300 word debate essay

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CHAPTER 4

We Changed the World 1945–1970

Vincent Harding Robin D. G. Kelley Earl Lewis

Near the end of the Second World War, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., one of black America’s most internationally conscious spokesmen, tried to place the ongoing African-American freedom movement into the context of the anticolonial struggles that were rising explosively out of the discontent of the nonwhite world. Already, movements for independence had begun in British colonies in West Africa and French colonies in West and Equatorial Africa. Later, colonies in North Africa and British East Africa joined the freedom struggle. Powell, who was both a flamboyant and effective congressman from Harlem and the pastor of that community’s best-known Christian congregation, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, declared:

The black man continues on his way. He plods wearily no longer—he is striding freedom road with the knowledge that if he hasn’t got the world in a jug, at least he has the stopper in his hand. … He is ready to throw himself into the struggle to make the dream of America become flesh and blood, bread and butter, freedom and equality. He walks conscious of the fact that he is no longer alone no longer a minority.

Although they might not have been able to express it in Powell’s colorful language, many black Americans were quite aware of the changes taking place. There were glaring differences, for instance, between where they grew up in the South and the Northern cities where they were trying to establish themselves for the first time. Most of the new arrivals realized that the North was not heaven, but they believed that it

was a place where they could escape some of the most hellish aspects of their life in the South. For instance, they did not expect ever again to have to see the bodies of men hanging from trees after they had been riddled with bullets and often mutilated. They did not expect that women would be vulnerable to rape and exploitation simply because they were black and defenseless. In the Northern cities they did not expect to have to teach their children to move out of the path when white people were approaching.

Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis. To Make Our World Anew, Volume II, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615. Created from apus on 2017-03-02 15:46:40.

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A member of the 12th Armored Division stands guard over Nazi prisoners who were captured by U.S. forces in 1945.

Blacks also migrated to the West and settled in cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle. One of the most exciting gifts that these new locales offered was the opportunity for black people to vote as free men and free women for the first time in their lives. Registering to vote in Philadelphia, Detroit, or Oakland did not mean risking your life and the lives of your family, risking your job or your home. In those postwar years, black people took significant advantage of this new freedom and became voters in even larger proportions than white Southerners who had migrated North. As a result, black voters in some Northern cities like Chicago and New York held the balance of power in close municipal elections. This new political involvement brought with it another change. In most of the Northern cities

where the black Southerners settled, the political structures were largely dominated by the Democratic party. Generally, the men who controlled these tightly organized political machines were eager to add the newly arrived black people to their voting tallies as long as they thought they could control their votes. And, in fact, millions of African Americans eventually broke away from their generations-long allegiance to the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. Ironically enough, this transfer of allegiance meant that Northern blacks were now aligned with the same Democratic party that had long been dominated on the national scene by the white racist sons of the slaveholders, men who kept their control of the party largely through terrorist acts to deny black voting rights in the South. In the North, black voters were now part of that Democratic party structure and were in a position to begin to challenge its worst traditions. Despite such rewards as finding better jobs and educational opportunities, and gaining the

right to vote, this liberating movement into the Northern cities carried some clear penalties. Racism lived in many white urban neighborhoods and postwar suburbs. The rising black middle class, anxious to buy property in a “nice” neighborhood with good schools and efficient services, often bumped up against a threatening white mob and its racist rhetoric. Sometimes white resistance to black neighbors turned deadly. In Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and

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several other cities (in both the North and the South), newly purchased homes were burned, vandalized, or had crosses burned on their lawns—a common tactic adopted by white supremacist organizations, notably the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, there were real estate agents and white residents who insisted that their form of

segregation was not racist but driven by economic realities. They claimed to have nothing against black people but were simply worried about their homes declining in value. Sadly, their arguments were tacitly backed by the federal government, notably the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the agency that insured homeowners’ loans to low-income Americans and set housing standards. Indeed, after the Second World War, the FHA refused to provide mortgages to blacks moving into white neighborhoods and claimed that African Americans were regarded as poor risks for loans. The FHA also claimed that the future value of homes owned by blacks was uncertain. Most of the new migrants could not afford to buy homes immediately, especially in the

sprawling suburbs. No matter where they ended up, however, primarily the inner areas of urban centers like Chicago and Detroit, they sought to create the rich sense of community they had left behind. For even in the midst of harsh white oppression and poverty, black people, nurtured by their extended families and by their churches, had managed to build astonishing reservoirs of love, faith, and hope in the South. Such support was not readily available in the North. Reflecting on his own Harlem childhood in Nobody Knows My Name (1961), James

Baldwin caught some of the perplexing dilemma of a city block in the long-anticipated “Promised Land” of the North.

They work in the white man’s world all day and come home in the evening to this fetid block. They struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child to survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifference, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patience, nor is patience usually enough. … Such frustration so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and women whose only crime is color to the very gates of paranoia. …

It required the sensitivity and skills of gifted artists to capture the complexities of the changes that millions of black women, men and children were experiencing in their movement North. Baldwin was only one of the writers who tried to explain that complexity to the world. Ann Petry provided a painfully honest account of a young woman’s encounter with the Northern urban reality in her novel The Street. Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man reflected the humor, anger, hope, and the search for new beginnings that the urban experience represented for the transplanted black Southerners. Ellison’s protagonist discovers a major difference between the South and the North when he first arrives in Harlem and begins to mingle with the evening crowds who have gathered to listen to the street-corner teachers and lecturers. Most of the rousing speeches eventually turn to the injustices of white people against people of color at home and abroad, and the young man in the novel, who has come North from Alabama, says, “I never saw so many Negroes angry in public before.” The expanding ability to be angry in public was a major part of the change that black people

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found in the North. In his novels, short stories, and essays, Richard Wright, who had originally gone to Chicago from Mississippi in the twenties, expressed this anger and its consequences more vividly and consistently than anyone else in his novel Native Son (1940). Still, there were emotions and experiences that could never be captured by the written word.

The music surging out of black communities became a powerful vehicle for communicating these feelings. The blues that had come up with the solitary old guitars from Memphis and the Mississippi Delta took on the new electricity and complexity of the cities, eventually becoming the music of small combos and big bands, pressing on toward what would soon be known as rhythm and blues. At the same time, out of the familiar settings of classic African-American jazz, piercing new sounds began to break through, offering unexpected, unresolved, and often jagged tonal edges in place of the smoother flows of the music from which it sprang. This was called “bebop” or “bop” for short. The names of its practitioners—Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie (“Yardbird”) Parker, and the young Miles Davis—and the boldness of their lifestyles soon became as well known in the black community and among white jazz fans as their predecessors Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, and Coleman Hawkins. Whatever else bop was, it was the music of change. Everything in it sounded protest, marked

a determination to break out of the older, predictable harmonies. Based in places like Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, the 52nd Street jazz strip further downtown in New York City, and Los Angeles’s famed Central Avenue, the irrepressible music grew out of the urgency of a postwar generation to sing its new songs, to wail and scream when necessary. Nowhere were the songs more important than in the thousands of black churches in the

Northern cities. Following the lead of vibrant women vocalists such as Mahalia Jackson, Sallie and Roberta Martin, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, supplied with a stream of songs by the prolific gospel songwriter Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey, the churches were filled with resounding, rhythmic witness to the new time, as gospel singers shouted, “There’s been a great change since I been born.” In the decade following the Second World War, more than sixty percent of the black

population was still living in the South, however. And the nation’s attention focused on that region as the African-American community won a series of significant battles in the courts and at the executive level of the federal government. In 1946, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. Two years later, the Court outlawed the use of “restrictive covenants”—codicils added on to a deed to limit the sale of a home to specific racial groups. Restrictive covenants were generally used to keep African Americans from buying homes in all-white neighborhoods. Although these gains were long overdue, they were partial outgrowths of national and international circumstances that forced President Harry S. Truman and the Democrats to pay attention to blacks. First, Truman, his cabinet, and Congress were all concerned about America’s image abroad,

especially now that the United States was competing with the Soviet Union for influence over the new nations in Asia and Africa, for example, created by the collapse of European colonialism. They could not promote their version of democracy abroad as long as the United States treated its own black citizens so badly. Second, Truman’s reelection in 1948 depended on black votes more than ever. This time around, the Democratic party was in utter disarray. On one side stood former Vice President Henry Wallace, who decided to run for president as a

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member of the newly formed Progressive party. Wallace was highly regarded in the black community; his civil rights record was impeccable, and he sought to bring the Cold War with the Soviet Union to an end through cooperation rather than military threats. On the other side were the Southern Democrats led by South Carolina senator Strom

Thurmond. Their break from the Democrats further divided the vote, creating a situation in which black voters would have a decisive role in the elections. Calling themselves the States’ Rights party (also known as the Dixiecrats), these Southern Democrats believed Truman’s civil rights agenda had gone too far. Because Truman had to respond to African-American and international pressure, he and his

cabinet contributed to the Southern white flight from the Democratic party. The main catalyst was Truman’s decision to create the first Civil Rights Commission. The commission’s report, To Secure These Rights (1947), proposed some specific ways in which the federal government might respond to the demands of the postwar black community. For example, the report called for the establishment of a permanent federal civil rights commission—a bold and progressive proposal in those days. The report urged an end to segregation in the U.S. armed forces and pressed for laws to protect the voting rights of black people. To Secure These Rights provided solid evidence to black people that their needs were

finally being dealt with at the highest level of U.S. political life. Meanwhile, almost every year in the crucial postwar decade seemed to produce new, affirming responses from the federal courts to the dozens of challenges to segregation and disenfranchisement that the NAACP and thousands of black plaintiffs were pressing in the courts. One of the most important of these cases, Morgan v. Virginia, was heard by the U.S.

Supreme Court in 1946. Irene Morgan had firmly refused to move to the back of a Virginia-to- Baltimore Greyhound bus, as Virginia law required. She was convicted of a misdemeanor. The Court declared that the practice of segregated seating in interstate public transportation was unconstitutional and that black people traveling across state lines could not be legally forced into segregated rear seats when they arrived in a Southern state. The “back of the bus” experience was one of the most humiliating and widely known manifestations of legalized white supremacy, so word of the decision was welcomed in the nation’s black communities. Irene Morgan became a hero among black Americans. But a Supreme Court decision did not guarantee change. Neither the bus companies nor the Southern states leaped to comply with the ruling. So others had to take up Irene Morgan’s initiative and move it forward. That was precisely what happened in the spring of 1947 when a group of sixteen men,

evenly divided between black and white, began what they called a Journey of Reconciliation. The trip was organized by a Chicago-based interracial organization known as the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. A relatively new offshoot from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—a Christian pacifist organization, founded during the First World War, that advocated nonviolent social change through civil disobedience—CORE was deeply committed to nonviolent direct action. Its members took inspiration from the spirit of the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi in their quest for racial justice and reconciliation. At the same time, with the black members of the team sitting in front and the whites in back of the two Greyhound and Trailways buses that they rode from Washington, D.C., to stops in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, they were testing compliance with the recent Morgan decision and

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urging federal enforcement of the ruling. The major immediate result of the journey was that some other black passengers felt encouraged to move toward the front of the buses. In one incident during the fifteen-city trip through the South, three members of the CORE team were arrested and sentenced to twenty-one days of hard labor on a North Carolina prison farm. The Journey of Reconciliation provided the model for the later Freedom Rides in 1961. Probably no legal victory of the immediate postwar years could match the overall

significance of the 1944 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright. This decision essentially destroyed one of the major legal obstacles to black political participation in the South—the white primaries of the Democratic party. Earlier in the twentieth century, having claimed that their party primary voting process was

the activity of private associations, Democrats managed to exclude African Americans from participating in this “private” activity. As a result, black citizens were left with little voice in government, since the Southern Democratic primaries often determined the outcome of the general elections. African Americans refused to accept this situation, and in state after state they brought lawsuits challenging these exclusively white primaries. In July 1940, Lonnie Smith, an African-American resident of Harris County, Texas, was

stopped from voting in the Democratic party’s primary election. Though he met all the legal requirements to vote, Smith was forbidden to vote because of his race. With the assistance of an NAACP legal team that included attorney Thurgood Marshall, Smith sued election judge Allwright. Finally, in Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court responded to the black challengers with a judgment outlawing the white primary process. When that happened, everyone knew that a new era was beginning: blacks across the South took that decision regarding the Texas primary as a signal to expand and intensify their voter registration activity. With the help of a ruling by a South Carolina federal judge, J. Waties Waring, black

plaintiffs won a crucial victory in that state. When South Carolina attempted to circumvent the Smith v. Allwright decision by removing all statutes relating to primaries—on the assumption that without state involvement, the Democratic primaries would be a private matter—George Elmore challenged the state’s move. In the case of Rice v. Elmore (1947), Waring ruled that as long as the Democratic primary constituted the only real election in the state, blacks were entitled to participate in it. In many places this was a dangerous resolve to take, especially in the rural South’s “Black

Belt”—a line of counties stretching from North Carolina to Texas, where the flat and fertile land had been dominated by cotton plantations. There, the legacy of plantation-based slavery had created counties where black people outnumbered whites in proportions of three-, four-, and five-to-one—sometimes more. The obvious implications of this human arithmetic were clearly stated by one distressed white cotton-gin owner. Speaking to a New York Times reporter, he tried to imagine what would happen if black people gained full access to the ballot box in his Tennessee county: “The niggers would take over the county if they could vote in full numbers. They’d stick together and vote blacks into every office in the county. Why you’d have a nigger judge, nigger sheriff, a nigger tax assessor—think what the black SOB’s would do to you.” Ever since the days of slavery such fears were common to many white Southerners who

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wondered what black people would do if the racial tables were turned. Many whites found it easy to rally around the virulently racist rhetoric of a politician like Theodore G. Bilbo, U.S. senator from Mississippi. He voiced the fears of many Southern whites, especially the poorer ones, when he declared that the Second World War “and all of its great victories will not in any way or in any manner change the views and sentiments of white America on the question of social equality … of the negro and white race.” In a time when so much was changing, Bilbo and his fellow white supremacists were seeking guarantees that they would continue to dominate. Throughout the South, white supremacists were desperate to preserve an old world that was

coming to an end. They had no intention of giving up their control of the region and would use all legal means of undermining the constitutional defenses on which black people increasingly depended. Many also conspired to use illegal means, from economic coercion to acts of terrorism, to keep their black fellow Southerners “in their place.” Nowhere was this new world more evident than in the ranks of the thousands of African

Americans who returned from the battlegrounds of the Second World War. They were the ones who seemed most ready to demonstrate the truth of Adam Clayton Powell’s statement that black people were “ready to throw [themselves] into the struggle to make the dream of America become flesh and blood.” A recently discharged army corporal from Alabama spoke for many of his black comrades in 1945 when he declared, “I spent four years in the army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home. No sirree-bob! I went into the Army a nigger; I’m comin’ out a man.” Among those determined to win voting rights for blacks in the South was a solid core of

veterans who felt like they had earned the right to vote after risking their lives for democracy overseas. In 1946, brothers Charles and Medgar Evers returned home from the war to their town of Decatur, Mississippi, determined to vote. But they were driven away from the registrar’s desk, and one of the white men predicted that there would be “trouble” if these black citizens persisted in their attempts to register and vote. But he could never have guessed the nature of the coming trouble. For the Evers brothers and thousands like them would return all over the South to challenge the keepers of the old terror. The powerful thrusts of postwar change were not confined to politics. A remarkable change

in the world of sports captured the attention of the rest of the nation. Jackie Robinson, another veteran of the war and a baseball player with the Kansas City Monarchs of the segregated Negro Leagues, was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945. The action broke the racial barrier in major league baseball, the “national pastime.” An outstanding athlete who had lettered in baseball, basketball, track, and football at the University of California at Los Angeles, an outspoken critic of America’s racial betrayals of democracy, the twenty-eight- year-old Robinson spent a year with the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal before finally joining the Brooklyn lineup in the spring of 1947. Black people were ecstatic. The black community followed local and national developments in civil rights by reading

African-American newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide. These papers were circulated through many hands in households, barbershops, beauty parlors, churches, and restaurants. In

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the hands of Pullman car porters, they found their way into the Deep South as well. By reading the papers, black people followed the anticolonial, independence-oriented

exploits of the darker-skinned majority of the world in places like India, Africa, and China. There were constant references to Gandhi, who had spent decades challenging his people in India to wage a nonviolent struggle for independence against the great British Empire that governed them. Repeatedly, the black newspapers carried letters and editorials contending that Gandhi’s movement offered a model for black America, especially in the South. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University in Washington, D.C.; Howard Thurman, mystically oriented preacher and dean of Howard University’s chapel; and Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, were some of the best-known black Americans who had made the pilgrimage to the ashrams, the humble communal villages where Gandhi based himself. Gandhi’s life and teaching mirrored some of the best African-American traditions. Like the

nineteenth-century abolitionists David Walker and Frederick Douglass, like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Howard Thurman, Gandhi believed that the despised of the earth actually carried within their own lives and history the seeds of healing transformation for themselves, their oppressors, and their world. So when black Americans identified their struggle as part of a larger, worldwide movement, it was not simply the idea “that [we are] no longer alone” that compelled them. It was also the vision that as the rising children of their enslaved forbears, they—like Gandhi’s masses—might have some liberating gift to offer to the world. While blacks were developing an understanding of worldwide repression, the U.S.

government seemed to be, in some instances, supporting that repression. On the one hand, U.S. foreign policy appeared to link the United States with the interests and points of view of its white, Western allies, such as England, France, Portugal, and white South Africa, countries still identified with colonial domination. On the other hand, as part of the deepening Cold War against the Soviet Union, the United States was also projecting itself as “the leader of the free world,” avowedly concerned for the rights of oppressed people everywhere, especially people of color who might be tempted to turn to the Soviet Union and to other socialist and communist movements for assistance in their freedom struggles. So when black leaders with socialist sympathies, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and the

politically active actor, singer, and scholar Paul Robeson, spoke out on behalf of the nonwhite peoples and their freedom struggles, when they articulated too positive a view of the Russian Revolution’s social and economic ambitions, when they sharply criticized U. S. foreign and domestic policy, the U.S. government considered them un-American and dangerous. The passports of both men were confiscated to prevent them from traveling and speaking abroad on behalf of the anticolonial movements and against the reign of white supremacy in America. Still, both men continued to speak out. But the price they paid was very high. Robeson essentially lost his lucrative concert career, and ultimately his health. Du Bois, in the fearful climate of anticommunism in America, found himself deserted by many people who had benefited from his decades of unstinting service to the cause of freedom, justice, and democratic hope, and he moved permanently to Africa. Anticommunist fervor virtually crushed these two intellectual giants, but it could not crush

the movement. In the streets and in the courts, black activists forced the federal government to Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis. To Make Our World Anew, Volume II, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615. Created from apus on 2017-03-02 15:46:40.

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admit that segregation was wrong and must be remedied. By 1954, it became evident to all that African Americans, like their counterparts in the colonial world, would no longer wait for the birth of a new freedom.

Jim Crow Must Co!: The Road from Brown to Montgomery Revolutions always exact a price from their participants. People have lost their livelihoods, lost friends and family, lost their connection to community, even lost their lives. The movement to end segregation and press America to live up to its creed of justice for all was no different. Nowhere was this personal cost more obvious than in the five legal cases that would force their way into the U.S. Supreme Court and become known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education. The case known as Briggs v. Elliott provided the legal bedrock on which the entire set of Brown cases was built. The setting for this initial drama was Clarendon County, South Carolina, known for its bitter

resistance to any attempts at changing the brutal traditions of white supremacy. There, love for their children drove black parents to take the simple but dangerous risk of confronting the school board with their children’s need for bus transportation to their segregated school. The white children had several buses, while the black children, who outnumbered the others, had no buses at all. Of course, the black parents and their supporters were also aware that the all- white school board spent more money on each white child in the county than on each black one. What the adults had to figure out was how to deal with the rude and repeated rebuffs from the school board and its chairman, R. W. Elliott, who said at a meeting with black people, “We ain’t got no money to buy a bus for your nigger children.” Then Rev. J. A. Delaine, a local black pastor and school superintendent in Summerton, met

Rev. James A. Hinton, a regional representative for the NAACP, at a meeting at Allen College, one of the black colleges in Columbia, about sixty miles from Summerton. Hinton told the gathering that the NAACP was trying to find men and women to become plaintiffs in a case that would challenge the legality of the segregated schools. Delaine knew after the meeting that he had to become the bridge between the unrelenting but frustrated neighbor parents and the national organization. Delaine and his wife worked for the school board they were suing, and both lost their jobs.

They also lost their home and their church when the buildings were burned to the ground. Meanwhile, in Farmville, Virginia, in 1951, a courageous sixteen-year-old high-school junior organized her fellow students to fight for equal facilities for black schools. Under Barbara Rose Johns’s dynamic leadership, the black students at the woefully inadequate Moton High not only went on strike but arranged with the NAACP to file a desegregation lawsuit in their county. That suit was eventually tied to the one initiated by Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas, on behalf of his daughter Linda and all the black children of their city. The Topeka school board had denied Linda Brown admission to a school just five blocks

from her home, forcing her to make a long commute across town, because her neighborhood school was for whites only. Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund were the attorneys for the Browns. In his Supreme Court argument, Marshall presented evidence that separating black and white students placed the

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blacks at a great disadvantage. Marshall’s strategy was to force the Supreme Court to overturn the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which upheld the legality of segregation as long as states provided “separate but equal” facilities to African Americans. Such practices, he said, violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection of the laws. Once he was able to get the Court to overturn Plessy, Marshall did not have to prove that facilities set aside for “colored only” were unequal to those set aside for whites. To buttress his argument, Marshall brought in pioneering black psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, whose research demonstrated that African-American children in inferior, segregated schools had a negative self-image and generally performed poorly as a result. When the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in Brown on Monday, May

17, 1954, it was a stunning accomplishment. All eyes focused on the solemn announcement that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” After more than half a century of determined struggle, black people and their allies had finally turned the Supreme Court around. Two days after Brown, the Washington Post declared, “It is not too much to speak of the court’s decision as a new birth of freedom.” Perhaps it was only the opening of a new chapter in the long black struggle for authentic

democracy in America. But it forced individual men and women to make hard, exciting choices about how they would lead their own lives. In Boston, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his new bride, the former Coretta Scott, had been facing such choices together ever since their marriage in June 1953, and his completion of the coursework for his doctorate in theology at Boston University. Soon Coretta would complete her three years of work in music education at the New England Conservatory of Music, and the choices they had been wrestling with were now leading to a move from Boston to Montgomery, Alabama. Born in Atlanta in January 1929, Martin was the beloved first son of Martin Luther King,

Sr., one of that city’s leading Baptist ministers, and his wife, Alberta Williams King, whose father had been the founding pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the congregation now headed by King Senior. The younger King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the most respected black colleges in the nation, when he was only fifteen. He became a popular student leader and a serious student. When he was eighteen, not long before he graduated from Morehouse with a B.A. in

sociology, King decided to stop resisting an inner calling to the Christian ministry. So his father proudly ordained the young man who had finally decided that he would not take the path of law or medicine, possibilities that had intrigued him for a while. At that point in his life young “M.L.” was often torn between the image of ministry he saw in his father, a pietistic man with an engaging, emotionally charged approach, and the one he found in Benjamin Mays, Morehouse’s president. Mays’s combination of profound spirituality, intellect, and commitment to social justice left a deep mark on the lives of many of his “Morehouse Men.” Martin King, Jr., left Atlanta in 1948 to enroll at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester,

Pennsylvania (one of the few white theological schools that accepted more than one or two black men in each entering class). He carried with him a profound sense of identity with the black church, community, and extended family that had done so much to shape and nurture him. Although he knew that he did not want to be the kind of preacher that his father was, King was deeply appreciative of the older man’s unwavering religious faith and his readiness to confront

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racism. So although Crozer was King’s first extended experience in an overwhelmingly white

institution, he was spiritually and mentally prepared for it. By now the young Atlantan, whose eloquence was praised by his professors, was firmly grounded in the way of thinking that marked the lives of many young black people in those days. He knew that his life and career were not simply matters of personal success and advancement. Instead, he recognized and acknowledged an inextricable connection to the “cause” of black advancement, to the responsibility he bore for fighting for “the uplift of the race.” King graduated from Crozer in 1951 as valedictorian of his class and received a coveted fellowship to pursue his doctorate at Boston University. The decision to do doctoral work reflected King’s continuing exploration of the possibility that he might somehow combine his love for academic work with his passion for the Christian ministry. In Boston, King was introduced to Coretta Scott, a bright, attractive young woman who had

grown up not far from Selma, Alabama. Living in the rural South of the thirties and forties, Coretta saw many instances of violently enforced white domination, including the beating of her father. With these disturbing memories of the past and her own professional ambitions on her mind, Coretta King was strongly inclined to stay out of the South. And King was attracted by invitations to consider positions in the North. But, King later remembered, “The south, after all, was our home. Despite its shortcomings we loved it as home. …” At the same time, Martin and Coretta King were part of the long black Southern tradition that called on its educated young people to work to change the South they had known. So Coretta was neither very surprised nor very resistant when her husband finally declared

that they were going to live in the South. By the spring of 1954 King had accepted an invitation to the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the city known as “The Cradle of the Confederacy.” Montgomery was where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the pro-slavery states that seceded from the Union in 1861. By the time King began his official tenure as pastor of Dexter’s middle-class congregation in September 1954, it was clear that the city’s black population of close to fifty thousand was on the brink of a new time. Like their counterparts throughout the South, many of the most activist-oriented members of

Montgomery’s black population had been prodded into new forms of organizing. For instance, the expanding, state-by-state defeat of the segregated white primary system inspired the creation of a number of voter registration organizations and campaigns in Montgomery. It also encouraged a variety of risky experiments to challenge the humiliating segregation of everyday life. One of the most important of these experiments was the formation of the Women’s Political

Council (WPC), a well-organized group of black, middle-class women. They developed an important telephone communications link (called a “telephone tree” in those days) among their members, initially used for voter registration campaigns. But eventually the group expanded its concerns to other issues faced by a black community in a white-dominated segregated city. In the early fifties these issues ranged from black citizens’ seeking access to the public parks that their taxes helped to maintain to the constantly vexing matter of the harsh treatment black people received on the local buses.

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It was not long before King discovered that the creative and outspoken chairperson of the WPC, JoAnn Robinson, a faculty member at Alabama State College, the local black college, was a member of Dexter’s congregation. He quickly recruited her to lead the church’s Social and Political Action Committee, which he had organized. In turn, as Robinson and her conscientious group of women took their concerns into the chambers of the Montgomery City Council, she often called on her young pastor to go with them to add his sharp mind, eloquent voice, and passionate commitment to justice to their arguments for change. In Montgomery, as elsewhere in the South, those black citizens demanding justice included

many military veterans. The Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, pastor of First Baptist Church, was one of the best known of these veterans. He had served with the U.S. Army in Europe, then returned to study at Montgomery’s Alabama State College and earn his master’s degree in sociology at Atlanta University. As Abernathy later recalled of those days in Montgomery, “Many of the older clergy were in favor of sweeping social change, but they were willing for it to come about slowly, when white society was ready to accept it.” He also remembered that “those of us in our twenties were less patient and less afraid of making trouble. …As we talked with one another, we began saying that we were willing to help tear down the old walls, even if it meant a genuine uprising.” Another highly regarded veteran freedom worker who was ready for change was E. D.

Nixon, the gruff-voiced, outspoken Pullman car porter who had worked for years with the legendary A. Philip Randolph organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Now in his fifties, Nixon was probably best known for his role as president of the Alabama branch of the NAACP and as an unrelenting campaigner for black citizenship rights, especially the right to vote. In his NAACP role, Nixon was quietly and efficiently assisted by a highly respected woman in her early forties who served as secretary to the local NAACP branch and as adviser to the organization’s youth council. A seamstress by profession, she was named Rosa Parks, and she turned out to be less patient than she sometimes seemed. By 1955, it was not just Montgomery’s black pastors, NAACP members, and community

leaders who sensed with Martin and Coretta King that something remarkable was happening. Many of the city’s ordinary black citizens recognized that they were entering a new time. Of course, they (and the rest of the nation, even the world) also knew about the brutal

lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was beaten and killed in Mississippi in 1955 by two white men after Till made the mistake of speaking familiarly to a white woman, the wife of one of the men. The black newspapers and journals spread the word (and the photos) of the murdered teenager whose Chicago upbringing had not prepared him for the proper approach to a white woman in rural Mississippi. The papers also reported that black Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr., of Michigan, and national NAACP officials went to Money, Mississippi, to attend the trial of Till’s accused killers, along with Till’s mother, Mamie Till, who helped to turn the tragedy of her son’s death into a rallying point for the Civil Rights movement. Because she insisted on an open casket, and allowed photographs, people nationwide saw firsthand the horrors of Southern lynching. In spite of the predictable not-guilty verdict in the Till murder case that summer, the black

people of Montgomery realized they had seen signals of a new time: In the heart of Bilbo’s Mississippi, keepers of the past had been forced to hold a trial and to face a black member of

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the U.S. House of Representatives; they had been pressed to recognize the rising power of an inflamed black community at home and to answer hard questions from people of color and of conscience from around the world. For many ordinary black citizens, some of their most painful and consistently humiliating

encounters with white power and injustice took place in public, especially on city buses. In the mid-fifties the automobile had not yet become the ubiquitous presence that it is now especially not for the thousands of black people in Montgomery who earned their living as maids, cooks, janitors, porters, and the like. High-school and college students were also part of the seventeen thousand or so black people who made up some seventy-five percent of the passengers on the segregated buses. During their daily rides, blacks were relegated to the often-crowded back area and were forbidden to take vacant seats in the forward white section, even if no white passengers were present. Beyond this were the all-too-common encounters with rude and hostile white bus drivers (there were no black ones) who often called their black passengers “apes,” “niggers,” “black cows,” and other demeaning names. Often they demanded that blacks get up and surrender their seats to white passengers when the white section was full. Black passengers were also required to pay their fare in front and then get off to re-board through the rear door. Such practices were common on the buses in cities all over the South, but that did not make

them any more palatable. In the spring of 1955 a teenaged Montgomery high-school student named Claudette Colvin loudly resisted both the driver’s orders to give up her seat and the police who were called to arrest her. Colvin’s screams and curses were not quite what leaders like Robinson and Nixon had in mind as they searched for a case that could be used to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregated seating. Their aim was to rally the black community to experiment with a brief boycott of the buses that would focus not only on the segregated seating but on the humiliating treatment. Colvin was not the test case they needed, but Nixon and the waiting WPC forces knew that someone else would eventually be pressed beyond the limit and would resist. Evicted in the early forties for sitting too far forward, Rosa Parks, who had long served as a freedom worker, provided the opportunity that Nixon and the WPC needed. On December 1, 1955, quiet, soft-spoken Rosa Parks did what she had to do. After all, she

was a veteran freedom worker and in many ways one of the most prepared for this historic moment. During the previous decade, she had served as secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, worked on voter-registration campaigns, and had run the local NAACP Youth Council. Because of her earlier challenge to bus segregation ordinances, a few bus drivers refused to stop for her. Perhaps she remembered how right she had felt the previous summer at the Tennessee training center for social change called Highlander Folk School, as she talked with other black and white participants about Montgomery and what was needed there. They talked about their South and how they might contribute to the powerful transformation unfolding everywhere. Perhaps she remembered the young people of her NAACP Youth Council and the models they needed. So when a bus driver told Parks and three other black people in her row to get up and

relinquish their seats to a white man who was standing, she had to say no. There were no shouts, no curses, no accusations, just an inwardly powerful woman sensing the strength of her

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conviction and refusing to move. When, inevitably, policemen boarded the bus and one ordered her to get up, she still had to say no, realizing that arrest would be the next step. Rosa Parks, the magnificently proper and respectable church member, prepared to go to jail, in a time when such people did not go to such places. But first she responded to the policeman who asked her why she did not obey the driver. She said, “I didn’t think I should have to.” Then she asked the officer, “Why do you push us around?” His response may have been the only one he could give: “I don’t know.” Yet he revealed his own entrapment in the system: “But the law is the law, and you are under arrest.” And he took Rosa Parks to the police station.

Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, was accompanied by NAACP activist E. D. Nixon (second from left) as she appealed her conviction.

At the station Parks called her friend and NAACP coworker, E. D. Nixon. For the veteran freedom worker, the shock of Parks’s arrest was immediately mixed with the conviction that this was the test case that would challenge the city’s bus segregation laws. After informing Parks’s husband, Raymond, and her mother, Nixon immediately contacted two local whites he knew he could depend on, Clifford and Virginia Durr. Clifford Durr was a white lawyer in private practice, and he and Nixon went to the station to bail out Rosa Parks. Immediately they began discussing with her the possibility that her arrest could develop into the test case they all needed, and that she needed to recognize the physical and economic risks this might entail. After some hesitation on the part of her husband, Parks and her family were ready. But history, JoAnn Robinson, and the black people of Montgomery soon overtook those

original plans. For when Robinson heard the news of Parks’s adventure she realized that the arrest of her friend was potentially more powerful than a legal case. She began to use the telephone tree that her WPC had developed for its voter-registration work, and soon dozens of black people knew that the highly respected Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to

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cooperate with the humiliating bus segregation practices that troubled them all. Working all that night and into the next morning, Robinson managed to compose, type the stencil, and run off more than thirty thousand mimeographed copies of a leaflet that said:

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off all buses Monday.

That morning, Friday, December 2, with the assistance of some of her students and WPC coworkers, Robinson blanketed the black community with the leaflets. By then, Nixon had begun to mobilize the traditional black community leaders, especially the ministers. It soon became clear that both his and Robinson’s best instincts had been right: There was a powerful and positive reaction to the call for the leaders to meet and respond both to Parks’s arrest and to Robinson’s call for a boycott. By that evening the local community leaders, including King, had decided to confirm

Robinson’s initiative and agreed that the next Monday, December 5, would be the day for a one-day experimental boycott. Since that was also the day for which Parks’s trial was scheduled, it seemed logical to call for a mass community meeting that evening. In order to spread the word of Monday’s boycott and mass meeting, the leadership group was depending upon another leaflet, many phone calls, and crucially, the dozens of black church services scheduled for Sunday, December 4. Then, when one of the leaflets got into the hands of a white employer and was passed on to the Montgomery Advertiser, the city’s daily newspaper, a great gift of publicity was handed to the planners: a Sunday-morning front-page story on the planned boycott and mass meeting. Of course, no one could be certain how the black community would respond to the call.

There was significant fear among the leaders, including King, that a combination of apathy and fear might overwhelm the sense of righteous indignation that people felt. Nor could anyone predict how white people, especially the more rigid and violence-prone segregationists, would respond. All over the South, many white men and women had been eagerly rallying to the calls of the White Citizens Council to defend segregation by any means necessary. The local Ku Klux Klan was also very much alive and well, carrying on its periodic marches and car caravans through Montgomery’s black community, knowing that their reputation for lynchings, beatings, and bombings was enough to drive most blacks off the streets and porches behind the relative safety of closed doors. It was clear to blacks that there was real physical danger involved in the simple act of not riding the buses. But for a lot of black riders there might also be economic danger if their employers objected to such black initiative and protest. As a result, it was impossible to predict what the results of the boycott attempt would be.

The leaders of the courageous experiment felt the action would be successful if sixty percent of

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the riders stayed off the buses. That cold and cloudy morning, as Martin and Coretta King looked out their front window toward a nearby bus stop, the uncertain victory now seemed clear. Most of the buses moving by were empty. Neither apathy nor fear had prevailed. Then, as King went out to drive along the black community bus routes, he saw an extraordinary scene: everywhere, black people were walking, thumbing rides, riding mules, resurrecting old horse and buggy contraptions, taking taxis. Some older men and women were walking more than five miles each way, at times saying, “I’m walking for my grandchildren.” Meanwhile, all the buses from the black communities were at least ninety-five percent empty. King recognized instinctively that more than bus seating, more than painful memories of

humiliation, even more than solidarity with Rosa Parks was at stake here. As he said later, “A miracle had taken place. The once dormant and quiescent Negro community was now fully awake.” At the same time, King’s own personal awakening, inextricably tied to the rising of the people of Montgomery, was still in process. That Monday afternoon, he gathered with twenty or so other local leaders to assess and celebrate the overwhelming success of the almost spontaneous boycott and to plan for the evening’s mass meeting. King was then surprised to find himself—one of the youngest and newest community leaders—nominated and elected president of the new organization that they had just brought into being at that session, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The immediate task of the new MIA leaders was to build on the powerful momentum of the

one-day boycott. They decided to move rather slowly, to focus first on the simple need for more courteous and humane treatment of black bus riders. They also called for what Coretta King and later others ruefully described as “a more humane form of segregation,” which would allow white riders to fill the buses from the front to the middle, black riders from back to middle, with no need for anyone to have to give up a seat. They also pressed for the hiring of black drivers in black neighborhoods. The new MIA leadership decided to call for black people to continue the boycott until these changes were made. That night at the first mass meeting at the large Holt Street Baptist Church, the leaders

immediately recognized that an extraordinary spirit was taking hold. The crowd was so dense and animated that King and the other speakers had a hard time pushing their way to the pulpit. One of the few white reporters on hand, Joe Azbell of the Advertiser, was almost awestruck by the experience he witnessed, including the consideration shown to him as a white person. The next day he wrote, “The meeting was much like an old-fashioned revival with loud applause added. … It proved beyond any doubt that there was a discipline among Negroes that many whites had doubted. It was almost a military discipline combined with emotion.” As the new MIA president and featured speaker, King had to decide how to position himself

in the midst of the dynamic power he had recognized among the people since early in the morning. The twenty-six-year-old pastor later described his struggle to figure out the correct approach:

How could I make a speech that would be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds? I knew that many of the Negro people were victims of bitterness that could easily rise to flood proportions. What could I say to keep them courageous and prepared for positive action and yet devoid of hate and resentment? Could the militant and the moderate be combined in a single speech?

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In what might be called a freedom sermon, combining the vivid preaching style found in the black churches with the content of the freedom movement, the young pastor set the people and their movement in their largest context that night. He identified them “first and foremost” as American citizens, citizens who had the right and the responsibility to protest injustice and to work for a better society. At every point he grounded himself in the concrete experience of Montgomery’s black people and their experiences on the buses and elsewhere in their unjust, humiliating, and segregated city. So there was constant enthusiastic and empathetic verbal response all through his presentation, particularly when King uttered the words, “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” He pushed even further, pressing on the audience a sense of identity beyond their status as victims of oppression, declaring, “I want to say that we’re not here advocating violence. … We have never done that. … I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are a Christian people. … We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.” All through that statement of their central religious identity the people shouted and applauded, moved with King, pressed him forward even as he urged them toward their own best possibilities. He said, “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.” So the issue was already far beyond the buses, encompassing freedom, justice, and equality.

Calling upon the people to continue to work together for much more than a desegregated bus seat, King set an example for the freedom movement leadership. For he declared to his community:

Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future … somebody will have to say, “There lived a race of people … who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. … And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.” And we’re going to do that. God grant that we will do it before it is too late.

The excited, inspired people hardly had time to consider this grand calling to be the bearers of new universal values when they were brought right back to the concrete realities of their new movement. Right there in the meeting they were called upon to vote their approval of the proposals the MIA leadership was using as a basis for their negotiating with the city administration and the bus company. They were also told that private automobiles and black- owned taxis had to be volunteered, along with drivers, for use in a car pool that would soon become the most highly organized element of the boycott movement. And, of course, money had to be collected, for gas, for maintenance, and for all the other expenses connected to the development of an essentially volunteer organization. So the marvelously ordinary black men and women who were just being called upon by King to inject “a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization” were also being asked to drop their hard-earned quarters and dollars into the MIA collection baskets. The sense that something new was being born in Montgomery’s black churches had drawn

black leaders from other parts of Alabama to the initial meeting that night. They came from such places as Birmingham, Mobile, Tuskegee, and Tuscaloosa, both to encourage the people

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of Montgomery and to gain new inspiration for their own struggles. Still, it is quite possible that the expansion of the boycott’s inspiring potential might have simply been confined to Alabama if its white opponents had not made a series of mistakes, mistakes based on their stubborn refusal to realize that a new time and a new black community were emerging. First, in the earliest attempts at negotiation, the representatives of the city and the bus

company refused to make even the slightest accommodation to the relatively modest changes the MIA leadership was proposing. This stiff resistance on the part of the white leaders helped to steel the resolve of the aroused and walking people. Then the city commissioners inaugurated what they called a “get tough” policy with the boycotters and their leadership. Legal harassment of the crucial cabs and car pool, and an unjustified arrest of King for speeding were part of the strategy of intimidation. This was soon followed by a publicly announced decision by all three city commissioners to join the local White Citizens Council, a slightly more respectable version of the Klan. Such actions only compelled black Montgomery to form a deeper resolve to stay off the

buses. Then the most important of the early opposition mistakes took place on Monday night, January 30, 1956, almost two months into the boycott. That night, while King was at one of the mass meetings, his wife and young child were at home accompanied by a member of Dexter Church. The two women heard something hit the front porch. They ran to the back room where three-month-old Yolanda Denise was sleeping. What they had heard was a stick of dynamite landing on the front porch, and its explosion blew a hole in the porch floor, shattered four windows, and damaged a porch column. Running to the back had saved Coretta King and her friend from possible injury. Called out of the mass meeting, King arrived at his house some fifteen minutes after the

blast. There he found hundreds of angry black people, some of them armed, milling around his front porch. After determining that his family was safe, he came back out to address the crowd, some of whom were fiercely challenging the chief of police and the mayor to match them gun for gun, and defiantly refusing to obey police orders to disperse. “Getting tough” was obviously an approach that had epidemic possibilities, but when King appeared he maintained an extraordinary and crucial composure that transformed the situation. After assuring the crowd that his family had not been harmed, he said,

We believe in law and order. Don’t get panicky. … Don’t get your weapons. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember, that is what God said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them.

After urging that stern and demanding post-dynamite discipline upon himself and the crowd, pressing them to apply the tenets of their religion to the crisis of that night, King went on to remind the quieting crowd, “I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman.” Then he added, “I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped this movement will not stop … What we are doing is just. And God is with us.” The gathered people responded by spontaneously breaking into song, including hymns and “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.” It was the terrorist bombing and King’s mature and challenging response to it that effectively

began to push the Montgomery story beyond the confines of the African-American press and the Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis. To Make Our World Anew, Volume II, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615. Created from apus on 2017-03-02 15:46:40.

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local newspapers into the nation’s mainstream mass media and into the consciousness (and consciences) of hundred of thousands of its citizens, irrespective of color. Meanwhile, the white defenders of Montgomery continued to misread the times and the

people with whom they were dealing. Shortly after the dynamite attack on King’s house, a bomb was thrown into the front yard of MIA treasurer and movement stalwart E. D. Nixon. Two weeks later eleven thousand white people gathered in Montgomery for a White Citizens Council rally, where they cheered the mayor and police chief for holding the line in the cause of bus segregation. Perhaps encouraged by their own mass meeting, the city officials decided to ask a grand jury to indict nearly one hundred leaders of the MIA on charges of conspiracy. That broadside approach and the refusal of the MIA leadership to be intimidated by it only intensified the national media interest in Montgomery and in King. The first time that the Montgomery story appeared on the front page of the internationally

respected New York Times and New York Herald Tribune was when these papers reported the mass meeting held the evening after the leaders were arrested, and immediately bailed out, on the conspiracy charge. Readers around the world were able to catch the spirit of determined, nonviolent resistance as thousands of boycotters gathered to hear the news from the courtroom and to stand in solidarity with their leaders. Thus the nation received King’s message: “This is not a war between the white and the Negro but a conflict between justice and injustice.” Expanding his vision to include the largest possible participation, King went on, “If our victory is won—and it will be won—it will be a victory for Negroes, a victory for justice, a victory for free people, and a victory for democracy.” In a sense, there were hundreds of thousands of distant listeners as he proclaimed, “If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love.” The nation began to respond in a variety of ways. The proprietor of Sadie’s Beauty Shop in

the black community of Gastonia, North Carolina, took up a collection in her shop for Montgomery’s walkers. The first African-American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ralph Bunche, who served as an official of the United Nations, wrote to praise and encourage King and the people of the movement: “Your patient determination, your wisdom and quiet courage are constituting an inspiring chapter in the history of human dignity.” In hundreds of black churches across the country the combination of praying and organizing produced scenes like the one in Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, where a collection of four thousand dollars was taken up for Montgomery in trash cans and cake boxes after the collection plates were filled. This vital connection between King and Montgomery’s church-based movement and the

black churches throughout the country was crucial in transforming the nation after the Second World War. Supplementing the news that came from black newspapers and magazines like Jet, Ebony, and Sepia, as well as from the newly attentive white-owned media, black churches served as a massive network for information and mobilization regarding Montgomery. Other committed groups—the skycaps at Newark Airport and some longshoremen in San Francisco, for example—made their own contributions, sometimes just an hour’s pay. King and the movement attracted the attention of two of the most important religiously based

pacifist groups in the country: The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the American Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis. To Make Our World Anew, Volume II, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615. Created from apus on 2017-03-02 15:46:40.

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Friends Service Committee, better known as Quakers. Many of their members had hoped and worked for a long time to see Mahatma Gandhi’s religiously inspired organizing combined with the courageous, nonviolent spirit of Jesus in the cause of racial justice and equality in the United States. Though predominantly white, they were often joined and even led by a number of African Americans, such as Howard and Sue Thurman, Benjamin Mays, Mordecai Johnson, and Bayard Rustin, the radical Quaker and peace activist. Indeed, when Montgomery broke into the mainstream news, the national chairman of the FOR was Charles Lawrence, a 1936 Morehouse College graduate who was then teaching sociology at Brooklyn College in New York. Lawrence, a firm, articulate, and jovial believer in the nonviolent struggle for justice, wrote to King as soon as he saw the newspaper reports on the post-indictment mass meeting and claimed that he found the stories “among the most thrilling documents I have ever read.” He wrote, “Who knows? Providence may have given the Negroes of Montgomery the historic mission of demonstrating to the world the practical power of Christianity, the unmatched vitality of a nonviolent loving approach to social protest.” Inspired by such grand hopes, Lawrence and his FOR colleagues sent their national field

secretary, Glenn Smiley, on an exploratory visit to Montgomery that winter. Smiley, a white Texan who was an ordained minister in the Southern Methodist Church, had been involved with the Fellowship since the early forties and had been a conscientious objector on religious grounds during the Second World War. According to Lawrence’s instructions, Smiley’s FOR mission in Montgomery would be “primarily that of finding out what those of you who are involved directly would have those of us who are ‘on the outside’ do.” Meanwhile, Rustin, one of the best-known activists in the pacifist movement, also went

independently to offer his services to King and the Montgomery struggle. A personable, brilliant, nonviolent strategist and writer, Rustin did not, unfortunately, stay long in Montgomery. Ironically, in the eyes of some of the MIA officers, Rustin’s past involvement with communist-related organizations and his prior arrest for a homosexual liaison made him more of a risk than Smiley. Nevertheless, both men helped King on what he later called his “pilgrimage to nonviolence,” introducing him to leading religious pacifists, such as Howard Thurman and Harry Emerson Fosdick; introducing him to the classic published writings on nonviolence, such as Fosdick’s Hope of the World; and assisting the MIA in developing its own training workshops in nonviolence. Rustin, in particular, helped King prepare important articles on the Montgomery struggle for a number of religious journals. By the end of the winter of 1956, as the boycott moved into its fourth month, King’s picture

had appeared on the cover of a number of national magazines, and his name and message were familiar in many other parts of the world. He carried the message across the nation, his powerful baritone voice reverberating in scores of large churches, on college and university campuses, in municipal auditoriums, at conventions of the NAACP and the National Urban League, at fraternal and religious conventions, even at a black funeral directors’ convention. By the fall of 1956 Montgomery had become the unmistakable symbol of transformation in

the nation, a symbol of its African-American citizens and its Southern-based traditions of legal segregation, white domination, and the subversion of democratic hope. That symbol belonged to all the licensed practical nurses, the maids and skycaps, the scholars and Nobel laureates, the prisoners, students, artists, and pastors who would eventually create their own versions of

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Montgomery across the nation. By this time the Montgomery movement had also provided a crucial set of opportunities for

King and his coworkers to experiment with Gandhian nonviolent action (or “passive resistance,” as King sometimes described it) on behalf of freedom and justice. King could now announce with confidence, “We in Montgomery have discovered a method that can be used by the Negroes in their fight for political and economic equality. … We fight injustice with passive resistance.… Mohandas Gandhi … used it to topple the British military machine.… Let’s now use this method in the United States.” At the same time, while he increasingly referred to Gandhi, King kept returning to his

fundamental grounding in the black church experience. “The spirit of passive resistance came to me from the Bible,” he said, “from the teachings of Jesus. The techniques came from Gandhi.” Summing up what the events in Montgomery meant for a religiously sensitive region and nation, King continued to affirm that “This is a spiritual movement, depending on moral and spiritual forces.” But such a spiritual vision did not exclude the use of practical methods. For instance, the

white authorities’ unwillingness to negotiate and the continued harassment and violence directed at the black community compelled the MIA leaders to take their struggle into the courts. In consultation with the local and national NAACP lawyers, the MIA initiated a legal suit to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregated bus system. They had moved far beyond the initial quest for “a more humane form of segregation.” Now they were challenging the Jim Crow transportation system itself. The case was identified as Gayle v. Browder (1956). And when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the black citizens of Montgomery, it was clear the South was about to change forever. The Court’s ruling in Gayle v. Browder was announced on November 13, 1956, but no one

knew when the official papers of notification would reach Montgomery. The city commission refused to allow the bus company to make any changes in its practices until the court documents actually arrived in their offices. But the people of the movement prepared themselves for the next phase of the journey they had begun on December 5, 1955. On the night when the Supreme Court decision was announced, a caravan of forty cars of Klan members drove through the city’s black neighborhoods. But no one ran into their houses. No one pulled down the shades. Instead, many “New Negroes” stood and watched calmly. Some even waved to the disconcerted white-robed visitors, and soon the visitors drove away. The next night there were two mass meetings to accommodate all the people full of courage

who had come to give thanks for the past and plan for the future. It was natural that the MIA executive committee called on King to address the meetings that night. Speaking at Holt Street Church, where they had begun together, King said, “These eleven months have not all been easy. … We have lived with this protest so long that we have learned the meaning of sacrifice and suffering. But somehow we feel that our suffering is redemptive.” Forever the teacher, King felt that he had to encourage the people to consider what it would mean to “press on” to their next steps “in the spirit of the movement.” For him, two elements were crucial. One was the need to avoid arrogance as they made their victorious return to the buses. Taking on a personal tone, he said to the people, “I would be terribly disappointed if anybody goes back to the buses bragging about, we, the Negroes, have won a victory over the white people.” Instead,

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King called on them to remember the need to open both the struggle and the victory beyond racial lines. So he said that when the legal papers finally arrived, “it will be a victory for justice and a victory for goodwill and a victory for the forces of light. So let us not limit this decision to a victory for Negroes. Let us go back to the buses in all humility and with gratitude to the Almighty God for making this [court] decision possible.” Even at such a high point in their struggle, King knew that he was pressing his people

toward a fiercely demanding discipline. He said, “I know it’s hard” but keep pushing: “the strong man is the man … who can stand up for his rights and yet not hit back.” King knew they were on a dangerous path. They were poised at a crucial moment in history,

a moment that required disciplined courage and disciplined love, especially in the light of the South’s long history of violence against black attempts to gain justice. Finally, King faced his people with the ultimate encouragement—his willingness to sacrifice his own life. Normally not given to this kind of self-focus, it was a clear sign that he saw the moment as a moment of crisis, one similar to that January night on his bombed-out porch. So he said to the visibly moved assembly:

I’m not telling you something that I don’t live. [Someone yelled, “That’s right!”] I’m aware of the fact that the Ku Klux Klan is riding in Montgomery. I’m aware of the fact that a week never passes that somebody’s not telling me to get out of town, or that I’m going to be killed next place I move. But I don’t have any guns in my pockets. I don’t have any guards on my side.

But I have the God of the Universe on my side. I’m serious about that. I can walk the streets of Montgomery without fear. I don’t worry about a thing. They can bomb my house. They can kill my body. But they can never kill the spirit of freedom that is in my people.

Finally, on December 20, the Supreme Court mandate made its way to Montgomery, affirming the people and their audacious struggle. The next morning a restrained but happy group, including King, Abernathy, and Smiley, boarded the first desegregated bus, beginning a new phase of the long journey toward freedom and justice for all.

Old Order, New Order By the time the victory was won in Montgomery, the struggle had lasted for more than a year. All along the way there were dramatic, compelling new events, bombings, indictments, rallies in other cities, and courtroom trials reminding people, especially black people, that the Montgomery movement was alive. Black folks had stuck together and grown together in the longest sustained campaign for justice that the nation had ever seen. And, of course, the movement’s prime symbol, Martin Luther King, Jr., seemed to be

everywhere, proclaiming and exemplifying the emergence of a new people and a new time. By the time the legal victory was announced in Montgomery, it appeared that King was right: It was far more than a victory for the black walkers of Montgomery (although that victory certainly needed to be savored and celebrated), and wherever people claimed the fruits of the long ordeal, a powerful energy of hope and a sense of new possibilities appeared. Sometimes the Montgomery connections to other places in the nation was obvious. In cities

such as Mobile and Birmingham, Alabama, and nearby Tallahassee, Florida, ministers tried to Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis. To Make Our World Anew, Volume II, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615. Created from apus on 2017-03-02 15:46:40.

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repeat the Montgomery success with their own bus boycotts. In January 1957 King and the Fellowship of Reconciliation brought together some sixty representatives of these and other boycott movements to a conference in Atlanta. They discussed the possibility of forming a regional organization based on the Montgomery experience. Before the summer of 1957 was over, King and his fellow black ministers had established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The major early accomplishments of SCLC were the sponsorship of several conferences and

organizing, with Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, a “prayer pilgrimage” of about twenty thousand people in Washington, D.C., who were calling for civil rights legislation. SCLC also hoped to undertake a “Crusade for Citizenship,” projected as a massive Southwide voter- registration campaign based in the black churches. Due to lack of personnel, planning, and finances, this campaign never materialized. Even with its provocative founding announcement that “we have come to redeem the soul of

America” and the predictable choice of King as president, the mostly Baptist group was not, however, able to focus and mobilize the new energies in the ways that King, his Alabama comrades, and his Northern allies had hoped. This was partly because the approximately one hundred men (there were only men in mainstream black church leadership) who formed the core of the SCLC were only a small minority of the black ministers of the South. And, besides, SCLC’s ministers had had no real experience in forming a regional organization that would be both flexible and open to new strategies yet also structured enough to mount a sustained challenge to the system of legal segregation. So for a number of years after the Montgomery victory, the energies that were released there

had to be channeled into less obvious places than the Southern black churches that had anchored the celebrated boycott. As a result, the expansion of the Southern freedom movement depended on unlikely groups of people, emerging from unexpected places. For instance, there was the teenager John Lewis, a short, slightly built, slow-speaking

country boy from Troy, Alabama, who had first heard King’s pre-boycott preaching on a local black radio station. The unassuming but religiously rooted Lewis had been training himself for his own calling by preaching to the livestock in his family’s yard, and baptizing some of them too. Regardless of his unconventional training and practice congregation, Lewis knew that there was work for him to do, and King and the people of Montgomery were his models. Throughout the post-Montgomery decade, John Lewis took that work and those models into some of the most dangerous frontiers of the Southern-based struggle for freedom, accumulating many scars and much honor in the process. As a Freedom Rider in 1961, Lewis rode buses throughout the South, testing the law that made segregated buses and station facilities illegal. He became the first Freedom Rider to meet with violence when he was struck by some white men as he attempted to go through the white entrance to the Rock Hill, South Carolina, Greyhound bus station. In the same way, few people would have predicted that a matronly, middle-aged black South

Carolinian named Septima Poinsette Clark would be one of the most effective carriers of Montgomery’s best spirit. In her fifties when the victory was won, the Charleston woman was not too old to be a “new Negro.” A veteran teacher in the public school system of Charleston, she had led important struggles for the equalizing of salaries for black and white teachers.

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Then, on April 19, 1956, a law was passed prohibiting state and city employees from having an affiliation with any civil rights group, including the NAACR Clark refused to obey the law and lost her job. She now joined forces with the white Southerners who had founded the Highlander Folk School in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. Highlander was established in the thirties as a nontraditional educational center to encourage local citizens and others to build a more just and democratic society across racial lines. At Highlander the soft-spoken but iron-willed Clark created a program based on work she

had been doing for decades. She called it Citizenship Education, and it involved an informal but carefully crafted workshop combination of storytelling, political analysis, American and African-American history, religious education, autobiographical sharing, careful study of arcane voter-registration laws and forms, and much singing and mutual encouragement. With such deceptively simple methods, Clark and her expanding group of coworkers performed an almost unbelievable task. They helped thousands of marginally literate (and sometimes illiterate) black people not only learn to read and write their way to voter-registration skills, but also to teach others, and to become committed believers in the freedom movement. By that time many people had discovered that the path blazed by Rosa Parks, Martin Luther

King, Jr., and the Montgomery boycotters was not meant to be duplicated exactly. That was clear not only in efforts of people like John Lewis and Septima Clark. It could also be seen in the failed attempts to build Montgomery copycat boycotts in places like Mobile and Tallahassee, failures that inspired people to search for other methods. Indeed when King had declared near the close of the Montgomery boycott that “nothing can kill the spirit of my people,” he probably understood that the spirit needed to take many different forms. That spirit was seen, for instance, in the fiery determination of Fred Shuttlesworth, the

Birmingham pastor who became a staunch comrade to Martin King in the next stages of the Southern freedom movement. A contrast to King in almost every conceivable way, Shuttlesworth was a native of Alabama’s backwoods—a wiry, volatile, and gritty man. Before he answered the inner call to the Christian ministry, he had been a truck driver, cement worker, and operator of the family’s whiskey still. Indeed, he was just the kind of utterly courageous, sharp-tongued, quick-tempered believer in nonviolence that the movement needed. Though profoundly inspired by King and Montgomery, Shuttlesworth was his own man. When white- led governments across the South responded to black assertiveness by banning established organizations such as the NAACP, Shuttlesworth’s independence proved invaluable. In Alabama the white authorities formally blamed the national organization and its local

branches for organizing an illegal boycott by black residents of Montgomery and used that as their excuse for outlawing the organization in the state. The state demanded its membership lists (a demand that the NAACP managed successfully to resist for the eight years that it took to get the state action reversed in federal courts). Just a few days after the NAACP ban went into effect, Fred Shuttlesworth angered the local authorities when he formed a new, replacement organization from his Birmingham base, calling it the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). Led essentially (and somewhat autocratically) by Shuttlesworth, the ACMHR became one of the most vital affiliates of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, temporarily providing a mass movement-oriented substitute for the NAACP and eventually carrying the spirit of Montgomery to another level of confrontation. The ACMHR

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fought against bus segregation in December 1956 and October 1958, using direct-action tactics. It also tried to integrate Birmingham schools and train stations in 1957. In other states, such as Mississippi and Florida, courageous NAACP officials and those who

tried to stand with them were sometimes run out of the state or assassinated. On Christmas night 1951, Harry T. Moore, executive secretary of NAACP branches in Florida, and his wife were killed when their house was bombed in Mims, Florida. Shuttlesworth himself was subjected to everything from midday beatings by mobs of white segregationists to the nighttime bombing of his house and church. The attacks intensified after the intrepid pastor insisted on personally desegregating the Birmingham city buses and on trying to enroll his children in an all-white school in the stubbornly segregated city school system. Indeed, public opinion polls revealed that eighty percent of white Southerners were opposed

to school desegregation in the immediate post-Brown period. Although the terms of opposition were framed in various ways, so much finally came down to the basic truth that South Carolina Governor James Byrnes had expressed. If taken seriously, desegregation marked “the beginning of the end of civilization in the South” as white people, especially privileged white people, had known it. In the same way, there was no room for misinterpreting the so-called “Southern manifesto” that had been signed in March 1956 by ninety Southern members of the House of Representatives and by all of the senators except Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore of Tennessee and Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson. In this document these respected senators and representatives denied that the Supreme Court had a right to rule on racial issues in the realm of public education, as it had in the Brown decision, and called upon their constituents to disobey the court’s order, offering “massive resistance” to the ruling. In addition, the person who might have been expected to provide some firm guidance to the

nation in this crucial time of transition was offering a version of his own resistance. The widely admired military hero Dwight D. Eisenhower had been elected president in 1952 and again in 1956. He probably had more leverage to lead the nation down the path of peaceful change than any other public figure, but he never really came to the aid of African Americans. Rather, the president chose to condemn what he called “the extremists on both sides” of the school desegregation question, thereby equating courageous children and their communities who were working for democratic change with men and women who defied the Supreme Court, dynamited buildings, and assassinated leaders. Though Eisenhower never made a clear public statement of opposition to the Court’s action

in Brown, neither did he ever publicly support it. He felt that “forcing” desegregation would raise white resistance. But as the nature of the battle for desegregation progressed, Eisenhower was forced to take action on behalf of the federal government. Faced with such a range of opposition midnight bombers, an uncommitted president,

members of Congress urging “massive resistance,” and the Supreme Court’s own ambiguous 1955 call for school districts to move to implement the Brown decision not by any certain date but “with all deliberate speed,” it would not have been surprising if Southern blacks had given up the quest for desegregated schools. But they were constantly reminding each other that “we’ve come too far to turn back.” Children, ranging in ages from six to seventeen, were on the front lines of this phase of the

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struggle. In hundreds of schools across the South, the children had to face hatred, ignorance, and fear. As they arrived at newly desegregated schools, they had to face screaming, cursing, threatening presences of white men, children, and women who had appointed themselves as protectors of the social and educational bastions of white supremacy. Still, the black children went into the schools—sometimes to the accompaniment of white

rioting in the streets, sometimes under the protection of federal marshals or troops. Eventually, all the possibilities and complications of the post-Montgomery struggles for a

desegregated nation seemed to gather around Little Rock’s Central High. Little Rock was considered a city that was reasonably open to the powerful surges of change that were mounting in the South, and in 1954 it had been the first Southern city to respond positively to the Brown decision. Less than a week after the decision was announced, the Little Rock school board declared its intention to voluntarily desegregate its public schools, beginning with the two-thousand-student Central High, located in a working-class white neighborhood. However, it was not until 1957 that the board announced that it would actually begin the desegregation process on a rather timid level that fall. Then seventy-five students volunteered to lead the way. Of those, twenty-five were chosen. The all-white school board, worried about a brewing politically inspired white reaction, soon pared the number down to nine. Six young women and three young men were chosen to “carry the banner.” Unfortunately, the white community of Little Rock and the state of Arkansas once again

lacked the kind of courageous moral leadership that would have helped guide them. Instead the confused and searching citizens were subjected to the mercurial and election-driven performance of Governor Orville Faubus. A racial “moderate” in pre-1954 Southern white terms, he had become convinced that in order to be reelected, he had to respond to the worst fears of the white parents and politicians who were busy galvanizing opposition to the school board’s modest desegregation plan. This led to the spectacle of Faubus calling out the Arkansas National Guard that fall to block the way of the black students as they—with amazing poise—moved past a crowd of screaming adults and young people and tried to enter Central High. Such a use of state troops to resist a U.S. Supreme Court order, carried out in front of

national network television cameras, finally pushed Eisenhower to action. But his initial attempt to use his personal powers of persuasion on Faubus turned out to be too little too late and served only to help heighten the crisis. Ten days after the beginning of the Little Rock crisis, Eisenhower summoned Faubus to a private conference. The governor left his conversation with the president to return to Little Rock and pull away the Arkansas National Guard, leaving only the local police to deal with the constantly expanding crowd of white adult opponents at the school building. Their hysterical calls for resistance to integration finally erupted into violence against several black journalists. At the same time there were reckless threats from the mob to lynch one or more of the black students. The scenes of white crowds surging against the overwhelmed and under-committed local police moved across the nation’s television screens. (The medium was new, and the black struggle for freedom in the South was its first major ongoing story.) Many people also saw the electrifying image of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the black students in Little Rock, accidentally cut off from the rest of the group of students, surrounded by the hostile mob, moving in silent, terrified dignity, finally joined by

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a tall white woman, Grace Lorch, who stood by her side and then helped her board a bus to safety.

Armed soldiers confront white students at Central High School in Little Rock. Because of the serious challenge to federal authority in Arkansas, President Eisenhower sent one thousand U.S. Army troops to protect the nine black students who had defied white protests and threats of violence to enroll at the school.

Eisenhower finally did what he had pledged never to do: send federal troops to Little Rock “to aid in the execution of federal law,” he said to the nation. But he also sent more than a thousand riot-trained troops from the 101st Airborne Division to protect the right of nine young citizens to make use of the opportunity that the Supreme Court had guaranteed to them. The Little Rock pioneers stayed the course, managed to live through an academic year of

hateful taunts and actual assaults, managed also to find a few friends. For a while each student was accompanied in the school by a soldier, but these military companions could not go into locker rooms, lavatories, classrooms, the cafeteria, and other spaces that had become danger spots. There came a time when one of the nine, Minnie Jean Brown, finally gave in to the deep frustration they were all feeling and one day poured her bowl of chili on the head of a persistent tormenter. Her unexpected action evoked a spontaneous round of applause from the black cafeteria workers, but it also led to a suspension from school, and Minnie Jean finished her academic year in New York City. Meanwhile the other students continued, making their way through Central High’s school year, carrying the banner—and the pain—all the way. Crucial to their endurance was the community support that they found. Many people in both the South and the North, however, were not convinced that a just and

humane new nation could be born on this bloody ground. These reluctant unbelievers simply could not convince themselves that American democracy could ever become a reality for black people. As a matter of fact, even as the Little Rock struggle was going on in the 1957–58 academic

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year, in Monroe, North Carolina, a rather different scenario was developing. Ex-Marine Robert Williams, who had been so ecstatic with hope at the time of the Brown decision, had returned to his hometown of Monroe after the Korean War. He soon became president of the local branch of the NAACP and also became convinced that his military training provided a better alternative for dealing with the terrorists of the Klan and other white groups than King’s way of nonviolent resistance. With the help of the National Rifle Association, Williams created a rifle club within his NAACP branch and began talking of the need to “meet lynching with lynching.” But by the middle of 1959 Williams found himself attacked and disowned by the national NAACP organization and hounded as a fugitive by local and national law enforcement agencies. Two years later, he was forced to flee the country altogether as a result of trumped-up kidnapping charges. Eventually he became an exile from the land that once inspired his hope, finding political asylum in Cuba, which had just undergone its own socialist revolution. He later went to China and then the East African nation of Tanzania before returning to America almost a decade later. Nevertheless, Williams’s demand for an alternative to nonviolent resistance did not end with

his departure. His calls for armed self-defense and physical retaliation were familiar themes in the traditions of black American resistance. Indeed, even then an important variation on this theme was rising up in the northern cities of the nation. When all eyes seemed to be on Montgomery, in the black communities of Detroit, New York,

Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere a growing number of young black men, impeccably dressed in suits and bow ties, and young women, wrapped in long, flowing white dresses, became a regular part of the urban landscape. These quiet, dignified, disciplined black folk were practicing Muslims, members of the Nation of Islam (NOI). The NOI was founded by an obscure self-styled prophet named W. D. Fard in the thirties. Fard and his handpicked successor, Elijah Poole (who would later take the name Elijah Muhammad), preached a modified version of Islam. It combined claims of black racial supremacy (such as the idea that black people were the original people and whites were “devils” invented by a mad scientist named Yacub) with elements of the orthodox Islamic tradition and borrowed heavily from the style and structure of black Christian churches. Despite their reputation for being a radical sect, the NOI promoted fairly conservative ideas and values. It sought to “uplift” the race by establishing black-owned businesses and “teaching” black ghetto dwellers the importance of discipline, self-help, and cleanliness. It imposed strict rules about personal behavior: Alcohol, drugs, tobacco, gambling, dancing, adultery, premarital sex, profanity, or watching movies with sex or “coarse speech,” for example, were simply not allowed. The NOI even impressed black conservative George Schuyler, managing editor of the New York office of the black-owned Pittsburgh Courier, who praised them for their values and moral vision. “Mr. Muhammad may be a rogue and a charlatan,” wrote Schuyler in 1959, “but when anybody can get tens of thousands of Negroes to practice economic solidarity, respect their women, alter their atrocious diet, give up liquor, stop crime, juvenile delinquency and adultery, he is doing more for the Negro’s welfare than any current Negro leader I know.” Although the NOI officially stayed out of politics, focusing its energies on the spiritual uplift of African Americans and offering an alternative to the “white man’s religion,” it did practice self-defense and did not shy away from violence. During the thirties in Detroit, for example, black Muslims, as

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members of the NOI were known, attracted attention during a bloody shootout with police. And under Fard’s leadership, the NOI even established a paramilitary organization known as the Fruit of Islam. They kept order at big gatherings, served as bodyguards for “the Messenger” (Muhammad), and were trained to defend NOI institutions at any cost.

The Nation of Islam attracted thousands of urban blacks to the disciplined life of abstinence, prayer, and black self- determination.

The NOI remained a fairly small religious sect until the Second World War. Its membership began to increase after Elijah Muhammad and about one hundred other Muslims were jailed for resisting the draft. As a result, the NOI not only garnered more national publicity but it began to recruit members from the ranks of black prisoners. One of those prisoners who discovered the Nation was Malcolm Little, whose name was changed to Malcolm X by Elijah Muhammad. He wrote in his autobiography that he received the X from the Nation of Islam as a symbol of his unknown African ancestry. More than any other figure, Malcolm X was responsible for turning the NOI into a national force to be reckoned with. And more than anyone else, he embodied the NOI’s militant, uncompromising, and, when needed, violent image, one that would scare many white liberals and nurture a new generation of black radicals. The son of Earl Little, a Baptist preacher, and his wife, Louisa, Malcolm and his siblings

experienced dramatic confrontations with racism. According to his autobiography, hooded Klansmen burned their home in Lansing, Michigan. Earl Little was killed under mysterious circumstances, welfare agencies split up the children and eventually had Louisa Little committed to a mental institution, and Malcolm was forced to live in a detention home run by a racist white couple. By the eighth grade he had left school, moved to Boston to live with his half-sister Ella, and discovered the underground world of African-American hipsters and petty criminals. His downward spiral ended in 1946, when he was sentenced to ten years in jail for burglary. After discovering Islam, Malcolm Little submitted to the discipline and guidance of the NOI

and became a voracious reader of the Koran and the Bible. He also immersed himself in works Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis. To Make Our World Anew, Volume II, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615. Created from apus on 2017-03-02 15:46:40.

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of literature and history in the prison library. Upon his release in 1952, Malcolm X, a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammad, rose quickly within the NOI ranks, serving as minister of Harlem’s Temple No. 7, where he went in 1954. He later ministered to temples in Detroit and Philadelphia. Through speaking engagements, television appearances, and by establishing Muhammad Speaks—the NOI’s first nationally distributed newspaper—Malcolm X called America’s attention to the Nation of Islam. His criticisms of civil rights leaders for advocating integration into white society instead of building black institutions and defending themselves from racist violence generated opposition from both conservatives and liberals. But Malcolm showed signs of independence from the NOI line. During the mid-fifties, for

example, he privately scoffed at Elijah Muhammad’s interpretation of the genesis of the “white race” and seemed uncomfortable with the idea that all white people were literally devils. More significantly, Malcolm clearly disagreed with the NOI’s policy of not participating in politics. He not only believed that political mobilization was indispensable but occasionally defied the rule by supporting boycotts and other forms of protest. He had begun developing a Third World political perspective during the fifties, when anticolonial wars and decolonization were pressing public issues. Indeed, Africa remained his primary political interest outside black America: In 1959 he toured Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana to develop ties between African Americans and the newly independent African states. African Americans had long seen themselves as part of a larger world, as more than

‘minorities’ within the confines of the United States. But there was never a time like this, when every corner of the earth seemed engaged in a struggle for freedom, and the black freedom movement in American seemed to be at the eye of the international storm.

Freedom Now!: The Student Revolutionaries On a Sunday morning late in November 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr., announced to his congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, that he had decided to leave the city and return to his native Atlanta. The major reason was the need to connect himself more firmly to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which had been headquartered in Atlanta since its founding in 1957. In the years since its establishment, SCLC had been having a hard time getting organized. In the statement he made to the Dexter congregation that Sunday, King seemed to be trying to rally himself, his organization, and the larger developing freedom movement to a new state of activity. He said, “The time has come for a broad, bold advance of the Southern campaign for equality. … Not only will it include a stepped-up campaign of voter registration, but a full-scale assault will be made upon discrimination and segregation in all forms. … We must employ new methods of struggle involving the masses of our people.” In this “bold advance” King envisioned SCLC as a crucial force, and he was convinced that

a great deal of the energy that was needed would come from black young people. Indeed, King said, “We must train our youth … in the techniques of social change through nonviolent resistance.” It is likely that King was envisioning a youth movement that would be firmly based in the SCLC organization. But by the time King moved to Atlanta in January 1960, SCLC had not yet done anything to organize a youth movement. Fortunately, the young people were not

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waiting. Beginning independently from several Southern bases, an ever-expanding nonviolent army of black young people and their white allies began to put an indelible mark on the sixties. On January 31, 1960, at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (known as

A&T), one of the South’s many black colleges, four freshmen decided to move from words to deeds. Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, Franklin McClain, and David Richmond decided that they were going to confront one of the most demeaning symbols of segregation: the all-white lunch counter at the local Wool-worth’s department store. Like all the chain stores in the South, the Greensboro store accepted the money of its African-American customers at the various merchandise counters, but the lunch counter was a different story. Black people were not permitted to sit for a snack, a meal, or even a drink of water. Usually, such segregationist practices were enforced by local ordinances, state laws, and coercion by whites acting almost out of habit. Whites considered public space theirs to control and define, and they were especially sensitive about public eating places, where white employees might be perceived as serving blacks (as opposed to merely accepting their payments at other store counters). The young men from A&T planned to go into Woolworth’s on Monday morning, February 1,

shop for some small items in other parts of the store, and then go to the lunch counter. They would sit there quietly, with dignity and with a firm insistence on their right to be served. For these students the central issue was not the hamburgers or Cokes. The issues were justice, human dignity, fairness, equality, and freedom. They were all driven by the desire to reach the fundamental goal: “Jim Crow Must Go.” The three young men who had grown up in Greensboro (McNeil came from Wilmington)

were fully aware of a strong local tradition of challenging segregation. They and their parents had been active in the NAACP, and they had heard of blacks who fought to desegregate the local schools. They attended NAACP-sponsored public presentations by black student pioneers of the effort to desegregate Central High in Little Rock. And, of course, they all had as an example the noble actions of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., the best-known public heroes of the successful Montgomery bus boycott. When King spoke in Greensboro in 1959, Ezell Blair, Jr., remembered that his sermon was “so strong” that “I could feel my heart palpitating. It brought tears to my eyes.” The young men knew that they could go to jail. Or there could be violence. So it was not surprising that David Richmond later recalled that “all of us were afraid” that Sunday night before their planned action; yet, he added, “We went ahead and did it.” Monday morning, February 1, 1960, was the day they “did it.” When they sat down and

asked clearly for coffee and snacks and were told that they could not be served, they refused to get up from their seats. Like Rosa Parks, they believed that holding their seats was essential to affirming their dignity and their place as citizens. So Blair, their chosen spokesman, responded to the refusal of service with a polite but probing inquiry: “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but you just served us [at the other counters], why can’t we be served here?” By that time other customers were noticing the four neatly dressed, quietly determined young

black men. The manager asked them to leave, but they refused, still quiet, still polite. As a matter of fact, not only did they say they would stay until the store closed, but they announced that they would return again the next day, and the days after that, until they were served, until all black people could be served and their humanity duly recognized—at least at that lunch

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counter. When McClain recalled that first sit-in in an interview more than twenty years later, he

reported, “If it’s possible to know what it means to have your soul cleansed, I felt pretty clean at that time. I probably felt better on that day than I’ve ever felt in my life. … I felt as though I had gained my manhood, so to speak, and not only gained it, but had developed quite a lot of respect for it.” That afternoon’s action concluded when the manager ordered the store closed. By the time

the four freshmen returned to the campus, word of their action had streaked through the classrooms, dormitories, dining halls, and gymnasiums. Many of their fellow students soon pledged their determination to return to the lunch counter the next day. The example set by the freshmen was so powerful that the new excitement could not be

confined to one campus or one city. The students at Bennett College, a private, black women’s school nearby, heard the news and joined the fight. Within a few days this powerful moral action had also become a challenge to local white undergraduates, starting with students at the elite Women’s College of the University of North Carolina, located in Greensboro. Beginning on Thursday, February 4, small groups of them decided to join the demonstration and risk all the protection of their whiteness, to risk their social and family connections, and to reconsider the meaning of democracy, Christianity, and human dignity. Before the week was over, the relatively low-key action of the four sit-in leaders had

escalated to unexpected levels. Nineteen students came to Woolworth’s on the second day, and more than eighty were present on Wednesday. Now there were more students ready to sit in than there were seats at Woolworth’s lunch counter. So, the nearby S. H. Kress store became the next target, and by Saturday of that first week hundreds of students from A&T were streaming into the downtown area to participate in what had become a kind of student crusade. Even members of the A&T football team—including a quarterback named Jesse Jackson— abandoned the apolitical, disengaged stance that marked so many college athletes. They were on the scene when gangs of young white men, waving Confederate flags, began to harass the black students, attempting to block their access to the lunch counters. On at least one occasion, members of the A&T football team, waving small U.S. flags, opened a path through the threatening white crowd for the sit-in squads.

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To occupy their time while they were waiting to be served, students participating in sit-ins did their homework and wrote letters.

By the next week the new, youth-led movement had spilled over into other North Carolina cities, as students in Durham, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Chapel Hill, and elsewhere began their own sit-in campaigns. In Chapel Hill, as in other cities, there were demonstrators with picket signs on the streets as well as students sitting at the lunch counters. Several of the Chapel Hill demonstrators carried signs that expressed the message they wanted all Americans to hear: “We do not picket just because we want to eat. We can eat at home or walking down the street. We do picket to protest the lack of dignity and respect shown to us as human beings.” None of this activity had been pre-planned or coordinated. But, as one Charlotte student put

it, the sit-ins provided a “means of expressing something that had been on our minds for a long time.” Speaking for his generation of activists, Greensboro’s Joseph McNeil said, “I guess everybody was pretty well fed up at the same time.” By the middle of February 1960, the nation had begun to discover that “everybody” really

meant everybody and not just the North Carolina students. Within weeks the sit-ins had become a powerful social movement, ranging across the South and evoking imaginative responses of support from many places in the North. Students organized sit-ins at the New York affiliates of Woolworth’s, for example. Longtime black social activist Bayard Rustin and singer and actor Harry Belafonte helped organize the Struggle for Freedom in the South, which raised funds to cover legal fees of arrested sit-in participants. Television helped to spread what people called “sit-in fever” across the South and demanded the nation’s attention. But there were also human networks that carried the news. All over the South, adult veterans of the long struggle for justice and equality made phone calls, wrote letters, traveled by car to make sure that others knew what had begun in North Carolina and encouraged them to consider what needed to be done in their own communities. The students themselves contacted friends, relatives, and members of their fraternities and

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sororities on other campuses in other states. Lunch counters were usually the focus of the action, but the students soon turned their attention to other forms of public accommodations as well. They created “wade-ins” at segregated public pools and beaches, “kneel-ins” at churches, “read-ins” at public libraries, and “bowl-ins” and “skate-ins” at segregated recreation centers. Usually, the students combined those nonviolent “direct action” challenges with marches and picketing at local city halls, seeking negotiations, demanding that the white elected officials take responsibility and take action to change the segregation statutes. After the initial white surprise at these challenges to the laws and traditions of segregation,

resistance to the student actions became very real. In some places it came in the form of arrests by the local police. In other situations the police stood by as white citizens took affairs in their own hands. Angry, frightened, and determined to maintain their historic positions of domination and control, white people frequently attacked the students. Sometimes sit-in participants were dragged from the lunch-counter stools and beaten. Ketchup was poured on their heads. Lighted cigarettes were pressed into their hair and on their exposed necks and shoulders. Women swung handbags at them, and men and boys used sticks and bats. Consistently, the students refused to allow themselves to be diverted from their central purpose or from their nonviolent stance, and they chose not to strike back at their attackers. In Atlanta, one of the early targets of the demonstrating black students was the cafeteria in

City Hall, where a sign announced, “Public Is Welcome.” Julian Bond, a Morehouse College student leader and son of Dr. Horace Mann Bond, an internationally known scholar, led a student contingent into the cafeteria on March 15, 1960. There, they were greeted by the manager, who asked, “What do you want?” When Bond replied, “We want to eat,” the manager’s response was, “We can’t serve you here.” Bond then said, “The sign outside says the public is welcome and we’re the public and we want to eat.” They got their food, but the cashier refused to take their money. Bond and seventy-five of his companions did not get a meal in the public cafeteria that day but a cell in the nearby city jail. However, when they were bailed out of jail the next day, the group immediately organized themselves and other students in the Atlanta University complex (which included Spelman College, Clark College, Gammon Theological Seminary, Morehouse, and Morris Brown College) into what became known as the Committee on an Appeal for Human Rights. This turned out to be the first step toward its emergence as one of the most important student movement groups in the South. Its eloquent and thoughtful “Appeal for Human Rights” eventually appeared in the Congressional Record, the New York Times, and publications in many other parts of the world:

We … have joined our hearts, minds, and bodies in the cause of gaining those rights which are inherently ours as members of the human race and as citizens of the United States.

We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are already legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time. … We want to state clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate, in a nation professing democracy and among people professing Christianity, the discriminatory conditions under which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia.

People who knew Southern black communities of that time would have expected Georgia’s capital city to produce a significant student movement. Its six black institutions of higher education, the presence of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC, the tradition of a

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distinguished and relatively progressive African-American middle class, and the existence of a white leadership group that was concerned about maintaining its reputation for moderation (exemplified by Ralph McGill and his Atlanta Constitution, the best-known Southern newspaper)—all of these factors could have led contemporary observers to predict that Atlanta students would rise to the occasion of the new movement. They did, but it was actually the student sit-in leadership of Nashville, Tennessee, not Atlanta, that provided the focal point for the emerging student movement. Nashville was home to one of the nation’s oldest and best-known black schools, Fisk

University, alma mater of W. E. B. Du Bois. In the largely segregated city, black students were also enrolled at Meharry Medical School, the American Baptist Theological Seminary, and Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College, a large, all-black state school. But it was one of the first black students at Vanderbilt University who played the central role. James Lawson, son of a Methodist minister and a strong and devout mother, had originally gone to Nashville from Ohio in 1958 as Southern field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The FOR was a mostly white organization of religious pacifists that had long been involved in a quiet search for nonviolent methods of fighting for racial justice in America. Lawson first met Martin Luther King, Jr., when King was visiting Oberlin College in Ohio and Lawson was one of its older undergraduates. When King learned about the impressive personal history and Gandhian commitments of the articulate, self-assured, and spiritually grounded young man, he urged Lawson to come South and work with him in the expanding freedom movement. Lawson, a year older than King, had already explored many aspects of the world of

nonviolent action. In 1951, while active in organized Methodist youth work, Lawson had refused to register for the military draft that was then gathering young men for service in the Korean War. Basing his objection to participation in the war on the nonviolent teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, and his own mother, Lawson had been arrested for resisting the draft after he was denied conscientious objector status. He spent more than a year in jail. While in prison he met other black and white men who were refusing military service based on their religious and philosophical commitment to pacifism and nonviolence. Eventually, Lawson was released on parole in the care of the Methodist Board of Overseas Missions, and he spent three years as a Christian fraternal worker in India under the board’s auspices. During this time, while teaching and coaching sports in Methodist schools, Lawson was able to explore more deeply his strong interest in Gandhian nonviolent action. He had already decided that he wanted to help create an American version of Gandhi’s spiritually based liberation movement when he happened to see the first story about the Montgomery bus boycott in an Indian newspaper. As he read the article, Lawson literally jumped for joy and vowed to deepen his own commitment to work for racial justice and reconciliation in the United States. So King’s later invitation was a powerful affirmation of what Jim Lawson had long been preparing for. Responding to King’s challenge, Lawson decided to explore an earlier invitation from the

Fellowship of Reconciliation to become its Southern field secretary, possibly based in Nashville. Lawson also accepted an invitation to develop workshops on nonviolence from the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), an affiliate of King’s SCLC that was led by the outspoken black Baptist pastor Kelly Miller Smith. Joined by his white FOR colleague and fellow Methodist minister Glenn Smiley, Lawson began his Nashville responsibilities by

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leading a workshop on nonviolent action for the NCLC in March 1958. By the fall of that year, he had decided to enroll as a student at the Divinity School of Nashville’s all-white, Methodist-affiliated Vanderbilt University. He was soon offering extended versions of his initial workshop, focused now on ways in which Nashville’s segregated world of public accommodations could be challenged and changed by well-trained, committed teams of nonviolent volunteers. By the beginning of 1960 there were some seventy-five regular participants in Lawson’s

weekly workshops at First Baptist Church. Some of them had even experimented with sitting in at some of the downtown lunch counters and then leaving when refused service. They set up role-playing situations, anticipating what they would do and say when they encountered the expected violent opposition in words or deeds. Then the word came from North Carolina. It appeared as if the action they were preparing

for in Nashville had actually begun several hundred miles away. That Friday night at their usual meeting time, the regular Nashville participants were overwhelmed by some five hundred students and adults who wanted to join the fight. Because Lawson’s corps of nonviolent trainees had been getting ready, they quickly decided to sit in at the segregated Nashville outlets of Woolworth’s and Kress, and they wanted to begin the next morning, Saturday, February 6. The students who became the heart of the Nashville movement included Marion Barry, a

Mississippi native who was a graduate student in chemistry at Fisk University (and later became mayor of Washington, D.C.); Diane Nash and Angela Butler, two student leaders from the Fisk campus; and a trio of students from the all-black American Baptist Seminary, James Bevel, John Lewis, and Bernard Lafayette. After two weeks of almost daily sit-ins without arrests, attacks, or lunch-counter service, they began to hear that the police were ready to begin arresting them and that local white troublemakers were prepared to attack them physically. Undeterred, the Nashville students (joined by several white exchange students on their campuses) were determined to continue their campaign. When the Nashville students went back downtown, at the start of the third week, the jailing,

the ridicule, the spit, the fierce attacks were all waiting for them—and eventually the world saw it. Perhaps even more important, the black community began to experience a new level of solidarity. Adults rallied to the side of their children and students. Such solidarity became one of the hallmarks of the sit-in phase of the movement, providing an important source of strength for the ongoing freedom struggle. Thousands of black citizens showed their willingness to come forward with every needed kind of assistance, from bail money, to food for the imprisoned students, to the impassioned offering of long and deep prayers on behalf of their young freedom fighters. At the same time, there were some black adults who thought the students were too brash, too

uncompromising, too dangerously provocative, and these various points of view led to significant tensions. But the college students’ spirit of bold, nonviolent defiance was infectious, and its effect on an even younger generation may have been at least as significant as its challenge to the elders. One of Nashville’s high-school students from those days later recalled that when the sit-ins began, he paid relatively little attention to them, for he was very wrapped up in his private ambition of becoming a famous and wealthy rock star. So even when

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the college students started marching right past his high school, Cordell Reagon was still “unconscious,” as he put it. Then, Reagon said, “One day they came by, and just on impulse I got some friends together and said, ‘Let’s go.’ We weren’t committed to the cause or anything. We just wanted to see what they were up to—it looked exciting.” That day the marching students had a stop to make on their way to the lunch counters, a stop

that opened new possibilities for young Cordell Reagon’s life. He said,

They were marching to the jail, where Diane Nash, one of the main student leaders in the movement, was being kept. We go down to the jail, and we’re all singing. There up in the jail cell we could see Diane. And everyone was shouting and waving. And I’m just looking. There is something amazing—a black woman only a couple of years older than me, up in this cell. There was some spirit, some power there, I had never seen before. Suddenly, I realized that everyone had marched down the street, and I was all alone staring at the cell. I ran down and caught up with the end of the march. But I figured then I better not let these people go. There is some power here that I never experienced before.

Responding to that power, holding on to those people, Reagon eventually moved toward the center of the movement, becoming one of the first full-time field secretaries for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). He was also a member of SNCC’s Freedom Singers, carrying the music, the stories, and the action of the movement around the world. There were young people like Cordell Reagon all over the South. Not long after Reagon caught up with the end of the powerful line in Nashville, students in downtown Orangeburg, South Carolina, demonstrated. There, they faced tear gas, high-powered fire hoses, and police beatings. In Tallahassee, Florida, the students from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College also encountered tear gas and violence, but they met up at the lunch counters with white students from neighboring Florida State University who had pledged to arrive before them and to share their food if the black students were refused service. Everywhere in the South black students were meeting these mixed realities: harsh resistance,

some overly cautious elders, new self-confidence and transformation, the emergence of new, sometimes unexpectedly courageous white allies, the beginning of some desegregation victories, and a fresh sense of themselves and the meaning of their movement. At the same time, in spite of the growing sense of solidarity, other black adults were troubled and frightened by the unprecedented boldness of the student action. Too familiar with the world of white violence and intimidation, these adults wondered what harsh reactions the student uprising would bring. What jobs would be lost, what homes and churches bombed, what bank loans canceled, what licenses revoked, which young careers aborted, which lives lost? Because of such understandably adult concerns, the students especially appreciated the consistent support and encouragement from Martin King’s public statements. Indeed, it seemed as if King clearly recognized that these students embodied some of his

own best dreams for the future of a nonviolent, mass-based freedom movement. So he offered great encouragement to their activities whenever possible and tried to interpret them to the world. Speaking in Durham, North Carolina, King said, “What is fresh, what is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, led and sustained by students. What is new is that American students have come of age. You now take your honored places in the world-wide struggle for freedom.”

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Then he urged them to move ahead and “fill up the jails.” Ever since the days of Gandhi in India, resistance leaders had issued the call to fill up the jails as both a personal and strategic challenge. On the personal level in America, it urged nonviolent warriors to overcome their justifiable fear of dangerous Southern jails as well as the sense of shame that respectable families experienced when their children ended up there. On the strategic level, it was a call to present so many challengers to the legal system that its machinery would be blocked, making it difficult to carry on business as usual. By the end of the winter of 1960 the mostly black contingent of Southern students was taking

King—and their own consciences—seriously; their sit-ins were reaching into every Southern state except Mississippi, which was too harsh in its resistance; they were filling up at least some of the jails of the region, and their sophisticated political consciousness and courageous action were catching the attention of the nation and the world. In March some of the leaders of the local movements got a much-needed opportunity to meet together for the first time to catch their breath. The occasion was what had originally been an annual conference of mostly white Southern college student activists. The 1960 session at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee reflected the rapidly changing nature of the Southern student leadership scene. Now, more than half of the eighty-five participants in the Annual Leadership Workshop for College Students were black student sit-in leaders. Highlander Folk School, established in the thirties, was run by a white couple, Myles and

Zilphia Horton. Highlander’s adult education programs, sometimes conducted by an interracial staff, included interracial conferences and workshops to train citizens to work for social change. It was an extraordinary and risky set of activities in the South in those days. As a result of its nonconformist agenda and its left-wing friends, the school had experienced

much harassment and persecution from local and state government authorities. Nevertheless, the Hortons persisted in their work, making Highlander a well-known resource center for labor movement organizers and for Southern freedom movement workers such as Septima Clark of Charleston, E. D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fred Shuttlesworth. Since 1953 Highlander had held an annual workshop for college student leaders. For the

1960 workshop, the Hortons chose a new, post-Greensboro theme: “The New Generation Fights for Equality.” In that retreatlike mountainside setting, leaders from the sit-in movements and their potential white allies shared experiences, exchanged strategies, and recognized fellow pioneers. They considered long-range goals, explored new meanings of nonviolence, and talked about not only surviving but prevailing while in jail. And there was time for singing, singing, singing—the flooding soulful glue that held

everything and everyone together. By now it was obvious that this was to be a singing movement, especially as it developed in Nashville, where James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and the young Cordell Reagon had taken their love for rhythm and blues street-corner singing and moved right into the hymns and spirituals of their home churches. At Highlander, Zilphia Horton had discovered anew the power of song in social movements.

In her work with union organizers, she had heard the old nineteenth-century African-American religious song “I’ll Be Alright,” which became “I Will Overcome.” Then she heard the song transformed by black women labor organizers in the forties, who took it to the picket lines of

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the justice-seeking Food and Tobacco Workers Union in Charleston, South Carolina, as a great rallying call: “We shall overcome. … Oh yes, down in my heart I do believe, we shall overcome some day.” Eventually, it became a kind of community anthem at Highlander. Spontaneously developing new verses out of their own sit-in experiences (“We are not afraid; We shall live in peace; Black and White together”), students sang it into the night, feeling the power of the expanding interracial band of sisters and brothers. The gathering at Highlander was a valuable development in the necessary process of turning

a set of semi-spontaneous, creative, youthful challenges into a powerful, sustained, insurgent mass movement that would eventually break the decades-old bondage of legal segregation in the South. Indeed, some adult veterans of the long black struggle for freedom had already begun to plan for a more formal meeting of the sit-in leaders. Central among the movement veterans was Ella Baker, a native North Carolinian who in the

twenties had dreamed of becoming a medical missionary. Unfortunately, the financial pressures of the Great Depresssion made her medical school dream unattainable. So after graduation from Shaw University, a black Baptist institution in Raleigh, North Carolina, she moved to Harlem. Soon, she became involved in a number of political and economic organizing activities. These included the development of a consumers’ cooperative organization and attempts at organizing African-American domestic workers, who badly needed better wages and working conditions. By the beginning of the forties, Baker was on the national staff of the NAACP, serving an important and often dangerous role as a roving organizer of NAACP chapters in the hostile South. Later, when the Montgomery movement began to catch the attention of the world, Baker

became part of a small group of New York-based social activists who called themselves “In Friendship.” They initially focused their attention on raising funds to assist black and white Southerners who had suffered economic losses because of their freedom movement activities or sympathies. As a result of her work with “In Friendship,” Baker met King and was later encouraged by her New York colleagues—including Bayard Rustin—to return to the South and help SCLC as its temporary executive director, operating from its Atlanta office. A brilliant grassroots organizer, Baker was also an articulate and outspoken woman with a

feminist consciousness far ahead of her time. Baker therefore found it difficult to work effectively in a leadership role in an organization made up of black pastors who were too often accustomed to seeing women only as compliant subordinates. Nevertheless, as a result of her SCLC position, Baker was strategically located when the Southern student sit-in movement erupted. And as soon as she began to grasp what was happening among the young people, she decided to find a way to bring their leaders together. Later Baker said that she wanted to encourage their interests “not in being leaders as much

as in developing leadership among other people.” So she convinced administrators at Shaw University that they should host a conference of the sit-in leaders. She convinced Martin Luther King, Jr., and other SCLC leaders that the organization should put up eight hundred dollars to cover the basic expenses for what was officially called a Southwide Youth Leadership Conference on Nonviolence, to be held April 15–17, 1960, the Easter weekend break. Baker and King signed a letter of invitation and sent it out to student activists and their allies

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all over the nation. The letter called the sit-in movement and its accompanying nonviolent actions “tremendously significant developments in the drive for Freedom and Human Dignity in America.” (Many of the more active leaders and grassroots participants in the Southern movement used “freedom” and “human dignity” to describe the goals of their struggle much more often than “civil rights”) Now, according to King and Baker, it was time to come together for an evaluation of the burgeoning movement, “in terms of where do we go from here.” The young student leaders were ready for such a gathering. Responding to letters, phone

calls, and other personal contacts, more than two hundred students and adult observers made their way to Raleigh. Of these, about one hundred twenty came from more than fifty black colleges and high schools in twelve Southern states. They brought with them a rich treasury of experiences and stories about organizing, about marching, about opposition forces and their weapons, about nonviolent resistance, about jails, about the jokes that made it possible for them to laugh in some of the most perilous situations. And of course they brought their songs of defiance, of empowerment, of hope. In an opening address to the conference on Friday night, April 15, the eloquent and insightful

Baker spoke pointedly to the adults present when she said, “The younger generation is challenging you and me. … They are asking us to forget our laziness and doubt and fear, and follow our dedication to the truth to the bitter end.” King, who was only thirty-one years old himself, picked up a similar theme in another address when he declared that the student movement “is also a revolt against the apathy and complacency of adults in the Negro community; against Negroes in the middle class who indulge in buying cars and homes instead of taking on the great cause that will really solve their problems; against those who have become so afraid they have yielded to the system.” In the post-Raleigh years, this double- edged role of the young warriors would continue: inspiration and tough challenge to the adult community. Because he was the freedom movement leader best known to the press, King was initially

the focus of attention for the small press contingent at Shaw. But in the course of the first evening’s speeches, they had to deal with the powerful presences of James Lawson and Ella Baker. Baker was acknowledged by the students as their prime mentor. Lawson, the official coordinator of the conference, and Baker both encouraged the students to think about forming an independent organization of their own. By the time the evening was over, the students had become the center of the weekend. And they were eager to seize the opportunities presented to them. Well-attended workshops

ranged from discussions of nonviolence to the political and economic implications of their crusade. They discussed and debated proposals for future organizational structure and spent much time and energy exploring the moral and strategic significance of refusing bail. One of the ten discussion groups that day focused on the role of “white supporters” in the rising movement. From the heart of that discussion a powerful insight emerged, one that would mark the student-led campaigns for several years. According to the notes kept by one of the participants, the workshop participants declared, “This movement should not be considered one for Negroes but one for people who consider this a movement against injustice. This would include members of all races.” By welcoming idealistic, non-black participants into their struggle, blacks confirmed one of

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the best self-definitions of the Southern-based freedom movement: Freedom for black Americans freed all Americans. This vision was a central reason why so many socially committed whites were attracted to the movement at large and particularly to the politically conscious and religiously motivated nonviolent student workers. It was not surprising to find among the “observers” at Shaw representatives from such groups as the ecumenical National Council of Churches; the Northern-based Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which fought for integration; the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR); and the overwhelmingly white National Students Association, which represented college students. The conference concluded with the birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Conferees elected Marion Barry as the new organization’s first chairman. Barry held that post through the fall of 1961, when he returned to graduate school in Nashville. During his brief tenure, he established a tone that characterized the group well into the late sixties. He professed SNCC’s intention of directly and forcefully confronting segregation and injustice, even vowing to go to jail to achieve results.

The Arduous Task: Rooting Out Fear and Getting Out Votes In one of his characteristically insightful essays on the American condition, Ralph Ellison wrote, “The business of being an American is an arduous task.” In the context of the African- American struggles of the sixties, this was perhaps an understatement. For what emerged from the Southern freedom struggle by the beginning of the sixties was the clear recognition that the arduous task for black people would be redefining what it means to be an American. Nowhere was this work of recreation more evident than in the battles for justice that took place in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi in 1961. In May of that year, CORE organized an interracial group of activists to challenge a

Supreme Court order outlawing segregation in bus terminals. Calling themselves Freedom Riders, they set out across the South to see if they could integrate all bus terminal facilities, including lunch counters, waiting rooms, and rest rooms. They began their ride in Washington, D.C., and originally hoped to end it in New Orleans. Where they failed, they hoped to draw attention to the continued racism in the South and the need for federal intervention to protect black rights. All was relatively peaceful until they entered Alabama. But the riders met with violence in almost every city they stopped in throughout that state. In Anniston, for example, mobs actually threw a bomb on the bus and set it on fire. As a result of international publicity, President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General

Robert Kennedy tried to persuade the riders to stop their journey. When they refused, the Kennedys struck a deal with Mississippi officials, allowing them to maintain segregated facilities as long as the Freedom Riders were not harmed. Instead of being attacked, riders in Mississippi were simply arrested. Altogether, at least 328 Freedom Riders served time in Mississippi’s jails. Realizing that the negative publicity would not die down and that CORE would continue to challenge segregation, Robert Kennedy asked the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue an order banning segregation in terminals that catered to interstate transportation. That September, the ICC complied with the attorney general’s request, issuing a statement that all interstate facilities must obey the Supreme Court ruling.

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The next battle took place in Albany, Georgia, a city of approximately sixty thousand people that was intimately shaped by its agricultural setting and the racial attitudes of its Black Belt location. Bernice Johnson, who later married Cordell Reagon, was one of the most powerful participants in the Albany movement. She was a student at the segregated Albany State College in 1961 when the emerging Southern movement began to take hold in Albany. As an officer of the Youth Council of the local NAACP, Johnson had been one of the students

who marched in 1961 on the college president’s house to protest the administration’s failure to develop adequate security measures against white intruders from town. Such men regularly harassed students on the campus and more than once sneaked into women’s dormitories in an attempt to intimidate and sexually threaten the students. So Johnson, many of her fellow students, and some of their parents were already preparing

to challenge the system when representatives of SNCC appeared in Albany that fall of 1961. Recognizing that it was really not able to coordinate a widely scattered Southern student movement that had already begun to change its character, the fledgling organization had decided to become essentially a committed group of antisegregation organizers. More than a dozen of the core group of SNCC people announced late that spring and summer that they were dropping out of school for a year in order to commit themselves to the struggle for justice, dignity, and hope. It was also during this summer of 1961 that the group decided that it would send out “field secretaries” to do grassroots organizing, especially educating and preparing potential voters across the South, working for SNCC at subsistence wages of twenty-five to forty dollars per week, depending on whether they were single or married. It was during that same period that the young freedom workers engaged in a series of very long and piercing debates with each other about whether the organization should continue to commit itself to nonviolent direct action or focus instead on voter registration in the Deep South. SNCC’s ongoing internal debates became so heated at times during that summer of 1961 that

the new organization seemed in danger of breaking apart. One of the major forces pushing the organization to focus on voter registration was President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, the U.S. attorney general. They were urging the Southern freedom movement organizations to take their primary action “out of the street” and focus on what the Kennedy brothers assumed would be a less volatile, and therefore less internationally embarrassing, action of registering black voters. As a part of their proposal, the Kennedys promised to round up foundation funds for the voter-registration campaigns and to ensure federal protection for its participants. Of course, not only were the Kennedys and their friends hoping to get the movement off the front pages of the world’s newspapers, but they expected that the vast majority of any new black registered voters would be ready to cast their votes for the Democratic party, especially if that party appeared to be committed to securing their rights. Many of SNCC’s young people brought a high level of moral sensitivity and political savvy

to their work. So it was not surprising that in the course of the long meetings, many of them thought they saw political and financial bribery at work in the Kennedys’ offers. For some who had recently come out of the terror of the Freedom Rides and the resultant rigors of Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary, any call to turn away from such direct action was a call to betray their history. So the internal battle was a hard one, and it was only the wisdom of their trusted mentor, Ella Baker, that finally led the students to the decision that avoided a split.

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The “band of brothers,” as they had begun to call themselves, reflecting both the sexism of the time and the deep love and respect these young men and women shared for each other, decided to set up a “direct action” project and a “voter registration” project within the one organization. That fall two SNCC voter-registration organizers headed into Southwest Georgia,

considered by black people to be a region of the state most resistant to such activities. SNCC had already begun to develop its risky practice of choosing the most difficult and dangerous places to start its projects, working on the assumption that once the “hardest nuts” in a state were cracked, it would be possible to assure local people and their own members that they could take on anything else. But “Terrible” Terrell County, SNCC’s chosen starting point, proved to be too much at first. It was a place too filled with the fear and the bloody memories of its black people and the brutality of its white citizens to be ready for the voter-registration action that Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon had in mind. Sherrod was a seminary student from Virginia who had left school to join SNCC’s crusade. His eighteen-year-old companion was the same Cordell Reagon who had been drawn out of his Nashville classroom the previous year by the sheer power of that city’s student movement. So they turned toward Albany, the largest town in the area. Because an order of the Interstate

Commerce Commission banning segregation in all interstate travel facilities (notably, bus terminals and train stations) was scheduled to take effect on November 1, 1961, Sherrod and Reagon decided that they should encourage the local black young people of Albany to test the ICC mandate. In this way they could take “direct action.” As the first SNCC people on the scene in Albany, Sherrod and Reagon had to improvise in

organizing the black people there. The two men also had to figure out a way to reach the most receptive young people in the African-American community without seeming to compete with the local NAACP chapter and its own Youth Council. Reagon later remembered: “We would sit in the student union building on the college campus all day long, drinking soda, talking with the students, trying to convince them to test the public accommodations at the bus station.” SNCC organizers like Reagon and Sherrod were key in bringing teenagers into the center of the freedom movement of the sixties. The SNCC workers and their young student compatriots appeared at the Trailways bus

terminal in Albany on November 1, 1961, ready to test the new federal desegregation mandate. On that same day, other bus terminals in scores of Southern and border cities were tested in a CORE-inspired follow-up to the Freedom Rides. The Albany action that day marked the beginning of a rising tide of student-led nonviolent confrontations with the city’s police force as blacks met an incoming train carrying an interracial group of Freedom Riders. Although the passengers disembarked without incident, the confrontation inspired the formation of a coalition among SNCC, the local NAACP, a local ministers group, and others, which became known as the Albany Movement. Albany’s young people staged their challenge to the bus system on Wednesday, November

22, the day before Thanksgiving. Normally, on that day, Albany State’s many out-of-town students would file dutifully into the “colored” side of the bus and train terminals to travel home for the holiday break. This time, even before the crowd of college students arrived, three high-school students from the SNCC-revived NAACP Youth Council walked into the white

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side of the bus terminal. When the police ordered them to move, they refused, and were arrested. Although they were quickly bailed out by the head of the local NAACP branch, who was not happy about the path on which Reagon and Sherrod were leading his youth, their audacious action was like the first crack in a dam. Before long the college students arrived at the terminal. They had heard about the arrest of

the high-school students, and their college dean was there to try to make sure his students were not carried away by their new sense of duty. He directed them to the “colored” side. Nevertheless, two Albany State students from the SNCC workshop, Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall, refused. A detective informed them that their presence in the white ticket line was creating a disturbance, and when Gober and Hall did not leave, they were arrested. Their presence in Albany’s dirty jail over the holiday became the magnet that drew the

larger black community of the city together. Not only did people bring Gober and Hall a steady stream of Thanksgiving dinners, but the Albany Movement leaders took the arrests, along with those of the high-school students, as a sign that they had to join their children in the challenge to the old ways. The city and its youth-inspired movement caught the attention of the national press, and the Albany Movement held its first Montgomery-like mass meeting on the Saturday evening after Thanksgiving, November 25. By then Gober and Hall had been bailed out of jail, but they had also been suspended from college by their easily intimidated administrators, a decision that only solidified black community support for the students. At the Saturday-night mass meeting, all the religious fervor of Albany’s black people was poured into the songs that the students had brought out of their workshops and their jail cells and transformed for the occasion. The Albany Singers, including Bernice Johnson, were principally responsible for defining the music of the Civil Rights movement. Later, Johnson founded the women’s singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. By now the people at the meeting were ready to do more than sing and listen to testimonies.

They were prepared to march on City Hall to demand enforcement of federal law, the reinstatement of the Albany State students, and the end of segregation. Over the next two weeks, at least three groups marched, praying for and demanding change, and when they did, they were arrested in scores. The steady rising of their inspired people actually surprised the leaders of the Albany Movement, among them movement President Dr. William Anderson, a local osteopath, and Vice President Slater King, a local realtor. They were not prepared for a situation in which nearly a thousand people, including parents and breadwinners, were at one point stranded in jail with no bail money available and no significant response to their call for desegregation of public transportation facilities. It was at this point that some of the leadership, especially Anderson, decided that they

needed the help of Martin Luther King, Jr. Anderson was a college friend of Ralph Abernathy and a fraternity brother of King. He decided to use these connections to bring in the best-known hero of the Southern movement to see if his presence could bring greater national attention to their struggle, and thereby shake the resistance of the white establishment. This determination to call in King and SCLC widened divisions that were already present in

the Albany Movement leadership. For instance, additional SNCC forces had come in to help Sherrod and Reagon as the work expanded, and SNCC adamantly opposed calling in King and SCLC. Its leaders argued that the media attention King would attract might well suffocate the

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creative development of a local grassroots leadership and that they could become too dependent on the star of the freedom struggle. Nevertheless, King, Abernathy, and some of their SCLC staff arrived in Albany for a

December 16 mass meeting that they understood to be a one-night inspirational event. But at the meeting Anderson publicly maneuvered King into leading a march the next day. As a result, King and his organization became enmeshed in a very difficult situation. Increasingly, Albany attracted black and white allies from across the nation. Religious

communities were especially attracted to the strong church component of the movement’s mass meetings, marches, and mass jailing. But Albany’s black leaders, now joined by King and the SCLC, were working for something that had never been attempted in the South before. They had moved beyond the immediate confrontational settings of the bus and train terminals and were pressing for the desegregation of the entire city, beginning with its municipally owned public accommodations and its local bus lines. Such a development was a necessary and inevitable step in the burgeoning Southern struggle, but no one knew how to organize for it or to develop a citywide strategy. The movement’s task was complicated by the fact that Laurie Pritchett, the chief of police,

was not a volatile loose cannon like some of his counterparts in other Southern communities. Instead, Pritchett was very concerned about public relations and insisted that his officers rein in their tendencies toward violent treatment of the black community, especially when they were under the scrutiny of the mass media. This strategy was meant to deprive the movement of emotional rallying points and to deprive an already recalcitrant federal government of any reasons for entering the Albany situation. Partly because of Pritchett’s strategy, partly because of divisions within the Albany Movement, partly because of the unprecedented demands that they were pressing on the segregated city, and partly because of their own inexperience with such a setting, King, SNCC, and the Albany Movement leaders were unable to reach their immediate goals of achieving the desegregation of public facilities. Pritchett undermined the very basis of nonviolent passive resistance by refusing to respond with violence. There were no dramatic images of activists being attacked or beaten by mobs. Instead, they were peacefully arrested for breaking the law. There was no victorious breakthrough in Albany for several reasons. The Kennedy

administration agreed not to intervene directly, either to enforce the ICC ruling or to protect the civil rights activists, as long as the Albany authorities could keep the peace. Pritchett succeeded not only in keeping the peace and reducing publicity, but in defeating the movement there. By the end of 1962, a year after the Albany campaign started, SCLC called the campaign off, although SNCC activists remained in Albany for another six years. Segregation was still firmly in place, and only a handful of African Americans could vote. Nevertheless, even in failure, the movement gained a new vision, a new voice. Partly by

accident it had chosen to try to challenge the segregation patterns of an entire Southern city. This was the first time in the post-Montgomery years of the freedom movement that young people and their elders had marched and gone to jail together, had together shaped an organization to challenge segregation. As important, the movement had discovered its capacity to take on more than a boycott, or a sit-in, or a voter-registration project. It had learned something through failure. These lessons would be important when King and the forces of

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SCLC eventually responded to the invitation from their fearless comrade, Fred Shuttlesworth, and moved in the spring of 1963 toward Birmingham, perhaps the toughest, most terrifying city in America in which to stage a fight for desegregation. The road to Birmingham was not the only path that the Southern movement took in those

years following the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides. Even while the Albany Movement was at its height, a small but steady stream of SNCC’s voter-registration workers arrived in the counties that Sherrod and Reagon had originally targeted. As the Albany campaign slowed down in 1962, Sherrod himself went back into the nearby rural areas to lead the work on the voter-registration project in Baker, Terrell, Lee, and Dougherty counties. Although it rarely received the same kind of media attention as the dramatic public

confrontation of marches, demonstrations, and sit-ins, this sort of tedious, demanding, unglamorous, and dangerous day-to-day work of voter registration was an essential step in providing blacks with the tools, and the power, to transform the nation. The work of these voter-registration campaigners began simply: They made themselves

known in the local black community—where they were often identified as “Freedom Riders.” They visited homes, churches, schools, individuals, and families, and they sought out black community leaders. Central to their strategy was always the work of “canvassing.” Moving on foot, on bicycles, in cars, on mules, the young men and women went from house to house, often at night, asking if people were registered or if they wanted to register, telling them about the benefits of voting, letting them know that classes were being set up to help people deal with the intentionally complicated registration process, and calming their fears. The atmosphere of confrontation and overcoming fear became most evident in a meeting in

Sasser, a country town in Terrell County. On Monday night, July 25, 1962, Sherrod, some of his interracial SNCC comrades, and several of the local black leaders and participants were carrying on their weekly voter-registration meeting at Mount Olive Baptist Church. There were some thirty or thirty-five people in the building. Attendance was lower than usual partly because of a threat from whites that the gathering would be broken up. But the meeting went on, likely encouraged by the presence of three national newspaper

reporters who had also heard about the threat. The session began, as usual, with a hymn, a prayer, and a Bible reading, the necessary ingredients for starting a meeting anywhere in the black South. Sherrod was in charge of this part of the meeting. The anxiety level was higher than usual that night, but the SNCC organizer kept his voice even and calm as he opened the session. They sang, “Pass me not/O gentle Savior,” and then repeated the Lord’s Prayer together. Sherrod led them in repeating the Twenty-third Psalm, slowing down on the words, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Just then they heard the sound of car doors slamming in the driveway. Sherrod had begun to read one of his favorite passages from the New Testament. When he

heard the car doors, he said quietly, firmly, “They are standing just outside now. If they come in I’m going to read this over again.” He read from Romans 8:31, “If God be for us, then who can be against us?” At that point about fifteen white men from Sasser walked in, including one in a deputy sheriff’s uniform, along with Sheriff Mathews, in plain clothes. They lined up against the wall in the back of the church while Sherrod completed the reading. Then, without missing

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a beat, the young freedom minister began to pray: “Into thy hand do we commend our minds and souls and our lives every day. … We’ve been abused so long. … We’ve been down so long.” The “Amens” and “Uh-huhs” of the people had begun to roll into place between his phrases, and they came again when Sherrod went on. “All we want,” he said, “is for our white brothers to understand that Thou who made us, made us all. … And in Thy sight we are all one.” Sheriff Mathews had bowed his head and closed his eyes. Sherrod led the strangely mixed congregation in the Lord’s Prayer, and then someone began

singing, “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder.” Soon after the song began, the men in the back filed out. At the end of the song Sheriff Mathews, accompanied by two of his deputies and the sheriff of neighboring Sumter County, walked back in. One deputy now had a large revolver holstered on his belt, and the other one was brandishing a two-foot-long flashlight, a familiar weapon. By this time, Lucius Holloway, the local chairman of the voter-registration drive, had begun

to lead the meeting, and he called out to the lawmen, “Everybody is welcome. This is a voter- registration meeting.” Sheriff Mathews responded:

We are a little fed up with this registering business. Niggers down here have been happy for a hundred years, and now this has started. We want our colored people to live like they’ve been living. There never was any trouble before all this started. It’s caused great dislike between colored and white.

Then the deputies began taking the names of everyone present, and they told the local black people that they did not need the outsiders from SNCC in order to register. They also issued ominous threats about what could happen to blacks after their outsider allies left the area. In the midst of the lawmen’s performance, someone began humming “We Shall Overcome.” Others picked up the song. The lawmen retreated to the back of the church and the people continued their meeting, giving reports of registration attempts, testimonies of beatings, and statements of hope. At the end of the meeting, they gathered in a circle at the church door to sing “We are not

afraid.” That night there was no violence, except to the tires of one of the reporters’ cars. But several nights later, the church was burned to the ground. Eventually, most of the SNCC workers and community leaders who were at the meeting found themselves thrown in jail, and beaten, as usual. Still, the organizing and overcoming continued in Terrell County and elsewhere in the Deep South. In these settings it had usually been so long since black people had voted that many local

black people did not even know that the nation’s laws guaranteed them that right. Voting and politics generally were considered “white folks’ business,” and there were terrible memories that reminded them of what could happen to blacks who tried to participate in that business. In addition to the physical terror that stood between African Americans and the ballot box, everyone knew of the economic intimidation that was often used against them, sometimes forcing them off the land they were farming as sharecroppers, putting them out of the miserable shacks they lived in, making it impossible to get jobs with local employers, ultimately forcing them to leave the area. These were the settings that had produced black registered voting percentages of zero to five percent in many places where black people made up more than fifty percent of the population.

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But in every such setting, there were always people willing to work for a new day. That was certainly what Bob Moses found when he went into Mississippi. Moses had been working in Atlanta as a volunteer in the SNCC office staff in the summer of 1960. He was sent to Alabama and Mississippi that summer to recruit participants for the next SNCC organizing conference, scheduled for the fall. In preparation for the trip, Ella Baker supplied Moses with the names of people she had worked with during her days as an NAACP organizer in the South. One such person was Amzie Moore, president of the local, somewhat bedraggled NAACP

chapter in Cleveland, Mississippi. When Moses met Moore, the forty-nine-year-old Mississippi movement veteran was farming part-time, working a few hours each day in the local post office, and running his own gas station. Because Moore had insisted on trying to develop a voter-registration campaign in Cleveland in the mid-fifties, and because he refused to put up the legally required “colored” and “white” signs in his station, he had almost lost his business and his life. But he was still there when Moses arrived, looking for recruits for SNCC. Moore convinced Moses that what Mississippi needed more than a group of young SNCC-

like recruits going off to Atlanta was a band of SNCC’s arduous freedom workers coming to Mississippi to create a major voter-registration campaign, starting right there in Cleveland. Moses said he would take the message back to Atlanta. But Moses promised that regardless of what SNCC formally decided, he would personally return to Cleveland the following summer. When Moses returned South in the summer of 1961, much had changed throughout the nation. Most important among the changes was the influence of the Freedom Rides and the hope they inspired. And in Mississippi itself, Medgar Evers, the head of that state’s NAACP organization, was openly calling for the city government of Jackson, the capital city, to desegregate public facilities. But the time was still not quite right for a voter-registration campaign in Moore’s Delta area.

White reaction to black assertiveness was swift and violently brutal, federal protection could not be assured, and many blacks questioned the wisdom of “stirring up trouble.” Instead, some local NAACP leaders in Southwest Mississippi had heard about the possibility of a SNCC team coming to the state to work on voter registration, and they asked their friend Moore to put them in touch with Moses. As a result, SNCC’s voter education wing began its Mississippi development in a small town called McComb, near another town named Liberty. Courageous older NAACP veterans from the area, like C. C. Bryant, E. W. Steptoe, and Webb Owens helped to open the way for Moses, who was soon joined by two former Freedom Riders, John Hardy and Reginald Robinson. The SNCC forces started in the usual way. With the help of the committed older men and

women in the town, they began to introduce themselves to other local leaders and soon sought out the young people as well. Many of the teenage group were fascinated by the fact that these activists had come to their town, and they were ready for any kind of exciting direct action. Their elders, however, knew that people in their area had been beaten, killed, or driven out of town for trying to register to vote. So when Moses and his team began to set up a “school” to help people prepare for the intimidating moment when they might face a hostile registrar, the response was slow. Moses made it a practice never to pressure local people to register, because he knew, and they also knew, that he was asking them to risk their lives, a decision that

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they had to make themselves.

Poll taxes, literacy tests, and citizenship exams—as well as other, more brutal methods—were routinely used to keep blacks away from the polls in the South.

But when the first group of three local volunteers, an older man and two middle-aged women, were finally ready, it was Moses whose life was most at risk. After helping his frightened candidates break their silence as they faced the registrar, Moses was attacked on the main street of McComb by a man who was the sheriff’s cousin. He split Moses’s scalp with the heavy handle of a hunting knife. About a week later Moses felt a different kind of pain when he had to identify the body of Herbert Lee, a black farmer who had risked his life to volunteer as a driver for the SNCC voter-registration team. Because of his movement association, Lee had been shot to death in daylight by a white segregationist—a Mississippi state legislator. Meanwhile in McComb, the committed high-school students were too young to register and

too impatient to wait. They wanted to enter the freedom struggle more directly than by teaching older people to read the registration materials. By now, SNCC people from the “direct action” contingent, like Marion Barry and Diane Nash, had also begun to gather in McComb, and they were leading workshops for the teenagers on nonviolent direct action. As soon as they could, the students put their training into action with a sit-in at a local lunch counter, the first in that part of Mississippi, an action for which SNCC had not planned. The sit-in squad was put in jail, and some of them were suspended from school. That led to a student-organized walkout from their school and a march to City Hall. Sensing that the teenagers were moving into a dangerous action that they could not handle,

Moses and some of his coworkers decided to march with them. The youngsters decided that they wanted to pray on the steps of City Hall. The police thought prayers belonged only in churches or homes, and they began to arrest the young people. The students were repeating the Lord’s Prayer, and each time one was interrupted and arrested, another walked up the steps to

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continue the prayer. Finally, the police arrested more than one hundred young people and took them to jail. By then the spectacle had attracted a crowd of curious and angry white people. Moses and his two SNCC companions offered a striking testimony to the spirit of SNCC.

One of them was Charles “Chuck” McDew, an Ohio-born black college student who became a sit-in leader at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. The other was Bob Zellner, the organization’s first full-time field secretary assigned to recruiting white students. A native of Alabama, Zellner was the son of a white Southern Methodist minister, and he went to McComb instead of traveling to white campuses because he wanted to know what SNCC was actually doing in order to be an effective recruiter for the cause. However, the white people of McComb wanted to know what he was doing there in the

midst of the black troublemakers. Here, and in many future situations, Zellner was considered “a traitor to the white race.” So as he came down the City Hall steps on his way to jail, several men rushed to attack him. There were many beatings and jailings in McComb that fall. At one point, all but one of the SNCC organizers were in jail. But it was the death of Herbert Lee that haunted people more than anything else. Despite the harsh white resistance that had forced the adults of McComb to temporarily slow down their attempts at voter registration, leading to SNCC’s temporary withdrawal, still no one could miss the tremors of change throughout the state. In 1962, the most spectacular tremor in Mississippi was the decision of black Air Force

veteran James Meredith, with the support of the NAACP, to apply for admission to Ole Miss. Few institutions were considered more quintessentially white Mississippian, more worthy of defense against the black challenge than the University of Mississippi at Oxford. When Meredith first tried to enroll in the university, Governor Ross Barnett barred him from admission, a power that a federal court ruled Barnett did not possess. Barnett then encouraged white people in the state to believe that their active, armed resistance—even to a court- ordered change—could halt desegregation. So by the end of September 1962, when it was time for Meredith to appear on campus to

register for his first classes, thousands of white Mississippians—both students and others— believed that they could physically guard the university against the newly defined black presence that Meredith represented. Students and their segregationist allies rioted against the federal marshals who had slipped onto the Meredith campus the Sunday afternoon before registration. The rioters hurled rocks, bricks, lead pipes, and tear gas at the marshals, and finally even shot at them in a one-sided battle in which the marshals were ordered not to return the fire. In the course of the uproar, a foreign reporter and a local white worker were shot and killed, and some 350 others, mostly marshals, were wounded. The Kennedys had been trying to negotiate their way to a settlement with Barnett that would not require them to send in federal troops to protect Meredith’s rights. However, in the end, the Kennedys decided they had to send in the troops. Though late, this federal intervention finally ended the white resistance. The next day, James Meredith finally registered as the first black student at Ole Miss and

became a powerful symbol to the black people of the nation. As the SNCC workers reflected on their experiences in southwest Georgia and southwest

Mississippi, they moved to the northwest area of Mississippi, known as the Delta. They

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stopped in Jackson to work out the details of a new coalition. Now they would coordinate their work with the activities of the NAACP, SCLC, and CORE, and together they formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). This coalition was largely Bob Moses’ idea, and it served as an important pipeline for the funds that supported registration work. Ultimately, this united front was important for the morale of Mississippi’s black people,

providing them with a sense of the joint strength that was needed to break open the “closed society” of their state. Nevertheless, the essential energies and people power of the next stages of the COFO campaign came from SNCC, which was the heart of COFO. SNCC realized that the dangerous and essentially underground work of registering blacks had to become more visible to the world, not only to provide protection and build morale but also to prod the federal government into action. From the spring of 1962 to the fall of 1963 the Mississippi voting-rights work was focused

on the Delta region. It was known as one of the most terror-filled sections of a violence-prone state. Partly because of this reputation, partly because this was the area where Amzie Moore lived, Bob Moses, as the new COFO program director, took his voter-registration forces there, working to make Moore’s old dream come true. The reality of voter registration in the Delta was harsher than the dreams, however. Once

again, the violence was persistent and nerve-wracking. As in every other voter-registration campaign in the Black Belt, however, SNCC and other groups were constantly meeting such men and women as Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, a town not far from Greenwood. The forty- seven-year-old sharecropper with a sixth-grade education went to a mass meeting one night in 1962 and heard James Bevel, the charismatic leader who had emerged from the Nashville student movement, holding forth like an evangelist, calling people to a new life of struggle for freedom. Hamer later said, “Until then I’d never heard of no mass meeting and I didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote.” But when she found out, she was one of the first volunteers to go to the courthouse the next day. Hamer knew she was volunteering for danger, and later she said, “I guess if I’d had any

sense I’d a-been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared. The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.” From that day on Hamer was at the heart of the movement. While in Greenwood, Bob Moses wrote about how to face the long, hard, dangerous times

when it was easy to give in to fear:

You dig into yourself and the community and prepare to wage psychological warfare; you combat your own fears about beatings, shootings, and possible mob violence; you stymie by your own physical presence the anxious fear of the Negro community … you organize, pound by pound, small bands of people who gradually focus in the eyes of Negroes and whites as people tied up in “that mess”; you create a small striking force capable of moving out when the time comes, which it must, whether we help it or not.

Of course no one could predict how and when the time would come, again and again, in these life-changing campaigns. But for people on the front lines, like Moses, the testing time was always nearby. This was the testimony of one of his coworkers, Marian Wright, a Spelman College graduate who was taking some time from her Yale Law School studies to join the forces of hope in Greenwood. She wrote,

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I had been with Bob Moses one evening and dogs kept following us down the street. Bob was saying that he wasn’t used to dogs, that he wasn’t brought up around dogs, and he was really afraid of them. Then came the march, and the dogs growling and the police pushing us back. And there was Bob, refusing to move back, walking, walking towards the dogs.

Neither Moses nor the dogs backed down, and one of the animals tore a piece out of his trousers before the dog’s police handler finally pulled him away. Bob Moses kept walking. In Greenwood, in 1962 and early 1963, no one knew how long they would have to walk and

work, facing dogs, facing death, facing fear. But one thing began to be clear: They were not walking alone. For instance, in response to appeals from SNCC, communities in the North were donating truckloads of food and clothing for desperate Delta families. Dick Gregory, the socially concerned comedian, came to stand in solidarity and mordant humor with the people who continued to walk toward the courthouse and the registrar’s office. Folksinger Bob Dylan arrived for his baptism in the work of the movement, sharing his songs and hope. In the early spring of 1963, many of the full-time SNCC workers took time out from

Greenwood’s battleground to attend the annual SNCC staff meeting in Atlanta. The organization’s full-time staff was now up to sixty people, and they came in from all over the South. Some 350 people attended the April gathering held at one of Atlanta’s black theological schools, Gammon Seminary. Reflecting later on the session, James Forman, who was the organization’s indefatigable

executive secretary during those crucial years, summed up the spirit and meaning of the experience: “The meeting was permeated by an intense comradeship, born of sacrifice and suffering and a commitment to the future, and out of a knowledge that our basic strength rested in the energy, love, and warmth of the group. The band of sisters and brothers, in a circle of trust, felt complete at last.” In the midst of a throbbing social movement nothing remained “complete” for long. Even as

the SNCC meeting was going on, its companion and slightly elder organization, SCLC, was opening another front of the expanding Southern freedom movement. Responding to repeated invitations from Fred Shuttlesworth, leader of the Birmingham Civil Rights movement, and determined to learn crucial lessons from the many difficulties and experiments in Albany, in the spring of 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., and his staff had gone to Birmingham, Alabama.

Birmingham: The Days beyond “Forever” When SCLC decided to challenge segregation in Birmingham, it was taking on a city with one of the worst records of anti-labor and anti-civil rights violence in the country. Because of its surrounding coal and steel industries, the city had always attracted labor-organizing activities. In 1931, the police force established the “Red Squad” to handle communist and other Left- Wing organizers with force, and from then on Birmingham’s law-enforcement agencies—with much assistance from private citizens—were infamous for their brutal tactics. During the thirties, many black and white labor organizers were arrested, kidnapped, beaten, or even killed. And in 1941, Birmingham experienced a wave of police killings and beatings. The best- known incidents involved the deaths of two young black men, O’Dee Henderson and John

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Jackson. Henderson, who was arrested and jailed for merely arguing with a white man, was found handcuffed and shot the next morning in his jail cell. A few weeks later, Jackson, a metalworker in his early twenties, was shot to death as he lay in the backseat of a police car. He had made the fatal mistake of arguing with the arresting officers in front of a crowd of blacks lined up outside a movie theater. After the Second World War, blacks often referred to the rigidly segregated city as

“Bombingham.” The name called attention to the frequent bombings of the homes and churches of those African Americans who dared to take even tentative steps toward the establishment of racial justice. This was the setting in which Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth and his family had been beaten, bombed, attacked, and jailed. Many people agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr., when he said, “As Birmingham goes, so goes the South.” Later, when he reflected on the Birmingham campaign, King wrote:

We believed that while a campaign in Birmingham would surely be the toughest fight of our civil-rights careers, it could, if successful, break the back of segregation all over the nation. This city had been the country’s chief symbol of racial intolerance. A victory there might well set forces in motion to change the entire course of the drive for freedom and justice.

After exploring the situation, SCLC moved into action in Birmingham during the first days of April 1963. This was a period of intense freedom movement activity all across the South, with thousands of demonstrators challenging segregation from Maryland to Louisiana. In Birmingham, SCLC and Shuttlesworth’s Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) focused on breaking the hold of legalized segregation in all the public facilities, starting with its downtown stores and its municipal facilities, such as city-owned parks, pools, and drinking fountains. They also hoped to open up the police force to black officers. To work out details and to keep the process moving beyond the demonstrations, the black organizations pressed for the establishment of a city-sponsored biracial committee. In light of Birmingham’s history—and in the presence of Alabama’s new governor, George

Wallace, who had declared in his 1963 inaugural address, “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”—this relatively modest set of goals appeared to most white residents to be undesirable, and impossible. Complicating the situation was the fact that the white leadership of Birmingham was deeply divided. When SCLC came on the scene that spring, the city was awaiting a judicial decision concerning a recent, disputed municipal election. The decision would either establish Bull Connor, the police commissioner, as mayor or place in office a more moderate segregationist named Albert Boutwell. At the same time there was a white business community of expanding influence whose members were greatly concerned about their city’s image, an image they were trying to refurbish “to look like Atlanta,” the liberal showcase city of the region. But in the midst of all of this the Ku Klux Klan and its adherents were still dangerously active, rallying behind their new governor. For most of April, SCLC’s challenge to Birmingham seemed to have a hard time capturing

the full energy and interest of local black people or the national press. Even when King and Abernathy were arrested and jailed for marching on Good Friday, April 12, the best of the nightly mass meetings could not produce more than fifty or sixty volunteers for the next morning’s demonstrations, which were designed to demand an immediate end to racist

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employment practices and segregation in public accommodations. It was important to note who did show up to march. At the outset of the campaign it was the

older people who stepped forward. Eventually, the Birmingham grandchildren would respond to the elders. While King sat in the isolation cell of Bull Connor’s jail, one of his lawyers managed to

smuggle in some newspapers. In one of the Birmingham papers King came across a statement signed by a group of local white clergymen who considered themselves friends of black people and open to “moderate” racial change. Expressing concern that the desegregation campaign could play into Bull Connor’s hands, they urged King and SCLC to leave Birmingham’s future in the hands of its moderate black and white leaders. King seized the opportunity to respond. After a yellow, legal-sized pad was passed on to him, King ended up with a lengthy handwritten document that attempted to lay out the justification for his presence in Birmingham, to express the meaning and purpose of nonviolent direct action, and to provide a statement concerning the role of the churches in the quest for racial justice. However, the single most powerful section of his long letter arose out of his determination to let the white clergymen—and any other readers—know something about what it meant to be a black person in the segregated South, and what it meant to be told by white “friends” and Christian brothers to wait for a more convenient time to protest and challenge the injustice and inhumanity of segregation. King wrote, “I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation

to say, ‘Wait.’” Then in the longest sentence he had ever written, or would ever write again, he poured out a statement that was more than a moan or a plea for understanding.

When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim, when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity, when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an air- tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (no matter how old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at a tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, one of the classic statements of the freedom movement, did not begin to reach the outside world until more than a month after it was written. It was published in a number of newspapers and magazines and in book form in 1964 as Why We Can’t Wait. As the Birmingham demonstrations grew larger and more public, young people were eager

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to join in. Soon, young people regularly attended the nightly mass meetings and begged their parents to let them join the marches. But the movement leaders debated about encouraging students to miss school for an almost certain rendezvous with prison, or worse. Marchers were attacked by police dogs, shot with high-power water hoses, and beaten with clubs. In that debate the views of SNCC leaders Diane Nash Bevel and her husband, SCLC staff member James Bevel, prevailed. James Bevel, who played a major role as a strategist for the Birmingham protests, argued that since the young people did not carry the burden of their family’s economic responsibilities on them, they were free to meet the challenge of going to jail. But the situation soon became more complicated. For as soon as the announcement was made in mass meeting that Thursday, May 2, 1963, would be the day for high-school demonstrations, dozens of elementary schoolchildren declared their own readiness to march. Now there was another debate among the leaders. What should be the minimum age for their

freedom marchers? They decided that anyone who was old enough to volunteer to become a church member should be old enough to volunteer to become a member of the freedom corps. In that black Baptist-dominated setting, such a decision meant that children as young as six might be on the marching line when Thursday morning came. That morning Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the usual meeting place, was filled with

hundreds of children. Shuttlesworth offered the morning send-off prayers, and the recently released King told the young people how important they were. Before the day was over, more than six hundred of the children discovered that the way to freedom led directly through Birmingham’s jail.

The Birmingham fire hoses knocked protesters to the ground with enough force to take the bark off trees.

Bull Connor had been caught off-guard on Thursday by the surge of young marchers, moving around the police lines. He did not intend to be upstaged again by a flood of singing black children. So on Friday, May 3, when the young marchers came singing down the steps of Sixteenth Street Church, they saw fire trucks in the park facing the church. Andrew Young, who oversaw SCLC’s fledgling voter-registration drive and was a chief negotiator in the

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Birmingham campaign, later described what happened:

As groups of kids marched past the park headed for downtown, Connor issued the order to the firemen to uncoil their hoses. Police dogs had been seen before, and once again they were brought to the front of the barricades, straining at their leashes. But until now, the fire trucks had remained on the sidelines. Suddenly fire hoses didn’t seem like fun anymore, and the kids watched with trepidation as the firehoses were unwound. They kept marching and their voices grew stronger with the comforting tunes of the freedom songs. It never ceased to amaze me, the strength that people drew from the singing of those old songs. … Suddenly, Connor ordered the firemen to open the hoses on both the marchers and the large crowd of onlookers who had gathered in the park. The water was so powerful it knocked people down and the line began to break as marchers ran screaming through the park to escape the water. Connor then ordered the police to pursue the terrified kids with angry dogs, and to our horror actually unleashed some of them. The police ran through the park, swinging their billy clubs at marchers, onlookers, and newsmen—anyone in the way.

As the tension escalated, an international audience watched. By now it was clear that the nation’s leaders could not continue to avoid direct engagement with the situation in Birmingham and still claim to be “leaders of the free world.” The Kennedys, after some initial annoyance with SCLC’s timing and methods, let it be known, first privately, then publicly, that they believed a negotiated way should be found through Birmingham’s troubles. They sent personal emissaries to the city, especially to urge the business leaders to take responsibility for moving toward desegregation. Robert Kennedy himself made dozens of phone calls to corporate leaders nationwide whose Southern subsidiaries were located in the Birmingham area. He urged them to put pressure on their local people to cooperate with the movement’s demands for desegregation. With the rising pressure of the federal government, negotiations based on the movement’s

basic demands were finally begun. The negotiations were difficult, but they lasted less than a week. They led to an agreement that was announced on May 7, 1963, about a month after the demonstrations had begun. Under the agreement, an irreversible process of desegregation was begun in public accommodations and municipal facilities. SCLC won its demands for desegregated lunch counters, rest rooms, fitting rooms, and drinking fountains. Downtown store owners agreed to hire African-American clerks. Expanded hiring and promotion of black people had begun throughout the industrial community of Birmingham. All the imprisoned demonstrators were released on bail that was supplied from various local and national sources, and the cases against the released prisoners were soon dismissed. But there was a compromise: SCLC agreed to a timetable of planned stages rather than demanding that these changes take place immediately. It also agreed to the release of arrested demonstrators on bail rather than insist that the charges be dismissed outright. But it would not be a simple matter to extricate Birmingham from its past. On the evening

after the announcement, the Ku Klux Klan leadership bitterly condemned the arrangement at a rally on the edge of the city. Later that night a bomb badly damaged the home of A. D. King, Martin’s younger brother, who was an activist pastor in the city and a participant in the movement. Soon, a second bomb exploded at the Gaston Motel, practically demolishing Room 30, the modest suite that King normally used as his headquarters. Fortunately, A. D. King’s family was not hurt, Martin King had already left the city, and no one else was injured at the motel. But the bombings drew hundreds of outraged black people into the streets. Without waiting for a request from the new mayor, Albert Boutwell, Governor Wallace sent in state

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troopers to maintain order. However, the pushing, attacking, cursing troopers seemed intent on provoking the leaderless crowd into violence. In response, black people threw rocks and bottles and set some stores and cars on fire. For a moment it seemed as if a major explosion would blow apart the new agreement. Instead, some of the SCLC and local Birmingham leaders were able to work out a truce between the enraged black people and the brutally aggressive troopers. The Birmingham campaign, saved from catastrophe, had not only energized the Civil Rights

movement, but it had made the world aware of segregation’s ugliness. Television was a critical factor. The new technology enabled millions of viewers to watch with rapt horror as the police attacked the youthful demonstrators. There was no mistaking the haunting scenes of Birmingham police dogs snapping at the legs of children. Nor could even the most casual viewer ignore the fire department’s role in the daily confrontations. It became clear to the White House that the civil rights activists would not abandon their

cause without fundamental changes. An angry encounter between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and African Americans gathered by black writer James Baldwin highlighted the rawness of race relations in the country. Blacks bluntly told Kennedy that they expected more from him and his brother, the president. Robert Kennedy left the room angered by their demands, yet he later reflected that the encounter forever changed his views about race and the race problem in American life. Even the politically pragmatic John Kennedy would understand very soon that he could not shrink from the demands for full inclusion. To his credit, President Kennedy tried to get a new civil rights bill through the Congress. The new bill was stronger than all previous ones. It would end discrimination in all interstate transportation, at hotels, and in other public places; it ensured all who had a sixth-grade education the right to vote; and it gave the attorney general the power to cut off government funds to states and communities that continued to practice racial discrimination. It would be more than a year before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the meantime, President Kennedy worried that any further demonstrations threatened his ability to secure sufficient bipartisan support for the legislation. King and others sensed that it was time to bring the strategies of the Southern Civil Rights

movement to the nation’s capital. In a private conversation with friends Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones, recorded by an FBI wiretap, King broached the idea of a huge, one-hundred- thousand person march on Washington. The FBI had begun to tap King’s phone lines after FBI director J. Edgar Hoover convinced Robert Kennedy that Levison, who was white, was a member of the Communist party and had too much influence over King. Hoover, in fact, had a difficult time believing that blacks had initiated the movement and that it was led by blacks. Unaware that others were listening, King and his friends added other names to the list of possible organizers, including the venerable labor leader A. Philip Randolph, whose earlier threats to march on Washington had led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which banned hiring discrimination at military facilities and government agencies during the Second World War. The planning committee brought together representatives from civil rights organizations and

the labor movement, interested clergy, and entertainment figures. The logistics of putting together the August 28, 1963, event were an enormous challenge. Organizers had to plan, for

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example, for inclement weather, medical emergencies, transportation, sanitation, drinking water, and food. They also needed to coordinate speakers and to mobilize members of black communities nationwide who would attend. In the meantime, ever worried by the prospect of social disturbances, President Kennedy readied several thousand soldiers for riot control. The response from Americans staggered the organizers. By the morning of the march, more

than a quarter million people had descended on Washington from every state in the Union. They arrived in twenty-one chartered trains, in caravans of buses and cars, on bicycles, and on foot. One fellow rollerskated to the march from Chicago. Men and women, old and young, black and white, made their way to the summertime shadows of the Washington Monument. Although the occasion was sometimes festive, the mood was serious. Few knew of the behind-the-scenes crisis threatening to destroy the semblance of unity among sometimes rival civil rights groups. But as folk singers such as Joan Baez, Odetta, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Bob Dylan

entertained the estimated quarter of a million people who assembled, march organizers worked to get SNCC leader John Lewis to temper his speech. Lewis’s prepared text bristled with anger. In a shorthand fashion he recalled the painful lessons sandwiched between the Birmingham campaign and the Washington march. In that period bombs had exploded in Birmingham; civil rights workers June Johnson, Annell Ponder, and Fannie Lou Hamer endured a tortuous beating at the hands of Winona, Mississippi, police; Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in his own driveway; and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee was burned to the ground. Lewis eventually agreed to the pleadings of Randolph, not because Washington area clergy

threatened to boycott the affair, but because he respected and understood the power of the moment. Nonetheless Lewis advised those watching and listening that blacks would not go slow. He told the gathering, “We shall crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy.” Though Lewis offered perhaps the most forceful message of the day, it was Martin Luther

King, Jr.’s speech that became a sort of national motto. Fusing classical philosophy to the oral traditions of the black Baptist Church, King preached that day about an America that could be. He shared his dream of a day when race did not matter: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!” King’s speech—and the entire march—energized the black community with the hope of

justice. Then on Sunday, September 15, 1963, little more than two weeks after the March on Washington, a package of dynamite ripped through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham while worshipers were preparing for church services. When the smoke cleared, four young girls—ages eleven to fourteen—lay dead. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley had not taken part in earlier demonstrations, but their young faces, appearing in newspapers worldwide, became instant symbols of both the tragedy of racism and the hope of the civil rights struggle. Two months later, violence of another kind erupted in Dallas, and the victim this time was

President Kennedy, who had gone to Texas to shore up his Southern base in the Democratic party. The 1964 election was a year away, and signs indicated that the Republicans might

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nominate the very conservative Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona. As his motorcade traveled the streets of Dallas on November 22, the sound of rifle fire rang out. The open limousine carrying Kennedy made him a ready target. With Kennedy’s death, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan and former majority leader in the

Senate, was sworn in as the country’s new president. Among his first acts was to call for passage of the Civil Rights Act proposed by Kennedy. He told a joint session of Congress, “No memorial or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought.” As Congress debated the merits of the legislation, blacks in Mississippi were continuing to

demand their voting rights. In the fall of 1963, activists launched a Freedom Vote campaign to register voters statewide and to demonstrate the importance of black electoral participation. With help from sixty white students drawn from Northern colleges, canvassers went door-to- door, enduring beatings, intimidation, and the fear of physical injury, to get black Mississippians to vote in a mock election. Nearly one hundred thousand voted for a Freedom party slate, thereby indicating what they could do if they had the right to vote. Following this campaign, longtime SNCC worker Bob Moses proposed an expansion of the

earlier effort. He and others had in mind a Freedom Summer, during which white college students, in alliance with local black leadership and blacks active in SNCC, would canvass Mississippi, registering voters and teaching in Freedom Schools. Moses had in mind something other than another mock vote; this time he would register blacks for the coming presidential election in November 1964. Freedom Summer lasted three months, June, July, and August. About one thousand volunteers participated, three-quarters of whom were white and three hundred of whom were women. The students hailed from Western and Northern colleges and universities. After spending a week in a training session directed by SNCC Executive Director James Forman in Oxford, Ohio, the first two hundred volunteers embarked for Mississippi and the forty-three project sites scattered across the state. Tragically, within the first two days of Freedom Summer, law-enforcement officials in

Philadelphia, Mississippi, added three new names to the list of martyrs who made the supreme sacrifice on behalf of civil rights. Andrew Goodman was a college student at Queens College in New York and a Freedom Summer volunteer. Michael Schwerner had recently opened the CORE office in Meridian with his wife, Rita. CORE worker James Chaney was the only one who was black and a native Mississipian. On June 21, 1964, the three had set out for Lawndale to investigate another church burning.

Near Philadelphia they were arrested for speeding, but the police let them go. That was the last time anyone other than their murderers saw them alive. One hundred fifty FBI agents, aided by sailors, searched woods and rivers. Investigators did not locate the three men until August 4, after they received a tip from an informant motivated by a thirty-thousand-dollar reward. The three decomposed bodies were found buried under a manmade dam. Later testimony revealed that the bulldozer operator at the dam had been paid by Klan members to hide the bodies there. Each had been shot by a .38-caliber gun; and clearly Chaney had been severely beaten before being shot. The U.S. Justice Department indicted nineteen men, including police officers and Klansmen, for the murders; only seven were found guilty.

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The horrifying events caused a few volunteers to drop out, but not many. Many would later recall that the summer of 1964 was a pivotal time in their lives. Many whites experienced the warm fellowship of local black Southerners, who freely adopted them into their lives and communities. Black and white participants struggled with the perceptions and realities of power. Some SNCC and CORE activists complained, for example, that white volunteers too quickly assumed they were experts and leaders. Each group had to be educated and reeducated about the other’s abilities and sensibilities. But the politics of leadership was no small matter. The tension soon grew into calls for black control of civil rights groups. More than anything, however, Freedom Summer highlighted the potential political

empowerment of black Mississippians. And it turned the national spotlight on racial violence and voting injustices in the state, forcing the federal government to respond. As August came to a close, more than eighty thousand blacks joined the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP). They would use this new strength to wrest changes from the national Democratic party, forcing the national body to undo, reluctantly, the practice of locking blacks out of the Mississippi party.

The Fire This Time President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964. It not only outlawed segregation in public accommodations of every kind throughout the country, but it laid the foundation for federal affirmative action policy. Affirmative action programs were meant to ensure that victims of past discrimination would have greater opportunities to find jobs, earn promotions, and gain admission to colleges and universities. In particular, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act outlawed employment discrimination by creating the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce the law. It not only applied to both governmental and nongovernmental employers but covered labor unions and employment agencies as well. Workers who believed they were discriminated against in the workplace because of their race, sex, creed, color, or religion could file a complaint with the federal government.

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The 1966 “March Against Fear” in Mississippi was initiated by James Meredith. After Meredith was shot, Martin Luther King, Jr., (front center) and others took over the march. Black militants denounced their tactics of nonviolence and urged blacks to defend themselves against attack.

But the new law did not dismantle the obstacles to voting that blacks in the South still faced. In the summer of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP) filed a lawsuit against the Democratic party for discrimination and used the television cameras to take their story to the nation. Fannie Lou Hamer told the world how she had been beaten and tortured by white supremacists simply because “we want to register,” and she pointed out that the white Democrats were not even loyal to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Those Democrats vehemently attacked Johnson’s candidacy because of his commitment to civil rights and equal opportunity for all. Yet, while Johnson agreed with the MFDP’s assessment, he and his party would not recognize its delegates as the legitimate representatives of the state of Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention. Questioning both the horrors at home and the Democratic party’s refusal to take their

delegation seriously, Hamer asked, “Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave?” Johnson’s response was to strike a deal: He signaled that he was prepared to select the liberal Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey as his running mate, if MFDP delegates and their surrogates cooperated by allowing the delegation to remain intact, with one modification. Two members of the MFDP would sit as members of the Mississippi delegation, while other MFDP delegates would attend the convention as observers. Although Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, and several mainstream black leaders urged the MFDP to accept the compromise, they refused. Most MFDP delegates felt the compromise minimized their claim of truly representing Democrats in Mississippi. When election day arrived, all of Mississippi’s electoral votes went to archconservative

Republican Barry Goldwater. Indeed, the Republican party made history, not only winning the state of Mississippi for the first time but also declaring victories in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. The Democratic party’s failure to fully embrace Mississippi’s black

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voters signaled the beginning of the end of the solid Democratic South. Johnson won by a landslide, but the failure of the capital-D Democratic party to support

small-d democratic forces in the South and the willingness of Martin Luther King and other national civil rights figures to go along with Johnson struck a blow to the movement. Increasingly, local activists in the rural South, SNCC activists, and urban activists associated compromise with weakness. Less than a year later King supported another compromise that would further damage and

divide the movement. It involved a struggle in Selma, Alabama, where SNCC activists had been locked in a battle with local forces and Governor George Wallace, who used brutal violence to suppress the movement there. After SNCC organizer Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by a state trooper as he tried to shield his mother from officers’ billy clubs during a civil rights demonstration, SNCC and SCLC decided to hold a march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965. After calling for the march, however, King reconsidered after a tortuous conversation with Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. It was clear that President Johnson did not want the march to happen, because the potential violence would generate bad publicity and, from his perspective, jeopardize his relations with Southern Democrats. Worried that his defiance of Johnson’s wishes might undermine the goal of passing a voting rights bill, King decided to cancel the march at the very last minute. He and Ralph Abernathy left town, announcing that they had to minister to their congregations. But the young people of SNCC were not about to postpone the march. They convinced SCLC

leader Hosea Williams to go on with it, with or without King. (Many marchers, however, did not know what had happened and were surprised by King’s absence.) But they never made it; the police and state troopers brutally attacked the racially mixed crowd as it reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, forcing the marchers to turn back. Three days later, amidst criticism for his absence, King decided to lead another group of three thousand people, who had answered the call to go to Selma and complete the march, across the bridge. But unbeknownst to the crowd he had made a secret agreement with Attorney General Katzenbach to retreat as soon as they came up against the state troopers. So when King and the march leaders got within fifty feet of the troopers’ blockade, they kneeled, prayed, and, as they rose, called on the marchers to retreat. Angry and confused, the marchers did what they were told. The march was eventually held a few weeks later, after much negotiation with the Johnson administration and Governor Wallace. Despite its fits and starts, the Selma march contributed to the passage of an important piece

of legislation by the federal government: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Signed into law on August 6, 1965, the act prohibited states from imposing literacy requirements, poll taxes, and similar obstacles to the registration of black voters. Of course, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, passed almost a century earlier, was supposed to guarantee this right to vote, but a federal system of “states’ rights” had allowed Southern states to deny black people voting privileges through such measures as the poll tax, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses (until 1939). With the Voting Rights Act, however, blacks could not be denied the vote any more. Federal

examiners were now sent South to safeguard black citizens’ right to register and vote. The impact of the act was dramatic: Between 1964 and 1969, the number of black adults registered

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to vote increased from 19.3 percent to 61.3 percent in Alabama, 27.4 percent to 60.4 percent in Georgia, and 6.7 percent to 66.5 percent in Mississippi. It took several more years before blacks turned the right to vote into electoral might. The victory was bittersweet. King’s role in the Selma march tarnished his reputation in the

eyes of his followers. As respect for King’s ideas and strategies began to wane among young people, groups such as SNCC began to envision new, more militant strategies. It became clear —from the failure of the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic National Convention to the Selma fiasco—that African Americans could not always rely on the federal government for support. A new generation of activists realized that black people needed more than friends in high places; they needed power. Within SNCC, a recent Howard University graduate named Stokely Carmichael quickly

emerged as a voice of uncompromising militancy and, later, black nationalism. Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City, Carmichael had been associated with interracial radical movements since high school. Like many of his contemporaries, he joined the Civil Rights movement but never fully embraced the philosophy of nonviolence. He and several other SNCC activists began carrying guns to protect themselves from violence. Carmichael led a militant voter registration campaign, organizing open rallies and marches for black rights in the heart of the Black Belt—with its long history of white violence and terrorism against black sharecroppers. In Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1965, he founded the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). An all-black group (mainly because whites would not join), the LCFO adopted the symbol of the black panther because, according to its chairman, John Hulett, the panther will come out fighting for its life when cornered. The LCFO was only the beginning of the new black militancy. A few months later, a group of

black SNCC activists in Atlanta circulated a position paper calling on white members to leave the organization and devote their attention to organizing white people in their own communities. Although most SNCC members, black and white, opposed this position, it became clear to many white activists that the character of the movement had changed profoundly. Several leading white figures resigned voluntarily or were forced to leave because, in their view at least, the political climate had become intolerable. Carmichael had successfully contested John Lewis for the chairmanship of SNCC and he, along with other SNCC militants such as veteran organizer Willie Ricks, began questioning the movement’s integrationist agenda. Then, during the summer of 1966, the slogan Black Power emerged full- blown within SNCC as well as within the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). On June 5, James Meredith, the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi,

initiated a march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, in order to mobilize black Mississippians to register to vote. A few hours into the march, however, Meredith was shot and the march came to an abrupt end. Martin Luther King, Jr., Carmichael, and CORE leader Floyd McKissick decided to go to Memphis in order to finish the march to Jackson. From the very beginning, however, tensions between King and Carmichael created tensions within the ranks. Carmichael insisted that the Deacons for Defense, an armed black self- defense group based in Louisiana, provide cover for the marchers, a request to which King reluctantly agreed. At the same time, SNCC activist Willie Ricks began to promote the slogan Black Power among the membership, who seemed to embrace it enthusiastically. While King

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called it “an unfortunate choice of words,” McKissick embraced it. As he explained, “Black Power is not Black supremacy; it is a united Black voice reflecting racial pride in the tradition of our heterogeneous nation. Black Power does not mean the exclusion of White Americans from the Negro Revolution; it means the inclusion of all men in a common moral and political struggle.” Not everyone agreed with this definition, of course, but it quickly became clear during the

summer of 1966 that the issue of Black Power would transform the movement in multiple ways. Tired and impatient with the slow pace of the civil rights establishment, a new attitude overtook the movement: no more compromise, no more “deals” with white liberals, no more subordinating the movement to the needs of the Democratic party. Out of bitter disappointment rose this new slogan. The Black Power of the sixties had roots in the Southern freedom movement, in the many

compromises made by mainstream leaders, and in the recognition that ending Jim Crow was not enough to win full equality or political power. It also had roots in the increasingly black cities of the North and South, where poverty and police brutality were becoming increasingly visible. And it was nourished by the growing popularity of black nationalism—the idea that black people constitute a single community, if not a “nation,” within the United States and therefore have a right to determine their destiny—as expressed by people such as former North Carolina NAACP leader Robert Williams, as well as SNCC leaders such as H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. Perhaps the most important and controversial progenitor of the Black Power movement was

Malcolm X. For many young people, particularly those in the Civil Rights movement, Malcolm’s uncompromising stance toward white supremacy and his plainspoken oratory on black history, culture, and racism deeply affected a new generation of activists. Even efforts to portray Malcolm in a negative light, such as the special 1959 television documentary on the Nation of Islam called “The Hate That Hate Produced” revealed to many black viewers Malcolm’s critique of nonviolence and of the strategy to ally with white liberals. He clearly saw the need for a movement in the urban North, one that would focus on the needs of the poor and deal with pressing issues such as police brutality, crumbling schools, and the lack of jobs. While preaching black self-reliance, he also attacked mainstream civil rights leaders for being sellouts. “The black masses,” he argued, “are tired of following these hand-picked Negro ‘leaders’ who sound like professional beggars, as they cry year after year for white America to accept us as first-class citizens.” These civil rights leaders, Malcolm said, were leading a nonviolent Negro revolution, when

what was needed was a black revolution. Whereas the Negro wants to desegregate, he said, the black demands land, power, and freedom. Whereas the Negro adopts a Christian philosophy of “love thy enemy,” the black has no love or respect for the oppressor. As long as Malcolm remained in the Nation of Islam, he was compelled to conceal his

differences with Elijah Muhammad. But as Malcolm became more popular, the tensions between the two men became increasingly evident. The final blow came when Malcolm discovered that the NOI’s moral and spiritual leader had fathered children by two former secretaries. The tensions became publicly visible when Muhammad silenced Malcolm for remarking after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that it was a case of the

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“chickens coming home to roost.” Malcolm’s point was that the federal government’s inaction toward racist violence in the South had come back to strike the president. When Malcolm learned that Muhammad had planned to have him assassinated, he decided to leave the NOI. On March 8, 1964, he announced his resignation and formed the Muslim Mosque, Inc., an Islamic movement devoted to working in the political sphere and cooperating with civil rights leaders. Despite his criticisms of black leadership, Malcolm had always said that he should be actively involved in the struggles in the South and elsewhere, but Elijah Muhammad’s rule that NOI members not participate in politics had hampered Malcolm. Free of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm sought alliances with those willing to work with him.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X met accidentally and amicably in Washington, D.C., in 1964. Despite their differences in style and philosophy, they shared many of the concerns, goals, and risks involved in freedom-movement leadership.

That same year he made his first pilgrimage to Mecca—the holy city of Islam, in Saudi Arabia. During his trip he changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and embraced the multiracial Islam he found during his pilgrimage. He publicly acknowledged that whites were no longer devils, though he still remained a black nationalist and staunch believer in black self-determination and self-organization. During the summer of 1964 Malcolm formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity

(OAAU). Inspired by the Organization of African Unity, made up of the independent African states, the OAAU’s program combined advocacy for independent black institutions (for example, schools and cultural centers) with support for black participation in mainstream politics, including electoral campaigns. Following the example of Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, who had submitted a petition to the United Nations in 1948 claiming that black people in the United States were victims of genocide, Malcolm planned to submit a similar petition in 1965. The UN petition documented human rights violations and acts of genocide against African Americans. Unfortunately, Malcolm and members of the OAAU never had a chance to submit the petition: On February 21, 1965, he was assassinated by gunmen affiliated

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with the NOI. Malcolm had known he was in danger ever since he had left the NOI. He received regular

death threats and was constantly followed by suspicious characters. One week before his murder, his home in Queens, New York, was firebombed. He had even begun to carry a gun for protection. But on Sunday, February 21, as he took the stage to speak to a small audience at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, two gunmen stood up and opened fire. One got away, but the crowd stopped the other, a Muslim named Talmadge Hayer. (One year later, Hayer was convicted of the murder of Malcolm.) The OAAU died with Malcolm X. Although Malcolm left no permanent organizations (the Muslim Mosque, Inc., collapsed

soon after his death), he did exert a notable impact on the Civil Rights movement in the last year of his life. Black activists in SNCC and CORE who had heard him speak to organizers in Selma just weeks before his death began to support some of his ideas, especially on armed self-defense, racial pride, and the creation of black-run institutions. Ironically, Malcolm’s impact on black politics and culture was greater after his death than before it. In fact, not long thereafter, the Black Power movement and his ideas about community control, African liberation, and race pride became extremely influential. His autobiography, written with Alex Haley—the future author of Roots—become a movement standard. Malcolm’s life story proved to movements such as the Black Panther party, founded in 1966, that ex-criminals and hustlers can be turned into revolutionaries. And arguments in favor of armed self-defense—certainly not a new idea in African-American communities—were renewed by the publication of Malcolm’s autobiography and speeches. One of the first radical organizations to be inspired by Malcolm’s ideas was the

Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). It originated neither in the South nor in the Northeast. Rather, its founders were a group of black Ohio students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Central State College, and Wilberforce University. Active in SNCC, CORE, and local chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a predominantly white national student group that emerged during the Vietnam War protests, this gathering began meeting in 1961 to discuss the significance of Robert Williams’s armed self-defense campaign in North Carolina and his subsequent flight to Cuba. Led by Donald Freeman, a student at Case Western Reserve, the group agreed that armed self-defense was a necessary component of the black freedom movement and that activists had to link themselves to anticolonial movements around the world. Freeman was influenced by Malcolm X’s speeches and the writings of an independent black Marxist intellectual named Harold Cruse, who argued that African Americans themselves lived under colonialism inside the United States. Freeman hoped to transform the group into a revolutionary movement akin to the Nation of Islam but one that would adopt the direct action tactics of SNCC. By the spring of 1962, they became the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). Although RAM’s leaders decided to organize it as an underground movement, it did attract

activists across the nation. In the South, RAM built a small but significant following at Fisk University in Nashville, the training ground for many leading SNCC activists. In northern California, RAM grew primarily out of the Afro-American Association, a student group founded in 1962 based at Oakland’s Merritt College and the University of California at Berkeley. Never a mass movement, RAM had a radical agenda that anticipated many of the

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goals of the left wing of the Black Power movement. Its twelve-point program called for the development of freedom schools, national black student organizations, rifle clubs, a guerrilla army made up of youth and the unemployed, and black farmer cooperatives not just for economic development but to keep “community and guerrilla forces going for a while.” They also pledged support for national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as the adoption of socialism to replace capitalism across the globe. After RAM spent years as an underground organization, a series of “exposes” that ran in

Life magazine and Esquire in 1966 identified it as one of the leading extremist groups “Plotting a War on ‘Whitey.’” RAM members were not only considered armed and dangerous but “impressively well read in revolutionary literature.” Not surprisingly, these highly publicized articles were followed by a series of police raids on the homes of RAM members in Philadelphia and New York City. In June 1967, RAM members were rounded up and charged with conspiracy to instigate a riot, poison police officers with potassium cyanide, and assassinate NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and National Urban League Director Whitney Young. Though the charges did not stick, the FBI’s surveillance of RAM intensified. By 1969, RAM had essentially dissolved itself, though its members opted to infiltrate existing black organizations, continue to push the twelve-point program, and develop study groups that focused on the “Science of Black Internationalism.” RAM’s movement was, in part, based on the assumption that black people had the potential

to launch a war against the U.S. government. Writing in exile from Cuba and later China, Robert Williams anticipated black urban uprisings in a spring 1964 edition of The Crusader, a publication RAM members regarded as an unofficial organ of their movement. Entitled “USA: The Potential of a Minority Revolution,” Williams’s article announced, “This year, 1964 is going to be a violent one, the storm will reach hurricane proportions by 1965 and the eye of the hurricane will hover over America by 1966. America is a house on fire—FREEDOM NOW! —or let it burn, let it burn. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!!” Williams was not alone in this assessment. A year earlier, the writer James Baldwin had

predicted that in the coming years race riots would “spread to every metropolitan center in the nation which has a significant Negro population.” The next six years proved them right. With riots erupting in the black communities of Rochester, New York City, Jersey City, and Philadelphia, 1964 was indeed a “violent” year. By 1965, these revolts had indeed reached “hurricane proportions.” The hurricane also touched the West Coast in the black Los Angeles community of Watts.

Sparked when a resident witnessed a black driver being harrassed by white police officers, a frequent occurrence on the streets of Los Angeles, the Watts rebellion turned out to be the worst urban disturbance in nearly twenty years. When the smoke cleared, thirty-four people had died, and more than $35 million in property had been destroyed or damaged. The remainder of the decade witnessed the spread of this hurricane across America: Violence erupted in some three hundred cities, including Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Cambridge, Maryland; Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Conneticut; San Francisco; and Phoenix. Altogether, the urban uprisings involved close to half a million African Americans, resulted in millions of dollars in property damage, and left two hundred fifty people (mostly African Americans) dead, ten thousand seriously injured, and countless black people homeless. Police

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and the National Guard turned black neighborhoods into war zones, arresting at least sixty thousand people and employing tanks, machine guns, and tear gas to pacify the community. In Detroit in 1967, for instance, forty-three people were killed, two thousand were wounded, and five thousand watched their homes destroyed by flames that engulfed fourteen square miles of the inner city. Robert Williams was not too far off the mark: A real war erupted in America’s inner cities.

Elected officials, from the mayor’s office to the Oval Office, must have seen these uprisings as a war of sorts because they responded to the crisis with military might at first. Later they turned to a battery of social science investigators, community programs, and short-lived economic development projects to pacify urban blacks. Just as the American military advisers in Southeast Asia could not understand why so many North Vietnamese supported the communists, liberal social scientists wanted to find out why African Americans rioted. Why burn buildings in “their own” communities? What did they want? Were these “disturbances” merely a series of violent orgies led by young hoodlums out for television sets and a good time, or were they protest movements? To the surprise of several research teams, those who rioted tended to be better educated and more politically aware than those who did not. One survey of Detroit black residents after the 1967 riot revealed that eighty-six percent of the respondents identified discrimination and deprivation as the main reasons behind the uprising. Hostility to police brutality was at the top of the list. Although Robert Williams, James Baldwin, and many African Americans who survived

each day in the crumbling ghettoes of North America knew the storm was on the horizon, government officials and policymakers were unprepared. After all, things seemed to be looking up for black folk: Between 1964 and 1969, the median black family income rose from $5,921 to $8,074; the percentage of black families below the poverty line declined from 48.1 percent in 1959 to 27.9 percent in 1969. However, these statistics also reveal a growing chasm between members of a black middle class who were beginning to benefit from integration, affirmative action policies, and a strong economy, and the black poor left behind in deteriorating urban centers. Dilapidated, rat-infested housing, poor and overcrowded schools, the lack of city services, and the disappearance of high-wage jobs in innercity communities all contributed to the expansion of urban poverty and deprivation. But there is more to the story: The black freedom movement and the hope it engendered in black communities convinced many blacks that change was inevitable. Some historians have called it “rising expectations”; others simply identified it as “rights consciousness.” Either way, an increasing number of African Americans, including the poor, adopted a new attitude for a new day. They demanded respect and basic human rights, expected decent housing and decent jobs as a matter of rights, and understood that social movements and protests were the way to achieve these things. This attitude manifested itself in the daily interactions between blacks and whites. For example, after buses had been desegregated in the South, white residents complained frequently of the growing impudence and discourtesy of black passengers. As one white Birmingham woman complained, “Can’t get on the bus and ride to town because the colored have taken the buses.” But the same circumstances that unleashed such fervent opposition to segregation and

emboldened ordinary black people to assert their rights also unleashed a more sustained effort on the part of the police to put things back in order. Police repression reached an all-time high

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between 1963 and the early seventies and black male youths from poor communities were involved in the majority of incidents. There is a similar paradox evident in the growth in the number of welfare recipients during

the sixties. In 1960, 745,000 families received assistance; by 1968 that figure had grown to 1.5 million. The most dramatic increase took place between 1968 and 1972, when the welfare rolls grew to three million. On the one hand, the surge in the welfare rolls reflects the expansion of poverty amidst plenty, the growing numbers of poor people (particularly among minority women and children) who needed assistance to survive. But the growth also reflects a “rights consciousness” among welfare recipients inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the period. In 1966, the former associate director of CORE, George Wiley, created the Poverty Rights Action Center (PRAC) in order to help coordinate the activities of numerous local welfare rights organizations that had begun appearing during the early sixties. Out of discussions within PRAC, Wiley helped found the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) a year later. Led primarily by black female welfare recipients, the NWRO educated the poor about eligibility for assistance under existing laws and pressured welfare agencies to provide benefits without stigmatizing applicants. They demanded adequate day-care facilities and criticized poorly planned job-training programs. They attacked degrading, low-wage employment and the practice of scrutinizing women’s lives as a precondition for support (such as investigations to determine whether recipients were unwed mothers, had a man living with them, or spent their meager welfare check on things a social worker might find unnecessary, such as makeup). Moreover, they viewed welfare not merely as a gift from the government or a handout but as a right. By emphasizing that welfare was a right, the NWRO stripped welfare of its stigma in the eyes of many poor women and convinced them that they could receive assistance and retain their dignity. The NWRO was not the only advocate for the increased demands of the black poor. Under

President Lyndon Johnson, the federal government launched a “War on Poverty” as part of his overall vision of transforming America into a “Great Society.” Most of the programs that fell under the broad title of the “War on Poverty” were created by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Agencies such as the Job Corps, administered by the Department of Labor, sought to create employment opportunities for the poor. And through the newly created Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), agencies such as the Legal Services Corporation, to provide civil legal assistance; the Community Action Program; Head Start, a preschool education program; and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) sought to provide services for the poor and incorporate them in the decision-making and policymaking process at the local level. The OEO’s director, Sargent Shriver, called for the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in these agencies and, more generally, in the process of solving the problems of poverty. The only program that actively tried to implement “maximum feasible participation” was the

Community Action Program (CAP). CAP’s mission was to coordinate the work of more than a thousand federally funded, neighborhood-based antipoverty agencies and to make new services more accessible to the poor. Unlike other antipoverty agencies, CAP focused its efforts on rehabilitating the entire community rather than poor families or individuals who happened to fall below the poverty line. Although CAP quickly earned a reputation for “stirring up the poor,” it mainly worked with prosperous local blacks and established black middle-class

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leadership. Indeed, despite directives from on high calling for maximum feasible participation, urban rebellions from below turned out to be what got the black activists and community people into the antipoverty agencies. The bureaucrats and planners who implemented these poverty programs conceived of

“maximum feasible participation” very differently from groups like the NWRO or leaders of the Civil Rights movement. After all, they were planned almost entirely by middle-class white men in the Johnson administration who set out to provide “a hand up” to the poorest segment of society, from the ghetto residents in America’s sprawling cities, to the Mexican migrants on farms and in barrios in the Southwest, to the poor whites scratching out a living in Appalachia. Overall, Johnson’s Great Society programs did begin to reduce poverty ever so slightly.

Ironically, the greatest successes were not products of the Equal Opportunity Act of 1964 but of other programs, notably the expansion of the food stamp program, free school meals and other nutrition projects, and the creation of Medicaid and Medicare programs (which provided the poor and elderly with free health care). But Johnson’s War on Poverty fell short of the mark. First, agencies such as the Job Corps focused on job training rather than creating new, decent-paying jobs. Second, Johnson refused to raise taxes in order to pay for these programs, which proved disastrous because he had given the middle class a huge tax cut in 1964 and there was not enough money available. Besides, the cost of fighting the Vietnam War steadily drained federal resources away from the War on Poverty and contributed to rising inflation. Third, the War on Poverty operated from a very limited definition of poverty, one that included only families who fell below a fixed poverty line. The goal was not to change the structure of poverty, to reduce income inequality or help the working poor earn more money; rather, it was to change the behaviors that officials believed led to poverty by providing educational, legal, and job-training services to the very poor in order to give them the resources to rise up out of poverty. In other words, the Johnson administration believed the causes of poverty to be culture and behavior rather than political and economic forces. Rather than deal with issues such as low wages, a shortage of well-paying jobs, and blatant racism in employment and labor unions, the proponents of the War on Poverty sought to “correct” poor people’s behavior or improve their social skills. The administrators and intellectuals working in these federal programs saw their task in terms of reversing “community pathology,” breaking the “culture of poverty,” or restoring the “broken family.” The poor, especially the black poor, were considered “disadvantaged.” Most black activists did not believe liberal goodwill, as they viewed it, could eliminate

poverty. They viewed the problem in terms of power and unequal distribution of wealth. As NWRO leader George Wiley put it: “I am not at all convinced that comfortable, affluent, middle-class Americans are going to move over and share their wealth and resources with the people who have none. But I do have faith that if the poor people who have the problems can organize, can exert their political muscle, they can have a chance to have their voices and their weight felt in the political process of this country, and there is hope.” Martin Luther King, Jr., concurred. In his book Where Do We Go From Here?, King wrote:

“The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The problem of transforming the ghetto is, therefore, a problem of power.”

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So King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took the movement to the urban North, settling in Chicago in 1966. They initially tried to build a grassroots union of poor black residents rather than opening their efforts with a directaction campaign that would draw media attention, as King and his associates had done in Birmingham three years earlier. When the organizing drive failed to generate much support, King decided to lead a march through a white Chicago neighborhood to demand an end to racial discrimination in housing. King and the SCLC had gone there to appeal to the city, the state, and the nation for open housing for all, and to use the power of love to persuade white racists that segregation was immoral. Instead, King met an angry white crowd raining rocks and bottles on the protesters. In all of his years fighting racism and injustice in the South, he had never seen anything like this before. The Chicago campaign marked another failure for King. To compound matters, his

increasing opposition to the Vietnam War drew fire from nearly every major older mainstream black leader in the country, who feared alienating the volatile president, and further distanced him from the Johnson administration. Given King’s deep and abiding commitment to nonviolence, he was bound to come out

openly against the war. And militants in CORE and SNCC had begun issuing antiwar statements as early as 1966. SNCC openly endorsed resistance to the draft. It declared: “Vietnamese are being murdered because the United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law.” King understood the link between the war abroad and the failure to wage a real war on poverty at home. He pointed out that the United States was spending close to five hundred thousand dollars to kill each enemy soldier but spent only a paltry thirty-five dollars a year to help a needy American in poverty. The more he criticized the war, the more isolated he became in mainstream civil rights circles. His longtime allies Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young denounced him publicly, and they were joined by a chorus of distinguished black spokesmen, including Ralph Bunche, Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, and former baseball star Jackie Robinson. And, of course, this diminished his standing with the White House. But King’s national, and international, reputation after winning the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize meant he could not be ignored entirely. As he endured criticism from white and black friends, King became more radical in key

respects. He became more committed than ever to organizing the poor and he openly rejected liberal reform as the strategy for change. King and his aides at SCLC planned a massive Poor People’s Campaign on Washington to take place in the spring of 1968. The march was to bring thousands of poor people from all ethnic and racial backgrounds to demand, among other things, a federally supported guaranteed income policy. Despite plans for a new campaign, the movement and the criticisms had taken their toll on

King. Many friends and associates described him as tired and depressed. He talked openly of death, his own death. As he fretted in the first months of 1968, behind the scenes King and his associates vigorously debated the wisdom of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. A few encouraged King to support their call for a civil disobedience campaign that would close key streets in the nation’s capital. Bayard Rustin, among others, considered such a strategy pure folly, given the outbreaks of violence that had marred the public landscape since 1965. King, moreover, worried that too little had been done to recruit those of all races who were very poor and chronically unemployed.

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Meanwhile, in February 1968, in Memphis, another battle erupted, this one between municipal workers who sought union recognition and city officials who refused such recognition. Black garbage collectors in the city fumed when twenty-two of them were sent home without pay due to bad weather, while white workers were allowed to stay and were paid. The 1,300 members of AFSCME Local 1733, a nearly all-black local union representing the sanitation workers, refused to let the issue die; they demanded that the city acknowledge their union and refused to work otherwise. Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb refused to negotiate with the men or anyone else. Residents of the black community joined the men, boycotting downtown merchants and triggering a thirty-five percent loss of profit. Still the mayor refused to budge. And following an unsuccessful public meeting, a confrontation with police resulted in an ugly moment of violence, onlookers overturned police cars, and the police indiscriminately maced and clubbed everyone in their way. Seeking to dramatize the plight of black workers and force the city to the bargaining table,

longtime civil rights activist and minister of Centenary Methodist Church James Lawson placed a call to King for assistance. The fusing of race and economics had by now been a chief concern for King for several years. Still he put Lawson off at first, pleading fatigue and a tight schedule. King did go to Memphis and addressed more than fifteen thousand on the evening of March 18. He then promised to return the next week, a promise broken only by a rare foot of snow that forced a postponement of the march he was to have joined. In the interim, further negoitations with city officials produced little. On March 28 he did return, prepared to fight until victory was won. Speaking before a black audience on April 3, King predicted that the Memphis sanitation

workers’ struggle would succeed. But in midstream, when the audience rose with his inspirational tone, King’s speech changed rather abruptly. Sweat pouring down his face, he closed with these famous and fateful words:

I don’t know what will happen now. But it really doesn’t matter to me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. I won’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. … I may not get there with you but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

The following evening, April 4, 1968, King was fatally shot by a white man named James Earl Ray. For some inexplicable reason, the police who had been guarding King’s hotel happened to be absent at the time of his assassination. Although they caught the assailant, America lost a visionary. The response to King’s death was immediate and varied. Some white students at the

University of Texas at Arlington screamed with glee, joyous that an assassin’s bullet had taken out the “troublemaker” King. At the same time the New York Times editorialized, “Dr. King’s murder is a national disaster.” And that it was: Major riots engulfed Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago. All told, more than one hundred cities suffered from rioting after the assassination of King, leaving thirty-nine people dead and millions of dollars’ worth of property destroyed. President Johnson declared April 7, 1968, a day of mourning, and in

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tribute to the man whose death brought condolences from leaders and citizens around the world, the country flew its flag at half mast. Between King’s death and his funeral on April 9, Coretta Scott King and her children led a silent, peaceful march through the streets of Memphis. On the hot, humid April day of the funeral, thousands of schoolchildren sat transfixed as

black-and-white televisions were hauled into classrooms so that the nation could collectively mourn King’s passing. What they witnessed that day was a unique assembly. In the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta sat Vice President Hubert Humphrey, presidential aspirants Democrat Robert Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon, civil rights warriors young and old, Jacqueline Kennedy, who a few years earlier had suffered the loss of her own husband, as well as an assortment of friends, acquaintances, and loved ones. Ralph David Abernathy eulogized his old and dear friend. At Coretta King’s insistence, Martin offered his own eulogy, too, as a tape recording of his “A Drum Major for Justice” sermon played for all to hear. That voice, deep and rich, so full of vitality, reminded all of the man who was made by the needs of his time. A simple cart pulled by two mules hauled King’s draped casket to its final resting place. His

grave marker told the world what his life had come to symbolize:

FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST THANK GOD ALMIGHTY

I’M FREE AT LAST.

Where Do We Go from Here? One year before his murder in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., published the book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? More than the title itself, the subtitle captured what the year 1968 felt like to many Americans. With increasing regularity young men were fleeing the nation to escape the draft or returning from Vietnam in body bags. Thousands of miles from that war, American support for a declining Portugal as it struggled

to hang on to its African colonies in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau produced another kind of chaos. For those African Americans paying attention to liberation campaigns on the African continent, the support revealed the degree to which the United States would resort to violence to prop up an aging colonial power. The U.S. government supplied the Portuguese with military advisors and many weapons, including napalm bombs that were dropped on towns and villages where African nationalists had established bases. Back in the United States, 1968 was a year of unprecedented chaos and considerable

violence. Inner-city neighborhoods, such as Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Memphis, visited by race riots, continued to burn; incidents of police brutality rose steadily; dozens of black activists committed to protecting their communities from police violence were embroiled in several shoot-outs with law-enforcement officials; and political assassinations continued. Just weeks after the country watched the burial of Martin Luther King, Jr., a gunman named Sirhan Sirhan fatally shot Democratic party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Liberals sought to turn this chaos into “community,” to stem the country’s division into two

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nations, one black and the other white. This was certainly the goal outlined in the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, a presidentially appointed committee whose study of the causes of urban uprisings was also published in 1968. Better known as the Kerner Commission (named after Ohio Governor Otto Kerner, the commission’s head), its report acknowledged the urgent need for the government to bridge the widening gulf between blacks and whites. The report recommended massive job-training and employment programs, educational improvements, an overhaul of the welfare system, and a plan for integrating blacks into the nation’s mainstream. The authors of the report, a predominantly white group of liberal social scientists and

policymakers committed to racial integration and ending poverty, made what seemed to many Americans a bold and startling claim: that racism was endemic to U.S. society. Racism was not merely the bad behavior of a few individuals but operated through institutions and forces of power. Thus in order to eliminate racism, massive changes in American institutions needed to take place. As the authors wrote, “The essential fact is that neither existing conditions nor the garrison state [referring to the massive numbers of police and National Guardsmen in riot- plagued communities] offered acceptable alternatives for the future of this country. Only a greatly enlarged commitment to national action, compassionate, massive, and sustained, backed by the will and resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth, can shape a future that is compatible with the historic ideals of American society.” While the Kerner Commission proposed a plan to turn “chaos” into “community,” African-

American activists who embraced the politics of Black Power saw themselves already as community builders. They had previously viewed racism as institutionalized, and most had lost faith in the American creed of justice for all, the goal of integration, or the kindness of white liberals. Instead, they sought to build alternative institutions within black communities, to strengthen the black community itself, and to fight for political and economic power. Of course, precisely what Black Power meant was always open to debate. For some it was a movement for black political power with the hope of making American democracy more open and inclusive for all. For others it meant building black businesses. For many grassroots activists, Black Power meant creating separate, autonomous institutions within black communities. The leadership of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a leading force in the Civil

Rights movement, had begun to embrace Black Power around the same time it shifted its focus from large, highly visible direct-action campaigns against segregation to less visible community organizing in poor African-American neighborhoods, especially in the urban North. CORE underwent a change in leadership when Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as executive director in January 1966. Farmer, who had been a charter member of the group and took over its leadership in 1961, had been a longtime proponent of integration and direct action, while McKissick had been among the early advocates of Black Power. With the shift to a focus on building up black communities, CORE’s black membership

increased dramatically. Some of the increase can be attributed to McKissick. Among his many symbolic and substantive actions, he moved the national office from downtown New York City to Harlem. There, he combined an interest in economic development and an appreciation of cultural training, especially the teaching of African languages. Though he never advocated complete racial separation, CORE’s new leader did preach a message of black autonomy and

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self-determination. It was Roy Innis, who took over CORE in 1968, who linked black self-determination and

black capitalism, that is, getting a fair share of the economic pie, especially control of businesses in urban ghettos. In some ways he saw the black community as a colony within the United States that could become independent only if it had a strong economic base. Innis therefore called for federal funds to establish black businesses. He envisioned a federal system in which black communities would be linked together in a federation, constituting a black “nation within a nation.” The U.S. Constitution made no allowances for such a possibility, however. Innis eventually lost faith in black nationalism as a strategy of liberation. By 1972, he had thrown his support behind conservative Republican Richard Nixon and promoted a limited strategy of black enterprise and assimilation. Others embraced a more conventional, if not conservative, form of economic black

nationalism. A small but dominant group came from the rising black middle class. Many college-educated blacks who were nonetheless concerned about affairs within black communities interpreted Black Power to mean black capitalism. In fact, in an age when Black Power evoked fears of bomb-throwing militants and radicals with Afro hairstyles, it is interesting to note that the first Black Power conference was organized by conservative Republican Nathan Wright, and the second was cosponsored by Clairol, a manufacturer of hair-care products. Even Republican Richard Nixon, who won the 1968 presidential election, praised Black Power, since he, like the conservative business daily the Wall Street Journal, connected Black Power to black economic self-sufficiency. Nixon was not the only symbol of the white mainstream who embraced black capitalism. A

number of corporations promoted a black managerial class and supported black capitalism: Xerox sponsored the TV series “Of Black America”; Chrysler put a little money in a black- owned bank; and the lumber and paper products giant Crown Zellerbach set up subsidiaries run by black management. Companies that to date had viewed blacks as no more than consumers even modified their lending policies in the years between 1968 and 1970. Prudential, the large life insurance conglomerate, made more than $85 million in loans to blacks in urban communities, after much of the property it owned and insured in Newark, New Jersey, was destroyed after the 1967 rebellion. Throughout 1968 and 1969, Nixon and other white conservatives supported black economic advancement as an alternative to rebellion or revolution. They believed if people had a real stake in society they would be less inclined to seek its overthrow. In 1968 and 1969 the federal government and many average citizens openly worried about

the overthrow of the government. Many saw chaos and feared true anarchy. College campuses, especially, were sites of antiwar demonstrations, calls for changes in curriculum, attempts to ban the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC, a military training program), and other actions. Campuses became a cauldron of black protest, too. In the years 1968–69, fifty-seven percent of all campus protests involved black students. This level reflects both the growing numbers of black students on campuses and the increasing numbers who ended up at predominantly white colleges. Between 1964 and 1970, the number of black college students nearly doubled, from 234,000 to half a million, while the percentage attending black colleges dropped from fifty-one to thirty-four percent.

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Black students often faced attacks from some white students who were uncomfortable with their increasing numbers on previously nearly all-white campuses; they found the campus environment hostile, given their small numbers, isolation from other students, discrimination by various student groups, and lack of African-American faculty and administrators; and they judged their classes as lacking relevance to their own lives. Out of this atmosphere emerged the black studies movement. On campuses nationwide,

Black Student Unions (BSUs) were formed to advocate further social and curricular changes, especially the introduction of black studies programs. Of course, scholars at many of these institutions and at historically black colleges have taught some aspects of African-American history or studies, but no department committed to developing a broad curriculum based on the lives of African peoples had ever been established. Students took the initiative, first forming political and cultural organizations such as the Afro-American Students Association at Berkeley and Merritt College in Oakland, California, and the Black Student Congress at Columbia University in New York. As early as 1967 students at Howard University called for the creation of a concentrated program in the study of African Americans. Black students at Cornell University in 1969 launched their own effort to force substantial

curricular changes. Since 1967, scores of colleges and universities, both black- and white- dominated, had to address the demands of blacks. In fact, between 1960 and 1969, the scene of the sit-in shifted from the lunch counter to the university president’s office. Protests visited campuses as varied as the University of Massachusetts, Duke, Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Simmons College, and Antioch. At Cornell, a particularly dramatic episode transfixed the nation. Through the mid-sixties

Cornell had had a dismal record of attracting and graduating African-American students. But beginning around mid-decade the school began in earnest to recruit blacks. Once there, however, the black students complained of overtly racist acts and general alienation. They also sought to institute a black studies department. After a series of incidents, including the tossing of a burning cross into a dormitory, tensions reached a critical phase, and black students took over part of the student union during Parents Week in April. Fearing more violence, especially given their small numbers (only two hundred and fifty of the more than ten thousand students on campus were black), a few black students managed to smuggle guns into the union. After long negotiations, which ultimately led to Cornell’s first black studies program, the students filed out peacefully and ended the standoff. When the incident ended without loss of life, the country recalled only the image of gun-toting black students. What many outside commentators failed to realize was that students wanted more than freedom by 1969; they wanted liberation, and they were willing to fight for their demands, educational or otherwise. The link between liberation and education was not confined to the university. By 1968 the

struggle for Black Power in education had reached down to public schools in many locales. More and more community activists began demanding control over local schools. Black parents and teachers objected to a curriculum that excluded Third World cultural perspectives. They objected, too, to the tracking of their children into remedial and special education classrooms, which they considered just another form of segregation; and they objected to the failure to funnel blacks and Latinos into college preparatory classes. More than anything, they objected to the fact that they had so little control over what their children learned.

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For some blacks, the fight to transform education was merely a small part of a larger revolutionary movement. Organizations sprang up during this period that sought to transform the whole country, to eliminate all forms of inequality and racial discrimination. Perhaps the best-known of the radical black organizations was the Black Panther party (BPP). Although it is often identified as a proponent of Black Power, the BPP was essentially a Marxist organization. Embracing the ideology of the nineteenth-century German political philosopher Karl Marx, BPP members believed that the poor and oppressed peoples of the world would eventually mount a revolution to overthrow capitalism. Calling itself the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, it was founded in October 1966 in

Oakland, California. The group was led by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, former student activists at Merritt College in Oakland. At its founding, the party issued a ten-point program calling for, among other things, full employment, decent housing, relevant education, black exemption from military service, an end to police brutality, freedom for all black prisoners, and trials with juries of their peers. Seeing themselves as part of a global liberation movement, the Panthers also spoke of the black community as a colony inside the United States.

A 1968 Black Panther rally in New York. Carrying guns and wearing their trademark berets, the Panthers believed blacks should arm themselves against police brutality. Over the next few years, shoot-outs with police officers and FBI agents were frequent.

Yet, unlike many other black or interracial radical groups of their day, they never advocated secession or the creation of a separate state. Instead, they preferred interracial coalitions when possible. They joined forces with the predominantly white Peace and Freedom party (a third party of socialists and peace activists) and developed strong ties with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In alliance with the Peace and Freedom party, the Black Panther party put up candidates in

both the national and California state elections of 1968. The coalition’s presidential candidate was Eldridge Cleaver, an ex-prisoner who wrote the best-selling book Soul on Ice (1968). He had joined the party in February 1967. As a writer and speaker, Cleaver emerged as the main spokesperson for the Panthers after Bobby Seale was arrested for armed invasion of the State Assembly chamber in Sacramento and Newton was jailed for allegedly shooting an Oakland

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police officer. The charges against Newton were eventually dropped, but only after a long national campaign to free him. The Black Panthers felt that armed struggle was the only way to defend the black community

from police repression. By carrying loaded firearms in public (which was legal in California at the time), the Panthers drew a great deal of attention from the media and wrath from the police and FBI. Perhaps because of their notoriety, their ranks grew; by 1970 Panther chapters had taken root in nineteen states and in more than thirty cities, and eventually in England, Israel, and France. A deft combination of style and substance accounted for the party’s popularity. Early BPP

members looked sharp in their all-black outfits of jeans, shirt, beret, and sunglasses. They affected a politics of style, making themselves look daring, mysterious, dangerous, and powerful. But style alone would fail, they quickly realized. As a result, the Panthers sponsored several community-based initiatives in most cities in the country, including clothing drives, a community day-care center, a Panther school, and a free breakfast program. Their free breakfast program provided meals to two hundred thousand children daily. Most amazingly, they proved that grassroots movements could make a difference, even when the U.S. government vowed to eliminate the organization by any means necessary. Federal law enforcement officers, especially the FBI, targeted a growing list of black-run

organizations in the late sixties. Since the mid-sixties the agency had spied on Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and other notable black leaders. By 1968 spying had come to include an active policy of group infiltration, in which FBI informants posed as members of radical or militant organizations. Local and federal police began a crackdown. In 1969, for example, police arrested 348 Panthers for a range of offenses, among them murder, rape, robbery, and assault. The FBI and local police declared war on the Panthers. In 1968 alone, at least eight Black

Panthers were killed by police in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Seattle. And the during the following year, two Chicago Panther leaders, Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, were killed in their sleep during an early morning police raid. The violence and constant surveillance by the FBI reflected the position of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: The only good Panther was a dead Panther. Without question, the FBI helped destroy the Black Panther party. Yet it was much more difficult to snuff out all who were swayed by the appeal of Black

Power. In Detroit, for example, radical Black Power ideology influenced one of the most militant labor movements in the country. Eventually calling themselves the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), the group was founded by several young black auto workers, many of whom worked at Detroit’s Dodge Main Plant. Led by activists such as Luke Tripp, General Baker, John Watson, Mike Hamlin, and Ken Cockrel, they were a unique bunch. All had been students at Wayne State University and had worked together in a black nationalist organization called Uhuru (Swahili for “Freedom”). Uhuru had been loosely associated with RAM—the same organization from which several founding members of the Black Panther party came. Two events spurred the creation of the league. The first was the Detroit riots of 1967, which

revealed the degree of unrest, poverty, and police brutality in the “Motor City.” The Detroit

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chapter of the NAACP was flooded with complaints about police treatment of African Americans. Even black police officers were subjected to brutality. The second event was more immediate: On May 2, 1968, General Baker and several other

black militants in the Dodge Main Plant led a walkout of four thousand workers, the first in that factory in fourteen years and the first organized and led entirely by black workers. The strike was over a speedup of the assembly line, which in the previous week had increased from forty-nine to fifty-eight cars per hour. Out of this strike emerged the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). It was the first of several Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) that popped up at auto plants in and around Detroit, and which subsequently led to the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

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DRUM’s specific demands—safer workplaces, lower production demands, an end to racist hiring practices—echoed past grievances. Of course they wanted to win better working conditions and wages for black workers, but their ultimate goal was freedom for all workers, and that meant, in their view, the end of capitalism. DRUM members knew that racism limited the ability of workers to unite, and that white workers, as well as black workers, were hurt by this. But they also argued that white workers benefited from racism in the form of higher wages, cleaner and safer jobs, and greater union representation. Not everyone in the league agreed as to the best way to achieve Black Power and workers’

power. One group, led by General Baker, believed the movement should focus on shop-floor struggles, while Watson, Hamlin, and Cockrel felt that the league needed to organize black communities beyond the factories. Thus, the latter got together and organized the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC) in the spring of 1969. At the urging of former SNCC leader James Forman, who had recently arrived in Detroit, the league became heavily involved in the planning and running of the conference. Out of BEDC came Forman’s proposal for a Black Manifesto, which demanded, among

other things, $500 million in reparations from white churches and synagogues to be used to purchase land in the South, fund black publishing companies, a research skills center, a black Southern university, and a national black labor strike fund. The work in BEDC took the league leadership, of which Forman was now a part, away from its local emphasis. Their efforts led to the founding of the Black Workers Congress (BWC) in 1970. The BWC called for workers’ control over the economy and the state to be brought about through cooperatives, neighborhood centers, student organizations, and ultimately a revolutionary party. And they demanded better wages and working conditions for all workers. Meanwhile, the league’s local base began to disintegrate. Dodge had fired several league

activists, including General Baker. The General Policy Statement of the league, which based everything on the need for vibrant DRUM-type organizations, seemed to have fallen by the wayside. Divisions between the leadership groups were so entrenched that no one could cooperate any more. Influenced by events on the factory floor and in the universities, writers laid claim to their

own interpretations of Black Power. Starting with John Oliver Killen’s 1954 novel Youngblood, and increasing in frequency by the mid-sixties, black writers debated whether there was something distinctive about black culture, something that made it different from “white” or European-American culture. The debate had less to do with whether black writers would write about black life—they had been doing so since the days of the first slave narratives in the United States—and more to do with a universal definition of a black aesthetic. In the midst of the debates and disagreements that ensued, some sense of a general consensus did emerge. Black was not only powerful, it was beautiful. And it was up to black people to express and celebrate both the power and the beauty. Thus, the political revolution in black America was accompanied by a profound cultural

revolution. A new generation of artists created literature, art, and music that celebrated black people and promoted rebellion against racism and poverty throughout the world. They encouraged African Americans to celebrate their African heritage and to embrace their blackness not as a mark of shame but as a symbol of beauty.

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To understand this revolution, however, we need to go back to the fifties, when Africans declared war on European colonialism and began to win their independence. Inspired by Africa’s example, jazz pianist Randy Weston recorded the album Uhuru Afrika (1960); drummer Max Roach brought together African and African-American musicians to produce We Insist: Freedom Now Suite (1960); and the brilliant saxophonist John Coltrane recorded songs such as “Dahomey Dance” (1961), “Africa” (1961), and “Liberia” (1964). African Americans even began to emulate African styles or create new styles that, in their mind, represented African culture. During the early sixties a number of black women artists, most notably the folk singer Odetta, the jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln, and the exiled South African singer Miriam Makeba, styled their hair in medium to short Afros. They refused to straighten their hair and instead allowed it to grow naturally. All of these independent cultural developments emerging out of the late fifties and early

sixties began to coalesce into a full-blown movement just when America’s cities began to explode. In 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm X, the poet and playwright Leroi Jones and several other black writers, namely Larry Neal, Clarence Reed, and Askia Muhammad Toure, founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater School (BART) in an old brownstone building on 130th Street in Harlem. With meager support from federal War on Poverty programs, they held classes for Harlem residents and launched a summer arts and culture program that brought music, drama, and the visual arts to the community virtually every day of the week. Like many artists of his generation, Leroi Jones could not ignore the black freedom

movement in his midst. Before founding BART, he was the senior member of the downtown New York literary scene. Born to a working-class family in Newark, New Jersey, Jones attended Howard University (a historically black college), served briefly in the Air Force, and ended up a struggling writer in New York’s Greenwich Village. After the success of his first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), his first book of prose, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), and his first play, Dutchman (1964), he no longer had to struggle. Indeed Dutchman, a surreal encounter between an educated black man and a white woman who, as a symbolic representative of the racist state, taunts the man and eventually kills him, earned him many awards and accolades. After Dutchman, Jones could have pursued a lucrative career as a writer but chose instead to use his artistic insights to build a political movement. In 1966, a year after founding BART, Jones moved back to his hometown of Newark, started

a similar institution called Spirit House, and changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. Although Spirit House also sponsored community arts programs, it developed a more explicit political orientation after Newark’s ghettos exploded in 1967. In the aftermath of the riots, Spirit House held a Black Power conference that attracted several national black leaders, including Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther party, and Imari Obadele of the newly formed Republic of New Africa (a black nationalist organization that demanded land on which African Americans could settle and form an independent nation, and was partly an outgrowth of RAM). Shortly thereafter, Spirit House became the base for the Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN). In addition to attracting black nationalists, Black Muslims, and even a few Marxists, CFUN bore the mark of Maulana Karenga’s US

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Organization. Karenga, originally a West Coast leader of RAM, insisted that the crisis facing black

America was first and foremost a cultural crisis. He envisioned “US” as a movement of cultural reconstruction, creating a new synthesis between traditional African culture and African-American culture. Drawing on African religions, philosophies, and ideas about family and kin relations, US attempted to create a political movement rooted in communal ties between people of African descent rather than competition or individualism. Although tensions arose between Karenga and some of the Newark activists over his treatment of women and the overly centralized leadership structure CFUN had imported from the US Organization, the movement continued to grow. In this setting, the search for artistic expression became known as the Black Arts Movement.

In addition to Baraka, other leading lights included poets Nikki Giovanni, Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Jayne Cortez, and Sonia Sanchez; playwrights Ed Bullins, Ben Caldwell, and Jimmy Garrett, to name a few. Although openly critical of whites and brutally critical of blacks who seemed to go along with a system of white supremacy, the members of the Black Arts Movement were important for the innovations they introduced in literary form. Determined to bring poetry and prose to the people, they experimented with freer forms and drew heavily on jazz rhythms and the everyday vernacular language of black folk. They often turned the hip, cool phrases of black youth into hot, angry declarations of war against American racism and exploitation. While literary artists made an appeal for the hearts and souls of the black majority, it was

musicians who achieved mass appeal in the late sixties, a time of intense experimentation and political expression. Some of them, such as James Brown (known as the “godfather of soul”) and poet/singer Gil Scott-Heron, adopted a Black Power stance more clearly than others. Within jazz circles, artists such as saxo phonists Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Archie Shepp, pianists Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, and many others, lauded a new sound, variously known as “free jazz,” “the new thing,” the “jazz avant-garde,” or the “new black music.” Detractors, on the other hand, called the music “anti-jazz” or “nihilism.” Essentially, the new jazz musicians began playing free form, breaking out of traditional harmonies, rhythms, and song structures. Inspired by music from Africa and Asia, they often improvised freely over a single musical phrase. Furthermore, many of these musicians identified with the black arts movement; Ayler, Shepp, Sun Ra, and others performed frequently at BART, and the jazz avant- garde even had its own publications calling for the creation of revolutionary music. The key journal at the time was called the Grade: Improvised Music in Transition. In the Gracle, black musicians debated the music’s relationship to the movement, thought about ways to fuse music and literature, and discussed the importance of political education for black artists. Although the jazz avant-garde sought to establish direct ties to black communities, its music

never achieved the popularity of “soul” music. The creators of soul consciously searched for black roots; their products reflected gospel’s major influence. Aretha Franklin’s early music, for example, was characterized by gospel-style piano playing. A product of mid- to late-sixties transformations, soul was also much more political than

rock and roll. Its themes have to do with more than equality; they deal with conditions in the urban North such as poverty, the powerlessness of black folk, and drug use. The titles tell the

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story: James Carr’s “Freedom Train,” the Chi-Lites’ “Give More Power to the People,” and Tony Clarke’s “Ghetto Man.” Still, there was no single ideology of Black Power in soul music. Singers Curtis Mayfield

and James Brown simultaneously promoted reform of the system and acceptance into it. While recording songs promoting black pride like “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and “Soul Brother No. 1,” Brown also came out with the patriotic assimilationist tune “America is My Home.” After King was assassinated and riots began erupting, Brown went on national television to urge blacks to go back home. He even came out in support of the conservative and sometimes openly racist President Richard Nixon, mainly because of Nixon’s advocacy of black capitalism as a way of achieving racial equality. The Temptations and Marvin Gaye were also politically conscious, but unlike Mayfield,

whose songs were of hope and possibility, theirs were songs of pessimism: Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” and “What’s Goin’ On?” and the Temptations’ “Message from a Black Man,” “Cloud Nine,” and “Ball of Confusion.” In the last, before the chorus, “Ball of Confusion, that’s what the world is today,” we hear a baritone voice singing “And the band plays on,” signaling business-as-usual politics, indifference, and apathy. The “band” is symbolically drowning out the noise of poverty and resistance. The irony of this world as described by the Temptations is captured in the line “The only safe place to live is on an Indian reservation.” As millions of black Americans tuned in to the sounds of soul and jazz, they also tuned in to

the dramatic television broadcast from the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. What happened there represented the most international expression of Black Power. To call attention to racism in sports here and abroad, former San Jose State basketball and track and field star Harry Edwards formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Its intent was to organize an international boycott of the 1968 games. Edwards hoped to draw attention both to the treatment of black athletes as well as to the

general condition of black people throughout the world. As he put it, “What value is it to a black man to win a medal if he returns to the hell of Harlem?” Specifically, he and others sought to ban athletes from South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (both at the time were white- dominated African countries that segregated and exploited the African population) from the Olympics, the appointment of a black member to the U.S. Olympic Committee, appointment of an additional black coach on the U.S. team, the desegregation of the New York Athletic Club, and the removal of the International Olympic Committee’s president, Avery Brundage. Among other things, Brundage was quoted as saying he would sell his exclusive Santa Barbara, California, country club membership before admitting “niggers and kikes” as members. Instead of boycotting the Olympics, however, black athletes decided to use the event as a

way to draw attention to racism and the black struggle. They agreed to wear black armbands and developed strategies to protest during the victory ceremonies. The most famous demonstration involved track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who mounted the awards platform wearing knee-length black socks, no shoes, and a black glove on one hand (Smith also wore a black scarf around his neck). When the band played the U.S. national anthem, they bowed their heads and raised their gloved fists toward the sky in the Black Power salute. In an interview with sportscaster Howard Cosell, the pair explained that the closed-fisted salute symbolized black power and unity; the socks with no shoes represented the poverty most black

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people must endure; and Smith’s scarf symbolized black pride. They bowed their heads in memory of fallen warriors in the black liberation movement, notably Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Although their actions did not harm anyone or incite violence, the U.S. Olympic Committee

decided to suspend Smith and Carlos from the games and strip them of their medals for being overtly political. Angered by the decision, many of their fellow black athletes continued to protest. The three U.S. medalists who swept the 400-meter dash wore black berets on the victory stand, as did the 1600-meter relay team (which also broke the world record). Bob Beamon and Ralph Boston, medal winners in the long jump, wore black socks without shoes to protest both the condition of black people and the treatment of their teammates. And Wyomia Tyus, anchor in the women’s four-hundred-meter relay team, dedicated her gold medal to Carlos and Smith. The political stance of black athletes in Mexico City combined with other examples of

forceful advocacy of Black Power to provoke fear and a backlash. By 1969, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, many white Americans began to ask: What more does the Negro want? Dissatisfied with the responses they heard to that question, more and more whites found their own answers in the politics of rage endorsed first by George Wallace and then by Richard Nixon. George Wallace had surfaced as a national political force in the early sixties, after he made

a highly publicized effort to block the desegregation of the University of Alabama. He had been active in Alabama politics since before the start of the Second World War. Steeped in the traditions of Alabama and the South, he held views on race that were neither enlightened nor particularly regressive. Each race had its own genius and place in the life of country, he asserted at the time. To him this was less a disputable fact than merely an obvious truth. He held fast to that view through the Alabama gubernatorial campaign of his mentor “Big

Jim” Folsom in the mid-fifties. With the Brown v. Board of Education decision fresh in people’s minds, with Montgomery roiling from the effects of the bus boycott and news of similar boycotts forming across the region, Wallace staked out a new political image. It was an image that distanced him from his mentor, ensured his own selection as governor of Alabama in 1962, and forever solidified his reputation as the embodiment of Southern obstruction of black rights. But it was Wallace the presidential candidate rather than Wallace the governor who attracted

more attention. George Wallace’s ascendancy as a legitimate third-party candidate in 1968 signaled a clear backlash. He openly courted whites who felt disenfranchised by governmental policy. For his efforts he won five Southern states in 1968 and between eight and fifteen percent of the vote in more than a dozen Northern and Western states. Before an assassin’s bullet nearly killed him in 1972, Wallace had received nearly as many popular votes in the Democratic presidential primaries as George McGovern, the Democratic party’s eventual candidate. Wallace’s most important influence, however, may have been inspiring the Republican party to adopt a strategy that catered to white fears of social equality for blacks. Richard Nixon quickly moved into the political space Wallace had created. Aided by the

conservative push in his own party, the electoral appeal of law and order themes in 1968, and

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his own realization that Republicans could use race as an issue to drive Southern whites into their party, he outlined a plan for what became the Republican party’s Southern strategy. Heading into the spring of 1968, polls showed Nixon tying either Robert F. Kennedy or Hubert H. Humphrey, the two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy’s assassination left Humphrey, the old liberal now too closely aligned with Lyndon Johnson’s failed social and military policies. Nixon won the election in part due to his ability to channel a racial backlash. This backlash came just as black Americans intensified their demands for social, economic, and political action. Despite backlash politics and the rising tide of racism, this was also the moment Black

Power in some ways entered the realm of electoral politics. Nearly a generation after a new wave of black migrants moved into urban areas, during what became known as the Second Great Migration, their numbers had grown sufficiently—and whites had fled city centers in large enough numbers—to give blacks electoral majorities, or at the very least working margins. This change in the racial makeup of cities improved the likelihood that African Americans could gain a stronger political foothold in major urban centers. In some cases, they were successful. The mayoral victories of Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, in 1967 raised black hopes that electoral politics might offer real opportunities, at least at the municipal level. However, despite a growing black electorate in the nation’s cities, African Americans held few really important political offices. During the early seventies, for example, black elected officials tended to hold low-level city

and county jobs, especially in law enforcement, on school boards, and on some city councils. Most of these black elected officials were in the South. The lack of more significant black political representation in big Northern cities where African Americans made up forty to fifty percent of the population was particularly striking. To pave the way for participation at higher levels of city government, black political leaders worked hard on devising strategies to win local elections. When the clock ticked off the last minute of 1969 and African Americans took stock of the

last few years, they thought not only about the changes they had witnessed but also about the ones they still hoped to see. They knew they were the caretakers of King’s dream of living in a nation where character was more important than color. And they knew they had to take charge of their community. After all, the civil rights and Black Power eras had forged change through community action. Although many blacks may have sensed that all progress was tempered by the social, economic, and political realities of a government and a white public often resistant to change, they could not ignore the power of their own past actions. America in 1969 was not the America of 1960 or 1965. At the end of the decade, a chorus could be heard rising from the black community proclaiming, “We changed the world.”

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