From Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (Clayborne Carson) Awakenings (1954-1956) Introduction by Vincent Harding “Another man done gone” was the painfully ambiguous, often bitter cry that was so familiar to the black community of the United States in the 1950s. Thus, many person would not have been surprised if the inhuman, atavistic (but terribly recognizable) murder of a young Chicago-based teenager in Mississippi, and the predictable legal exoneration of his murderers, had led to nothing more than tears, burning, bottled-up rage, and a great outpouring of indignant words from the relatively safe North But 1955 was a new time, and more than tears and words were needed. Now, even though the newness of the time was only dimly perceived in that brutally familiar summer, some things were known. Just about everyone who was black and alive at the time realized that the long, hard struggles, led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), its often brilliant and courageous lawyers, and its lengthening line or risk-taking black plaintiffs, had forced the Supreme Court to take a major stand on the side of justice in the Brown v Board of Education of Topeka decision. A young black man who had been in the Marine Corps at the time of the Court’s decision spoke for many black people when he later remembered how he felt when he heard about the 1954 decision: My inner emotions must have been approximate to the Negro slaves’ when they first heard about the Emancipation Proclamation. Elation took hold of me so strongly that If found it very difficult to refrain from yielding to an urge of jubilation . On this momentous night of May 17, 1954, I felt that at last the government was willing to assert itself on behalf of first-class citizenship, even for Negroes. I experience a sense of loyalty that I had never felt before. I was sure that this was the beginning of a new era of American Democracy. Robert Williams, who shared those memories, in Negroes with Guns (Marzani Munssall, 1962), soon after became a fugitive from America’s justice. Yes, it seemed clear that 1955 was different. By then a rising tide of the nonwhite peoples of the globe had gathered at Bandung, Indonesia, to demand that the Western world hear their determined pronouncements that the old white-dominated colonial order was a dying way of life. And many Afro-Americans understood that they were somehow part of this reemerging contingent of the world’s most ancient peoples. They felt a fundamental agreement with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the audacious preacher-politician from Harlem who came back from Bandung to announce that the revolutions of the nonwhite world had brought us all to a new point in history with new responsibilities for justice and freedom. Of course, a similarity existed between Powell’s sentiments and those of the thousands of black veterans of World War II who had returned home determined to carry on the struggle for democracy. It was they, too, who helped to make it a different time. In 1955 the nation was deeply involved in what it chose to call a “cold war” with a Russian-led, anti-capitalist network of nations. The United States was proclaiming itself “the leader of the free world,” and many of its white leaders especially wanted to demonstrate to the raw materials-rich nations of the nonwhite world that the U.S.A. did not deserve their acerbic taunts concerning the apparently unfree condition of this nation’s own major nonwhite community. In a variety of ways, the new international situation put the black community in the United States in its best bargaining Supplemental Readings July 18, 2009 www.sffreedomschool.org p. 1 of 10 position since the end of the Civil War. Finally, if anyone had any doubts that 1955 was a new time, they needed only to pay close attention to what was developing in Montgomery, Alabama, by the end of the year. There, in the old capital of the Confederacy, inspired by one woman’s courage; mobilized and organized by scores of grassroots leaders in churches, community organizations, and political clubs; called to new visions of their best possibilities by a young black preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., a people was reawakening to its destiny. By the end of the following year, after a long, hard, and dangerous struggle, it was clear that the events that transpired in Montgomery, Alabama, marked a unique, mass-based new beginning in a struggle that had been going on in this land since the first slave ships denied the colonists’ claims to be democratic, since the first enslaved Africans demanded through their words and their deeds that this new nation be faithful to its own best vision. Montgomery was the newest manifestation of the embattled black dream, the latest coming of the vision-based people determined to create a new reality for themselves and all Americans, beginning with a chance to sit in peace and dignity on a Montgomery city bus. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From Chicago Defender editorial October 1, 1955 Eyes on the Prize Reader (ed. Carson et al) For the Mose Wrights are born with low ceilings over their heads. They’re denied an education, they’re denied a fair return for their labor; they’re denied the right to participate in their government; they’re denied a chance to walk in the sun and frequently denied the right to live until they’re sixty- five, as Milam reminded Mose Wright. In the midst of this frustration, it appears that the Negro in the South as well as the North, has but one way to go. That is to the ballot box. And the federal government, starting with the White House that been so negligent in the past in these matters, must be prodded into making it possible for the Negro to exercise this one right—the right to vote. Yes, the Till trial is over, but the Till case cannot be closed until Negroes are voting in Tallahatchie and Leflore counties and throughout the South. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (Juan Williams) Organizing before the Boycott: An Interview with Jo Ann Robinson The Women’s Political Council [WPA] was an organization begun in 1946 after dozens of black people had been arrested on the buses. We witnessed the arrests and humiliations and the court trials and the fines paid by people who just sat down on empty seats. We knew something had to be done. We organized the Women’s Council and within a month’s time we had over a hundred members. We organized a second chapter and a third . .Wherever there were more than ten blacks employed, we had a member there. We were organized to the point that we knew that in a matter of hours we could corral the whole city. The evening that Rosa Parks was arrested, Fred Gray called me and told me that her case would be [heard] on Monday. As president to the main body of the WPA, I got on the phone and called all the officers of the three chapters. I told them that Rosa Parks had been arrested and she would be tried. They said, “You have the plans, put them into operation.” I didn’t go to bed that night. I cut those stencils and took them to [the] college . I ran off Supplemental Readings July 18, 2009 www.sffreedomschool.org p. 2 of 10 35,000 copies. After we had circulated those 35,000 circulars, we went by the church. That was about 3:30 in the afternoon. We took them to the minister. The [ministers] agreed to meet that night to decide what should be done about the boycott after the first day. You see, the WPA planned it only for Monday, and it was left up to the men to take over after we had forced them really to decide whether or not it had been successful enough to continue, and how long it was to be continued. They had agreed at the Friday night meeting that they would call this meeting at Holt Street Church and they would let the audience determine whether or not they would continue the bus boycott or end it in one day. Monday night, the ministers held their meeting. The church itself holds four or five thousand people. But there were thousands of people outside of the church that night. They had to put up loudspeakers so they would know what was happening. When they got through reporting that very few people had ridden the bus, that the boycott was really a success. .. .they voted unanimously to continue the boycott. I think people were fed up . that they had to do it or die. And that’s what kept it going. It was the sheer spirit for freedom, for the feeling of being a man or a woman. Now when you ask why the courts had to come in, they had to come in. You get 52,000 people in the streets and nobody’s showing any fear, something had to give. So the Supreme Court had to rule that segregation was not the way of life . We [ met] after the news came through. All of these people who had fought got together to communicate and to rejoice and to share that built-up emotion and all the other feelings they had lived with during the past thirteen months. And we just rejoiced together. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- King Papers Project http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/index Jo Ann Robinson (1912-1992) As president of the Women’s Political Council (WPC) and a board member of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), Jo Ann Robinson was instrumental in creating and sustaining the Montgomery bus boycott, the nonviolent protest that brought national attention to Martin Luther King, Jr.