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4CHAPTER

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 amboyant and e ective 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 esh 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

di erences, for instance, between where they grew up in the South and the Northern cities

where they were trying to establish themselves for the rst time.

To Make Our World Anew : A History of African Americans, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615. Created from apus on 2026-07-29 23:07:09.

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.

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 o ered was the opportunity for black

people to vote as free men and free women for the rst 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

signi cant 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 nding 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 e cient 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 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 a ord 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.

Re ecting on his own Harlem childhood in (1961), James Nobody Knows My Name

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

indi erence, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They

patiently browbeat the landlord into xing 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 . Ralph Ellison’s classic novel The Street Invisible

re ected the humor, anger, hope, and the search for new beginnings that the urban Man

experience represented for the transplanted black Southerners. Ellison’s protagonist

discovers a major di erence between the South and the North when he rst 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 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 (1940).Native Son

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,

o ering unexpected, unresolved, and often jagged tonal edges in place of the smoother

ows 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

proli c gospel songwriter Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey, the churches were lled 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 signi cant 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 speci c 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

in uence 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 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 ight from the Democratic party. The main

catalyst was Truman’s decision to create the rst Civil Rights Commission. The commission’

s report, (1947), proposed some speci c ways in which the federal To Secure These Rights

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

nally 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, a rming responses from the

federal courts to the dozens of challenges to segregation and disenfranchisement that the

NAACP and thousands of black plainti s were pressing in the courts.

One of the most important of these cases, v. , was heard by the U.S. Morgan Virginia

Supreme Court in 1946. Irene Morgan had rmly 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 o shoot from the Fellowship

of Reconciliation (FOR)—a Christian paci st 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 decision and urging federal enforcement of the ruling. Morgan

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 fteen-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

signi cance of the 1944 Supreme Court decision in v. . This decision Smith Allwright

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 v. , the Supreme Court responded to the black Smith Allwright

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

plainti s won a crucial victory in that state. When South Carolina attempted to circumvent

the v. decision by removing all statutes relating to primaries—on the Smith Allwright

assumption that without state involvement, the Democratic primaries would be a private

matter—George Elmore challenged the state’s move. In the case of v. (1947), Rice Elmore

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 at 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 ve-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

reporter, he tried to imagine what would happen if black people gained full York Times

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 o ce in

the county. Why you’d have a nigger judge, nigger sheri , 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

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 esh 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 con ned 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 nally 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 , the , the Pittsburgh Courier Chicago Defender

, and the . These papers were circulated Baltimore Afro-American Norfolk Journal and Guide

through many hands in households, barbershops, beauty parlors, churches, and restaurants.

In 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 o ered 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 identi ed 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

o er 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 identi ed 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 con scated 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 bene ted 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 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 di erent. Nowhere was this personal cost more obvious than in the ve legal cases that

would force their way into the U.S. Supreme Court and become known collectively as Brown

v. . The case known as v. provided the legal bedrock on Board of Education Briggs Elliott

which the entire set of cases was built.Brown

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 gure out was

how to deal with the rude and repeated rebu s 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 nd men and women to become plainti s

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 ght 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 le 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 ve 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 blacks at a great disadvantage. Marshall’s strategy was to force the

Supreme Court to overturn the 1896 v. ruling, which upheld the legality of Plessy Ferguson

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 , Marshall Plessy

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 on Monday, May Brown

17, 1954, it was a stunning accomplishment. All eyes focused on the solemn announcement

that “in the eld 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 nally

turned the Supreme Court around. Two days after , the declared, “It Brown Washington Post

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 rst 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 fteen. 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 nally 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 racism.

So although Crozer was King’s rst 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 rmly 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 ghting 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

re ected 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 nally

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 Je erson 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 o cial tenure as pastor of Dexter’s middle-class

congregation in September 1954, it was clear that the city’s black population of close to

fty 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 fties 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.

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 gru -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 fties, 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 e ciently 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 o cials 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 rsthand 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 the U.S. House of Representatives; they had been pressed to recognize the rising

power of an in amed 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- fties 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- ve 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 o 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 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 magni cently proper and respectable church member, prepared to go to

jail, in a time when such people did not go to such places. But rst 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 o cer, “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, Cli ord and Virginia Durr. Cli ord 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

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 o more than thirty thousand mimeographed copies of a lea et 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 o 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 a ord to stay out of school for one day if you

have no other way to go except by bus. You can also a ord 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 o 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 lea ets. 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 con rm

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 lea et, many phone calls, and crucially, the dozens of black church

services scheduled for Sunday, December 4. Then, when one of the lea ets got into the

hands of a white employer and was passed on to the , the city’s daily Montgomery Advertiser

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 signi cant 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 o

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 the riders stayed o 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 ve miles each way, at times saying, “I’m walking for my

grandchildren.” Meanwhile, all the buses from the black communities were at least ninety-

ve 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 nd 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 rst 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 ll 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 rst 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 , was almost Advertiser

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 gure 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 ood 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?

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 identi ed them “ rst 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 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 con ned 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 sti 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 unjusti ed 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 o 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 oor, 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 fteen 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 ercely challenging the chief of police and the mayor to match

them gun for gun, and de antly 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

e ectively began to push the Montgomery story beyond the con nes of the African-

American press and the 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

o cials 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 intensi ed the national media interest in Montgomery and in King.

The rst time that the Montgomery story appeared on the front page of the

internationally respected and was when these New York Times New York Herald Tribune

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

con ict 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 rst African-American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ralph

Bunche, who served as an o cial 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 lled.

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 , and , as well as from the newly attentive white-owned Jet, Ebony Sepia

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 paci st groups in the country: The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the

American 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 rm, 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 eld

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 nding 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 paci st movement, also went

independently to o er 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 o cers, 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 paci sts, such as

Howard Thurman and Harry Emerson Fosdick; introducing him to the classic published

writings on nonviolence, such as Fosdick’s and assisting the MIA in Hope of the World;

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 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 con dence, “We in Montgomery have discovered a method that can be

used by the Negroes in their ght for political and economic equality. … We ght 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 a rm 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 identi ed as Gayle

v. (1956). And when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the black citizens of Browder

Montgomery, it was clear the South was about to change forever.

The Court’s ruling in v. announced on November 13, 1956, but no one Gayle Browder was

knew when the o cial papers of noti cation 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 o ces. 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 sacri ce and su ering. But somehow we feel that our su ering 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, 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 nally 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 ercely 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 sacri ce 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,

a rming the people and their audacious struggle. The next morning a restrained but happy

group, including King, Abernathy, and Smiley, boarded the rst 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 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 nances, 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 exible 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 rst 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 rst 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 e ective carriers

of Montgomery’s best spirit. In her fties 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.

Then, on April 19, 1956, a law was passed prohibiting state and city employees from

having an a liation 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 e orts 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 di erent forms.

That spirit was seen, for instance, in the ery 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 e ect, 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 a liates 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 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 o cials 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 intensi ed 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 nally 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, o ering “massive

resistance” to the ruling.

In addition, the person who might have been expected to provide some rm guidance to

the nation in this crucial time of transition was o ering 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 gure, 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 de ed

the Supreme Court, dynamited buildings, and assassinated leaders.

Though Eisenhower never made a clear public statement of opposition to the Court’s

action in , neither did he ever publicly support it. He felt that “forcing” desegregation Brown

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 decision not by any certain Brown

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 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 rst Southern city to respond positively

to the decision. Less than a week after the decision was announced, the Little Rock Brown

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- ve

students volunteered to lead the way. Of those, twenty- ve 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, nally 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 nally 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 rst major ongoing story.) Many people also saw the

electrifying image of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the black students in Little Rock,

accidentally cut o from the rest of the group of students, surrounded by the hostile mob,

moving in silent, terri ed dignity, nally joined by 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 de ed white protests and threats of violence to enroll at

the school.

Eisenhower nally 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 nd 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, nally

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 nished 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 year, in Monroe, North Carolina, a rather di erent 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 Ri e

Association, Williams created a ri e 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 ee the

country altogether as a result of trumped-up kidnapping charges. Eventually he became an

exile from the land that once inspired his hope, nding 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, owing

white dresses, became a regular part of the urban landscape. These quiet, digni ed,

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 modi ed 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 o ce 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 o cially stayed out of

politics, focusing its energies on the spiritual uplift of African Americans and o ering 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 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

gure, 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 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 —the NOI’s rst nationally distributed newspaper—Malcolm Muhammad Speaks

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- fties, for

example, he privately sco ed 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 signi cantly, Malcolm clearly disagreed with the NOI’s policy of not

participating in politics. He not only believed that political mobilization was indispensable

but occasionally de ed the rule by supporting boycotts and other forms of protest. He had

begun developing a Third World political perspective during the fties, 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 con nes 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 rmly 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 rmly 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 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 di erent 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

de ne, 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 rm 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 e ort 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 co ee 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 a rming 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 counter.

When McClain recalled that rst 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

con ned to one campus or one city. The students at Bennett College, a private, black

women’s school nearby, heard the news and joined the ght. 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 rst 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

ags, 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.

ags, opened a path through the threatening white crowd for the sit-in squads.

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 and not just the North Carolina students. Within weeks the sit-ins everybody

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 a liates 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 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 o cials 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 a airs 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- ve 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

rst 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 , the , and publications in many other parts of the Congressional Record New York Times

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 signi cant student movement. Its six black institutions of higher

education, the presence of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC, the tradition of a

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 (exempli ed by Ralph McGill and his , the best-known Atlanta Constitution

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 To Make Our World Anew : A History of African Americans, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615. Created from apus on 2026-07-29 23:07:09.

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 rst 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 eld secretary for the Fellowship of

Reconciliation. The FOR was a mostly white organization of religious paci sts that had long

been involved in a quiet search for nonviolent methods of ghting for racial justice in

America. Lawson rst 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 paci sm 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 rst 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 a rmation 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 eld secretary, possibly based in

Nashville. Lawson also accepted an invitation to develop workshops on nonviolence from

the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), an a liate 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 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-a liated Vanderbilt University. He was soon o ering 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- ve 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 ve hundred students and adults who wanted to join the ght. 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 erce 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 o ering of long and deep

prayers on behalf of their young freedom ghters.

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

signi cant tensions. But the college students’ spirit of bold, nonviolent de ance was

infectious, and its e ect on an even younger generation may have been at least as

signi cant 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 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 gured

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 rst full-time eld 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 re 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-con dence 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

o ered 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 ght 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.”

Then he urged them to move ahead and “ ll up the jails.” Ever since the days of Gandhi

in India, resistance leaders had issued the call to ll up the jails as both a personal and

strategic challenge. On the personal level in America, it urged nonviolent warriors to

overcome their justi able 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 di cult 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 lling 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 rst 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 re ected the rapidly changing nature of the Southern

student leadership scene. Now, more than half of the eighty- ve 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 sta , 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 ooding 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 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 nancial

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 sta 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 su ered 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

o ce.

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 di cult to work

e ectively 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 nd 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 o cially 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 all over the nation. The letter called the sit-in movement and its accompanying

nonviolent actions “tremendously signi cant 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 fty

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 de ance, 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 rst

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 o cial

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

signi cance 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 con rmed one

of the best self-de nitions 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 nd 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 rst 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 rede ning 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 re.

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 o cials, 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.

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 o cer 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 edgling

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 “ eld secretaries” to do grassroots organizing,

especially educating and preparing potential voters across the South, working for SNCC at

subsistence wages of twenty- ve 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 o 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 nancial bribery at work in the Kennedys’ o ers. 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 nally led the students to the decision that

avoided a split. The “band of brothers,” as they had begun to call themselves, re ecting

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 di cult 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 rst. It was a place too lled 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 e ect 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 rst 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 gure 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 le 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 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 rst 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 rst 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 solidi ed 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 de ning 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 signi cant 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

su ocate the 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 sta 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 di cult 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 o cers 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 o , although SNCC activists remained in Albany for another six years.

Segregation was still rmly 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 rst 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 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 ght 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 identi ed 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 bene ts 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- ve 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, rmly, “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 fteen white men from Sasser walked in,

including one in a deputy sheri ’s uniform, along with Sheri Mathews, in plain clothes.

They lined up against the wall in the back of the church while Sherrod completed the

reading. Then, without missing 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.” Sheri 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 led out. At the end of the song Sheri Mathews, accompanied by two of his deputies

and the sheri 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 ashlight,

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.” Sheri 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 o 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 ve percent in many places where

black people made up more than fty percent of the population.

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 o ce sta 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 o ce, and running his own gas station. Because Moore had insisted on trying to

develop a voter-registration campaign in Cleveland in the mid- fties, 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 o 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 in uence 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 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 rst group of three local volunteers, an older man and two middle-aged

women, were nally 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 sheri ’s cousin. He split Moses’s scalp

with the heavy handle of a hunting knife. About a week later Moses felt a di erent 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 rst 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 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 o ered 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 rst full-time eld 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 e ective recruiter for the cause.

However, the white people of McComb wanted to know what was doing there in the he

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 rst 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

believed that they could physically guard the university against the newly de ned 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 nally even shot at them in a one-sided battle in which the marshals were ordered not

to return the re. 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

nally ended the white resistance.

The next day, James Meredith nally registered as the rst black student at Ole Miss and

became a powerful symbol to the black people of the nation.

As the SNCC workers re ected on their experiences in southwest Georgia and southwest

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

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- lled 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 rst 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,

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 nally 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 o ce.

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 sta meeting in Atlanta. The

organization’s full-time sta 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.

Re ecting 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 sacri ce and

su ering 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 di culties and

experiments in Albany, in the spring of 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., and his sta 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 Jackson. Henderson, who was arrested and jailed for

merely arguing with a white man, was found handcu ed 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 o cers 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 re ected on the Birmingham campaign, King wrote:

We believed that while a campaign in Birmingham would surely be the toughest ght 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 rst 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 o cers.

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 o ce a more moderate segregationist named Albert Boutwell. At the

same time there was a white business community of expanding in uence 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 fty or sixty volunteers for the next

morning’s demonstrations, which were designed to demand an immediate end to racist

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 justi cation

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- lled 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 a uent society; when you suddenly nd 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

ve-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 nd 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 rst 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 ghting a degenerating sense of

“nobodiness”; then you will understand why we nd it di cult to wait.

King’s , one of the classic statements of the freedom movement, Letter from Birmingham Jail

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 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

sta 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 lled with

hundreds of children. Shuttlesworth o ered the morning send-o 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 re hoses knocked protesters to the ground with enough force to take the bark o

trees.

Bull Connor had been caught o -guard on Thursday by the surge of young marchers,

moving around the police lines. He did not intend to be upstaged again by a ood of singing

black children. So on Friday, May 3, when the young marchers came singing down the steps

of Sixteenth Street Church, they saw re trucks in the park facing the church. Andrew

Young, who oversaw SCLC’s edgling voter-registration drive and was a chief negotiator in

the Birmingham campaign, later described what happened:

As groups of kids marched past the park headed for downtown, Connor issued the order

to the remen 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 re trucks had remained on the sidelines. Suddenly re hoses didn’t seem like

fun anymore, and the kids watched with trepidation as the rehoses 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 remen 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 terri ed 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, rst 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 nally begun. The negotiations were di cult, 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, tting 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 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

re. 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 re 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 re ected 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 o

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 su cient 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 in uence over King. Hoover, in fact,

had a di cult 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 gures. The logistics of

putting together the August 28, 1963, event were an enormous challenge. Organizers had to

plan, for 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 a air, 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 o ered 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 nominate the very conservative Barry Goldwater, a senator from

Arizona. As his motorcade traveled the streets of Dallas on November 22, the sound of ri e

re 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 rst 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 e ort. 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 rst two hundred volunteers

embarked for Mississippi and the forty-three project sites scattered across the state.

Tragically, within the rst two days of Freedom Summer, law-enforcement o cials in

Philadelphia, Mississippi, added three new names to the list of martyrs who made the

supreme sacri ce 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 o ce 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 fty 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 o cers and Klansmen, for the murders; only seven were

found guilty.

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 a rmative action policy. A rmative action programs

were meant to ensure that victims of past discrimination would have greater opportunities

to nd 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 le a complaint with the

federal government.

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) led 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 modi cation. 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 rst time but also declaring victories in Alabama, Georgia,

South Carolina, and Louisiana. The Democratic party’s failure to fully embrace Mississippi’s

black 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 gures 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 o cers’ 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 de ance 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 fty 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 ts 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 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 asco—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 ghting 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 gures 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 rst 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 nish

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 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 re ecting 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 de nition, 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 most important and controversial progenitor of the Black Power movement the

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 a ected a new generation of activists. Even e orts

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 rst-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

di erences with Elijah Muhammad. But as Malcolm became more popular, the tensions

between the two men became increasingly evident. The nal 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

“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 di erences in style and philosophy, they shared many of the concerns, goals, and risks

involved in freedom-movement leadership.

That same year he made his rst 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

a liated 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 rebombed. 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 re. 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 in uential. His autobiography, written with

Alex Haley—the future author of —become a movement standard. Malcolm’s life story Roots

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 rst 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 signi cance of Robert Williams’s armed self-defense

campaign in North Carolina and his subsequent ight 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 in uenced 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 signi cant 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 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, ri e 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

magazine and in 1966 identi ed it as one of the leading extremist groups Life Esquire

“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 o cers 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 intensi ed.

By 1969, RAM had essentially dissolved itself, though its members opted to in ltrate

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

, a publication RAM members regarded as an uno cial organ of their movement. Crusader

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 re—

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 signi cant 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 o cers, 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 fty people (mostly African

Americans) dead, ten thousand seriously injured, and countless black people homeless.

Police 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 ve thousand watched their homes destroyed by ames that engulfed

fourteen square miles of the inner city.

Robert Williams was not too far o the mark: A real war erupted in America’s inner

cities. Elected o cials, from the mayor’s o ce to the Oval O ce, must have seen these

uprisings as a war of sorts because they responded to the crisis with military might at rst.

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 nd 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 identi ed 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 o cials 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 bene t

from integration, a rmative 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 identi ed 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

e ort on the part of the police to put things back in order. Police repression reached an all-

time high 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 gure 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

re ects 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 re ects 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 bene ts 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 nd 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 O ce 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

e orts 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 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 di erently 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 ghting the

Vietnam War steadily drained federal resources away from the War on Poverty and

contributed to rising in ation. Third, the War on Poverty operated from a very limited

de nition of poverty, one that included only families who fell below a xed 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 o cials

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, a uent,

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 ?, King wrote: Where Do We Go From Here

“The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power both to con ne those

who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The problem of transforming the

ghetto is, therefore, a problem of power.”

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 e orts 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 ghting 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 re 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 ve hundred thousand dollars to kill each enemy soldier but spent only a

paltry thirty- ve 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 rst 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.

Meanwhile, in February 1968, in Memphis, another battle erupted, this one between

municipal workers who sought union recognition and city o cials 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- ve percent loss of pro t.

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 o at rst, pleading

fatigue and a tight schedule. King did go to Memphis and addressed more than fteen

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 o cials produced little. On March 28

he did return, prepared to ght 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 editorialized, “Dr. New York Times

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 su ered 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 tribute to the man whose death brought condolences from leaders and citizens

around the world, the country ew its ag 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 trans xed 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 su ered 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

o ered 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 nal 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

? More than the title itself, the subtitle captured what We Go From Here: Chaos or Community

the year 1968 felt like to many Americans. With increasing regularity young men were

eeing 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 o cials; 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 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] o ered 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 ght 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 o ce 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 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 a airs 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 rst 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

, connected Black Power to black economic self-su ciency.Journal

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 modi ed 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 O cers Training Corps (ROTC, a military training program),

and other actions. Campuses became a cauldron of black protest, too. In the years 1968–69,

fty-seven percent of all campus protests involved black students. This level re ects 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 fty-one to thirty-four percent.

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, rst

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 e ort 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 o ce.

Protests visited campuses as varied as the University of Massachusetts, Duke, Harvard,

Columbia, Yale, Simmons College, and Antioch.

At Cornell, a particularly dramatic episode trans xed 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 fty 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 rst black

studies program, the students led out peacefully and ended the stando . 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 ght for their

demands, educational or otherwise.

The link between liberation and education was not con ned 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.

For some blacks, the ght 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 identi ed 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 o cers 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 police o cer. 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 rearms 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 out ts of jeans, shirt, beret, and sunglasses. They

a ected 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 di erence,

even when the U.S. government vowed to eliminate the organization by any means

necessary.

Federal law enforcement o cers, 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 in ltration, 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 o enses, 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 re ected 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 di cult to snu out all who were swayed by the appeal of Black

Power. In Detroit, for example, radical Black Power ideology in uenced 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 rst was the Detroit riots of 1967,

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

Detroit chapter of the NAACP was ooded with complaints about police treatment of

African Americans. Even black police o cers 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 rst in

that factory in fourteen years and the rst 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 fty-eight cars per hour. Out of this strike emerged the Dodge

Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). It was the rst 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.