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Home , Albany Movement, All the Way (play), Big Six (activists), Breach of Peace (book), Charles Hamilton Houston, Civil Rights Act of 1957

FREEAT LAST

THE U.S. FREEAT

LASTTHE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

“”: The August, 1963 on for Jobs and Freedom was the largest political demonstration the nation had ever seen. Crowds gathered before the and around the reflection pool heard Dr. Martin Jr. offer perhaps the finest oration ever delivered by an American. CONTENTS

— 1 — Spreads to America 3 A Global Phenomenon Transplanted to America Slavery Takes Hold Slave Life and Institutions Bonds Spotlight: The Genius of the — 2 — “Three-Fifths of Other Persons:” A Promise Deferred 8 A Land of ? The Pen of The By the Sword The Rebellious The Spotlight: Black Soldiers in — 3 — “:” African Respond to the Failure of Reconstruction 18 Congressional Reconstruction Temporary Gains … and Reverses The Advent of “Jim Crow” Booker T. Washington: The Quest for Economic Independence W.E.B. Du Bois: The Push for Political Agitation Spotlight: Marcus Garvey: Another Path — 4 — and Launch the Legal Challenge to Segregation 26 Charles Hamilton Houston: The Man Who Killed Jim Crow Thurgood Marshall: Mr. Civil Rights The Brown Decision Spotlight: Ralph Johnson Bunche: Scholar and Statesman Spotlight: : Breaking the Color Barrier — 5 — “We Have a Movement” 35 “Tired of Giving In:” The Montgomery Bus Sit-Ins Freedom Rides The Arrest in Birmingham Letter From Birmingham Jail “We Have a Movement” The March on Washington SPOTLIGHT: : Mother of the Civil Rights Movement Spotlight: Civil Rights Workers: Death in Spotlight: : of the Mississippi Movement — 6 — “It Cannot Continue:” Establishing Legal Equality 52 Changing Lyndon Baines Johnson The The Act’s Powers The Voting Rights Act of 1965: The Background in Selma The Selma-to-Montgomery March The Voting Rights Act Enacted What the Act Does SPOTLIGHT: ’ Reactions to the Civil Rights Movement

Epilogue 65 The Triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement — 1 — Sl a v e r y Sp r e a d s t o Am e r i c a

mong the antiquities displayed at the United slaves and that the Hebrews, upon their exodus from Egypt, Nations headquarters in is a replica used slaves of their own. Early accepted the of the Cyrus Cylinder. Named for Cyrus the practice, as did Islam. North and East African Arabs enslaved Great, ruler of the Persian Empire and conqueror black Africans, and Egypt and Syria enslaved Mediterranean ofA Babylonia, the document dates to about 539 B.C. Cyrus Europeans, whom they captured or purchased from slave guaranteed to his subjects many of what we today call civil traders and typically employed to produce sugar. Many Native rights, among them freedom of religion and protection of American tribal groups enslaved members of other personal property. Cyrus also abolished slavery, “a tradition,” captured in war. he asserted, that “should be exterminated the world over.” A number of factors combined to stimulate Throughout history, nations have varied in how broadly slave trade. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (now they define and how vigorously they defend their citizens’ Istanbul) in 1453 disturbed trade patterns and deprived personal protections and privileges. The is sweet-toothed Europeans of highly prized sugar. Led by the a nation built on these civil rights, on the soaring ideals Portuguese, Europeans began to explore the West African enshrined in its Declaration of Independence and the coast and to purchase slaves from African slave traders. After legal protections formalized in its Constitution, and most Christopher Columbus’s 1492 discovery of the New World, prominently, in the first 10 amendments to that Constitution, European colonizers imported large numbers of African known collectively as the American people’s Bill of Rights. slaves to work the land and, especially in the , to Yet one group of arrivals did not enjoy those rights and protections. Even as European immigrants found unprecedented economic opportunity and greater personal, political, and religious liberty in the New World, black Africans were transported there involuntarily, often in chains, to be sold as chattel slaves and compelled to labor for “masters,” most commonly in the great agricultural in the South. This book recounts how those African-American slaves and their descendants struggled to win — both in and in practice — the civil rights enjoyed by other Americans. It is a story of dignified persistence and struggle, a story that produced great heroes and heroines, and one that ultimately succeeded by forcing the majority of Americans to confront squarely the shameful gap between their universal principles of equality and justice and the inequality, injustice, and oppression faced by millions of their fellow citizens.

A Global Phenomenon Transplanted to America Man has enslaved his fellow man since prehistoric times. While the conditions of servitude varied, slave labor was employed by the ancient Mesopotamian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations, in classical Greece and Rome, and in pre- Colombian America by the native Aztec, Inca, and Mayan Enslaved Africans on the deck of the bark Wildfire, Key West, , empires. The tells us that the Egyptians used Hebrew April 1860.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 3 An 1823 drawing depicts slaves cutting sugar cane on the Caribbean cultivate sugar. Caribbean islands soon supplied some 80 to 90 island of Antigua. percent of Western Europe’s sugar demand. It is difficult in today’s world to understand the prominent role that crops such as sugar, , cotton, and captured from a Spanish ship in the Caribbean. The settlers spices once played in the world economy. In 1789, for example, purchased this “cargo,” the original slaves in the future the small colony of Saint Domingue (today’s ) accounted United States. for about 40 percent of the value of all French foreign trade. For the next 50 years, slaves were not a prominent source The economic forces driving the were of labor in the fledgling colony. The landowning powerful. In all, at least 10 million Africans endured the elites preferred to rely on “indentured” white labor. Under “.” (The term refers to the Atlantic Ocean this arrangement, potential European immigrants signed an segment — the second and longest — of the triangular trade indenture, or contract, under which they borrowed from an that sent textiles, rum, and manufactured goods to , employer the price of transportation to America. In return, slaves to the Americas, and sugar, tobacco and cotton to they agreed to work several years to pay off that debt. During Europe.) Most arrived in Portuguese , Spanish Latin this period, the sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, relations America, and the various British and French Caribbean between the races were relatively intimate. A small number of “sugar islands.” Only about 6 percent of the enslaved Africans particularly resourceful blacks even obtained their freedom were brought to British North America. Even so, the African- and prospered in their own right. differed profoundly from those of Beginning in the second half of the 17th century, however, the other immigrants who would found and expand the both the price of slaves and the supply of immigrants willing United States. to indenture themselves decreased. As slave labor became cheaper than indentured labor, slavery grew and spread. By Slavery Takes Hold 1770, comprised about 40 percent of the population in the southern colonies and a majority in South The very first slaves in British North America arrived by Carolina. (Slaves were also found in the northern colonies, but accident. Twelve years after the 1607 founding of the frst the slave population there never exceeded about 5 percent.) permanent British settlement, at Jamestown, Virginia, a Faced with such a large, oppressed, and potentially rebellious privateer docked there with some “20 and odd ” it had

4 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT minority, southern elites encouraged a hardening of social to carve out a measure of personal, cultural, and religious attitudes toward African Americans. of slave autonomy. “It was not that the slaves did not act like men,” women were declared to be slaves. Masters were permitted historian writes. “Rather, it was that they to kill slaves in the course of punishing them. Perhaps most could not grasp their collective strength as a people and act importantly, white Virginia elites began to promote anti-black like political men.” Nevertheless, Genovese concludes that as a means of dividing blacks from less wealthy most slaves “found ways to develop and assert their manhood white workers. and womanhood despite the dangerous compromises forced Most African-American slaves labored on farms that upon them.” produced staple crops: tobacco in , Virginia, One way was the “black church.” Over time, increasing and ; rice in the . In 1793, the numbers of African-American slaves embraced Christianity, American inventor Eli Whitney produced the first cotton typically denominations like Baptist and Methodist that gin, a mechanical device that removed cotton seeds from the prevailed among white southerners. Some masters feared surrounding cotton fiber. This spurred a dramatic expansion that Christian tenets would undermine their justifcations for in cotton cultivation throughout the Lower South, one slavery, but others encouraged their slaves to attend church, that expanded westward through , Mississippi, although in a separate, “blacks-only” section. and and into . About one million African- After exposure to Christianity, many slaves then American slaves moved westward during the period 1790- established their own parallel, or underground, churches. 1860, nearly twice the number carried to the United States These churches often blended Christianity with aspects from Africa. of the slaves’ former African religious cultures and beliefs. Religious services commonly incorporated shouting, dance, Slave Life and Institutions and the call-and-response interactions that would later feature prominently in the great sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King African-American slaves were compelled to work hard, and in Jr. and other leading black preachers. The black church often some cases brutally hard. In some states, known as slave emphasized different aspects of the Christian tradition than codes authorized terrible punishments for offending slaves. did southern white churches. Where the latter might interpret According to Virginia’s 1705 slave code: the biblical Curse of Ham (“a servant of servants shall he be All , , and Indian slaves within this unto his brethren”) as justifying slavery, African-American dominion … shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist services might instead emphasize the story of how Moses led his master … correcting such slave, and shall happen to be the Israelites from bondage. killed in such correction … the master shall be free of all For African-American slaves, religion offered a measure punishment … as if such accident never happened. of solace and hope. After the American Civil War brought This code also required that slaves obtain written an end to slavery, black churches and denominational permission before leaving their . It authorized organizations grew in membership, infuence, and whipping, branding, and maiming as punishment for even organizational strength, factors that would prove vital to the minor offenses. Some codes forbade teaching slaves how to success of the civil rights movement. read and write. In , the punishment for this offense was a fine and/or whipping if the guilty party were a “slave, Family Bonds Negro, or free .” The slaves’ tight family bonds would prove a similar source Although the lot of American slaves was harsh, they of strength. Slave masters could, and often did, split up labored under material conditions by some measures — literally selling members to other slave owners, comparable to those endured by many European workers splitting husband from wife, parents from children. But and peasants of that era. But there was a difference. The slaves many slave families remained intact, and many scholars lacked their freedom. have noted the “remarkable stability, strength, and Denial of fundamental handicapped durability of the nuclear family under slavery.” Slaves were African-American political and economic progress, but typically housed as extended family units. Slave children, slaves responded by creating institutions of their own, historian C. Vann Woodward writes, at least “were assured vibrant institutions on which the civil rights movement of a childhood, one exempt from labor and degradation past the mid- would later draw for sustenance and the age when working-class children of England and social capital. Earlier accounts often portrayed the slaves as were condemned to mine and factory.” infantilized objects “acted upon” by their white masters, but we now understand that many slave communities managed

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 5 A drawing, circa 1860, depicts a black preacher addressing his mixed-race congregation on a plantation.

The African-American family structure adapted to meet Slavery brought Africans to America and deprived them the challenges posed by slavery, and later by discrimination of the freedoms enjoyed by Americans of European origin. But and economic inequality. Many black family units resembled even in bondage, many African Americans developed strong extended clans rather than smaller, immediate families. Some family ties and faith-based institutions and laid a foundation were organized with strong females as central authority upon which future generations could build a triumphant figures. Slaveholders sometimes encouraged these family civil rights movement. The struggle for freedom and equality ties, reasoning that the threat of breaking up a family helped began long before Rosa Parks claimed a seat on the front of undermine the threats of disobedience and rebellion. the bus, more than a century before Martin Luther King Jr. Regardless, strong immediate and extended families inspired Americans with his famous dream. helped ensure African-American survival. In the Caribbean colonies and in Brazil, slave mortality rates exceeded birth rates, but blacks in the United States reproduced at the same rate as the white population. By the 1770s, only one in five slaves in British North America had been born in Africa. Even after 1808, when the United States banned the importation of slaves, their numbers increased from 1.2 million to nearly 4 million on the eve of the Civil War in 1861.

6 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT The Genius of the Black Church

frican-American Anglicanism, the United communal of of imprisoned African religious communi- Methodist Church, and a the black church in the face Americans. The search Aties have contributed host of other traditions. of repression helped spawn toward identity immensely to American The great gift, indeed a civil rights movement remains the foundation of society, not least by supplying genius, of African-American that sought its objectives by such a spirituality, however. much of the moral, political, religious sensibility is its peaceful means. Through the election of and organizational founda- drive to forge a common Many of the powerful the frst African-American tion of the 20th-century identity. Black slaves from voices of the civil rights president and the increase civil rights movement and different parts of Africa were movement — King, of course, of minorities in higher by shaping the thought of its transported to America but also such powerful and education, the journey toward leaders, Rosa Parks and the by means of the “middle signifcant fgures as U.S. common identity remains Reverend Martin Luther King passage” across the Atlantic. Representatives Barbara on course. Jr. among them. As slaves, they endured Jordan and , the In sum, the black church Enslaved and free African- massive oppression. Against political activist and Baptist helped African Americans Americans formed their this background of diversity minister , and survive the harshest forms own congregations as early and social deprivation, the gospel legend Mahalia of oppression and developed as the mid- to late 18th African-American religious Jackson — all were formed a revolutionary appeal century. After , belief and practice afforded from their worship life in for universal communal fully fedged denominations solace and the intellectual the black church. Indeed, spirituality. The black church emerged. What we today foundation for a successful King’s role as chief articulator didn’t just theorize about call the “black church” means of solving deep-seated of civil rights refects the democracy, it practiced encompasses seven confict: the techniques direct relationship between democracy. From its historic black denominations: of and African-American religious there fowered the civil African Methodist Episcopal . The black communities and the struggle rights movement — creative, (AME); African Methodist church also supplied black for racial and social justice inclusive, and nonviolent. Episcopal Zion (AMEZ); political activists with a in the United States. The Christian Methodist powerful philosophy: to focus spiritual infuence of African- Episcopal (CME); the upon an ultimate solution for American religious practice National Baptist Convention, all rather than palliatives for spread beyond this nation’s By Michael Battle USA, Incorporated; the a select few. The civil rights shores, as global leaders Ordained a priest by National Baptist Convention movement would adopt such as and Archbishop Desmond of America, Unincorporated; this policy — never to allow Archbishop Tutu, the Very Rev. Michael the Progressive National systemic oppression of any learned from King how to Battle is Provost and Canon Baptist Convention; and the human identity. Its genius, embody a loving, inclusive Theologian of the Cathedral Church of in Christ. then, was a natural overfow African and Christian Center of St. Paul in the These denominations from African-American identity. Episcopal Diocese of Los emerged after the religious communities that Today’s African-American Angeles. His books include emancipation of the African- sought to make sense of communal spirituality is as The Black Church in America: American slaves. They drew a tragic history and strong and engaged as ever. African American Spirituality. mainly on Methodist, Baptist, toward a future, not just for Black churches work to craft and Pentecostal traditions, themselves, but also for their responses to contemporary but often featured ties to nation and the world. challenges such as the spread American Catholicism, In short, while some form of HIV/AIDS, the need to of resistance to slavery and ameliorate poverty, and the then Jim Crow segregation disproportionate recidivism probably was inevitable, the

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 7 — 2 — “Th r e e -Fi f t h s o f Ot h e r Pe r s o n s ” A Promise Deferred

uring the 19th and early 20th centuries, African Americans and their white allies employed many strategies as they fought to end slavery and then Dto secure legal equality for the “freedmen.” Progress toward was destined to be slow, not least because slavery and oppression of blacks were among the sectional political compromises that undergirded national unity. The Civil War of 1861-1865 would end slavery in the United States, but once the confict ended, northern political will to overcome white southern resistance to racial equality gradually ebbed. The imposition of the “Jim Crow” system of legal segregation throughout the South stifed black political progress. Nevertheless, African-American leaders continued to build the intellectual and institutional capital that would nourish the successful of the mid- Depiction of George Washington with his black field workers on his Mount to late 20th century. Vernon, Virginia, estate, 1757.

A Land of Liberty? By 1787, many Americans had determined to replace Slavery divided Americans from their very first day of the existing loose, decentralized alliance of 13 states with a independence. As the South grew more dependent on a new stronger federal government. The Constitutional Convention, staple crop — “King Cotton” — and on the slave-intensive held in from May to September of that year, plantations that cultivated it, the prospect of a clash with produced a blueprint for such a government. “There were increasingly antislavery northern states grew. The young big fights over slavery at the convention,” according to David nation delayed that conflict with a series of moral evasions and Stewart, author of The Summer of 1787: The Men Who political compromises. Invented the Constitution. While “many of the delegates were The United States’ Declaration of Independence (1776) actually abolitionist in their views … there was not a feel for includes stirring language on universal brotherhood: “We abolition in the country at the time.” hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created Because any proposed constitution would not take effect equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain until ratifed by 9 of the 13 states, it became necessary to reach unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and a compromise on the status of the African-American slaves. the Pursuit of Happiness.” And yet its principal draftsman, Northern delegates to the convention, led by James Wilson Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slaveholding Virginian. of , reached an agreement with three large Jefferson understood the contradiction, and his draft sharply slaveholding states. Both sides agreed that every five “unfree condemned the slave trade — although not slavery itself persons” — slaves — would count as three people when — calling it “a cruel war against human nature.” But the calculating the size of a state’s congressional delegation. They , America’s government at the also agreed to bar the U.S. Congress for 20 years from time, deleted the slave trade reference from the Declaration any law prohibiting the importation of slaves. (Congress later to avoid any controversy that might fracture its pro- would abolish the slave trade, effective 1808. By then, this was independence consensus. It would not be the last time that not a controversial measure owing to the natural increase of political expediency would trump moral imperatives. the slave population.)

8 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT This map of the United States in 1857 depicts the “free” states in dark This “three-fifths compromise” has been described as green, slave states in and light red, and the territories (American lands not yet admitted to statehood) in light green. America’s Faustian bargain, or original sin. As David Walker, a free northern black, argued in an 1829 pamphlet: “Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the world that we are inferior to the Congress hammered out a number of compromises that whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and of minds?” generally ensured that states allowing slavery would enter The compromise allowed the states to form a stronger union, the Union paired with new states that prohibited it. The but it also ensured that slavery would continue in the South, , the , and the where the 1793 invention of the cotton gin had sparked -Nebraska Act all maintained this political balance. In the growth of a slave-intensive plantation system of cotton 1857, however, the ruled in the Dred Scott v. cultivation. It also bore profound political consequences for Sanford case that Congress could not bar slavery in western the young nation. In the hotly contested presidential election territories not yet admitted as states. The decision intensifed of 1800, the additional electoral votes awarded southern states the sectional confict over slavery and hastened the ultimate by virtue of their slave populations supplied Thomas Jefferson confrontation to come. with his margin of victory over the incumbent president, John Even as the young nation’s political system failed to Adams of . secure for African Americans the civil rights enjoyed by their Of even greater importance was how slavery affected white countrymen, brave men and women were launching the nation’s expansion. The question of whether new states efforts to abolish slavery and to ensure that the United States would permit slavery assumed decisive importance upon would live up to its own best ideals. the congressional balance-of-power between the “slave” and “free” states. During the first half of the ,

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 9 The Pen of Frederick Douglass Although the U.S. political system proved unable to dislodge slavery from the American South, the “peculiar institution,” as southerners often called it, did not go unchallenged. Determined women and men — blacks and whites — devoted their lives to the cause of abolition, the legal prohibition of slavery. They employed an array of tactics, both violent and nonviolent. And just as in Martin Luther King’s day, the pen and the appeal to would prove a powerful weapon. While the American Civil War was not solely a battle to free the slaves, the abolitionists persuaded many northerners to concur with the sentiment expressed in 1858 by a senatorial candidate named : “A house divided against An anti-slavery meeting in Boston, 1835, attracts both whites and free blacks. itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” Their Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society immediately hired The stirring words of African-American and white Douglass as an agent. thinkers forced increasing numbers of their countrymen In his new career, Douglass spoke at public meetings to confront the contradiction between their noble ideals throughout the North. He condemned slavery and argued that and the lives of bondage imposed on black Americans in African Americans were entitled by right to the civil rights the South. Perhaps the most powerful pen belonged to that the U.S. Constitution afforded other Americans. On a Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, journalist, publisher, number of occasions, racist mobs attacked these abolitionist and of liberty. Douglass was born into slavery in gatherings, but other whites befriended Douglass and either 1817 or 1818. His mistress defed Maryland state law championed his cause. After one mob knocked out the teeth by teaching the boy to read. At age 13 he purchased his frst of a white colleague who saved Douglass from violent attack, book, a collection of essays, poems, and dialogues extolling Douglass wrote his friend: “I shall never forget how like two liberty that was widely used in early 19th-century American very brothers we were ready to dare, do, and even die for each schoolrooms. From these youthful studies, Douglass began other.” Douglass praised his colleague’s willingness to leave to hone the skills that would make him one of the century’s a “life of ease and even luxury … against the wishes of your most powerful and effective . In 1838, Douglass father and many of your friends,” instead to do “something escaped from the plantation where he worked as a feld hand toward breaking the fetters of the slave and elevating the and arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he would dispised [sic] black man.” launch a remarkable career. In 1845, Douglass published the first of several acclaimed In 1841, the leading white abolitionist, William Lloyd autobiographies. His writings educated Garrison, sponsored an anti-slavery convention held in about plantation life, disabused them of the notion that slavery , Massachusetts. One attendee familiar with was somehow “good” for blacks, and convinced many that no Douglass’s talks at local black churches invited him to address just society could tolerate the practice. But with Douglass’s the gathering. “It was with the utmost difficulty that I could sudden fame came a real danger: that his master might find stand erect,” Douglass later wrote, “or that I could command and recapture him. Douglass prudently left the country for and articulate two words without hesitation and stammering.” a two-year speaking tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland. But his words moved the crowd: “The audience sympathized While Douglass was overseas, his friends purchased his with me at once, and from having been remarkably quiet, freedom — the price for one of the nation’s greatest men was became much excited.” The convention organizers agreed. just over $700.

10 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT In Great Britain, Douglass was exposed to a more Douglass’s remarkable career continued after the war’s politically aggressive brand of . When he end. He worked for passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, returned to the United States in 1847, Douglass broke with and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution — the . Garrison favored purely moral and postwar amendments that spelled out rights that applied nonviolent action against slavery, and he was willing to see to all men, not just to whites, and prohibited the individual the North secede from the Union to avoid slavery’s “moral states from denying those rights. While it would take a later stain.” Douglass pointed out that such a course would do little generation of brave civil rights champions to ensure that for black slaves in the South, and he offered his support for a these amendments would be honored, they would build on range of more aggressive activities. He backed mainstream the constitutional foundation laid by Douglass and others. political parties promising to prevent the extension of slavery Douglass went on to hold a number of local offices in the into the western territories and other parties demanding capital city of Washington, D.C., and to continue his work for complete nationwide abolition. He offered his house as a women’s and equality. He died in 1895, by any fair station on the Underground Railroad (the name given to a reckoning the leading African-American figure of the network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to the 19th century. North) and befriended the militant abolitionist John Brown, who aimed to spark a violent slave uprising. The Underground Railroad In 1847, Douglass launched The North Star, the frst of Frederick Douglass was a man of singular abilities. His several newspapers he would publish to promote the causes contemporaries, both white and African American pursued a of equal rights for blacks and for women. Its motto was “Right variety of tactics to combat slavery and win blacks their civil is of no Sex — Truth is of no Color — God is the Father of us rights. In a nation that was half slave and half free, one obvious all, and we are all brethren.” Douglass was an early and fervent tactic was to spirit slaves northward to freedom. Members champion of equality. In 1872, he would run for vice of several religious denominations took the lead. Beginning president on an Equal Rights Party ticket headed by Victoria around 1800, a number of Quakers (a religious denomination Clafin Woodhull, the United States’ frst woman presidential founded in England and influential in Pennsylvania) began candidate. to offer runaway slaves refuge and assistance either to start Douglass campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in the new lives in the North or to reach . “Fugitive Slave” 1860 presidential election. When the American Civil War — laws enacted in 1793 and 1850 provided for the seizure and pitting the northern Union against the rebellious southern return of runaway slaves, but the Quakers were willing Confederacy — broke out shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration, nonviolently to disobey what they considered unjust laws. Douglass argued that the Union should employ black troops: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.” Too old himself to fight, Douglass recruited black soldiers for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments, two black-manned units that fought with great valor. During the great confict, Douglass’s relations with Lincoln initially were choppy, as the president worked frst to conciliate the slaveholding border states crucial to the Union war effort. On September 22, 1862, however, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring the freedom — on January 1, 1863 — of all slaves held in the areas still in rebellion. In March 1863, Lincoln endorsed the recruitment of black soldiers, and the following year he fatly rejected suggestions to enter into negotiations before the South agreed to abolish slavery. The president twice invited Douglass to meet with him at the . Douglass later wrote of Lincoln that “in his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color,” and the president received him “just as you have seen one gentleman receive another.” leading escaped slaves to freedom in Canada.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 11 Evangelical Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists slave masters. They could look for inspiration to Haiti, where subsequently joined the effort, which expanded to help greater native resistance expelled the French colonizers, ended their numbers of escaped slaves find their way out of the South. slave-plantation labor system, and established an independent Free blacks came to assume increasingly prominent roles republic. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a successful black in the movement, which became known as the Underground entrepreneur named James Forten concluded that African Railroad, not because it employed tunnels or trains — it Americans similarly “could not always be detained in their used neither — but for the railroad language it employed. A present bondage.” In the American South, white plantation “conductor” familiar with the local area would spirit one or owners feared he might be right, and they reacted brutally to more slaves to a “station,” typically the home of a sympathizing even the slightest tremor of possible rebellion. “stationmaster,” then to another station, and so on, until the Even so, some brave African Americans were determined slaves reached free territory. The slaves would normally travel to take up arms against impossible odds. Perhaps the best- under cover of darkness, usually about 16 to 32 kilometers known struggle occurred in Virginia in 1831. Nat Turner per night. This was extremely dangerous work. Conductors (1800-1831) was a slave in Southampton , Virginia. His and slaves alike faced harsh punishment or death if they were frst master allowed Turner to be schooled in reading, writing, captured. and religion. Turner began to preach, attracted followers, and, The most famous conductor was a woman, an escaped by some accounts, came to believe himself divinely appointed African-American slave named Harriet Tubman. After to lead his people to freedom. On August 22, 1831, Turner and reaching freedom in 1849, Tubman returned to the South a group of between 50 and 75 slaves armed themselves with on some 20 Underground Railroad missions that rescued knives, hatchets, and axes. Over two days, they moved from about 300 slaves, including Tubman’s own sister, brother, house to house, freeing the slaves they met and killing more and parents. She was a master of disguise, posing at times as than 50 white Virginians, many of them women and children. a harmless old woman or a deranged old man. No slave in The response was as swift as it was crushing. Local militia Tubman’s care was ever captured. African Americans looking hunted down the rebels, 48 of whom would be tried and 18 northward called her “Moses,” and the River that divided of whom were hanged. Turner escaped, but on October 30 slave states from free states in parts of the nation the “River he was cornered in a cave. After trial and conviction, Turner Jordan,” biblical references to reaching the Promised Land. was hanged and his body fayed, beheaded, and quartered. Slaveholders offered a $40,000 reward for her capture, and Meanwhile, mobs of vengeful whites attacked any blacks John Brown called her “General Tubman.” they could fnd, regardless of their involvement in the Turner In 1850, a sectional political compromise resulted in the revolt. About 200 blacks were beaten, lynched, or murdered. passage of a new and stronger Fugitive Slave Law. While many The political consequences of the Nat Turner rebellion northern states had quietly declined to enforce the previous extended far beyond Southampton County. The antislavery statute, this new law established special commissioners movement was suppressed throughout the South, with harsh authorized to enforce in federal court slave-masters’ claims to new laws curtailing black more tightly than ever escaped slaves. It imposed heavy penalties on federal marshals before. Meanwhile in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison tarred who failed to enforce its terms, and on anyone who gave as hypocrites those who blamed the antislavery movement for assistance to an escaped slave. The Underground Railroad Turner’s revolt. The slaves, Garrison argued, had fought for the now was forced to adopt more aggressive tactics, including daring rescues of blacks from courtrooms and even from the custody of federal marshals. While the numbers of agents, stationmasters, and conductors was relatively small, their efforts freed tens of thousands of slaves. Their selfess bravery helped spark an increase in northern antislavery sentiment. That response, and northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, convinced many white southerners that the North would not permanently accept a half-slave nation.

By the Sword As early as 1663, when several Gloucester County, Virginia, A depiction of the 1831 Virginia led by Nat Turner. blacks were beheaded for plotting rebellion, African- American slaves launched a number of rebellions against their

12 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT very liberties that white Americans proudly celebrated After slavery advocates conducted a raid on “free” at every turn: Lawrence, Kansas, Brown and four of his sons, on May 24, 1856, carried out the , descending Ye accuse the pacific friends of emancipation of instigating on the slaveholding village of Pottawatomie and killing five the slaves to revolt. Take back the charge as a foul slander. The slaves need no incentives at our hands. They will find men. Brown then launched a series of guerrilla actions against them in their stripes — in their emaciated bodies — in their armed pro-slavery bands. He returned to , ceaseless toil — in their ignorant minds — in every field, in hoping — unsuccessfully — to raise an African-American every valley, on every hill-top and mountain, wherever you fighting force and — more successfully — to raise funds from and your fathers have fought for liberty — in your speeches, leading abolitionists. your conversations, your celebrations, your pamphlets, After a convention of Brown supporters meeting in your newspapers — voices in the air, sounds from across Canada declared him commander-in-chief of a provisional the ocean, invitations to resistance above, below, around government to depose southern slaveholders, Brown them! What more do they need? Surrounded by such established a secret base in Maryland, near Harpers Ferry, influences, and smarting under their newly made wounds, Virginia (now West Virginia). He waited there for supporters, is it wonderful [surprising] that they should rise to contend most of whom failed to arrive. On October 16, 1859, Brown — as other “heroes” have contended — for their lost rights? led a biracial force of about 20 that captured the federal It is not wonderful. arsenal at Harpers Ferry and held about 60 local notables hostage. The plan was to arm groups of escaped slaves and head south, liberating additional slaves as they marched. The Rebellious John Brown But Brown delayed too long and soon was surrounded by a Another famous effort to free the company of U.S. Marines led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert African-American slaves by the E. Lee (future commander of the southern forces during sword was led by a white American. the Civil War). Brown refused to surrender. Wounded and John Brown, a native New captured in the ensuing battle, Brown was tried in Virginia Englander, had long mulled the idea and convicted of , conspiracy, and murder. of achieving abolition by force and Addressing the after the verdict was announced, had, in 1847, confided to Frederick Brown said: Douglass his intent to do precisely I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have that. In 1855, Brown arrived in always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised the Kansas Territory, scene of poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed John Brown, pictured here violent clashes between pro- and circa 1859, led an ill-fated necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of antislavery factions. At issue was raid on Harpers Ferry, West the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the whether Kansas would be admitted Virginia (then Virginia), in blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this hopes of sparking a wider to the Union as a “free-soil” or slave slave rebellion. slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, state. Each faction built its own and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done! settlements. Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859, a martyr to the antislavery cause. In the Civil War that began a year later, Union soldiers marched to variants of a tune they called “John Brown’s Body” (one version, penned by Julia Ward Howe, would become “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). A typical stanza read: Old John Brown’s body is a-mouldering in the dust, Old John Brown’s rifle is red with blood-spots turned to rust, Old John Brown’s pike has made its last, unflinching thrust, ’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), site of John Brown’s His soul is marching on! infamous raid.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 13 Abraham Lincoln depicted against the text of his Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in the still rebellious territories, effective January 1, 1863.

14 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT The American Civil War The future African-American leader Booker T. Washington was about seven years old when the The issue of slavery and the status of black Americans eroded Emancipation Proclamation was read on his plantation. As he relations between North and South from the first days of recalled in his 1901 memoir : American independence until the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860. Lincoln opposed slavery, As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the calling it a “monstrous injustice,” but his primary concern was slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, to maintain the Union. He thus was willing to accept slavery and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the in those states where it already existed while prohibiting plantation songs had some reference to freedom. ... its further extension in the western territories. But white Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a U.S. officer, I southerners considered Lincoln’s election a threat to their presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long social order. Beginning with South Carolina in December paper — the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After 1860, 11 southern states seceded from the Union, forming the the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go Confederate States of America. when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears For Lincoln and for millions of northerners, the Union of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all was, as the historian James M. McPherson has written, “a meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long bond among all of the American people, not a voluntary praying, but fearing that she would never live to see. association of states that could be disbanded by action of any one or several of them.” As the president explained to his As a condition of regaining their congressional private secretary: “We must settle this question now, whether representation, the seceding states were obliged to ratify the in a free government the minority have the right to break Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the up the government whenever they choose.” Thus, as Lincoln U.S. Constitution. These “Reconstruction Amendments” made clear early in the war: “My paramount object in this abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection of the law struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to — including by the states — to all citizens, and barred destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any voting discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or previous slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves condition of servitude.” The years following the Civil War thus I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving established the legal basis for guaranteeing African Americans others alone I would also do that.” the civil rights accorded other Americans. Shamefully, the But slavery drove the sectional confict. As the brutal plain meaning of these laws would be ignored for nearly war wore on, many northerners grew more unwilling to abide another century, as the politics of sectional compromise again slavery under any circumstances. Northern troops who came would trump justice for African Americans. into frsthand contact with southern blacks often became more sympathetic to their plight. Lincoln also saw that freeing those slaves would strike at the Confederacy’s economic base and hence its ability to wage war. And once freed, the former slaves could take up arms for the Union cause, thus “earning” their freedom. For all these reasons, freeing the black slaves joined preserving the Union as a northern war aim. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, declared all slaves in the rebellious states “thenceforward, and forever free.” As he signed the document, Lincoln remarked that “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.”

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 15 Black Soldiers in the Civil War

hen the Why did many military controlled (southern) out Confederate-controlled American Civil and civilian leaders reject mainland. Most of their slaves South Carolina, Georgia, and WWar began the idea of recruiting black remained on the islands, Florida — and to recruit black in 1861, Jacob Dodson, a soldiers? Some said that and they soon were joined men capable of bearing arms free black man living in black troops would prove too by black escapees from the as Union soldiers. He would Washington, D.C., wrote cowardly to fght white men, mainland who believed they attempt to train and form the to Secretary of War Simon others said that they would would be liberated if only they frst all-black regiment of the Cameron informing him be inferior fghters, and some could reach the Union lines. It Civil War. that he knew of “300 reliable thought that white soldiers would not be that simple. News traveled slowly in free citizens” who would not serve with black Even as Hunter needed those days, and President wanted to enlist and defend soldiers. There were a few more soldiers to control the Abraham Lincoln did not the city. Cameron replied military leaders, though, who region’s many tidal rivers hear about Hunter’s that “this department has had different ideas. and islands against stubborn regiment until June. While no intention at present to On March 31, 1862, almost Confederate guerrilla Lincoln opposed slavery, call into the service of the a year after the frst shots of resistance, he observed how he feared moving more government any colored the Civil War were fred at escaping mainland slaves quickly than public opinion soldiers.” It didn’t matter that Fort Sumter, South Carolina, were swelling the islands’ in the embattled North — black men, slave and free, had Union (northern) troops black population. Perhaps, and particularly in the served in colonial militias and commanded by General he reasoned, the African slaveholding border states had fought on both sides of David Hunter took control Americans could solve his that had sided with the the Revolutionary War. Many of the islands off the coasts manpower shortage. He Union — would allow. He black men felt that serving in of northern Florida, Georgia, devised a radical plan. also was adamant that “no the military was a way they and South Carolina. Local Hunter, a staunch aboli- commanding general shall might gain freedom and full whites who owned the rich tionist, took it upon himself do such a thing, upon my citizenship. cotton and rice plantations to free the slaves — not just responsibility, without fed to the Confederate- on the islands but through- consulting me.” In an angry

Frederick Douglass: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S. … a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”

16 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT and the inclusion of men Once black men were officers. Eight black surgeons of African descent into the accepted into the military, also received commissions in military. As white northerners they were limited in the USCT. More than a dozen increasingly understood that many cases to garrison USCT soldiers were given black slaves were crucial to and fatigue duty. The the Congressional Medal of the Confederacy’s economy famed Massachusetts Honor for bravery. and to its war effort, Lincoln 54th Regiment’s Colonel In 1948, President Harry could justify freeing the slaves actively S. Truman ordered the as matter of military necessity. petitioned superiors to give desegregation of the armed With the Emancipation Proclamation, When Abraham Lincoln his men a chance to engage in forces. Today’s military the Union (Northern) Army began signed the Emancipation battle and prove themselves remains an engine of social actively to recruit African-American Proclamation on January 1, as soldiers. Some of the other and economic opportunity soldiers. 1863, the military’s policy officers who knew what their for black Americans. But toward enslaved people men could do did the same. it was the sacrifces of the letter, the president informed became clearer. Those who Black troops had to fght to Civil War-era black soldiers the general that neither he reached the Union lines get the same pay as white that paved the way for the nor any other subordinate would be free. Also, the War soldiers. Some regiments full acceptance of African had the right to free anyone, Department began to recruit refused to accept lower pay. Americans in the United although he carefully asserted and enlist black troops for It was not until 1865, the year States military. More for himself the right to newly formed regiments the war ended, that Congress fundamentally, their efforts emancipate slaves at a time of the — the passed a law providing equal were an important part of his choosing. Hunter United States Colored Troops pay for black soldiers. of the struggle of African was ordered to disband the (USCT). All of the officers Despite these restrictions, Americans for liberty and regiment, but the seed he in these regiments, however, the United States Colored dignity. planted soon sprouted. would be white. Troops successfully In August 1862, two By the fall of 1864, some participated in 449 military weeks after Hunter had 140 black regiments had been engagements, 39 of them dismantled his regiment, the raised in many northern major battles. They fought By Joyce Hansen War Department allowed states and in southern in battles in South Carolina, A four-time winner of the General Rufus Saxton to raise territories captured by Louisiana, Florida, Virginia, Honor the Union Army’s frst official the Union. About 180,000 , Alabama, and Book Award, Joyce Hansen black regiment, the First South African Americans served other states. They bravely has published short Carolina Volunteers. This during the Civil War, stormed forts and faced stories and 15 books of and other black regiments including more than 75,000 artillery knowing that if contemporary and historical organized in the coastal northern black volunteers. captured by the enemy, they fiction and non-fiction for regions successfully defended Although the black would not be given the rights young readers, including and held the coastal islands for regiments were segregated of prisoners of war, but instead Between Two Fires: Black the duration of the war. from their white would be sold into slavery. Soldiers in the Civil War. The First Kansas counterparts, they fought the The black troops performed Colored Volunteers was same battles. Black troops with honor and valor all of also organized around this performed bravely and the duties of soldiers. time, but without official successfully even though Despite the Army’s policy War Department sanction. they coped with both the of only having white officers, Meanwhile, President Confederate enemy and the eventually about 100 black Lincoln had carefully laid the suspicion of some of their soldiers rose from the ranks groundwork for emancipation Union military colleagues. and were commissioned as

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 17 — 3 — “Se p a r a t e b u t Eq u a l ” African Americans Respond to the Failure of Reconstruction

This reconstruction-era wood engraving depicts a ’s Bureau ore than 600,000 Americans perished in representative standing between armed white and black Americans. The the Civil War. Their sacrifice resolved some failure of Reconstruction would in the era of “Jim Crow” segregation in the American South. of the nation’s most intractable conflicts. Slavery at last was prohibited, and the principleM that no state could secede from the Union was established. But incompatible visions of American society generally applied only to men — could work where and how persisted, and the consequences for African Americans would he wanted, could accumulate property in his own name, and, prove immense. most importantly, was free to rise as far as his talents and One vision, associated during the 19th and early 20th abilities might take him. centuries with the Democratic Party, blended American Abraham Lincoln was a of this self-made man. As individualism and suspicion of big government with a president, he would boast: “I am not ashamed to confess that preference for local and state authority over federal power, 25 years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a and, at least in the South, a dogged belief in white superiority. fat-boat. … ” Even as many Republicans condemned slavery The Republican Party, founded in the 1850s, was more willing as immoral, all viewed the South as lagging in both economic to employ federal power to promote economic development. growth and social mobility. As the historian Antonia Etheart Its core belief was often called “free labor.” For millions of has written, Republicans saw in the South “an unchangeable northerners, free labor meant that a man — the concept then

18 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT hierarchy dominated by the aristocracy of slaveholders.” as vagrants former slaves who left their plantations without After the North’s military victory ended slavery, its free- permission. Meanwhile, Johnson ordered the restoration of labor ideology required that the freedmen possess their civil abandoned southern plantations to their former slave-master rights. During the years that followed the Civil War, northern owners. Republicans at first were determined to “reconstruct” the Many northerners were outraged. Surely, they argued, South along free-labor principles. Although many white they had not fought and died only to re-empower the racist southerners resisted, northern military might for a time southern aristocracy. The 1866 congressional election ensured blacks the right to vote, to receive an education, and, returned large numbers of “” determined generally, to enjoy the constitutional privileges afforded other to ensure greater civil rights for blacks, and, more generally, Americans. But northerners’ determination to support blacks’ through government power to reconstruct the South aspirations gradually ebbed as their desire for reconciliation along northern lines. This 40th Congress refused to seat with the South deepened. By the end of the 19th century, members elected under Johnson-authorized southern state southern elites had reversed many black gains and imposed an governments. It then overrode Johnson’s veto to enact several oppressive system of legal segregation. important civil rights laws. One such law extended the operations of the Freedman’s Congressional Reconstruction Bureau. Established before Lincoln’s death, this federal agency helped ease the freed slaves’ transition to freedom. It supplied The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 elevated medical care, built hundreds of schools to educate black Vice President to the presidency. Johnson, a children, and helped freed slaves negotiate labor contracts Tennessee Democrat chosen as Lincoln’s 1864 running mate with their former owners and other employers. to signal moderation and a desire for postwar reconciliation, A second law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declared moved swiftly to readmit the former Confederate states to that all persons born in the United States were citizens, full membership in the Union. Southern states were obliged without regard to race, color, or previous condition. African to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery. Americans thus were entitled to make and enforce contracts, But they were not required to protect the equality and sue and be sued, and own property. civil rights of their African-American populations. White- Because Johnson opposed and arguably attempted to dominated southern state governments organized under subvert the application of these and other measures, the Johnson’s guidelines swiftly adopted Black Codes — punitive House of Representatives in 1868 impeached (indicted) statutes that closely regulated the behavior of supposedly Johnson, thus initiating the constitutionally proscribed “free” African Americans. These laws typically imposed method for removing a president from office. The Senate curfews, banned possession of firearms, and even imprisoned acquitted Johnson by one vote, but for the remainder of his term, he mostly refrained from challenging Congress’s reconstruction program. Most important of all, Congress made clear that the formerly rebellious states would not be permitted to regain their congressional representation until they ratifed the proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment would supply the legal bedrock on which the modern civil rights movement would stake its claim for racial equality. The frst 10 amendments, known collectively as the Bill of Rights, had protected Americans against encroachments by the federal government. This afforded African Americans little or no protection against racist laws enacted by state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratifed in July 1868, remedied this. “No State,” it reads, shall “deprive The assassination of Abraham Lincoln brought the southerner Andrew any person of life, liberty, or property, without due Johnson to the presidency. Here, Johnson pardons white rebels for taking up process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction arms against the Union. the equal protection of the laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment,

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 19 adopted shortly afterward, declared that the “right of citizens veterans and fought for greater federal expenditures in his of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by district. the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or Republican-led state governments in the Reconstruction- previous condition of servitude.” era South typically raised taxes and expanded social services. Among their innovations were state-supported educational Temporary Gains … and Reverses systems and measures to subsidize economic growth. African Americans were major beneficiaries of these innovations, With northern troops enforcing Reconstruction legislation and for a time it seemed as if their civil rights might be throughout much of the South, African Americans scored permanently secured. major gains. The apparatus of the slave system — slave But the majority of southern whites were determined quarters, gang labor, and the like — was dismantled. Blacks to resist black equality. Many could not unlearn the harsh increasingly founded their own churches. Headed by black stereotypes of black inferiority on which they had been raised. ministers, these would provide the organizational sinew on Many southern whites were very poor, and they grounded which Martin Luther King Jr. and others later would build the their identity in a perceived sense of racial superiority. modern civil rights movement. Southern elites understood that this racial divide could Black voters aligned with a small faction of southern block interracial political efforts to advance their common whites to elect Republican-led governments in several economic interests. They often employed white racial southern states. Many blacks held important public offices resentment as a tool to regain political power. at the state and county levels. Two African Americans White southerners, associated in this era with the were elected to the U.S. Senate, and 14 to the House of Democratic Party, launched a blistering political attack Representatives. Typical was Benjamin Sterling Turner, on white southern Republicans. They called the native Alabama’s first black congressman. Born into slavery, Turner southerners “,” a term derived from a word meaning was freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He swiftly “undersized or worthless animal”; the northerners who sought established himself as an entrepreneur and then was elected their fortune in the postwar South were called “” tax collector and city councilman in Selma, the site of a because these newcomers allegedly carried their belongings in crucial 20th-century civil rights struggle. Elected to Congress travel bags made of carpet. in 1870, Turner secured monthly pensions for black Civil War The reaction against newly empowered African Americans was harsher still. Secret terrorist organizations such as the Knights of the White Camellia — named for the snow-white bloom of a southern fowering shrub and intended to symbolize the purity of the white race — and the (KKK) launched violent attacks to intimidate black voters and keep them away from the polls. President Ulysses S. Grant dispatched three regiments of infantry and a fotilla of gunboats to ensure fair elections in in 1874. Grant used federal troops to smash the Klan, but the continued as militant whites formed informal “social clubs” described by historian James M. McPherson as “paramilitary organizations that functioned as armed auxiliaries of the Democratic Party in southern states in their drive to ‘redeem’ the South from ‘black and tan Negro-Carpetbag rule.’ ” Some northern whites feared that Grant had gone too far, and more simply wearied of the struggle. As McPherson writes: Many Northerners adopted a “plague on both your houses” attitude toward the White Leagues and the “Negro- Carpetbag” state governments. Withdraw the federal U.S. Representative Benjamin Sterling Turner was elected to Congress from Reconstruction-era Alabama. With the end of Reconstruction and the troops, they said, and let the southern people work out withdrawal of Union troops from the South, black Americans in that region their own problems even if that meant a for the were systematically deprived of their political rights. white-supremacy Democratic Party. This was essentially what happened. In elections marred

20 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT by fraud, intimidation, and violence, Democrats gradually as later civil rights advocates tirelessly would document, was regained control of state governments throughout the South. that separate never really was equal. Public schools and other In 1877, a political bargain declared Republican Rutherford B. facilities designated colored nearly always were inferior. Often Hayes the winner of the closely contested 1876 presidential they were shockingly so. But more fundamentally, the issue election. In exchange, Hayes withdrew the last federal troops was whether a fair reading of the Constitution might justify from the South. Black Americans, the overwhelming majority separating Americans on the basis of race. As John Marshall of whom then lived in the states of the former Confederacy, Harlan, the dissenting justice in the Plessy case, argued in were again at the mercy of racist state laws. words that resonate to this day: In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in The Advent of “Jim Crow” this country no superior, dominant, of citizens. During the years that followed, and especially after 1890, There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, state governments in the South adopted segregationist laws and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In mandating separation of the races in nearly every aspect respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. of everyday life. They required separate public schools, Justice Harlan’s view would at last prevail in 1954, when railroad cars, and public libraries; separate water fountains, the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education restaurants, and hotels. The system became known informally decision overruled Plessy. For African Americans, however, as “Jim Crow,” from the 1828 song “Jump Jim the rise of Jim Crow segregation required new responses, new Crow,” which was typically performed by white performers in strategies for claiming their civil rights. as a caricature of the unlettered, inferior black man. Jim Crow could not have existed had the federal courts Booker T. Washington: interpreted broadly the relevant constitutional protections. The Quest for Economic Independence But the judicial branch instead seized upon technicalities and loopholes to avoid striking down segregationist laws. In The failure of Reconstruction and the rise of legal segregation 1875, Congress enacted what would be the last civil rights forced African Americans to make difficult choices. The law for nearly a century. The barred overwhelming majority still lived in the South and faced “any person” from depriving citizens of any race or color of fierce, even violent resistance to civil equality. Some concluded equal treatment in public accommodations such as inns, that direct political efforts to assert their civil rights would theaters, and places of public amusement, and in public be futile. Led by Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), they transportation. In 1883, the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited discrimination by states but not by individuals. Congress accordingly could not prohibit individual acts of discrimination. Perhaps the most significant judicial decision came in 1896. Six years earlier, Louisiana had adopted a law requiring separate rail cars for whites, blacks, and “” of mixed ancestry. An interracial group of citizens who opposed the law persuaded , a public education advocate with a white complexion and a black great-grandmother, to test the law. Plessy purchased a ticket for a “whites-only” rail car. After taking his seat, Plessy revealed his ancestry to the train conductor. He was arrested, and the litigation began. In 1896, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In a seven-to-one decision, the court upheld the Louisiana law. “The enforced separation of the two races,” did not, the majority ruled, “stamp the colored race with a badge of inferiority.” If black Americans disagreed, that was their own interpretation and not that of the statute. Thus did the high court lend its prestige and its imprimatur to what became Booker T. Washington championed economic empowerment as the means of achieving future African-American political gains. known as “separate but equal” segregation. One problem with Plessy (formally, Plessy v. Ferguson),

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 21 argued instead for focusing on black economic development. But close study of Washington’s speech suggests that Others, including most prominently the leading scholar and he did not mean to accept permanent inequality. Instead, he intellectual William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, called for African Americans gradually to amass social capital insisted upon an uncompromising effort to achieve the voting — jobs “just now” were more valuable than the right to attend and other civil rights promised by the Constitution and its the . Or, as he put it more bluntly: “No race that has postwar amendments. anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington was about nine any degree ostracized.” years old at the time of emancipation. He attended Hampton Washington was the nation’s leading African-American Normal and Agricultural Institute — today’s Hampton figure for many years, although increasing numbers of blacks University — in southeastern Virginia, excelled at his studies, gradually turned away from his vision. One problem was that and found work as a schoolteacher. In 1881 he was offered the the postwar South was itself a poor region, lagging behind opportunity to head a new school for African Americans in the North in modernization and economic development. Macon County, Alabama. Opportunity for southerners, black or white, simply was Washington had concluded that practical skills and not as great as Booker T. Washington hoped. His gradualist economic independence were the keys to black advancement. posture was also unacceptable to blacks unwilling to defer to He decided to ground his new school, renamed the Tuskegee some unspecified future date their claims for full and equal Normal and Industrial Institute (now ) civil rights. in industrial education. Male students learned skills such as carpentry and blacksmithing, females typically studied W.E.B. Du Bois: The Push for Political Agitation nursing or dressmaking. Tuskegee also trained schoolteachers Many blacks turned for leadership to the historian and to staff African-American schools throughout the South. This social scientist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). A graduate of approach promised to develop economically productive black , a historically black institution in Nashville, citizens without forcing the nation to confront squarely the Tennessee, Du Bois earned a PhD in history from Harvard civil rights question. A number of leading philanthropists, University and took up a professorship at University, such as the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, steel producer a school founded with the assistance of the Freedman’s Andrew Carnegie, and Sears, Roebuck head Julius Rosenwald, Bureau and specializing in the training of black teachers, all raised funds for Tuskegee. The school grew in size, librarians, and other professionals. Du Bois authored and reputation, and prestige. edited a number of scholarly studies depicting black life in In September 1895, Washington delivered to a America. Social science, he believed, would provide the key to predominantly white audience his famous Atlanta improving . Compromise speech. He argued that the greatest danger facing African Americans is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. … It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities. Not surprisingly, many whites found soothing a vision in which blacks concentrated on acquiring real estate or industrial skill rather than political office, a vision that seemingly accepted the Jim Crow system. As Washington put it in his Atlanta address: “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.” W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the United States’ leading 20th century figures, testifies before Congress in 1945.

22 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT But as legal segregation — often enforced by weakly organized and poorly funded. It disbanded in 1910. A new (extralegal and often mob-instigated seizures and killings of and stronger organization was ready to take its place by then. “criminal suspects,” without trial and usually on the fimsiest A false charge that a black man had attempted to rape a of evidence) — took hold throughout the South, Du Bois white woman led to anti-black rioting in Springfield, , in gradually concluded that only direct political agitation and August 1908. The left seven dead and forced thousands protest could advance African-American civil rights. Inevitably of African Americans to fee the city. The suffragette Mary Du Bois came into dispute with Booker T. Washington, who White Ovington led a call for an organizational meeting of quietly built political ties to national Republicans to secure reformers. “The spirit of the abolitionists must be revived,” a measure of political patronage even as his priority for she later wrote. Her group soon expanded and linked up with American blacks remained economic development. Du Bois and other African-American activists. In 1910, they In 1903, Du Bois published . founded the National Association for the Advancement of Described by the scholar Shelby Steele as an “impassioned Colored People (NAACP). The new organization’s leadership reaction against a black racial ideology of accommodation included white Americans, many of them Jewish, and Du and humility,” Black Folk declared squarely that “the problem Bois, who assumed the editorship of the NAACP’s influential of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” magazine The Crisis. Addressing Booker T. Washington, Du Bois argued that Beginning in 1913, when President , a native southerner, permitted the segregation of the federal his doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and civil service, the NAACP turned to the courts, initiating South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic the decades-long legal effort to overturn Jim Crow. Under spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, Du Bois’s leadership, The Crisis analyzed current affairs and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our and featured the works of the great writers of the energies to righting these great wrongs. Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, among them and . By some estimates, its Du Bois also disagreed with Washington’s exclusive circulation exceeded 100,000. emphasis on artisan skills. “The Negro race, like all races,” he Du Bois continued to write, cementing a reputation as argued in a 1903 article, “is going to be saved by its exceptional one of the century’s major American thinkers. He emerged men.” This “talented tenth” of African Americans “must be as a leading anticolonialist and expert on African history. made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among In 1934, Du Bois broke with the integrationist NAACP over their people.” For this task, the practical training Booker T. his advocacy of Pan-African nationalism and the growing Washington offered at Tuskegee Institute would not suffice: Marxist and socialist aspects of his thought. Du Bois would If we make money the object of man-training, we shall live on into his 90s, dying a Ghanaian citizen and committed develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make Communist. technical skill the object of education, we may possess But the NAACP, the organization he helped to found, artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as would launch the modern civil rights struggle. we make manhood the object of the work of the schools — intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it. … On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand, and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life. Two years later, Du Bois and a number of leading black intellectuals formed the Niagara Movement, a civil rights organization squarely opposed to Washington’s policies of accommodation and gradualism. “We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now!” Du Bois declared. (Du Bois also advocated woman suffrage.) The Niagara group held a notable 1906 conference at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, site of John Brown’s rebellion; lobbied against ; distributed pamphlets and circulars; and attempted generally to raise the issues of civil rights and racial justice. But the movement was

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 23 Marcus Garvey: Another Path

arcus Garvey persons around the world Washington’s Up From Garvey was determined (1887-1940), should make a united effort Slavery, Garvey asked himself: to spread his program of Ma major black to form institutions that “Where is the black man’s black empowerment in the nationalist of the early 20th could concentrate wealth and government? Where is his United States. Arriving century, was born in power in their own hands. To king and kingdom? Where in 1915, Garvey argued but spent his most successful this end he formed, among is his president, his country, that African Americans years in the United States. other organizations, the his ambassadors, his army, could command respect An enthusiastic capitalist, United Negro Improvement his navy, and his men of big by building their economic he believed that African Association (UNIA). affairs? I could not fnd them. power. To that end, he strove Americans and other black After reading Booker T. I decided, I will help to to establish a network of make them.” black-owned businesses: Garvey was born in the grocery stores, laundries, and parish of St. Ann, Jamaica, others capable of thriving where in his early teens independently of the white he was apprenticed to his economy. While these and godfather, a printer named other initial attempts to Alfred Burrowes. Garvey’s organize the masses met father was a bookish man, with little success, Garvey’s as was Burrowes, and the perseverance earned him youthful Marcus received increasing fame; by the end early exposure to the world of the First World War, his of letters. Migrating to name was widely known Kingston, Garvey displayed among black Americans. highly refned talents as a Garvey was a master at typesetter and developed an manipulating the media interest in journalism. and at staging dramatic After being blacklisted public events. He founded for attempting to organize his own newspaper, Negro workers, he left Jamaica to World, which was distributed visit Latin America, and widely throughout the he later spent two years in United States and in some England. During these years, Latin American countries. he studied informally at the He held colorful annual University of London and conventions in New York worked for the Sudanese- City, where men and women Egyptian black nationalist, marched under a banner Duse Mohammed Ali, of red, black, and green. founder of The African Times This fag, along with other and Orient Review. tricolored emblems, remains popular among African Americans to the present day. The striking military The black nationalist Marcus Garvey represented one strand of African- regalia sometimes worn by American thought. Most blacks, however, would choose to fight for equality Garveyites demonstrated the and full participation in U.S. political and economic life. nationalistic and militaristic

24 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Randolph accused its previous membership Garvey of cooperating with levels. He retained sufficient white racists in a scheme to U.S. popularity to draw repatriate American blacks an attentive audience to a back to Africa. Garvey meeting in Windsor, Ontario, denied any such ambitions, just across the river from but he did send emissaries , , a base to the Republic of to for Garvey’s earlier . investigate the prospects of His fnal operations were new business undertakings, conducted from London, and he found considerable England, where he died sympathy for his ideas among in 1940. young African intellectuals. In 1925, Garvey was imprisoned on federal charges of using the mails By Wilson Jeremiah Moses to defraud. He denied the Moses is Ferree Professor of charge, and even some of History at the Pennsylvania his critics found it unfair. State University and author of President Calvin Coolidge the scholarly article “Marcus pardoned Garvey in 1927, but Garvey: A Reappraisal.” His as a convicted felon who was books include The Golden Advertisement for a 1917 Marcus Garvey speech. not a U.S. citizen, Garvey was Age of , immediately deported to his 1850-1925. native Jamaica. W.E.B. Du image that his , and purchased several Bois, one of Garvey’s severest nationalist movement strove steamships, unfortunately in critics, wished him well, to convey. dilapidated condition. encouraging him to pursue There is a legend that Garvey believed in his efforts in his own country. once a Congolese leader in a separation of the races and Establishing himself in remote African village was was willing to cooperate London, England, Garvey asked if he knew anything with leaders of white racist launched a new magazine, about the United States. His organizations, notably the The Black Man, which response was said to be, “I Ku Klux Klan. After meeting criticized such prominent know the name of Marcus with Klan leadership, he came black American fgures as Garvey.” under attack from several the heavyweight boxing Under the name of the already-hostile black leaders. champion Joe Louis, the Black Star Line, the UNIA A. Philip Randolph, founder entertainer and political launched an abortive attempt and leader of the Brotherhood activist , and to open up the world to of Sleeping Car Porters, the controversial spiritual black-owned commerce. The America’s earliest successful, fgure for their organization sold impressive predominantly black labor failure to supply effective amounts of stock in this union, was particularly race leadership. But Garvey enterprise, mostly in small hostile. was unable there either to amounts to ordinary working rebuild his organization to

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 25 — 4 — Ch a r l e s Ha m i l t o n Ho u s t o n a n d Th u r g o o d Ma r s h a l l Launch the Legal Challenge to Segregation

n November 1956, a black-instigated boycott of the and their allies had long struggled to achieve the rights segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, promised them by the U.S. Constitution and its post-Civil had entered its 12th month. A year earlier, a black War amendments. It is important also to understand that woman named Rosa Parks had bravely refused to the modern civil rights movement rested on two pillars. relinquishI her front seat on a municipal bus to a white man, One was formed by the brave nonviolent protesters who launching a and introducing Americans forced their fellow Americans at last to confront squarely to a courageous and dynamic leader — the Reverend Dr. the scandalous treatment of black Americans. The second Martin Luther King Jr. But it was not until the courts forbade consisted of attorneys such as Charles Hamilton Houston and the relegation of African Americans to the back of the his greatest student, Thurgood Marshall, who ensured that bus that the city of Montgomery yielded and the boycott those protestors would have the United States’ most powerful succeeded. As historian Kevin Mumford has written: force — the law of the land — on their side. “Without constitutional legitimacy and the promise of Marshall, the attorney who argued for Montgomery’s protection from the courts, local black protesters would be blacks in 1956, relied on legal precedents he had established in crushed by state and local officials, and white segregationists other successful court cases. Brown v. Board of Education was could easily prevail.” the most celebrated, but even before Brown, the partnership Americans often refer to the mid-20th-century social between Houston and Marshall had dismantled much of the justice campaigns led by King and others as the civil rights legal structure by which the American South had enforced its movement. As we have seen, however, African Americans Jim Crow system of race segregation.

Charles Hamilton Houston: The Man Who Killed Jim Crow Charles Hamilton Houston was born in 1895 in Washington, D.C. A brilliant student, he graduated as a valedictorian from Amherst College at the age of 19, then served in a segregated U.S. Army unit during the First World War. After his brush with racism in the Army, Houston determined to make the fght for civil rights his life’s calling. Returning home, he studied law at , becoming the frst African- American editor of its prestigious law review. He would go on to earn a PhD in juridical science at Harvard and a doctor of civil law degree at the University of Madrid in Spain. Houston believed that an attorney’s proper vocation was to wield the law as an instrument for securing justice. “A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society,” he argued. In 1924, Houston began teaching part time at Law School, the Washington, D.C. institution responsible by some accounts for training fully three-fourths of the African-American attorneys then practicing. By 1929, Houston headed the law school. In just six years, Houston radically improved the The skilled litigator and legal educator Charles Hamilton Houston launched education of African-American law students, earned full the legal assault on “Jim Crow” laws. accreditation for the school, and produced a group of lawyers trained in civil rights law. In the book Black Profiles, George R.

26 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Metcalf writes that Houston took the job to turn Howard into to blacks were not equal to those afforded whites, Houston “a West Point [a popular name for the United States Military reasoned, segregationist states were not meeting even the Academy] of Negro leadership, so that Negroes could gain Plessy standard. Separate but equal logically required those equality by fghting segregation in the courts.” states either to improve drastically the black facilities, a hugely Meanwhile, the National Association for the expensive undertaking, or else integrate. Advancement of Colored People was laying the groundwork This equalization strategy bore fruit in 1935, when for a legal challenge to the separate-but-equal doctrine Houston and Marshall prevailed in a Maryland case, Murray approved in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy decision. On v. Pearson. The African-American plaintiff challenged his Houston’s recommendation, the organization engaged former rejection by the segregated University of Maryland law school. U.S. Attorney Nathan Ross Margold to study the practical The university’s lawyers argued that the school met the workings of separate but equal in the South. Margold’s report separate but equal requirement by granting qualifed black — 218 legal-sized-pages long — was completed in 1931. It applicants scholarships to enroll at out-of-state law schools. documented woeful inequality in state expenditures between The state courts rejected this argument. While they were white and black segregated schools. not yet prepared to rule against segregated public schools, In 1934, Houston accepted the position of NAACP they did hold that Maryland’s out-of-state option was not special counsel. He surrounded himself with a select group of an equal opportunity. Maryland’s law school was ordered to young, mostly Howard-trained lawyers, among them James admit qualifed African-American students. The triumph was Nabrit, Spottswood Robinson III, A. Leon Higginbotham, especially sweet for Marshall, who numbered himself among Robert Carter, William Hastie, George E.C. Hayes, Jack the qualifed blacks rejected by the school. Greenberg, and . With his young protégé Thurgood Houston retired from the NAACP in 1940 because of Marshall often in tow, Houston began to tour the South, ill health, and he died in 1950. “We owe it all to Charlie,” armed with a camera and a portable typewriter. Marshall later Marshall later remarked. While Houston’s prize student recalled that he and Houston traveled in Houston’s car: “There would lead the fnal legal assault on segregation, it was was no place to eat, no place to sleep. We slept in the car and Houston, the teacher, who devised the strategy and we ate fruit.” This could be dangerous work, but the visual illuminated the path. record Houston compiled and the data amassed by Margold would anchor a new legal strategy: If the facilities allocated

Thurgood Marshall (left) and Charles Hamilton Houston flank , plaintiff in Thurgood Marshall in 1962, after Senate confirmation of a case that struck the University of Maryland Law School policy denying admission to qualified his appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 1967, black students. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall the first African-American Supreme Court justice.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 27 Thurgood Marshall: Mr. Civil Rights to vote in the general election, they were just voting for one segregationist or the other; they didn’t have a choice.” “No other American did more to lead our country out of •  , where Marshall obtained a the wilderness of segregation than Thurgood Marshall,” Morgan v. Virginia (1946) Supreme Court ruling barring segregation in interstate bus said his fellow Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell. Born transportation. In a later case, Boynton v. Virginia (1960), in 1908 and educated in a segregated , Maryland, Marshall persuaded the court to order desegregation of bus secondary school, Marshall attended Lincoln University, “the terminals and other facilities made available to interstate frst institution founded anywhere in the world to provide a passengers. These cases led to the movement higher education in the arts and sciences for youth of African of the . descent.” Knowing he would be turned away by the whites- • In , the Supreme Court only University of Maryland Law School, Marshall enrolled Patton v. Mississippi (1947) accepted Marshall’s argument that from which at Howard Law School, enduring the long commute from African Americans had been systematically excluded could Baltimore to Washington, D.C. His mother pawned her not convict African-American defendants. wedding and engagement rings to pay the tuition. Marshall • In , Marshall persuaded the excelled at his studies, graduated frst in his class of 1933, and Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) Supreme Court that state courts could not constitutionally earned the respect of Charles Hamilton Houston. prevent the sale of real property to blacks, even if that Working closely with Houston, Marshall prevailed property was covered by a racially restrictive . in the Murray v. Pearson case described previously, then These covenants were a legal tactic commonly used to accepted a staff attorney position with the NAACP. In 1938, prevent homeowners from selling their properties to blacks, he succeeded Houston as head of the organization’s legal , and other minorities. committee. In 1940, he became the frst chief of the NAACP The NAACP team’s victories had established that the Legal Defense Fund. courts would overturn separate-but-equal arrangements It was a wise choice. Marshall possessed a unique where facilities were in fact not equal. It was a real combination of skills. He was, as United Press International achievement, but not the best tool to effect broad change, later concluded, especially with regard to education. Poor African Americans … an outstanding tactician with exceptional attention to in each of the hundreds of school districts in the South detail, a tenacious ability to focus on a goal — and a deep could hardly be expected to litigate the comparative merits voice that often was termed the loudest in the room. He of segregated black and white schools. Only a direct ruling also possessed a charm so extraordinary that even the most against segregation itself could at one stroke eliminate intransigent southern segregationist sheriff could not resist disparities like those in Clarendon County, South Carolina, his stories and jokes. where per pupil expenditures in 1949-1950 averaged $179 Armed with this potent combination of likeability and skill, Thurgood Marshall in 1946 persuaded an all-white Southern jury to acquit 25 blacks of a rioting charge. On other occasions, he escaped only narrowly the beatings — or worse — risked by every assertive African American in the Jim Crow South. It was under Marshall that the Houston-devised gradualist legal strategy at last succeeded. Case by case, Marshall and the NAACP attorneys chipped away at the legal pillars upholding segregation. In all, Marshall won an astounding 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. His legal victories included the following:

• Smith v. Allwright (1944), a Supreme Court decision barring the whites-only primary elections in which political parties chose their general election candidates. According to his biographer, , Marshall considered the often provided African Americans greater protection, but it case his most important triumph: “The segregationists typically applied only in an “interstate” context. Years before Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on a bus whose route crossed state lines. would [demand that (the candidates) support segregation to With Thurgood Marshall as her attorney, Morgan prevailed, and segregation capture their party’s nomination], and by the time the blacks was legally barred on interstate bus routes. and Hispanics and ... even in some cases, the women, got

28 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Clockwise from top: President Dwight D. Eisenhower would use federal troops to ensure the enrollment of the first black students in the previously segregated Little Rock [] Central High School. The Revs. Martin Luther King Jr., , and confer. A sign of progress: removal of a Jim Crow sign from a Greensboro, North Carolina, bus, 1956.

for white students and only $43 for blacks. Marshall would that the Supreme Court at last rule that segregated facilities succeed in getting this direct ruling with the “case of the were, by defnition and as a matter of law, unequal and hence century,” Brown v. Board of Education. unconstitutional. Marshall’s legal strategy relied on social scientifc The Brown Decision evidence. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund assembled a team of experts spanning the felds of history, economics, The Brown case began to take shape once Marshall found , and psychology. Particularly signifcant the right plaintiff in the Reverend Oliver Brown, father of was a study in which the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Topeka, Kansas, grade-schooler Linda Brown. Linda had Clark sought to determine how segregation affected the self- been obliged to attend a 21 blocks from her esteem and mental well-being of African Americans. Among house, although there was a white school only seven blocks their poignant fndings: Black children aged three to seven away. The Kansas state courts had rejected Brown’s claim by preferred white rather than otherwise identical black dolls. fnding that the segregated black and white schools were of comparable quality. This gave Marshall the chance to urge

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 29 On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court vindicated Legal segregation, meanwhile, still prevailed in much of Marshall’s strategy. Citing the Clark paper and other studies the South, not just at many schools but at nearly every kind of identifed by plaintiffs, the Supreme Court ruled decisively: public facility, from swimming pools to buses and from movie theaters to lunch counters. And segregationists succeeded ... in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate all too often in depriving African Americans of their most but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs basic constitutional right. Through a combination of unfair and others similarly situated ... are, by reason of the technicalities, outright fraud and chicanery, and ultimately segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection by threat of violence, the plain language of the Fifteenth of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Amendment was subverted, and blacks throughout the South were unable to vote. Education attorney Deryl W. Wynn, a member of the Plainly, new civil rights laws were required. Passing Oxford University Roundtable on Education Policy, has said of them would require a political consensus strong enough to the signifcance of Brown: overcome the die-hard opposition of southern representatives Here was the highest court in the land essentially saying in Congress. The legal struggle continued with Thurgood that something was wrong with how black Americans were Marshall leading the way — from 1961 to 1965 as Judge being treated.... I remember my father, who was a teenager Marshall of the U.S. Court of Appeals (the nation’s second at the time, saying the decision made him feel like he was highest federal court), and then during the quarter-century somebody.... On a personal level, Brown’s real legacy is that from 1967 to 1991 as the nation’s frst African-American it serves as a constant reminder that each child, each of us, Supreme Court justice. is somebody. Meanwhile, a new, political civil rights movement was coalescing. Brave African Americans, joined by allies of every The Court did not specify a timeframe for ending school race and creed, began frmly but peaceably to insist upon segregation, but the following year, in a group of cases known the full measure of civil rights to which they were entitled collectively as “Brown II,” Marshall and his colleagues secured as Americans. As they forced their countrymen to confront a Supreme Court ruling that desegregation proceed “with all squarely the unconscionable realities of segregation and deliberate speed.” racial oppression, the balance of national sympathies — and Even then, resistance continued in parts of the South. In of political forces — shifted. It all began on a December September 1957, when black students were forcibly turned 1955 evening in Montgomery, Alabama, when a 42-year-old away from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, seamstress, tired after a long day at work, refused to give up Marshall few to the city and fled suit in federal court. her seat on a segregated bus. His victory in this case set the stage for President Dwight Eisenhower’s declaration of September 24: “I have today issued an directing the use of troops under federal authority to aid in the execution of federal law at Little Rock, Arkansas.... Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.” Brown, Little Rock, and the NAACP team’s other legal triumphs illustrated both the strengths and the limits of the “legal” civil rights movement. Black Americans, relegated for decades to inferior, segregated schools, scarcely might have imagined the sight of federal authorities escorting black students into formerly all white classrooms — in Little Rock, at the University of Mississippi in 1962, and at the in 1963. But litigation worked slowly, and one case at a time.

30 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Ralph Johnson Bunche: Scholar and Statesman

ven as African Americans fought for Etheir civil rights, their individual accomplishments demonstrated the justice of their cause. The achievements of the Nobel Prize-winning scholar and international official demonstrated to all fair- minded people that black Americans could contribute fully to American society. Ralph Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan, on , 1903. His father was an itinerant barber, his mother a housewife and amateur pianist. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died when Bunche was 14 years old. From then on he lived in , , with his maternal grandmother, whose wisdom and strength of character greatly infuenced him. He graduated with honors from the University of California at Los Angeles and continued Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, peacemaker, mediator, and U.S. diplomat, receives the Bunche set up the Political 1950 Nobel Prize for Peace. as a graduate student on Science Department at scholarship at Harvard Howard University, the University. of U.S. race relations, An State Department. At the historically black university From his earliest years, American Dilemma, was Conference in Washington, D.C. His Bunche was acutely conscious cited approvingly by the U.S. in 1945, he drafted two many articles on racial of and Supreme Court in its Brown v. chapters of the charter, discrimination later became was determined to work Board of Education decision. on non-self-governing basic literature for the U.S. against it. His studies of As the Second World territories (colonies) and civil rights movement. colonial Africa persuaded War loomed, Bunche on the system. Bunche also pioneered him that had was recruited by the U.S. These chapters provided the study of colonialism in much in common with racial government to advise on the basis for accelerating the United States. He was discrimination in the United Africa, and then transferred after the chief associate and co- States. He was determined to to the State Department to the war. Bunche did as writer of the Swedish social help put an end to both. work on the future United much as anyone to make economist , Nations charter. He was decolonization a reality. whose landmark 1944 study the frst black official in the

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 31 In the newly established underground Zionist faction Bunche assembled and Ralph Bunche cared , Bunche condemned by Bunche and deployed the United Nations passionately about getting set up the trusteeship by mainstream Zionists) Emergency Force in Egypt things done, but very little system. His achievements in in September only eight days after the about getting personal . as a member of the 1948, and Bunche became General Assembly had called (He even tried to refuse U.N. Secretariat were mediator. In , for it. the .) extraordinary. As he initiated armistice talks, Bunche’s pioneering His great achievements are secretary of the 1947 U.N. starting with Egypt and . effort in international remembered, but seldom Special Commission on Armistice agreements were was his his role in them. African Palestine, Bunche wrote concluded between Israel proudest achievement. He Americans, the millions the commission’s majority and her four Arab neighbors, set up and led the 20,000 liberated from the old report on partition as well providing a formal basis for strong U.N. peacekeeping colonial world, and the as the minority report on a the cessation of hostilities. operation dispatched to the United Nations itself are federal state. The former was In 1950, Bunche won the Congo in 1960, and took particularly in his debt. He adopted by the U.N. General Nobel Peace Prize for these the lead in forming a similar was one of the greatest public Assembly and remains the achievements. force in in 1964. After servants of the 20th century. basic goal of peacemakers in Dag Hammarskjold Hammarskjold died in an the Middle East. of became U.N. air crash in Africa, Bunche In May 1948, the British Secretary-General in 1953. became the indispensable left Palestine, a Jewish state As an undersecretary- adviser of Hammarskjold’s By was declared in that part general, Bunche became successor, of Burma A former Undersecretary- of mandatory Palestine so Hammarskjold’s closest — so indispensable that U General of the United designated by the General political adviser. In 1956 — Thant’s entreaties prevented Nations, Urquhart is the Assembly, and fve Arab after Egyptian Bunche from retiring from author of Hammarskjöld, states invaded the new of the Suez Canal — Britain, the United Nations to A Life in Peace and War, state of Israel. The U.N. France, and Israel invaded immerse himself full time in Ralph Bunche: An American Security Council appointed Egypt in an ill-advised the civil rights movement. Odyssey, and other historical a mediator, Count Folke adventure that shocked the Bunche died, from overwork studies. Bernadotte, with Bunche world. To get the invaders and the effects of diabetes, on as his chief adviser. They out of Egypt required , 1971. established a truce in something completely new, Palestine, and Bunche a U.N. “peace and police organized a group of U.N. force,” as its sponsor, Lester military observers to Pearson of Canada, called it. supervise it, the beginning Hammarskjold asked Bunche of U.N. peacekeeping to raise and deploy this operations. Bernadotte force with minimum delay. was assassinated by the Ominous Soviet threats of Stern Gang (an armed, intervention lent additional urgency. Working around the clock with the enthusiastic support of the United States and many other countries,

32 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Jackie Robinson: Breaking the Color Barrier

he Dodgers arrived at Shibe Park, Tbringing their new lightning rod of controversy to the baseball stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — a black player named Jackie Robinson. The symbols of intolerance few down from the crowd, and the words of intolerance spilled out from the home team’s bench. “Philadelphia was the worst,” said Ralph Branca, who was there as a pitcher for Brooklyn. “They threw black cats on the feld. They threw watermelon on the feld. Ben Chapman, the Philadelphia manager, was very vocal, getting on Jackie.” It was 1947 in the United States, and for many the country still came in two shades — black and white. But then came Robinson, , including many bursting past the color from the South, were long barrier on April 15, 1947, as flled with hate simply over an infelder for the team in the color of a person’s skin. the racially diverse New York Black people, from their City borough of Brooklyn. He perspective, didn’t deserve became a pioneering symbol equal civil rights with whites. that transcended sports, a And that had extended to the large frst step on a lengthy unofficial-but-understood path toward driving home idea among baseball officials the concept of equality. His and team owners since before teammate Branca explained the turn of the century that how Robinson’s achievement transcended the baseball Top: After a Brooklyn victory over the New York Yankees in the first game of the the major leagues were for 1952 World Series, Jackie Robinson (front right) celebrates with teammates diamond: white players only. Blacks Joe Black (back left), Duke Snyder (front left), and Pee Wee Reese (back right). would have to play on their I’ve often said that it Team manager Chuck Dressen is at center. Above: Jackie Robinson (right) and former boxing heavyweight champion own circuit, the Negro changed baseball, but leagues. Floyd Patterson (left) meet in Birmingham, Alabama with civil rights leaders it also changed the Ralph D. Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr., 1963. country and eventually changed the world … .. Jackie made it easier for

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 33 Rosa Parks. He made it But he was acquitted In his frst major-league National Association for the easier for Martin Luther and earned an honorable season, at the age of 28, Advancement of Colored King Jr. And he made discharge. “He was a person Robinson played frst base People. it easier for any black of action,” says his widow, and compiled a .297 batting In 1972, Jackie Robinson leader who was going to Rachel Robinson. “He didn’t average. He displayed a suffered a heart attack and strive for racial equality. want to be complacent about dynamic style by stealing died, age 53. In those 53 years, It basically changed the our situation.” a National League-leading Robinson impacted millions attitude of the whole Meanwhile, the Brooklyn 29 bases, won the league’s of lives. He shamed the bigot, country as far as looking Dodgers’ general manager, Rookie of the Year award, and inspired African Americans, at blacks. Branch Rickey, decided it helped the team reach the and through his unfagging was time to integrate the World Series. It helped that example of resilience and It happened on the team. national pastime of baseball, other teams acknowledged dignity moved Americans of We had southern guys not least because he believed that Robinson had given all stripes toward acceptance who grew up in that set that African-American the Dodgers a real edge and of African-American civil of mores who looked players would give his club began themselves signing rights. down on blacks. They a competitive advantage. and playing black players. His “A life is not important,” [African Americans] had Rickey understood that his best season came in 1949: Robinson himself said, to ride in the back of the man would have to possess He played second base and “except in the impact it has on bus, and they couldn’t the fortitude and strength of batted .342 with 16 home other lives.” drink at the same water character to withstand the runs, 124 runs batted in, and fountains, couldn’t go to inevitable racist taunts — and 37 stolen bases, earning the the same [bathrooms]. worse — of players and fans. league’s Most Valuable Player They [the white players] Rickey scouted Robinson in award. By Brian Heyman eventually changed 1945, playing for Kansas City In all, Robinson spent 10 The winner of over 30 their minds. in the Negro leagues, and seasons with the Dodgers journalism awards, Brian Born in Cairo, Georgia, on decided that he had found and made six World Series Heyman is a sportswriter at January 31, 1919, Robinson such a player, and such a man. appearances, including The Journal-News in White grew up in Pasadena, Robinson spent the next Brooklyn’s one and only Plains, New York. California. He excelled at season with the Dodgers’ championship year of 1955. four sports while in college minor-league team in After the following season, at the nearby University of Montreal, and then was the six-time All-Star retired California at Los Angeles promoted to the Dodgers for rather than go along with a — baseball, football, the 1947 season. It wasn’t easy trade to the rival New York basketball, and track. The being a pioneer. Rickey made Giants. In 1962, Robinson was U.S. Army drafted him in Robinson promise for three inducted into the Baseball 1942. The military was still years not to respond to the Hall of Fame, the frst black segregated (President Harry insults that came at him from player so honored. S. Truman would order its fans around the league and After his playing career desegregation in 1948); when the opposing teams. Enduring ended, Robinson continued the proud Robinson refused experienced by to help in the fght for racial to ride in the back of a bus, he no player before or since, equality, speaking up for civil was brought up on military Robinson excelled on the rights and for the leading charges of insubordination. feld. men and organizations in the movement. This included service on the Board of Directors of the

34 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT — 5 — “We Ha v e a Mo v e m e n t ”

Above: Dr. King outlines strategies for the he successful boycott of segregated buses boycott of Montgomery, Alabama, buses. in Montgomery, Alabama — which began Among his advisors is Rosa Parks, seated with the arrest of Rosa Parks on December second from left in the front row. 1, 1955 — transformed the civil rights Left: After Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, she was arrested, booked, causeT into a mass political movement. It demonstrated and jailed. Her booking photo was that African Americans could unite and engage in discovered nearly a half-century later, disciplined political action, and marked the emergence of during a house cleaning of the sheriff’s Martin Luther King Jr. — the indispensable leader who office. inspired millions, held them to the high moral standard of , and built bridges between Americans of all races, creeds, and colors. While many by for blacks in the South, Parks was active in her local brave activists contributed to the civil rights revolution of the NAACP, a registered voter (another privilege held by few 1960s, it was King who, more than any other individual, forced southern blacks), and a respected fgure in Montgomery, millions of white Americans to confront directly the reality Alabama. In the summer of 1955, she attended an interracial of Jim Crow — and shaped the political reality in which the leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School, a landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of Tennessee institution that trained labor organizers and 1965 could become law. desegregation advocates. Parks thus knew of efforts to improve the lot of African Americans and that she was well- “Tired of Giving In”: The suited to provide a test case should the occasion arise. On December 1, 1955, Parks was employed as a Rosa Parks would later say of the day that changed her life: seamstress at a local department store. When she rode home “The only tired I was was tired of giving in.” A secondary- from work that afternoon, she sat in the frst row of the school graduate at a time when diplomas were hard to come “colored section” of seats between the “white” and “black”

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 35 rows. When the white seats flled, the driver ordered Parks to that … preacher, and so do all the other who give up her seat when another white person boarded the bus. were there.” Parks refused. She was arrested, jailed, and ultimately fned In the end, the desegregation of the Montgomery bus $10, plus $4 in court costs. Parks was 42 years old; she had system required not only Rosa Parks’s personal initiative and crossed the line into direct political action. bravery and King’s political leadership, but also an NAACP- An outraged black community formed the Montgomery style legal effort. As the boycotters braved segregationist Improvement Association (MIA) to organize a boycott of opposition, desegregationist attorneys cited the precedent of the city bus system. Partly to forestall rivalries among local Brown v. Board of Education in their court challenge to the community leaders, citizens turned to a recent arrival to Montgomery bus ordinance. In November 1956, the Supreme Montgomery, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The newly- Court of the United States rejected the city’s fnal appeal, and installed pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King the segregation of Montgomery buses ended. Thus fortifed, was just 26 years old but he had been born to leadership: the civil rights movement moved on to new battles. His father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., headed the infuential Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was active in Sit-Ins the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, and had since the 1920s Shortly after the successful conclusion of the Montgomery refused to ride Atlanta’s segregated bus system. bus boycott, Martin Luther King and a number of senior In his first speech to MIA, the younger King told movement fgures — the Reverends Ralph Abernathy, T.J. the group: Jemison, , Fred Shuttlesworth, and C.K. Steele, We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we and the activists and — founded the have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This new our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were civil rights organization was devoted to a more aggressive being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from approach than that of the legally oriented NAACP. The SCLC that patience that makes us patient with anything less than launched “Crusade for Citizenship,” a voter registration effort. freedom and justice. Younger activists, meanwhile, were growing impatient Under King’s leadership, boycotters organized carpools, with King’s gradualist tactics. In 1960, some 200 of them, while black taxi drivers charged boycotters the same fare — 10 including Howard University student Stokley Carmichael, cents — they would have paid on the bus. By auto, by horse- formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or and-buggy, and even simply by walking, direct, nonviolent SNCC. And in Greensboro, North Carolina, four freshman political action forced the city to pay a heavy economic price at the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical for its segregationist ways. College took matters into their own hands. It also made a national fgure of King, whose powerful At 4:30 p.m. on February 1, 1960, students Ezell Blair presence and unsurpassed oratorical skills drew publicity Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin Eugene McCain, Joseph for the movement and attracted support from sympathetic Alfred McNeil, and David Leinail took whites-only seats at whites, especially those in the North. King, Time magazine a local Woolworth department store lunch counter. They later concluded, had “risen from nowhere to become one were denied service, but sat quietly until the store closed of the nation’s remarkable leaders of men.” Even after his house was attacked and King himself, along with more than 100 boycotters, was arrested for “hindering a bus,” his continued grace and adherence to nonviolent tactics earned respect for the movement and discredited the segregationists of Montgomery. When an explosion shook King’s house with his wife and baby daughter inside, it briefy appeared that a would ensue. But King calmed the crowd: We want to love our enemies — be good to them. This is what we must live by, we must meet hate with love. We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us. A Montgomery, Alabama, sit-in, 1961. Merely by sitting quietly at segregated A white Montgomery policeman later told a journalist: lunch counters, civil rights activists risked arrest … and much worse. “I’ll be honest with you, I was terrifed. I owe my life to

36 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT a civil rights activist and missionary who had served in and studied Gandhian , or nonviolent resistance. King urged Lawson to relocate to the South: “Come now,” King said. “We don’t have anyone like you down there.” Working with King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Lawson in 1958 began to train a new generation of nonviolent activists. His students included , , and John Lewis, today a U.S. representative from Georgia. All soon would assume prominence in the civil rights movement. At these training seminars, they agreed to stage a series of sit-ins at department store restaurants. Blacks were permitted to spend money in those stores, but not to eat at their restaurants. The Nashville activists organized carefully and moved deliberately. But when the Greensboro sit-in began to draw national attention, they were ready. In February 1960, hundreds of their activists began the sit- ins. Their student-drafted instruction sheets captured the personal discipline and dignifed commitment to nonviolence they would offer the world: Don’t strike back or curse back if abused. … Don’t block entrances to the stores and aisles.

The labor leader A. Philip Randolph (right) founded and led Show yourself friendly and courteous at all times. the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which offered many African Sit straight and always face the counter. … Americans a rare pathway to middle-class employment. Randolph’s threatened 1941 march on Washington forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt Remember the teachings of Christ, Mohandas K. to bar racial discrimination by defense contractors and served as the model , and Martin Luther King. for the famous 1963 march. Remember love and nonviolence, may God bless each of you. an hour later. The next morning, 20 Negro students took lunch-counter seats in groups of three or four. “There was Typically a lunch counter would close when a sit-in no disturbance,” the Greensboro Record reported, “and there began, but after the frst few incidents, police began to arrest appeared to be no conversation except among the groups. protestors, and the subsequent trials drew large crowds. Some students pulled out books and appeared to be studying.” When convicted of disorderly conduct, the activists chose to Blair told the newspaper that Negro adults “have been serve jail time rather than pay a fne. complacent and fearful. … It is time for someone to wake up Nashville was an early example of how Jim Crow and change the situation … and we decided to start here.” could not survive exposure. The legendary journalist David The nonviolent occupation of a public space, or sit-in, Halberstam was just beginning his career, and his reports dated at least to ’s campaigns for Indian for the Nashville Tennessean helped attract national media independence from Britain. In the United States, labor attention. The sit-in movement spread throughout much of the organizations and the northern-based Congress of Racial country, and soon Americans across the nation were stunned Equality (CORE) had employed sit-ins as well. As events in by photographs like the one that appeared in the February 28, Greensboro began to draw attention, SNCC moved swiftly to 1960 New York Times. The caption read: “A white man swings associate itself with this civil rights tactic, and over the next an 18-inch-long [46-centimeter-long] bat at a Negro woman two months, sit-ins spread to more than 50 cities. in Montgomery. She was injured by the blow. The attack Particularly signifcant were events in Nashville, occurred yesterday after the woman brushed against another Tennessee, where the King-affiliated Nashville Christian white man. Police, standing near by, made no arrest.” Leadership Council had been preparing for this moment. Back in 1955, King had reached out to the Reverend ,

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 37 On April 19 of that year, a bomb exploded at the home front of an interstate bus or use the previously whites-only of the Nashville students’ chief legal counsel. Some 2,000 facilities at a southern bus terminal would meet with a violent African Americans swiftly organized a march to the City response. Understanding this, an interracial group of 13, Hall, where they confronted the mayor. Would he, Diane including CORE National Director , departed Nash asked, favor ending lunch-counter segregation? Yes, Washington, D.C., by bus. Farmer and his companions came the reply, but, “I can’t tell a man how to run his business. planned to make several stops en route to New Orleans. “If He has got rights too.” there is arrest, we will accept that arrest,” Farmer said. “And This “right” to discriminate lay at the heart of the struggle. if there is violence, we are willing to receive that violence Meanwhile, the bad publicity stung the businessmen of without responding in kind.” Nashville, as did the stark contrast between the dignifed, Farmer was right to anticipate violence. Perhaps the worst nonviolent black students and their armed and all-too-violent of it occurred near Anniston, Alabama. Departing Atlanta, opponents. Secret negotiations began, and on May 10, 1960, the had split into two groups, one riding in quietly and without fanfare, a number of downtown lunch a Greyhound bus, the other in a Trailways bus. When the counters began serving black customers. There were no Greyhound bus reached Anniston, the sidewalks, unusually, further incidents, and soon thereafter Nashville became the were lined with people. The reason soon became clear. When frst southern city successfully to begin desegregating its the bus reached the station parking lot, a mob set upon it, public facilities. using rocks and brass knuckles to shatter some of the bus windows. Two white highway patrolmen in the bus, assigned Freedom Rides to spy on the Riders, sealed the door and prevented the Ku Klux Klan-led mob from entering. Some of the young Nashville sit-in leaders joined up with the When the local police fnally arrived, they bantered with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which in 1961 the crowd, made no arrests, and escorted the bus to the city helped to launch the “Freedom Rides.” Back in 1946, Thurgood limits. The mob, by some accounts now about 200 strong, Marshall’s NAACP lawyers had obtained a Supreme Court followed close behind in cars and pickup trucks. About 10 ruling that barred segregation in interstate bus travel. (Under kilometers outside Anniston, fat tires brought the bus to a the U.S. federal system of government, it is easier for the halt. A crowd of white men attempted to board the bus, and national government to regulate commerce that crosses one threw a fre bomb through a bus window. As the historian state lines.) In the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision, the Raymond Arsenault writes: “The Freedom Riders had been Court expanded its ruling to include bus terminals and other all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the facilities associated with interstate travel. But possessing a mob that the whole bus was about to explode.” The bus was right and exercising it are two very different things. consumed by the blaze; the feeing Freedom Riders, reported It was widely understood that any African American the , “took a brief but bloody beating.” who exercised his or her constitutional right to sit at the

Boarding a June, 1961 Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C., to Florida are the Rev. Perry A. Smith III, of Brentwood, Maryland, and Rev. Robert Stone of . Left: A Trailways bus with Freedom Riders aboard approaches the bus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi.

38 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT the impression would have been given that whenever a movement starts, that all that has to be done is that you attack it with massive violence and the blacks would stop.” With reinforcements from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other black and white activists supplementing the original Freedom Riders, a new effort was launched. On May 20, a group of Freedom Riders boarded a Birmingham-to-Montgomery, Alabama, Greyhound. Their bus was met by a mob estimated at 1,000 “within an instant” of pulling into the station, the Associated Press reported. Among the injured were John Seigenthaler, an assistant to Attorney General Kennedy. Freedom Riders traveling from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, are escorted by National Guardsmen with bayonets at the ready. Kennedy dispatched 400 federal marshals to Montgomery to Over 20 additional Freedom Riders are behind the guardsmen. enforce order, while the Congress of Racial Equality promised to continue the Freedom Ride, pressing on to Jackson, Mississippi, and then to New Orleans. “Many students are The second group of Freedom Riders shared their standing by in other cities to serve as volunteers if needed,” Trailways bus with a group of Klansmen who boarded at James Farmer told . And some 450 Atlanta. When the black Freedom Riders refused to sit at the Americans did step forward, boarding the buses and then back of the bus, more beatings ensued. The white Freedom flling the jails, notably in Jackson, when Farmer and others Riders, among them 61-year-old educator Walter Bergman, refused to pay fnes imposed for “breaching the peace.” were attacked with particular savagery. All of the Freedom On May 29, Attorney General Kennedy directed the Riders held to their Ghandian training; none fought back. Interstate Commerce Commission to adopt stiff regulations When the bus at last arrived in Birmingham, matters only to enforce the integration of interstate transportation. The grew worse. CBS News commentator Howard K. Smith agency did so. With this sustained federal effort, Jim Crow offered an eyewitness account: “When the bus arrived, the faltered in bus terminals, on buses, and on trains, at least those toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, that crossed state lines. pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fsts.” The Freedom Riders’ victory set the tone for the great Inside the segregated bus station, the Freedom Riders civil rights campaigns that followed. Not for the frst time hesitated momentarily, then entered the whites-only waiting during these climactic years, a free press forced Americans to room. They, too, were beaten, some unconscious, while take a cold, hard look at the reality of racial oppression. The Birmingham’s police chief, Eugene “Bull” Connor, refused to Birmingham mob beat Tommy Langston, a photographer for restrain the Klansmen and their supporters. the local Post-Herald newspaper, and smashed his camera. But Still, the Riders were determined to continue. In they forgot to remove the film, and the newspaper’s front page Washington, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asked subsequently displayed his picture of the savage beating of a Alabama John Patterson to guarantee safe passage black bystander. Each arrest and each beating attracted more through his state. Patterson declined: “The citizens of the state media and more coverage. And while many of those accounts are so enraged I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch still referred to “Negro militants,” the contrast between rabid of rabble-rousers.” A member of Alabama’s congressional white mobs and the calm, dignifed, biracial Freedom Riders delegation, Representative George Huddleston Jr., deemed the forced Americans to decide, or at this point at least begin Freedom Riders “self-anointed merchants of racial hatred.” deciding: Who best represented American values? He said the frebombed Greyhound group “got just what they White religious leaders were prominent among those asked for.” who lauded the bravery of the Freedom Riders and the In Nashville, Diane Nash feared the political justice of their cause. The Reverend called for consequences. “If the Freedom Ride had been stopped as a prosecution of their attackers and declared it “deplorable result of violence,” she later said, “I strongly felt that the future when certain people in any society have been treated as of the movement was going to be just cut short because

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 39 second-class citizens.” Bernard J. Bamberger denounced white segregationist violence as “utterly indefensible in terms of morality and law” and criticized whites who urged civil rights activists to “go slow.” And always there were the righteous: Raymond Arsenault writes that while the Greyhound bus burned outside Anniston, “one little girl, 12-year-old Janie Miller, supplied the choking victims with water, flling and reflling a fve-gallon [19-liter] bucket while braving the insults and taunts of Klansmen.”

The Albany Movement Two major civil rights campaigns during 1962 and 1963 would illustrate both the limits and the possibilities of nonviolent resistance. African Americans in the segregated city of Albany, Georgia, had traditionally engaged in as much political activism as was Montgomery, Alabama: about 70 clergymen of different creeds and possible in the Jim Crow South. In 1961, SNCC volunteers denominations being arrested after holding an anti-segregation prayer vigil arrived to beef up an ongoing voter registration effort. They in front of city hall, August 1962. established a voter-registration center that served as a home base for a campaign of sit-ins, , and other protests. In the peace. When the court offered King and Abernathy their November 1961, a number of local black organizations formed choice of jail time or a fne, they chose jail, the option certain the Albany Movement, under the leadership of William to attract press coverage. But they found that an “anonymous G. Anderson, a young osteopath. The protests accelerated, benefactor” — a segregationist recruited by Pritchett — had and by mid-December more than 500 demonstrators had paid their fne. been jailed. Anderson had met both Martin Luther King Jr. When the media moment fnally came, it was not the one and his colleague, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, pastor at King had hoped for. By July 24, 1962, many of Albany’s African Montgomery’s First Baptist Church and King’s chief lieutenant Americans had grown frustrated at the lack of progress. That at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He decided evening, a crowd of 2,000 blacks armed with bricks, bottles, to invite King’s help, both to maintain the Albany Movement’s and rocks attacked a group of Albany policemen and Georgia momentum and to secure national publicity for its cause. highway patrolmen. One trooper lost two teeth. But Laurie Albany Police Chief proved a formidable Pritchett’s well-schooled officers did not retaliate, and the opponent for King and the other activists. Pritchett realized chief was quick to seize the initiative: “Did you see them that news media coverage of segregationist violence against nonviolent rocks?” he asked. dignifed, nonviolent civil rights activists already had turned King moved swiftly to limit the damage. He cancelled a many Americans against Jim Crow. Pritchett worked planned mass demonstration and declared a day of penance. assiduously to deprive the Albany Movement of a similar But a federal against further demonstrations in “media moment.” Albany police officers were warned against Albany added to the difficulties: Up till then, the civil rights employing any kind of violence against protestors, especially if cause had had the law on its side. Further action in Albany the press was nearby. While earlier protestors had successfully would allow segregationists to portray King and his followers “flled the jails,” Pritchett scattered them in jails throughout as lawbreakers. the surrounding counties. “In the end,” the New Georgia King understood that his presence in Albany would no Encyclopedia concluded, “King ran out of willing marchers longer help the wider movement. SNCC, NAACP, CORE, and before Pritchett ran out of jail space.” other local activists continued the fght in Albany and would Pritchett also understood that King was the media star eventually secure real gains for the city’s African Americans. and that national press coverage would ebb if there was no For King and his SCLC team, Albany was a learning King “angle” to pursue. King returned several times to Albany, experience. As King explained in his autobiography: and several times was arrested and convicted for breach of

40 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT When we planned our strategy for Birmingham months On April 3, 1963, activists launched a round of lunch- later, we spent many hours assessing Albany and trying counter sit-ins. A march on Birmingham’s City Hall followed to learn from its errors. Our appraisals not only helped to on the 6th. The city’s African Americans began to boycott make our subsequent tactics more effective, but revealed downtown businesses, a tactic King deemed “amazingly that Albany was far from an unqualified failure. effective.” A number of shops swiftly removed their whites- only signs, only to be threatened by with the loss Arrest in Birmingham of their business licenses. As the numbers of volunteers grew, If Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett possessed the political the Birmingham movement expanded its efforts to “kneel-ins” savvy and emotional detachment to fght nonviolence with in local church buildings and library sit-ins. The number of nonviolence, his Birmingham, Alabama, counterpart, Bull arrests grew and the jails flled. Connor, did not. King and the other movement leaders rightly The police response remained muted to this point. The anticipated that Connor would prove a perfect foil. King New York Times described a typical incident: biographer depicted Connor as “a bombastic Eight Negros entered the segregated library. They strolled segregationist of the old, unapologetically bluff sort — a through three of the four floors and sat at desks reading podgy, strutful, middle-aged bossman in a snap-brim straw magazines and books. The police were present but did not hat who … held a famously irascible temper.” Connor did order them to leave. They left voluntarily after about half not represent the views of all white Birmingham residents; a an hour. recent municipal election had produced gains for reformist About 25 whites were in the library when the Negroes candidates. But he controlled the police, and the “greeting” entered. Some made derogatory remarks such as, “It stinks that the Freedom Riders had experienced in Birmingham in here.” Others asked the Negroes: “Why don’t you go amply illustrated what activists might expect to fnd there. home?” But there were no incidents. Albany had taught King and his SCLC team to focus on specifc goals rather than a general desegregation. As King On April 10, Connor followed Pritchett’s example, later wrote: obtaining a county court injunction barring King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and 134 other leaders from engaging in boycotts, We concluded that in hard-core communities, a more sit-ins, picketing, and other protest activities. Any violation of effective battle could be waged if it was concentrated the injunction would be contempt of court, punishable by more against one aspect of the evil and intricate system substantial jail time than a mere . of segregation. We decided, therefore, to center the King now faced a choice. He and Abernathy decided they Birmingham struggle on the business community, for we would violate the injunction. King issued a brief statement: knew that the Negro population had sufficient buying power so that its withdrawal could make the difference We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction between profit and loss for many businesses. which is an unjust, undemocratic, and unconstitutional misuse of the legal process. We do this not out of any disrespect for the law but out of the highest respect for the law. This is not an attempt to evade or defy the law or engage in chaotic anarchy. Just as in all good conscience we cannot obey unjust laws, neither can we respect the unjust use of the courts.

We believe in a system of law based on justice and morality. Out of our great love for the Constitution of the United States and our desire to purify the judicial system of the state of Alabama, we risk this critical move with an awareness of the possible consequences involved. On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King led a protest march toward downtown Birmingham. On the ffth block, King, Abernathy, and about 60 others, including a white clergyman who joined the protest, were arrested. As King was Albany, Georgia: African-American demonstrators kneel in prayer during a taken into custody, Connor remarked: “That’s what he came December 1961 hearing for Freedom Riders arrested there. down here for, to get arrested. Now he’s got it.”

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 41 Letter From Birmingham Jail “We Have a Movement” As King languished in his jail cell, he produced one of the Because the required their leadership, most extraordinary documents in the history of American Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy posted bond thought. A number of local white clergymen, themselves after eight days in jail. They turned to an idea credited to the friendly to King’s long-term objectives, disagreed with his Reverend James Bevel, a Nashville sit-in and Freedom Ride short-term tactics. They published a public statement calling veteran recruited by King to serve as Southern Christian the King-led demonstrations “unwise and untimely,” and Leadership Conference’s director of and they opposed King’s civil disobedience “however technically nonviolent education. Knowing that few black families could peaceful those actions may be.” afford to have their primary wage earner serve jail time, Bevel King’s reply was the Letter From Birmingham Jail. Lacking began to organize the city’s young African Americans. College writing paper, he scribbled in the margins of a newspaper students, secondary schoolers, and even elementary school page. King’s handwritten words wrapped around the pest pupils were instructed in the principles of nonviolence. They control ads and garden club news, recalled the King aide who prepared to march downtown, there to enter whites-only smuggled the newsprint out of the jail. Yet those margins held lunch counters, use the whites-only drinking fountains, study a powerful condemnation of inaction in the face of injustice, in the whites-only libraries, pray in the whites-only churches. and they displayed an extraordinary faith that in America the In some denominations, at least, white churches welcomed cause of freedom necessarily would prevail. the young blacks. King answered the white pastors’ charges with timeless, The decision to use children was a controversial one. The universal truth. Accused of being an outsider fomenting SCLC’s executive director, the Reverend , tension in Birmingham, King replied that, in the face of defended it on the grounds that “Negro children will get a oppression, there were no outsiders. “Injustice anywhere is a better education in fve days in jail than in fve months in a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable segregated school.” In his Autobiography, King related the case network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. of a black teenager who decided to march in the face of his Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” As for father’s objections: the tension: “There is a type of constructive, nonviolent “Daddy,” the boy said, “I don’t want to disobey you, but I tension which is necessary for growth.” For those who do not have made my pledge. If you try to keep me home, I will themselves suffer from the disease of segregation, King added, sneak off. If you think I deserve to be punished for that, I’ll no direct action ever seems well timed: “ ‘Wait’ has almost just have to take the punishment. For, you see, I’m not doing always meant ‘Never.’” No man, he continued, can “set the this only because I want to be free. I’m doing it also because timetable for another man’s freedom.” I want freedom for you and Mama, and I want it to come Acknowledging that he and his followers had indeed before you die.” violated the county court injunction, King cited Saint Augustine’s distinction between just and unjust laws. He That father thought again, and gave his son his blessing. asserted that one who breaks an unjust law in order to arouse On May 2, 1963, hundreds of young African Americans the consciousness of his community “is in reality expressing set out, linked by walkie-talkie, singing “.” the highest respect for law,” provided he acts “openly, lovingly, Hundreds were arrested, swelling the Birmingham jail well and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” Writing from his beyond its capacity. Perhaps most importantly, they stretched cell, King led by example. Bull Connor’s temper to its breaking point. From that cell, King believed that in the United States, On May 3, Connor determined to halt the freedom ultimately would —indeed, must — prevail: “I demonstrations by force. Fire hoses set to full pressure — have no fear about the outcome of our struggle. … We will enough to peel bark from a tree — knocked protestors off their reach the goal of freedom ... because the goal of America is feet and rolled them down the asphalt streets. At the police freedom. … Our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny ... chief’s order, police dogs were used to disperse the crowds, the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God and several demonstrators were bitten. are embodied in our echoing demands. … One day,” King Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist concluded, “the South will recognize its real heroes.” James Foreman was at SCLC headquarters when the news came. He reported that the leaders there were “jumping up and down, elated. … They said over and over again, ‘We’ve got a movement. We’ve got a movement. We had some .’ ” Foreman thought this “very cold, cruel, and calculating,” but, as the historian C. Vann Woodward

42 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT concluded: “The more seasoned campaigners had learned the a few minutes later, Bull Connor declared: “I’m sorry I missed price and worth of photographic opportunities.” it. … I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.” The young demonstrators returned each day that week, as By May 9, Birmingham’s business leaders had had enough. did the hoses and the dogs. The resulting photographs, video, They negotiated an agreement with King and Shuttlesworth. and written accounts dominated the news in the United Birmingham businesses would desegregate their lunch States and in much of the world. Faced with the greatest counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains. They would hire provocation, most demonstrators remained nonviolent. James and promote black employees. The jailed protestors would be Bevel roamed the streets, shouting through a bullhorn: “If freed, and charges dropped. Bull Connor called it “the worst you’re not going to demonstrate in a nonviolent way, then day of my life.” leave.” By May 6, Bull Connor was housing thousands of child The triumph of the Birmingham movement refected the prisoners at the state fairgrounds. bravery and discipline of the African-American protestors. It A New York Times editorial expressed the feeling of spoke to the inspiring and hard-headed leadership of men like growing numbers of Americans: Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, James Bevel, and others. It forced Americans to confront No American schooled in respect for human dignity squarely — in their newspapers and on their television can read without shame of the barbarities committed by Alabama police authorities against Negro and white screens — the reality of Jim Crow brutality. And it refected demonstrators for civil rights. The use of police dogs an idealism that had survived both slavery and segregation, and high-pressure fire hose to subdue schoolchildren and also an impatience over promises long deferred. On May in Birmingham is a national disgrace. The herding of 8, a Birmingham juvenile court judge conducted a hearing hundreds of teenagers and many not yet in their teens into on the case of a 15-year-old boy arrested during the May 3 jails and detention homes for demanding their birthright of demonstrations: freedom makes a mockery of legal process. Judge: I often think of what the Founding Fathers said: In Washington, D.C., one very important reader shared “There is no freedom without restraint.” Now I want you to this sentiment. As King biographer Marshall Frady relates: go home and go back to school. Will you do that? One news photo of a policeman clutching the shirtfront of a Boy: Can I say something? black youth with one hand while his other held the leash of Judge: Anything you like. a dog swirling at the youth’s midsection happened to pass under the eyes of the president in the Oval Office, and he Boy: Well, you can say that because you’ve got your told a group of visitors that day, “It makes me sick.” freedom. The Constitution says we’re all equal, but Negroes aren’t equal. On May 7, Fred Shuttlesworth was injured by a fre hose stream that hurled him against the side of his church. Arriving Judge: But you people have made great gains and they still are. It takes time. Boy: We’ve been waiting over 100 years.

The March on Washington Birmingham was a real victory, but a costly one. The long- term solution could not be for African Americans to defeat segregation one city at a time or by absorbing beatings, dog bites, and hosings. Even as the civil rights movement scored real gains, each advance came over dogged opposition. Federal troops were needed to ensure the admission of , the frst black to study at the University of Mississippi, in 1962. The following year, Alabama’s governor, , whose inaugural address promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” staged a “stand in the schoolhouse door.” Only the Birmingham, Alabama, May 1963: Fire hoses set to full pressure could strip intervention of federal marshals ensured the enrollment of the bark from a tree. Sheriff Bull Connor ordered their use against non-violent African Americans Vivian Malone and at the civil rights protestors and a horrified nation watched. University of Alabama. The very next day, Medgar Evers, leader of the Mississippi NAACP, was murdered outside his

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 43 home in Jackson. And in Birmingham itself, on September some estimates even more, gathered that day, among them at 15, 1963, three Klansmen planted 19 sticks of dynamite in least 50,000 whites. On the podium stood a stellar assemblage the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the of civil rights champions, Christian and Jewish religious unofficial headquarters of the Birmingham movement. Four leaders, labor chiefs, and entertainers. The black contralto young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia , who had performed at the Lincoln Wesley, and Denise McNair — were killed and 22 injured. Memorial in 1939 after being refused permission to sing at On , 1963, President John F. Kennedy told Washington’s Constitution Hall, offered the national anthem. the nation that he would submit to Congress legislation Each of the addressed the crowd that day, except for prohibiting segregation in all privately owned facilities: Farmer, who had been arrested during a protest in Louisiana. hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and the like. “We The best-remembered moment would be King’s. are confronted primarily,” the president said, “with a moral Considered by many the fnest oration ever delivered by an issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American American, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech drew on themes Constitution.” But the obstacles to passage of effective civil from the Bible and from such iconic American texts as the rights laws remained imposing. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Abraham A number of black leaders were determined to change Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. King organized his remarks in the political reality in which members of Congress would the style and structure of a sermon, the kind he had delivered consider civil rights legislation. One was A. Philip Randolph. at many a Sunday morning church service. Now well into his 70s, Randolph had earlier organized and for The speech began by linking the civil rights cause decades led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union. to earlier promises unfulflled. Lincoln’s Emancipation African Americans had long supplied large numbers of rail Proclamation, King said, appeared to the freed slaves as “a car attendants. These were among the best jobs open to blacks joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.” But in much of the country, and Randolph, as leader of these 100 years later, he continued, “the Negro … fnds himself an porters, had emerged as an important fgure in the American exile in his own land.” When the nation’s founders wrote the labor movement. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, “they were Back in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had sought signing a promissory note to which every American was to to boost defense production in anticipation of possible U.S. fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men entry into the Second World War. Randolph confronted as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Roosevelt, demanding an end to segregation in federal rights’ of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ” government agencies and among defense contractors. America, King continued, had defaulted on that Otherwise, Randolph warned, he would launch a massive promissory note, at least to her citizens of color. protest march on Washington, D.C. Roosevelt soon issued an We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We executive order barring discrimination in defense industries refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great and federal bureaus and creating the Fair Employment vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to Practices Committee. After the war, pressure from Randolph contributed to President Harry S Truman’s 1948 order desegregating the American armed forces. Now Randolph and his talented assistant Bayard Rustin contemplated a similar march, hoping “to embody in one gesture civil rights as well as national economic demands.” A “Big Six” group of civil rights leaders was formed to organize the event. Included were Randolph, King, (representing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), James Farmer (Congress of Racial Equality), John Lewis (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and Jr. (Urban League). They fxed a date: , 1963, and site for the main rally: the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” would be the largest political demonstration the nation had ever The “Big Six” meet in New York to plan the March on Washington. Left to seen. Chartered buses and trains carried participants from right: John Lewis, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., throughout the nation. A quarter-million Americans, and by James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins.

44 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live riches of freedom and the security of justice. out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights,” King warned, I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the but he also noted that sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. in the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our freedom and justice. creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live Some believe that King spoke extemporaneously as he in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of delivered the “dream” portion of his address. The famed gospel their skin but by the content of their character. singer was on the stage while King spoke, I have a dream today! and she addressed him during the speech: “Tell them about , Martin,” she said. And he did. As the words and images of the day’s events sped across the nation and around the world, momentum for real change … and so even though we face the difficulties of today and accelerated. But there were battles still to be fought, and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted victory, while ever closer, still lay in the distance. in the .

“I have a dream today!” Martin Luther King addresses the largest political demonstration the nation had ever seen. For many, his speech in 1963 was the finest ever delivered by an American.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 45 Rosa Parks: Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

osa McCauley Parks is known today as the R“mother of the civil rights movement” because her arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat sparked the pivotal Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. She didn’t set out to make history when she left her job as a seamstress to board a bus on the afternoon of December 1, 1955. She was tired, and she just wanted to go home. Still, when the bus driver asked her to move toward the back of the bus so that a white man could sit, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “I didn’t get on the bus with the intention of being arrested,” she said later. “I got on the bus with the intention of going home.” While she did not know her act would set in motion a 381-day bus boycott, she knew one thing. Her own personal bus boycott began that day. “I knew that as far as I was concerned, I would never ride on a segregated bus again.” The arrest and brief jailing Above: Rosa Parks seated at the front of of Rosa Parks, a woman the bus, after the Supreme Court of the highly respected in the black United States ruled unconstitutional the community, and the boycott segregated seating that had prevailed on that followed led to a U.S. the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. Supreme Court decision Parks’s December 1955 refusal to give outlawing segregation on up her seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and launched the city buses. The boycott also civil rights career of Martin Luther King Jr. raised to national prominence Right: Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after a youthful, little-known her arrest. minister named Martin Luther King Jr. Under his leadership, the boycott set a

46 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT pattern for nonviolent, At the school, Parks learned Rosa Parks, age 84, community-based protest “to believe we could do what displays a program from the dedication of the Rosa Parks that became a successful we wanted in life.” She also Elementary School in San strategy in the civil rights learned from the teachers Francisco, California. movement. that not all white people There were many forces were bigots. in Rosa Parks’s early life It was there she met that helped forge her quiet , and the two activism. She was born girls started a friendship that Rosa Louise McCauley on would last a lifetime. Carr February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, said of her friend’s childhood: Alabama. Her childhood “I was noisy and talkative, revolved around a small but she was very quiet, and to support his efforts. The Rosa Parks was always church where her uncle always stayed out of trouble. following year, Parks moved modest about her role in the was the pastor. There she But whatever she did, she north, to Detroit, Michigan, civil rights movement, giving developed both a strong always put herself completely where she worked for credit to a higher power for faith and a sense of racial into it. But she was so quiet Congressmen , her decision not to give up pride. Parks later in life spoke you would never have who often joked that he had her seat. “I was fortunate proudly of the fact that the believed she would get to the more people visit his office to God provided me with the African Methodist Episcopal point of being arrested.” meet his staff assistant than strength I needed at the Church had for generations Parks wanted to be a to meet him. precise time conditions were been a strong advocate for teacher, but had to drop Parks was inducted into ripe for change. I am thankful black equality. out of school to care for her the National Women’s Hall to him every day that he gave She also was strongly ailing mother. (She later of Fame in 1993. She was me the strength not to move.” infuenced by her received her high school presented the Medal of grandparents, especially her diploma.) When she was 18, Freedom Award by President grandfather. He responded she fell in love with barber in 1996 and to the family’s fears of the Raymond Parks and they the Congressional Gold By Kenneth M. Hare violent, racist, secret society later married. During part Medal in 1999. The Southern The Editorial Page Director at known as the Ku Klux of the Second World War, Christian Leadership Council The Montgomery (Alabama) Klan by keeping a loaded she worked at the racially established an annual Rosa Advertiser, Hare is also the double-barreled shotgun desegregated Maxwell Field Parks Freedom Award. author of They Walked to nearby. While the very real (now Maxwell Air Force After her death on Freedom 1955–1956: The possibility of Klan violence Base) in Montgomery. October 24, 2005, Congress Story of the Montgomery Bus never materialized for She later attributed her approved a resolution Boycott. her immediate family, her indignation toward the allowing her body to lie in grandfather’s defant attitude segregated Montgomery honor in the rotunda of the helped mold her thinking. transportation system to the U.S. Capitol. She was the 31st When she turned 11, Rosa contrast with the integrated person, the frst woman, and was sent to a school for girls on-base transportation she only the second black person in Montgomery that had an had experienced. to be accorded that honor all-black student body and After the bus boycott since the practice began an all-white teaching staff. ended successfully in 1956, in 1852. Parks continued working for civil rights. On several occasions she joined King

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 47 Civil Rights Workers: Death in Mississippi

he murders of civil Fearing that the rest of the rights workers James United States did not fully TChaney, Andrew understand the importance Goodman, and Michael of these events, the civil Schwerner by a conspiracy of rights movement hatched a police and Ku Klux Klansmen plan to create the Mississippi in Mississippi on June 21, Summer Project, later known 1964, was one of the pivotal as , in events of the civil rights which 1,000 northern college movement. Because two students, mostly white, of the victims were white would food the state to — and their disappearance help with voter registration baffled investigators for and, by their presence, make almost the entire summer Mississippi’s situation better of 1964 — the case became known. At the prospect a national preoccupation, of such an “invasion,” bringing the Federal Bureau local resistance stiffened; of Investigation (FBI) and belligerent state leaders world press attention to tiny vowed opposition, and the Ku Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Klux Klan, a white vigilante town where the young men group that historically had had disappeared. employed violence and Mississippi was intimidation to enforce historically a conservative regional racial customs, was state where whites exercised revived. considerable control over the On the very frst day of majority black population; Freedom Summer, June 21, over the years, it had the three civil rights workers developed a strong distrustful — Chaney, a local black attitude toward outsiders Mississippian who was 21; or anyone who threatened Goodman, a 20-year old New “the southern way of life,” York college student; and A 44-day FBI search in Mississippi discovered the bodies of the murdered meaning segregation and the Schwerner, a social worker civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Early Chaney, and Michael Henry Schwerner. denial of many basic rights from New York’s Lower East to black people. As early as Side who at 24 was already 1961, civil rights workers a veteran activist — drove After meeting with their them to the Neshoba County had targeted Mississippi to the remote black hamlet contacts there and viewing jail. The civil rights workers, for efforts to encourage of Longdale to investigate a the charred remains of a while naturally suspicious expanded voting rights, for recent Klan assault. They had church the Klan had set on of the local police, did not in its repressive environment, visited previously in the hope fre, the young men were resist. Like everyone in their few blacks were allowed to of opening a class to teach heading west toward the movement, they believed in vote. The voter registration blacks how to register to vote. county seat of Philadelphia the power of nonviolence and work was difficult, however, when Deputy Sheriff Cecil nonconfrontation to attain with volunteers frequently Ray Price stopped them for the goal of racial equality. being beaten and arrested. speeding. He placed them under arrest and escorted

48 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT old Reconstruction-era civil In the decades after 1964, rights laws. It had never done many Mississippians grew so successfully, but the Justice ashamed of their state’s Department resolved to try conduct during the civil again. In early December rights era, and there were 1964, the FBI arrested 21 men calls for the state to come to in the case — local Klansmen terms with its mishandling of and several police officers, the affair. On June 21, 2005, among them the Neshoba exactly 41 years to the day County sheriff and his deputy since the three young men — and charged them with had vanished, a Mississippi conspiracy to violate the state court convicted Edgar three activists’ civil rights. Ray Killen, a Klan organizer In 2005, 41 years after the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, Prosecutors were forced to of the conspiracy who had was convicted of the murders. go to the U.S. long escaped accountability, Supreme Court to have the of manslaughter. Americans laws clarifed and validated of all races and ethnicities They had no way of knowing A 44-day search ensued, for use in this case. But in hailed the event as a symbolic that Price was part of a Klan as FBI agents dispatched by 1967, in a landmark verdict, a victory for justice and a conspiracy to hold them President Lyndon Johnson federal jury of Mississippians partial resolution of a crime in jail until a mob could be scoured the state. All summer found seven of the defendants that had long haunted the assembled. long the world read reports of guilty, and the federal court nation. Later that night the deputy the mystery, while Mississippi handed down sentences of up released the three boys, who officials refused to even to 10 years. immediately returned to investigate the case, insisting The murders of Chaney, their car and began driving that the disappearance of Goodman, and Schwerner By Philip Dray toward Meridian, where the men was likely a hoax. proved a tipping point in The author of Capitol they were based, about a When, on August 4, the FBI overcoming the dogged Men: The Epic Story of half hour’s drive south. Out fnally located the dead of “Fortress Reconstruction Through on the dark rural highway, rights workers, a national Mississippi.” While the Lives of the First Black however, a Klan posse of outcry demanded that those some civil rights workers Congressmen, Dray is also vehicles, including that of responsible for so heinous complained that it had taken the co-author, with Seth Deputy Price, chased down a crime be caught and the deaths of white men Cagin, of We Are Not Afraid: the civil rights workers. punished. fnally to bring national The Story of Goodman, Removing them to a secluded In the U.S. justice system, scrutiny on Mississippi, the Schwerner, and Chaney, and area nearby, the Klansmen murders are normally powerful national reaction the Civil Rights Campaign for pulled their victims from the prosecuted under state law, helped topple the state’s Mississippi. car, shot and killed them, and in the courts of the state particularly vicious forms secreted their bodies in an where the crime took place. of racial discrimination earthen dam being built on a When Mississippi declined once and for all. Today, neighborhood dairy farm. to press murder charges, the black Mississippians vote federal government sought in large numbers, sit in the alternatives. Beginning in the state , and have 1940s, Washington had tried represented their state in the unsuccessfully to prosecute U.S. Congress. southern lynch mobs under

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 49 Medgar Evers: Martyr of the Mississippi Movement

edgar Evers, head and fght a bass. There is of the National room here for my children to MAssociation play and grow and become for the Advancement of good citizens — if the white Colored People (NAACP) in man will let them.” Mississippi, was a dynamic At the time, however, leader whose life was cut whites’ cooperation appeared short by assassination in 1963. very much in doubt. Two His loss at age 37 was a tragic of the United States’ most reversal for the civil rights infamous modern lynchings movement, but it galvanized occurred in Mississippi further protest and drew in those years — the 1955 the sympathetic concern of killing of 14-year-old the federal government to , and the 1959 his cause. of Mack Charles Born in rural Mississippi Parker in Poplarville. Evers in 1925, Evers served with helped investigate the Till U.S. armed forces in Europe murder, a case that received in the Second World War, extensive national attention. returning home to attend Despite strong evidence of Alcorn College (a historically the defendants’ guilt, an all- black institution located near Medgar Evers in 1963. He would be assassinated later that year. white male jury took only Lorman, Mississippi), where 67 minutes to acquit them. he was an accomplished the demand for civil rights In 1954, Evers challenged One juror later asserted that student and athlete. There he among the broader black the segregationist order by the panel took a “soda break” met his future wife, Myrlie; population. applying for enrollment to stretch deliberations the couple was married Evers determined to see at the law school of the beyond one hour, “to make in 1951. the freedoms he had fought all-white University of it look good.” (In May 2004, Evers became a protégé for overseas established at Mississippi, known as “Ole the Justice Department, of T.R.M. Howard, a black home. He soon emerged Miss.” Evers was turned away, calling the 1955 prosecution physician and businessman as one of the Mississippi but his effort won him the a “grotesque miscarriage of who founded both an Regional Council’s most admiration of the NAACP’s justice,” reopened the murder insurance agency and effective activists. Like his Legal Defense Fund, and he investigation. But with many a medical clinic in the mentor, he mixed business was subsequently named potential witnesses long dead . Howard with civil rights campaigning, the organization’s frst feld and evidence scattered, a also established the working as a salesman for secretary in Mississippi, grand jury declined to indict Mississippi Regional Council Howard’s Magnolia Mutual a dangerous and lonely the last remaining living of Negro Leadership, a civil Life Insurance Company assignment. suspect.) rights organization that while organizing local “It may sound funny, but Mississippi reacted harshly employed a “top-down” chapters of the NAACP I love the South,” Evers once to the Supreme Court’s 1954 approach, encouraging and leading boycotts of gas said. “I don’t choose to live Brown v. Board of Education leading African-American stations that refused blacks anywhere else. There’s land ruling and its order to professionals and clergy to access to restrooms. (“Don’t here where a man can raise desegregate the nation’s public promote self-help, business Buy Gas Where You Can’t cattle, and I’m going to do schools. Local white groups ownership, and, ultimately, Use the Restroom” read one it someday. There are lakes known as Citizens Councils bumper sticker.) where a man can sink a hook vowed to resist integration

50 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Soon, attempts were made was acquitted by white juries. on Evers’s life: A bomb was Not until 1994, a full three thrown into his carport, a decades after Evers had led vehicle nearly ran him over. his fellow Mississippians in a As Evers returned home on crusade against bigotry and the night of June 12, 1963, he intolerance, was Beckwith was ambushed and shot as he convicted and sentenced to got out of his car. He died at life in prison, where he died Myrlie Evers addresses a Howard University rally after the murder of her his own front door. in 2001. husband, Medgar Evers. Myrlie Evers would emerge as a prominent civil rights activist, and later would serve as chairperson of the NAACP. The murder of so popular Ultimately, Evers a leader enraged the black triumphed, even in death. The community. Over several year he was murdered, only at any cost. Evers, who had use of courtesy titles (Mr., days there were numerous 28,000 black Mississippians earlier been denied admission Mrs., Miss) by whites who confrontations with police in had successfully registered to Ole Miss, assisted other dealt with black shoppers in downtown Jackson. Even the to vote. By 1971, that number blacks’ efforts to enroll there. downtown stores. whites who ran the city were had risen to over a quarter- In 1962, Air Force veteran The city’s reaction was shocked by Evers’s death, for million and, by 1982, to half a James Meredith was admitted ominous. Workmen erected although he was an agitator, million. By 2006, Mississippi to the school by a direct order on the nearby Mississippi he was at least a familiar had the highest number of from U.S. Supreme Court State Fairgrounds a series presence. The city fathers black elected officials in the Justice Hugo Black. State of fenced stockades capable made the unusual concession country, including a quarter officials resisted the order, of holding thousands of of allowing a silent march of its delegation in the U.S. and Meredith managed to protestors — a blunt message to honor him, as civil rights House of Representatives and begin classes only after a to those who considered leaders from across the nation some 27 percent of its state night of rioting in which protesting. Undeterred, Evers arrived to pay tribute. He was legislature. two people were killed and and his supporters fought buried at Arlington National hundreds injured. on. Local blacks, including Cemetery in Washington, As his efforts on many children, took part in D.C., with full military Meredith’s behalf intensifed the subsequent rallies and honors. Medgar’s brother By Philip Dray the segregationist hatred of store boycotts, marching and Charles assumed some of The author of Capitol Evers, he launched a series of joining picket lines. These his duties with the Jackson Men: The Epic Story of boycotts, sit-ins, and protests demonstrations represented campaign, and his widow, Reconstruction Through in Jackson, Mississippi’s a culmination of Evers’s long Myrlie, became a well-known the Lives of the First Black largest city. Even the NAACP years of civil rights work. A activist and would serve as Congressmen, Dray is also was occasionally concerned high point came when Evers chairperson of the NAACP the co-author, with Seth with the extent of Evers’s appeared on local television from 1995 to 1998. Cagin, of We Are Not Afraid: efforts. When Martin Luther to explain the movement’s It was Medgar Evers’s fate The Story of Goodman, King Jr. led a high-profle objectives. Whites were not to have his name linked with Schwerner, and Chaney, and civil rights campaign in accustomed to seeing black one of the most frustrating the Civil Rights Campaign for Birmingham, Alabama, in the people on TV, especially legal cases of the civil rights Mississippi. spring of 1963, Evers stepped presenting their case in their era. His killer, a white up his Jackson Movement own words, and many were supremacist named Byron — demanding the hiring of outraged. De La Beckwith, scion of black police, the creation of an old Mississippi family, a biracial committee, the was put on trial twice in the desegregation of downtown 1960s, but in each instance lunch counters, and the

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 51 — 6 — “It Ca n n o t Co n t i n u e ” Establishing Legal Equality

he civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. and others was the indispensable catalyst for the passage of two new laws of unparalleled importance. TheT Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 at last would establish frmly the legal equality of African Americans. They were enacted partly because of a structural transformation of American politics, including the unexpected elevation of a powerful, pro-civil-rights southern president who helped overcome the forces that had defeated earlier civil rights legislation. Above all, support for these laws came from the growing political constituency for change — the millions of Americans horrifed by the actions of segregationists in the South.

Top to bottom: The Rev. addresses a 1965 Selma, Alabama Changing Politics voter registration rally. Ever since post-Civil War Reconstruction failed to ensure 1966: With the Voting Rights Act now law, Alabama African Americans queue up to register as voters. the civil rights of blacks in the American South, two great obstacles had blocked efforts at the national level to end

52 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Jim Crow: the political party system and the rules of the for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful effort to block U.S. Congress. When the United States acquired vast and the mild . potentially slaveholding territories (including California But slowly the constellation of political forces was shifting and much of today’s American Southwest) in the Mexican in ways that would prove helpful to the civil rights movement. War of 1846-1848, the nation’s political parties increasingly The black vote, at least in the North, had grown more formulated their positions on sectional lines: Democrats important. For most of the nation’s history, the overwhelming favored the South, and the expansion of slavery; Whigs, and majority of African Americans resided in the South. During later Republicans, favored the North, opposed the extension of the frst half of the 20th century, many African Americans slavery into the newly acquired territories, and often believed began to move from the South to and other northern that complete abolition was only a matter of time. Whigs and cities. An estimated 6 million blacks would head north during Republicans in this era favored the aggressive use of federal this “Great Migration.” The North was not free of racial power to promote economic development. Southerners prejudice, but blacks there could vote, and they became an and Democrats — fearing federal action against slavery — increasingly attractive target for ambitious politicians. favored the supremacy of individual states against a federal In 1960, the Democratic candidate for president, Senator government properly limited to only those powers specifcally John F. Kennedy, was determined to increase his share of the granted by the Constitution. This “states’ rights” concept has historically Republican African-American vote. When Martin deep roots in American history. Early in the 19th century, Luther King Jr. was jailed following an Atlanta sit-in, Kennedy however, it became entangled with the issues of slavery, phoned King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to offer his sympathy, segregation, and civil rights. even as his brother, the future attorney general, Robert F. These patterns persisted after the Civil War. As we Kennedy, worked to secure King’s release. Freed on bail, King have seen, the post-war Radical Republicans pressed for acknowledged a “great debt of gratitude to Senator Kennedy a Reconstruction that would ensure African-American and his family.” Kennedy carried an estimated 70 percent of rights. After Reconstruction, the “Party of Lincoln” — the the African-American vote in a tight election in which he Republicans — continued to enjoy the support of most blacks. prevailed over Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon The Democratic Party, meanwhile, evolved into an alliance by less than 1 percent of the popular vote. of southern segregationists and northern urban residents, While historians differ over the Kennedy administration’s often immigrants and industrial workers. As the 20th century civil rights record, it is not unfair to remark that it was better progressed, the party’s northern wing became more politically than that of its 20th-century predecessors, but not as strong as liberal, and, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s civil rights activists would have liked. John and Robert Kennedy economic policies, more accepting of broad federal powers. repeatedly urged King not to press too hard. But when King Liberal northern Democrats often chafed against southern would forge ahead, the Kennedys generally would follow. racism, but their party could not compete nationally without As previously described, President Kennedy introduced the support of the “solid South.” broad civil rights legislation in the aftermath of the events The rules of the U.S. Senate were another formidable in Birmingham. With Kennedy’s assassination in November obstacle to civil rights legislation. While passing a bill 1963, responsibility for that legislation would fall to his vice required only a simple majority, any senator could block president and successor, Lyndon Johnson. a vote simply by declining to stop speaking during Senate debate, refusing to relinquish the foor. At that time, a two- Lyndon Baines Johnson thirds majority of senators could vote “” of debate. In The new president possessed two enormous assets: a practical terms, then, no signifcant legislation could pass the singularly powerful personality and a mastery of the Senate without the support of two-thirds of its members. This procedures and personalities of the U.S. Congress perhaps meant that southern senators, elected in states where blacks unparalleled in American history. From 1954 to 1960, Johnson were routinely deprived of the right to vote, could — and did had served, in the words of biographer Robert Dallek, as — block civil rights bills. “the most effective majority leader in Senate history.” To his Anti-civil-rights flibusters, as these lengthy senatorial command of the Senate’s often arcane rules and traditions, speeches came to be known, blocked much legislation over Johnson added what one might call intense powers of the years. In 1946, a weeks-long filibuster defeated a bill personal persuasion. “He’d come on just like a tidal wave,” that enjoyed majority support and would have prevented said Johnson’s vice president, . “He went workplace discrimination. In 1957, Senator through walls. … He’d take the whole room over.” (then a Democratic senator from South Carolina) filibustered The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who served as a

White House fellow under Johnson, recalled Johnson’s ability

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 53 to focus all his energies on extracting a needed vote from transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, hundreds or even a recalcitrant senator. She called it “The Treatment.” King thousands more Rosa Parks — and Martin Luther Kings biographer Marshall Frady described it as — would be needed to desegregate fully the South. Plainly, legislation was needed to prohibit acts of private … a ferocious manner of persuasion that proceeded by discrimination in public places. Such a law would represent a kind of progressive physical engulfment: wrapping one giant arm around a colleague’s shoulder with his other a dramatic expansion of federal authority. The American hand clenching his lapel, then straightening the senator’s tie Constitution explains what the federal — and, in the post- knot, then nudging and punching his chest and sticking a Civil War amendments the state governments — may and forefinger into his shirt. Johnson would lower his face closer may not do. It does not speak of Woolworth’s lunch counter. and closer to his subject’s in escalating exhortation until the In the end, proponents of what became the Civil Rights man would be bowed backward like a parenthesis mark. Act of 1964 would assert, and the courts subsequently would accept, that Congress possessed the authority to ban Johnson had been born poor in Texas and understood discrimination in employment, public accommodations, intimately the conditions under which African Americans and other aspects of life. They pointed to the constitutional and Mexican Americans labored. As a congressman and provision (Article I, Section 8) authorizing Congress “to then senator from a southern state, electoral realities obliged regulate Commerce … among the several States.” By the mid- Johnson to mute some of his progressive views on civil 20th century, nearly every economic transaction involved some rights and racial equality. But elevated unexpectedly to the form of interstate commerce, were one to look closely enough. presidency, Johnson placed the full measure of his political In 1969, for instance, the Supreme Court, in Daniel v. Paul, skills to work for the passage of the landmark civil rights laws. rejected a discriminatory “entertainment club’s” claim that its As the new president told Richard Russell, an infuential lack of interstate activity exempted it from the Civil Rights Act. senator from Georgia whose opposition to civil rights Among the Court’s fndings: The snack bar served hamburgers legislation posed a formidable obstacle: “I’m not going to cavil and hot dogs on rolls, and the “principal ingredients going into and I’m not going to compromise. I’m going to pass it just as it the bread were produced and processed in other States.” is, Dick, and if you get in my way I’m going to run you down. I President Johnson’s introduction of the Civil Rights Act just want you to know that because I care about you.” of 1964 provoked one of the nation’s great political contests. The act prevailed because much of the nation had looked hard The Civil Rights Act of 1964 into Bull Connor’s eyes and had not liked what it saw. But passage also would require all of Johnson’s formidable skills. It For nearly a century, many states had managed to escape the was understood that majorities of Republicans and northern obvious mandate of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Democrats would support the bill, but that Johnson would Constitution: have to engineer a two-thirds Senate majority to overcome the No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge inevitable filibuster by . the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; Johnson, in his frst State of the Union Address on nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or January 8, 1964, urged Congress to “let this session … be property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person known as the session which did more for civil rights than the within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. last hundred sessions combined.” The months that followed Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education saw intense congressional fact-fnding and debate over the and the many others won by Thurgood Marshall and the act. The House of Representatives held more than 70 days of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People public hearings, during which some 275 witnesses offered fnally established that government, even state governments nearly 6,000 pages of testimony. At the end of this process, the in the Deep South, could not discriminate against African House passed the bill by a vote of 290 to 130. Americans or anyone else. Civil rights activists like the The Senate flibuster would last for 57 days, during which Freedom Riders risked their lives, but at least there was no time the Senate conducted virtually no other business. As doubt that the law was on their side and that those who the speeches continued (one senator carried a 1,500-page attacked them were lawbreakers. speech onto the foor), President Johnson subjected many a But the owners of a movie theater or a department store senator to “The Treatment,” and a variety of labor, religious, lunch counter were not the government. As a result, the civil and civil rights groups lobbied for cloture and a fnal vote. rights movement was obliged to wage battles one city and Finally, on June 10, 1964, the Senate voted 71 to 29 to end one business at a time. While Rosa Parks’s brave refusal to debate — the frst time cloture had ever been successfully move to the back of the bus led to the desegregation of public invoked in a civil rights matter. A week later, the Senate passed

54 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT “It cannot continue … .” President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the Civil its version of the civil rights bill. On July 2, 1964, the House Rights Act of 1964, in the presence of congressional leaders, and Attorney of Representatives agreed to the Senate version, sending the General Robert F. Kennedy (at rear, directly behind Johnson). bill to the White House. President Johnson affixed his signature that evening, But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of in the course of a nationally televised address. “Americans our Republic, forbids it. … The purpose of the law is simple. of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom,” he told the nation. He continued, It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of It does not give special treatment to any citizen. Americans has been called on to continue the unending It does say the only limit to a man’s hope for happiness, and search for justice within our own borders. for the future of his children, shall be his own ability. We believe that all men are created equal. Yet many are It does say that there are those who are equal before denied equal treatment. God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yet classrooms, in the factories … many Americans do not enjoy those rights. My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of We must not fail. liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for — not because of their own failures, but because of the color wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant of their skin. differences and make our nation whole. Let us hasten that The reasons are deeply imbedded in history and tradition day when our unmeasured strength and our unbounded and the nature of man. We can understand — without spirit will be free. rancor or hatred — how this all happened.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 55 Clockwise from above: “We shall overcome.” A newly registered voter in Selma, Alabama, August 1965. Civil rights marchers approach Montgomery, Alabama, on the fourth day of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Americans from across the nation joined in the effort. The four protestors at front hailed from (left to right) New York (first two), Michigan, and Selma, Alabama. : A federal marshal reads a court order enjoining a planned voter registration protest march at Selma, Alabama. Dr. King is at right, , a future Ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, is at left with arms folded.

The Act’s Powers • Title IV, which authorized the attorney general to file suit to force the desegregation of public schools. This provision After two centuries of slavery, segregation, and legal aimed to accelerate the slow progress made during the inequality, and the resulting economic disadvantage, the Civil decade since Brown v. Board of Education. Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government and private • Title VI, which extended the act’s provisions to “any individuals the legal authority they needed to attack squarely program or activity receiving federal fnancial assistance.” It racial (and gender — the act also bars discrimination on the authorized the federal government to withhold federal funds basis of sex) discrimination. from any such program that practiced discrimination. This authority is spelled out in broad provisions, called • Title VII, which prohibited employment discrimination by “titles.” The major points include: any business employing more than 25 people. It established • Title I, which abolished unequal application of voter the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to registration requirements. review complaints of discrimination in recruitment, hiring, • Title II, which prohibited discrimination in public compensation, and advancement. accommodations. The title authorized individuals to fle to obtain injunctive relief (a court order ordering someone to do or not to do something) and allowed the The Voting Rights Act of 1965: The Background attorney general of the United States to intervene in those Court decisions and civil rights statutes were crucial tools lawsuits he deemed “of general public importance.” in establishing, protecting, and enforcing the civil rights • Title III, which authorized the U.S. attorney general to of African Americans. The surest way to guarantee the fle a , provided the case would “materially further permanence of these rights, however, was to empower blacks the orderly progress of desegregation in public facilities,” politically to assert themselves as full participants in the where an aggrieved person was unable himself or herself to democratic system. The right to vote, then, was arguably maintain such a suit. the most fundamental right of all, and one that, practically

56 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT speaking, African Americans in the South had not enjoyed an early volunteer, the plantation worker , since the failure of Reconstruction. memorably explained: “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have Looking back, after the withdrawal of northern armies been scared — but what was the point of being scared? The from the South in 1877, white southern elites re-imposed their only thing they [white people] could do was kill me, and it political dominance. Suppressing the African-American vote seemed they’d been trying to do that a little at a time since I was crucial to this objective and was achieved by a number could remember.” of methods. At frst, raw violence was the preferred tool. A In 1964, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, number of other practices developed. the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association One such practice was the “poll tax.” This was a special for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Student tax levied equally on every member of a community. Citizens Nonviolent Coordinating Committee launched the “Freedom who failed to pay were deemed ineligible to vote. Many Summer.” More than 1,000 northern whites, mostly college southern states introduced poll taxes between 1889 and 1910. students, volunteered to travel to Mississippi and help black Given the extent of African-American poverty, the poll tax voters register. Their presence also was intended to draw disenfranchised large numbers of black voters, and poor national attention to the violent suppression of black whites as well. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the U.S. voting rights. Constitution (1964) prohibited denying any citizen the right On June 21, the very frst day of Freedom Summer, the to vote in an election for federal office for failure to pay a poll volunteers achieved this goal in a tragic manner. Three civil tax. A Supreme Court decision two years later extended this rights workers, African American and two prohibition to state and local elections. white Jewish Americans, and Andrew Another practice was the “ requirement” for voter Goodman, were reported missing and later found murdered. registration. Highly subjective oral and written examinations Their murder forced Americans to confront more directly the nearly always were applied with special vigor to African- related issues of voting rights and violence. While the brave American applicants. Some states would not even permit an volunteers persuaded some 17,000 equally brave African applicant to take the examination unless an already-registered Americans to complete voter registration applications, voter would vouch for him or her. It was nearly impossible for election officials ultimately accepted less than 10 percent many black applicants even to take the test, since there were of these. Blacks, more and more Americans understood, very few African Americans on the southern voting rolls, comprised nearly half of Mississippi’s population but only 5 and few southern whites would risk social ostracism or worse percent of its registered voters. to vouch-in a prospective black voter. The examination was often blatantly unfair. It might require an applicant to write Bloody Sunday in Selma out a passage from the Constitution as dictated by the county The following year, civil rights organizations launched a registrar — dictated clearly to white applicants, mumbled registration drive in Selma, Alabama, a small city about 50 to blacks. miles west of Montgomery. There were about 15,000 blacks Southern election officials adopted any number of tactics residing in Selma, but only 350 had successfully registered to to prevent black applicants from qualifying. In Alabama, for vote. At a February 1965 voting rights rally in nearby Marion, instance, the decision whether an applicant passed or failed police shot and killed a young black man named Jimmie Lee was made in secret, and there was no method for challenging Jackson. the decisions. Not surprisingly, at least one Alabama board of In response, activists called a march from Selma registrars “qualifed” each and every white applicant and not a to the at Montgomery. Led by John single black. Lewis of SNCC and Martin Luther King’s aide, the Reverend Whatever tactic was employed, the threat of violence Hosea Williams, some 525 marchers were met on the Pettus always lurked in the background. Election officials might Bridge over the Alabama River by Alabama state troopers and publish in local newspapers the names of black voter local lawmen. They had gas masks at hand and nightsticks applicants. This alerted local white Citizens Councils and at the ready. The trooper leader (Major John Cloud) ordered Ku Klux Klan chapters to blacks who might need to be the marchers to return to their church. Reverend Williams “persuaded” to withdraw their applications. answered: “May we have a word with the major?” “There is no Against this background of violent intimidation, activists word to be had,” came the reply. from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and The suppression of the march, the New York Times the Congress of Racial Equality, among others, launched voter reported, “was swift and thorough.” The paper described a registration campaigns in rural and heavily black parts of the fying wedge of troopers and recounted how “the frst 10 or Deep South in 1961. The work took incredible courage. As 20 Negroes were swept to the ground screaming, arms and

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 57 “Bloody Sunday,” Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965. The suppression of the first Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march was swift and thorough. “I thought I saw death,” said future U.S. Representative John Lewis. legs fying.” With the news media on hand and recording their actions for a horrifed national audience, the troopers fred tear gas canisters. Local law enforcement pursued the retreating protestors with whips and nightsticks. “I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick ... I thought I saw death,” said Lewis, hospitalized with a concussion. For millions of Americans, March 7, 1965, would be known simply as Bloody Sunday. Typical was the reaction of U.S. Representative James G. O’Hara of Michigan, who called the day’s events “a savage action, storm-trooper style, under direction of a reckless demagogue [a reference to Alabama’s governor, George Wallace].” From Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr. announced that he and Ralph Abernathy would lead a second Selma-to- Montgomery march that Tuesday. He called on “religious leaders from all over the nation to join us on Tuesday in our peaceful, nonviolent march for freedom.” Before the march could occur, a federal judge, not unfriendly to the activists but determined to hold hearings before acting, issued a court order temporarily forbidding the march. King was under intense political pressure from every corner. Federal officials urged him to delay the march. With Marchers cross the Edmund Pettis bridge over the Alabama River, March 21, 1965, the beginning of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march. the judge’s injunction now in place, King and his followers would be the lawbreakers should the march proceed. But

58 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT younger activists, many affiliated with SNCC, wanted to move faster. King risked losing his place at the head of the movement were he unable to satisfy their demands. On March 9, King and Abernathy led some 3,000 peaceful protestors — their black followers joined by hundreds of white religious leaders — on the second Selma-to-Montgomery march. Troopers again met them at the Pettus Bridge. The marchers stopped, then sang the movement’s anthem: “We Shall Overcome.” The group then prayed, and Abernathy thanked God for the marchers who “came to present their bodies as a living sacrifce.” King then directed his followers to turn back. “As a nonviolent, I couldn’t move people into a potentially violent situation,” he told . King’s decision disappointed some of the more zealous activists. But King had been conferring quietly with federal officials. The events of Bloody Sunday also had exerted great pressure on an already sympathetic President Johnson. Too many Americans at long last had seen enough. From religious groups and state , youthful protestors and members of Congress, the demand for federal action was growing. The two leaders appear to have struck a tacit bargain: King would not violate the injunction, and the Johnson administration quietly suggested it would soon be lifted. On March 15, Johnson introduced the legislation that would become the Voting Rights Act. Addressing the nation that night, President Johnson employed the plainest of language in the service of a basic American value — the right “We have come from three centuries of suffering and hardship.” The marchers to vote: arrive at Montgomery. There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American Their cause must be our cause too, because it is not just problem. Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall And we are met here tonight as Americans … to solve that overcome. problem. Two days later, the federal court lifted the injunction The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from against the marchers. U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an Jr. further ordered that state and county authorities not oath before God to support and to defend that Constitution. interfere and indeed take affirmative measures to protect the We must now act in obedience to that oath. … activists. “The law is clear,” the judge wrote, “that the right to There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong exercised in large groups … and these rights may be exercised — deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans by marching, even along public highways.” the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for The Selma-to-Montgomery March human rights. … By March 21, thousands of Americans from all walks of What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement life began to assemble in Selma for the third Selma-to- which reaches into every section and State of America. It is Montgomery march. The marchers planned to cover the the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the entire 87-kilometer route over the course of fve days and four full blessings of American life. nights, with marchers sleeping under the stars. The route they followed is today a National Historic Trail.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 59 With the support of the Johnson administration and The marchers covered a bit over 11 kilometers that frst an aroused American people, the difference from the earlier day, then pitched two large circus tents and slept in sleeping efforts could not be more apparent. Major John Cloud of bags and blankets. The next morning King announced: “I am the Alabama State Troopers had ordered the beatings and happy to say that I have slept in a sleeping bag for the frst time gassings two weeks earlier. Now he was obliged to occupy in my life. I feel fne.” By the second day, though, blisters and the lead car accompanying the protestors across the Pettus sunburn were common. Bridge. Federal military police were on hand to provide Because the highway narrowed in rural areas, the federal protection, and elements of the were court had ruled that only 300 marchers could participate temporarily placed under federal command. As more than until the road widened again outside Montgomery. But a fair 3,000 marchers began the frst leg of their quest, Abernathy number of “extras” chose to tag along, even during the third told them, “When we get to Montgomery, we are going to go day, which was marked by torrential rains. The marchers up to Governor Wallace’s door and say, ‘George, it’s all over responded in song; among their selections: “Ain’t Gonna Let now. We’ve got the ballot.’ ” Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” and “We Shall Overcome.” “Walk together, children,” King instructed, “and don’t you King briefy left the march to deliver a long-scheduled get weary, and it will lead us to a Promised Land.” address in , Ohio. There King made explicit his The New York Times offered this description of the crowd debt to Mahatma Gandhi, whose famous march to the as it set out along U.S. Highway 80: sea anticipated the Selma-to-Montgomery trek. “We are challenged to make the world one in terms of brotherhood,” There were civil rights leaders and , pretty coeds and King said. “We must learn to live together as brothers, or we bearded representatives of the student left, movie stars and infants in strollers. There were two blind people and a man will all perish as fools.” with one leg. But mostly there were the Negroes who believe As the marchers approached Montgomery, the crowd they have been denied the vote too long. swelled to 25,000 or more. They came by chartered plane, by bus, and by rail. A delegation of leading American historians arrived to participate in the fnal leg. They issued a statement: “We believe it is high time for the issues over which the Civil War was fought to be fnally resolved.” The singer and civil rights activist enlisted an all-star group of Hollywood entertainers. On March 25, with Martin Luther King at the head, the activists entered Montgomery. They marched up Dexter Avenue, tracing the path traversed a century ago by the inaugural parade of , frst and only president of the Confederate States of America, the would-be nation whose championing of slavery sparked the Civil War. Now, a century later, the descendants of black slaves approached the state house to demand the rights to which they had long been entitled, and long been denied. Their petition read: We have come not only five days and 50 miles [80 kilometers], but we have come from three centuries of suffering and hardship. We have come to you, the Governor of Alabama, to declare that we must have our freedom NOW. We must have the right to vote; we must have equal protection of the law, and an end to police brutality. Governor Wallace had already fed the scene. It didn’t matter. King delivered that day one of his most famous speeches, one in which he quoted a 70-year-old participant in the Montgomery bus boycott. Asked one day whether she would “How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever,” said Martin Luther King, Jr. at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Pictured here: King not have preferred riding to walking, Mother Pollard replied: delivering a sermon at his Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. “My feets is tired, but .”

60 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT The just concluded march, King said, was “a shining What the Act Does moment in the conscience of man.” He singled out as The Fifteenth Amendment already barred racial honorable and inspiring “the pilgrimage of clergymen discrimination in voting rights, so the problem was not that and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to African Americans lacked the legal right to vote. It was that face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.” “Like an some state and local officials had systematically deprived idea whose time has come,” King continued, “not even the blacks of those rights. The Voting Rights Act accordingly marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to the authorized the federal government to assume control of land of freedom.” the voter registration process in any state or voting district We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at that had in 1964 employed a literacy or other qualifying test peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. and in which fewer than half of voting age residents had That will be a day not of the white man, not of the black either registered or voted. Six entire southern states were man. That will be the day of man as man. thus “covered,” as were a number of counties in several other I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” I come states. Covered jurisdictions were prohibited from modifying to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, their voting rules and regulations without frst affording however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because federal officials the opportunity to review the change for truth pressed to earth will rise again. discriminatory intent or effect. Other provisions barred the future use of literacy tests and directed the attorney general of How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. the United States to commence legal action to end the use of How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow. poll taxes in state elections. (The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratifed in January 1964, already How long? Not long. Because the arm of the moral universe barred the poll tax in elections for federal office.) is long but it bends toward justice. The introduction of federal “examiners” ended the mass intimidation of potential minority voters. The results were The Voting Rights Act Enacted dramatic. By the end of 1965, the fve states of the Deep South Five months later, the Congress passed and President Johnson alone registered 160,000 new African-American voters. By signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Shortly before 2000, African-American registration rates trailed that of noon on August 6, 1965, Johnson drove to the U.S. Capitol whites by only 2 percent. In the South, where in 1965 only two building. Waiting for him were the leaders of Congress and African Americans served either in the U.S. Congress or a of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and John state legislature, the number today is 160. Lewis among them. In signing the act into law, Johnson told The Voting Rights Act was originally enacted for a fve- the nation: year period, but it has been both extended and expanded to The central fact of American civilization ... is that freedom introduce new requirements, such as the provision of bilingual and justice and the dignity of man are not just words to us. election materials. We believe in them. Under all the growth, and the tumult, In 1982, President signed a 25-year and abundance, we believe. And so, as long as some among extension: “The right to vote is the crown jewel of American us are oppressed and we are part of that oppression, it must liberties,” he said, “and we will not see its luster diminished.” blunt our faith and sap the strength of our high purpose. President George W. Bush signed another 25-year extension in 2006. Thus this is a victory for the freedom of the American Negro, but it is also a victory for the freedom of the American nation. And every family across this great entire searching land will live stronger in liberty, will live more splendid in expectation, and will be prouder to be American because of the act that you have passed that I will sign today.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 61 White Southerners’ Reactions to the Civil Rights Movement

frican Americans on African Americans. Blacks who waged epic labored in white homes as Astruggles for civil nannies, cooks, maids, and rights also altered white yardmen. Whites expected Southerners’ worlds. Some docility; black resistance whites embraced the seemed unfathomable. prospect of a new interracial Through the long years of land. Many more reacted slavery and segregation, white with hostility. They feared Southerners produced and social and political change, absorbed cruel stereotypes and grappled uncomfortably about African Americans: with the fact that their way of that they were unclean and life seemed gone for good. shiftless, unintelligent and The “Southern way of life” oversexed. Blacks became encompassed a distinctive either clowns or savages, with mix of economic, social, no area in between. Whites and cultural practices — often defned themselves — symbolized by the fragrant their status, identities, daily magnolia, the slow pace lives, and self-worth — in of life, and the sweet mint relation to these concocted julep, a popular alcoholic notions about African Demonstrators protesting the integration of a New Orleans, Louisiana, public elementary school, 1960. beverage. It also contained Americans. If blacks were implications about the submissive and infantile, region’s racial order — one in whites were strong and the falsity of such beliefs. At Southern politicians which whites wielded power dignifed. Blackness meant long last, African Americans denounced the court ruling. and blacks accommodated. degradation; to be free was voiced their discontent and In language that played upon Centuries of slavery and to be white. The civil rights demanded dignity. Black whites’ underlying racial decades of segregation struggle threatened to hoist rebellion clashed so sharply fears and stoked contempt cemented a legal and political African Americans up and with white perceptions that for the federal government, system characterized by out of this social “place” that many disbelieved their own senators such as Harry Byrd white dominance. By the whites had created for them. eyes. And as of Virginia claimed the 20th century, “Jim Crow” White Southerners would organizers led a mass court had overstepped its had become a shorthand for fnd blacks in their schools movement for black equality, bounds. White Southerners legalized segregation. (That and neighborhoods, their whites rose up in resistance. tried to circumvent the phrase derived from the restaurants, and polling The U.S. Supreme Court, order, and rallied to beat name of a character in a 19th places. Many whites feared with its 1954 decision in back desegregation at every century minstrel show in this vision of the Southern Brown v. Board of Education, turn. Local leaders and which whites wore blackface future. ensured that Southern businessmen organized makeup and caricatured slave Many white Southerners schools would become the themselves into Citizens culture.) Massive inequalities came to believe that African frst battlegrounds. The court Councils, groups that visited marked every facet of daily Americans abided — and ruled that segregated schools economic reprisal upon any life. Blacks always addressed even enjoyed — their roles as stamped black children with blacks — or whites — who whites as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” second-class citizens. When a “badge of inferiority,” and dared advocate integration. though whites seldom the civil rights movement that Southern states must bestowed such courtesy titles tore through the South in the integrate their schools “with and 1960s, it exposed all deliberate speed.”

62 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT In 1957, a federal court scene they thought had died upon them — and them and rifts emerged within the ordered integration of the with Reconstruction: that alone. Across the region, white South. Still, a majority Little Rock, Arkansas, public of federal troops protecting poor whites shouldered the desired the same end — a schools. Nine blacks were blacks’ civil rights in the “burden” of integration. If return to the nostalgic days selected to enroll in Little South. the upper classes maintained when blacks doffed their hats Rock’s Central High School, A similar confagration social safety valves like to whites and acquiesced to but Governor erupted in New Orleans country clubs, private schools, their roles in the segregated blocked the students from when that city became the and exclusive , Jim Crow order. the schoolhouse door. After frst in the Deep South to poorer whites confronted Extremism on one side initial reluctance, President desegregate. In November the fact that their public often handed victory to the Dwight Eisenhower mobilized 1960, four African-American schools, swimming pools, other. The Klan’s horrifying a battle group of the U.S. girls integrated Frantz and neighborhoods were violence pricked white Army’s 101st Airborne Elementary School in the often the frst to experience America’s conscience and, Division to enforce the court city’s Ninth Ward. That desegregation. ultimately, moved the nation order by escorting the “Little neighborhood was one of the Millions of white closer to passage of epic civil Rock Nine” to class. When city’s poorest. In addition to Southerners found rights legislation — the 1964 several African-American grievances against organized champions in politicians Civil Rights Act and the 1965 teenagers fnally arrived at blacks and an active such as Alabama’s governor, Voting Rights Act. When Central, they encountered a federal government, white George Wallace, who both President Lyndon Johnson, vicious white mob. Parents Southerners also felt deep cultivated and exploited for himself a native Texan and a jeered the incoming students class divides. White Ninth political gain a deep anti-civil- Southerner, helped usher the and the federal marshals who Ward residents believed that rights sentiment. In his 1963 legislation through Congress, protected them. Enraged the city’s rich and powerful inaugural address, Wallace white Southerners felt white Southerners deplored a had foisted integration declared: “Segregation now, betrayed. segregation tomorrow, The Civil Rights Act segregation forever.” He integrated businesses and became the very picture of public facilities. Suddenly, white resistance. Members whites had to serve blacks of the Ku Klux Klan — a in their stores and dine violent organization driven beside them at restaurants. by racism, anti-Semitism, Such changes shattered the and nativism — persisted rhythm of white southerners’ in a similar delusion: that daily lives. Many whites the bloodshed they inficted denounced the “Civil Wrongs could postpone the day of Bill,” holding that such federal racial equality. In 1963 in laws imperiled their own Birmingham, Alabama, rights. They clung to the Klansmen bombed a black notion that rights were fnite, Baptist church and killed four and that as blacks gained girls. The next year, Klansmen freedom, whites must suffer in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a loss of their own liberties. murdered three civil rights On the precarious seesaw workers and buried them of Southern race relations, Often hooded, members of the Ku Klux Klan advocated and under an earthen dam. Such whites thought they would employed , violence, and lynching against African Americans, Jews, gruesome violence sickened plummet if blacks ascended. and Roman Catholics, among others. many white Southerners,

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 63 Throughout black-majority The civil rights movement While whites fought the ghosts of the Jim Crow South areas, the Voting Rights Act forever altered white civil rights movement have vanished. After the civil granted African Americans Southerners’ everyday lives, with varying strategies of rights movement, African a stunning new power. In upended their traditional resistance, few escaped its Americans could attend these citadels of the old attitudes about blacks, and, long reach. integrated schools, they ran slave South, where whites in some towns, shifted the In the end, the civil rights for — and won — political were outnumbered by a balance of political power. movement transformed office, and they lived with ratio of almost four-to-one, It stripped the veneers the South and the nation. a dignity that the culture blacks voted some of their of docility from African As it changed Southerners’ of Jim Crow had denied. own into political office. In Americans and invested lives and minds, some These changes also seeped several rural locales, like them with a new dignity. whites felt they had been into white Southern life and Macon County and Greene Life seemed unrecognizable liberated — freed from reshaped its very contours. County, Alabama, African to many white Southerners. the mandate to degrade The civil rights movement Americans suddenly wielded Confronted with a reality and oppress, free from the pushed Southerners, black political power. Before the they had barely contemplated, roles they assumed in the and white alike, further civil rights years, few whites some whites retaliated with constricting . along the path toward racial could have conceived of any weapons at their disposal. Into the 21st century, equality. such transformations. By Others attempted to avoid however, racial inequality the 1970s, the previously the upheaval; they tried to continues to haunt American unthinkable became political maintain cherished ways of life. Black Americans reality. life even as the ground shifted remain disproportionately By Jason Sokol beneath their feet. In the end, impoverished, imprisoned, A Mellon Postdoctoral evasion proved impossible. and undereducated. Yet many Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Sokol is also the author of There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights.

Lunchtime in an integrated public school.

64 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Epilogue

More than at any time in our nation’s history, we are all Americans. n March 21, 1965, Marshall, King, and the Integration, he said, was “an as civil rights others. The great triumphs insidious subterfuge, for Oadvocates and their of the civil rights movement the maintenance of white fragmented the Panther supporters gathered in Selma, were evidence that, in a supremacy.” Meanwhile, movement. It petered out in a local Southern Christian nation of laws, the key to the , a maze of factionalism and Leadership Conference progress lay in establishing (some accounts trace the mutual recriminations. leader warned the press the real legal equality of name to a visual emblem for The year 1968 was one of that the “irresponsibility” of African Americans — in illiterate voters used in an political upheaval throughout the more militant activists public facilities, in places of Alabama voter registration much of the Western world. might cause the movement education, and, most of all, at drive) founded in Oakland, In the United States, that year enormous harm. The the voting booth. California, in October 1966 would see the assassination Reverend Jefferson P. Rogers But this truth was not by activists Huey P. Newton of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was referring to the Student yet apparent. By May and , employed who as attorney general had Nonviolent Coordinating 1966, Stokley Carmichael, armed members — “Panthers” provided timely assistance to Committee, whose leadership veteran of numerous voter — to shadow police officers civil rights activists. And it was growing increasingly registration drives, had whom they believed unfairly would see the end of King’s impatient with the gradualist established himself as the targeted blacks. While remarkable career. strategy of Martin Luther new head of SNCC. In the party briefy enjoyed It was a measure of the King and the mainstream a speech at Greenwood, a measure of popularity, civil rights movement’s civil rights movement. Nearly Mississippi, Carmichael particularly through its social accomplishments in securing every broad-based social raised a call for “Black services programs, armed legal equality that King movement faces similar Power.” Where Thurgood altercations with local police dedicated his last years tensions, but the years and Marshall and Martin resulted in the death or to fghting for economic decades that followed would Luther King Jr. had sought jailing of prominent Panthers, equality. On April 3, 1968, prove the wisdom of the integration, Carmichael turned many Americans he campaigned in Memphis, strategy pursued by Thurgood instead sought separation. against its violent ways, and Tennessee, on behalf of

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 65 striking — and primarily black — sanitation workers. King’s last address drew strongly on his lifelong study of the Bible. It would prove prophetic: Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to . And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like Owning a home long has been a to live a long life — large part of the American Dream. longevity has its place. Left: Forty-two years after her friend But I’m not concerned Denise McNair was murdered by about that now. I just racist vigilantes, want to do God’s will. took office as the nation’s Secretary of State. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised who vote wield real political Land. I may not get there power. With the vote — and with you. But I want you the passage of time — legal to know tonight that we, and political equality for as a people, will get to African Americans has the Promised Land. And produced gains in nearly so I’m happy tonight; every walk of life. I’m not worried about John R. Lewis, for example, anything; I’m not fearing The murder of Martin The Triumphs of the Civil was one of the Freedom any man. Mine eyes Luther King Jr. set off riots Rights Movement Riders beaten bloody by the in Washington, D.C., and Montgomery mob in 1961. have seen the glory of the The historical experience in more than 100 other Today he represents Georgia’s coming of the . of African Americans American cities. At that Fifth District in the U.S. An assassin’s bullet took will always be unique. moment, the short of vision House of Representatives. King’s life the very next day. But meaningful federal and the faint of heart might Nearly 50 of his colleagues He was 39 years old. The enforcement of the right have questioned King’s life are African Americans, medical examiners said he to vote equipped black work. But the Promised Land and several of them wield died with the heart of a 60 Americans with the tools that King described was in great political power as year old, because King had that immigrants and other many ways far closer than it chairpersons of influential for so long carried the burden minority groups long have seemed on those angry, fre-lit congressional committees. of so many. Some 300,000 used to pursue — and achieve nights of . Americans attended — the American Dream. In his funeral. the United States, people

66 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time. And, as the President-elect told the nation on the night of his electoral triumph

President-elect Barack If there is anyone out Obama addresses a there who still doubts Chicago crowd on the that America is a night of his election to place where all things the presidency . are possible; who still wonders if the dream In 1963, Denise McNair they also refect the genuine Should government of our founders is alive was among the girls killed progress achieved over the intervene when schools are in our time; who still when racist vigilantes decades that followed. effectively segregated because questions the power of bombed Birmingham’s Consider education, the of new housing patterns, and our democracy, tonight is Sixteenth Street Baptist subject of the Brown v. Board not, as in Linda Brown’s day, your answer. Church. In 2005, her friend of Education decision. Recent because millions of African- Condoleezza Rice took office Supreme Court decisions American students were Obama’s victory is one as the nation’s secretary explore the permissible purposely segregated and measure of the nation’s of state. limits of “” relegated to shabby, inferior progress. Another measure, Black secondary school policies that seek to redress schools? surely the most important graduation rates have nearly past discrimination and Americans of all stripes of all, is the emergence, not tripled since 1966, and the to require or encourage can and do disagree over least among the younger rate of poverty has been that public institutions issues like this. And few Americans who will build nearly halved in that time. refect demographically the American leaders have the nation’s future, of a broad The emergence of a black communities they serve. answers to these dilemmas. and deep consensus that the middle class is a widely noted Judges are now asked to As this book goes to press, shameful histories of slavery, social development, as are decide the competing needs , the son of a segregation, and disadvantage the many successful African- in, for example, a school black man from and a must be relegated to the past. American entrepreneurs, district that allows all parents white woman from Kansas, scholars, and literary and to select their children’s has been elected President artistic achievers. school. If too many request a of the United States. In a Although Americans particular school, only some campaign speech on race in continue to wrestle with students may attend their America, Obama said that racial issues, those issues frst-choice institution. In the answer to the slavery differ profoundly from those that case, may the district question was already addressed by Thurgood assert, even as a “tiebreaker,” embedded within Marshall, Martin Luther its desire to maintain a racial our Constitution — a King, and the civil rights balance in that popular Constitution that had at movement. While today’s school to determine which its very core the ideal of questions are no less real, requests will be honored? equal citizenship under

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 67 Executive Editor: George Clack Editor-in-Chief: Mildred Solá Neely Managing Editor: Michael Jay Friedman Director: Min-Chih Yao Photo Research: Maggie Johnson Sliker

Michael Jay Friedman, the author of this volume’s principal text, is Division Chief for Print Publications at the Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs. He holds a PhD in U.S. political and diplomatic history. Printed by Global Publishing Solutions (A/ISS/GPS) © (09-20094-E-1.0) GPS U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Bureau of International Information Programs 2008 http://www.america.gov

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