by Gerald Boerner
February is Black History Month and we start out with an exploration of the civil disobedience associated with the quest for equal status in these United States for African-Americans. This group, more than other minority groups in this country, has suffered overt discrimination, especially in the southern states where discriminatory laws were known as “Jim Crow” laws. Segregation was open and blatant; the Civil Rights movement was targeted at bringing down these laws and winning true equality for the African-American population with the right to vote, use the same facilities as the whites, etc. GLB
“We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs.”
— James Farmer
“There are those who say to you – we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.”
— Hubert H. Humphrey
“I’m the world’s original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.”
— Thurgood Marshall
“There are a million Negroes in Mississippi. I think they’ll take care of me.”
— James Meredith
“How could they say that my religion, Islam was a ‘race hate’ religion after all the plunder and enslavement and domination of my people by white Christians in the name of white supremacy?”
— Muhammad Ali
“The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”
— Lyndon B. Johnson
“I am – Somebody. I may be poor, but I am – Somebody! I may be on welfare, but I am – Somebody! I may be uneducated, but I am – Somebody! I must be, I’m God’s child. I must be respected and protected. I am black and I am beautiful! I am – Somebody! Soul Power!”
— Jesse Jackson
“The Negro wants to be everything but himself… He wants to integrate with the white man, but he cannot integrate with himself or with his own kind. The Negro wants to lose his identity because he does not know his own identity.”
— Elijah Muhammad
“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue… whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”
— John Fitzgerald Kennedy
“We don’t go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything. You have yours and you control yours; we have ours and we control ours.”
— Malcolm X
Sit-Ins for Civil Rights
The African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) refers to the reform movements in the United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against African Americans and restoring Suffrage in Southern states. 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 the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from oppression by whites.
Many of those who were active in the Civil Rights Movement, with organizations such as NAACP, SNCC, CORE and SCLC, prefer the term “Southern Freedom Movement” because the struggle was about far more than just civil rights under law; it was also about fundamental issues of freedom, respect, dignity, and economic and social equality.
Prominent figures of the African-
American Civil Rights Movement.
Top left: W. E. B. Du Bois; top right:
Malcolm X; bottom left:
Martin Luther King, Jr.;
bottom right: Rosa Parks.
During the period 1955–1968, acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience produced crisis situations between activists and government authorities. Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, educational institutions, and communities often had to respond immediately to crisis situations which highlighted the inequities faced by African Americans. Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts such as the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) in Alabama; “sit-ins” such as the influential Greensboro sit-in (1960) in North Carolina; marches, such as the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama; and a wide range of other nonviolent activities.
Noted legislative achievements during this phase of the Civil Rights Movement were passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, that banned discrimination based on “race, color, religion, or national origin” in employment practices and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that restored and protected voting rights; the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, that dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional European groups; and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and across the country young people were inspired to action.
Background
After the disputed election of 1876 resulted in the end of Reconstruction, Whites in the South resumed political control of the region. Systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans took place in Southern states from 1890 to 1908 and lasted until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s. For more than 60 years, for example, blacks were not able to elect a single person in the South to represent their interests in Congress.
During this period, the white-dominated Democratic Party resumed political control over the South. The Republican Party—the “party of Lincoln”—which had been the party that most blacks belonged to, shrank to insignificance as black voter registration was suppressed. By the early 1900s, almost all elected officials in the South were Democrats.
At the same time as African-Americans were being disenfranchised, racial segregation was being imposed by law, and violence against blacks mushroomed. The system of overt, state-sanctioned racial discrimination and oppression that emerged out of the post-Reconstruction South became known as the “Jim Crow” system. It remained virtually intact into the early 1950s. Thus, the early 1900s is a period often referred to as the “nadir of American race relations.” While problems and civil rights violations were most intense in the South, social tensions affected African Americans in other regions as well.
Characteristics of the post-Reconstruction period:
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Racial segregation. By law[4], public facilities and government services such as education were divided into separate “white” and “colored” domains. Characteristically, those for colored were underfunded and of inferior quality.
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Disenfranchisement. When white Democrats regained power, they passed laws that made voter registration more inaccessible to blacks. Black voters were forced off the voting rolls. The number of African American voters dropped dramatically, and they no longer were able to elect representatives. From 1890 to 1908, Southern states of the former Confederacy created constitutions with provisions that disfranchised most African Americans and tens of thousands of poor white Americans.
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Exploitation. Increased economic oppression of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, denial of economic opportunities, and widespread employment discrimination.
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Violence. Individual, police, organizational, and mass racial violence against blacks (and Latinos in the Southwest and Asians in California).
African-Americans and other racial minorities rejected this regime. They resisted it in numerous ways and sought better opportunities through lawsuits, new organizations, political redress, and labor organizing (see the American Civil Rights Movement 1896–1954). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909. It fought to end race discrimination through litigation, education, and lobbying efforts. Its crowning achievement was its legal victory in the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that rejected separate white and colored school systems and by implication overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson.
The situation for blacks outside the South was somewhat better (in most states they could vote and have their children educated, though they still faced discrimination in housing and jobs). From 1910 to 1970, African Americans sought better lives by migrating north and west. A total of nearly seven million blacks left the South in what was known as the Great Migration.
Invigorated by the victory of Brown and frustrated by the lack of immediate practical effect, private citizens increasingly rejected gradualist, legalistic approaches as the primary tool to bring about desegregation. They were faced with “massive resistance” in the South by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression. In defiance, African Americans adopted a combined strategy of direct action with nonviolent resistance known as civil disobedience, giving rise to the African-American Civil Rights Movement of 1955–1968.
Mass Action Replacing Litigation
The strategy of public education, legislative lobbying, and litigation within the court system that typified the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the 20th Century broadened after Brown to a strategy that emphasized “direct action”—primarily boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, marches and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. This mass action approach typified the movement from 1960 to 1968.
Churches, the centers of their communities, and local grassroots organizations mobilized volunteers to participate in broad-based actions. This was a more direct and potentially more rapid means of creating change than the traditional approach of mounting court challenges.
Troops from the 327th Regiment,
101st Airborne escorting the
Little Rock Nine up the steps of
Central High
The Montgomery Improvement Association—created to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott managed to keep the boycott going for over a year until a federal court order required Montgomery to desegregate its buses. The success in Montgomery made its leader Dr. Martin Luther King a nationally known figure. It also inspired other bus boycotts, such as the highly successful Tallahassee, Florida, boycott of 1956–1957.
In 1957 Dr. King and Rev. John Duffy, the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association, 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. The SCLC, with its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, did not attempt to create a network of chapters as the NAACP did. It offered training and leadership assistance for local efforts to fight segregation. The headquarters organization raised funds, mostly from Northern sources, to support such campaigns. It made non-violence both its central tenet and its primary method of confronting racism.
In 1959, Septima Clarke, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, with the help of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, began the first Citizenship Schools in South Carolina’s Sea Islands. They taught literacy to enable blacks to pass voting tests. The program was an enormous success and tripled the number of black voters on Johns Island. SCLC took over the program and duplicated its results elsewhere.
Sit-Ins, 1960
The Civil Rights Movement received an infusion of energy with a student sit-in at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four students Ezell A. Blair Jr. (now known as Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, an all-black college, sat down at the segregated lunch counter to protest Woolworth’s policy of excluding African Americans. These protesters were encouraged to dress professionally, to sit quietly, and to occupy every other stool so that potential white sympathizers could join in. The sit-in soon inspired other sit-ins in Richmond, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta, Georgia. As students across the south began to “sit-in” at the lunch counters of a few of their local stores, local authority figures sometimes used brute force to physically escort the demonstrators from the lunch facilities.
Click HERE for the Slideshow on the Greensboro Four
(http://www.sitins.com/photogallery.shtml)
The “sit-in” technique was not new—as far back as 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality sponsored sit-ins in Chicago, St. Louis in 1949 and Baltimore in 1952. In 1960 the technique succeeded in bringing national attention to the movement. The success of the Greensboro sit-in led to a rash of student campaigns throughout the South. Probably the best organized, most highly disciplined, the most immediately effective of these 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. Upon being arrested, student demonstrators made “jail-no-bail” pledges, to call attention to their cause and to reverse the cost of protest, thereby saddling their jailers with the financial burden of prison space and food.
In April, 1960 activists who had led these sit-ins held a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina that led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC took these tactics of nonviolent confrontation further, to the freedom rides.
Freedom Rides, 1961
Freedom Rides were journeys by Civil Rights activists on interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, (1960) 364 U.S. that ended segregation for passengers engaged in inter-state travel. Organized by CORE, the first Freedom Ride of the 1960s left Washington D.C. on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.
During the first and subsequent Freedom Rides, activists traveled through the Deep South to integrate seating patterns and desegregate bus terminals, including restrooms and water fountains. That proved to be a dangerous mission. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed, forcing its passengers to flee for their lives. In Birmingham, Alabama, an FBI informant reported that Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor gave Ku Klux Klan members fifteen minutes to attack an incoming group of freedom riders before having police “protect” them. The riders were severely beaten “until it looked like a bulldog had got a hold of them.” James Peck, a white activist, was beaten so hard he required fifty stitches to his head.
Mob violence in Anniston and Birmingham temporarily halted the rides, but SNCC activists from Nashville brought in new riders to continue the journey from Birmingham. In Montgomery, Alabama, at the Greyhound Bus Station, 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 continued their rides into Jackson, Mississippi, where they were arrested for “breaching the peace” by using “white only” facilities. New freedom rides were organized by many different organizations. As riders arrived in Jackson, they were arrested. By the end of summer, more than 300 had been jailed in Mississippi.
President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Civil Rights
leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young,
James Farmer
The jailed freedom riders were treated harshly, 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.
Public sympathy and support for the freedom riders led the Kennedy administration to order the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue a new desegregation order. When the new ICC rule took effect on November 1, passengers were permitted to sit wherever they chose on the bus; “white” and “colored” signs came down in the terminals; separate drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms were consolidated; and lunch counters began serving people regardless of skin color.
The student movement involved such celebrated figures as John Lewis, a single-minded activist; 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; 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, Hosea Williams, and Stokely Carmichael.
Fraying of alliances
King reached the height of popular acclaim during his life in 1964, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His career after that point was filled with frustrating challenges. The liberal coalition that had gained passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to fray.
Alabama governor George Wallace
stands against desegregation at the
University of Alabama in 1963.
King was becoming more estranged from the Johnson Administration. In 1965 he broke with it by calling for peace negotiations and a halt to the bombing of Vietnam. He moved further left in the following years, speaking of the need for economic justice and thoroughgoing changes in American society. He believed change was needed beyond the civil rights gained by the movement.
King’s attempts to broaden the scope of the Civil Rights Movement were halting and largely unsuccessful, however. King made several efforts in 1965 to take the Movement north to address issues of employment and housing discrimination. SCLC’s campaign in Chicago publicly failed, as Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley marginalized SCLC’s campaign by promising to “study” the city’s problems. In 1966, white demonstrators holding “white power” signs in notoriously racist Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, threw stones at marchers demonstrating against housing segregation.
Race Riots, 1963–1970
By the end of World War II, more than half of the country’s black population lived in Northern and Western industrial cities rather than Southern rural areas. Migrating to those cities for better job opportunities, education and to escape legal segregation, African Americans often found segregation that existed in fact rather than in law.
While after the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was not prevalent, by the 1960s other problems prevailed in northern cities. Beginning in the 1950s, there had been deindustrialization and restructuring of major areas of the economies: railroads and meatpacking, steel industry and car industry. As the last population to enter the industrial job market, blacks were disadvantaged by its collapse. At the same time, investment in highways and private development of suburbs in the postwar years had drawn many ethnic whites out of the cities to newer housing in expanding suburbs. Urban blacks who did not follow the middle class out of the cities became concentrated in the older housing of inner-city neighborhoods, among the poorest in most major cities.
Because jobs in new service areas and parts of the economy were being created in suburbs, unemployment was much higher in many black than in white neighborhoods, and crime was frequent. African Americans rarely owned the stores or businesses where they lived. Many were limited to menial or blue-collar jobs, although union organizing in the 1930s and 1940s had opened up good working environments for some. African Americans often made only enough money to live in dilapidated tenements that were privately owned, or poorly maintained public housing. They also attended schools that were often the worst academically in the city and that had fewer white students than in the decades before WWII.
The racial makeup of the police departments, usually largely white, was a large factor. In black neighborhoods such as Harlem, the ratio was only one black officer for every six white officers, and in majority black cities such as Newark, New Jersey only 145 of the 1322 police officers were black. Police forces in Northern cities were largely composed of white ethnics, descendants of 19th century immigrants: mainly Irish, Italian, and Eastern European officers. They had established their own power bases in the police departments and in territories in cities. Some would routinely harass blacks with or without provocation.
One of the first major race riots took place in Harlem, New York, in the summer of 1964. A white Irish-American police officer, Thomas Gilligan, shot 15-year-old James Powell, who was black, for allegedly charging at him with a knife. In fact, Powell was unarmed. A group of black citizens demanded Gilligan’s suspension. Hundreds of young demonstrators marched peacefully to the 67th Street police station on July 17, 1964, the day after Powell’s death.
Gilligan was not suspended. Although this precinct had promoted the NYPD’s first black station commander, neighborhood residents were tired of the inequalities. They looted and burned anything that was not black-owned in the neighborhood. This unrest spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant, a major black neighborhood in Brooklyn. That summer, rioting also broke out in Philadelphia, for similar reasons.
In the aftermath of the riots of July 1964, the federal government funded a pilot program called Project Uplift, in which thousands of young people in Harlem were given jobs during the summer of 1965. The project was inspired by a report generated by HARYOU called Youth in the Ghetto. HARYOU was given a major role in organizing the project, together with the National Urban League and nearly 100 smaller community organizations. Permanent jobs at living wages, however, were still out of reach of many young black men.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, but the new law had no immediate effect on living conditions for blacks. A few days after the act became law, a riot broke out in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Like Harlem, Watts was an impoverished neighborhood with very high unemployment. Its residents had to endure patrols by a largely white police department. While arresting a young man for drunk driving, police officers argued with the suspect’s mother before onlookers. The conflict triggered a massive destruction of property through six days of rioting. 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, increased acts of anger were now directed at the police. Black residents growing tired of police brutality continued to riot. Some young people joined groups such as the Black Panthers, whose popularity was based in part on their reputation for confronting police officers.
Riots occurred in 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, a comfortable black middle class had begun to develop among families of blacks who worked at well-paying jobs in the automotive industry. Blacks who had not moved upward were living in much worse conditions, subject to the same problems as blacks in Watts and Harlem. When white police officers shut down an illegal bar on a liquor raid and arrested a large group of patrons, furious residents rioted.
One significant effect of the Detroit riot was the acceleration of “white flight,” the trend of white residents moving from inner-city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburbs. Detroit experienced “middle class black flight” as well. Cities such as Detroit, Newark, and Baltimore now have less than 40% white population as a result of these riots and other social changes. Changes in industry caused continued job losses, depopulation of middle classes, and concentrated poverty in such cities.
As a result of the riots, President Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1967. The commission’s final report called for major reforms in employment and public assistance for black communities. It warned that the United States was moving toward separate white and black societies.
Fresh rioting broke out in April 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Riots erupted in many major cities at once, including Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., West Side Riots in Chicago, Illinois, 1968 New York City riot and Louisville riots of 1968.
Affirmative Action altered the hiring process of more black police officers in every major city. Blacks make up a proportional majority of the police departments in cities such as Baltimore, Washington, New Orleans, Atlanta, Newark, and Detroit. Civil rights laws have reduced employment discrimination. The conditions that led to frequent rioting in the late 1960s have receded, but not all the problems have been solved.
With industrial and economic restructuring, tens of thousands of industrial jobs disappeared since the later 1950s from the old industrial cities. Some moved South, as has much population, and others out of the US altogether. Civil unrest broke out in Miami in 1980, in Los Angeles in 1992, and in Cincinnati in 2001.
Other Events on this Day
- In 1790…
The U.S. Supreme Court convenes for the first time, in New York City. - In 1861…
Texas secedes from the Union. - In 1893…
Thomas Edison comletes the world’s first movie studio in West Orange, New Jersey. - In 1960…
Four black college students begin a sit-in protest at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they’d been refused service. - In 2003…
The space shuttle Columbia disintegrates during reentry, killing all seven crew members.
Dates and events based on:
William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)
Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Wikipedia: African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement_%281955%E2%80%931968%29
Wikipedia: Greensboro Sit-Ins…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins
Web Sites and Blogs:
History Learning Site: Civil Rights Quotes…
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/civil%20rights%20quotes.htm
Sitins.com: Sit-In Photo Gallery…
http://www.sitins.com/photogallery.shtml
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