1969 ROY WILKINS VINTAGE PHOTO WASHINGTON NAACP CIVIL RIGHTS For Sale

A VINTAGE PHOTO MEASURING
8 X 10INCHES DEPICTING
CIVIL RIGHTS 1969 PHOTO DEPICTING FORMER SECTY AND ROY WILKINS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE NAACP
Roy Ottoway Wilkins (August 30, 1901 – September 8, 1981) was a prominent activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s.[1][2] Wilkins' most notable role was his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); in which he held the title of Executive Secretary from 1955 to 1963, and Executive Director from 1964-1977.[2] Wilkins' was a central figure in many notable marches of the civil rights movement. He made valuable contributions in the world of African American literature, and his voice was used to further the efforts in the fight for equality. Wilkins' pursuit of social justice also touched the lives of veterans and active service members, through his awards and recognition of exemplary military personnel.[3]Contents1 Early life2 Early career3 Leading the NAACP4 Views5 Stance on War and Military Involvement6 Legacy7 See also8 References9 Further reading10 External linksEarly lifeWilkins was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 30, 1901.[4] His father was not present for his birth, having fled the town in fear of being lynched after he refused demands to step away and yield the sidewalk to a white man.[4] When he was four years old, his mother died from tuberculosis, after which Wilkins and his siblings were raised by an aunt and uncle in the Rondo Neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota, where they attended local schools.[5] His nephew was Roger Wilkins. Wilkins graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in sociology in 1923.[4]
In 1929, he married social worker Aminda "Minnie" Badeau; the couple had no children of their own, but they raised the two children of Hazel Wilkins-Colton, a writer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Early careerWhile attending college, Wilkins worked as a journalist at The Minnesota Daily and became editor of The Appeal, an African-American newspaper. After he graduated he became the editor of The Call in 1923.
His confrontation of the Jim Crow Laws led to his activist work, and in 1931 he moved to New York City as assistant NAACP secretary under Walter Francis White. When W. E. B. Du Bois left the organization in 1934, Wilkins replaced him as editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP. From 1949 to 1950, Wilkins chaired the National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization, which comprised more than 100 local and national groups.
He served as an adviser to the War Department during World War II.
In 1950, Wilkins—along with A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Arnold Aronson,[6] a leader of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council—founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). LCCR has become the premier civil rights coalition, and has coordinated the national legislative campaign on behalf of every major civil rights law since 1957.
Leading the NAACP
Roy Wilkins as the Executive Secretary of the NAACP in 1963In 1955, Roy Wilkins was chosen to be the executive secretary of the NAACP, and in 1964 he became its executive director. He had developed an excellent reputation as an articulate spokesperson for the civil rights movement. One of his first actions was to provide support to civil rights activists in Mississippi who were being subjected to a "credit squeeze" by members of the White Citizens Councils.
Wilkins backed a proposal suggested by Dr. T.R.M. Howard of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, who headed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a leading civil rights organization in the state. Under the plan, black businesses and voluntary associations shifted their accounts to the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Memphis, Tennessee. By the end of 1955, about $300,000 had been deposited in Tri-State for this purpose. The money enabled Tri-State to extend loans to credit-worthy blacks who were denied loans by white banks.[7] Wilkins participated in the March on Washington (August 1963) which he helped organize.[2] This march was dedicated to the idea of protesting through acts of nonviolence, something that Roy Wilkins was a firm believer in. [8] Wilkins also participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965), and the March Against Fear (1966).
He believed in achieving reform by legislative means, testified before many Congressional hearings and conferred with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. These achievements gained Wilkins attention from government officials and other established politicians, earning him respect as well as the nickname, "Mr. Civil Rights". [9] Wilkins strongly opposed militancy in the movement for civil rights as represented by the "black power" movement due to his non-violence principles. He was a strong critic of racism in any form regardless of its creed, color, or political motivation, and he also declared that violence and racial separation of blacks and whites were not the answer.[2] As late as 1962, Wilkins criticized the direct action methods of the Freedom Riders, but changed his stance after the Birmingham campaign, and was arrested for leading a picketing protest in 1963.[10]
On issues of segregation, as well, he was a proponent of systematic integration instead of radical desegregation. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, he declared,
We Negroes want the improvements in the public school system – and among them, of course, the elimination of segregation, based upon race – the institution of the same quality education in the schools attended by our children as those attended by other children, and we want Negro teachers and we want Negro supervisors, and we want all the opportunity, but the only way our form of government and our structure of society can survive is by some common indoctrination of our citizenry, and we have found this in the public school system. And, for any reformer, black or white, zealot or not, to come along and say, "I'll destroy it, if it doesn't do like I want it to do," is very dangerous business, as far as I'm concerned.[11]
However, these moderate views increasingly brought him into conflict with younger, more militant black activists who saw him as an "Uncle Tom".
Wilkins was also a member of Omega Psi Phi, a fraternity with a civil rights focus, and one of the intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternities established for African Americans.Wilkins (right) with Sammy Davis, Jr. (left) and a reporter at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.In 1964, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP.[12]
During his tenure, the NAACP played a pivotal role in leading the nation into the Civil Rights Movement and spearheaded the efforts that led to significant civil rights victories, including Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 1968, Wilkins also served as chair of the U.S. delegation to the International Conference on Human Rights. After turning 70 in 1971, he faced increased calls to step down as NAACP chief. In 1976, he fell into a dispute with undisclosed board members at the NAACP national convention in Memphis, Tennessee. Although he had intended to retire that year, he decided to postpone it until 1977 because he thought that the pension plan offered to him by the NAACP was inadequate. Board member Emmitt Douglas of Louisiana demanded that Wilkins disclose the offenders and not impugn the board as a whole. Wilkins merely said that the offenders had "vilified" his reputation and questioned his health and integrity.[13]
In 1977, at the age of 76, Wilkins finally retired from the NAACP and was succeeded by Benjamin Hooks.[4] He was honored with the title Director Emeritus of the NAACP in the same year.[2] He died on September 8, 1981 in New York City of heart problems related to a pacemaker implanted on him in 1979 due to his irregular heartbeat.[2] In 1982, his autobiography Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins was published posthumously.
The players in this drama of frustration and indignity are not commas or semicolons in a legislative thesis; they are people, human beings, citizens of the United States of America.
— Roy WilkinsViewsWilkins was a staunch liberal and proponent of American values during the Cold War, and he denounced suspected and actual communists within the civil rights movement. He had been criticized by some on the left of the civil rights movement, such as Daisy Bates, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert F. Williams, and Fred Shuttlesworth, for his cautious approach, his suspicion of grassroots organizations, and his conciliatory attitude towards white anticommunism.
In 1951, J. Edgar Hoover and the state department, in collusion with the NAACP and Wilkins (then editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP), arranged for a ghost-written leaflet to be printed and distributed in Africa.[14] The purpose of the leaflet was to spread negative press and views about the Black political radical and entertainer Paul Robeson throughout Africa. Roger P. Ross, a State Department public affairs officer working in Africa, issued three pages of detailed guidelines including the following instructions:[15]
United States Information and Educational Exchange (USIE) in the Gold Coast, and I suspect everywhere else in Africa, badly needs a through-going, sympathetic and regretful but straight talking treatment of the whole Robeson episode ... there's no way the Communists score on us more easily and more effectively out here, than on the US. Negro problem in general, and on the Robeson case in particular. And, answering the latter, we go a long way toward answering the former.[14][16]
The finished article published by the NAACP was called Paul Robeson: Lost Shepherd,[17] penned under the false name of "Robert Alan", whom the NAACP claimed was a "well known New York journalist." Another article by Roy Wilkins, called "Stalin's Greatest Defeat", denounced Robeson as well as the Communist Party of the USA in terms consistent with the FBI's information.:[14][15]
At the time of Robeson's widely misquoted[18] declaration at The Paris Peace Conference in 1949, that African Americans would not support the United States in a war with the Soviet Union because of their continued lynchings and second-class citizen status under law following World War II,[19] Roy Wilkins stated that regardless of the number of lynchings that were occurring or would occur, Black America would always serve in the armed forces.[20] Wilkins also threatened to cancel a charter of an NAACP youth group in 1952 if they did not cancel their planned Robeson concert.Stance on War and Military InvolvementDuring the presidential terms of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson the civil rights movement was in its peak. International affairs were somewhat overlooked by numerous members of the NAACP and other civil rights groups in order to focus on domestic issues in the United States. However, Wilkins stayed true to his liberal values and carried these to the White House during his time with the NAACP. Wilkins' friendship and constant correspondence with Johnson gave him an even larger platform to speak out on war efforts and policies affecting civil rights.
His views towards the participation of black military members in the U.S service was a point of contention between him and other prominent civil rights leaders. While most civil rights groups and activists were staying quiet or speaking out against the Vietnam War, Wilkins' was focused on what African-Americans could gain out of serving in the military. An article posted in the Western Journal of Black Studies suggests that black troops were fighting for equality both in the United States as well as overseas. Wilkins emphasized the financial benefits of serving in the military along with the importance of African-American citizens participating in the first integrated American army.[21]
The civil rights movement (also known as the American civil rights movement and other terms)[b] in the United States was a decades-long struggle with the goal of enforcing constitutional and legal rights for African Americans that white Americans already enjoyed. With roots that dated back to the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, the movement achieved its largest legislative gains in the mid-1960s, after years of direct actions and grassroots protests that were organized from the mid-1950s until 1968. Encompassing strategies, various groups, and organized social movements to accomplish the goals of ending legalized racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and discrimination in the United States, the movement, using major nonviolent campaigns, eventually secured new recognition in federal law and federal protection for all Americans.
After the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, most of whom had recently been enslaved. For a period, African Americans voted and held political office, but they were increasingly deprived of civil rights, often under Jim Crow laws, and subjected to discrimination and sustained violence by whites in the South. Over the following century, various efforts were made by African Americans to secure their legal rights. Between 1955 and 1968, acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience produced crisis situations and productive dialogues between activists and government authorities. Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, and communities often had to respond immediately to these situations, which highlighted the inequities faced by African Americans across the country. The lynching of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi, and the outrage generated by seeing how he had been abused, when his mother decided to have an open-casket funeral, mobilized the African-American community nationwide.[1] Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts, such as the successful Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) in Alabama; "sit-ins" such as the influential Greensboro sit-ins (1960) in North Carolina and successful Nashville sit-ins in Tennessee; marches, such as the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade and 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama; and a wide range of other nonviolent activities.
Moderates in the movement worked with Congress to achieve the passage of several significant pieces of federal legislation that overturned discriminatory practices and authorized oversight and enforcement by the federal government. The Civil Rights Act of 1964[2] expressly banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment practices; ended unequal application of voter registration requirements; and prohibited racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and in public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected voting rights for minorities by authorizing federal oversight of registration and elections in areas with historic under-representation of minorities as voters. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 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 take action.
From 1964 through 1970, a wave of inner-city riots in black communities undercut support from the white middle class, but increased support from private foundations.[3] The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from about 1965 to 1975, challenged the established black leadership for its cooperative attitude and its practice of nonviolence. Instead, its leaders demanded that, in addition to the new laws gained through the nonviolent movement, political and economic self-sufficiency had to be developed in the black community.
Many popular representations of the movement are centered on the charismatic leadership and philosophy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in non-violent, moral leadership. However, some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to any one person, organization, or strategy.[4]Contents1 Background2 The beginnings of direct action (1950s)3 History3.1 Brown v. Board of Education, 19543.2 Emmett Till's murder, 19553.3 Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–19563.4 Desegregating Little Rock Central High School, 19573.5 The method of Nonviolence and Nonviolence Training3.6 Robert F. Williams and the debate on nonviolence, 1959–19643.7 Sit-ins, 1958–19603.8 Freedom Rides, 19613.9 Voter registration organizing3.10 Integration of Mississippi universities, 1956–19653.11 Albany Movement, 1961–623.12 Birmingham campaign, 19633.13 "Rising tide of discontent" and Kennedy's response, 19633.14 March on Washington, 19633.15 Malcolm X joins the movement, 1964–19653.16 St. Augustine, Florida, 1963–643.17 Chester School Protests, Spring 19643.18 Freedom Summer, 19643.19 Civil Rights Act of 19643.20 Harlem riot of 19643.21 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 19643.22 Selma Voting Rights Movement3.23 Voting Rights Act of 19653.24 Watts riot of 19653.25 Fair housing movements, 1966–19683.26 Nationwide riots of 19673.27 Memphis, King assassination and the Poor People's March 19683.28 Civil Rights Act of 19684 Movements, politics, and white reactions4.1 Grassroots leadership4.2 Black power (1966–1968)4.3 Black conservatism4.4 Avoiding the "Communist" label4.5 Kennedy administration, 1961–19634.6 American Jewish community and the civil rights movement4.6.1 Profile4.7 White backlash4.8 African-American women in the movement4.8.1 Discrimination4.9 Long-term impact5 Johnson administration: 1963–19686 Prison reform6.1 Gates v. Collier7 Cold War8 In popular culture9 Activist organizations10 Individual activists11 See also12 Notes13 References14 Bibliography15 Further reading15.1 Historiography and memory15.2 Autobiographies and memoirs16 External linksBackgroundFurther information: Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era, Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Jim Crow laws, Civil rights movement (1865–1896), and Civil rights movement (1896–1954)Before the American Civil War, almost four million blacks were enslaved in the South, only white men of property could vote, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only.[5][6][7] Following the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were passed, including the 13th Amendment (1865) that ended slavery; the 14th Amendment (1868) that gave African-Americans citizenship, adding their total population of four million to the official population of southern states for Congressional apportionment; and the 15th Amendment (1870) that gave African-American males the right to vote (only males could vote in the U.S. at the time). From 1865 to 1877, the United States underwent a turbulent Reconstruction Era trying to establish free labor and civil rights of freedmen in the South after the end of slavery. Many whites resisted the social changes, leading to insurgent movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, whose members attacked black and white Republicans to maintain white supremacy. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant, the U.S. Army, and U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, initiated a campaign to repress the KKK under the Enforcement Acts.[8] Some states were reluctant to enforce the federal measures of the act. In addition, by the early 1870s, other white supremacist and insurgent paramilitary groups arose that violently opposed African-American legal equality and suffrage, intimidating and suppressing black voters, and assassinating Republican officeholders.[9][10] However, if the states failed to implement the acts, the laws allowed the Federal Government to get involved.[10] Many Republican governors were afraid of sending black militia troops to fight the Klan for fear of war.[10]
After the disputed election of 1876 resulted in the end of Reconstruction and federal troops were withdrawn, whites in the South regained political control of the region's state legislatures. They continued to intimidate and violently attack blacks before and during elections to suppress their voting, but the last African Americans were elected to Congress from the South before disenfranchisement of blacks by states throughout the region, as described below.The mob-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909From 1890 to 1908, southern states passed new constitutions and laws to disenfranchise African Americans and many poor whites by creating barriers to voter registration; voting rolls were dramatically reduced as blacks and poor whites were forced out of electoral politics. After the landmark Supreme Court case of Smith v. Allwright (1944), which prohibited white primaries, progress was made in increasing black political participation in the Rim South and Acadiana – although almost entirely in urban areas[11] and a few rural localities where most blacks worked outside plantations.[12] The status quo ante of excluding African Americans from the political system lasted in the remainder of the South, especially North Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s to provide federal enforcement of constitutional voting rights. For more than sixty years, blacks in the South were essentially excluded from politics, unable to elect anyone to represent their interests in Congress or local government.[10] Since they could not vote, they could not serve on local juries.
During this period, the white-dominated Democratic Party maintained political control of the South. With whites controlling all the seats representing the total population of the South, they had a powerful voting bloc in Congress. The Republican Party—the "party of Lincoln" and the party to which most blacks had belonged—shrank to insignificance except in remote Unionist areas of Appalachia and the Ozarks as black voter registration was suppressed. Until 1965, the “Solid South” was a one-party system under the white Democrats. Excepting the previously noted historic Unionist strongholds the Democratic Party nomination was tantamount to election for state and local office.[13] In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, to dine at the White House, making him the first African American to attend an official dinner there. "The invitation was roundly criticized by southern politicians and newspapers."[14] Washington persuaded the president to appoint more blacks to federal posts in the South and to try to boost African-American leadership in state Republican organizations. However, these actions were resisted by both white Democrats and white Republicans as an unwanted federal intrusion into state politics.[14]Lynching victim Will Brown, who was mutilated and burned during the Omaha, Nebraska race riot of 1919. Postcards and photographs of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.[15]During the same time as African Americans were being disenfranchised, white southerners imposed racial segregation by law. Violence against blacks increased, with numerous lynchings through the turn of the century. The system of de jure state-sanctioned racial discrimination and oppression that emerged from the post-Reconstruction South became to be known as the "Jim Crow" system. The United States Supreme Court, made up almost entirely of Northerners, upheld the constitutionality of those state laws that required racial segregation in public facilities in its 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, legitimizing them through the "separate but equal" doctrine.[16] Segregation, which began with slavery, continued with Jim Crow laws, with signs used to show blacks where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat.[17] For those places that were racially mixed, non-whites had to wait until all white customers were served first.[17] Elected in 1912, President Woodrow Wilson gave in to demands by Southern members of his cabinet and ordered segregation of workplaces throughout the federal government.[18]
The early 20th century is a period often referred to as the "nadir of American race relations", when the number of lynchings was highest. While tensions and civil rights violations were most intense in the South, social discrimination affected African Americans in other regions as well.[19] At the national level, the Southern bloc controlled important committees in Congress, defeated passage of federal laws against lynching, and exercised considerable power beyond the number of whites in the South.
Characteristics of the post-Reconstruction period:
Racial segregation. By law, public facilities and government services such as education were divided into separate "white" and "colored" domains.[20] Characteristically, those for colored were underfunded and of inferior quality.Disenfranchisement. When white Democrats regained power, they passed laws that made voter registration more restrictive, essentially forcing black voters off the voting rolls. The number of African-American voters dropped dramatically, and they were no longer able to elect representatives. From 1890 to 1908, Southern states of the former Confederacy created constitutions with provisions that disfranchised tens of thousands of African Americans, and U.S. states such as Alabama disenfranchised poor whites as well.Exploitation. Increased economic oppression of blacks through the convict lease system, Latinos, and Asians, denial of economic opportunities, and widespread employment discrimination.Violence. Individual, police, paramilitary, organizational, and mob racial violence against blacks (and Latinos in the Southwest and Asians in the West Coast).
KKK night rally in Chicago, c. 1920African Americans and other ethnic 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 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) when the Court rejected separate white and colored school systems and, by implication, overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896. Segregation had continued intact into the mid-1950s. Following the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, many states began to gradually integrate their schools, but some areas of the South resisted by closing public schools altogether.
The integration of Southern public libraries followed demonstrations and protests that used techniques seen in other elements of the larger civil rights movement.[21] This included sit-ins, beatings, and white resistance.[21] For example, in 1963 in the city of Anniston, Alabama, two black ministers were brutally beaten for attempting to integrate the public library.[21] Though there was resistance and violence, the integration of libraries was generally quicker than the integration of other public institutions.[21]Colored Sailors room in World War IThe 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 out of the South. A total of nearly seven million blacks left the South in what was known as the Great Migration, most during and after World War II. So many people migrated that the demographics of some previously black-majority states changed to white majority (in combination with other developments). The rapid influx of blacks altered the demographics of Northern and Western cities; happening at a period of expanded European, Hispanic, and Asian immigration, it added to social competition and tensions, with the new migrants and immigrants battling for place in jobs and housing.
Reflecting social tensions after World War I, as veterans struggled to return to the workforce and labor unions were organizing, the Red Summer of 1919 was marked by hundreds of deaths and higher casualties across the U.S. as a result of white race riots against blacks that took place in more than three dozen cities, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919 and the Omaha race riot of 1919. Urban problems such as crime and disease were blamed on the large influx of Southern blacks to cities in the north and west, based on stereotypes of rural southern African-Americans. Overall, African Americans in Northern and Western cities experienced systemic discrimination in a plethora of aspects of life. Within employment, economic opportunities for blacks were routed to the lowest-status and restrictive in potential mobility. Within the housing market, stronger discriminatory measures were used in correlation to the influx, resulting in a mix of "targeted violence, restrictive covenants, redlining and racial steering".[22] The Great Migration resulted in many African Americans becoming urbanized, and they began to realign from the Republican to the Democratic Party, especially because of opportunities under the New Deal of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression in the 1930s.[23] Substantially under pressure from African-American supporters who began the March on Washington Movement, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the first federal order banning discrimination and created the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Black veterans of the military after both World Wars pressed for full civil rights and often led activist movements. In 1948, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which eventually led to the end of segregation in the armed services.[24]White tenants seeking to prevent blacks from moving into the housing project erected this sign, Detroit, 1942.Housing segregation was a nationwide problem, widespread outside the South. Although the federal government had become increasingly involved in mortgage lending and development in the 1930s and 1940s, it did not reject the use of race-restrictive covenants until 1950, in part because of provisions by the Solid South Democrats in Congress.[25] Suburbanization became connected with white flight by this time, because whites were better established economically to move to newer housing. The situation was perpetuated by real estate agents' continuing racial discrimination. In particular, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) issued guidelines that specified that a realtor "should never be instrumental in introducing to a neighborhood a character or property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will be clearly detrimental to property values in a neighborhood." The result was the development of all-black ghettos in the North and West, where much housing was older, as well as South.[26]
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-American activists adopted a combined strategy of direct action, nonviolence, nonviolent resistance, and many events described as civil disobedience, giving rise to the civil rights movement of 1954 to 1968.
The beginnings of direct action (1950s)The strategy of public education, legislative lobbying, and litigation that had typified the civil rights movement during the first half of the 20th century broadened after Brown to a strategy that emphasized "direct action": boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, marches or walks, and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance, standing in line, and, at times, civil disobedience.[citation needed]
Churches, local grassroots organizations, fraternal societies, and black-owned businesses 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 used by the NAACP and others.
In 1952, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), led by T. R. M. Howard, a black surgeon, entrepreneur, and planter, organized a successful boycott of gas stations in Mississippi that refused to provide restrooms for blacks. Through the RCNL, Howard led campaigns to expose brutality by the Mississippi state highway patrol and to encourage blacks to make deposits in the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Nashville which, in turn, gave loans to civil rights activists who were victims of a "credit squeeze" by the White Citizens' Councils.[27]
After Claudette Colvin was arrested for not giving up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in March 1955, a bus boycott was considered and rejected. But when Rosa Parks was arrested in December, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson of the Montgomery Women's Political Council put the bus boycott protest in motion. Late that night, she, John Cannon (chairman of the Business Department at Alabama State University) and others mimeographed and distributed thousands of leaflets calling for a boycott.[28][29] The eventual success of the boycott made its spokesman Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a nationally known figure. It also inspired other bus boycotts, such as the successful Tallahassee, Florida boycott of 1956–57.[30]
In 1957, Dr. King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, 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 (SCLC). 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 nonviolence both its central tenet and its primary method of confronting racism.
In 1959, Septima Clarke, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, with the help of Myles Horton's 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.
HistoryMain article: Timeline of the civil rights movementFurther information: Civil rights movement (1865–1896) and Civil rights movement (1896–1954)Brown v. Board of Education, 1954Main article: Brown v. Board of EducationIn the spring of 1951, black students in Virginia protested their unequal status in the state's segregated educational system. Students at Moton High School protested the overcrowded conditions and failing facility.[31] Some local leaders of the NAACP had tried to persuade the students to back down from their protest against the Jim Crow laws of school segregation. When the students did not budge, the NAACP joined their battle against school segregation. The NAACP proceeded with five cases challenging the school systems; these were later combined under what is known today as Brown v. Board of Education.[31]
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that mandating, or even permitting, public schools to be segregated by race was unconstitutional. 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.[32]
The lawyers from the NAACP had to gather plausible evidence in order to win the case of Brown vs. Board of Education. Their method of addressing the issue of school segregation was to enumerate several arguments. One pertained to having exposure to interracial contact in a school environment. It was argued that interracial contact would, in turn, help prepare children to live with the pressures that society exerts in regards to race and thereby afford them a better chance of living in a democracy. In addition, another argument emphasized how "'education' comprehends the entire process of developing and training the mental, physical and moral powers and capabilities of human beings".[33]
Risa Goluboff wrote that the NAACP's intention was to show the Courts that African American children were the victims of school segregation and their futures were at risk. The Court ruled that both Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had established the "separate but equal" standard in general, and Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899), which had applied that standard to schools, were unconstitutional.
The federal government filed a friend of the court brief in the case urging the justices to consider the effect that segregation had on America's image in the Cold War. Secretary of State Dean Acheson was quoted in the brief stating that "The United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations because of various practices of discrimination in this country." [34][35]
The following year, in the case known as Brown II, the Court ordered segregation to be phased out over time, "with all deliberate speed".[36] Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) did not overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Plessy v. Ferguson was segregation in transportation modes. Brown v. Board of Education dealt with segregation in education. Brown v. Board of Education did set in motion the future overturning of 'separate but equal'.School integration, Barnard School, Washington, D.C., 1955On May 18, 1954, Greensboro, North Carolina, became the first city in the South to publicly announce that it would aoffere by the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling. "It is unthinkable,' remarked School Board Superintendent Benjamin Smith, 'that we will try to [override] the laws of the United States."[37] This positive reception for Brown, together with the appointment of African American Dr. David Jones to the school board in 1953, convinced numerous white and black citizens that Greensboro was heading in a progressive direction. Integration in Greensboro occurred rather peacefully compared to the process in Southern states such as Alabama, Arkansas, and Virginia where "massive resistance" was practiced by top officials and throughout the states. In Virginia, some counties closed their public schools rather than integrate, and many white Christian private schools were founded to accommodate students who used to go to public schools. Even in Greensboro, much local resistance to desegregation continued, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Transition to a fully integrated school system did not begin until 1971.[37]
Many Northern cities also had de facto segregation policies, which resulted in a vast gulf in educational resources between black and white communities. In Harlem, New York, for example, neither a single new school was built since the turn of the century, nor did a single nursery school exist – even as the Second Great Migration was causing overcrowding. Existing schools tended to be dilapidated and staffed with inexperienced teachers. Brown helped stimulate activism among New York City parents like Mae Mallory who, with the support of the NAACP, initiated a successful lawsuit against the city and state on Brown's principles. Mallory and thousands of other parents bolstered the pressure of the lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959. During the boycott, some of the first freedom schools of the period were established. The city responded to the campaign by permitting more open transfers to high-quality, historically-white schools. (New York's African-American community, and Northern desegregation activists generally, now found themselves contending with the problem of white flight, however.)[38][39]
Emmett Till's murder, 1955Main article: Emmett Till
Emmett TillEmmett Till, a 14-year old African American from Chicago, visited his relatives in Money, Mississippi, for the summer. He allegedly had an interaction with a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a small grocery store that violated the norms of Mississippi culture, and Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam brutally murdered young Emmett Till. They beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river. Mamie Till, Emmett's Mother, "brought him home to Chicago and insisted on an open casket. Tens of thousands filed past Till's remains, but it was the publication of the searing funeral image in Jet, with a stoic Mamie gazing at her murdered child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism."[40] Vann R. Newkirk wrote: "The trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy".[1] The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were speedily acquitted by an all-white jury.[41]
"Emmett's murder," historian Tim Tyson writes, "would never have become a watershed historical moment without Mamie finding the strength to make her private grief a public matter."[42] The visceral response to his mother's decision to have an open-casket funeral mobilized the black community throughout the U.S.[1] "Young black people such as Julian Bond, Joyce Ladner and others who were born around the same time as Till were galvanized into action by the murder and trial."[42] They often see themselves as the "Emmett Till Generation." One hundred days after Emmett Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Alabama—indeed, Parks told Mamie Till that "the photograph of Emmett's disfigured face in the casket was set in her mind when she refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus."[43] The glass topped casket that was used for Till's Chicago funeral was found in a cemetery garage in 2009. Till had been reburied in a different casket after being exhumed in 2005.[44] Till's family decided to donate the original casket to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American Culture and History, where it is now on display.[45] In 2007, Bryant disclosed that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her story in 1955.[46][47]
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1956Main articles: Rosa Parks and Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey after being arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus to a white personOn December 1, 1955, nine months after a 15-year-old high school student, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested, Rosa Parks did the same thing. Parks soon became the symbol of the resulting Montgomery Bus Boycott and received national publicity. She was later hailed as the "mother of the civil rights movement".
Parks was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and had recently returned from a meeting at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee where nonviolence as a strategy was taught by Myles Horton and others. After Parks' arrest, African Americans gathered and organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott to demand a bus system in which passengers would be treated equally.[48] The organization was led by Jo Ann Robinson, a member of the Women's Political Council who had been waiting for the opportunity to boycott the bus system. Following Rosa Park's arrest, Jo Ann Robinson mimeographed 52,500 leaflets calling for a boycott. They were distributed around the city and helped gather the attention of civil rights leaders. After the city rejected many of their suggested reforms, the NAACP, led by E. D. Nixon, pushed for full desegregation of public buses. With the support of most of Montgomery's 50,000 African Americans, the boycott lasted for 381 days, until the local ordinance segregating African Americans and whites on public buses was repealed. Ninety percent of African Americans in Montgomery partook in the boycotts, which reduced bus revenue significantly, as they comprised the majority of the riders. In November 1956, the United States Supreme Court upheld a district court ruling in the case of Browder v. Gayle and ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated, ending the boycott.[48]
Local leaders established the Montgomery Improvement Association to focus their efforts. Martin Luther King Jr. was elected President of this organization. The lengthy protest attracted national attention for him and the city. His eloquent appeals to Christian brotherhood and American idealism created a positive impression on people both inside and outside the South.[29]
Desegregating Little Rock Central High School, 1957Main article: Little Rock Nine
Troops from the 327th Regiment, 101st Airborne escorting the Little Rock Nine African-American students up the steps of Central HighA crisis erupted in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus called out the National Guard on September 4 to prevent entry to the nine African-American students who had sued for the right to attend an integrated school, Little Rock Central High School.[49] Under the guidance of Daisy Bates, the nine students had been chosen to attend Central High because of their excellent grades.
On the first day of school, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford was the only one of the nine students who showed up because she did not receive the phone call about the danger of going to school. A photo was taken of Eckford being harassed by white protesters outside the school, and the police had to take her away in a patrol car for her protection. Afterwards, the nine students had to carpool to school and be escorted by military personnel in jeeps.White parents rally against integrating Little Rock's schools.Faubus was not a proclaimed segregationist. The Arkansas Democratic Party, which then controlled politics in the state, put significant pressure on Faubus after he had indicated he would investigate bringing Arkansas into compliance with the Brown decision. Faubus then took his stand against integration and against the Federal court ruling. Faubus' resistance received the attention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was determined to enforce the orders of the Federal courts. Critics had charged he was lukewarm, at best, on the goal of desegregation of public schools. But, Eisenhower federalized the National Guard in Arkansas and ordered them to return to their barracks. Eisenhower deployed elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the students.
The students attended high school under harsh conditions. 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 other students for the rest of the year. Although federal troops escorted the students between classes, the students were teased and even attacked by white students when the soldiers were not around. One of the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown, was suspended for spilling a bowl of chilli on the head of a white student who was harassing her in the school lunch line. Later, she was expelled for verbally abusing a white female student.[50]
Only Ernest Green of the Little Rock Nine graduated from Central High School. After the 1957–58 school year was over, Little Rock closed its public school system completely rather than continue to integrate. Other school systems across the South followed suit.
The method of Nonviolence and Nonviolence TrainingDuring the time period considered to be the "African-American civil rights" era, the predominant use of protest was nonviolent, or peaceful.[51] Often referred to as pacifism, the method of nonviolence is considered to be an attempt to impact society positively. Although acts of racial discrimination have occurred historically throughout the United States, perhaps the most violent regions have been in the former Confederate states. During the 1950s and 1960s, the nonviolent protesting of the civil rights movement caused definite tension, which gained national attention.
In order to prepare for protests physically and psychologically, demonstrators received training in nonviolence. According to former civil rights activist Bruce Hartford, there are two main branches of nonviolence training. There is the philosophical method, which involves understanding the method of nonviolence and why it is considered useful, and there is the tactical method, which ultimately teaches demonstrators "how to be a protestor—how to sit-in, how to picket, how to defend yourself against attack, giving training on how to remain cool when people are screaming racist insults into your face and pouring stuff on you and hitting you" (Civil Rights Movement Veterans). The philosophical method of nonviolence, in the American civil rights movement, was largely inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's "non-cooperation" with the British colonists in India, which was intended to gain attention so that the public would either "intervene in advance," or "provide public pressure in support of the action to be taken" (Erikson, 415). As Hartford explains it, philosophical nonviolence training aims to "shape the individual person's attitude and mental response to crises and violence" (Civil Rights Movement Veterans). Hartford and activists like him, who trained in tactical nonviolence, considered it necessary in order to ensure physical safety, instill discipline, teach demonstrators how to demonstrate, and form mutual confidence among demonstrators (Civil Rights Movement Veterans).[51][52]
For many, the concept of nonviolent protest was a way of life, a culture. However, not everyone agreed with this notion. James Forman, former SNCC (and later Black Panther) member and nonviolence trainer, was among those who did not. In his autobiography, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Forman revealed his perspective on the method of nonviolence as "strictly a tactic, not a way of life without limitations." Similarly, Bob Moses, who was also an active member of SNCC, felt that the method of nonviolence was practical. When interviewed by author Robert Penn Warren, Moses said "There's no question that he [Martin Luther King Jr.] had a great deal of influence with the masses. But I don't think it's in the direction of love. It's in a practical direction . . ." (Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren).[53][54]
Robert F. Williams and the debate on nonviolence, 1959–1964The Jim Crow system employed "terror as a means of social control,"[55] with the most organized manifestations being the Ku Klux Klan and their collaborators in local police departments. This violence played a key role in blocking the progress of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. Some black organizations in the South began practicing armed self-defense. The first to do so openly was the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP led by Robert F. Williams. Williams had rebuilt the chapter after its membership was terrorized out of public life by the Klan. He did so by encouraging a new, more working-class membership to arm itself thoroughly and defend against attack.[56] When Klan nightriders attacked the home of NAACP member Dr. Albert Perry in October 1957, Williams' militia exchanged gunfire with the stunned Klansmen, who quickly retreated. The following day, the city council held an emergency session and passed an ordinance banning KKK motorcades.[57] One year later, Lumbee Indians in North Carolina would have a similarly successful armed stand-off with the Klan (known as the Battle of Hayes Pond) which resulted in KKK leader James W. "Catfish" Cole being convicted of incitement to riot.[58]
After the acquittal of several white men charged with sexually assaulting black women in Monroe, Williams announced to United Press International reporters that he would "meet violence with violence" as a policy. Williams' declaration was quoted on the front page of The New York Times, and The Carolina Times considered it "the biggest civil rights story of 1959."[59] NAACP National chairman Roy Wilkins immediately suspended Williams from his position, but the Monroe organizer won support from numerous NAACP chapters across the country. Ultimately, Wilkins resorted to bribing influential organizer Daisy Bates to campaign against Williams at the NAACP national convention and the suspension was upheld. The convention nonetheless passed a resolution which stated: "We do not deny, but reaffirm the right of individual and collective self-defense against unlawful assaults."[60] Martin Luther King Jr. argued for Williams' removal,[61] but Ella Baker[62] and WEB Dubois[4] both publicly praised the Monroe leader's position.
Williams—along with his wife, Mabel Williams—continued to play a leadership role in the Monroe movement, and to some degree, in the national movement. The Williamses published The Crusader, a nationally circulated newsletter, beginning in 1960, and the influential book Negroes With Guns in 1962. Williams did not call for full militarization in this period, but "flexibility in the freedom struggle."[63] Williams was well-versed in legal tactics and publicity, which he had used successfully in the internationally known "Kissing Case" of 1958, as well as nonviolent methods, which he used at lunch counter sit-ins in Monroe—all with armed self-defense as a complementary tactic.
Williams led the Monroe movement in another armed stand-off with white supremacists during an August 1961 Freedom Ride; he had been invited to participate in the campaign by Ella Baker and James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The incident (along with his campaigns for peace with Cuba) resulted in him being targeted by the FBI and prosecuted for kidnapping; he was cleared of all charges in 1976.[64] Meanwhile, armed self-defense continued discreetly in the Southern movement with such figures as SNCC's Amzie Moore,[64] Hartman Turnbow,[65] and Fannie Lou Hamer[66] all willing to use arms to defend their lives from nightrides. Taking refuge from the FBI in Cuba, the Willamses broadcast the radio show "Radio Free Dixie" throughout the eastern United States via Radio Progresso beginning in 1962. In this period, Williams advocated guerilla warfare against racist institutions, and saw the large ghetto riots of the era as a manifestation of his strategy.
University of North Carolina historian Walter Rucker has written that "the emergence of Robert F Williams contributed to the marked decline in anti-black racial violence in the U.S....After centuries of anti-black violence, African Americans across the country began to defend their communities aggressively—employing overt force when necessary. This in turn evoked in whites real fear of black vengeance..." This opened up space for African Americans to use nonviolent demonstration with less fear of deadly reprisal.[67] Of the many civil rights activists who share this view, the most prominent was Rosa Parks. Parks gave the eulogy at Williams' funeral in 1996, praising him for "his courage and for his commitment to freedom," and concluding that "The sacrifices he made, and what he did, should go down in history and never be forgotten."[68]
Sit-ins, 1958–1960See also: Greensboro sit-ins, Nashville sit-ins, and Sit-in movementIn July 1958, the NAACP Youth Council sponsored sit-ins at the lunch counter of a Dockum Drug Store in downtown Wichita, Kansas. After three weeks, the movement successfully got the store to change its policy of segregated seating, and soon afterwards all Dockum stores in Kansas were desegregated. This movement was quickly followed in the same year by a student sit-in at a Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City led by Clara Luper, which also was successful.[69]
Mostly black students from area colleges led a sit-in at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina.[70] On February 1, 1960, four students, Ezell A. Blair Jr., 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 from being served food there.[71] The four students purchased small items in other parts of the store and kept their receipts, then sat down at the lunch counter and asked to be served. After being denied service, they produced their receipts and asked why their money was good everywhere else at the store, but not at the lunch counter.[72]
The protesters had been encouraged to dress professionally, to sit quietly, and to occupy every other stool so that potential white sympathizers could join in. The Greensboro sit-in was quickly followed by other sit-ins in Richmond, Virginia;[73] Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta, Georgia.[74][75] The most immediately effective of these was in Nashville, where hundreds of well organized and highly disciplined college students conducted sit-ins in coordination with a boycott campaign.[76][77] As students across the south began to "sit-in" at the lunch counters of local stores, police and other officials sometimes used brutal force to physically escort the demonstrators from the lunch facilities.
The "sit-in" technique was not new—as far back as 1939, African-American attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker organized a sit-in at the then-segregated Alexandria, Virginia, library.[78] In 1960 the technique succeeded in bringing national attention to the movement.[79] On March 9, 1960, an Atlanta University Center group of students released An Appeal for Human Rights as a full page advertisement in newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, and Atlanta Daily World.[80] Known as the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), the group initiated the Atlanta Student Movement and began to lead sit-ins starting on March 15, 1960.[75][81] By the end of 1960, the process of sit-ins had spread to every southern and border state, and even to facilities in Nevada, Illinois, and Ohio that discriminated against blacks.
Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but also on parks, beaches, libraries, theaters, museums, and other public facilities. In April 1960 activists who had led these sit-ins were invited by SCLC activist Ella Baker to hold a conference at Shaw University, a historically black university in Raleigh, North Carolina. This conference led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[82] SNCC took these tactics of nonviolent confrontation further, and organized the freedom rides. As the constitution protected interstate commerce, they decided to challenge segregation on interstate buses and in public bus facilities by putting interracial teams on them, to travel from the North through the segregated South.[83]
Freedom Rides, 1961Main article: Freedom RiderFreedom 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, 364 U.S. 454 (1960), which ruled that segregation was unconstitutional for passengers engaged in interstate 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.[84]
During the first and subsequent Freedom Rides, activists travelled through the Deep South to integrate seating patterns on buses 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.[85]A mob beats Freedom Riders in Birmingham. This picture was reclaimed by the FBI from a local journalist who also was beaten and whose camera was smashed.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 badly that he required fifty stitches to his head.[85]
In a similar occurrence in Montgomery, Alabama, the Freedom Riders followed in the footsteps of Rosa Parks and rode an integrated Greyhound bus from Birmingham. Although they were protesting interstate bus segregation in peace, they were met with violence in Montgomery as a large, white mob attacked them for their activism. They caused an enormous, 2-hour long riot which resulted in 22 injuries, five of whom were hospitalized.[86]
Mob violence in Anniston and Birmingham temporarily halted the rides. SNCC activists from Nashville brought in new riders to continue the journey from Birmingham to New Orleans. 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 James Zwerg, a white student from Fisk University, and beat him in the face with a suitcase, knocking out his teeth.[85]
On May 24, 1961, 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 and continued to flow into the South. As riders arrived in Jackson, they were arrested. By the end of summer, more than 300 had been jailed in Mississippi.[84]
.. When the weary Riders arrive in Jackson and attempt to use "white only" restrooms and lunch counters they are immediately arrested for Breach of Peace and Refusal to Obey an Officer. Says Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett in defense of segregation: "The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him." From lockup, the Riders announce "Jail No Bail"—they will not pay fines for unconstitutional arrests and illegal convictions—and by staying in jail they keep the issue alive. Each prisoner will remain in jail for 39 days, the maximum time they can serve without loosing [sic] their right to appeal the unconstitutionality of their arrests, trials, and convictions. After 39 days, they file an appeal and post bond...[87]
The jailed freedom riders were treated harshly, crammed into tiny, filthy cells and sporadically beaten. In Jackson, some male prisoners were forced to do hard labor in 100 °F heat. Others were transferred to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, where they were treated to harsh conditions. 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 John F. Kennedy's administration to order the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue a new desegregation order. When the new ICC rule took effect on November 1, 1961, 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, strategist, and facilitator. Other prominent student activists included Charles McDew, Bernard Lafayette, Charles Jones, Lonnie King, Julian Bond, Hosea Williams, and Stokely Carmichael.
Voter registration organizingAfter the Freedom Rides, local black leaders in Mississippi such as Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers, and others asked SNCC to help register black voters and to build community organizations that could win a share of political power in the state. Since Mississippi ratified its new constitution in 1890 with provisions such as poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests, it made registration more complicated and stripped blacks from voter rolls and voting. Also, violence at the time of elections had earlier suppressed black voting.
By the mid-20th century, preventing blacks from voting had become an essential part of the culture of white supremacy. In June and July 1959, members of the black community in Fayette County, TN formed the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League to spur voting. At the time, there were 16,927 blacks in the county, yet only 17 of them had voted in the previous seven years. Within a year, some 1,400 blacks had registered, and the white community responded with harsh economic reprisals. Using registration rolls, the White Citizens Council circulated a blacklist of all registered black voters, allowing banks, local stores, and gas stations to conspire to deny registered black voters essential services. What's more, sharecropping blacks who registered to vote were getting evicted from their homes. All in all, the number of evictions came to 257 families, many of whom were forced to live in a makeshift Tent City for well over a year. Finally, in December 1960, the Justice Department invoked its powers authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to file a suit against seventy parties accused of violating the civil rights of black Fayette County citizens.[88] In the following year the first voter registration project in McComb and the surrounding counties in the Southwest corner of the state. Their efforts were met with violent repression from state and local lawmen, the White Citizens' Council, and the Ku Klux Klan. Activists were beaten, there were hundreds of arrests of local citizens, and the voting activist Herbert Lee was murdered.[89]
White opposition to black voter registration was so intense in Mississippi that Freedom Movement activists concluded that all of the state's civil rights organizations had to unite in a coordinated effort to have any chance of success. In February 1962, representatives of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). At a subsequent meeting in August, SCLC became part of COFO.[90]
In the Spring of 1962, with funds from the Voter Education Project, SNCC/COFO began voter registration organizing in the Mississippi Delta area around Greenwood, and the areas surrounding Hattiesburg, Laurel, and Holly Springs. As in McComb, their efforts were met with fierce opposition—arrests, beatings, shootings, arson, and murder. Registrars used the literacy test to keep blacks off the voting rolls by creating standards that even highly educated people could not meet. In addition, employers fired blacks who tried to register, and landlords evicted them from their rental homes.[91] Despite these actions, over the following years, the black voter registration campaign spread across the state.
Similar voter registration campaigns—with similar responses—were begun by SNCC, CORE, and SCLC in Louisiana, Alabama, southwest Georgia, and South Carolina. By 1963, voter registration campaigns in the South were as integral to the Freedom Movement as desegregation efforts. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[2] protecting and facilitating voter registration despite state barriers became the main effort of the movement. It resulted in passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had provisions to enforce the constitutional right to vote for all citizens.
Integration of Mississippi universities, 1956–1965Beginning in 1956, Clyde Kennard, a black Korean War-veteran, wanted to enroll at Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi) at Hattiesburg under the G.I. Bill. Dr. William David McCain, the college president, used the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, in order to prevent his enrollment by appealing to local black leaders and the segregationist state political establishment.[92]
The state-funded organization tried to counter the civil rights movement by positively portraying segregationist policies. More significantly, it collected data on activists, harassed them legally, and used economic boycotts against them by threatening their jobs (or causing them to lose their jobs) to try to suppress their work.
Kennard was twice arrested on trumped-up charges, and eventually convicted and sentenced to seven years in the state prison.[93] After three years at hard labor, Kennard was paroled by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. Journalists had investigated his case and publicized the state's mistreatment of his colon cancer.[93]
McCain's role in Kennard's arrests and convictions is unknown.[94][95][96][97] While trying to prevent Kennard's enrollment, McCain made a speech in Chicago, with his travel sponsored by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. He described the blacks' seeking to desegregate Southern schools as "imports" from the North. (Kennard was a native and resident of Hattiesburg.) McCain said:
We insist that educationally and socially, we maintain a segregated society...In all fairness, I admit that we are not encouraging Negro voting...The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man's hands.[94][96][97]
Note: Mississippi had passed a new constitution in 1890 that effectively disfranchised most blacks by changing electoral and voter registration requirements; although it deprived them of constitutional rights authorized under post-Civil War amendments, it survived U.S. Supreme Court challenges at the time. It was not until after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that most blacks in Mississippi and other southern states gained federal protection to enforce the constitutional right of citizens to vote.James Meredith walking to class accompanied by U.S. marshalsIn September 1962, James Meredith won a lawsuit to secure admission to the previously segregated University of Mississippi. He attempted to enter campus on September 20, on September 25, and again on September 26. He was blocked by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, who said, "[N]o school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor." The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Barnett and Lieutenant Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. in contempt, ordering them arrested and fined more than $10,000 for each day they refused to allow Meredith to enroll.[98]U.S. Army trucks loaded with U.S. Marshals on the University of Mississippi campusAttorney General Robert Kennedy sent in a force of U.S. Marshals. On September 30, 1962, Meredith entered the campus under their escort. Students and other whites began rioting that evening, throwing rocks and firing on the U.S. Marshals guarding Meredith at Lyceum Hall. Two people, including a French journalist, were killed; 28 marshals suffered gunshot wounds, and 160 others were injured. President John F. Kennedy sent regular U.S. Army forces to the campus to quell the riot. Meredith began classes the day after the troops arrived.[99]
Kennard and other activists continued to work on public university desegregation. In 1965 Raylawni Branch and Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong became the first African-American students to attend the University of Southern Mississippi. By that time, McCain helped ensure they had a peaceful entry.[100] In 2006, Judge Robert Helfrich ruled that Kennard was factually innocent of all charges for which he had been convicted in the 1950s.[93]
Albany Movement, 1961–62Main article: Albany MovementThe SCLC, which had been criticized 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 because of the canny tactics of Laurie Pritchett, the local police chief, and divisions within the black community. The goals may not have been specific enough. Pritchett contained the marchers without violent attacks on demonstrators that inflamed national opinion. He also arranged for arrested demonstrators to be taken to jails in surrounding communities, allowing plenty of room to remain in his jail. Pritchett 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 having achieved any dramatic victories. The local movement, however, continued the struggle, and it obtained significant gains in the next few years.[101]
Birmingham campaign, 1963Main article: Birmingham campaignThe Albany movement was shown to be an important education for the SCLC, however, when it undertook the Birmingham campaign in 1963. Executive Director Wyatt Tee Walker carefully planned the early strategy and tactics for the campaign. It focused on one goal—the desegregation of Birmingham's downtown merchants, rather than total desegregation, as in Albany.
The movement's efforts were helped by the brutal response of local authorities, in particular Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety. He had long held much political power but had lost a recent election for mayor to a less raofferly segregationist candidate. Refusing to accept the new mayor's authority, Connor intended to stay in office.
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.[102]
While in jail, King wrote his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail"[103] on the margins of a newspaper, since he had not been allowed any writing paper while held in solitary confinement.[104] Supporters appealed to the Kennedy administration, which intervened to obtain King's release. King was allowed to call his wife, who was recuperating at home after the birth of their fourth child and was released early on April 19.
The campaign, however, faltered as it ran out of demonstrators willing to risk arrest. James Bevel, SCLC's Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education, then came up with a bold and controversial alternative: to train high school students to take part in the demonstrations. As a result, in what would be called the Children's Crusade, more than one thousand students skipped school on May 2 to meet at the 16th Street Baptist Church to join the demonstrations. More than six hundred marched out of the church fifty at a time in an attempt to walk to City Hall to speak to Birmingham's mayor about segregation. They were arrested and put into jail. In this first encounter, the police acted with restraint. On the next day, however, another one thousand students gathered at the church. When Bevel started them marching fifty at a time, Bull Connor finally unleashed police dogs on them and then turned the city's fire hoses water streams on the children. National television networks broadcast the scenes of the dogs attacking demonstrators and the water from the fire hoses knocking down the schoolchildren.[105]
Widespread public outrage led the Kennedy administration to intervene more forcefully in 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—the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was particularly critical, since he was skeptical about the good faith of Birmingham's power structure from his experience in dealing with them. Parts of the white community reacted violently. They bombed the Gaston Motel, which housed the SCLC's unofficial headquarters, and the home of King's brother, the Reverend A. D. King. In response, thousands of blacks rioted, burning numerous buildings and one of them stabbed and wounded a police officer.[106]Congress of Racial Equality march in Washington D.C. on September 22, 1963, in memory of the children killed in the Birmingham bombingsKennedy prepared to federalize the Alabama National Guard if the need arose. Four months later, on September 15, a conspiracy of Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls.
"Rising tide of discontent" and Kennedy's response, 1963Main articles: Gloria Richardson, Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, and Civil Rights AddressBirmingham was only one of over a hundred cities rocked by the chaotic protest that spring and summer, some of them in the North but mainly in the South. During the March on Washington, Martin Luther King would refer to such protests as "the whirlwinds of revolt." In Chicago, blacks rioted through the South Side in late May after a white police officer shot a fourteen-year-old black boy who was fleeing the scene of a robbery.[107] Violent clashes between black activists and white workers took place in both Philadelphia and Harlem in successful efforts to integrate state construction projects.[108][109] On June 6, over a thousand whites attacked a sit-in in Lexington, North Carolina; blacks fought back and one white man was killed.[110][111] Edwin C. Berry of the National Urban League warned of a complete breakdown in race relations: "My message from the beer gardens and the barbershops all indicate the fact that the Negro is ready for war."[107]
In Cambridge, Maryland, a working‐class city on the Eastern Shore, Gloria Richardson of SNCC led a movement that pressed for desegregation but also demanded low‐rent public housing, job‐training, public and private jobs, and an end to police brutality.[112] On June 11, struggles between blacks and whites escalated into violent rioting, leading Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes to declare martial law. When negotiations between Richardson and Maryland officials faltered, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy directly intervened to negotiate a desegregation agreement.[113] Richardson felt that the increasing participation of poor and working-class blacks was expanding both the power and parameters of the movement, asserting that "the people as a whole really do have more intelligence than a few of their leaders.ʺ[112]
In their deliberations during this wave of protests, the Kennedy administration privately felt that militant demonstrations were ʺbad for the countryʺ and that "Negroes are going to push this thing too far."[114] On May 24, Robert Kennedy had a meeting with prominent black intellectuals to discuss the racial situation. The blacks criticized Kennedy harshly for vacillating on civil rights, and said that the African-American community's thoughts were increasingly turning to violence. The meeting ended with ill will on all sides.[115][116][117] Nonetheless, the Kennedys ultimately decided that new legislation for equal public accommodations was essential to drive activists "into the courts and out of the streets."[114][118]Alabama governor George Wallace stands against desegregation at the University of Alabama and is confronted by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach in 1963On June 11, 1963, George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, tried to block[119] the integration of the University of Alabama. President John F. Kennedy sent a military force to make Governor Wallace step aside, allowing the enrollment of Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood. That evening, President Kennedy addressed the nation on TV and radio with his historic civil rights speech, where he lamented "a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety." He called on Congress to pass new civil rights legislation, and urged the country to embrace civil rights as "a moral issue...in our daily lives."[120] In the early hours of June 12, Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, was assassinated by a member of the Klan.[121][122] The next week, as promised, on June 19, 1963, President Kennedy submitted his Civil Rights bill to Congress.[123]
March on Washington, 1963Main article: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Bayard Rustin (left) and Cleveland Robinson (right), organizers of the March, on August 7, 1963
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the National MallA. Philip Randolph had planned a march on Washington, D.C., in 1941 to support 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.[124]
Randolph and Bayard Rustin were the chief planners of the second march, which they proposed in 1962. In 1963, the Kennedy administration initially opposed the march out of concern it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation. However, Randolph and King were firm that the march would proceed.[125] With the march going forward, the Kennedys decided it was important to work to ensure its success. Concerned about the turnout, President Kennedy enlisted the aid of white church leaders and Walter Reuther, president of the UAW, to help mobilize white supporters for the march.[126][127]
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 lawsa massive federal works programfull and fair employmentdecent housingthe right to voteadequate integrated education.Of these, the march's major focus was on passage of the civil rights law that the Kennedy administration had proposed after the upheavals in Birmingham.Martin Luther King Jr. at a Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C.National media attention also greatly contributed to the march's national exposure and probable impact. In the essay "The March on Washington and Television News,"[128] historian William Thomas notes: "Over five hundred cameramen, technicians, and correspondents from the major networks were set to cover the event. More cameras would be set up than had filmed the last presidential inauguration. One camera was positioned high in the Washington Monument, to give dramatic vistas of the marchers". By carrying the organizers' speeches and offering their own commentary, television stations framed the way their local audiences saw and understood the event.[128]
"I Have a Dream"MENU0:0030-second sample from "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963Problems playing this file? See media help.The march was a success, although not without controversy. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 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 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 not doing more to protect southern blacks and civil rights workers under attack in the Deep South.
After the march, King and other civil rights leaders met with President Kennedy at the White House. While the Kennedy administration appeared sincerely committed to passing the bill, it was not clear that it had enough votes in Congress to do so. However, when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963,[123] the new President Lyndon Johnson decided to use his influence in Congress to bring about much of Kennedy's legislative agenda.
Malcolm X joins the movement, 1964–1965Main articles: Malcolm X, Black Nationalism, and The Ballot or the BulletIn March 1964, Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz), national representative of the Nation of Islam, formally broke with that organization, and made a public offer to collaborate with any civil rights organization that accepted the right to self-defense and the philosophy of Black nationalism (which Malcolm said no longer required Black separatism). Gloria Richardson, head of the Cambridge, Maryland, chapter of SNCC, and leader of the Cambridge rebellion,[129] an honored guest at The March on Washington, immediately embraced Malcolm's offer. Mrs. Richardson, "the nation's most prominent woman [civil rights] leader,"[130] told The Baltimore Afro-American that "Malcolm is being very practical...The federal government has moved into conflict situations only when matters approach the level of insurrection. Self-defense may force Washington to intervene sooner."[130] Earlier, in May 1963, writer and activist James Baldwin had stated publicly that "the Black Muslim movement is the only one in the country we can call grassroots, I hate to say it...Malcolm articulates for Negroes, their suffering...he corroborates their reality..."[131] On the local level, Malcolm and the NOI had been allied with the Harlem chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) since at least 1962.[132]
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. speak to each other thoughtfully as others look on.Malcolm X meets with Martin Luther King Jr., March 26, 1964On March 26, 1964, as the Civil Rights Act was facing stiff opposition in Congress, Malcolm had a public meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. at the Capitol. Malcolm had tried to begin a dialog with Dr. King as early as 1957, but King had rebuffed him. Malcolm had responded by calling King an "Uncle Tom", saying he had turned his back on black militancy in order to appease the white power structure. But the two men were on good terms at their face-to-face meeting.[133] There is evidence that King was preparing to support Malcolm's plan to formally bring the U.S. government before the United Nations on charges of human rights violations against African Americans.[134] Malcolm now encouraged Black nationalists to get involved in voter registration drives and other forms of community organizing to redefine and expand the movement.[135]
Civil rights activists became increasingly combative in the 1963 to 1964 period, seeking to defy such events as the thwarting of the Albany campaign, police repression and Ku Klux Klan terrorism in Birmingham, and the assassination of Medgar Evers. The latter's brother Charles Evers, who took over as Mississippi NAACP Field Director, told a public NAACP conference on February 15, 1964, that "non-violence won't work in Mississippi...we made up our minds...that if a white man shoots at a Negro in Mississippi, we will shoot back."[136] The repression of sit-ins in Jacksonville, Florida, provoked a riot in which black youth threw Molotov cocktails at police on March 24, 1964.[137] Malcolm X gave numerous speeches in this period warning that such militant activity would escalate further if African Americans' rights were not fully recognized. In his landmark April 1964 speech "The Ballot or the Bullet", Malcolm presented an ultimatum to white America: "There's new strategy coming in. It'll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, and something else next month. It'll be ballots, or it'll be bullets."[138]
As noted in the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, "Malcolm X had a far reaching effect on the civil rights movement. In the South, there had been a long tradition of self reliance. Malcolm X's ideas now touched that tradition".[139] Self-reliance was becoming paramount in light of the 1964 Democratic National Convention's decision to refuse seating to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and instead to seat the regular state delegation, which had been elected in violation of the party's own rules, and by Jim Crow law instead.[140] SNCC moved in an increasingly militant direction and worked with Malcolm X on two Harlem MFDP fundraisers in December 1964.
When Fannie Lou Hamer spoke to Harlemites about the Jim Crow violence that she'd suffered in Mississippi, she linked it directly to the Northern police brutality against blacks that Malcolm protested against;[141] When Malcolm asserted that African Americans should emulate the Mau Mau army of Kenya in efforts to gain their independence, many in SNCC applauded.[142]
During the Selma campaign for voting rights in 1965, Malcolm made it known that he'd heard reports of increased threats of lynching around Selma. In late January he sent an open telegram to George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, stating:
"if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans...you and your KKK friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not handcuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence."[143]
The following month, the Selma chapter of SNCC invited Malcolm to speak to a mass meeting there. On the day of Malcolm's appearance, President Johnson made his first public statement in support of the Selma campaign.[144] Paul Ryan Haygood, a co-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, credits Malcolm with a role in gaining support by the federal government. Haygood noted that "shortly after Malcolm's visit to Selma, a federal judge, responding to a suit brought by the Department of Justice, required Dallas County, Alabama, registrars to process at least 100 Black applications each day their offices were open."[145]
St. Augustine, Florida, 1963–64Main article: St. Augustine movement
"We Cater to White Trade Only" sign on a restaurant window in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1938. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and spent a night in jail for attempting to eat at a white-only restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida.St. Augustine was famous as the "Nation's Oldest City", founded by the Spanish in 1565. It became the stage for a great drama leading up to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. A local movement, led by Dr. Robert B. Hayling, a black dentist and Air Force veteran affiliated with the NAACP, had been picketing segregated local institutions since 1963. In the fall of 1964, Hayling and three companions were brutally beaten at a Ku Klux Klan rally.
Nightriders shot into black homes, and teenagers Audrey Nell Edwards, JoeAnn Anderson, Samuel White, and Willie Carl Singleton (who came to be known as "The St. Augustine Four") sat in at a local Woolworth's lunch counter, seeking to get served. They were arrested and convicted of trespassing, and sentenced to six months in jail and reform school. It took a special act of the governor and cabinet of Florida to release them after national protests by the Pittsburgh Courier, Jackie Robinson, and others.
In response to the repression, the St. Augustine movement practiced armed self-defense in addition to nonviolent direct action. In June 1963, Dr. Hayling publicly stated that "I and the others have armed. We will shoot first and answer questions later. We are not going to die like Medgar Evers." The comment made national headlines.[146] When Klan nightriders terrorized black neighborhoods in St. Augustine, Hayling's NAACP members often drove them off with gunfire. In October 1963, a Klansman was killed.[147]
In 1964, Dr. Hayling and other activists urged the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to come to St. Augustine. Four prominent Massachusetts women – Mary Parkman Peabody, Esther Burgess, Hester Campbell (all of whose husbands were Episcopal bishops), and Florence Rowe (whose husband was vice president of John Hancock Insurance Company) – also came to lend their support. The arrest of Mrs. Peabody, the 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, for attempting to eat at the segregated Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge in an integrated group, made front-page news across the country and brought the movement in St. Augustine to the attention of the world.[148]
Widely publicized activities continued in the ensuing months. When Dr. King was arrested, he sent a "Letter from the St. Augustine Jail" to a northern supporter, Rabbi Israel Dresner. A week later, in the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history took place, while they were conducting a pray-in at the segregated Monson Motel. A well-known photograph taken in St. Augustine shows the manager of the Monson Motel pouring muriatic acid in the swimming pool while blacks and whites are swimming in it. The horrifying photograph was run on the front page of a Washington newspaper the day the Senate were to vote on passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Chester School Protests, Spring 1964In the early 1960s, racial unrest and civil rights protests led by George Raymond of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP) and Stanley Branche of the Committee for Freedom Now (CFFN) made Chester, Pennsylvania one of the key battlegrounds of the civil rights movement. James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality called Chester "the Birmingham of the North".[149]
In 1962, Branche and the CFFN focused on improving conditions at the predominantly black Franklin Elementary school in Chester. Although the school was built to house 500 students, it had become overcrowded with 1,200 students. The school's average class-size was 39, twice the number of nearby all-white schools.[150] The school was built in 1910 and had never been updated. Only two bathrooms were available for the entire school.[151] In November 1963, CFFN protesters blocked the entrance to Franklin Elementary school and the Chester Municipal Building resulting in the arrest of 240 protesters. Following public attention to the protests stoked by media coverage of the mass arrests, the mayor and school board negotiated with the CFFN and NAACP.[149] The Chester Board of Education agreed to reduce class sizes at Franklin school, remove unsanitary toilet facilities, relocate classes held in the boiler room and coal bin and repair school grounds.[151]
Emboldened by the success of the Franklin Elementary school demonstrations, the CFFN recruited new members, sponsored voter registration drives and planned a citywide boycott of Chester schools. Branche built close ties with students at nearby Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania Military College and Cheyney State College in order to ensure large turnouts at demonstrations and protests.[149] Branche invited Dick Gregory and Malcolm X to Chester to participate in the "Freedom Now Conference"[152] and other national civil rights leaders such as Gloria Richardson came to Chester in support of the demonstrations.[153]
In 1964, a series of almost nightly protests brought chaos to Chester as protestors argued that the Chester School Board had de facto segregation of schools. The mayor of Chester, James Gorbey, issued "The Police Position to Preserve the Public Peace", a ten-point statement promising an immediate return to law and order. The city deputized firemen and trash collectors to help handle demonstrators.[149] The State of Pennsylvania deployed 50 state troopers to assist the 77-member Chester police force.[151] The demonstrations were marked by violence and charges of police brutality.[154] Over six hundred people were arrested over a two month period of civil rights rallies, marches, pickets, boycotts and sit-ins.[149] Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton became involved in the negotiations and convinced Branche to obey a court-ordered moratorium on demonstrations.[152] Scranton created the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission to conduct hearings on the de facto segregation of public schools. All protests were discontinued while the commission held hearings during the summer of 1964.[155]
In November 1964, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission concluded that the Chester School Board had violated the law and ordered the Chester School District to desegregate the city's six predominantly African-American schools. The city appealed the ruling, which delayed implementation.[151]
Freedom Summer, 1964Main article: Freedom SummerIn the summer of 1964, COFO brought nearly 1,000 activists to Mississippi—most of them white college students from the North and West—to join with local black activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom Schools," and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).[156]
Many of Mississippi's white residents deeply resented the outsiders and attempts to change their society. State and local governments, police, the White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan used arrests, beatings, arson, murder, spying, firing, evictions, and other forms of intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent blacks from registering to vote or achieving social equality.[157]Missing persons poster created by the FBI in 1964 shows the photographs of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner.On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared: James Chaney, a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two Jewish activists, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College anthropology student; and Michael Schwerner, a CORE organizer from Manhattan's Lower East Side. They were found weeks later, murdered by conspirators who turned out to be local members of the Klan, some of them members of the Neshoba County sheriff's department. This outraged the public, leading the U.S. Justice Department along with the FBI (the latter which had previously avoided dealing with the issue of segregation and persecution of blacks) to take action. The outrage over these murders helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
From June to August, Freedom Summer activists worked in 38 local projects scattered across the state, with the largest number concentrated in the Mississippi Delta region. At least 30 Freedom Schools, with close to 3,500 students, were established, and 28 community centers set up.[158]
Over the course of the Summer Project, some 17,000 Mississippi blacks attempted to become registered voters in defiance of the red tape and forces of white supremacy arrayed against them—only 1,600 (less than 10%) succeeded. But more than 80,000 joined the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), founded as an alternative political organization, showing their desire to vote and participate in politics.[159]
Though Freedom Summer failed to register many voters, it had a significant effect on the course of the civil rights movement. It helped break down the decades of people's isolation and repression that were the foundation of the Jim Crow system. Before Freedom Summer, the national news media had paid little attention to the persecution of black voters in the Deep South and the dangers endured by black civil rights workers. The progression of events throughout the South increased media attention to Mississippi.[160]
The deaths of affluent northern white students and threats to non-Southerners attracted the full attention of the media spotlight to the state. Many black activists became embittered, believing the media valued lives of whites and blacks differently. Perhaps the most significant effect of Freedom Summer was on the volunteers, almost all of whom—black and white—still consider it to have been one of the defining periods of their lives.[160]
Civil Rights Act of 1964Main article: Civil Rights Act of 1964Although President Kennedy had proposed civil rights legislation and it had support from Northern Congressmen and Senators of both parties, Southern Senators blocked the bill by threatening filibusters. After considerable parliamentary maneuvering and 54 days of filibuster on the floor of the United States Senate, President Johnson got a bill through the Congress.[161]Lyndon B. Johnson signs the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[2] which banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, sex or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations. The bill authorized the Attorney General to file lawsuits to enforce the new law. The law also nullified state and local laws that required such discrimination.
Harlem riot of 1964Main article: Harlem riot of 1964When police shot an unarmed black teenager in Harlem in July 1964, tensions escalated out of control. Residents were frustrated with racial inequalities. Rioting broke out, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, a major black neighborhood in Brooklyn erupted next. That summer, rioting also broke out in Philadelphia, for similar reasons. The riots were on a much smaller scale than what would occur in 1965 and later.
Washington responded with a pilot program called Project Uplift. 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.[162] HARYOU was given a major role in organizing the project, together with the National Urban League and nearly 100 smaller community organizations.[163] Permanent jobs at living wages were still out of reach of many young black men.
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964Main article: Mississippi Freedom Democratic PartyBlacks in Mississippi had been disfranchised by statutory and constitutional changes since the late 19th century. In 1963 COFO held a Freedom Ballot in Mississippi to demonstrate the desire of black Mississippians to vote. More than 80,000 people registered and voted in the mock election, which pitted an integrated slate of candidates from the "Freedom Party" against the official state Democratic Party candidates.[164]President Lyndon B. Johnson (center) meets with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, and James Farmer, January 1964In 1964, organizers launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the all-white official party. When Mississippi voting registrars refused to recognize their candidates, they held their own primary. They selected Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray to run for Congress, and a slate of delegates to represent Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.[156]
The presence of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was inconvenient, however, for the convention organizers. They had planned a triumphant celebration of the Johnson administration's achievements in civil rights, rather than a fight over racism within the Democratic Party. All-white delegations from other Southern states threatened to walk out if the official slate from Mississippi was not seated. Johnson was worried about the inroads that Republican Barry Goldwater's campaign was making in what previously had been the white Democratic stronghold of the "Solid South", as well as support that George Wallace had received in the North during the Democratic primaries.
Johnson could not, however, prevent the MFDP from taking its case to the Credentials Committee. There Fannie Lou Hamer testified eloquently about the beatings that she and others endured and the threats they faced for trying to register to vote. Turning to the television cameras, Hamer asked, "Is this America?"
Johnson offered the MFDP a "compromise" under which it would receive two non-voting, at-large seats, while the white delegation sent by the official Democratic Party would retain its seats. The MFDP angrily rejected the "compromise."
The MFDP kept up its agitation at the convention after it was denied official recognition. When all but three of the "regular" Mississippi delegates left because they refused to pledge allegiance to the party, the MFDP delegates borrowed passes from sympathetic delegates and took the seats vacated by the official Mississippi delegates. National party organizers removed them. When they returned the next day, they found convention organizers had removed the empty seats that had been there the day before. They stayed and sang "freedom songs".
The 1964 Democratic Party convention disillusioned many within the MFDP and the civil rights movement, but it did not destroy the MFDP. The MFDP became more radical after Atlantic City. It invited Malcolm X to speak at one of its conventions and opposed the war in Vietnam.
Selma Voting Rights MovementMain articles: Selma to Montgomery marches and Voting Rights Act
President Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965"Remarks on the Signing of the Voting Rights Act"File:Remarks on the Signing of the Voting Rights Act (August 6, 1965) Lyndon Baines Johnson.ogvStatement before the United States Congress by Johnson on August 6, 1965, about the Voting Rights Act"Remarks on the Signing of the Voting Rights Act"MENU0:00audio onlyProblems playing these files? See media help.SNCC had undertaken an ambitious voter registration program in Selma, Alabama, in 1963, but by 1965 little headway had been made in the face of opposition from Selma's sheriff, Jim Clark. After local residents asked the SCLC for assistance, King came to Selma to lead several marches, at which he was arrested along with 250 other demonstrators. The marchers continued to meet violent resistance from police. Jimmie Lee Jackson, a resident of nearby Marion, was killed by police at a later march in February 17, 1965. Jackson's death prompted James Bevel, director of the Selma Movement, to initiate and organize a plan to march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital.
On March 7, 1965, acting on Bevel's plan, Hosea Williams of the SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC led a march of 600 people to walk the 54 miles (87 km) from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. Six blocks into the march, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge where the marchers left the city and moved into the county, state troopers and local county law enforcement, some mounted on horseback, attacked the peaceful demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire, and bull whips. They drove the marchers back into Selma. Lewis was knocked unconscious and dragged to safety. At least 16 other marchers were hospitalized. Among those gassed and beaten was Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was at the center of civil rights activity at the time.Police attack non-violent marchers on "Bloody Sunday", the first day of the Selma to Montgomery marches.The national broadcast of the news footage of lawmen attacking unresisting marchers' seeking to exercise their constitutional right to vote provoked a national response, and hundreds of people from all over the country came for a second march. These marchers were turned around by Dr. King at the last minute so as not to violate a federal injunction. With the support of James Forman and other SNCC leaders, activists throughout the country committed civil disobedience for Selma, particularly in Montgomery and at the White House. The marchers were able to lift the injunction and obtain protection from federal troops, permitting them to make the march across Alabama without incident two weeks later.
The evening of a second march on March 9 to the site of Bloody Sunday, local whites attacked Rev. James Reeb, a voting rights supporter. He died of his injuries in a Birmingham hospital March 11. On March 25, four Klansmen shot and killed Detroit homemaker Viola Liuzzo as she drove marchers back to Selma at night after the successfully completed march to Montgomery.
Voting Rights Act of 1965Eight days after the first march, but before the final march, President Johnson delivered a televised address to support the voting rights bill he had sent to Congress. In it he stated:
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
On August 6, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended literacy tests and other subjective voter registration tests. It authorized Federal supervision of voter registration in states and individual voting districts where such tests were being used and where African Americans were historically under-represented in voting rolls compared to the eligible population. African Americans who had been barred from registering to vote finally had an alternative to taking suits to local or state courts, which had seldom prosecuted their cases to success. If discrimination in voter registration occurred, the 1965 act authorized the Attorney General of the United States to send Federal examiners to replace local registrars.
Within months of the bill's passage, 250,000 new black voters had been registered, one-third of them by federal examiners. Within four years, voter registration in the South had more than doubled. In 1965, Mississippi had the highest black voter turnout at 74% and led the nation in the number of black public officials elected. In 1969, Tennessee had a 92.1% turnout among black voters; Arkansas, 77.9%; and Texas, 73.1%.
Several whites who had opposed the Voting Rights Act paid a quick price. In 1966 Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma, Alabama, infamous for using cattle prods against civil rights marchers, was up for reelection. Although he took off the notorious "Never" pin on his uniform, he was defeated. At the election, Clark lost as blacks voted to get him out of office.
Blacks' regaining the power to vote changed the political landscape of the South. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, only about 100 African Americans held elective office, all in northern states. By 1989, there were more than 7,200 African Americans in office, including more than 4,800 in the South. Nearly every Black Belt county (where populations were majority black) in Alabama had a black sheriff. Southern blacks held top positions in city, county, and state governments.
Atlanta elected a black mayor, Andrew Young, as did Jackson, Mississippi, with Harvey Johnson Jr., and New Orleans, with Ernest Morial. Black politicians on the national level included Barbara Jordan, elected as a Representative from Texas in Congress, and President Jimmy Carter appointed Andrew Young as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Julian Bond was elected to the Georgia State Legislature in 1965, although political reaction to his public opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War prevented him from taking his seat until 1967. John Lewis was first elected in 1986 to represent Georgia's 5th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives, where he has served since 1987.
Watts riot of 1965Main article: Watts Riots
Police arrest a man during the Watts Riots, August 1965The new Voting Rights Act of 1965 had no immediate effect on living conditions for poor 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 a majority-black neighborhood with very high unemployment and associated poverty. Its residents confronted a largely white police department that had a history of abuse against blacks.[165]
While arresting a young man for drunk driving, police officers argued with the suspect's mother before onlookers. The spark 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 Riots among the most expensive in American history.
With black militancy on the rise, ghetto residents directed acts of anger 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 among blacks occurred in 1966 and 1967 in cities such as Atlanta, San Francisco, Oakland, Baltimore, Seattle, Tacoma, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Newark, Chicago, New York City (specifically in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx), and worst of all in Detroit.
Fair housing movements, 1966–1968The first major blow against housing segregation in the era, the Rumford Fair Housing Act, was passed in California in 1963. It was overturned by white California voters and real estate lobbyists the following year with Proposition 14, a move which helped precipitate the Watts Riots.[166][167] In 1966, the California Supreme Court invalidated Proposition 14 and reinstated the Fair Housing Act.[168]
Working and organizing for fair housing laws became a major project of the movement over the next two years, with Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, and Al Raby leading the Chicago Freedom Movement around the issue in 1966. In the following year, Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council also attracted national attention with a fair housing campaign in Milwaukee.[169][170] Both movements faced violent resistance from white homeowners and legal opposition from conservative politicians.
The Fair Housing Bill was the most contentious civil rights legislation of the era. Senator Walter Mondale, who advocated for the bill, noted that over successive years, it was the most filibustered legislation in U.S. history. It was opposed by most Northern and Southern senators, as well as the National Association of Real Estate Boards. A proposed "Civil Rights Act of 1966" had collapsed completely because of its fair housing provision.[171] Mondale commented that:
A lot of civil rights [legislation] was about making the South behave and taking the teeth from George Wallace, [but] this came right to the neighborhoods across the country. This was civil rights getting personal.[25]
Nationwide riots of 1967Main articles: Detroit Riot of 1967, 1967 Newark riots, 1967 Plainfield riots, and Long Hot Summer of 1967In 1967 riots broke out in black neighborhoods in more than 100 U.S. cities, including Detroit, Newark, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C.[172] The largest of these was the 1967 Detroit riot.
In Detroit, a large black middle class had begun to develop among those African Americans who worked at unionized jobs in the automotive industry. These workers complained of persisting racist practices, limiting the jobs they could have and opportunities for promotion. The United Auto Workers channelled these complaints into bureaucratic and ineffective grievance procedures.[173] Violent white mobs enforced the segregation of housing up through the 1960s.[174] Blacks who were not upwardly mobile were living in substandard conditions, subject to the same problems as poor African Americans in Watts and Harlem.
When white Detroit Police Department (DPD) officers shut down an illegal bar and arrested a large group of patrons during the hot summer, furious black residents rioted. Rioters looted and destroyed property while snipers engaged in firefights from rooftops and windows, undermining the DPD's ability to curtail the disorder. In response, the Michigan Army National Guard and U.S. Army paratroopers were deployed to reinforce the DPD and protect Detroit Fire Department (DFD) firefighters from attacks while putting out fires. Residents reported that police officers and National Guardsmen shot at black civilians and suspects indiscriminately. After five days, 43 people had been killed, hundreds injured, and thousands left homeless; $40 to $45 million worth of damage was caused.[174][175]
State and local governments responded to the riot with a dramatic increase in minority hiring.[176] In the aftermath of the turmoil, the Greater Detroit Board of Commerce also launched a campaign to find jobs for ten thousand "previously unemployable" persons, a preponderant number of whom were black.[177] Governor George Romney immediately responded to the riot of 1967 with a special session of the Michigan legislature where he forwarded sweeping housing proposals that included not only fair housing, but "important relocation, tenants' rights and code enforcement legislation." Romney had supported such proposals in 1965, but abandoned them in the face of organized opposition. The laws passed both houses of the legislature. Historian Sidney Fine wrote that:
The Michigan Fair Housing Act, which took effect on November 15, 1968, was stronger than the federal fair housing law...It is probably more than a coincidence that the state that had experienced the most severe racial disorder of the 1960s also adopted one of the strongest state fair housing acts.[178]
President Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in response to nationwide wave of riots. The commission's final report called for major reforms in employment and public policy in black communities. It warned that the United States was moving toward separate white and black societies.
Memphis, King assassination and the Poor People's March 1968Main articles: Poor People's Campaign and Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.See also: Orangeburg massacre"I've Been to the Mountaintop"MENU0:00Final 30 seconds of "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. These are the final words from his final public speech.Problems playing this file? See media help.
A 3,000-person shantytown called Resurrection City was established in 1968 on the National Mall as part of the Poor People's Campaign.Rev. James Lawson invited King to Memphis, Tennessee, in March 1968 to support a sanitation workers' strike. These workers launched a campaign for union representation after two workers were accidentally killed on the job; they were seeking fair wages and improved working conditions. King considered their struggle to be a vital part of the Poor People's Campaign he was planning.
A day after delivering his stirring "I've Been to the Mountaintop" sermon, which has become famous for his vision of American society, King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Riots broke out in black neighborhoods in more than 110 cities across the United States in the days that followed, notably in Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.
The day before King's funeral, April 8, Coretta Scott King and three of the King children led 20,000 marchers through the streets of Memphis, holding signs that read, "Honor King: End Racism" and "Union Justice Now". Armed National Guardsmen lined the streets, sitting on M-48 tanks, to protect the marchers, and helicopters circled overhead. On April 9, Mrs. King led another 150,000 people in a funeral procession through the streets of Atlanta.[179] Her dignity revived courage and hope in many of the Movement's members, confirming her place as the new leader in the struggle for racial equality.
Coretta Scott King said,[180]
[Martin Luther King Jr.] gave his life for the poor of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam. The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace.
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. It was to unite blacks and whites to campaign for fundamental changes in American society and economic structure. The march went forward under Abernathy's plainspoken leadership but did not achieve its goals.
Civil Rights Act of 1968Main article: Civil Rights Act of 1968As 1968 began, the fair housing bill was being filibustered once again, but two developments revived it.[25] The Kerner Commission report on the 1967 ghetto riots was delivered to Congress on March 1, and it strongly recommended "a comprehensive and enforceable federal open housing law" as a remedy to the civil disturbances. The Senate was moved to end their filibuster that week.[181]
As the House of Representatives deliberated the bill in April, Dr. King was assassinated, and the largest wave of unrest since the Civil War swept the country.[182] Senator Charles Mathias wrote that:
some Senators and Representatives publicly stated they would not be intimidated or rushed into legislating because of the disturbances. Nevertheless, the news coverage of the riots and the underlying disparities in income, jobs, housing, and education, between White and Black Americans helped educate citizens and Congress about the stark reality of an enormous social problem. Members of Congress knew they had to act to redress these imbalances in American life to fulfil the dream that King had so eloquently preached.[181]
The House passed the legislation on April 10, and President Johnson signed it the next day. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, and national origin. It also made it a federal crime to "by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone...by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin."[183]
Movements, politics, and white reactionsGrassroots leadership
Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (and other Mississippi-based organizations) is an example of local grassroots leadership in the movement.While most popular representations of the movement are centered on the leadership and philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to one person, organization, or strategy. Sociologist Doug McAdam has stated that, "in King's case, it would be inaccurate to say that he was the leader of the modern civil rights movement...but more importantly, there was no singular civil rights movement. The movement was, in fact, a coalition of thousands of local efforts nationwide, spanning several decades, hundreds of discrete groups, and all manner of strategies and tactics—legal, illegal, institutional, non-institutional, violent, non-violent. Without discounting King's importance, it would be sheer fiction to call him the leader of what was fundamentally an amorphous, fluid, dispersed movement."[184] Decentralized grassroots leadership has been a major focus of movement scholarship in recent decades through the work of historians John Dittmer, Charles Payne, Barbara Ransby, and others.
Black power (1966–1968)Main articles: Black Power and Black Power movementDuring the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, numerous tensions within the civil rights movement came to the forefront. Many blacks in SNCC developed concerns that white activists from the North and West were taking over the movement. The participation by numerous white students was not reducing the amount of violence that SNCC suffered, but seemed to exacerbate it. Additionally, there was profound disillusionment at Lyndon Johnson's denial of voting status for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention.[185][186] Meanwhile, during CORE's work in Louisiana that summer, that group found the federal government would not respond to requests to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or to protect the lives of activists who challenged segregation. The Louisiana campaign survived by relying on a local African-American militia called the Deacons for Defense and Justice, who used arms to repel white supremacist violence and police repression. CORE's collaboration with the Deacons was effective in disrupting Jim Crow in numerous Louisiana areas.[187][188]
In 1965, SNCC helped organize an independent political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), in the heart of the Alabama Black Belt, also Klan territory. It permitted its black leaders to openly promote the use of armed self-defense. Meanwhile, the Deacons for Defense and Justice expanded into Mississippi and assisted Charles Evers' NAACP chapter with a successful campaign in Natchez. Charles had taken the lead after his brother Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963.[189] The same year, the 1965 Watts Rebellion took place in Los Angeles. Many black youth were committed to the use of violence to protest inequality and oppression.[190]
During the March Against Fear in 1966, initiated by James Meredith, SNCC and CORE fully embraced the slogan of "black power" to describe these trends towards militancy and self-reliance. In Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael declared, "I'm not going to beg the white man for anything that I deserve, I'm going to take it. We need power."[191]
Some people engaging in the Black Power movement claimed a growing sense of black pride and identity. In gaining more of a sense of a cultural identity, blacks demanded that whites no longer refer to them as "Negroes" but as "Afro-Americans," similar to other ethnic groups, such as Irish Americans and Italian Americans. Until the mid-1960s, blacks had dressed similarly to whites and often straightened their hair. As a part of affirming their identity, blacks started to wear African-based dashikis and grow their hair out as a natural afro. The afro, sometimes nicknamed the "'fro," remained a popular black hairstyle until the late 1970s. Other variations of traditional African styles have become popular, often featuring braids, extensions, and dreadlocks.
The Black Panther Party (BPP), which was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966, gained the most attention for Black Power nationally. The group began following the revolutionary pan-Africanism of late-period Malcolm X, using a "by-any-means necessary" approach to stopping racial inequality. They sought to rid African-American neighborhoods of police brutality and to establish socialist community control in the ghettos. While they conducted armed confrontation with police, they also set up free breakfast and healthcare programs for children.[192] Between 1968 and 1971, the BPP was one of the most important black organizations in the country and had support from the NAACP, SCLC, Peace and Freedom Party, and others.[193]
Black Power was taken to another level inside prison walls. In 1966, George Jackson formed the Black Guerrilla Family in the California San Quentin State Prison. The goal of this group was to overthrow the white-run government in America and the prison system. In 1970, this group displayed their dedication after a white prison guard was found not guilty of shooting and killing three black prisoners from the prison tower. They retaliated by killing a white prison guard."Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud"MENU0:00James Brown's "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud" from Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm ProudProblems playing this file? See media help.
Gold medalist Tommie Smith (center) and bronze medalist John Carlos (right) showing the raised fist on the podium after the 200 m race at the 1968 Summer Olympics; both wear Olympic Project for Human Rights badges. Peter Norman (silver medalist, left) from Australia also wears an OPHR badge in solidarity with Smith and Carlos.Numerous popular cultural expressions associated with black power appeared at this time. Released in August 1968, the number one Rhythm & Blues single for the Billboard Year-End list was James Brown's "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud".[194] In October 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.
King was not comfortable with the "Black Power" slogan, which sounded too much like black nationalism to him. When King was assassinated in 1968, Stokely Carmichael said that whites had murdered the one person who would prevent rampant rioting and that blacks would burn every major city to the ground. Riots broke out in more than 100 cities across the country. Some cities did not recover from the damage for more than a generation; other city neighborhoods never recovered.
Black conservatismDespite the common notion that the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Black Power only conflicted with each other and were the only ideologies of the civil rights movement, there were other sentiments felt by many blacks. Fearing the events during the movement were occurring too quickly, there were some blacks who felt that leaders should take their activism at a slower pace. Others had reservations on how focused blacks were on the movement and felt that such attention was better spent on reforming issues within the black community.
Those who blatantly rejected integration had various rationales for doing so, such as fearing a change in the status quo they had been used to for so long or fearing for their safety if they found themselves in environments where whites were much more present. Some defended segregation for the sake of keeping ties with the white power structure from which many relied on for social and economic mobility above other blacks. Based on her interpretation of a 1966 study made by Donald Matthews and James Prothro detailing the relative percentage of blacks for integration, against it or feeling something else, Lauren Winner asserts that:
Black defenders of segregation look, at first blush, very much like black nationalists, especially in their preference for all-black institutions; but black defenders of segregation differ from nationalists in two key ways. First, while both groups criticize NAACP-style integration, nationalists articulate a third alternative to integration and Jim Crow, while segregationists preferred to stick with the status quo. Second, absent from black defenders of segregation's political vocabulary was the demand for self-determination. They called for all-black institutions, but not autonomous all-black institutions; indeed, some defenders of segregation asserted that black people needed white paternalism and oversight in order to thrive.[195]
Oftentimes, African-American community leaders would be staunch defenders of segregation. Church ministers, businessmen and educators were among those who wished to keep segregation and segregationist ideals in order to retain the privileges they gained from patronage from whites, such as monetary gains. In addition, they relied on segregation to keep their jobs and economies in their communities thriving. It was feared that if integration became widespread in the South, black-owned businesses and other establishments would lose a large chunk of their customer base to white-owned businesses, and many blacks would lose opportunities for jobs that were presently exclusive to their interests.[196] On the other hand, there were the everyday, average black people who criticized integration as well. For them, they took issue with different parts of the civil rights movement and the potential for blacks to exercise consumerism and economic liberty without hindrance from whites.[197]
For Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and other leading activists and groups during the movement, these opposing viewpoints acted as an obstacle against their ideas. These different views made such leaders' work much harder to accomplish, but they were nonetheless important in the overall scope of the movement. For the most part, the black individuals who had reservations on various aspects of the movement and ideologies of the activists were not able to make a game-changing dent in their efforts, but the existence of these alternate ideas gave some blacks an outlet to express their concerns about the changing social structure.
Avoiding the "Communist" labelSee also: The Communist Party and African-AmericansOn December 17, 1951, the Communist Party–affiliated Civil Rights Congress delivered the petition We Charge Genocide: "The Crime of Government Against the Negro People", often shortened to We Charge Genocide, to the United Nations in 1951, arguing that the U.S. federal government, by its failure to act against lynching in the United States, was guilty of genocide under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention.[198] The petition was presented to the United Nations at two separate venues: Paul Robeson, concert singer and activist, to a UN official in New York City, while William L. Patterson, executive director of the CRC, delivered copies of the drafted petition to a UN delegation in Paris.[199]
Patterson, the editor of the petition, was a leader in the Communist Party USA and head of the International Labor Defense, a group that offered legal representation to communists, trade unionists, and African Americans in cases involving issues of political or racial persecution. The ILD was known for leading the defense of the Scottsboro boys in Alabama in 1931, where the Communist Party had considerable influence among African Americans in the 1930s. This had largely declined by the late 1950s, although they could command international attention. As earlier civil rights figures such as Robeson, Du Bois and Patterson became more politically radical (and therefore targets of Cold War anti-Communism by the U.S. Government), they lost favor with both mainstream Black America and the NAACP.[199]
In order to secure a place in the mainstream and gain the broadest base, the new generation of civil rights activists believed they had to openly distance themselves from anything and anyone associated with the Communist party. According to Ella Baker, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference adopted "Christian" into its name to deter charges of Communism.[200] The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been concerned about communism since the early 20th century, and continued to label as "Communist" or "subversive" some of the civil rights activists, whom it kept under close surveillance. In the early 1960s, the practice of distancing the civil rights movement from "Reds" was challenged by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who adopted a policy of accepting assistance and participation by anyone, regardless of political affiliation, who supported the SNCC program and was willing to "put their body on the line." At times this political openness put SNCC at odds with the NAACP.[199]
Kennedy administration, 1961–1963
Attorney General Robert Kennedy speaking before a hostile Civil Rights crowd protesting low minority hiring in his Justice Department June 14, 1963[201]For the first two years of the Kennedy administration, civil rights activists had mixed opinions of both the president and Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy. A well of historical skepticism toward liberal politics had left African Americans with a sense of uneasy disdain for any white politician who claimed to share their concerns for freedom, particularly ones connected to the historically pro-segregationist Democratic Party. Still, many were encouraged by the discreet support Kennedy gave to Dr. King, and the administration's willingness, after dramatic pressure from civil disobedience, to bring forth racially progressive initiatives.
Many of the initiatives resulted from Robert Kennedy's passion. The younger Kennedy gained a rapid education in the realities of racism through events such as the Baldwin-Kennedy meeting. The president came to share his brother's sense of urgency on the matter, resulting in the landmark Civil Rights Address of June 1963 and the introduction of the first major civil rights act of the decade.[202][203]
Robert Kennedy first became concerned with civil rights in mid-May 1961 during the Freedom Rides, when photographs of the burning bus and savage beatings in Anniston and Birmingham were broadcast around the world. They came at an especially embarrassing time, as President Kennedy was about to have a summit with the Soviet premier in Vienna. The White House was concerned with its image among the populations of newly independent nations in Africa and Asia, and Robert Kennedy responded with an address for Voice of America stating that great progress had been made on the issue of race relations. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the administration worked to resolve the crisis with a minimum of violence and prevent the Freedom Riders from generating a fresh crop of headlines that might divert attention from the President's international agenda. The Freedom Riders documentary notes that, "The back burner issue of civil rights had collided with the urgent demands of Cold War realpolitik."[204]
On May 21, when a white mob attacked and burned the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where King was holding out with protesters, Robert Kennedy telephoned King to ask him to stay in the building until the U.S. Marshals and National Guard could secure the area. King proceeded to berate Kennedy for "allowing the situation to continue". King later publicly thanked Kennedy for deploying the force to break up an attack which might otherwise have ended King's life.
With a very small majority in Congress, the president's ability to press ahead with legislation relied considerably on a balancing game with the Senators and Congressmen of the South. Without the support of Vice-President Johnson, a former Senator who had years of experience in Congress and longstanding relations there, many of the Attorney-General's programs would not have progressed.
By late 1962, frustration at the slow pace of political change was balanced by the movement's strong support for legislative initiatives, including administrative representation across all U.S. Government departments and greater access to the ballot box. 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. He continued to work on these social justice issues in his offer for the presidency in 1968.
On the night of Governor Wallace's capitulation to African-American enrollment at the University of Alabama, President Kennedy gave an address to the nation, which marked the changing tide, an address that was to become a landmark for the ensuing change in political policy as to civil rights. In 1966, Robert Kennedy visited South Africa and voiced his objections to apartheid, the first time a major US politician had done so:
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.
— LOOK Magazine[205]Robert Kennedy's relationship with the movement was not always positive. As attorney general, he was called to account by activists—who booed him at a June 1963 speech—for the Justice Department's own poor record of hiring blacks.[201] He also presided over FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his COINTELPRO program. This program ordered FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of Communist front groups, a category in which the paranoid Hoover included most civil rights organizations.[206][207] Kennedy personally authorized some of the programs.[208] According to Tim Weiner, "RFK knew much more about this surveillance than he ever admitted." Although Kennedy only gave approval for limited wiretapping of Dr. King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so." Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of the black leader's life they deemed important; they then used this information to harass King.[209] Kennedy directly ordered surveillance on James Baldwin after their antagonistic racial summit in 1963.[210][211]
American Jewish community and the civil rights movementSee also: African American–Jewish relations; New York City teachers' strike of 1968; and Brownsville, Brooklyn
Jewish civil rights activist Joseph L. Rauh Jr. marching with Martin Luther King in 1963Many in the Jewish community supported the civil rights movement. In fact, statistically Jews were one of the most actively involved non-black groups in the Movement. Many Jewish students worked in concert with African Americans for CORE, SCLC, and SNCC as full-time organizers and summer volunteers during the Civil Rights era. Jews made up roughly half of the white northern and western volunteers involved in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project and approximately half of the civil rights attorneys active in the South during the 1960s.[212]
Jewish leaders were arrested while heeding a call from Martin Luther King Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in June 1964, where the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history took place at the Monson Motor Lodge—a nationally important civil rights landmark that was demolished in 2003 so that a Hilton Hotel could be built on the site. Abraham Joshua Heschel, a writer, rabbi, and professor of theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, was outspoken on the subject of civil rights. He marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march. In the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, the two white activists killed, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were both Jewish.
Brandeis University, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored college university in the world, created the Transitional Year Program (TYP) in 1968, in part response to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. The faculty created it to renew the university's commitment to social justice. Recognizing Brandeis as a university with a commitment to academic excellence, these faculty members created a chance to disadvantaged students to participate in an empowering educational experience.
The American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League (ADL) actively promoted civil rights. While Jews were very active in the civil rights movement in the South, in the North, many had experienced a more strained relationship with African Americans. In communities experiencing white flight, racial rioting, and urban decay, Jewish Americans were more often the last remaining whites in the communities most affected.[citation needed] It has been argued that with Black militancy and the Black Power movements on the rise, "Black Anti-Semitism" increased leading to strained relations between Blacks and Jews in Northern communities. In New York City, most notably, there was a major socio-economic class difference in the perception of African Americans by Jews.[213] Jews from better educated Upper Middle Class backgrounds were often very supportive of African American civil rights activities while the Jews in poorer urban communities that became increasingly minority were often less supportive largely in part due to more negative and violent interactions between the two groups.
According to political scientist Michael Rogin, Jewish-Black hostility was a two-way street extending to earlier decades. In the post-World War II era, Jews were granted white privilege and most moved into the middle-class while Blacks were left behind in the ghetto.[214] Urban Jews engaged in the same sort of conflicts with Blacks—over integration busing, local control of schools, housing, crime, communal identity, and class divides—that other white ethnics did, leading to Jews participating in white flight. The culmination of this was the 1968 New York City teachers' strike, pitting largely Jewish schoolteachers against predominantly Black parents in Brownsville, New York.[215]
ProfileMany Jewish individuals in the Southern states who supported civil rights for African Americans tended to keep a low profile on "the race issue", in order to avoid attracting the attention of the anti-Black and antisemitic Ku Klux Klan.[216] However, Klan groups exploited the issue of African-American integration and Jewish involvement in the struggle to launch acts of violent antisemitism. As an example of this hatred, in one year alone, from November 1957 to October 1958, temples and other Jewish communal gatherings were bombed and desecrated in Atlanta, Nashville, Jacksonville, and Miami, and dynamite was found under synagogues in Birmingham, Charlotte, and Gastonia, North Carolina. Some rabbis received death threats, but there were no injuries following these outbursts of violence.[216]
White backlashKing 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.
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 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.[217]
Politicians and journalists quickly blamed this white backlash on the movement's shift towards Black Power in the mid-1960s; today most scholars view backlash as a phenomenon that was already developing in the mid-1950s, embodied in the "massive resistance" movement of the South where even the few moderate white leaders (including George Wallace, who had once been endorsed by the NAACP) shifted to openly racist positions.[218][219] Northern and Western racists opposed the southerners on a regional and cultural basis, but also held segregationist attitudes which became more pronounced as the civil rights movement headed north and west. For instance, prior to the Watts riot, California whites had already mobilized to repeal the state's 1963 fair housing law.[217]
Even so, the backlash was not sufficient at the time to roll back major civil rights victories or swing the country into reaction. Social historians Matthew Lassiter and Barbara Ehrenreich note that backlash's primary constituency was suburban and middle-class, but not working-class whites: "among the white electorate, one half of blue-collar voters…cast their ballot for [the liberal presidential candidate] Hubert Humphrey in 1968…only in the South did George Wallace draw substantially more blue-collar than white-collar support."[220]
African-American women in the movementWomen often acted as leaders in the civil rights movement and led organizations that contributed to the cause of civil rights. African-American women stepped into the roles that men had previously held. Women were members of the NAACP because they believed it could help them contribute to the cause of civil rights.[221] Women involved with the Black Panthers would lead meetings, edit the Black Panther newspaper, and advocated for childcare and sexual freedom.[222] Women involved with SNCC helped to organize sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, as well as keeping the organization together.[223] Women also formed church groups, bridge clubs, and professional organizations, such as the National Council of Negro Women, to help achieve freedom for themselves and their race.[222] Some women who participated in these organizations lost their jobs because of their involvement.[222]
DiscriminationMany women in the movement experienced gender discrimination and sexual harassment within the movement.[224] In the SCLC, Ella Baker's input was discouraged in spite of her being the oldest and most experienced person on the staff. Within the ministers' patriarchal hierarchy, age and experience were actually considered detriments for a woman. Her role as an executive was only assigned as a placeholder for a male leader.[225] Women that worked under SNCC did the clerical work and were not consistently given leadership positions. Women who worked in multiple civil rights organizations noted that males tended to become the leaders and women "faded into the background" and the men of the movement did not acknowledge the gender discrimination present in the organization.[226] Much of the reasoning for the lesser role that women took in the movement was that it was time for black men to take on a role as a leader now that they had the opportunity. Women got very little recognition for their roles in the civil rights movement despite the fact that they were heavily involved with the participation and planning.[227]
Long-term impactA 2018 study in the American Journal of Political Science found that civil rights protest activity had a meaningful persistent impact on attitudes in the long-run. The study found that "whites from counties that experienced historical civil rights protests are more likely to identify as Democrats and support affirmative action, and less likely to harbor racial resentment against blacks... counties that experienced civil rights protests are associated with greater Democratic Party vote shares even today."[228]
Johnson administration: 1963–1968Further information: Civil Rights Act of 1964, War on Poverty, and Lyndon B. JohnsonLyndon Johnson made civil rights one of his highest priorities, coupling it with a whites war on poverty. However in creasing the shrill opposition to the War in Vietnam, coupled with the cost of the war, undercut support for his domestic programs.[229]
Under Kennedy, major civil rights legislation had been stalled in Congress. His assassination changed everything. On one hand president Lyndon Johnson was a much more skillful negotiator than Kennedy but he had behind him a powerful national momentum demanding immediate action on moral and emotional grounds. Demands for immediate action originated from unexpected directions, especially white Protestant church groups. The Justice Department, led by Robert Kennedy, moved from a posture of defending Kennedy from the quagmire minefield of racial politics to acting to fulfill his legacy. The violent death and public reaction dramatically moved the moderate Republicans, led by Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, whose support was the margin of victory for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act immediately ended de jure (legal) segregation and the era of Jim Crow.[230]
With the civil rights movement at full blast, Lyndon Johnson coupled black entrepreneurship with his war on poverty, setting up special program in the Small Business Administration, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and other agencies.[231] This time there was money for loans designed to boost minority business ownership. Richard Nixon greatly expanded the program, setting up the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) in the expectation that black entrepreneurs would help defuse racial tensions and possibly support his reelection .[232]
Prison reformGates v. Collier
Mississippi State PenitentiaryConditions at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, then known as Parchman Farm, became part of the public discussion of civil rights after activists were imprisoned there. In the spring of 1961, Freedom Riders came to the South to test the desegregation of public facilities. By the end of June 1963, Freedom Riders had been convicted in Jackson, Mississippi.[233] Many were jailed in Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Mississippi employed the trusty system, a hierarchical order of inmates that used some inmates to control and enforce punishment of other inmates.[234]
In 1970 the civil rights lawyer Roy Haber began taking statements from inmates. He collected 50 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 violating 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, as was the trusty system, which allowed certain inmates to have power and control over others.[235]
The prison was renovated in 1972 after the scathing ruling by Judge Keady, who wrote that the prison was an affront to "modern standards of decency." Among other reforms, the accommodations were made fit for human habitation. The system of trusties was abolished. (The prison had armed lifers with rifles and given them authority to oversee and guard other inmates, which led to many abuses and murders.)[236]
In integrated correctional facilities in northern and western states, blacks represented a disproportionate number of the prisoners, in excess of their proportion of the general population. They were often treated as second-class citizens by white correctional officers. Blacks also represented a disproportionately high number of death row inmates. Eldridge Cleaver's book Soul on Ice was written from his experiences in the California correctional system; it contributed to black militancy.[237]
Cold WarThere was an international context for the actions of the U.S. federal government during these years. The Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination in the U.S.[238] Deeming American criticism of its own human rights abuses hypocritical, the Soviet government would respond by stating "And you are lynching Negroes".[239] In his 1934 book Russia Today: What Can We Learn from It?, Sherwood Eddy wrote: "In the most remote villages of Russia today Americans are frequently asked what they are going to do to the Scottsboro Negro boys and why they lynch Negroes."[240]
In Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, the historian Mary L. Dudziak wrote that Communists who were critical of the United States accused it of practicing hypocrisy when it portrayed itself as the "leader of the free world," while so many of its citizens were being subjected to severe racial discrimination and violence; she argued that this was a major factor in moving the government to support civil rights legislation.[241]
In popular cultureMain article: Civil rights movement in popular cultureThe 1954 to 1968 civil rights movement contributed strong cultural threads to American and international theater, song, film, television, and folk art.
BERNHARD: Mr. Wilkins, could you tell me—when did you first come into contactwith the late President Kennedy [John F. Kennedy]?WILKINS: During the Civil Rights Bill debate in 1957. The Senator and I ran intoeach other in the Senate restaurant on the late lunch hour. It was the daywhen the senators were jockeying and debating and lining up andarranging the vote on Part 3, which was the part to grant the Attorney General initiativepowers for actions in civil rights cases, and in the so-called jury trial amendment. TheSenator divided with the other senator from Massachusetts, Senator Saltonstall [LeverettSaltonstall], the Republican, and one voted for jury trial amendment and the other against theprovision to give the Attorney General these added powers. I think the Senator took theopportunity to talk at some length in general about the whole matter. His vote had alreadybeen determined by himself and he was pledged to vote a certain way on this matter. I am notsure, because I didn’t know him very well at that time and I’m not in hindsight able to judgehis mood or his Kennedy determination, but it appeared to me at that time that the Senatormight have been inclined to vote otherwise had someone talked to him beforehand and withsome of the background material that I was able to give him. I’m not sure that this was true.BERNHARD: Do you know, Mr. Wilkins—did he vote, as you recall it, against the jurytrial amendment or against Part 3? Do you remember how he paired onthat?WILKINS: I think he voted for Part 3, and against the jury trial amendment. I’m notcertain now. Of course, I have it here in our records, but I’m just givingthis as my recollection. Because I remember that later when—but the Part3 business continued to be discussed for added powers for the Attorney General and one ofthe arguments used by civil rights groups was that President Kennedy, when he was aSenator, had favored this. That’s all I can say about my recollection of it. I know he wasdivided, and it seemed to me at that time that he felt that he might have voted differently, orat least that he was beginning to get a glimpse into this very complex civil rights picture thathe hadn’t had before.BERNHARD: Did you feel that he was knowledgeable about the civil rights issue then?[-1-]WILKINS: No, I didn’t. But I did feel that he had a very keen sense of the morality ofthe whole question. I don’t think I ever had any doubt as to how hispersonal convictions stood. He, of course, was not as experienced in theprocedures and in political maneuvering as some of the other senators, and so he might havehad some hesitancy at that point about charting a direct course politically, and inparliamentary language, but there was never any doubt as to his moral commitment. I neverhad any of that either the first time I met him or up until the time he died.BERNHARD: When was the next time that you saw him or discussed any matters withhim?WILKINS: I’m not sure. The next time I actually saw him to stop and have adiscussion was during the 1960 campaign. I had some correspondencewith him in-between times. I saw him momentarily at this affair or thataffair, but to actually sit down and talk with him again—it was 1960, in September, I believe.After the Senate had come back and gone to work and after the nominatingconventions were over, the Senator made an appointment for Robert C. Weaver, who was atthat time chairman of the board of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancementof Colored People], and myself to come down to Washington and have dinner with him at hishome in Georgetown. I remember distinctly that since the Senate was in session and they hadso much business to transact—and a vote was on that evening and a couple of roll calls—theSenator was an hour or an hour and twenty minutes late for dinner but the people at the housesaid they were used to this and they cooked meals that could be prepared to take care of theSenator’s tardiness. But he didn’t let his tardiness cut down the length of the talk. It was adinner at which we went over the general civil rights picture and for a small part of the timethe specific housing picture because Weaver is and was a housing man, a housing expert.But, in general, the Senator simply wanted to inform himself a little bit more about ourparticular approach to the civil rights problem, our philosophy, and our dealings with thenational legislature, and he took his time, he didn’t rush us, he didn’t say—“Well, I’m sorry,I’m late and I’m behind schedule, and I’ll have to cut this short”—he went on.When we came out from the dining room the Mayor of the city of New York [RobertFerdinand Wagner, Jr.] was there as his next caller—who was also late as we were. I don’tknow what they say about the Kennedy schedule, but they say it was never ahead of time. Idon’t know whether anybody said it was ever on time or not, but I’m not going to be one tosay it was always late. My experience on that occasion was that it was late.[-2-]BERNHARD: Did you at that time, Mr. Wilkins, ever discuss with him specific programsthat you would like to see him carry out were he to be elected?WILKINS: We did urge civil rights legislation upon him. We talked in some detailabout the filibuster and about the necessity of reforming the rules of theSenate. We had, of course, gone through the ‘57 Civil Rights Billcampaign, and then the ’60 Bill had just been enacted which expanded somewhat the ‘57Bill. The ‘57 Bill, of course, embodied the establishment of the United States Civil RightsCommission. And we were pressing for a still further expansion of congressional activity andlegislation to cover the civil rights field on several points.He made no commitments, as I remember it, in September except to assure us byword and attitude of his very warm sympathy and the fact that he was trying to getinformation. Now we did say that the Civil Rights Conference was being held shortly. I thinkit was in October. And he said he would listen very carefully to recommendations of thatconference but he made no specific commitments at that time. But here again he gave me, ashe did in 1957, a distinct impression of his deep personal interest.BERNHARD: If you recall in October right before that conference—it was actuallyOctober 10—you said that if we were giving out marks for civil rightsvoting, the score of Kennedy would have to above ninety. I don’t know ifyou recall making that particular statement. That was right before the two-day conference, ifyou recall.WILKINS: Yes, I do recall that very well, and I meant it then and I still mean it.BERNHARD: Subsequently—by the end of that year, about December 29 or so, youstated that you deplored really the atmosphere of super-caution, I thinkyou said, on civil rights that had pervaded Kennedy’s discussions andstrategies since mid-November. Do you recall what may have led to that point?WILKINS: I recall the period very well because I remember my own keendisappointment. You see President Kennedy had captured the hearts andminds of Americans because he advocated bold attack on the problemsfacing the nation. He advocated in essence innovations, daring, and disregard for unnecessaryprotocol and precedent and tradition, and he indicated that we needed to take a fresh look atthis question.One of the things that had buoyed my expectations was his first television debate withMr. Nixon [Richard M. Nixon]. It happened that Mrs. Wilkins [Aminda B. Wilkins] and Iwere in Quebec City in September—I think it was the 26th or thereabouts—but it was lateSeptember. It was the first
[-3-]debate. And we both felt that we wanted to see and hear this man in actual combat with hisopponent. Mrs. Wilkins, because she had strong feelings against Mr. Nixon and his position,and she was also very curious about John Fitzgerald Kennedy because she is a Catholic alsoand she wanted to see what one of her communicants had to say. I was only mildly curiousbecause I felt that television debates were just nothing. But the man simply captivated both ofus with his fresh formulation of the position of the Negro in the United States and his lowhorizon of expectations, his health problems, his employment problems, and his educationproblems. This was a new formulation in entirely new language—it caught the ear rightaway—in the way he delivered it. “Well,” I said to myself—and we both said—“this man iswhat we’ve been looking for”—and I say that only to indicate the expectations I had.But when he was elected, the first thing that leaked out of the White House—and youknow some leaks in the White House are deliberately turned on and openings made for themto get out and some leaks just leak—I don’t know what kind of a leak this was but within tendays of his election, even while the debate was going on furiously about whether he won by ahundred thousand or whether he won by fifty thousand and so forth, came this word that hepositively was not going to advocate any civil rights legislation in the new Congress; was notgoing to put such legislation before the Congress; would not officially endorse suchlegislation; would not press it because he did not want to split the Party and didn’t want tosplit the Congress when he had so much new legislation on major issues that he wanted to getthrough. He felt that he ought to keep the Congress whole so they could attack these majorproblems.Well, this simply floored me because it amounted to telling the opposition, forexample—in football analogy—that you weren’t going to use the forward pass. We may hitthe tackles and go around end but one thing you could be sure of, we aren’t going to use theforward pass. I felt that this was a tactical error although I tried to understand the President’sreasoning. So we were disappointed and I thought it was super-caution. I thought he shouldhave kept riding his horse that he was riding in September and October and charge theopposition.BERNHARD: What was your reaction during this period as to what was an apparentdetermination to resort to executive action and to some acceleratedappointments to qualified Negroes to high positions as opposed tolegislation? Did you think this was significant?[-4-]WILKINS: Well, I thought it was a change, at least in the degree that it wasannounced as a line of procedure rather than being followed as a line ofprocedure. But we expressed to the President our skepticism over theeffectiveness of this approach at a conference we had with him early in January 1961 beforethe Inauguration. He was on one of his rather frequent trips to New York City and we talkedto him at the Hotel Carlyle—Mr. Arnold Aaronson, the secretary of the LeadershipConference on Civil Rights, and myself.BERNHARD: That was on January 6, as I recall.WILKINS: January 6, 1961—yes. We saw him in the Carlyle. I recall—I don’t knowhow symbolic it is—as a backdrop they had an impressionistic painting byRomare Bearden. Now Romare Bearden is a well-known New YorkNegro artist and the gallery across the street, the Parke-Bernet, used to furnish artwork forthe Carlyle for the President’s suite. The owners of the Carlyle had this impressionisticpainting—I couldn’t tell a thing about Romare’s painting—I’ve known him since he was alittle boy—it just looked to me like a big blob or something there, and I wondered if thispainting had any significance insofar as the Kennedy policies were concerned on the Negro.Was it impressionistic or what was it?Well, we talked and he explained his objections to legislation and the fact that he felthe could proceed by executive order and we pounced upon that immediately and said—well,we agreed, he could, proceed by executive order. But we felt that an executive order here andan executive order there and an executive order over there dealing with a variety of topicswas not the way to go about it and that if the federal impact were to have its full effect youought to issue a sweeping, executive order taking in the whole business. We told him that wethought in our opinion and in the opinion of the lawyers who talked to us that he had suchauthority and we urged him to use it.BERNHARD: What was his reaction?WILKINS: Well—skeptical, to say the least. He didn’t deride it at all. He was muchtoo courteous for that. He didn’t assail it with arguments against it, but hedid say that he didn’t know whether he had the authority, or whether itwould be wise even if he had the authority, to issue a sweeping executive order coveringhousing and employment and education and travel and public accommodations and so on andso forth. But he did finally wind up saying “Why don’t you get in touch with Ted Sorensen[Theodore C. Sorensen] and maybe prepare a memorandum on this, and let him talk it overwith some of the staff members and we’ll see what comes out of it”—and that’s what we did.[-5-]BERNHARD: Right, I’ve noticed that you had said after the meeting that you weresatisfied that the President understood the importance of the place of civilrights and that you also said, and I’m quoting, “His administration willsupport all the pledges of the platform.”WILKINS: Yes, I did say that, and he embarked upon a personal and highlysuccessful and inspiring effort to carry out part of that program on theExecutive level. He announced honestly and in front that he wasn’t goingto proceed with the legislation at the time but—you take for example his inauguration day—Iwon’t forget that incident. This illustrates his type of mind and the way he tackled it. Alongabout 6:15 in the evening as the sun was going down and it was getting dusk, he noticed thatin a Coast Guard contingent going by there were no Negroes and he made a note of it. Andthis is the most important day in a man’s life—the day he is inaugurated President of theUnited States; there can’t be any other more important day—yet he took time out of that dayto notice there were no Negroes in the Coast Guard unit and had the White House call up thenext day and ask the Coast Guard commander did they have a policy to exclude Negroes.And upon being hastily assured they did not, of course, he said, “Well, I didn’t see anyyesterday in the parade.” Well, who else would do that except John Fitzgerald Kennedy?Who else would have bothered?Well, this illustrates that he intended—it seemed to me—had in his mind the intentionto utilize every opportunity on executive levels to do what he could in this program becausehe believed that tactically he could not afford to sponsor legislation, even though a lot ofpeople disagreed with him, including ourselves.BERNHARD: Early in that year—actually on March 6, 1961—the President issued theexecutive order on employment by the government and its contractorsand he created the President’s Committee on Equal EmploymentOpportunities. How did you view this? Did you think this was a significant advance or wasthis just one spot effort?WILKINS: We viewed it as a spot effort and we also viewed it as not a new approach.The Truman administration [Harry S. Truman] and the Eisenhoweradministration [Dwight D. Eisenhower] had made some efforts towarddoing away with discrimination in employment and they had President’s committees. As amatter of fact, they had two committees—one was on employment within the governmentand one was on employment by contractors doing business with the government—and Inever could understand—I’d hear that the FEPC Committee was having a meeting—I neverknew which one was[-6-]having the meeting or what they were doing and I think it fell on rather hard days during thelatter part of the second Eisenhower term. It began to be a pro forma business and then Mr.Nixon, recognizing its political potentialities, attempted some sort of a rejuvenation of it inthe latter eighteen months of the Eisenhower administration but not with much success. Sowhen the new President issued this executive order and set up a new committee, combinedthis time to deal with all types of discrimination in federally-financed programs, it was notnew—it was not fresh—but very quickly he got over the point that the Kennedy approachwas going to be much more vigorous and much more thorough than the approachesheretofore.BERNHARD: Would this be as a result—at least your conclusion—a result of the variouscomments he made subsequent to the establishment of that order when heissued the memorandum to all the executive departments and agencies tocease sponsorship of any discriminatory employee recreational activity? And then he met, ifyou recall, later in May with executives of 48 business concerns in job discrimination.WILKINS: Yes. It was partly inspired by that action of his and those pronouncements,but it was inspired by constant reports we were getting from elsewherethan the White House or White House sources, or suspect politicalsources—constant reports that the White House was insisting on this in depth and it was notmerely a formulation. It was not merely a memorandum sent out and consigned to the filesbut there was a follow-up on it and every department head and every agency head felt theWhite House prodding them on this. We got this from below, from the people who werebeing prodded, as a matter of fact. And it got to be a kind of sub rosa joke aroundWashington even among the Negroes that Kennedy was so hot on the department heads, thecabinet officers, and agency heads that everyone was scrambling around trying to findhimself a Negro in order to keep the President off his neck.Well, this is only testifying to the fact that he did do—attempted to do—a very goodjob. We pointed out to him in January, for example, that there were limitations to thisbusiness of what he could do by executive order and that he needed legislation to back up hisintentions. But, of course, in working in employment he was active in a very sensitive areaand an area that gave rewards quickly—if you could get results quickly, because there was nosubstitute for ten thousand new jobs or for twenty thousand new jobs and, in certaincircumstances, in certain showcase situations, there was no substitute for maybe two jobs, orthree jobs.[-7-]BERNHARD: Were you surprised at the approach or the vigor with which he met thischallenge of the NAACP to the award of government contract to theLockheed people in Marietta, Georgia?WILKINS: I was—a little bit. But then I must confess that when I looked at thesituation—and we looked at it very carefully, we estimated it before wemade our move—it was loaded with political dynamite, of course, but itwas also loaded with one billion dollars. Now, any time a policy, announced policy orpolitical practice, backed up by an active and vocal minority which feels itself aggrieved andwhich has a demonstrable case—any time that comes between contractors and one billiondollars and between the government and all the product of one billion dollars, not onlyairplanes but all the other side products and emoluments that accrue to the government fromsuch contracts—we knew, in the political realities of the situation and more especially in theeconomic realities, that we were due to get prompt and decisive action—which we got.BERNHARD: Yes—I notice that on April 6 the NAACP called the award “a shamefulmockery” and by May 25 Lockheed agreed to total desegregation andaccepted nondiscrimination. During this early part of the Kennedy periodit has often been said that the main effort really was in the area of voting—that it was felt thiswas the area in which long-range permanent results could be effectuated, and the criticismwas made that this was really being done almost to the exclusion of a concerted effort inother fields. Do you share that view at all?WILKINS: I tell you I feel a little sympathy for an officeholder who’s called upon tograpple with this civil rights question because on Monday he meetssomeone who tells him, “Employment is the key. Solve employment andyou’ll solve the Negro question;” on Tuesday he meets a man who says, “Education is thekey. Give them schools and teach them to act right and you’ll solve the Negro problem;” andon Wednesday he meets somebody who tells him, “Housing is the key. They are allfrustrated and packed up six or eight or ten in a room. Spread them out and give them someair and light and trees and you’ll solve the Negro question.”Well, I don’t know. I think the President did pretty well in approaching this problem.He made some natural mistakes but he made them not in an effort to duck the issue but in aneffort to find the most feasible and workable plan that could be instituted at the moment,recognizing at the same time that the problem had many other ramifications. Some peoplehave said I take too much the view of the other fellow and sympathize too much with hisdifficulties. That may be so, but I think I can understand the President’s troubles alongthrough here in trying to get hold of this issue and in trying to do something about it.[-8-]BERNHARD: As he was going along early in these first few months, you may recall thatthere was a bit of a problem that arose out of the—some of thecelebrations of the Civil War Centennial Commission, and particularlywith the problem of the segregated housing facilities in Charleston, South Carolina. Wereyou surprised when the President, on March 17, 1961, protested the segregated housingfacilities for a meeting of this Civil War Centennial Commission? Do you think that was easyfor him to do and why do you think he did it? It actually achieved desegregation down there.WILKINS: I think it was both easy and hard for him to do. It was easy because hebelieved in it himself. He had no compunction about where he stood. Itwas not a case of pure political necessity apart from his personalconvictions. And a good many officeholders, you must admit, do act out of politicalconsiderations even when they don’t believe this—but Kennedy believed this. So in thatsense it was easy. I think it was easy in another sense—he had an issue on which the entireNegro population was a unit and in which, I believe, the majority of the white populationfelt—say—“It’s a damn shame—celebrating the centennial of the EmancipationProclamation and these people have to be segregated just as they were in 1863, a hundredyears before.”And so I believe that President Kennedy understood not only how the Negro minorityfelt but how the vast majority of Americans felt so he felt then that he could take whateverpolitical risk was involved in flat-footedly calling for the ending of segregation.Incidentally, today that same hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, that refused toaccommodate the New Jersey delegation because they had a colored woman, Mrs. SamuelWilliams, is now desegregated and Negroes are able to stay at the Francis Marion Hotel inCharleston, South Carolina.BERHNARD: That’s under the Act?WILKINS: Yes, that’s under the Act, but it desegregated before the Act was passed. Imust give them credit.BERNHARD: During this whole period, maybe from the period of Inauguration upthrough the beginning of May, the President did not appear to be underunusual public pressure for swifter action. While the NAACP and othersattacked his failure to push for civil rights legislation, there didn’t seem to be any outpouringof great support. But I’d like to talk to you a minute about what may have changed some ofthat and get your reaction as to whether you think it really did.As you’re fully aware, the Freedom Rides took place sometime in May. The firstgroup actually left in the beginning of May. They left Washington and they were going downto New Orleans.[-9-]First there were two riders beaten in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and then on May 10, tworiders were arrested in Minnsboro, South Carolina, and then on May 14, if you recall, one ofthe buses was burned at Anniston, Alabama, and then a second bus arrived in Birminghamand met with violence and so on. And, as you recall, the Governor of Alabama, JohnPatterson [John Malcolm Patterson], called out the National Guard after there were threatsdown in Montgomery. I guess you remember. Then the President finally—this went on andon and on after they had had marshals in there—the President said in a news conferencefinally on July 19th that he endorsed the rights of citizens to move in interstate commerce forwhatever reasons they traveled, and ultimately they got out these new ICC [InterstateCommerce Commission] orders.Do you see this whole period—the Freedom Ride thing—as being anything more thanenlisting vast public support? Do you think it changed fundamentally the approach of theadministration—or is that an overstatement?WILKINS: I don’t think it changed the administration at that point. I think it began tobend the administration or at least it began to convince the administrationthat perhaps the attack agreed upon was not as adequate as the Presidenthad thought at the outset.BERNHARD: Now you’re talking about the attack of executive action really?WILKINS: Yes. He must have become convinced during this time—maybe notconvinced, but at least beginning to listen to the voices that said “yourcourse is not going to fill the bill.” Now, I was in the Attorney General’s[Robert F. Kennedy] office on May 15th, the day after the bus was burned, and we talked atsome length about that and also about the voting assault. The Kennedys were very muchintrigued with the voting—the disfranchisement of Negroes—even as Eisenhower had beenbefore them. Eisenhower’s special advisors talked about voting but they hadn’t gone into itwith the thoroughness and energy of Robert Kennedy or of John F. and their advisors. But Ithink in this period the President was beginning to be assaulted by some doubts as to whetherthis very complex question could be resolved in the way he thought. But he hadn’t given upyet.In July of 196l the NAACP held its convention in Philadelphia and we set aside oneday to close down the convention and send delegates down to Washington on a special trainto confer with our senators and congressmen on civil rights legislation; Since we had aroundtwo thousand delegates from all over the country and this was the closest they could get toWashington. The President[-10-]agreed to see our board of directors members, our president, chairman of the board, and thevice presidents, of course, and our state presidents—those who were present at theconvention. All in all, there were about 65 of us who sent to the White House.And, incidentally, there was one of those little personal touches here that you don’trun across very often. Before the meeting with the 65, the President asked Bishop StephenGill Spottswood, the chairman of our board, Arthur Spingarn [Arthur Barnett Spingarn], ourpresident, and me if we would come upstairs to his study. We did and chatted for a littlewhile before we went down to meet with the big group. On the way down we met Mrs.Kennedy [Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy] in the corridor and she had a smudge on one cheek,as I remember, and a smudge on her nose and a smudge on her chin. I don’t remember whatshe called him, but I heard her say, “I’ve found the Lincoln [Abraham Lincoln] china.” Andthe President kept saying, “I’d like to introduce you to Bishop Spottswood and Mr. Spingarnand Mr. Wilkins.” And she said, “How do you do—how do you do—hello—Jack, I’ve foundthe Lincoln china.” And he reached over and brushed the smudge off her cheek and we wenton down to the meeting and I thought this was quite something.When he got to the meeting, he was his usual charming and courteous self. The firstthing he did was to see that all the women there got seats and he was getting chairs himselffor them—not clapping hands and having somebody bring in chairs. But, anyway, he listenedvery intently to Bishop Spottswood’s message—it was about four and a half or fiveminutes—which was pointed precisely and directly to the need for civil rights legislation tosupplement what the President was doing on the executive level—saying that the questioncould not be solved only through executive action—we needed legislation. And he listenedintently. He didn’t gaze out the window. He didn’t fiddle around. He listened. He got up andwas gracious, jocular, serious and in a stubborn manner possibly, he said, in effect, “No, Iainta gonna do it.” But everyone went out of there absolutely charmed by the manner inwhich they had been turned down. He didn’t say, “You’ve sold me.” He said, “We remainconvinced that legislation is not the way. At least, it’s inadvisable at this time.”And we pointed out that his experience with the Congress from January until that Julywhen all of his so-called major bills had been clobbered to death—that he didn’t gainanything by refusing to put a civil rights bill before them because he didn’t want to stir upcontroversy. They stirred up a lot of controversy over what he had put before them and if hethought he was going[-11-]to buy time and votes and consideration for his pet measures by refraining from civil rights,he had had a demonstration that they would walk over everything. Well, he acknowledgedthis. He listened to all this outline but he still said “No.” You know, he wasn’t a man to giveup easily.BERNHARD: I doubt it. Did you have the feeling then that he was surprised at what hadhappened or didn’t this come up on the Freedom Ride and whether or nota Negro in this country could travel freely from state to state. Do you thinkthis was an education?WILKINS: I think it was part of his education. He was constantly adding to hiseducation in the race relations, civil rights, Negro field. After all, JohnKennedy lived in a different world. He lived first of all in Boston and inCape Cod, where such questions did not intrude themselves in everyday happenings at least.And then, of course, he moved in a different economic level altogether and he just didn’tcome into contact with this. And in political life he was a representative from Massachusetts;he was a senator from Massachusetts. On weekends he went sailing and that sort of thing. Hemoved with entirely different people. So I think it was inconceivable to him. It really was ashock to find the petty, humiliating, annoying restrictions on Negroes in their personalcomings and goings and then, of course, he was appalled and I use the word advisedly—Ithink he was appalled at the subversion of the Constitution with respect to their rights ascitizens.I think he was still learning about this matter up to the day he died. Because I think inthe last six months of his life the lashing he was getting from the south on the civil rightsissue finally awakened him to the poison and venom that had been the daily lot of the Negroand he, the President of the United States, was getting it simply because he exhibited acompassion and an understanding and a desire to do something about this. I think he was stilllearning about this issue until he died.BERNHARD: During the last part of 1961 I recall that Martin Luther King [MartinLuther King, Jr.] said on November 26th that the Kennedyadministration’s record in promoting civil rights for Negroes was betterthan Eisenhower’s. He said, “because President Kennedy has a greater understanding of thedepths and the dimensions of the problem” and then he went on to say, however, that theKennedy administration has not done all that could be done or all that it promised to do. Didyou feel that there was a qualitative significant difference in the approach during the firstyears of the Kennedy Administration to what had preceded him?[-12-]WILKINS: I don’t know. I was fond of saying during that period that the Kennedyshad the correct attitude; that the President and his brother had personalconvictions and the correct attitude and they had the very quick andcomprehensive intelligence to tackle and find out whatever there was about this problem thatthey didn’t understand. For example, if the President didn’t understand West Virginia, hestudied about West Virginia right away quick to find out about West Virginia, and if hedidn’t know all there was to know about a certain aspect of nuclear warfare, he found outabout it right away. He read about it and had somebody tell him about it and he understood.And they used this period to find out about the Negro question, about his practicalities—butto begin with they had the attitude; they had the right roots, you might say. That was myposition.Now, I don’t believe that in order to evaluate one man at his true word, you need toforget what another man has done, and Martin King has made a direct comparison here. Mr.Eisenhower did not have the comprehension of this problem that the Kennedys had. He didnot understand it. Especially, he didn’t feel it either intellectually or personally, I think. Hewas outraged by some of the things—the crass, crude things that he knew about—andEisenhower did do something about this problem. He did erase segregation anddiscrimination in the military and naval institutions in the United States. The first thing,specifically, he did was to do away with segregated schools on bases, and then he did awaywith discrimination between employees on the bases—cafeterias and that sort of thing. Sothat he, Eisenhower, did do something. I just feel that the Kennedys had a comprehensionand an intelligence on this question that Eisenhower did not have.BERNHARD: Well, Roy, during this discussion we’ve been having here, you mentionedon a number of occasions “the Kennedys.” Did you draw a distinction inapproach at all between the Attorney General and the President, or did youthink they were really in concert and that when you spoke with the Attorney General youwere really in a sense speaking with someone who had the full authority of the President?WILKINS: I don’t know that I ever analyzed it that way. I’ve said “the Kennedys” agood deal because generally speaking they are a family—or were a familyteam—but I think there was a difference between the two.BERNHARD: What was the difference?[-13-]WILKINS: I don’t know. It’s hard to put your finger on. Robert Kennedy is a hard,clear-thinking, determined public servant who has, in addition to aconviction, a moral concern. But the President had, while not excessivewarmth as you measure it with other warm people, he had a grace and a charm and above allan intelligence on this thing that immediately invited you into commune with him on it, so tospeak. I never got the impression you’re communing with Robert Kennedy. You’re talking tohim; you’re arguing with him; and you’re dealing with a brain that’s clear and determinedand a brain of a man who can be, I imagine, a very spirited and resourceful antagonist. I’dwant him on my side in any scrap we were having.I can’t put into words exactly the difference. But in the overall issues, in the overallobjectives of the Kennedy administration, and in the general way in which the Presidentintended his administration to go, I think we were able to say “the Kennedys” because I don’tthink there was any difference between Robert and Jack in that respect.BERNHARD: Earlier in the administration—say when they first came in—do you thinkit would have been possible, as the President did later in September of ‘6l,to have issued that personal plea, if you recall, for an end of segregation inrestaurants and other places of public service, or even to consider, as he did in October toappoint Thurgood Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals? And then later, Iremember, when he said at a news conference that he personally approved of RobertKennedy’s resignation from the segregated Metropolitan Club in Washington. These were allthings that seemed to indicate a definite commitment in a number of specific, almost personalacts. Do you think these are things that he might have done earlier, or was this a latereducational development?WILKINS: No, I don’t think he might have done them earlier. I don’t think theywould have had the ring of authenticity that they had when he did dothem. If he had done them earlier they would have been subject to theinterpretation that they were political moves or politically dictated, and John FitzgeraldKennedy was not that kind of a man. Once he became convinced and once he saw thepicture, he did not hesitate to act and I think his pronouncement in this area was a result ofthis continuing flowering of his education on this issue and as he began to see the reallydevastating spread of the thing. Furthermore, there is this—he had a concept of thepresidency as more than an administrative office. His concept extended to the use of themoral force of the president’s office, his prestige, his powers—named and unnamed—and Ithink this persuaded him as he went along to make these pronouncements and take theactions he did.[-14-]BERNHARD: During this first year there were a number of occasions on which you andothers active in the civil rights movement called for an issuance of afederal order banning discrimination in federally-assisted housing, andduring that year there wasn’t very much receptivity on the part of the President to theserequests. To what do you attribute this?WILKINS: Here, again, I attribute this to John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s general lack ofknowledge in the field and his lack of comprehension of the complexitiesand, more especially perhaps, his lack of information on the extent, thevirulence, and persistence of the organized opposition to such a movement by the President.During the campaign, as all of us now recall, he very blithely got off that wisecrack aboutgetting rid of segregated housing with the stroke of a pen, and that Mr. Eisenhower couldhave done it and should have done it, and so on and so forth. Then when he got into theWhite House, people began handing him pens now and then. He could appreciate the joke atfirst, but I think he got a little tired soon afterwards.I think he began to discover that in the housing field where billions of dollars areinvested and where banks and mortgage companies and savings and loan associations are alltied in, and where the emotions of people and their personal prejudices, whether it involveseconomic status, or race, or nationality—some people don’t like immigrants around andsome people don’t like South Europeans, but they take North Europeans, and some of themdon’t mind this one, but they don’t want Negroes, and others will take Negroes but they don’twant Latins or this or that or the other. He found himself in a morass of all this—besidesbankers telling him it won’t do and real estate dealers telling him it won’t do and you’ll hurtproperty values—and so I think he decided to sit this one out for a while and he did.BERNHARD: That’s right—he did. And I recall that when you were really taking a lookat the first year of the Kennedy administration you made a number ofcomments dealing with housing and the failure to get legislation andessentially you both praised and at the same time condemned the first year of the KennedyAdministration. Do you recall those times?WILKINS: I recall very well. We recalled then after one year that the Democraticplatform had asked for civil rights legislation or it had named objectivesthat required legislation, and we noted that the President for one year hadfelt that he could get by without legislation and we pointed out that his excuse had fallenthrough because Congress had been just as hostile to him without civil rights[-15-]legislation as it would nave been with civil rights legislation. And we criticized the idea thatyou could solve this question only with executive action and we particularly singled out thehousing thing because it was beginning to fester at that time and people began noticing andtalking about it. His friends were needling him on it and his political enemies were notneedling him, but jabbing him, and he was reacting with characteristic Kennedy—call it whatyou will—if you’re a friend of his you call it coolness, and if you’re not a friend, you call itstubbornness.But it was this debate over the housing—and the delay over it—that brought outsomething, insofar as my recollection is concerned—the first time in American history—andit marks one of those little milestones that nobody had yet paid much attention to. You know,the Negro did not become, or start to become, politically significant in the North until about1930-35—along in there. It took him a long time to build up his political significance—migrations, the adjustments, and getting used to voting, and finding out about his politicalinfluence and power. But in this housing business one of the newspaper correspondentscommented that the White House delay on the housing executive order was occasioned bythe weighing of the Southern white vote as against the Northern Negro vote. Now, this isvery significant. This is the first time it’s ever been publicly acknowledged that the influenceof the northern Negro vote in the Democratic Party—because that’s what it had to mean witha Democratic President—was of such significance that an executive action waited upon theweighing of whether you could afford to take a step that might lose the white vote or refrainfrom taking a step that might offend the northern Negro vote. That meant they weresomewhere near in balance, maybe not exactly. This was a very significant paragraph and avery significant marker for this era in the Kennedy career.BERNHARD: The one aspect of the first year that we haven’t talked about and one of thethings that you commented on really in January of 1962 was that you feltthat school desegregation was proceeding in a very slow and painful paceand you indicated how few Negro students in the south were actually going to desegregatedschools and you were critical of the administration for not trying to do more. What do youbelieve the President’s reaction was to the process—the quantity of school desegregation?WILKINS: I think the President felt that it was too slow. But the President, like manymillions of other Americans, white and Negro—some Negroes, I’mconfident—simply was not able to appreciate the gravity of the question tothe Negro’s future. I feel very strongly[-16-]about it. I have always felt strongly about. I still feel strongly about it. I feel that we justdon’t know how extensively we’re crippling the Negro population for the next twenty-fiveyears by the lack of speed on school desegregation—the lack of speed in bringing the bestpossible public education within the reach of the greatest number of Negro kids. Now, whenthey come out in 1980 and 1985 they’re going to be under-equipped to deal with thecivilization in which they find themselves simply because in 1960 and ‘6l, and ‘62, and ‘63,and ‘64, we sat back in our chairs or in our committees and said, “Well, it’s gone up threepercentage points. This is pretty good,” or, “It’s gone too slowly but these things take time.”Every school year we waste we are sending scores of thousands of Negro kids backwards andnot forwards.I think the President understood some of this and he was shocked rather at the slowpace but I think—we finally used the word in connection with him and I don’t know whetherit’s fairly used or not but it’s the only one that occurs to me now—I think he was timorous atthe political problem presented as well as the physical problem presented. I don’t knowwhether he wanted to take the all-out action that was called for in order to speed up thisprocess. I can appreciate fully that a President of the United States must have a Congressthat’s going to go along part-way with him most of the time or else he isn’t going to getanywhere. Now, if you make one-third of that Congress, or one-fourth of it, or two-thirds ofit angry or distrustful over a matter like school desegregation, what are they going to do toappropriation bills? What are they going to do to water power? What are they going to do toforeign aid? What are they going to do—period? And I think a President probably has tothink about these things between 6:00 PM and 6:00 AM at some time, and he has to makechoices. Now, I hate like hell for him to make the choice that ten thousand of my kids aren’tgoing to get in school this year, but I think that’s what President Kennedy was up against.BERNHARD: Did you have much of an opportunity or any opportunity at all during thefirst year to personally talk to him about any of these matters?WILKINS: No, I never had a chance to talk to him about school desegregation,personally, at any length. He mentioned it a time or two, but I didn’t havemuch opportunity to see the President. I was welcome at the White House.In fact, it was made known to me that if I had a pressing matter and wanted to talk to thePresident, I could do so and it could be arranged—and one or two audiences were arranged.[-17-]But I didn’t feel that I wanted to go running to the White House with every single littleupsurge that happened to come along.I can’t tell you how I feel about education. I get outraged by lynchings, killings, riots,bombs, burning of homes and churches, and that sort of thing, but this is something that youcan understand. It’s tangible and you get angry at insults and misrepresentations by people inpublic life—I mean of Negroes generally. But it’s difficult to get around anger over thedeprivation of Negro kids in the school system. Every day I find the results of it. I talk topeople—just the other day about Negro youngsters in medicine. We aren’t training as manyNegro doctors as there are dropping out or dying and I was told, “Well, some of the biggestmedical schools in the country are open and some of the best-known hospitals haveinterneships freely available to Negro graduates.” But we don’t have the graduates with therequisite chemistry and biology, mathematics and all the things you need for premedical ofthe standard necessary. Now, these kids are being killed on the elementary and secondarylevels. Our doctors are being killed off—our engineers.Even the Kennedy administration people themselves, with all their fine intentions,came to me in 1962—one of them, not the President—and said, “Well, you know, Mr.Wilkins, this is a matter of not so much of prejudice but of preparation.” He said, “Now thePresident is anxious to appoint Negroes to the Foreign Service. He’d like to get some NegroAmbassadors. We can’t find any.” And I said, “Well, do you think we have Ambassadorswalking around the streets of New York and Chicago and Detroit just waiting for PresidentKennedy to come along to name them?” When you want somebody in the Foreign Service,he has to get the word along at least in high school so he can begin to take the subjects thathe needs to take—put stress on language and history and on political science, something onworld trade, international trade. I said, “In ten years we’ll have some boys who expect to gointo Foreign Service now that the doors are open.” Well, all I’m saying is that the longer wedelay this school desegregation—forthright action on it, more than just a few token placeshere and there—the longer we’re going to keep the Negroes back.BERNHARD: Well, if you look back over the entire Kennedy period in the area ofeducation, how do you see it? Do you see it as one in which the Presidentappreciated the depth of the problem as you’ve expressed it and meant toresolve it, or didn’t?[-18-]WILKINS: I don’t think you can put it in that fashion. I think the President had a veryfair grasp of the significance of it. It was just one of sixty-two problemsthat had to take its place. That’s all. He didn’t say in effect, “Here,Wilkins,” or, “Here, King,” or, “Here, Colored Citizens, I understand what you’re up againstbut I can’t do anything about it at this time,” or, “I don’t think it’s feasible.” He didn’t saythat. It’s just one of those things he didn’t get around to.Now, his brother as Attorney General, finally went into the Prince Edward County,Virginia, case with a little—as I understand—I’m no lawyer—with a little novel approach orat least a little exploration of stretching the federal interpretation here because it was such ashameful situation in Prince Edward County. And I think this mirrored the Kennedyadministration’s concern and realization of the seriousness of it but it didn’t bring them to thepoint of putting their foot down and saying, “We want legislation that will empower theAttorney General to go in and open up these school districts and have the federal courts handdown orders.”BERNHARD: Well, let me go into this for just a second now. You’re fully aware of theMeredith [James Howard Meredith] situation and the University ofMississippi problem that came up on September 10 of ‘62 when theSupreme Court ruled the University of Mississippi had to admit Mr. Meredith and then therewas the rioting and the final resolution, and by October of that year the Army withdrew anumber of its troops, and, I think, left still forty-five hundred or so. When you look back atthe Meredith case and the fact of the world impact it had and the wide publicity it received inthis country, how do you view this in terms of the impact it had on the administration policyin the area maybe not only of education, but of Civil Rights generally?WILKINS: I think this was one more fact of the education of JFK on the race questionin this country. Because I think that while he was fully prepared tounderstand the normal political implications, drawbacks and hesitancies,and reasons for action or non-action, I don’t think he was prepared for the type of resistance,the type of ‘reasoning’ that met him on the level of the University of Mississippi case. Ithappens that I was out of the country at the time. I was in Europe and I was thus able to get areaction far away from home. The English papers, the Swiss papers, the French papers, andthe Italian papers all played this very heavily with photographs and with banner headlines,and the television and radio people were anxious to get some interpretation of the Kennedyaction. Now, the only criticism[-19-]that I found was in an impatient young circle in Paris inclined toward the Left, I learned later,in which I remember one young woman saying at dinner, “President Kennedy finally calledout the troops, I see,” and in just about that tone. Well, before we could have a hair-pullingmatch—because Mrs. Wilkins is 160% American and this stuff just got under her nervesmore and more—I could see an explosion building up—I simply said, “Well, in our countryour President believes that the time to call out the troops is finally here and we don’t believein calling them out first.” Well, so much for the Left Wing wisdom of the Left Bank in Paris.I think this contributed to Kennedy’s education. He did everything possible not to usetroops in Mississippi and it might be remarked that Mr. Eisenhower did everything possiblenot to use troops in Little Rock, and this is as it should be.BERNHARD: Let me try to ask you one or two short questions and then some overallreaction. Finally, as you know, the executive order was issued inNovember of 1962 and then in early 1963—on February 28—thePresident came out with his first proposal on civil rights legislation which you will recalldealt almost exclusively really with the voting area—very little else—and what was yourreaction to this?WILKINS: Well, partly satisfaction at the final recognition by the Kennedyadministration that legislation was required. This had to do with ourpersonal satisfaction on the matter and part regret that it had taken so longfor this to get over and further regret that it covered only voting.BERNHARD: I notice that you said on March 23 of ‘63 that, “the Kennedyadministration has been smart on several counts in the civil rights fieldbut it has missed the boat completely on school desegregation,” and youwere also quoted as commenting on certain serious omissions that weakened the impact thatCivil Rights legislation proposed.WILKINS: That’s right. They were putting a toe in the water but they didn’t dive in atall and we felt that this was not the way to go about it. Of course, we weregrateful for any assistance on the White House level before legislation.The most helpful thing about that action in February ‘63 was that it finally signaled that theadministration recognized the necessity and efficacy of legislation. This was its chief value.[-20-]BERNHARD: All right—during the same period you may recall the Civil RightsCommission issued a special report on Mississippi in which it called forthe withholding of funds, and the President said that he wasn’t empoweredto deny funds in Mississippi nor did he want such power. This raises a general question of thePresident’s approach in using executive action. Up to the point when this particular issue wasraised, do you think that the President had given much attention to the use of economicsanction or economic leverage in trying to resolve some of these civil rights problems?WILKINS: I don’t know how much attention he had given to it but to go back to ourconversation in the Hotel Carlyle and his suggestion that we see TedSorensen and draw up a memorandum—we did. We drew up a verycomprehensive document dealing first with his authority and then with all of the pointspractically that were included in the legislation that just emerged from the Congress,including the withholding of federal funds. So that in August of 1961 he had before him aformal memorandum setting forth his powers to do this and with the strong recommendationthat funds be withheld from states which used them in a racially discriminatory manner. Wepointed out—I forget what the figures were in 1961—but in 1962, the fiscal year of 1962, thestates altogether received ten billion dollars in grants from the federal government, of whichsome two billion dollars went to the southern states. Now, these were used, as you wellknow, in a great variety of activities. They covered all sorts of things from feeding of cattleand building of highways to the underwriting of research grants and to land grant collegepayments and school lunches, and a whole host of other things, including the subsidization ofthe National Guard and, yet, in all these areas there was a great racial discrimination.Well, your recommendation—or the recommendation of the United States CivilRights Commission with respect to Mississippi followed naturally after the receipt of thereport of the Mississippi Advisory Committee which used the language, and I shan’t forget itas long as I live: “Terror stalks the Negro in Mississippi from birth to death. Terror is hislife.” And the report went on to say that “Terror has no place in representative democraticgovernment.” Well, there was nothing for the Commission to do with that sort of testimonyfrom concerned white Mississippians than to recommend the ultimate step of cutting offfunds that sustained this kind of treatment; but we had been urging it. And when I say ‘we’ Imean the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.BERNHARD: Had you ever had a chance to talk about this technique of economicleverage with the President or his advisors?[-21-]WILKINS: It came up once or twice, but they ran away from it like it was arattlesnake. You know a politician—and the President of the United Statesshould be the most skillful politician we have, among other things. Heshould be, of course, a man of great honor, integrity, ability, knowledge, education, skill,personal charm, and all the other things he should be, but he must also be a good politicianbecause this is a political state and a political animal has to run it. But the President, like allpractitioners in politics, didn’t want to subscribe to, and I don’t know whether he ever fullysubscribed to the idea that funds ought to be cut off.You see, there is so much quid pro quo in politics and if you cut off a dam for thissenator, he cuts off a barge for your district; and if you cut off a memorial for Texas, Texaswill cut off a wheat subsidy for North Dakota. Now this is the way it works. And if it worksthat way between senators and congressmen, it certainly works that way between Congressand the White House, or between the legislative and executive branches of government. Andboth branches have to be careful as to whether they’re going to blow up all their bridgesbehind them or not.BERNHARD: And it’s your feeling that the President was rather acutely aware of thisprocess?WILKINS: I think he was aware of it and I think he felt that it was a dangerousinstrument to use—a dangerous weapon. Our position, of course is—aswas the position of the Civil Rights Commission—that we’ve now reachedthe point where you have to employ all weapons and you can’t hesitate on whether it’sdangerous or not, because the evil that we’re trying to get rid of is more dangerous than thedangerous use of a dangerous weapon, you see.BERNHARD: As we move along to some of the other problems that came up duringPresident Kennedy’s administration we, of course, would have to focuson Birmingham and the Birmingham riots in 1963, in the Spring of 1963.In that regard I’d like to ask you—did you ever have an opportunity to talk to the Presidentabout these riots, about what led up to them, about the concept of demonstrations, civildisobedience and what the President’s role should be in this kind of thing?WILKINS: Not what the President’s role should be—no. But I believe—isn’t thatfunny, my recollection is better of 1960 than it is of 1963. But I believethat we touched upon the Birmingham[-22-]upheaval in conversation—even if just in passing. We never got to the President’s role but Igot the impression, and I may be in error, but I got the impression that the President fullyunderstood the position of the Negroes, that he was in great sympathy with their plight andwith the measures they felt forced to take.He made it clear on a number of occasions that as an American he could not condemndemonstrations, peaceful demonstrations, which are thoroughly in the tradition of Americanhistory. His own Boston was the scene of the first demonstration in our history—the BostonTea Party—so the President was not like some senators, congressmen, and governors,horrified at the idea of Negroes demonstrating, and he did not seek to condemn it or to say“Why don’t they stop that?” or “Why do they embarrass me by doing that?” He concededthat to be their right.BERNHARD: But do you think the Birmingham crises was a major factor—if a factor atall—in leading him to come out with the proposal for the new civil rightsbill?WILKINS: Indeed I do. Indeed I do feel that it was. I think it was a factor. I don’tbelieve, like some people, that it was the principal factor. I think as we’vecome along we’ve talked about the piling up of information and theexpansion of the knowledge of the Kennedys—to go back to the two of them—on the racequestion. I think both Robert F. and JFK learned from the Freedom Rides, from the contestsin courts over the right of Negroes to vote, from the detailed discovery by the Department ofJustice of the devious, ingenious, and crude ways in which Negroes were prevented fromvoting. I think the University of Mississippi episode in which two men were killed, in whichtroops had to be kept there to guard a man who was only going to college to learn something;the Birmingham demonstrations, the cruelty and stubbornness of the resistance, thebombings, the burnings, the insults, the Freedom Ride bus burnings, the beating of JohnSeigenthaler, Robert Kennedy’s assistant, in Birmingham—all these things piled up theeducation of the Kennedy’s on this issue until finally I see the Birmingham episodes asclinching the business, so to speak, and as convincing the President at long last that we had tohave legislation. This we knew in November 1960 when we disagreed with him right afterelection. We knew then but it took him two and a half years, you see, to come to where wewere in 1960.BERNHARD: Over the period of this administration there were a number of criticismsmade about a few things. One was the question of the caliber of thejudicial appointments that the President was making in the south in thefederal courts; another was the question of why the President was not more willing to use thefederal so-called presence in the South where there was voter intimidation, brutality of onesort or another. What’s your reaction to these two criticisms?[-23-]WILKINS: I think the first is legitimate. I think it had basis. I think the Kennedyadministration was wide open to this criticism. I think it was inevitablethat here and there a so-called hostile judge to civil rights would benamed, but there were too many named in the Kennedy administration. There was too muchobeisance paid to the sponsors of judges who were not going to carry out the Kennedypolicies.BERNHARD: Did you ever talk to the President or the Attorney General or any of theirrepresentatives about this?WILKINS: Yes, we made some representations to them. I don’t know whether it wasin a conversation or a memorandum or a letter. But we voiced on severaloccasions our extreme apprehension over the naming of some judges. Weonce did a compilation, sort of a White and Black List as it were, and there were far toomany names on the Black List.BERNHARD: Did you ever get an explanation for what was behind it?WILKINS: The only explanation we got was through third or fourth parties and thatwas that a lot of this was political and was necessary in the operation ofParty politics. There was never any confession that because Senator JamesO. Eastland of Mississippi was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, you either had to arriveat an understanding with him or you had to risk your nominations being either delayed orthrown out. There was also the notorious case of Judge Skelly Wright [James Skelly Wright]from Louisiana in which both senators declared him to be persona non grata—thereforemaking it impossible for the President to appoint him to serve in Louisiana, and all theclumsy business that had to be done to transfer Skelly Wright to the District of Columbiaonce there was an opening there and putting him on an appellate court there.I think the Kennedys were vulnerable on this point and I think they should haveexercised a little bit more of what Robert certainly has in him and that is the hard-fisted wardpolitician’s knowledge of the necessities of political life however unpleasant they might be.They should have said, “We want judges that are going to carry out the Constitution of theUnited States as it is interpreted by the Supreme Court and by most of the people of thiscountry, and we want people who are going to do that, and those who aren’t, we don’t want.”They didn’t say this.BERNHARD: And the second criticism?[-24-]WILKINS: And the second criticism was, of course, that...BERNHARD: The question about when there were all these reports of intimidation,economic reprisals, physical mistreatment of individuals who sought toregister and to vote and to do other things.WILKINS: That he didn’t bring in the federal presence.BERNHARD: Right.WILKINS: I sympathize with that criticism although I am not as convinced that it is asvalid as the one on judges. The one on judges I think is absolutely validbecause the judges are for life, and nine million Negroes live in the Southand they’re going to have to live under these judges. Every time they want to test theconstitutionality of their citizenship or their right to do something, they’ve got to get by oneof these judges. They’ve got to get up to a higher court. They’ve got to spend more money.They’ve got to do all sort of things. So by these injudicious judicial appointments theKennedys threw a lot of roadblocks in the way of Negroes that ought not to have been thereand they threw a roadblock in the way of Americanism.Now, as for displaying the federal presence, while I sympathize with that criticism, Idon’t know that it has as much validity. I think by all means that we have had demonstratedto us, and certainly the Kennedys should have had demonstrated to them, that by and largethey are not dealing with reasonable people in the south. A reasonable regime, the politicians,the seats of power in the South are not reasonable, and were not reasonable, and in manyareas are still not reasonable, and therefore a display of federal presence is necessary. Youcan’t talk morality to a man who doesn’t consider it immoral to mistreat Negroes.BERNHARD: Did you ever bring this to the attention of the President?WILKINS: We got an opportunity to talk about it, I think, only once or twice. We metwith the President after the March on Washington in August of 1963 andwe talked then about the general picture of civil rights and we talked aboutthe necessity of the Federal presence in the south. We also talked about the judges. We weretalking generally about the things that were blocking the civil rights advances. And thePresident was very shrewd and remarkably well-informed in this area. You got the sameimpression[-25-]on civil rights questions that other people got when they went to see him about the ExportImport Bank—he knew his homework, but he just wasn’t convinced.You see, I can understand a little even though I’m over here on the suffering side, youmight say. I can understand that a man who has to look out for the welfare of fifty statesmight well feel that he cannot afford to take certain steps that will alienate twelve or fifteenstates. Now, we all say what we would do if we were president and if I were president Iwould free every Negro in the United States. That’s what I would promise and if I got to theWhite House by any kind of a twentieth century miracle, that would probably be what Iwould try to do. But before I could do it I would have to do a hell of a lot of other things andmake a whole lot of other adjustments and clear away a lot of the underbrush and build up alot of other allies for what I wanted to do. So that I couldn’t march in there with the declaredintention of doing this, that and the other about the Negro population although I might wantto do it more sincerely than anybody that had ever been in the White House.So I can understand what Mr. Kennedy was up against. And I think he came closer tounderstanding it as he neared, what he did not know and none of us knew, would be the endof his life because he saw this thing rising up in the south. Here he had been a remarkablyrestrained president. He had not been a wild-eyed pro-Negro president. He had been properlyoutraged at treatment. He had been outraged at the inhumanity of it on one level and theunconstitutionality and un-Americanism of it on the other level, and he had oftendiscreetly—we thought too discreetly—brought his powers to bear. As we’ve traced hishistory, he increased it more and more—the tempo and the nature of the action increased. Buteven at its peak—his television talk to the country on June 11, 1963, was a compassionateappeal, man-to-man, heart-to-heart. It was not a club over the head of the south. It was notberating anybody. That was his peak. That was perhaps his greatest pronouncement in thisfield.There was no rational basis for the fierce hatred against the Kennedys on account ofthe civil rights issue because they had been different, but they had not been anathema. Theyhad not been that to the South. And I think this startled him in the last months. I think, notthat he was drawing in his horns in the sense that he was changing his opinion, but I think hewas changing the emphasis, or I think he was about to change the emphasis, or about to try tochange the emphasis. He was about to attempt to do that very difficult business ofmaintaining his principles, his beliefs, sustaining his record with such additional acts asmight be called upon, maintaining his integrity with the civil rights groups, black and white,and at the same time not losing completely his support in the South. Now, this is a verydifficult proposition.[-26-]BERNHARD: Overall, what do you see as the Kennedy contribution to the advancementof civil rights? What did he achieve? A change—or did he institute aclimate for change? What did he do?WILKINS: I think he did both. This is the sort of thing I’d rather think about than talkabout now, but off the top of my head I would say he did both. He createda climate in which change could take place, in which change was notregarded necessarily as a revolution, in which change was regarded as a step forward in themoral, economic, and political growth of the American ideal; a climate in which changecould take place because America was assuming more and more her leadership of the nationsof the free democratic world.He made these things understandable and plausible. He gave them a flair they hadn’thad before. And it became, in the circles in which he moved socially, himself personally, andin the circles in which he did not move but in which he inspired great admiration andpersonal affection, this became the American thing to do. It lost its opprobrium. It didn’t, Ipoint out, lose all the resistance. There were still people who didn’t like it, didn’t want it butthey were now on the defensive and a good many of them were underground. Well, thatprobably isn’t the word. They weren’t really underground in the sense of the Frenchunderground but they were not as open and it was not—as we’re fond of saying here in theNAACP—it’s no longer fashionable to be prejudiced, to exercise discrimination, eventhough you have it, and even though you practice it. There used to be a time when it wastalked about, bragged about, it was “the thing.”The measure of the Kennedy creation of a climate, it seems to me, was foundtragically enough in his assassination because then we discovered the wide expanse ofaffection and esteem not only for the man personally but for the ideals that he expressed andexemplified among hidden millions in the population that nobody ever thought. This meansthat he had created the climate. Now, did he do anything about it? Did he accomplishanything? I think he did. I think, as President Johnson [Lyndon B. Johnson] said naturallyand not startingly, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a memorial to John FitzgeraldKennedy. Now, if he has no other memorial—and the Lord knows he has many amemorial—this stands as a monument to outshine all other monuments because it is theembodiment in legislation at long last, after a hundred years, of the kind of Americanism thatthe Constitution is supposed to be translated into.[-27-]BERNHARD: What you’re saying in a sense is interesting because it raises thepossibility that despite the President’s initial determination to try toresolve these problems through executive action, whether or not he wassuccessful in this course—perhaps his greatest contribution may have been in the creation ofa climate that would lead to the passage of the Act.WILKINS: Yes, that is, in a sense, what I’m saying. He did in a very real sense createthe setting in which this Bill could be enacted and could become a law. Idon’t think anybody begrudges the fact that in its critical stages throughthe House and the Senate it had the support of President Johnson, but it’s essentially acreature of Kennedy.BERNHARD: When you look back on the specifics of executive action—executiveaction in employment, executive action in housing, the executive actionthat was taken by other departments—in the Defense Department andothers—do you see concrete results, concrete advances coming out of that, or more in termsof just a willingness to try to do these things through executive action? Have we gottenanywhere during the period of the Kennedy administration in housing or in employment?WILKINS: I don’t know that we’ve gotten anywhere in housing—to be frank withyou, I don’t know that we have. This is one of the great unexplored areasor at least areas that can mark up the least progress. I think we have gotsomewhere in employment although not in terms of total jobs now held or in the diversity ofthe jobs held. Here again JFK’s stamp is visible. He, by not just making this a topperformance by the administration, a pro forma thing, by making it a depth operation thatwent to corporations and to the man down below, the sergeant, the corporal as it were, he gotover the philosophy of this, the necessity of employment opportunities for Negroes.I refuse to be optimistic about this. I can’t be optimistic when I reflect that theunemployment rate among Negroes is two and a half times that among whites at the presenttime—the national rate. Some of this is contributed to by automation and displacement fromthe land, and so on and so forth and by the lack of specific skills, but a great deal of it is dueto just downright prejudice. So I can’t be optimistic in the face of these realisms. But I thinkit’s fair to Kennedy to say that—as against housing, we certainly made more progress inemployment and certainly in developing the type of mind that recognizes the necessity for nodiscrimination in employment.[-28-]BERNHARD: Some of President Kennedy’s bitterest critics nave said that his approachwas one of mollycoddling, of bowing to force and pressure and streetdemonstrations, which in fact he created by continuing to give into them.What is your reaction to this? Were these things—demonstrations—result of a feeling thatthey would receive presidential support? Would they have existed if there hadn’t been thissupport? Do you feel that there’s anything to this type of criticism?WILKINS: I think it’s sheer nonsense. Moreover, I think it’s dishonest nonsense, andnobody who accuses either Mr. Kennedy or any other president of being amollycoddler on this can point to any example of forthright action inbehalf of these causes.They can point to forthright refusal to act. If they choose, they can point to a man likeMr. Hoover [Herbert Hoover], for example, who never even saw a Negro spokesman ordelegation until two weeks before the nominating convention in 1928; or they could point toa man like Wilson [Woodrow Wilson] who said, “Yes, we’re going to have segregated toiletsin the federal establishment—period—that’s all there is to it.” “No, I’m not going to considerlynching, even though we’re fighting the Germans to save the world for democracy.” Theycan call that, if they want, being non-mollycoddlers. But I think it’s sheer nonsense to saythat President Kennedy who exhibited strength, but consideration, and who proceeded as hesaw it in a constitutional way with due consideration for what should have been their attitudeas American citizens and only when he found out that it was not their attitude and they werenot going to measure up to their responsibilities, did then he go forward in the conviction thathe had to act regardless of what they did.As for bowing to demonstrations, people don’t demonstrate just for exercise. Theydon’t demonstrate because they want to intimidate a President. They demonstrate becausethey have deep-seated grievances that they feel cannot be advertised or dramatized in anyother way. They’ve tried all other ways: petitioning, they can’t vote the people out of officewho hold and enthrall them because they can’t get to the ballot box, and they have no money,they can’t get jobs because they’re black, and they have no economic standing. So what dothey do? In desperation they’re forced out into the street to cry aloud and it’s not for thepurpose of intimidating and the man who listens to them is not thereby being intimidated.He’s being intelligent. He’s being humane. He’s being what an American president shouldbe—responding to the wishes of the people.The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States. It succeeded the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937).[1]
The FSA is famous for its small but highly influential photography program, 1935–44, that portrayed the challenges of rural poverty. The photographs in the FSA/Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This U.S. government photography project was headed for most of its existence by Roy Stryker, who guided the effort in a succession of government agencies: the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937), the Farm Security Administration (1937–1942), and the Office of War Information (1942–1944). The collection also includes photographs acquired from other governmental and nongovernmental sources, including the News Bureau at the Offices of Emergency Management (OEM), various branches of the military, and industrial corporations.[2]
In total, the black-and-white portion of the collection consists of about 175,000 black-and-white film negatives, encompassing both negatives that were printed for FSA-OWI use and those that were not printed at the time. Color transparencies also made by the FSA/OWI are available in a separate section of the catalog: FSA/OWI Color Photographs.[2]
The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming.
Reactionary critics, including the Farm Bureau, strongly opposed the FSA as an alleged experiment in collectivizing agriculture—that is, in bringing farmers together to work on large government-owned farms using modern techniques under the supervision of experts. After the Conservative coalition took control of Congress, it transformed the FSA into a program to help poor farmers buy land, and that program continues to operate in the 21st century as the Farmers Home Administration.
Origins
Walker Evans portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs (1936)
Arthur Rothstein photograph "Dust Bowl Cimarron County, Oklahoma" of a farmer and two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma (1936)
Dorothea Lange photograph of an Arkansas squatter of three years near Bakersfield, California (1935)The projects that were combined in 1935 to form the Resettlement Administration (RA) started in 1933 as an assortment of programs tried out by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The RA was headed by Rexford Tugwell, an economic advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[3] However, Tugwell's goal moving 650,000 people into 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2) of exhausted, worn-out land was unpopular among the majority in Congress.[3] This goal seemed socialistic to some and threatened to deprive powerful farm proprietors of their tenant workforce.[3] The RA was thus left with only enough resources to relocate a few thousand people from 9 million acres (36,000 km2) and build several greenbelt cities,[3] which planners admired as models for a cooperative future that never arrived.[3]
The main focus of the RA was to now build relief camps in California for migratory workers, especially refugees from the drought-stricken Dust Bowl of the Southwest.[3] This move was resisted by a large share of Californians, who did not want destitute migrants to settle in their midst.[3] The RA managed to construct 95 camps that gave migrants unaccustomed clean quarters with running water and other amenities,[3] but the 75,000 people who had the benefit of these camps were a small share of those in need and could only stay temporarily.[3] After facing enormous criticism for his poor management of the RA, Tugwell resigned in 1936.[3] On January 1, 1937,[4] with hopes of making the RA more effective, the RA was transferred to the Department of Agriculture through executive order 7530.[4]
On July 22, 1937,[5] Congress passed the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.[5] This law authorized a modest credit program to assist tenant farmers to purchase land,[5] and it was the culmination of a long effort to secure legislation for their benefit.[5] Following the passage of the act, Congress passed the Farm Security Act into law. The Farm Security Act officially transformed the RA into the Farm Security Administration (FSA).[3] The FSA expanded through funds given by the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.[3]
Relief workOne of the activities performed by the RA and FSA was the buying out of small farms that were not economically viable, and the setting up of 34 subsistence homestead communities, in which groups of farmers lived together under the guidance of government experts and worked a common area. They were not allowed to purchase their farms for fear that they would fall back into inefficient practices not guided by RA and FSA experts.[6]
The Dust Bowl in the Great Plains displaced thousands of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and laborers, many of whom (known as "Okies" or "Arkies") moved on to California. The FSA operated camps for them, such as Weedpatch Camp as depicted in The Grapes of Wrath.
The RA and the FSA gave educational aid to 455,000 farm families during the period 1936-1943. In June, 1936, Roosevelt wrote: "You are right about the farmers who suffer through their own fault... I wish you would have a talk with Tugwell about what he is doing to educate this type of farmer to become self-sustaining. During the past year, his organization has made 104,000 farm families practically self-sustaining by supervision and education along practical lines. That is a pretty good record!"[7]
The FSA's primary mission was not to aid farm production or prices. Roosevelt's agricultural policy had, in fact, been to try to decrease agricultural production to increase prices. When production was discouraged, though, the tenant farmers and small holders suffered most by not being able to ship enough to market to pay rents. Many renters wanted money to buy farms, but the Agriculture Department realized there already were too many farmers, and did not have a program for farm purchases. Instead, they used education to help the poor stretch their money further. Congress, however, demanded that the FSA help tenant farmers purchase farms, and purchase loans of $191 million were made, which were eventually repaid. A much larger program was $778 million in loans (at effective rates of about 1% interest) to 950,000 tenant farmers. The goal was to make the farmer more efficient so the loans were used for new machinery, trucks, or animals, or to repay old debts. At all times, the borrower was closely advised by a government agent. Family needs were on the agenda, as the FSA set up a health insurance program and taught farm wives how to cook and raise children. Upward of a third of the amount was never repaid, as the tenants moved to much better opportunities in the cities.[8]
The FSA was also one of the authorities administering relief efforts in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico during the Great Depression. Between 1938 and 1945, under the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, it oversaw the purchase of 590 farms with the intent of distributing land to working and middle-class Puerto Ricans.[9]
ModernizationThe FSA resettlement communities appear in the literature as efforts to ameliorate the wretched condition of southern sharecroppers and tenants, but those evicted to make way for the new settlers are virtually invisible in the historic record. The resettlement projects were part of larger efforts to modernize rural America. The removal of former tenants and their replacement by FSA clients in the lower Mississippi alluvial plain—the Delta—reveals core elements of New Deal modernizing policies. The key concepts that guided the FSA's tenant removals were: the definition of rural poverty as rooted in the problem of tenancy; the belief that economic success entailed particular cultural practices and social forms; and the commitment by those with political power to gain local support. These assumptions undergirded acceptance of racial segregation and the criteria used to select new settlers. Alternatives could only become visible through political or legal action—capacities sharecroppers seldom had. In succeeding decades, though, these modernizing assumptions created conditions for Delta African Americans on resettlement projects to challenge white supremacy.[10]
FSA and its contribution to societyThe documentary photography genre describes photographs that would work as a time capsule for evidence in the future or a certain method that a person can use for a frame of reference. Facts presented in a photograph can speak for themselves after the viewer gets time to analyze it. The motto of the FSA was simply, as Beaumont Newhall insists, "not to inform us, but to move us."[citation needed] Those photographers wanted the government to move and give a hand to the people, as they were completely neglected and overlooked, thus they decided to start taking photographs in a style that we today call "documentary photography." The FSA photography has been influential due to its realist point of view, and because it works as a frame of reference and an educational tool from which later generations could learn. Society has benefited and will benefit from it for more years to come, as this photography can unveil the ambiguous and question the conditions that are taking place.[11]
Photography programThe RA and FSA are well known for the influence of their photography program, 1935–1944. Photographers and writers were hired to report and document the plight of poor farmers. The Information Division (ID) of the FSA was responsible for providing educational materials and press information to the public. Under Roy Stryker, the ID of the FSA adopted a goal of "introducing America to Americans." Many of the most famous Depression-era photographers were fostered by the FSA project. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks were three of the most famous FSA alumni.[12] The FSA was also cited in Gordon Parks' autobiographical novel, A Choice of Weapons.
The FSA's photography was one of the first large-scale visual documentations of the lives of African-Americans.[13] These images were widely disseminated through the Twelve Million Black Voices collection, published in October 1941, which combined FSA photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam and text by author and poet Richard Wright.
PhotographersFifteen photographers (ordered by year of hire) would produce the bulk of work on this project. Their diverse, visual documentation elevated government's mission from the "relocation" tactics of a Resettlement Administration to strategic solutions which would depend on America recognizing rural and already poor Americans, facing death by depression and dust. FSA photographers: Arthur Rothstein (1935), Theodor Jung (1935), Ben Shahn (1935), Walker Evans (1935), Dorothea Lange (1935), Carl Mydans (1935), Russell Lee (1936), Marion Post Wolcott (1936), John Vachon (1936, photo assignments began in 1938), Jack Delano (1940), John Collier (1941), Marjory Collins (1941), Louise Rosskam (1941), Gordon Parks (1942) and Esther Bubley (1942).
With America's entry into World War II, FSA would focus on a different kind of relocation as orders were issued for internment of Japanese Americans. FSA photographers would be transferred to the Office of War Information during the last years of the war and completely disbanded at the war's end. Photographers like Howard R. Hollem, Alfred T. Palmer, Arthur Siegel and OWI's Chief of Photographers John Rous were working in OWI before FSA's reorganization there. As a result of both teams coming under one unit name, these other individuals are sometimes associated with RA-FSA's pre-war images of American life. Though collectively credited with thousands of Library of Congress images, military ordered, positive-spin assignments like these four received starting in 1942, should be separately considered from pre-war, depression triggered imagery. FSA photographers were able to take time to study local circumstances and discuss editorial approaches with each other before capturing that first image. Each one talented in her or his own right, equal credit belongs to Roy Stryker who recognized, hired and empowered that talent.
John Collier Jr.John Collier Jr.
Jack DelanoJack Delano
Walker EvansWalker Evans
Dorothea LangeDorothea Lange
Russell LeeRussell Lee
Carl MydansCarl Mydans
Gordon ParksGordon Parks
Arthur RothsteinArthur Rothstein
John VachonJohn Vachon
Marion Post WolcottMarion Post Wolcott
These 15 photographers, some shown above, all played a significant role, not only in producing images for this project, but also in molding the resulting images in the final project through conversations held between the group members. The photographers produced images that breathed a humanistic social visual catalyst of the sort found in novels, theatrical productions, and music of the time. Their images are now regarded as a "national treasure" in the United States, which is why this project is regarded as a work of art.[14]Photograph of Chicago's rail yards by Jack Delano, circa 1943Together with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (not a government project) and documentary prose (for example Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), the FSA photography project is most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the United States. Many of the images appeared in popular magazines. The photographers were under instruction from Washington, DC, as to what overall impression the New Deal wanted to portray. Stryker's agenda focused on his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among tenant cotton farmers, and the very poor conditions among migrant farm workers; above all, he was committed to social reform through New Deal intervention in people's lives. Stryker demanded photographs that "related people to the land and vice versa" because these photographs reinforced the RA's position that poverty could be controlled by "changing land practices." Though Stryker did not dictate to his photographers how they should compose the shots, he did send them lists of desirable themes, for example, "church", "court day", and "barns". Stryker sought photographs of migratory workers that would tell a story about how they lived day-to-day. He asked Dorothea Lange to emphasize cooking, sleeping, praying, and socializing.[15] RA-FSA made 250,000 images of rural poverty. Fewer than half of those images survive and are housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The library has placed all 164,000 developed negatives online.[16] From these, some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were originally made for the press, plus 644 color images, from 1600 negatives.
Documentary filmsThe RA also funded two documentary films by Pare Lorentz: The Plow That Broke the Plains, about the creation of the Dust Bowl, and The River, about the importance of the Mississippi River. The films were deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
World War II activitiesDuring World War II, the FSA was assigned to work under the purview of the Wartime Civil Control Administration, a subagency of the War Relocation Authority. These agencies were responsible for relocating Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast to Internment camps. The FSA controlled the agricultural part of the evacuation. Starting in March 1942 they were responsible for transferring the farms owned and operated by Japanese Americans to alternate operators. They were given the dual mandate of ensuring fair compensation for Japanese Americans, and for maintaining correct use of the agricultural land. During this period, Lawrence Hewes Jr was the regional director and in charge of these activities.[17]
Reformers ousted; Farmers Home AdministrationAfter the war started and millions of factory jobs in the cities were unfilled, no need for FSA remained.[citation needed] In late 1942, Roosevelt moved the housing programs to the National Housing Agency, and in 1943, Congress greatly reduced FSA's activities. The photographic unit was subsumed by the Office of War Information for one year, then disbanded. Finally in 1946, all the social reformers had left and FSA was replaced by a new agency, the Farmers Home Administration, which had the goal of helping finance farm purchases by tenants—and especially by war veterans—with no personal oversight by experts. It became part of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty in the 1960s, with a greatly expanded budget to facilitate loans to low-income rural families and cooperatives, injecting $4.2 billion into rural America.[18]
The Great DepressionThe Great Depression began in August 1929, when the United States economy first went into an economic recession. Although the country spent two months with declining GDP, the effects of a declining economy were not felt until the Wall Street Crash in October 1929, and a major worldwide economic downturn ensued.
Although its causes are still uncertain and controversial, the net effect was a sudden and general loss of confidence in the economic future and a reduction in living standards for most ordinary Americans. The market crash highlighted a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits for industrial firms, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth.[19]

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