’s chances but gave
his reluctant support. One-quarter of a
million people, including 60,000, whites came to Washington
where Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous “I Have A
Dream Speech.” The march was a huge
success without any violence, concluding with a general feeling of
accomplishment. Only eighteen days after the march’s conclusion, however, four black girls (ages 11-14) were murdered
when their church was blown up in Birmingham
during a Sunday School class.
Mississippi
Mississippi was
considered the most discriminatory state in the U.S. It had the country’s largest black population
(45%), but only 5% were registered to vote and all institutions in the state
were strictly segregated. The state had
no intent of following the Brown decision and closed schools to avoid
integration. In addition, the state
legislature outlawed “nuisance” lawsuits, which prevented court challenges to
segregation. The NAACP field secretary
in Mississippi was Medgar
Evers, a World War II combat veteran who had landed at Normandy
on D-Day. He and his brother, Charles, had
attempted to vote in the late 1940s but were turned away by a heavily armed mob. In 1954, he had unsuccessfully attempted to
gain admission to the law school of the University
of Mississippi.
The
James Meredith case focused national attention on Mississippi
in the fall of 1962. Meredith, a nine
year military veteran, was a sophomore at the all-black Jackson
State University
who wanted to transfer to the University
of Mississippi (Ole Miss). When a federal court ordered his admission in
September of 1962, Governor Ross Barnett spoke on statewide television,
maintaining that the state’s response to federal orders to integrate would
simply be “Never.” When federal marshals
escorted Meredith onto the campus on the night of September 30, rioting ensued. 168 marshals were injured (28 were shot) and
two people were killed. Under heavy
guard, Meredith began classes the next day.
A year later, he graduated with a degree in political science, wearing
an upside‑down “Never” button on his gown.
Evers
launched an anti-segregation campaign in Jackson
in 1963. When the mayor appeared on
television to urge the city’s black residents not to participate in
demonstrations and pledged that the city would not compromise, the Federal
Communications Commission ordered that Evers be given equal time,
and he spoke articulately to a statewide audience. A series of sit-ins was met with violent
resistance as participants were beaten and sprayed with paint. On the night that President Kennedy appeared
on national television to announce the new civil rights bill, June 12, 1963,
Evers was assassinated as he arrived at his home in Jackson. He was buried at Arlington
National Cemetery,
and a member of a White Citizens Council, Byron de la Beckwith, was arrested
for the shooting. Despite the fact that
a gun that he owned, containing only his fingerprints, was proven to be the
murder weapon, two trials both ended in hung juries.
After
Evers’ assassination, the focus in Mississippi
shifted to voter registration. Bob
Moses, a New York City
teacher who came to Mississippi
in 1960 as a CORE organizer, led a project in the fall of 1962 to demonstrate
the desire of black Mississippians to vote.
Moses had been arrested and beaten in the summer of 1961, and his driver
was shot and killed in September of 1961.
Because of overwhelming fear, it was unrealistic to expect blacks to
actually attempt to register, so Moses held a mock “Freedom Vote.” With the cooperation of all of the major
civil rights organizations in the state, a united organization known as COFO
(Council of Federated Organizations) was formed. Sixty white volunteers from Stanford and Yale
worked for two weeks to publicize the vote and 93,000 black’s cast “freedom
votes” for candidates representing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
(MFDP). Following the success of the
Freedom Vote, COFO decided to launch a much more ambitious project for the
summer of 1964. COFO invited hundreds of
college students to work in Mississippi. Their goals were to open “freedom schools” to
teach black children and conduct voter registration classes for adults as well
as to develop community centers to provide medical and legal assistance to the
black community. In addition, candidates
from the MFDP would challenge the state’s all-white Democratic Party delegation’s
right to represent the state at the party’s 1964 national convention.
Three-quarters
of the 800 student volunteers were white, many from prominent families. The first day of the project, June 21, three
civil rights workers disappeared. The
three men, Michael Schwerner, a twenty‑four year old white CORE organizer
who had been helping to organize a community center in Meridian, James Chaney,
a twenty‑one year old black from Meridian, and Andrew Goodman, a twenty‑one
year old white college student from New York had been arrested for speeding outside
of Philadelphia, Mississippi by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. After paying a fine the men were released and
simply disappeared. President Lyndon
Johnson sent federal agents into the state to search for the missing men. In the course of their search, the
investigators discovered the bodies of other black lynching victims and the
burned out remains of the three men’s car.
As
the search for Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman continued, Congress
finally passed the civil rights bill that the late President Kennedy had proposed
in the previous year. Known as the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, the law outlawed segregation in public accommodations (hotels,
restaurants, parks, pools, and libraries) and employment, shut off federal
funds to institutions that were guilty of discrimination, and allowed the Attorney
General to start suits to force school desegregation. On August 4, responding to information from a
paid KKK informant, the FBI located the bodies of the missing civil rights
leaders that had been buried beneath an earthen dam near Philadelphia. The men had been shot, and Chaney’s skull had
been fractured by a beating. In
December, twenty-one whites, included Deputy Sheriff Price, were arrested for
their murder.
At the
Democratic Convention in August, members of the MFDP challenged the right of
the elected white Democrats, who had been selected in a primary in which blacks
were almost universally excluded, to represent the state. The leaders of the regular party had already
adopted a statement repudiating the national party’s support for civil rights
and threatened to support Johnson’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, in the November
election. With Johnson’s nomination
assured, the battle over the Mississippi
delegation provided the main drama of the convention. Testifying at a nationally televised hearing,
a COFO volunteer, Fannie Lou Hamer, told of being
savagely beaten for attempting to register to vote. Hamer, sitting
beside Michael Schwerner’s widow, asked: “Is this America? The land of the free and
the home of the brave?”
Ultimately, the convention refused to unseat the white delegation
(although they walked out of the convention anyway), but brought nationwide
attention to the movement in Mississippi
and secured a promise that conventions would not seat segregated delegations in
the future. The Freedom Summer project
concluded as blacks, for the first time since Reconstruction, became involved
in the political process in Mississippi. The project also later became the basis of
Johnson’s Great Society programs of preschool education, nutrition programs,
and medical and legal assistance to the poor.
Selma
(1965)
After the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, the movement focused its attention on voting rights. The 1964 act did little to solve the problem
of southern blacks not being allowed to vote.
Between 1962‑1964 the number of registered blacks in Mississippi
only increased from 5.3% to 6.7%. In Alabama,
only 13.4% of eligible blacks were registered.
In 1965, Selma, Alabama became
the main target of the movement’s efforts to get Congress to pass a stronger
voting rights bill. Blacks made up half
of the population, but only 156 out of 15,000 were registered to vote. The Selma
registration office was only open the first and third Mondays of the month. Registrars arrived late, took long lunches,
and closed early. Blacks rarely passed
the literacy tests even if they had to read words like “constitutionality” to
the registrars. Many local blacks were
afraid of SNCC’s efforts to hold “voting clinics,” often
responding: “That’s white folks’ business.” The police, led by Sheriff Jim Clark, harassed those who attended
the clinics. SNCC organized a “Freedom
Day” on October 7, 1963 to register voters, and Clark
had photographers take pictures of each person in line as registrars asked “Does
your employer know you are here?” SNCC
leaders were arrested and newsmen were attacked.
After Martin Luther King accepted
the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964, he committed himself and the SCLC to the drive for
voting rights in Selma. King’s Selma
campaign began on January 18, 1965.
Demonstrators peacefully integrated a restaurant, but the next day, 60
people were arrested as they tried to register and the New York Times ran
a picture of Clark pushing a black woman with his billy club. Selma’s
black teachers then held a march to the courthouse on January 22. This was significant because teachers were
often afraid to support the movement out of fear that they would lose their
jobs. More marches followed, including
one in which Clark jabbed a women with a night stick. The woman then slugged Clark who beat her. Pictures of Clark
hitting the woman made the national newspapers.
After King was arrested after a march on February 1, and 800 school children
were arrested following a march, President Johnson announced he would send a voting
rights bill to Congress on February 6.
Meanwhile, violence in Selma
grew. Clark had a
confrontation with a minister C.T. Vivian in which Vivian compared him
to a Nazi and Clark slugged him. On February 18, the city street lights were
turned off in the middle of a night march and a white mob attacked the marchers. Dozens, including an NBC reporter were beaten,
and a twenty‑six year old black marcher, Jimmie Lee Johnson, was shot and
killed by a state trooper.
Two days
after Jackson’s death, the SCLC announced
a fifty mile march from Selma to
the state capital in Montgomery to
protest the violence in Selma. Governor Wallace announced that he would not
permit the march because it would obstruct traffic on the highway. Six hundred marchers began the march on March
7. As they left Selma,
they were met by mounted state troopers at the Edmund
Pettus Bridge. The troopers charged the marchers and
attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas. Television programs were interrupted to show
the battle to the nation. Dr. King, who
had not participated in the march, announced that he would lead a second march
two days later and sent out a nationwide appeal for supporters of the movement
to come to Selma and
participate. Governor Wallace still
opposed the march and a federal judge had issued an injunction forbidding a
march until a hearing could be heard in regard to an SCLC motion to prevent
Wallace from interfering. Reluctant to
spark violence while opposing the judge’s order, King halted the second march
when the 1,500 marchers were again met by state troopers at the bridge. SNCC leaders criticized King for turning around
and King announced he would try again following the hearing. While the civil rights leaders waited, one of
the volunteers that had responded to King’s appeal for support was murdered in Selma. James Reeb, a white
Unitarian minister from Boston was returning
from dinner with a group of ministers when he was attacked and beaten by a
group of whites.
Federal
Judge Frank Johnson finally gave approval for the march from Montgomery to
Selma, and on Sunday March 21, two weeks after the initial march, 25,000
marchers, black and white, from all over the U.S., triumphantly followed King across
the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Governor Wallace had refused police protection,
but President Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard. Five days later, King spoke on the steps of
the state capitol in Montgomery. Although a white housewife from Detroit,
Viola Liuzzo, was shot in her car by Klansmen the
night after the march, the successful march was seen by many as the ultimate
victory of the movement. Just ten years
earlier a small number of Montgomery’s
black citizens had given birth to the movement with their successful bus
boycott. Now the movement had drawn
international support from people of all races.
Dr. King, who was not yet thirty when the movement began was now one of
the most admired men in the world.
The
events in Selma led to the passage
of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed literacy tests and allowed federal
examiners to register voters in areas that had a history of discrimination. Within
two years, black voter registration went up nine-fold in the South, from
6.7% to 60% and the protection of black voting rights eventually changed
America. White public officials could no longer ignore
blacks. George Wallace publicly
apologized for his racist actions in the 1960s and won a majority of the black
vote when he ran for governor the last time in 1982. In Selma,
9,000 blacks helped vote Jim Clark out of office in 1966 (He later spent two
years in prison for marijuana smuggling). Blacks began to serve in important public offices.
Former SCLC aide Andrew Young
served as the U.S.
representative to the UN and served as mayor of Atlanta,
and blacks were elected mayors of many major American cities by the 1980s. By
1994, Mississippi had 751 black elected officials,
more than any other state.
In
retrospect, the events in Selma marked
the end of the united civil rights movement.
With the two main goals of the movement achieved, civil rights groups
disagreed over how to attack the more intractable economic inequalities between
the races, and Dr. King’s assassination in April of 1968 deprived the movement
of its most gifted leader.