Civil rights movement

The Civil Rights Movement refers to a set of noted events and reform movements in the United States aimed at abolishing public and private acts of racial discrimination against African Americans between 1954 to 1968, particularly in the southern United States. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, enlarged and gradually eclipsed the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from white authority.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century in the United States, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom. This period is sometimes referred to as the nadir of American race relations. Elected, appointed, or hired government authorities began to require or permit discrimination, specifically in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kansas. There were four required or permitted acts of discrimination against African Americans. They included racial segregation – upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 - which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level of government, voter suppression or disfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities. Although racial discrimination was present nationwide, the combination of law, public and private acts of discrimination, marginal economic opportunity, and violence directed toward African Americans in the southern states became known as Jim Crow.

Noted strategies employed prior to the Civil Rights Movement of 1955 to 1968 to abolish discrimination against African Americans initially included litigation and lobbying efforts by traditional organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These efforts were the distinction of the American Civil Rights Movement from 1896 to 1954. However, by 1955, private citizens became frustrated by gradual approaches to implement desegregation by federal and state governments and the "massive resistance" by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression. In defiance, they adopted a combined strategy of direct action with nonviolent resistance known as civil disobedience. The acts of civil disobedience produced crisis situations between practitioners and government authorities. The authorities of federal, state, and local governments often had to act with an immediate response to end the crisis situations – sometimes in the practitioners favor. Some of the different forms of civil disobedience employed include boycotts as successfully practiced by the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956) in Alabama, "sit-ins" as demonstrated by the influential Greensboro sit-in (1960) in North Carolina, and marches as exhibited by the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama.

Noted achievements of the Civil Rights Movement are the legal victory in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case that overturned the legal doctrine of "separate but equal" and made segregation legally impermissible, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations, passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that restored voting rights, passage of the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 which dramatically changed U.S. immigration policy, and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.

Key Events

The murder of Emmett Till, 1955

Murders of African-Americans at the hands of whites were still common in the 1950s and still unpunished in large areas of the South. The murder of Emmett Till, a teenage boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955 was different, however: the age of the boy, the nature of his crime—allegedly whistling at a white woman in a store—and his mother's decision to have the casket open at his funeral, showing the beating that had been inflicted on her son by his two white abductors before he was shot and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River on August 28 all made what might otherwise have been a routine statistic into a cause célèbre. As many as 50,000 people may have viewed his body at the funeral home in Chicago and many thousands more were exposed to the evidence of his murder when a photograph of his corpse was published in Jet Magazine.

The two murderers were arrested the day after Till's disappearance. They were acquitted a month later after the jury of all white men deliberated for sixty-seven minutes. The murder and subsequent acquittal galvanized opinion in the North in the same way that the long campaign to free the "Scottsboro Boys" had in the 1930s.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956

File:Rparksmug1.jpg

Rosa Parks' Police mugshot

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks (the "mother of the Civil Rights Movement") refused to get up out of her seat on a public bus to make room for white passengers. Rosa was arrested, tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. After word of this incident reached the black community, 50 African-American leaders gathered and organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott to protest the segregation of blacks and whites on public buses. The boycott lasted for 381 days, until the local ordinance segregating African-Americans and whites on public buses was lifted.

Mass action replaces litigation

That strategy shifted after Brown, however, to "direct action"—primarily bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience—from 1955 to 1965. In part this was the unintended result of the local authorities' attempt to outlaw and harass the mainstream civil rights organizations throughout the Deep South. The State of Alabama had effectively barred the NAACP from operating in Alabama in 1956 by requiring it to give the state a list of its members, then enjoining it from operating within the state when it failed to do so. While the United States Supreme Court ultimately reversed the order, for a few years in the mid-1950s the NAACP was unable to operate.

Churches and local grassroots organizations stepped in to fill the gap, and brought with them a much more energetic and broad-based style than the more legalistic approach of groups such as the NAACP.

The most important step forward was in Montgomery, Alabama, where longtime NAACP activists Rosa Parks and Edgar Nixon prevailed on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956. Activists and church leaders in other communities, such as Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had used the boycott in recent years, although those efforts often withered away after a few days. In Montgomery, on the other hand, the Montgomery Improvement Association created to lead the boycott managed to keep the boycott going for a year until a federal court order required Montgomery to desegregate its buses. The success in Montgomery made King a nationally known figure and triggered other bus boycotts, such as the highly successful Tallahassee, Florida boycott of 1956-1957.

The leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Dr. King and Rev. John Duffy, joined with other church leaders who had led similar boycott efforts, such as Rev. C. K. Steele of Tallahassee and Rev. T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge, and other activists, such as Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. The SCLC, with its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, did not attempt to create a network of chapters, the way the NAACP did, but offered training and other assistance for local efforts to fight segregation, while raising funds, mostly from northern sources, to support these campaigns. It made non-violence both its central tenet and its primary method of confronting racism.

In 1957, Septima Clarke, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, with the help of the Highlander Folk School began the first Citizenship Schools in South Carolina's Sea Islands, to teach literacy to allow blacks to pass voting tests. The program was an enormous success, tripling the number of black voters on St. John Island. The program was taken over by the SCLC and duplicated elsewhere.

Desegregating Little Rock, 1957

Following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown, the Little Rock, Arkansas school board voted in 1957 to integrate the school system. The NAACP had chosen to press for integration in Little Rock, rather than in the Deep South, because Arkansas was considered a relatively progressive southern state. A crisis erupted, however, when Governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus called out the National Guard on September 4 to prevent the nine African-American students who had sued for the right to attend an integrated school from attending Little Rock's Central High School.

Faubus himself was not a dyed-in-the-wool segregationist, but he had received significant pressure from the more conservative wing of the Arkansas Democratic Party, which controlled politics in that state at the time, after he had indicated the previous year that he would investigate bringing Arkansas into compliance with the Brown decision. Faubus took his stand against integration and against the federal court order that required it.

Faubus's order set him on a collision course with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was determined to enforce the orders of the Federal courts, even though he was lukewarm, at best, on the goal of desegregation of public schools. Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and ordered them to return to their barracks. Eisenhower then deployed elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the students.

The students were able to attend high school, although they had to pass through a gauntlet of spitting, jeering whites to arrive at school on their first day and to put up with harassment from fellow students for the rest of the year.

Sit-ins and freedom rides

Sit-ins

The Civil Rights Movement received an infusion of energy when students in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee and Atlanta, Georgia began to "sit-in" at lunch counters in local stores to protest those establishments' refusal to desegregate. Protesters were encouraged to dress up, sit quietly, and occupy every other stool so potential white sympathizers could join in. Many of these sit-ins resulted in authority figures physically and brutally escorting them from the lunch facility.

The technique was not new—the Congress of Racial Equality had used it to protest segregation in the Midwest in the 1940s—but it brought national attention to the movement in 1960. The success of the Greensboro sit-in led to a rash of student campaigns throughout the South. Probably the best organized and disciplined of these, and the most immediately effective, was in Nashville, Tennessee. By the end of 1960 the sit-ins had spread to every southern and border state and even to Nevada, Illinois, and Ohio. Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but also on parks, beaches, libraries, theaters, museums, and other public places. When they were arrested, student demonstrators made "jail-no-bail" pledges to call attention to their cause and to reverse the cost of protest, putting the financial burden of jail space and food on the jailers.

Freedom Rides

The activists who had led these sit-ins formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 to take these tactics of nonviolent confrontation further. Their first campaign, in 1961, was conducting freedom rides, in which activists traveled by bus through the deep South to desegregate these companies' bus terminals, as required by federal law. CORE's leader, James Farmer, supported the freedom rides, but backed out at the last minute.

That proved to be an enormously dangerous mission. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed, forcing its passengers to flee for their lives. In Birmingham, where an FBI informant reported that Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor had encouraged the Ku Klux Klan to attack an incoming group of freedom riders "until it looked like a bulldog had got a hold of them," the riders were severely beaten. In eerily quiet Montgomery, a mob charged another bus load of riders, knocking John Lewis unconscious with a crate and smashing Life photographer Don Urbrock in the face with his own camera. A dozen men surrounded Jim Zwerg, a white student from Fisk University, and beat him in the face with a suitcase, knocking out his teeth.

The freedom riders did not fare much better in jail, where they were crammed into tiny, filthy cells and sporadically beaten. In Jackson, Mississippi, some male prisoners were forced to do hard labor in 100-degree heat. Others were transferred to Parchman Penitentiary, where their food was deliberately oversalted and their mattresses were removed. Sometimes the men were suspended by "wrist breakers" from the walls. Typically, the windows of their cells were shut tight on hot days, making it hard for them to breathe.

The student movement involved such celebrated figures as John Lewis, the single-minded activist who "kept on" despite many beatings and harassments; James Lawson, the revered "guru" of nonviolent theory and tactics; Diane Nash, an articulate and intrepid public champion of justice; Bob Moses, pioneer of voting registration in Mississippi the most rural—and most dangerous—part of the South; and James Bevel, a fiery preacher and charismatic organizer and facilitator. Other prominent student activists included Charles McDew; Bernard Lafayette; Charles Jones; Lonnie King; Julian Bond (associated with Atlanta University); Hosea Williams (associated with Brown Chapel); and Stokely Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Ture.

Organizing in Mississippi

In 1962 Robert Moses, SNCC's representative in Mississippi, brought together the civil rights organizations in the state—SNCC, the NAACP, and CORE—to form COFO, the Council of Federated Organizations. Mississippi was the most dangerous of all the southern states, yet Moses, Medgar Evers of the NAACP, and local activists embarked on door-to-door voter education projects in rural Mississippi, while trying to recruit students to their cause. Evers was murdered the following year.

While COFO was working at the grassroots level in Mississippi,Clyde Kennard attempted to enter the University of Southern Mississippi. He was deemed a racial agitator by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, convicted of a crime he didnt commit, and sentenced to seven years in jail. He served three, and then was freed, but only because he had intestinal cancer and the government of Mississippi didnt want him to die in prison. Two years later, James Meredith was successfully suing for admission to the University of Mississippi. He won that lawsuit in September, 1962, and attempted to enter the campus on September 20, on September 25, and again September 26, 1962, only to be blocked by Mississippi Governor Ross R. Barnett, who proclaimed that "no school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor". After the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held both Barnett and Lieutenant Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr. in contempt, with fines of more than $10,000 for each day they refused to allow Meredith to enroll, Meredith, escorted by a force of U.S. Marshals, entered the campus on September 30, 1962.

White students and other whites began rioting that evening, throwing rocks at the U.S. Marshals guarding Meredith at Lyceum Hall, then firing on the marshals. Two persons, including a French journalist, were killed, 28 marshals suffered gunshot wounds and 160 others were injured. After the Mississippi Highway Patrol withdrew from the campus, President Kennedy sent the regular Army to the campus to quell the uprising. Meredith was able to begin classes the following day, after the troops arrived.

The Albany Movement, 1961-1967

The SCLC, which had been criticized along with other mainstream civil rights organizations by some student activists for its failure to participate more fully in the freedom rides, committed much of its prestige and resources to a desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. King, who had been criticized personally by some SNCC activists for his distance from the dangers that local organizers faced—and given the derisive nickname "De Lawd" as a result—intervened personally to assist the campaign led by both SNCC organizers and local leaders.

The campaign was a failure due to the canny tactics of Laurie Pritchett, the local police chief, who successfully contained the movement without the sort of violent attacks on demonstrators that inflamed national opinion, and divisions within the black community. Prichett also contacted every prison and jail within 60 miles of Albany and arranged for arrested demonstrators to be taken to one of these jails, allowing plenty of room to remain in his jail. In addition to these arrangements, Prichett also foresaw King's presence as a danger, and allowed his release to avoid King's rallying the black community. King left in 1962 without achieving any dramatic victories. The local movement, however, continued the struggle and obtained significant gains in the next few years.

The Birmingham campaign, 1963-1964

The Albany movement proved to be an important education for the SCLC, however, when it undertook the Birmingham campaign in 1963. The campaign focused on one concrete goal—the desegregation of Birmingham's downtown merchants—rather than total desegregation, as in Albany. It was also helped by the brutal response of local authorities, in particular Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety who had lost a recent election for mayor to a less rabidly segregationist candidate, but refused to accept the new mayor's authority.

The campaign used a variety of nonviolent methods of confrontation, including sit-ins, kneel-ins at local churches, and a march to the county building to mark the beginning of a drive to register voters. The City, however, obtained an injunction barring all such protests. Convinced that the order was unconstitutional, the campaign defied it and prepared for mass arrests of its supporters. King elected to be among those arrested on April 12, 1963.

While in jail, King wrote his famous (April 16) Letter from Birmingham Jail on the margins of a newspaper, since he had not been allowed any writing paper while held in solitary confinement by jail authorities. Supporters pressured the Kennedy administration to intervene to obtain his release or better conditions. King eventually was allowed to call his wife, who was recuperating at home after the birth of their fourth child, and was released on April 19.

The campaign, however, was faltering at this time, as the movement was running out of demonstrators willing to risk arrest. SCLC organizers came up with a bold and controversial alternative, calling on high school students to take part in the demonstrators. When more than a thousand students left school on May 2 to join the demonstrations in what would come to be called the Children's Crusade, more than six hundred ended up in jail. This was newsworthy but with this first encounter the police acted with restraint. On the next day however another thousand students gathered at the church and Bull Connor unleashed police dogs on them, then turned the city's fire hoses, set at a level that would peel bark off a tree or separate bricks from mortar, on the children. Television cameras broadcast the scenes of fire hoses knocking down schoolchildren and dogs attacking individual demonstrators, with no means of protecting themselves, to the nation.

Widespread public outrage forced the Kennedy administration to intervene more forcefully in the negotiations between the white business community and the SCLC. On May 10, the parties announced an agreement to desegregate the lunch counters and other public accommodations downtown, to create a committee to eliminate discriminatory hiring practices, to arrange for the release of jailed protesters, and to establish regular means of communication between black and white leaders.

Not everyone in the black community approved of the agreement—Fred Shuttlesworth was particularly critical, since he had accumulated a great deal of skepticism about the good faith of Birmingham's power structure from his experience in dealing with them. The reaction from parts of the white community was even more violent. The Gaston Motel, which housed the SCLC's unofficial headquarters, was bombed, as was the home of King's brother, the Reverend A. D. King. Kennedy prepared to federalize the Alabama National Guard, but did not follow through. Four months later, on September 15, Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (see 16th Street Baptist Church bombing) in Birmingham, killing four young girls.

Other events of the summer of 1963:
On June 11,1963, George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, attempted to block the integration of the University of Alabama. President John F. Kennedy sent enough force to make Governor Wallace step aside, allowing the enrollment of two black students. That evening, JFK addressed the nation on TV and radio with a historic civil rights speech.^[1] The next day Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi.^[2] The next week as promised, on June 19 1963, JFK submitted his Civil Rights bill to Congress.^[3]

The March on Washington, 1963

A. Philip Randolph had planned a March on Washington in 1941 in support of demands for elimination of employment discrimination in defense industries; he called off the march when the Roosevelt administration met the demand by issuing Executive Order 8802 barring racial discrimination and creating an agency to oversee compliance with the Order.

Randolph and Bayard Rustin were the chief planners of the second March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which they proposed in 1962. The Kennedy administration applied great pressure on Randolph and King to call it off, but without success. The march was held on August 28, 1963.

Unlike the planned 1941 march, for which Randolph included only black-led organizations in the planning, the 1963 march was a collaborative effort of all of the major civil rights organizations, the more progressive wing of the labor movement, and other liberal organizations. The march had six official goals: "meaningful civil rights laws, a massive federal works program, full and fair employment, decent housing, the right to vote, and adequate integrated education." Of these, the March's real focus was on passage of the civil rights law that the Kennedy administration had proposed after the upheavals in Birmingham.

The march was a success, although not without controversy. More than 200,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. While many speakers applauded the Kennedy Administration for the (largely ineffective) efforts it had made toward obtaining new, more effective civil rights legislation protecting the right to vote and outlawing segregation, John Lewis of SNCC took the Administration to task for how little it had done to protect southern blacks and civil rights workers under attack in the Deep South. While he toned down his comments under pressure from others in the movement, his words still stung:

We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here—for they have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages…or no wages at all. In good conscience, we cannot support the administration's civil rights bill.

This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses when engaging in peaceful demonstrations. This bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped-up charges like those in Americus, Georgia, where four young men are in jail, facing a death penalty, for engaging in peaceful protest.

I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it in the courts. Listen Mr. Kennedy, the black masses are on the march for jobs and for freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won't be a 'cooling-off period'.

After the march, King and other civil rights leaders met with President Kennedy at the White House. While the Kennedy administration appeared to be sincerely committed to passing the bill, it was not clear that it had the votes to do it. But when President Kennedy was assassinated November 22 1963,^[b] the new President Lyndon Johnson decided to and did use his power in Congress to bring about much of JFK's legislative agenda in 1964 and 1965 much to the public's approval.

Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964

COFO brought more than a hundred college students, many from outside the state, to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 ("Freedom Summer") to join with local activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom Schools" and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The work was as dangerous as ever: three civil rights workers, James Chaney, a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two white volunteers, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College anthropology student; and Michael Schwerner, a social worker from Manhattan's Lower East Side, were murdered by members of the Klan, some of them members of the Neshoba County sheriff's department, on June 21, 1964.

The national uproar caused by their disappearance forced the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate, even though President Johnson had to use indirect threats of political reprisals against J. Edgar Hoover to force him to do so. After paying at least one participant in the crime for details about the murders, the FBI found their bodies on August 4 in an earthen dam outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman had been shot once; Chaney, the lone African-American, had been savagely beaten and shot three times. The FBI also discovered in the course of its investigation the bodies of a number of other Mississippi blacks whose disappearances had been reported over the past several years without attracting any attention outside their local communities.

The disappearance of these three activists remained in the public eye for the month and-a-half until their bodies were found. Johnson used the outrage over their deaths and his formidable political skills to bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed July 2, which bars discrimination in public accommodations, employment and education. It also had a section about voting, but voting was addressed more substantially by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964

COFO had held a Freedom Vote in Mississippi in 1963 to demonstrate the desire of black Mississippians to vote. More than 90,000 people voted in mock elections which pitted candidates from the "Freedom Party" against the official state Democratic party candidates. In 1964, organizers launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the all-white slate from the state party. When Mississippi voting registrars refused to recognize their candidates, they held their own primary, selecting Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray to run for Congress and a slate of delegates to represent Mississippi at the 1964 national Democratic convention.

Their presence in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was very inconvenient, however, for the convention organizers, who had planned a triumphal celebration of the Johnson Administration’s achievements in civil rights, rather than a fight over racism within the Democratic Party itself. Johnson also was worried about the inroads that Barry Goldwater’s campaign was making in what previously had been the Democratic stronghold of the "Solid South" and the support that George Wallace had received during the Democratic primaries in the North. Other all-white delegations from other southern states had threatened to walk out if the all-white slate from Mississippi were not seated.

Johnson could not, however, prevent the MFDP from taking its case to the Credentials Committee, where Fannie Lou Hamer testified eloquently about the beatings that she and others were given and the threats they faced for trying to register to vote. Turning to the television cameras, Hamer asked, "Is this America?"

Johnson attempted to preempt coverage of Hamer's testimony by calling a hastily scheduled speech of his own. When that failed to move the MFDP off the evening news, he offered the MFDP a "compromise" under which it would receive two non-voting, at-large seats, while the white delegation sent by the official Democratic Party would retain its seats. The MFDP angrily rejected the compromise. As Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers' successor as President of the NAACP 's Mississippi affiliate, stated:

"Now, Lyndon made the typical white man's mistake: Not only did he say, 'You've got two votes,' which was too little, but he told us to whom the two votes would go. He'd give me one and Ed King one; that would satisfy. But, you see, he didn't realize that sixty-four of us came up from Mississippi on a Greyhound bus, eating cheese and crackers and bologna all the way there; we didn't have no money. Suffering the same way. We got to Atlantic City; we put up in a little hotel, three or four of us in a bed, four or five of us on the floor. You know, we suffered a common kind of experience, the whole thing. But now, what kind of fool am I, or what kind of fool would Ed have been, to accept gratuities for ourselves? You say, Ed and Aaron can get in but the other sixty-two can't. This is typical white man picking black folks' leaders, and that day is just gone."

Hamer put it even more succinctly:

"We didn't come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we’d gotten here. We didn't come all this way for no two seats, 'cause all of us is tired."

The MFDP kept up its agitation within the convention, however, even after it was denied official recognition. When all but three of the "regular" Mississippi delegates left because they refused to pledge allegiance to the party, the MFDP delegates borrowed passes from sympathetic delegates and took the seats vacated by the Mississippi delegates, only to be removed by the national party. When they returned the next day to find that convention organizers had removed the empty seats that had been there the day before, they stayed to sing freedom songs.

The 1964 convention disillusioned many within the MFDP and the Civil Rights Movement, but it did not destroy the MFDP itself. The MFDP became more radical after Atlantic City, inviting Malcolm X to speak at its founding convention and opposing the war in Vietnam.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his above-mentioned work for peace, December 10 1964.^[4]

Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965

SNCC had undertaken an ambitious voter registration program in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, but made little headway in the face of opposition from Selma's sheriff, Jim Clark. After local residents asked the SCLC for assistance, King came to Selma to lead a number of marches, at which he was arrested along with 250 other demonstrators. The marchers continued to meet violent resistance from police. A Selma resident, Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed by police at a later march in February.

On March 7, Hosea Williams of the SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC led a march of 600 people who intended to walk the 54 miles from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. Only six blocks into the march, however, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and local law enforcement, some mounted on horseback, attacked the peaceful demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire and bull whips, driving them back into Selma. John Lewis was knocked unconscious and dragged to safety, while at least 16 other marchers were hospitalized. Among those gassed and beaten was Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was at the center of civil rights activity at the time.

The national broadcast of the footage of lawmen attacking unresisting marchers seeking only the right to vote provoked a national response similar to the scenes from Birmingham two years earlier. While the marchers were able to obtain a court order permitting them to make the march without incident two weeks later, local whites murdered another voting rights supporter, Rev. James Reeb after a second march to the site of Bloody Sunday on March 9. He died in a Birmingham hospital March 11. Four Klansmen shot and killed Detroit homemaker Viola Liuzzo March 25 as she drove marchers back to Selma at night after the successful completed march to Montgomery.

Johnson delivered a televised address to Congress eight days after the first march in support of the voting rights bill he had sent to Congress. In it he stated:

But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.

Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6. The 1965 Act suspended poll taxes, literacy tests and other voter tests and authorized federal supervision of voter registration in states and individual voting districts where such tests were being used. African-Americans who had been barred from registering to vote finally had an alternative to the courts. If voting discrimination occurred, the 1965 Act authorized the Attorney General of the United States to send federal examiners to replace local registrars. Johnson reportedly stated to associates that signing the bill had lost the South for the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future.

The Act, however, had an immediate and positive impact for African-Americans. Within months of its passage on August 6, 1965, one quarter of a million new black voters had been registered, one third by federal examiners. Within four years, voter registration in the South had more than doubled. In 1965, Mississippi had the highest black voter turnout—74%—and led the nation in the number of black public officials elected. In 1969, Tennessee had a 92.1% turnout; Arkansas, 77.9%; and Texas, 73.1%.

Several Whites who opposed the voting rights act paid an immediate price as well. Sheriff Jim Clark of Mississippi who was infamous for using fire hoses and cattle prods to counteract civil rights marches was up for reelection in 1966. Taking off the notorious "Never" pin on his uniform to get the Black portion of the vote, he was unsuccessful. At the election poll, he lost as Blacks voted for the sake of just taking him out of office by any means possible.

Blacks winning the right to vote changed the political landscape of the South forever. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, barely 100 African-Americans held elective office in the U.S.; by 1989, there were more than 7,200, including more than 4,800 in the South. Nearly every Black Belt county in Alabama had a black sheriff, and southern blacks held top positions within city, county, and state governments. Atlanta had a black mayor, Andrew Young, as did Jackson, Mississippi—Harvey Johnson—and New Orleans, with Ernest Morial. Black politicians on the national level included Barbara Jordan, who represented Texas in Congress, and former mayor Young, who was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Carter Administration. Julian Bond was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1965, although political reaction to his public opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam prevented him from taking his seat until 1967. John Lewis currently represents Georgia's 5th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives, where he has served since 1987. Lewis sits on the House Ways and Means and Health committees.

The American Jewish community and the Civil Rights movement

Many in the American Jewish community supported the Civil Rights Movement. The Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald funded dozens of primary schools, secondary schools and colleges for black youth. He gave, and led the Jewish community in giving to, some 2,000 schools for black Americans. This list includes Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities. At one time some forty percent of southern blacks were learning at these schools.{{citation needed}} Fifty percent of the civil rights lawyers who worked in the south, were Jewish.{{citation needed}}

Leaders of the Reform Movement were arrested with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in the 1965 March on Selma. Source: Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Civil Rights

Abraham Joshua Heschel, a writer, rabbi and professor of theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America was outspoken on the subject of civil rights and marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in Selma.

The PBS television show From Swastika to Jim Crow explores Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement, demonstrating that Jewish professors, refugees from the Holocaust came to teach at Southern Black Colleges in the 1930s and '40s. There came to be empathy and collaboration between Blacks and Jews. Professor Ernst Borinski organized dinners at which blacks and whites sat next to each other, a simple act that challenged segregation. Black students empathized with the cruelty these scholars had endured in Europe.^[1]

The American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League actively promoted civil rights.

Fraying of alliances

King reached the height of popular acclaim during his life in 1964, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His career after that point was filled with frustrating challenges, as the liberal coalition that had made the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to fray.

King was, by this point, becoming more estranged from the Johnson administration, breaking with it in 1965 by calling for peace negotiations and a halt to the bombing of Vietnam. He moved further left in the following years, moving towards socialism and speaking of the need for economic justice and thoroughgoing changes in American society beyond the granting of the civil rights that the movement had sought to that date.

King's attempts to broaden the scope of the Civil Rights Movement were halting and largely unsuccessful, however. King made several efforts in 1965 to take the Movement north to address issues of employment and housing discrimination. His campaign in Chicago failed, as Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley marginalized King's campaign by promising to "study" the city's problems. In 1966, white demonstrators holding "white power" signs in then notoriously racist Cicero, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, threw stones at King and other marchers demonstrating against housing segregation, injuring King.

Race riots, 1963-1970

Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, many acts were signed into legislation guaranteeing equality for Black citizens. Enforcement of these acts, especially in northern cities was another issue altogether. After World War II, more than half of the country's Black population lived in northern and western cities rather than southern rural areas. Coming to these cities for better job opportunities and a lack of legal segregation, Blacks often did not receive the lifestyle that they had come for.

While Blacks were free from segregation and terror at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, other problems often presided. Urban Black neighborhoods were in fact amongst the worst and poorest in any major city. These neighborhoods were Ghettos rampant with unemployment and crime. Blacks rarely owned any neighborhood stores or businesses, most of which were Jewish owned. Blacks often worked menial or blue collar jobs for a fraction of pay that their white co-workers were working for. Blacks often made enough money to only live in the most dilapidated housing or public housing. Blacks often also were eligible for welfare being unable to find a well paying job. Drugs such as Cocaine and Heroin supplied by the Italian Mafia were out of control in Black neighborhoods before Whites ever began experimenting with them. Liquor stores were also in abundance adding to the lack of opportunity for Blacks that was in place. The only way for Blacks to ever make any sizable income was illegally through dealing drugs and pimping prostitutes. Blacks attended schools that were often the worst academically in the city and had very few White students inside of them. Worst of all, Black neighborhoods were subject to police problems that White neighborhoods were not at all accustomed to dealing with. The police forces in America were set up with the motto "To Protect and Serve." Rarely did this occur in any Black neighborhoods rather many Blacks felt police only existed to "Patrol and Control." The whiteness of the police departments was a huge factor here. Up until 1970, no urban police force in America was greater than 10% Black, in most Black neighborhoods, Blacks accounted for less than 5% of the police on patrol. The police were primarily constituted of Irish, Italian, and Eastern Europeans; all of which were poorer working class Whites that hated Blacks more than the upper-class Anglo-Saxon Whites. Arrests merely for being Black were common and as a result of racist police harassment and all the other listed factors causing for a poor living standard, rioting eventually broke out.

One of the first major racial riots in America took place in New York City in the Black neighborhood of Harlem in the summer of 1964. A White Irish-American Police officer Thomas Gilligan shot a 15 year old Black named James Powell for allegedly charging him with a knife. The fact remains that Powell was in fact unarmed and as a result, an angry mob approached the precinct demanded Gilligan's suspension and when it went unenforced, rampant rioting of several of the Jewish owned stores had occurred. Even though this precinct at the time had promoted the NYPD's first Black station commander, the neighborhood people were tired of the inequalities in place, and were so enraged that they looted and burned anything that was not Black owned in the neighborhood. This riot had later spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant, the main Black neighborhood in Brooklyn and during that same summer, riots broke out also in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for similar reasons.

The following year, 1965 President Johnson signed the voting rights act but Black conditions had not grown any better in several neighborhoods. This time, in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, another riot broke loose. Watts, like Harlem was subject to impoverished living conditions where unemployment and drugs were rampant and the neighborhood was subject to the patrol of an overtly White police department. The police, who were arresting a young man for drunk driving, argued with the suspect's mother before onlookers. The result like that of Harlem was a massive destruction of property caused by brutality at the hands of White police officers. The riot lasted six days. Thirty-four people were killed and property valued at about $30-million was destroyed, making the Watts riot one of the worst in American History.

With Black militancy on the rise, several acts of anger were now directed at police alone. Black residents growing tired of police brutality continued to riot and even began to join groups such as the Black Panthers solely to rid their neighborhoods of oppressive White police officers. Now, Blacks had not only began rioting but also began murdering White police who were deemed as racist and brutal while shouting words such as Honky and Pig towards the officers.

Rioting continued through 1966 and 1967 in cities such as Atlanta, San Francisco, Baltimore, Newark, Chicago, Brooklyn, and worst of all in Detroit. In Detroit, Michigan, several Blacks had previously received jobs in assembling automobiles, so a comfortable Black middle class was living well. However, all the Blacks who had not moved upward were living in even worse conditions subject to the same problems as Blacks in Watts and Harlem. When White police officers murdered a Black pimp and brutally shut down an illegal bar on a liquor raid, Black residents got extremely angered and began a new riot. The Detroit riot was so bad that it was one of the first major cities where Whites began to leave in a sense of "White Flight" because the riot seemed threatening enough to burn down White neighborhoods as well. Cities such as Detroit, Newark, and Baltimore now have a less than 40% White population as a result of these riots. Many Blacks felt victorious in ridding Whites from these cities, but to this day, these cities contain some of the worst living conditions for Blacks anywhere in America.

Rioting continued in 1968 after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered by alleged White supremacist, James Earl Ray. This time a riot broke out in every major city at once, but the cities that were burned the worst include Chicago, Cleveland, and Washington D.C.. The result of these riots called for major reforms in employment and public assistance sent to Black communities everywhere. It was seen that Blacks were demanding equality by any means necessary; while many Whites left these cities, many others gave in to these demands.

Affirmative Action helped in the hiring process of more Black police officers in every major city, and as a result cities such as Baltimore, Washington D.C., New Orleans, Atlanta, Newark and Detroit now have a majority Black police department. While many are glad at this development, many criticize the hiring of these officers as a method of appeasement and covering up of racism at the hands of the police departments. Employment discrimination in modern times is less of a problem but still at times happens. Illegal drugs are still rampant in Black neighborhoods, but statistics now show that Whites are as if not more likely to experiment than Blacks. Overall, improvements have been made in every city affected by these riots, but work is still to be done so that inequality can one day maybe disappear completely.

Black power, 1966

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Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos (right) showing the Black Power salute in the 1968 Summer Olympics, while Silver medalist Peter Norman (left) wears an OPHR badge to show his support for the two Americans.

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A statue honoring Carlos and Smith at San Jose State University

At the same time King was finding himself at odds with factions of the Democratic Party, he was facing challenges from within the Civil Rights Movement to the two key tenets upon which the movement had been based: integration and nonviolence. Black activists within SNCC and CORE had chafed for some time at the influence wielded by white advisors to civil rights organizations and the disproportionate attention that was given to the deaths of white civil rights workers while black workers' deaths often went virtually unnoticed. Stokely Carmichael, who became the leader of SNCC in 1966, was one of the earliest and most articulate spokespersons for what became known as the "Black Power" movement after he used that slogan, coined by activist and organizer Willie Ricks, in Greenwood, Mississippi on June 17, 1966.

In 1966 SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael also took Black Power to another level. He urged African American communities to meet the white supremacist group known as the Ku Klux Klan armed and ready for battle because he felt it was the only way to ever rid the communities of the terror caused by the Klan. Listening to this, several Blacks met the Ku Klux Klan armed and as a result the Klan stopped terrorizing their communities.

Several people engaging in the Black Power movement started to gain more of a sense in Black pride and identity as well. In gaining more of a sense of a cultural identity, several Blacks demanded that Whites no longer refer to them as "Negroes" but as "Afro-Americans." Up until the mid-1960s, Blacks had dressed similarly to whites and combed their hair straight. As a part of gaining a unique identity, Blacks now started to wear loosely fit Dashikis which were a multi-colored African clothing and had started to grow their hair out as a natural Afro. The Afro sometimes nicknamed the 'fro remained a popular black hairstyle until the late 1970s.

Black Power was made most public however by the Black Panther Party which founded in Oakland, California in 1966. This group followed ideology stated by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam using a "by-any-means necessary" approach to stopping inequality. They sought to rid African American neighborhoods of Police Brutality and had a ten-point plan amongst other things. Their dress code consisted of leather jackets, berets, light blue shirts, and an Afro hairstyle. They are best remembered for setting up free breakfast programs, referring to white police officers as "pigs", displaying shotguns and a black power fist, and often using the statement of "Power to the people."

Black Power was taken to another level inside of prison walls. In 1966, George Jackson formed the Black Guerilla Family in the California prison of San Quentin. The goal of this group was to overthrow the White ran government in America and the prison system in general. This group also preaches the general hatred of Whites and Jews everywhere. In 1970, this group displayed their ruthlessness after a White prison guard was found not guilty for shooting three black prisoners from the prison tower. The guard was found murdered in pieces and a message of how serious the group is was heard throughout the whole prison. This group also masterminded the 1971 Attica riot in New York which led to a takeover of the Attica prison. To this day, the Black Guerilla Family is one of the most feared and infamous advocates of Black Power behind prison walls.

Also in 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, while being awarded the gold and bronze medals, respectively, at the 1968 Summer Olympics, donned human rights badges and each raised a black-gloved Black Power salute during their podium ceremony. Incidentally, it was the suggestion of white silver medalist, Peter Norman of Australia, for Smith and Carlos to each wear one black glove. Smith and Carlos were immediately ejected from the games by the USOC, and later the IOC issued a permanent lifetime ban for the two. However, the Black Power movement had now been given a stage on live, international television.

King was not comfortable with the "Black Power" slogan, which sounded too much like black nationalism to his ears. SNCC activists, in the meantime, began embracing the "right to self-defense" in response to attacks from white authorities, and booed King for continuing to advocate non-violence. When King was murdered in 1968, Stokely Carmichael stated that Whites murdered the one person who would prevent rampant rioting and burning of major cities down and that Blacks would now burn every major city to the ground. In every major city from Boston to San Francisco, racial riots broke out in the Black community following King's death and as a result, "White Flight" occurred from several cities leaving Blacks in a dilapidated and nearly unrepairable city.

Memphis and the Poor People's March, 1968

Rev. James Lawson invited King to Memphis, Tennessee, in March, 1968, to support a strike by sanitation workers who had launched a campaign for union representation after two workers accidentally were killed on the job. A day after delivering his famous "Mountaintop" sermon at Lawson's church, King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Riots broke out in over 110 cities across the United States in the days that followed, notably in Chicago, Baltimore, and in Washington, D.C.

Rev. Ralph Abernathy succeeded King as the head of the SCLC and attempted to carry forth King's plan for a Poor People's March, which would have united blacks and whites to campaign for fundamental changes in American society and economic structure. The march went forward under Abernathy's plainspoken leadership, but is widely regarded as a failure.

Footnotes

To the reader : If you arrived at a footnote by clicking on a superscript [b] then click on its superscript b, to return:

^ "Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights," june 11 1963, transcript from the JFK library.
^ Medgar Evers, a worthwhile article, on The Mississippi Writers Page, a website of the University of Mississippi English Department.
^ ^b Civil Rights bill submitted, and date of JFK murder, plus graphic events of the March on Washington. This is an Abbeville Press website, a large informative article apparently from their book The Civil Rights Movement (ISBN 0789201232).
^ MLK's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on December 10 1964. This is part of the Nobel Foundation website.

External links

University of Southern Mississippi's Civil Rights Documentation Project, includes an extensive Timeline
What Was Jim Crow? (The racial caste system that precipitated the Civil Rights Movement)
Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, Mississippi, Civil Rights sculpture
History and images of the sit-in movement
Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project
"You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!" PBS documentary on first Freedom Ride, in 1947
Materials relating to the desegregation of Ole Miss in 1962
Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Florida from the State Archives of Florida
At the River I Stand California Newsreel documentary on Civil Rights and labor rights in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation workers' strike. 56 minutes, 1993
Civil Rights Movement Veterans website bios, photos, and testimony from nearly 300 people who fought for civil rights in the Deep South of the mid-1960s
The Georgia Movement

Jewish community and civil rights

Documentary films

Freedom on my Mind, 110 minutes, 1994, Producer/Directors: Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford, 1994 Academy Award Nominee, Best Documentary Feature
Eyes on the Prize, PBS television series.

^ PBS website From Swastika to Jim Crow

[1] PBS website From Swastika to Jim Crow

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