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Roy Emile Alfredo Innis (June 6, 1934 – January 8, 2017) was an American activist and politician. He had been National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) since his election to the position in 1968.
One of his sons, Niger Roy Innis, serves as National Spokesman of the Congress of Racial Equality.Contents1 Early life2 Early civil rights years3 Leadership of CORE4 Politics5 Criminal justice and National Rifle Association6 Controversy7 Political campaigns8 Death9 Bibliography10 References11 External linksEarly lifeInnis was born in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands in 1934.[1] In 1947, Innis moved with his mother from the U.S. Virgin Islands to New York City, where he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1952.[2] At age 16, Innis joined the U.S. Army, and at age 18 he received an honorable discharge. He entered a four-year program in chemistry at the City College of New York. He subsequently held positions as a research chemist at Vick Chemical Company and Montefiore Hospital.[3]
Early civil rights yearsInnis joined CORE's Harlem chapter in 1963. In 1964 he was elected Chairman of the chapter's education committee and advocated community-controlled education and black empowerment. In 1965, he was elected Chairman of Harlem CORE, after which he campaigned for the establishment of an independent Board of Education for Harlem.
In early 1967, Innis was appointed the first resident fellow at the Metropolitan Applied Research Center (MARC), headed by Dr. Kenneth Clark. In the summer of 1967, he was elected Second National Vice-Chairman of CORE.
Leadership of COREInnis was selected National Chairman of CORE in 1968 a contentious convention meeting.[4][5] Innis initially headed the organization in a strong campaign of Black Nationalism. White CORE activists, according to James Peck, were removed from CORE in 1965, as part of a purge of whites from the movement then under the control of Innis.[6] Under Innis' leadership, CORE supported the presidential candidacy of Richard Nixon in 1972. This was the beginning of a sharp rightward turn in the organization.[7]
Politics
Roy Innis (2nd from left) and then wife Doris Funnye Innis (center) with a delegation from CORE is greeted by Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta (left).Innis co-drafted the Community Self-Determination Act of 1968 and garnered bipartisan sponsorship of this bill by one-third of the U.S. Senate and over 50 congressmen. This was the first time in U.S. history that CORE or any civil rights organization drafted a bill and introduced it into the United States Congress.[8]
In the debate over school integration, Innis offered an alternative plan consisting of community control of educational institutions. As part of this effort, in October 1970, CORE filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in connection with Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971).
Innis and a CORE delegation toured seven African countries in 1971. He met with several heads of state, including Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, Liberia's William Tolbert and Uganda's Idi Amin, who was awarded a life membership of CORE.[9] Innis met with Amin and the aforementioned African statesmen as part of his CORE campaign drive for finding jobs in Africa for black Americans. In 1973 he became the first American to attend the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in an official capacity. In 1973, Innis was scheduled to participate in a televised debate with Nobel-winning physicist William Shockley on the topic of black intelligence. According to sources, Innis pulled out of the debate at the last moment because the student society at Princeton University organizing the event refused to allow the press and the public into the event. The debate went forward with Dr. Ashley Montagu replacing Innis.[10]
Criminal justice and National Rifle AssociationInnis was long active in criminal justice matters, including the debate over gun control and the Second Amendment. After losing two sons to criminals with guns, he became an advocate for the rights of law-aoffering citizens to self-defense.[11] A Life Member of the National Rifle Association,[11] he also served on its governing board.[12][13] Innis also chaired the NRA's Urban Affairs Committee and was a member of the NRA Ethics Committee, and continued to speak publicly in the US and around the world in favor of individual civilian ownership of firearms, gun issues, and individual rights[11]
Innis lost two of his sons to criminal gun violence. His eldest son, Roy Innis, Jr., was killed at the age of 13 in 1968. His next oldest son Alexander, 26, was shot and slain in 1982.[14] Innis told Newsday in 1993 "My sons were not killed by the KKK or David Duke. They were murdered by young, black thugs. I use the murder of my sons by black hoodlums to shift the problems from excuses like the KKK to the dope pushers on the streets."[15]
ControversyInnis was noted for two on-air fights in the middle of TV talk shows in 1988. The first in the midst of an argument about the Tawana Brawley case during a taping of The Morton Downey, Jr. Show, Innis shoved Al Sharpton to the floor.[16] Also that year, Innis was in a scuffle on Geraldo with white supremacist John Metzger.[17] The skirmish started after Metzger, son of White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger, called Innis an "Uncle Tom", and Innis grabbed the seated Metzger's throat, appearing to choke him.[18][19]
Innis raised American volunteers to fight for UNITA, an Angolan rebel army fighting the communist government.[20] UNITA was also supported by Uganda[citation needed] and apartheid-era South Africa.
Prosperity USA, a non-profit run by aides of presidential candidate Herman Cain, attracted controversy after it gave a $100,000 donation to CORE shortly before Cain's speech at a CORE event.[21]
Political campaignsIn 1986, Innis challenged incumbent Major Owens in the Democratic primary for the 12th Congressional District, representing Brooklyn. He was defeated by a three-to-one margin.
In the 1993, New York City Democratic Party mayoral primary, Innis challenged incumbent David Dinkins, the first African-American to hold the office. Given his conservative positions on the issues, he explained that "the Democratic Party is the only game in town. It's unfortunate that we have a corrupt one-party, one ideology system in New York City, and I'd like to change that. But being a Democrat doesn't mean you have to be a fool." During his own campaign, Innis also appeared at fundraising events for the Republican candidate Rudolph Giuliani. Innis received 25% of the vote in the four-way race with a majority of his votes coming from multi-ethnic areas, while he failed in less culturally diverse Assembly Districts. Innis lost to Dinkins, who then lost to Giuliani in the general election.
In February 1994, his son, Niger, who ran his primary campaign, suggested that Innis would also challenge incumbent governor Mario Cuomo in the Democratic primary.
In 1998, Innis joined the Libertarian Party and gave serious consideration to running for Governor of New York as the party's candidate that year. He ultimately decided against running, citing time restrictions related to his duties with CORE.[22]
Innis served as New York State Chair in Alan Keyes' 2000 presidential campaign.[23]
DeathInnis died on January 8, 2017, at the age of 82, from Parkinson's disease.[1]
Roy Innis, the autocratic national leader of the Congress of Racial Equality since 1968, whose right-wing views on affirmative action, law enforcement, desegregation and other issues put him at odds with many black Americans and other civil rights leaders, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 82.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, a statement from CORE said.
In a stormy career marked by radical rhetoric, shifting ideologies, legal and financial troubles and quixotic runs for office, Mr. Innis led CORE through changes that mirrored his own evolution from black-power militancy in the 1960s to staunch conservatism resembling a modern Republican political platform.
He came to prominence after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young and James Farmer had taken command of the civil rights movement and did not share their commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience. Nor did he embrace CORE’s pioneering roles in desegregation — school boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides through the South and voter registration drives that led to the murders of the activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi in 1964.
Though court decisions and new laws banned discrimination in education, employment and public accommodations, Mr. Innis was disillusioned by that progress, saying integration robbed black people of their heritage and dignity. He pronounced it “dead as a doornail,” proclaimed CORE “once and for all a black nationalist organization” and declared “all-out war” on desegregation.
Under his black-power banner, which Mr. Innis called “pragmatic nationalism,” he purged whites from CORE’s staff and allowed the organization’s white membership to wither. He espoused segregated schools to encourage black achievement, black self-help groups, black business enterprises and community control of the police, fire, hospital, sanitation and other services in poor black neighborhoods.
This is your last free article.Subscribe to The TimesBlack nationalism was hardly a new idea. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had already moved from integrationist to separatist aims. Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam and the poet Amiri Baraka followed in the footsteps of Marcus Garvey, who after World War I had attracted millions of American blacks to a “back to Africa” movement.
But most black Americans regarded black power as too radical, and the creation of separate black institutions in America too remote.
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ImageIn 1968, Mr. Innis, second from right, was chosen as national director of the Congress of Racial Equality.In 1968, Mr. Innis, second from right, was chosen as national director of the Congress of Racial Equality.Credit...BettmannIn the early 1970s, Mr. Innis toured Africa, visiting Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania and Idi Amin in Uganda. He made Amin a life member of CORE and predicted that he would lead a “liberation army to free those parts of Africa still under the rule of white imperialists.” He later urged black Vietnam veterans to assist anti-Communist forces fighting in Angola.
As his black nationalism converged with his increasingly conservative politics, Mr. Innis supported Richard M. Nixon for president in 1968 and 1972, and Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. Blacks voted overwhelmingly against both men, but Mr. Innis sided with them in clashes with civil rights leaders who criticized their records. Mr. Innis urged both presidents to reach out to blacks directly and urged blacks to join the Republican Party.
In 1981, after New York State accused him of illegal fund-raising and of misusing $500,000 of CORE’s money, Mr. Innis admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to repay $35,000 and accept tighter financial controls. In 1986, the Internal Revenue Service accused him of failing to report $116,000 in income. He did not contest the accusations and was assessed $56,000 in back taxes and $28,000 in civil penalties.
Mr. Innis survived lawsuits and efforts by CORE members to depose him. But as its membership declined, CORE increasingly aligned itself with corporations, including Monsanto and Exxon Mobil. Their donations became a primary source of funds, while CORE lent its support to their causes.
Mr. Innis acknowledged that his loss of two sons to gun violence in New York — Roy Jr., 13, in 1968, and Alexander, 26, in 1982 — influenced his decision to oppose gun control and defend citizens’ rights to carry arms in self-defense. He became a life member and a director of the National Rifle Association.
In 1984, Mr. Innis ardently supported Bernard H. Goetz, the white gunman who shot four black youths in a subway confrontation that he called an attempted mugging and that they called panhandling. The episode, with Mr. Goetz cast as a vigilante, came to symbolize New Yorkers’ frustration with soaring crime rates. A jury found him guilty only of carrying an unlicensed firearm.
Two years later, with Mr. Goetz at his side, Mr. Innis challenged Representative Major R. Owens, a black Brooklyn congressman, in the Democratic primary. Mr. Innis called affirmative action programs “morally corrupt” and promised to sit with the Republicans if he won. He lost by a three-to-one ratio.
Mr. Innis supported Robert H. Bork’s Supreme Court nomination by President Reagan in the late ’80s and Clarence Thomas’s nomination by President George Bush in the early ’90s. Both were Federal Appeals Court jurists for the District of Columbia who said they favored interpreting the Constitution in light of its framers’ intentions. The Senate rejected Judge Bork but approved Judge Thomas.ImageMr. Innis tended to make his alliances with the political right. In 2005, he threw his support behind Samuel A. Alito Jr., who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush.
Credit...Lauren Victoria Burke/Associated PressA favorite of conservative talk shows, Mr. Innis twice engaged in televised scuffles in 1988. On “The Morton Downey Jr. Show,” he erupted at challenges to his leadership and shoved the Rev. Al Sharpton to the floor. On “Geraldo,” he choked John Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance, who had called him an “Uncle Tom,” and the host, Geraldo Rivera, suffered a broken nose in the ensuing brawl.
In 1993, Mr. Innis challenged David N. Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor, in the Democratic mayoral primary. Mr. Innis pledged to fight homelessness by separating “the indolent from the indigent,” and to “give a voice to the silent majority in both the white and black communities.” Mr. Dinkins trounced him and narrowly lost the general election to Rudolph W. Giuliani, who ran on both the Republican and Liberal lines, and whom Mr. Innis supported.
In recent years, CORE’s membership declined, and while the organization continued to fight discrimination in jobs and housing and to provide training for single parents on welfare, critics said it no longer played a major role in civil rights and had become an ally of corporations and interests alien to its original charter.
Roy Emile Alfredo Innis was born on June 6, 1934, in St. Croix, the United States Virgin Islands, to Alexander and Georgianna Thomas Innis. His father, a police officer, died when Roy was 6. He moved to New York with his mother in 1946.
He attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan but dropped out at 16 to join the Army. When it was discovered that he was underage, he was sent home. He graduated from Stuyvesant in 1952, studied chemistry at City College of New York until 1958, then worked as a research chemist for Vicks Chemical Company and Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx.
Mr. Innis rarely spoke of his family, about which little is known. He lived in Harlem and was married several times, and the statement from CORE listed 10 children — Cedric, Winston, Kwame, Niger, Kimathi, Mugabe, Arenza, Lydia, Patricia and Corinne — and “a host of grandchildren.”
Mr. Innes joined the Harlem chapter of CORE in 1963. His second wife, Doris Funnye, was also active in civil rights. At the time, CORE was the most radical and action-oriented of the established civil rights organizations. He was named chapter chairman in 1965 and three years later, outmaneuvering rivals, succeeded Floyd McKissick as CORE’s national director. He held that title until becoming national chairman in 1982.
“In America today,” Mr. Innis told a national CORE convention, “there are two kinds of black people: the field-hand blacks and the house niggers. We of CORE — the nationalists — are the field-hand blacks. The integrationists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are house niggers.”
The reaction was explosive, and it set the tone for decades of strife.
LASTFREETHE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTAT“I Have A Dream”: The August, 1963 March on Washington for Jobsand Freedom was the largest political demonstration the nation had everseen. Crowds gathered before the Lincoln Memorial and around theWashington Monument reflection pool heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.offer perhaps the finest oration ever delivered by an American.FREELASTTHE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTAT— 1 —Slavery Spreads to America 3A Global Phenomenon Transplanted to AmericaSlavery Takes HoldSlave Life and InstitutionsFamily BondsSpotlight: The Genius of the Black Church— 2 —“Three-Fifths of Other Persons:” A Promise Deferred 8A Land of Liberty?The Pen of Frederick DouglassThe Underground RailroadBy the SwordThe Rebellious John BrownThe American Civil WarSpotlight: Black Soldiers in the Civil War— 3 —“Separate but Equal:” African Americans Respondto the Failure of Reconstruction 18Congressional ReconstructionTemporary Gains … and ReversesThe Advent of “Jim Crow”Booker T. Washington: The Quest for Economic IndependenceW.E.B. Du Bois: The Push for Political AgitationSpotlight: Marcus Garvey: Another Path— 4 —Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood MarshallLaunch the Legal Challenge to Segregation 26Charles Hamilton Houston: The Man Who Killed Jim CrowThurgood Marshall: Mr. Civil RightsThe Brown DecisionSpotlight: Ralph Johnson Bunche: Scholar and StatesmanSpotlight: Jackie Robinson: Breaking the Color BarrierCONTENTS— 5 —“We Have a Movement” 35“Tired of Giving In:” The Montgomery Bus BoycottSit-InsFreedom RidesThe Albany MovementArrest in BirminghamLetter From Birmingham Jail“We Have a Movement”The March on WashingtonSPOTLIGHT: Rosa Parks: Mother of the Civil Rights MovementSpotlight: Civil Rights Workers: Death in MississippiSpotlight: Medgar Evers: Martyr of the Mississippi Movement— 6 —“It Cannot Continue:” Establishing Legal Equality 52Changing PoliticsLyndon Baines JohnsonThe Civil Rights Act of 1964The Act’s PowersThe Voting Rights Act of 1965: The BackgroundBloody Sunday in SelmaThe Selma-to-Montgomery MarchThe Voting Rights Act EnactedWhat the Act DoesSPOTLIGHT: White Southerners’ Reactions to the Civil Rights MovementEpilogue 65The Triumphs of the Civil Rights MovementFREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 3— 1 —Among the antiquities displayed at the UnitedNations headquarters in New York is a replicaof the Cyrus Cylinder. Named for Cyrus theGreat, ruler of the Persian Empire and conquerorof Babylonia, the document dates to about 539 B.C. Cyrusguaranteed to his subjects many of what we today call civilrights, among them freedom of religion and protection ofpersonal property. Cyrus also abolished slavery, “a tradition,”he asserted, that “should be exterminated the world over.”Throughout history, nations have varied in how broadlythey define and how vigorously they defend their citizens’personal protections and privileges. The United States isa nation built on these civil rights, on the soaring idealsenshrined in its Declaration of Independence and thelegal protections formalized in its Constitution, and mostprominently, in the first 10 amendments to that Constitution,known collectively as the American people’s Bill of Rights.Yet one group of arrivals did not enjoy those rightsand protections. Even as European immigrants foundunprecedented economic opportunity and greater personal,political, and religious liberty in the New World, blackAfricans were transported there involuntarily, often inchains, to be sold as chattel slaves and compelled to laborfor “masters,” most commonly in the great agriculturalplantations in the South.This book recounts how those African-American slavesand their descendants struggled to win — both in law andin practice — the civil rights enjoyed by other Americans. Itis a story of dignified persistence and struggle, a story thatproduced great heroes and heroines, and one that ultimatelysucceeded by forcing the majority of Americans to confrontsquarely the shameful gap between their universal principlesof equality and justice and the inequality, injustice, andoppression faced by millions of their fellow citizens.A Global Phenomenon Transplanted to AmericaMan has enslaved his fellow man since prehistoric times.While the conditions of servitude varied, slave labor wasemployed by the ancient Mesopotamian, Indian, and Chinesecivilizations, in classical Greece and Rome, and in preColombian America by the native Aztec, Inca, and Mayanempires. The Bible tells us that the Egyptians used Hebrewslaves and that the Hebrews, upon their exodus from Egypt,used slaves of their own. Early Christianity accepted thepractice, as did Islam. North and East African Arabs enslavedblack Africans, and Egypt and Syria enslaved MediterraneanEuropeans, whom they captured or purchased from slavetraders and typically employed to produce sugar. Many NativeAmerican tribal groups enslaved members of other tribescaptured in war.A number of factors combined to stimulate the Atlanticslave trade. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (nowIstanbul) in 1453 disturbed trade patterns and deprivedsweet-toothed Europeans of highly prized sugar. Led by thePortuguese, Europeans began to explore the West Africancoast and to purchase slaves from African slave traders. AfterChristopher Columbus’s 1492 discovery of the New World,European colonizers imported large numbers of Africanslaves to work the land and, especially in the Caribbean, toSlavery Spreadsto AmericaEnslaved Africans on the deck of the bark Wildfire, Key West, Florida,April 1860.4 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTcultivate sugar. Caribbean islands soon supplied some 80 to 90percent of Western Europe’s sugar demand.It is difficult in today’s world to understand theprominent role that crops such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, andspices once played in the world economy. In 1789, for example,the small colony of Saint Domingue (today’s Haiti) accountedfor about 40 percent of the value of all French foreign trade.The economic forces driving the Atlantic slave trade werepowerful. In all, at least 10 million Africans endured the“middle passage.” (The term refers to the Atlantic Oceansegment — the second and longest — of the triangular tradethat sent textiles, rum, and manufactured goods to Africa,slaves to the Americas, and sugar, tobacco and cotton toEurope.) Most arrived in Portuguese Brazil, Spanish LatinAmerica, and the various British and French Caribbean“sugar islands.” Only about 6 percent of the enslaved Africanswere brought to British North America. Even so, the AfricanAmerican experience differed profoundly from those ofthe other immigrants who would found and expand theUnited States.Slavery Takes HoldThe very first slaves in British North America arrived byaccident. Twelve years after the 1607 founding of the firstpermanent British settlement, at Jamestown, Virginia, aprivateer docked there with some “20 and odd Negros” it hadcaptured from a Spanish ship in the Caribbean. The settlerspurchased this “cargo,” the original slaves in the futureUnited States.For the next 50 years, slaves were not a prominent sourceof labor in the fledgling Virginia colony. The landowningelites preferred to rely on “indentured” white labor. Underthis arrangement, potential European immigrants signed anindenture, or contract, under which they borrowed from anemployer the price of transportation to America. In return,they agreed to work several years to pay off that debt. Duringthis period, the sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, relationsbetween the races were relatively intimate. A small number ofparticularly resourceful blacks even obtained their freedomand prospered in their own right.Beginning in the second half of the 17th century, however,both the price of slaves and the supply of immigrants willingto indenture themselves decreased. As slave labor becamecheaper than indentured labor, slavery grew and spread. By1770, African Americans comprised about 40 percent of thepopulation in the southern colonies and a majority in SouthCarolina. (Slaves were also found in the northern colonies, butthe slave population there never exceeded about 5 percent.)Faced with such a large, oppressed, and potentially rebelliousAn 1823 drawing depicts slaves cutting sugar cane on the Caribbeanisland of Antigua.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 5minority, southern elites encouraged a hardening of socialattitudes toward African Americans. The children of slavewomen were declared to be slaves. Masters were permittedto kill slaves in the course of punishing them. Perhaps mostimportantly, white Virginia elites began to promote anti-blackracism as a means of dividing blacks from less wealthywhite workers.Most African-American slaves labored on farms thatproduced staple crops: tobacco in Maryland, Virginia,and North Carolina; rice in the Deep South. In 1793, theAmerican inventor Eli Whitney produced the first cottongin, a mechanical device that removed cotton seeds from thesurrounding cotton fiber. This spurred a dramatic expansionin cotton cultivation throughout the Lower South, onethat expanded westward through Alabama, Mississippi,and Louisiana and into Texas. About one million AfricanAmerican slaves moved westward during the period 1790-1860, nearly twice the number carried to the United Statesfrom Africa.Slave Life and InstitutionsAfrican-American slaves were compelled to work hard, and insome cases brutally hard. In some states, laws known as slavecodes authorized terrible punishments for offending slaves.According to Virginia’s 1705 slave code:All Negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves within thisdominion … shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resisthis master … correcting such slave, and shall happen to bekilled in such correction … the master shall be free of allpunishment … as if such accident never happened.This code also required that slaves obtain writtenpermission before leaving their plantation. It authorizedwhipping, branding, and maiming as punishment for evenminor offenses. Some codes forbade teaching slaves how toread and write. In Georgia, the punishment for this offensewas a fine and/or whipping if the guilty party were a “slave,Negro, or free person of color.”Although the lot of American slaves was harsh, theylabored under material conditions by some measurescomparable to those endured by many European workersand peasants of that era. But there was a difference. The slaveslacked their freedom.Denial of fundamental human rights handicappedAfrican-American political and economic progress, butslaves responded by creating institutions of their own,vibrant institutions on which the civil rights movement ofthe mid-20th century would later draw for sustenance andsocial capital. Earlier accounts often portrayed the slaves asinfantilized objects “acted upon” by their white masters, butwe now understand that many slave communities managedto carve out a measure of personal, cultural, and religiousautonomy. “It was not that the slaves did not act like men,”historian Eugene Genovese writes. “Rather, it was that theycould not grasp their collective strength as a people and actlike political men.” Nevertheless, Genovese concludes thatmost slaves “found ways to develop and assert their manhoodand womanhood despite the dangerous compromises forcedupon them.”One way was the “black church.” Over time, increasingnumbers of African-American slaves embraced Christianity,typically denominations like Baptist and Methodist thatprevailed among white southerners. Some masters fearedthat Christian tenets would undermine their justifications forslavery, but others encouraged their slaves to attend church,although in a separate, “blacks-only” section.After exposure to Christianity, many slaves thenestablished their own parallel, or underground, churches.These churches often blended Christianity with aspectsof the slaves’ former African religious cultures and beliefs.Religious services commonly incorporated shouting, dance,and the call-and-response interactions that would later featureprominently in the great sermons of Dr. Martin Luther KingJr. and other leading black preachers. The black church oftenemphasized different aspects of the Christian tradition thandid southern white churches. Where the latter might interpretthe biblical Curse of Ham (“a servant of servants shall he beunto his brethren”) as justifying slavery, African-Americanservices might instead emphasize the story of how Moses ledthe Israelites from bondage.For African-American slaves, religion offered a measureof solace and hope. After the American Civil War broughtan end to slavery, black churches and denominationalorganizations grew in membership, influence, andorganizational strength, factors that would prove vital to thesuccess of the civil rights movement.Family BondsThe slaves’ tight family bonds would prove a similar sourceof strength. Slave masters could, and often did, split upfamilies — literally selling members to other slave owners,splitting husband from wife, parents from children. Butmany slave families remained intact, and many scholarshave noted the “remarkable stability, strength, anddurability of the nuclear family under slavery.” Slaves weretypically housed as extended family units. Slave children,historian C. Vann Woodward writes, at least “were assureda childhood, one exempt from labor and degradation pastthe age when working-class children of England and Francewere condemned to mine and factory.”6 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTThe African-American family structure adapted to meetthe challenges posed by slavery, and later by discriminationand economic inequality. Many black family units resembledextended clans rather than smaller, immediate families. Somewere organized with strong females as central authorityfigures. Slaveholders sometimes encouraged these familyties, reasoning that the threat of breaking up a family helpedundermine the threats of disobedience and rebellion.Regardless, strong immediate and extended familieshelped ensure African-American survival. In the Caribbeancolonies and in Brazil, slave mortality rates exceeded birthrates, but blacks in the United States reproduced at the samerate as the white population. By the 1770s, only one in fiveslaves in British North America had been born in Africa. Evenafter 1808, when the United States banned the importation ofslaves, their numbers increased from 1.2 million to nearly4 million on the eve of the Civil War in 1861.Slavery brought Africans to America and deprived themof the freedoms enjoyed by Americans of European origin. Buteven in bondage, many African Americans developed strongfamily ties and faith-based institutions and laid a foundationupon which future generations could build a triumphantcivil rights movement. The struggle for freedom and equalitybegan long before Rosa Parks claimed a seat on the front ofthe bus, more than a century before Martin Luther King Jr.inspired Americans with his famous dream.A drawing, circa 1860,depicts a black preacheraddressing his mixed-racecongregation on a SouthCarolina plantation.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 7African-Americanreligious communities have contributedimmensely to Americansociety, not least by supplyingmuch of the moral, political,and organizational foundation of the 20th-centurycivil rights movement andby shaping the thought of itsleaders, Rosa Parks and theReverend Martin Luther KingJr. among them.Enslaved and free AfricanAmericans formed theirown congregations as earlyas the mid- to late 18thcentury. After emancipation,fully fledged denominationsemerged. What we todaycall the “black church”encompasses seven majorhistoric black denominations:African Methodist Episcopal(AME); African MethodistEpiscopal Zion (AMEZ);Christian MethodistEpiscopal (CME); theNational Baptist Convention,USA, Incorporated; theNational Baptist Conventionof America, Unincorporated;the Progressive NationalBaptist Convention; and theChurch of God in Christ.These denominationsemerged after theemancipation of the AfricanAmerican slaves. They drewmainly on Methodist, Baptist,and Pentecostal traditions,but often featured ties toAmerican Catholicism,Anglicanism, the UnitedMethodist Church, and ahost of other traditions.The great gift, indeedgenius, of African-Americanreligious sensibility is itsdrive to forge a commonidentity. Black slaves fromdifferent parts of Africa weretransported to Americaby means of the “middlepassage” across the Atlantic.As slaves, they enduredmassive oppression. Againstthis background of diversityand social deprivation,African-American religiousbelief and practice affordedsolace and the intellectualfoundation for a successfulmeans of solving deep-seatedconflict: the techniquesof civil disobedience andnonviolence. The blackchurch also supplied blackpolitical activists with apowerful philosophy: to focusupon an ultimate solution forall rather than palliatives fora select few. The civil rightsmovement would adoptthis policy — never to allowsystemic oppression of anyhuman identity. Its genius,then, was a natural overflowfrom African-Americanreligious communities thatsought to make sense ofa tragic history and movetoward a future, not just forthemselves, but also for theirnation and the world.In short, while some formof resistance to slavery andthen Jim Crow segregationprobably was inevitable, thecommunal spirituality ofthe black church in the faceof repression helped spawna civil rights movementthat sought its objectives bypeaceful means.Many of the powerfulvoices of the civil rightsmovement — King, of course,but also such powerful andsignificant figures as U.S.Representatives BarbaraJordan and John Lewis, thepolitical activist and Baptistminister Jesse Jackson, andthe gospel legend MahaliaJackson — all were formedfrom their worship life inthe black church. Indeed,King’s role as chief articulatorof civil rights reflects thedirect relationship betweenAfrican-American religiouscommunities and the strugglefor racial and social justicein the United States. Thespiritual influence of AfricanAmerican religious practicespread beyond this nation’sshores, as global leaderssuch as Nelson Mandela andArchbishop Desmond Tutulearned from King how toembody a loving, inclusiveAfrican and Christianidentity.Today’s African-Americancommunal spirituality is asstrong and engaged as ever.Black churches work to craftresponses to contemporarychallenges such as the spreadof HIV/AIDS, the need toameliorate poverty, and thedisproportionate recidivismof imprisoned AfricanAmericans. The searchtoward common identityremains the foundation ofsuch a spirituality, however.Through the election ofthe first African-Americanpresident and the increaseof minorities in highereducation, the journey towardcommon identity remainson course.In sum, the black churchhelped African Americanssurvive the harshest formsof oppression and developeda revolutionary appealfor universal communalspirituality. The black churchdidn’t just theorize aboutdemocracy, it practiceddemocracy. From its rootsthere flowered the civilrights movement — creative,inclusive, and nonviolent.By Michael BattleOrdained a priest byArchbishop DesmondTutu, the Very Rev. MichaelBattle is Provost and CanonTheologian of the CathedralCenter of St. Paul in theEpiscopal Diocese of LosAngeles. His books includeThe Black Church in America:African American Spirituality.The Genius of the Black ChurchFREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 78 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT— 2 —“Three-Fifths ofOtherPersons”A Promise DeferredDuring the 19th and early 20th centuries,African Americans and their whiteallies employed many strategies asthey fought to end slavery and thento secure legal equality for the “freedmen.” Progresstoward racial equality was destined to be slow, not leastbecause slavery and oppression of blacks were amongthe sectional political compromises that undergirdednational unity. The Civil War of 1861-1865 would endslavery in the United States, but once the conflict ended,northern political will to overcome white southernresistance to racial equality gradually ebbed. Theimposition of the “Jim Crow” system of legal segregationthroughout the South stifled black political progress.Nevertheless, African-American leaders continued tobuild the intellectual and institutional capital that wouldnourish the successful civil rights movements of the midto late 20th century.A Land of Liberty?Slavery divided Americans from their very first day ofindependence. As the South grew more dependent on a newstaple crop — “King Cotton” — and on the slave-intensiveplantations that cultivated it, the prospect of a clash withincreasingly antislavery northern states grew. The youngnation delayed that conflict with a series of moral evasions andpolitical compromises.The United States’ Declaration of Independence (1776)includes stirring language on universal brotherhood: “Wehold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are createdequal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certainunalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, andthe Pursuit of Happiness.” And yet its principal draftsman,Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slaveholding Virginian.Jefferson understood the contradiction, and his draft sharplycondemned the slave trade — although not slavery itself— calling it “a cruel war against human nature.” But theContinental Congress, America’s de facto government at thetime, deleted the slave trade reference from the Declarationto avoid any controversy that might fracture its proindependence consensus. It would not be the last time thatpolitical expediency would trump moral imperatives.By 1787, many Americans had determined to replacethe existing loose, decentralized alliance of 13 states with astronger federal government. The Constitutional Convention,held in Philadelphia from May to September of that year,produced a blueprint for such a government. “There werebig fights over slavery at the convention,” according to DavidStewart, author of The Summer of 1787: The Men WhoInvented the Constitution. While “many of the delegates wereactually abolitionist in their views … there was not a feel forabolition in the country at the time.”Because any proposed constitution would not take effectuntil ratified by 9 of the 13 states, it became necessary to reacha compromise on the status of the African-American slaves.Northern delegates to the convention, led by James Wilsonof Pennsylvania, reached an agreement with three largeslaveholding states. Both sides agreed that every five “unfreepersons” — slaves — would count as three people whencalculating the size of a state’s congressional delegation. Theyalso agreed to bar the U.S. Congress for 20 years from passingany law prohibiting the importation of slaves. (Congress laterwould abolish the slave trade, effective 1808. By then, this wasnot a controversial measure owing to the natural increase ofthe slave population.)Depiction of George Washington with his black field workers on his MountVernon, Virginia, estate, 1757.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 9This “three-fifths compromise” has been described asAmerica’s Faustian bargain, or original sin. As David Walker,a free northern black, argued in an 1829 pamphlet: “Has Mr.Jefferson declared to the world that we are inferior to thewhites, both in the endowments of our bodies and of minds?”The compromise allowed the states to form a stronger union,but it also ensured that slavery would continue in the South,where the 1793 invention of the cotton gin had sparkedthe growth of a slave-intensive plantation system of cottoncultivation. It also bore profound political consequences forthe young nation. In the hotly contested presidential electionof 1800, the additional electoral votes awarded southern statesby virtue of their slave populations supplied Thomas Jeffersonwith his margin of victory over the incumbent president, JohnAdams of Massachusetts.Of even greater importance was how slavery affectedthe nation’s expansion. The question of whether new stateswould permit slavery assumed decisive importance uponthe congressional balance-of-power between the “slave”and “free” states. During the first half of the 19th century,Congress hammered out a number of compromises thatgenerally ensured that states allowing slavery would enterthe Union paired with new states that prohibited it. TheMissouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and theKansas-Nebraska Act all maintained this political balance. In1857, however, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott v.Sanford case that Congress could not bar slavery in westernterritories not yet admitted as states. The decision intensifiedthe sectional conflict over slavery and hastened the ultimateconfrontation to come.Even as the young nation’s political system failed tosecure for African Americans the civil rights enjoyed by theirwhite countrymen, brave men and women were launchingefforts to abolish slavery and to ensure that the United Stateswould live up to its own best ideals.This map of the United States in 1857 depicts the “free” states in darkgreen, slave states in red and light red, and the territories (American landsnot yet admitted to statehood) in light green.10 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTThe Pen of Frederick DouglassAlthough the U.S. political systemproved unable to dislodge slavery fromthe American South, the “peculiarinstitution,” as southerners oftencalled it, did not go unchallenged.Determined women and men —blacks and whites — devoted theirlives to the cause of abolition, thelegal prohibition of slavery. Theyemployed an array of tactics, bothviolent and nonviolent. And justas in Martin Luther King’s day, thepen and the appeal to consciencewould prove a powerful weapon.While the American Civil War wasnot solely a battle to free the slaves,the abolitionists persuaded manynortherners to concur with thesentiment expressed in 1858 by asenatorial candidate named AbrahamLincoln: “A house divided againstitself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure,permanently half slave and half free.”The stirring words of African-American and whitethinkers forced increasing numbers of their countrymento confront the contradiction between their noble idealsand the lives of bondage imposed on black Americans inthe South. Perhaps the most powerful pen belonged toFrederick Douglass, an escaped slave, journalist, publisher,and champion of liberty. Douglass was born into slavery ineither 1817 or 1818. His mistress defied Maryland state lawby teaching the boy to read. At age 13 he purchased his firstbook, a collection of essays, poems, and dialogues extollingliberty that was widely used in early 19th-century Americanschoolrooms. From these youthful studies, Douglass beganto hone the skills that would make him one of the century’smost powerful and effective orators. In 1838, Douglassescaped from the plantation where he worked as a field handand arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he wouldlaunch a remarkable career.In 1841, the leading white abolitionist, William LloydGarrison, sponsored an anti-slavery convention held inNantucket, Massachusetts. One attendee familiar withDouglass’s talks at local black churches invited him to addressthe gathering. “It was with the utmost difficulty that I couldstand erect,” Douglass later wrote, “or that I could commandand articulate two words without hesitation and stammering.”But his words moved the crowd: “The audience sympathizedwith me at once, and from having been remarkably quiet,became much excited.” The convention organizers agreed.Their Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society immediately hiredDouglass as an agent.In his new career, Douglass spoke at public meetingsthroughout the North. He condemned slavery and argued thatAfrican Americans were entitled by right to the civil rightsthat the U.S. Constitution afforded other Americans. On anumber of occasions, racist mobs attacked these abolitionistgatherings, but other whites befriended Douglass andchampioned his cause. After one mob knocked out the teethof a white colleague who saved Douglass from violent attack,Douglass wrote his friend: “I shall never forget how like twovery brothers we were ready to dare, do, and even die for eachother.” Douglass praised his colleague’s willingness to leavea “life of ease and even luxury … against the wishes of yourfather and many of your friends,” instead to do “somethingtoward breaking the fetters of the slave and elevating thedispised [sic] black man.”In 1845, Douglass published the first of several acclaimedautobiographies. His writings educated white Americansabout plantation life, disabused them of the notion that slaverywas somehow “good” for blacks, and convinced many that nojust society could tolerate the practice. But with Douglass’ssudden fame came a real danger: that his master might findand recapture him. Douglass prudently left the country fora two-year speaking tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland.While Douglass was overseas, his friends purchased hisfreedom — the price for one of the nation’s greatest men wasjust over $700.An anti-slavery meeting in Boston, 1835, attracts both whites and free blacks.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 11In Great Britain, Douglass was exposed to a morepolitically aggressive brand of abolitionism. When hereturned to the United States in 1847, Douglass broke withWilliam Lloyd Garrison. Garrison favored purely moral andnonviolent action against slavery, and he was willing to seethe North secede from the Union to avoid slavery’s “moralstain.” Douglass pointed out that such a course would do littlefor black slaves in the South, and he offered his support for arange of more aggressive activities. He backed mainstreampolitical parties promising to prevent the extension of slaveryinto the western territories and other parties demandingcomplete nationwide abolition. He offered his house as astation on the Underground Railroad (the name given to anetwork of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to theNorth) and befriended the militant abolitionist John Brown,who aimed to spark a violent slave uprising.In 1847, Douglass launched The North Star, the first ofseveral newspapers he would publish to promote the causesof equal rights for blacks and for women. Its motto was “Rightis of no Sex — Truth is of no Color — God is the Father of usall, and we are all brethren.” Douglass was an early and ferventchampion of gender equality. In 1872, he would run for vicepresident on an Equal Rights Party ticket headed by VictoriaClaflin Woodhull, the United States’ first woman presidentialcandidate.Douglass campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in the1860 presidential election. When the American Civil War —pitting the northern Union against the rebellious southernConfederacy — broke out shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration,Douglass argued that the Union should employ black troops:“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters,U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on hisshoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no poweron earth which can deny that he has earned the right tocitizenship.” Too old himself to fight, Douglass recruited blacksoldiers for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments, twoblack-manned units that fought with great valor.During the great conflict, Douglass’s relations withLincoln initially were choppy, as the president worked first toconciliate the slaveholding border states crucial to the Unionwar effort. On September 22, 1862, however, Lincoln issuedthe Emancipation Proclamation, declaring the freedom — onJanuary 1, 1863 — of all slaves held in the areas still in rebellion.In March 1863, Lincoln endorsed the recruitment of blacksoldiers, and the following year he flatly rejected suggestions toenter into peace negotiations before the South agreed to abolishslavery. The president twice invited Douglass to meet with himat the White House. Douglass later wrote of Lincoln that “inhis company I was never in any way reminded of my humbleorigin, or of my unpopular color,” and the president receivedhim “just as you have seen one gentleman receive another.”Douglass’s remarkable career continued after the war’send. He worked for passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution — thepostwar amendments that spelled out rights that appliedto all men, not just to whites, and prohibited the individualstates from denying those rights. While it would take a latergeneration of brave civil rights champions to ensure thatthese amendments would be honored, they would build onthe constitutional foundation laid by Douglass and others.Douglass went on to hold a number of local offices in thecapital city of Washington, D.C., and to continue his work forwomen’s suffrage and equality. He died in 1895, by any fairreckoning the leading African-American figure of the19th century.The Underground RailroadFrederick Douglass was a man of singular abilities. Hiscontemporaries, both white and African American pursued avariety of tactics to combat slavery and win blacks their civilrights. In a nation that was half slave and half free, one obvioustactic was to spirit slaves northward to freedom. Membersof several religious denominations took the lead. Beginningaround 1800, a number of Quakers (a religious denominationfounded in England and influential in Pennsylvania) beganto offer runaway slaves refuge and assistance either to startnew lives in the North or to reach Canada. “Fugitive Slave”laws enacted in 1793 and 1850 provided for the seizure andreturn of runaway slaves, but the Quakers were willingnonviolently to disobey what they considered unjust laws.Harriet Tubman leading escaped slaves to freedom in Canada.12 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTEvangelical Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalistssubsequently joined the effort, which expanded to help greaternumbers of escaped slaves find their way out of the South.Free blacks came to assume increasingly prominent rolesin the movement, which became known as the UndergroundRailroad, not because it employed tunnels or trains — itused neither — but for the railroad language it employed. A“conductor” familiar with the local area would spirit one ormore slaves to a “station,” typically the home of a sympathizing“stationmaster,” then to another station, and so on, until theslaves reached free territory. The slaves would normally travelunder cover of darkness, usually about 16 to 32 kilometersper night. This was extremely dangerous work. Conductorsand slaves alike faced harsh punishment or death if they werecaptured.The most famous conductor was a woman, an escapedAfrican-American slave named Harriet Tubman. Afterreaching freedom in 1849, Tubman returned to the Southon some 20 Underground Railroad missions that rescuedabout 300 slaves, including Tubman’s own sister, brother,and parents. She was a master of disguise, posing at times asa harmless old woman or a deranged old man. No slave inTubman’s care was ever captured. African Americans lookingnorthward called her “Moses,” and the Ohio River that dividedslave states from free states in parts of the nation the “RiverJordan,” biblical references to reaching the Promised Land.Slaveholders offered a $40,000 reward for her capture, andJohn Brown called her “General Tubman.”In 1850, a sectional political compromise resulted in thepassage of a new and stronger Fugitive Slave Law. While manynorthern states had quietly declined to enforce the previousstatute, this new law established special commissionersauthorized to enforce in federal court slave-masters’ claims toescaped slaves. It imposed heavy penalties on federal marshalswho failed to enforce its terms, and on anyone who gaveassistance to an escaped slave. The Underground Railroadnow was forced to adopt more aggressive tactics, includingdaring rescues of blacks from courtrooms and even fromthe custody of federal marshals.While the numbers of agents, stationmasters, andconductors was relatively small, their efforts freed tens ofthousands of slaves. Their selfless bravery helped spark anincrease in northern antislavery sentiment. That response,and northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,convinced many white southerners that the North wouldnot permanently accept a half-slave nation.By the SwordAs early as 1663, when several Gloucester County, Virginia,blacks were beheaded for plotting rebellion, AfricanAmerican slaves launched a number of rebellions against theirslave masters. They could look for inspiration to Haiti, wherenative resistance expelled the French colonizers, ended theirslave-plantation labor system, and established an independentrepublic. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a successful blackentrepreneur named James Forten concluded that AfricanAmericans similarly “could not always be detained in theirpresent bondage.” In the American South, white plantationowners feared he might be right, and they reacted brutally toeven the slightest tremor of possible rebellion.Even so, some brave African Americans were determinedto take up arms against impossible odds. Perhaps the bestknown struggle occurred in Virginia in 1831. Nat Turner(1800-1831) was a slave in Southampton County, Virginia. Hisfirst master allowed Turner to be schooled in reading, writing,and religion. Turner began to preach, attracted followers, and,by some accounts, came to believe himself divinely appointedto lead his people to freedom. On August 22, 1831, Turner anda group of between 50 and 75 slaves armed themselves withknives, hatchets, and axes. Over two days, they moved fromhouse to house, freeing the slaves they met and killing morethan 50 white Virginians, many of them women and children.The response was as swift as it was crushing. Local militiahunted down the rebels, 48 of whom would be tried and 18of whom were hanged. Turner escaped, but on October 30he was cornered in a cave. After trial and conviction, Turnerwas hanged and his body flayed, beheaded, and quartered.Meanwhile, mobs of vengeful whites attacked any blacksthey could find, regardless of their involvement in the Turnerrevolt. About 200 blacks were beaten, lynched, or murdered.The political consequences of the Nat Turner rebellionextended far beyond Southampton County. The antislaverymovement was suppressed throughout the South, with harshnew laws curtailing black liberties more tightly than everbefore. Meanwhile in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison tarredas hypocrites those who blamed the antislavery movement forTurner’s revolt. The slaves, Garrison argued, had fought for theA depiction of the 1831 Virginia slave rebellion led by Nat Turner.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 13very liberties that white Americans proudly celebratedat every turn:Ye accuse the pacific friends of emancipation of instigatingthe slaves to revolt. Take back the charge as a foul slander.The slaves need no incentives at our hands. They will findthem in their stripes — in their emaciated bodies — in theirceaseless toil — in their ignorant minds — in every field, inevery valley, on every hill-top and mountain, wherever youand your fathers have fought for liberty — in your speeches,your conversations, your celebrations, your pamphlets,your newspapers — voices in the air, sounds from acrossthe ocean, invitations to resistance above, below, aroundthem! What more do they need? Surrounded by suchinfluences, and smarting under their newly made wounds,is it wonderful [surprising] that they should rise to contend— as other “ heroes” have contended — for their lost rights?It is not wonderful.The Rebellious John BrownAnother famous effort to free theAfrican-American slaves by thesword was led by a white American.John Brown, a native NewEnglander, had long mulled the ideaof achieving abolition by force andhad, in 1847, confided to FrederickDouglass his intent to do preciselythat. In 1855, Brown arrived inthe Kansas Territory, scene ofviolent clashes between pro- andantislavery factions. At issue waswhether Kansas would be admittedto the Union as a “free-soil” or slavestate. Each faction built its ownsettlements.After slavery advocates conducted a raid on “free”Lawrence, Kansas, Brown and four of his sons, on May 24,1856, carried out the Pottawatomie Massacre, descendingon the slaveholding village of Pottawatomie and killing fivemen. Brown then launched a series of guerrilla actions againstarmed pro-slavery bands. He returned to New England,hoping — unsuccessfully — to raise an African-Americanfighting force and — more successfully — to raise funds fromleading abolitionists.After a convention of Brown supporters meeting inCanada declared him commander-in-chief of a provisionalgovernment to depose southern slaveholders, Brownestablished a secret base in Maryland, near Harpers Ferry,Virginia (now West Virginia). He waited there for supporters,most of whom failed to arrive. On October 16, 1859, Brownled a biracial force of about 20 that captured the federalarsenal at Harpers Ferry and held about 60 local notableshostage. The plan was to arm groups of escaped slaves andhead south, liberating additional slaves as they marched.But Brown delayed too long and soon was surrounded by acompany of U.S. Marines led by Lieutenant Colonel RobertE. Lee (future commander of the southern forces duringthe Civil War). Brown refused to surrender. Wounded andcaptured in the ensuing battle, Brown was tried in Virginiaand convicted of treason, conspiracy, and murder.Addressing the jury after the verdict was announced,Brown said:I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I havealways freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despisedpoor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemednecessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance ofthe ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with theblood of my children and with the blood of millions in thisslave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel,and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859, amartyr to the antislavery cause. In the Civil Warthat began a year later, Union soldiers marched tovariants of a tune they called “John Brown’s Body”(one version, penned by Julia Ward Howe, wouldbecome “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). Atypical stanza read:Old John Brown’s body is a-mouldering in the dust,Old John Brown’s rifle is red with blood-spots turnedto rust,Old John Brown’s pike has made its last, unflinchingthrust,His soul is marching on! Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), site of John Brown’sinfamous raid.John Brown, pictured herecirca 1859, led an ill-fatedraid on Harpers Ferry, WestVirginia (then Virginia), inhopes of sparking a widerslave rebellion.14 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTAbraham Lincoln depicted against thetext of his Emancipation Proclamation,which freed all slaves in the still rebelliousterritories, effective January 1, 1863.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 15The American Civil WarThe issue of slavery and the status of black Americans erodedrelations between North and South from the first days ofAmerican independence until the election of AbrahamLincoln to the presidency in 1860. Lincoln opposed slavery,calling it a “monstrous injustice,” but his primary concern wasto maintain the Union. He thus was willing to accept slaveryin those states where it already existed while prohibitingits further extension in the western territories. But whitesoutherners considered Lincoln’s election a threat to theirsocial order. Beginning with South Carolina in December1860, 11 southern states seceded from the Union, forming theConfederate States of America.For Lincoln and for millions of northerners, the Unionwas, as the historian James M. McPherson has written, “abond among all of the American people, not a voluntaryassociation of states that could be disbanded by action of anyone or several of them.” As the president explained to hisprivate secretary: “We must settle this question now, whetherin a free government the minority have the right to breakup the government whenever they choose.” Thus, as Lincolnmade clear early in the war: “My paramount object in thisstruggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or todestroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing anyslave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slavesI would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leavingothers alone I would also do that.”But slavery drove the sectional conflict. As the brutalwar wore on, many northerners grew more unwilling to aoffereslavery under any circumstances. Northern troops who cameinto firsthand contact with southern blacks often becamemore sympathetic to their plight. Lincoln also saw that freeingthose slaves would strike at the Confederacy’s economic baseand hence its ability to wage war. And once freed, the formerslaves could take up arms for the Union cause, thus “earning”their freedom. For all these reasons, freeing the black slavesjoined preserving the Union as a northern war aim.Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, effectiveJanuary 1, 1863, declared all slaves in the rebellious states“thenceforward, and forever free.” As he signed the document,Lincoln remarked that “I never, in my life, felt more certainthat I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.”The future African-American leader BookerT. Washington was about seven years old when theEmancipation Proclamation was read on his plantation. As herecalled in his 1901 memoir Up From Slavery:As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in theslave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring,and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of theplantation songs had some reference to freedom. ...Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a U.S. officer, Ipresume) made a little speech and then read a rather longpaper — the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. Afterthe reading we were told that we were all free, and could gowhen and where we pleased. My mother, who was standingby my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tearsof joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it allmeant, that this was the day for which she had been so longpraying, but fearing that she would never live to see.As a condition of regaining their congressionalrepresentation, the seceding states were obliged to ratify theThirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to theU.S. Constitution. These “Reconstruction Amendments”abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection of the law— including by the states — to all citizens, and barredvoting discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or previouscondition of servitude.” The years following the Civil War thusestablished the legal basis for guaranteeing African Americansthe civil rights accorded other Americans. Shamefully, theplain meaning of these laws would be ignored for nearlyanother century, as the politics of sectional compromise againwould trump justice for African Americans.Black Soldiers in the Civil WarWhen theAmerican CivilWar beganin 1861, Jacob Dodson, afree black man living inWashington, D.C., wroteto Secretary of War SimonCameron informing himthat he knew of “300 reliablecolored free citizens” whowanted to enlist and defendthe city. Cameron repliedthat “this department hasno intention at present tocall into the service of thegovernment any coloredsoldiers.” It didn’t matter thatblack men, slave and free, hadserved in colonial militias andhad fought on both sides ofthe Revolutionary War. Manyblack men felt that serving inthe military was a way theymight gain freedom and fullcitizenship.Why did many militaryand civilian leaders rejectthe idea of recruiting blacksoldiers? Some said thatblack troops would prove toocowardly to fight white men,others said that they wouldbe inferior fighters, and somethought that white soldierswould not serve with blacksoldiers. There were a fewmilitary leaders, though, whohad different ideas.On March 31, 1862, almosta year after the first shots ofthe Civil War were fired atFort Sumter, South Carolina,Union (northern) troopscommanded by GeneralDavid Hunter took controlof the islands off the coastsof northern Florida, Georgia,and South Carolina. Localwhites who owned the richcotton and rice plantationsfled to the Confederatecontrolled (southern)mainland. Most of their slavesremained on the islands,and they soon were joinedby black escapees from themainland who believed theywould be liberated if only theycould reach the Union lines. Itwould not be that simple.Even as Hunter neededmore soldiers to control theregion’s many tidal riversand islands against stubbornConfederate guerrillaresistance, he observed howescaping mainland slaveswere swelling the islands’black population. Perhaps,he reasoned, the AfricanAmericans could solve hismanpower shortage. Hedevised a radical plan.Hunter, a staunch abolitionist, took it upon himselfto free the slaves — not juston the islands but throughout Confederate-controlledSouth Carolina, Georgia, andFlorida — and to recruit blackmen capable of bearing armsas Union soldiers. He wouldattempt to train and form thefirst all-black regiment of theCivil War.News traveled slowly inthose days, and PresidentAbraham Lincoln did nothear about Hunter’sregiment until June. WhileLincoln opposed slavery,he feared moving morequickly than public opinionin the embattled North —and particularly in theslaveholding border statesthat had sided with theUnion — would allow. Healso was adamant that “nocommanding general shalldo such a thing, upon myresponsibility, withoutconsulting me.” In an angryFrederick Douglass: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.… a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earthwhich can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”16 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTletter, the president informedthe general that neither henor any other subordinatehad the right to free anyone,although he carefully assertedfor himself the right toemancipate slaves at a timeof his choosing. Hunterwas ordered to disband theregiment, but the seed heplanted soon sprouted.In August 1862, twoweeks after Hunter haddismantled his regiment, theWar Department allowedGeneral Rufus Saxton to raisethe Union Army’s first officialblack regiment, the First SouthCarolina Volunteers. Thisand other black regimentsorganized in the coastalregions successfully defendedand held the coastal islands forthe duration of the war.The First KansasColored Volunteers wasalso organized around thistime, but without officialWar Department sanction.Meanwhile, PresidentLincoln had carefully laid thegroundwork for emancipationand the inclusion of menof African descent into themilitary. As white northernersincreasingly understood thatblack slaves were crucial tothe Confederacy’s economyand to its war effort, Lincolncould justify freeing the slavesas matter of military necessity.When Abraham Lincolnsigned the EmancipationProclamation on January 1,1863, the military’s policytoward enslaved peoplebecame clearer. Those whoreached the Union lineswould be free. Also, the WarDepartment began to recruitand enlist black troops fornewly formed regimentsof the Union Army — theUnited States Colored Troops(USCT). All of the officersin these regiments, however,would be white.By the fall of 1864, some140 black regiments had beenraised in many northernstates and in southernterritories captured bythe Union. About 180,000African Americans servedduring the Civil War,including more than 75,000northern black volunteers.Although the blackregiments were segregatedfrom their whitecounterparts, they fought thesame battles. Black troopsperformed bravely andsuccessfully even thoughthey coped with both theConfederate enemy and thesuspicion of some of theirUnion military colleagues.Once black men wereaccepted into the military,they were limited inmany cases to garrisonand fatigue duty. Thefamed Massachusetts54th Regiment’s ColonelRobert Gould Shaw activelypetitioned superiors to givehis men a chance to engage inbattle and prove themselvesas soldiers. Some of the otherofficers who knew what theirmen could do did the same.Black troops had to fight toget the same pay as whitesoldiers. Some regimentsrefused to accept lower pay.It was not until 1865, the yearthe war ended, that Congresspassed a law providing equalpay for black soldiers.Despite these restrictions,the United States ColoredTroops successfullyparticipated in 449 militaryengagements, 39 of themmajor battles. They foughtin battles in South Carolina,Louisiana, Florida, Virginia,Tennessee, Alabama, andother states. They bravelystormed forts and facedartillery knowing that ifcaptured by the enemy, theywould not be given the rightsof prisoners of war, but insteadwould be sold into slavery.The black troops performedwith honor and valor all ofthe duties of soldiers.Despite the Army’s policyof only having white officers,eventually about 100 blacksoldiers rose from the ranksand were commissioned asofficers. Eight black surgeonsalso received commissions inthe USCT. More than a dozenUSCT soldiers were giventhe Congressional Medal ofHonor for bravery.In 1948, President HarryS. Truman ordered thedesegregation of the armedforces. Today’s militaryremains an engine of socialand economic opportunityfor black Americans. Butit was the sacrifices of theCivil War-era black soldiersthat paved the way for thefull acceptance of AfricanAmericans in the UnitedStates military. Morefundamentally, their effortswere an important partof the struggle of AfricanAmericans for liberty anddignity.By Joyce HansenA four-time winner of theCoretta Scott King HonorBook Award, Joyce Hansenhas published shortstories and 15 books ofcontemporary and historicalfiction and non-fiction foryoung readers, includingBetween Two Fires: BlackSoldiers in the Civil War.With the Emancipation Proclamation,the Union (Northern) Army beganactively to recruit African-Americansoldiers.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 1718 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT— 3 —“SeparatebutEqual”African Americans Respond to the Failureof ReconstructionMore than 600,000 Americans perished inthe Civil War. Their sacrifice resolved someof the nation’s most intractable conflicts.Slavery at last was prohibited, and theprinciple that no state could secede from the Union wasestablished. But incompatible visions of American societypersisted, and the consequences for African Americans wouldprove immense.One vision, associated during the 19th and early 20thcenturies with the Democratic Party, blended Americanindividualism and suspicion of big government with apreference for local and state authority over federal power,and, at least in the South, a dogged belief in white superiority.The Republican Party, founded in the 1850s, was more willingto employ federal power to promote economic development.Its core belief was often called “free labor.” For millions ofnortherners, free labor meant that a man — the concept thengenerally applied only to men — could work where and howhe wanted, could accumulate property in his own name, and,most importantly, was free to rise as far as his talents andabilities might take him.Abraham Lincoln was a model of this self-made man. Aspresident, he would boast: “I am not ashamed to confess that25 years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on aflat-boat. … ” Even as many Republicans condemned slaveryas immoral, all viewed the South as lagging in both economicgrowth and social mobility. As the historian Antonia Ethearthas written, Republicans saw in the South “an unchangeableThis reconstruction-era wood engraving depicts a Freedman’s Bureaurepresentative standing between armed white and black Americans. Thefailure of Reconstruction would usher in the era of “Jim Crow” segregation inthe American South.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 19hierarchy dominated by the aristocracy of slaveholders.”After the North’s military victory ended slavery, its freelabor ideology required that the freedmen possess their civilrights. During the years that followed the Civil War, northernRepublicans at first were determined to “reconstruct” theSouth along free-labor principles. Although many whitesoutherners resisted, northern military might for a timeensured blacks the right to vote, to receive an education, and,generally, to enjoy the constitutional privileges afforded otherAmericans. But northerners’ determination to support blacks’aspirations gradually ebbed as their desire for reconciliationwith the South deepened. By the end of the 19th century,southern elites had reversed many black gains and imposed anoppressive system of legal segregation.Congressional ReconstructionThe assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 elevatedVice President Andrew Johnson to the presidency. Johnson, aTennessee Democrat chosen as Lincoln’s 1864 running mateto signal moderation and a desire for postwar reconciliation,moved swiftly to readmit the former Confederate states tofull membership in the Union. Southern states were obligedto ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery.But they were not required to protect the equality andcivil rights of their African-American populations. Whitedominated southern state governments organized underJohnson’s guidelines swiftly adopted Black Codes — punitivestatutes that closely regulated the behavior of supposedly“free” African Americans. These laws typically imposedcurfews, banned possession of firearms, and even imprisonedas vagrants former slaves who left their plantations withoutpermission. Meanwhile, Johnson ordered the restoration ofabandoned southern plantations to their former slave-masterowners.Many northerners were outraged. Surely, they argued,they had not fought and died only to re-empower the racistsouthern aristocracy. The 1866 congressional electionreturned large numbers of “Radical Republicans” determinedto ensure greater civil rights for blacks, and, more generally,through government power to reconstruct the Southalong northern lines. This 40th Congress refused to seatmembers elected under Johnson-authorized southern stategovernments. It then overrode Johnson’s veto to enact severalimportant civil rights laws.One such law extended the operations of the Freedman’sBureau. Established before Lincoln’s death, this federal agencyhelped ease the freed slaves’ transition to freedom. It suppliedmedical care, built hundreds of schools to educate blackchildren, and helped freed slaves negotiate labor contractswith their former owners and other employers.A second law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declaredthat all persons born in the United States were citizens,without regard to race, color, or previous condition. AfricanAmericans thus were entitled to make and enforce contracts,sue and be sued, and own property.Because Johnson opposed and arguably attempted tosubvert the application of these and other measures, theHouse of Representatives in 1868 impeached (indicted)Johnson, thus initiating the constitutionally proscribedmethod for removing a president from office. The Senateacquitted Johnson by one vote, but for theremainder of his term, he mostly refrained fromchallenging Congress’s reconstruction program.Most important of all, Congress madeclear that the formerly rebellious states wouldnot be permitted to regain their congressionalrepresentation until they ratified the proposedFourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.This amendment would supply the legal bedrockon which the modern civil rights movementwould stake its claim for racial equality. Thefirst 10 amendments, known collectively as theBill of Rights, had protected Americans againstencroachments by the federal government. Thisafforded African Americans little or no protectionagainst racist laws enacted by state governments.The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in July 1868,remedied this. “No State,” it reads, shall “depriveany person of life, liberty, or property, without dueprocess of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdictionthe equal protection of the laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment,The assassination of Abraham Lincoln brought the southerner AndrewJohnson to the presidency. Here, Johnson pardons white rebels for taking uparms against the Union.20 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTadopted shortly afterward, declared that the “right of citizensof the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged bythe United States or by any state on account of race, color, orprevious condition of servitude.”Temporary Gains … and ReversesWith northern troops enforcing Reconstruction legislationthroughout much of the South, African Americans scoredmajor gains. The apparatus of the slave system — slavequarters, gang labor, and the like — was dismantled. Blacksincreasingly founded their own churches. Headed by blackministers, these would provide the organizational sinew onwhich Martin Luther King Jr. and others later would build themodern civil rights movement.Black voters aligned with a small faction of southernwhites to elect Republican-led governments in severalsouthern states. Many blacks held important public officesat the state and county levels. Two African Americanswere elected to the U.S. Senate, and 14 to the House ofRepresentatives. Typical was Benjamin Sterling Turner,Alabama’s first black congressman. Born into slavery, Turnerwas freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He swiftlyestablished himself as an entrepreneur and then was electedtax collector and city councilman in Selma, the site of acrucial 20th-century civil rights struggle. Elected to Congressin 1870, Turner secured monthly pensions for black Civil Warveterans and fought for greater federal expenditures in hisdistrict.Republican-led state governments in the Reconstructionera South typically raised taxes and expanded social services.Among their innovations were state-supported educationalsystems and measures to subsidize economic growth. AfricanAmericans were major beneficiaries of these innovations,and for a time it seemed as if their civil rights might bepermanently secured.But the majority of southern whites were determinedto resist black equality. Many could not unlearn the harshstereotypes of black inferiority on which they had been raised.Many southern whites were very poor, and they groundedtheir identity in a perceived sense of racial superiority.Southern elites understood that this racial divide couldblock interracial political efforts to advance their commoneconomic interests. They often employed white racialresentment as a tool to regain political power.White southerners, associated in this era with theDemocratic Party, launched a blistering political attackon white southern Republicans. They called the nativesoutherners “scalawags,” a term derived from a word meaning“undersized or worthless animal”; the northerners who soughttheir fortune in the postwar South were called “carpetbaggers”because these newcomers allegedly carried their belongings intravel bags made of carpet.The reaction against newly empowered AfricanAmericans was harsher still. Secret terrorist organizationssuch as the Knights of the White Camellia — named for thesnow-white bloom of a southern flowering shrub and intendedto symbolize the purity of the white race — and the Ku KluxKlan (KKK) launched violent attacks to intimidate blackvoters and keep them away from the polls. President UlyssesS. Grant dispatched three regiments of infantry and a flotillaof gunboats to ensure fair elections in New Orleans in 1874.Grant used federal troops to smash the Klan, but the violencecontinued as militant whites formed informal “social clubs”described by historian James M. McPherson as “paramilitaryorganizations that functioned as armed auxiliaries of theDemocratic Party in southern states in their drive to ‘redeem’the South from ‘black and tan Negro-Carpetbag rule.’ ”Some northern whites feared that Grant had gonetoo far, and more simply wearied of the struggle. AsMcPherson writes:Many Northerners adopted a “plague on both your houses”attitude toward the White Leagues and the “NegroCarpetbag” state governments. Withdraw the federaltroops, they said, and let the southern people work outtheir own problems even if that meant a solid South for thewhite-supremacy Democratic Party.This was essentially what happened. In elections marredU.S. Representative Benjamin Sterling Turner was elected to Congressfrom Reconstruction-era Alabama. With the end of Reconstruction and thewithdrawal of Union troops from the South, black Americans in that regionwere systematically deprived of their political rights.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 21by fraud, intimidation, and violence, Democrats graduallyregained control of state governments throughout the South.In 1877, a political bargain declared Republican Rutherford B.Hayes the winner of the closely contested 1876 presidentialelection. In exchange, Hayes withdrew the last federal troopsfrom the South. Black Americans, the overwhelming majorityof whom then lived in the states of the former Confederacy,were again at the mercy of racist state laws.The Advent of “Jim Crow”During the years that followed, and especially after 1890,state governments in the South adopted segregationist lawsmandating separation of the races in nearly every aspectof everyday life. They required separate public schools,railroad cars, and public libraries; separate water fountains,restaurants, and hotels. The system became known informallyas “Jim Crow,” from the 1828 minstrel show song “Jump JimCrow,” which was typically performed by white performers inblackface as a caricature of the unlettered, inferior black man.Jim Crow could not have existed had the federal courtsinterpreted broadly the relevant constitutional protections.But the judicial branch instead seized upon technicalitiesand loopholes to avoid striking down segregationist laws. In1875, Congress enacted what would be the last civil rightslaw for nearly a century. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 barred“any person” from depriving citizens of any race or color ofequal treatment in public accommodations such as inns,theaters, and places of public amusement, and in publictransportation. In 1883, the Supreme Court declared the lawunconstitutional, reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendmentprohibited discrimination by states but not by individuals.Congress accordingly could not prohibit individual acts ofdiscrimination.Perhaps the most significant judicial decision came in1896. Six years earlier, Louisiana had adopted a law requiringseparate rail cars for whites, blacks, and “coloreds” of mixedancestry. An interracial group of citizens who opposed thelaw persuaded Homer Plessy, a public education advocate witha white complexion and a black great-grandmother, to testthe law. Plessy purchased a ticket for a “whites-only” rail car.After taking his seat, Plessy revealed his ancestry to the trainconductor. He was arrested, and the litigation began.In 1896, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Ina seven-to-one decision, the court upheld the Louisianalaw. “The enforced separation of the two races,” did not,the majority ruled, “stamp the colored race with a badge ofinferiority.” If black Americans disagreed, that was their owninterpretation and not that of the statute. Thus did the highcourt lend its prestige and its imprimatur to what becameknown as “separate but equal” segregation.One problem with Plessy (formally, Plessy v. Ferguson),as later civil rights advocates tirelessly would document, wasthat separate never really was equal. Public schools and otherfacilities designated colored nearly always were inferior. Oftenthey were shockingly so. But more fundamentally, the issuewas whether a fair reading of the Constitution might justifyseparating Americans on the basis of race. As John MarshallHarlan, the dissenting justice in the Plessy case, argued inwords that resonate to this day:In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is inthis country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind,and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. Inrespect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.Justice Harlan’s view would at last prevail in 1954, whenthe Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Educationdecision overruled Plessy. For African Americans, however,the rise of Jim Crow segregation required new responses, newstrategies for claiming their civil rights.Booker T. Washington:The Quest for Economic IndependenceThe failure of Reconstruction and the rise of legal segregationforced African Americans to make difficult choices. Theoverwhelming majority still lived in the South and facedfierce, even violent resistance to civil equality. Some concludedthat direct political efforts to assert their civil rights wouldbe futile. Led by Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), theyBooker T. Washington championed economic empowerment as the means ofachieving future African-American political gains.22 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTargued instead for focusing on black economic development.Others, including most prominently the leading scholar andintellectual William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois,insisted upon an uncompromising effort to achieve the votingand other civil rights promised by the Constitution and itspostwar amendments.Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington was about nineyears old at the time of emancipation. He attended HamptonNormal and Agricultural Institute — today’s HamptonUniversity — in southeastern Virginia, excelled at his studies,and found work as a schoolteacher. In 1881 he was offered theopportunity to head a new school for African Americans inMacon County, Alabama.Washington had concluded that practical skills andeconomic independence were the keys to black advancement.He decided to ground his new school, renamed the TuskegeeNormal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University)in industrial education. Male students learned skills suchas carpentry and blacksmithing, females typically studiednursing or dressmaking. Tuskegee also trained schoolteachersto staff African-American schools throughout the South. Thisapproach promised to develop economically productive blackcitizens without forcing the nation to confront squarely thecivil rights question. A number of leading philanthropists,such as the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, steel producerAndrew Carnegie, and Sears, Roebuck head Julius Rosenwald,all raised funds for Tuskegee. The school grew in size,reputation, and prestige.In September 1895, Washington delivered to apredominantly white audience his famous AtlantaCompromise speech. He argued that the greatest dangerfacing African Americansis that in the great leap from slavery to freedom wemay overlook the fact that the masses of us are to liveby the productions of our hands, and fail to keep inmind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learnto dignify and glorify common labor, and put brainsand skill into the common occupations of life. … It isat the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadowour opportunities.Not surprisingly, many whites found soothing avision in which blacks concentrated on acquiring realestate or industrial skill rather than political office, avision that seemingly accepted the Jim Crow system.As Washington put it in his Atlanta address: “Theopportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now isworth more than the opportunity to spend a dollar inan opera-house.”But close study of Washington’s speech suggests thathe did not mean to accept permanent inequality. Instead, hecalled for African Americans gradually to amass social capital— jobs “just now” were more valuable than the right to attendthe opera. Or, as he put it more bluntly: “No race that hasanything to contribute to the markets of the world is long inany degree ostracized.”Washington was the nation’s leading African-Americanfigure for many years, although increasing numbers of blacksgradually turned away from his vision. One problem was thatthe postwar South was itself a poor region, lagging behindthe North in modernization and economic development.Opportunity for southerners, black or white, simply wasnot as great as Booker T. Washington hoped. His gradualistposture was also unacceptable to blacks unwilling to defer tosome unspecified future date their claims for full and equalcivil rights.W.E.B. Du Bois: The Push for Political AgitationMany blacks turned for leadership to the historian andsocial scientist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). A graduate ofFisk University, a historically black institution in Nashville,Tennessee, Du Bois earned a PhD in history from HarvardUniversity and took up a professorship at Atlanta University,a school founded with the assistance of the Freedman’sBureau and specializing in the training of black teachers,librarians, and other professionals. Du Bois authored andedited a number of scholarly studies depicting black life inAmerica. Social science, he believed, would provide the key toimproving race relations.W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the United States’ leading 20th century figures,testifies before Congress in 1945.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 23But as legal segregation — often enforced by lynchings(extralegal and often mob-instigated seizures and killings of“criminal suspects,” without trial and usually on the flimsiestof evidence) — took hold throughout the South, Du Boisgradually concluded that only direct political agitation andprotest could advance African-American civil rights. InevitablyDu Bois came into dispute with Booker T. Washington, whoquietly built political ties to national Republicans to securea measure of political patronage even as his priority forAmerican blacks remained economic development.In 1903, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk.Described by the scholar Shelby Steele as an “impassionedreaction against a black racial ideology of accommodationand humility,” Black Folk declared squarely that “the problemof the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”Addressing Booker T. Washington, Du Bois argued thathis doctrine has tended to make the whites, North andSouth, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’sshoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimisticspectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation,and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not ourenergies to righting these great wrongs.Du Bois also disagreed with Washington’s exclusiveemphasis on artisan skills. “The Negro race, like all races,” heargued in a 1903 article, “is going to be saved by its exceptionalmen.” This “talented tenth” of African Americans “must bemade leaders of thought and missionaries of culture amongtheir people.” For this task, the practical training Booker T.Washington offered at Tuskegee Institute would not suffice:If we make money the object of man-training, we shalldevelop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we maketechnical skill the object of education, we may possessartisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only aswe make manhood the object of the work of the schools —intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world thatwas and is, and of the relation of men to it. … On thisfoundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand, andquickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and manmistake the means of living for the object of life.Two years later, Du Bois and a number of leading blackintellectuals formed the Niagara Movement, a civil rightsorganization squarely opposed to Washington’s policies ofaccommodation and gradualism. “We want full manhoodsuffrage and we want it now!” Du Bois declared. (Du Bois alsoadvocated woman suffrage.) The Niagara group held a notable1906 conference at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, site of JohnBrown’s rebellion; lobbied against Jim Crow laws; distributedpamphlets and circulars; and attempted generally to raise theissues of civil rights and racial justice. But the movement wasweakly organized and poorly funded. It disbanded in 1910. A newand stronger organization was ready to take its place by then.A false charge that a black man had attempted to rape awhite woman led to anti-black rioting in Springfield, Illinois, inAugust 1908. The riots left seven dead and forced thousandsof African Americans to flee the city. The suffragette MaryWhite Ovington led a call for an organizational meeting ofreformers. “The spirit of the abolitionists must be revived,”she later wrote. Her group soon expanded and linked up withDu Bois and other African-American activists. In 1910, theyfounded the National Association for the Advancement ofColored People (NAACP). The new organization’s leadershipincluded white Americans, many of them Jewish, and DuBois, who assumed the editorship of the NAACP’s influentialmagazine The Crisis.Beginning in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson,a native southerner, permitted the segregation of the federalcivil service, the NAACP turned to the courts, initiatingthe decades-long legal effort to overturn Jim Crow. UnderDu Bois’s leadership, The Crisis analyzed current affairsand featured the works of the great writers of the HarlemRenaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, among them LangstonHughes and Countee Cullen. By some estimates, itscirculation exceeded 100,000.Du Bois continued to write, cementing a reputation asone of the century’s major American thinkers. He emergedas a leading anticolonialist and expert on African history.In 1934, Du Bois broke with the integrationist NAACP overhis advocacy of Pan-African nationalism and the growingMarxist and socialist aspects of his thought. Du Bois wouldlive on into his 90s, dying a Ghanaian citizen and committedCommunist.But the NAACP, the organization he helped to found,would launch the modern civil rights struggle.Marcus Garvey:Another PathMarcus Garvey(1887-1940),a major blacknationalist of the early 20thcentury, was born in Jamaicabut spent his most successfulyears in the United States.An enthusiastic capitalist,he believed that AfricanAmericans and other blackpersons around the worldshould make a united effortto form institutions thatcould concentrate wealth andpower in their own hands. Tothis end he formed, amongother organizations, theUnited Negro ImprovementAssociation (UNIA).After reading Booker T.Washington’s Up FromSlavery, Garvey asked himself:“Where is the black man’sgovernment? Where is hisking and kingdom? Whereis his president, his country,his ambassadors, his army,his navy, and his men of bigaffairs? I could not find them.I decided, I will help tomake them.”Garvey was born in theparish of St. Ann, Jamaica,where in his early teenshe was apprenticed to hisgodfather, a printer namedAlfred Burrowes. Garvey’sfather was a bookish man,as was Burrowes, and theyouthful Marcus receivedearly exposure to the worldof letters. Migrating toKingston, Garvey displayedhighly refined talents as atypesetter and developed aninterest in journalism.After being blacklistedfor attempting to organizeworkers, he left Jamaica tovisit Latin America, andhe later spent two years inEngland. During these years,he studied informally at theUniversity of London andworked for the SudaneseEgyptian black nationalist,Duse Mohammed Ali,founder of The African Timesand Orient Review.Garvey was determinedto spread his program ofblack empowerment in theUnited States. Arrivingin 1915, Garvey arguedthat African Americanscould command respectby building their economicpower. To that end, he stroveto establish a network ofblack-owned businesses:grocery stores, laundries, andothers capable of thrivingindependently of the whiteeconomy. While these andother initial attempts toorganize the masses metwith little success, Garvey’sperseverance earned himincreasing fame; by the endof the First World War, hisname was widely knownamong black Americans.Garvey was a master atmanipulating the mediaand at staging dramaticpublic events. He foundedhis own newspaper, NegroWorld, which was distributedwidely throughout theUnited States and in someLatin American countries.He held colorful annualconventions in New YorkCity, where men and womenmarched under a bannerof red, black, and green.This flag, along with othertricolored emblems, remainspopular among AfricanAmericans to the presentday. The striking militaryregalia sometimes worn byGarveyites demonstrated thenationalistic and militaristicThe black nationalist Marcus Garvey represented one strand of AfricanAmerican thought. Most blacks, however, would choose to fight for equalityand full participation in U.S. political and economic life.24 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTimage that his blacknationalist movement stroveto convey.There is a legend thatonce a Congolese leader in aremote African village wasasked if he knew anythingabout the United States. Hisresponse was said to be, “Iknow the name of MarcusGarvey.”Under the name of theBlack Star Line, the UNIAlaunched an abortive attemptto open up the world toblack-owned commerce. Theorganization sold impressiveamounts of stock in thisenterprise, mostly in smallamounts to ordinary workingpeople, and purchased severalsteamships, unfortunately indilapidated condition.Garvey believed inseparation of the races andwas willing to cooperatewith leaders of white racistorganizations, notably theKu Klux Klan. After meetingwith Klan leadership, he cameunder attack from severalalready-hostile black leaders.A. Philip Randolph, founderand leader of the Brotherhoodof Sleeping Car Porters,America’s earliest successful,predominantly black laborunion, was particularlyhostile.Randolph accusedGarvey of cooperating withwhite racists in a scheme torepatriate American blacksback to Africa. Garveydenied any such ambitions,but he did send emissariesto the Republic of Liberia toinvestigate the prospects ofnew business undertakings,and he found considerablesympathy for his ideas amongyoung African intellectuals.In 1925, Garvey wasimprisoned on federalcharges of using the mailsto defraud. He denied thecharge, and even some ofhis critics found it unfair.President Calvin Coolidgepardoned Garvey in 1927, butas a convicted felon who wasnot a U.S. citizen, Garvey wasimmediately deported to hisnative Jamaica. W.E.B. DuBois, one of Garvey’s severestcritics, wished him well,encouraging him to pursuehis efforts in his own country.Establishing himself inLondon, England, Garveylaunched a new magazine,The Black Man, whichcriticized such prominentblack American figures asthe heavyweight boxingchampion Joe Louis, theentertainer and politicalactivist Paul Robeson, andthe controversial spiritualfigure Father Divine for theirfailure to supply effectiverace leadership. But Garveywas unable there either torebuild his organization toits previous membershiplevels. He retained sufficientU.S. popularity to drawan attentive audience to ameeting in Windsor, Ontario,just across the river fromDetroit, Michigan, a basefor Garvey’s earlier activism.His final operations wereconducted from London,England, where he diedin 1940.By Wilson Jeremiah MosesMoses is Ferree Professor ofHistory at the PennsylvaniaState University and author ofthe scholarly article “MarcusGarvey: A Reappraisal.” Hisbooks include The GoldenAge of Black Nationalism,1850-1925.Advertisement for a 1917 Marcus Garvey speech.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 2526 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTCharlesHamiltonHouston andThurgoodMarshallLaunch the Legal Challenge to Segregation— 4 —In November 1956, a black-instigated boycott of thesegregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama,had entered its 12th month. A year earlier, a blackwoman named Rosa Parks had bravely refused torelinquish her front seat on a municipal bus to a white man,launching a political movement and introducing Americansto a courageous and dynamic leader — the Reverend Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. But it was not until the courts forbadethe relegation of African Americans to the back of thebus that the city of Montgomery yielded and the boycottsucceeded. As historian Kevin Mumford has written:“Without constitutional legitimacy and the promise ofprotection from the courts, local black protesters would becrushed by state and local officials, and white segregationistscould easily prevail.”Americans often refer to the mid-20th-century socialjustice campaigns led by King and others as the civil rightsmovement. As we have seen, however, African Americansand their allies had long struggled to achieve the rightspromised them by the U.S. Constitution and its post-CivilWar amendments. It is important also to understand thatthe modern civil rights movement rested on two pillars.One was formed by the brave nonviolent protesters whoforced their fellow Americans at last to confront squarelythe scandalous treatment of black Americans. The secondconsisted of attorneys such as Charles Hamilton Houston andhis greatest student, Thurgood Marshall, who ensured thatthose protestors would have the United States’ most powerfulforce — the law of the land — on their side.Marshall, the attorney who argued for Montgomery’sblacks in 1956, relied on legal precedents he had established inother successful court cases. Brown v. Board of Education wasthe most celebrated, but even before Brown, the partnershipbetween Houston and Marshall had dismantled much of thelegal structure by which the American South had enforced itsJim Crow system of race segregation.Charles Hamilton Houston:The Man Who Killed Jim CrowCharles Hamilton Houston was born in 1895 in Washington,D.C. A brilliant student, he graduated as a valedictorian fromAmherst College at the age of 19, then served in a segregatedU.S. Army unit during the First World War. After his brushwith racism in the Army, Houston determined to make thefight for civil rights his life’s calling. Returning home, hestudied law at Harvard University, becoming the first AfricanAmerican editor of its prestigious law review. He would go onto earn a PhD in juridical science at Harvard and a doctor ofcivil law degree at the University of Madrid in Spain.Houston believed that an attorney’s proper vocationwas to wield the law as an instrument for securing justice.“A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite onsociety,” he argued. In 1924, Houston began teaching parttime at Howard University Law School, the Washington,D.C. institution responsible by some accounts for trainingfully three-fourths of the African-American attorneys thenpracticing. By 1929, Houston headed the law school.In just six years, Houston radically improved theeducation of African-American law students, earned fullaccreditation for the school, and produced a group of lawyerstrained in civil rights law. In the book Black Profiles, George R.The skilled litigator and legal educator Charles Hamilton Houston launchedthe legal assault on “Jim Crow” laws.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 27Metcalf writes that Houston took the job to turn Howard into“a West Point [a popular name for the United States MilitaryAcademy] of Negro leadership, so that Negroes could gainequality by fighting segregation in the courts.”Meanwhile, the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People was laying the groundworkfor a legal challenge to the separate-but-equal doctrineapproved in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy decision. OnHouston’s recommendation, the organization engaged formerU.S. Attorney Nathan Ross Margold to study the practicalworkings of separate but equal in the South. Margold’s report— 218 legal-sized-pages long — was completed in 1931. Itdocumented woeful inequality in state expenditures betweenwhite and black segregated schools.In 1934, Houston accepted the position of NAACPspecial counsel. He surrounded himself with a select group ofyoung, mostly Howard-trained lawyers, among them JamesNabrit, Spottswood Robinson III, A. Leon Higginbotham,Robert Carter, William Hastie, George E.C. Hayes, JackGreenberg, and Oliver Hill. With his young protégé ThurgoodMarshall often in tow, Houston began to tour the South,armed with a camera and a portable typewriter. Marshall laterrecalled that he and Houston traveled in Houston’s car: “Therewas no place to eat, no place to sleep. We slept in the car andwe ate fruit.” This could be dangerous work, but the visualrecord Houston compiled and the data amassed by Margoldwould anchor a new legal strategy: If the facilities allocatedto blacks were not equal to those afforded whites, Houstonreasoned, segregationist states were not meeting even thePlessy standard. Separate but equal logically required thosestates either to improve drastically the black facilities, a hugelyexpensive undertaking, or else integrate.This equalization strategy bore fruit in 1935, whenHouston and Marshall prevailed in a Maryland case, Murrayv. Pearson. The African-American plaintiff challenged hisrejection by the segregated University of Maryland law school.The university’s lawyers argued that the school met theseparate but equal requirement by granting qualified blackapplicants scholarships to enroll at out-of-state law schools.The state courts rejected this argument. While they werenot yet prepared to rule against segregated public schools,they did hold that Maryland’s out-of-state option was notan equal opportunity. Maryland’s law school was ordered toadmit qualified African-American students. The triumph wasespecially sweet for Marshall, who numbered himself amongthe qualified blacks rejected by the school.Houston retired from the NAACP in 1940 because ofill health, and he died in 1950. “We owe it all to Charlie,”Marshall later remarked. While Houston’s prize studentwould lead the final legal assault on segregation, it wasHouston, the teacher, who devised the strategy andilluminated the path.Thurgood Marshall (left) and Charles Hamilton Houston flank Donald Gaines Murray, plaintiff ina case that struck the University of Maryland Law School policy denying admission to qualifiedblack students.Thurgood Marshall in 1962, after Senate confirmation ofhis appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 1967,President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall the firstAfrican-American Supreme Court justice.28 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTThurgood Marshall: Mr. Civil Rights“No other American did more to lead our country out ofthe wilderness of segregation than Thurgood Marshall,”said his fellow Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell. Bornin 1908 and educated in a segregated Baltimore, Maryland,secondary school, Marshall attended Lincoln University, “thefirst institution founded anywhere in the world to provide ahigher education in the arts and sciences for youth of Africandescent.” Knowing he would be turned away by the whitesonly University of Maryland Law School, Marshall enrolledat Howard Law School, enduring the long commute fromBaltimore to Washington, D.C. His mother pawned herwedding and engagement rings to pay the tuition. Marshallexcelled at his studies, graduated first in his class of 1933, andearned the respect of Charles Hamilton Houston.Working closely with Houston, Marshall prevailedin the Murray v. Pearson case described previously, thenaccepted a staff attorney position with the NAACP. In 1938,he succeeded Houston as head of the organization’s legalcommittee. In 1940, he became the first chief of the NAACPLegal Defense Fund.It was a wise choice. Marshall possessed a uniquecombination of skills. He was, as United Press Internationallater concluded,… an outstanding tactician with exceptional attention todetail, a tenacious ability to focus on a goal — and a deepvoice that often was termed the loudest in the room. Healso possessed a charm so extraordinary that even the mostintransigent southern segregationist sheriff could not resisthis stories and jokes.Armed with this potent combination of likeability andskill, Thurgood Marshall in 1946 persuaded an all-whiteSouthern jury to acquit 25 blacks of a rioting charge. On otheroccasions, he escaped only narrowly the beatings — or worse— risked by every assertive African American in the JimCrow South.It was under Marshall that the Houston-devisedgradualist legal strategy at last succeeded. Case by case,Marshall and the NAACP attorneys chipped away at thelegal pillars upholding segregation. In all, Marshall won anastounding 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the SupremeCourt. His legal victories included the following:• Smith v. Allwright (1944), a Supreme Court decisionbarring the whites-only primary elections in which politicalparties chose their general election candidates. Accordingto his biographer, Juan Williams, Marshall considered thecase his most important triumph: “The segregationistswould [demand that (the candidates) support segregation tocapture their party’s nomination], and by the time the blacksand Hispanics and ... even in some cases, the women, gotto vote in the general election, they were just voting for onesegregationist or the other; they didn’t have a choice.”• Morgan v. Virginia (1946), where Marshall obtained aSupreme Court ruling barring segregation in interstate bustransportation. In a later case, Boynton v. Virginia (1960),Marshall persuaded the court to order desegregation of busterminals and other facilities made available to interstatepassengers. These cases led to the Freedom Ride movementof the 1960s.• In Patton v. Mississippi (1947), the Supreme Courtaccepted Marshall’s argument that juries from whichAfrican Americans had been systematically excluded couldnot convict African-American defendants.• In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), Marshall persuaded theSupreme Court that state courts could not constitutionallyprevent the sale of real property to blacks, even if thatproperty was covered by a racially restrictive covenant.These covenants were a legal tactic commonly used toprevent homeowners from selling their properties to blacks,Jews, and other minorities.The NAACP team’s victories had established that thecourts would overturn separate-but-equal arrangementswhere facilities were in fact not equal. It was a realachievement, but not the best tool to effect broad change,especially with regard to education. Poor African Americansin each of the hundreds of school districts in the Southcould hardly be expected to litigate the comparative meritsof segregated black and white schools. Only a direct rulingagainst segregation itself could at one stroke eliminatedisparities like those in Clarendon County, South Carolina,where per pupil expenditures in 1949-1950 averaged $179Federal law often provided African Americans greater protection, but ittypically applied only in an “interstate” context. Years before Rosa Parks, IreneMorgan refused to give up her seat on a bus whose route crossed state lines.With Thurgood Marshall as her attorney, Morgan prevailed, and segregationwas legally barred on interstate bus routes.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 29for white students and only $43 for blacks. Marshall wouldsucceed in getting this direct ruling with the “case of thecentury,” Brown v. Board of Education.The Brown DecisionThe Brown case began to take shape once Marshall foundthe right plaintiff in the Reverend Oliver Brown, father ofTopeka, Kansas, grade-schooler Linda Brown. Linda hadbeen obliged to attend a black school 21 blocks from herhouse, although there was a white school only seven blocksaway. The Kansas state courts had rejected Brown’s claim byfinding that the segregated black and white schools were ofcomparable quality. This gave Marshall the chance to urgethat the Supreme Court at last rule that segregated facilitieswere, by definition and as a matter of law, unequal and henceunconstitutional.Marshall’s legal strategy relied on social scientificevidence. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund assembled ateam of experts spanning the fields of history, economics,political science, and psychology. Particularly significantwas a study in which the psychologists Kenneth and MamieClark sought to determine how segregation affected the selfesteem and mental well-being of African Americans. Amongtheir poignant findings: Black children aged three to sevenpreferred white rather than otherwise identical black dolls.Clockwise from top: President Dwight D.Eisenhower would use federal troops to ensurethe enrollment of the first black students in thepreviously segregated Little Rock [Arkansas]Central High School.The Revs. Martin Luther King Jr., FredShuttlesworth, and Ralph Abernathy confer.A sign of progress: removal of a Jim Crow signfrom a Greensboro, North Carolina, bus, 1956.30 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTOn May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court vindicatedMarshall’s strategy. Citing the Clark paper and other studiesidentified by plaintiffs, the Supreme Court ruled decisively:... in the field of public education the doctrine of “separatebut equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities areinherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffsand others similarly situated ... are, by reason of thesegregation complained of, deprived of the equal protectionof the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.Education attorney Deryl W. Wynn, a member of theOxford University Roundtable on Education Policy, has said ofthe significance of Brown:Here was the highest court in the land essentially sayingthat something was wrong with how black Americans werebeing treated.... I remember my father, who was a teenagerat the time, saying the decision made him feel like he wassomebody.... On a personal level, Brown’s real legacy is thatit serves as a constant reminder that each child, each of us,is somebody.The Court did not specify a timeframe for ending schoolsegregation, but the following year, in a group of cases knowncollectively as “Brown II,” Marshall and his colleagues secureda Supreme Court ruling that desegregation proceed “with alldeliberate speed.”Even then, resistance continued in parts of the South. InSeptember 1957, when black students were forcibly turnedaway from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas,Marshall flew to the city and filed suit in federal court.His victory in this case set the stage for President DwightEisenhower’s declaration of September 24: “I have today issuedan Executive Order directing the use of troops under federalauthority to aid in the execution of federal law at Little Rock,Arkansas.... Mob rule cannot be allowed to override thedecisions of our courts.”Brown, Little Rock, and the NAACP team’s other legaltriumphs illustrated both the strengths and the limits of the“legal” civil rights movement. Black Americans, relegatedfor decades to inferior, segregated schools, scarcely mighthave imagined the sight of federal authorities escorting blackstudents into formerly all white classrooms — in Little Rock,at the University of Mississippi in 1962, and at the Universityof Alabama in 1963. But litigation worked slowly, and one caseat a time.Legal segregation, meanwhile, still prevailed in much ofthe South, not just at many schools but at nearly every kind ofpublic facility, from swimming pools to buses and from movietheaters to lunch counters. And segregationists succeededall too often in depriving African Americans of their mostbasic constitutional right. Through a combination of unfairtechnicalities, outright fraud and chicanery, and ultimatelyby threat of violence, the plain language of the FifteenthAmendment was subverted, and blacks throughout the Southwere unable to vote.Plainly, new civil rights laws were required. Passingthem would require a political consensus strong enough toovercome the die-hard opposition of southern representativesin Congress. The legal struggle continued with ThurgoodMarshall leading the way — from 1961 to 1965 as JudgeMarshall of the U.S. Court of Appeals (the nation’s secondhighest federal court), and then during the quarter-centuryfrom 1967 to 1991 as the nation’s first African-AmericanSupreme Court justice.Meanwhile, a new, political civil rights movement wascoalescing. Brave African Americans, joined by allies of everyrace and creed, began firmly but peaceably to insist uponthe full measure of civil rights to which they were entitledas Americans. As they forced their countrymen to confrontsquarely the unconscionable realities of segregation andracial oppression, the balance of national sympathies — andof political forces — shifted. It all began on a December1955 evening in Montgomery, Alabama, when a 42-year-oldseamstress, tired after a long day at work, refused to give upher seat on a segregated bus.Even as AfricanAmericans fought fortheir civil rights, theirindividual accomplishmentsdemonstrated the justice oftheir cause. The achievementsof the Nobel Prize-winningscholar and internationalofficial Ralph Bunchedemonstrated to all fairminded people that blackAmericans could contributefully to American society.Ralph Bunche was bornin Detroit, Michigan, onAugust 7, 1903. His fatherwas an itinerant barber, hismother a housewife andamateur pianist. His fatherabandoned the family, and hismother died when Bunchewas 14 years old. From thenon he lived in Los Angeles,California, with his maternalgrandmother, whose wisdomand strength of charactergreatly influenced him. Hegraduated with honors fromthe University of Californiaat Los Angeles and continuedas a graduate student onscholarship at HarvardUniversity.From his earliest years,Bunche was acutely consciousof racial discrimination andwas determined to workagainst it. His studies ofcolonial Africa persuadedhim that colonialism hadmuch in common with racialdiscrimination in the UnitedStates. He was determined tohelp put an end to both.Bunche set up the PoliticalScience Department atHoward University, thehistorically black universityin Washington, D.C. Hismany articles on racialdiscrimination later becamebasic literature for the U.S.civil rights movement.Bunche also pioneeredthe study of colonialism inthe United States. He wasthe chief associate and cowriter of the Swedish socialeconomist Gunnar Myrdal,whose landmark 1944 studyof U.S. race relations, AnAmerican Dilemma, wascited approvingly by the U.S.Supreme Court in its Brown v.Board of Education decision.As the Second WorldWar loomed, Bunchewas recruited by the U.S.government to advise onAfrica, and then transferredto the State Department towork on the future UnitedNations charter. He wasthe first black official in theState Department. At theSan Francisco Conferencein 1945, he drafted twochapters of the charter,on non-self-governingterritories (colonies) andon the trusteeship system.These chapters providedthe basis for acceleratingdecolonization afterthe war. Bunche did asmuch as anyone to makedecolonization a reality.Ralph Johnson Bunche:Scholar and StatesmanDr. Ralph J. Bunche, peacemaker, mediator, and U.S. diplomat, receives the1950 Nobel Prize for Peace.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 31In the newly establishedUnited Nations, Buncheset up the trusteeshipsystem. His achievementsas a member of theU.N. Secretariat wereextraordinary. Assecretary of the 1947 U.N.Special Commission onPalestine, Bunche wrotethe commission’s majorityreport on partition as wellas the minority report on afederal state. The former wasadopted by the U.N. GeneralAssembly and remains thebasic goal of peacemakers inthe Middle East.In May 1948, the Britishleft Palestine, a Jewish statewas declared in that partof mandatory Palestine sodesignated by the GeneralAssembly, and five Arabstates invaded the newstate of Israel. The U.N.Security Council appointeda mediator, Count FolkeBernadotte, with Buncheas his chief adviser. Theyestablished a truce inPalestine, and Buncheorganized a group of U.N.military observers tosupervise it, the beginningof U.N. peacekeepingoperations. Bernadottewas assassinated by theStern Gang (an armed,underground Zionist factioncondemned by Bunche andby mainstream Zionists)in Jerusalem in September1948, and Bunche becamemediator. In January 1949,he initiated armistice talks,starting with Egypt and Israel.Armistice agreements wereconcluded between Israeland her four Arab neighbors,providing a formal basis forthe cessation of hostilities.In 1950, Bunche won theNobel Peace Prize for theseachievements.Dag Hammarskjoldof Sweden became U.N.Secretary-General in 1953.As an undersecretarygeneral, Bunche becameHammarskjold’s closestpolitical adviser. In 1956 —after Egyptian nationalizationof the Suez Canal — Britain,France, and Israel invadedEgypt in an ill-advisedadventure that shocked theworld. To get the invadersout of Egypt requiredsomething completely new,a U.N. “peace and policeforce,” as its sponsor, LesterPearson of Canada, called it.Hammarskjold asked Buncheto raise and deploy thisforce with minimum delay.Ominous Soviet threats ofintervention lent additionalurgency. Working around theclock with the enthusiasticsupport of the United Statesand many other countries,Bunche assembled anddeployed the United NationsEmergency Force in Egyptonly eight days after theGeneral Assembly had calledfor it.Bunche’s pioneeringeffort in internationalpeacekeeping was hisproudest achievement. Heset up and led the 20,000strong U.N. peacekeepingoperation dispatched to theCongo in 1960, and tookthe lead in forming a similarforce in Cyprus in 1964. AfterHammarskjold died in anair crash in Africa, Bunchebecame the indispensableadviser of Hammarskjold’ssuccessor, U Thant of Burma— so indispensable that UThant’s entreaties preventedBunche from retiring fromthe United Nations toimmerse himself full time inthe civil rights movement.Bunche died, from overworkand the effects of diabetes, onDecember 9, 1971.Ralph Bunche caredpassionately about gettingthings done, but very littleabout getting personal credit.(He even tried to refusethe Nobel Peace Prize.)His great achievements areremembered, but seldomhis role in them. AfricanAmericans, the millionsliberated from the oldcolonial world, and theUnited Nations itself areparticularly in his debt. Hewas one of the greatest publicservants of the 20th century.By Brian UrquhartA former UndersecretaryGeneral of the UnitedNations, Urquhart is theauthor of Hammarskjöld,A Life in Peace and War,Ralph Bunche: An AmericanOdyssey, and other historicalstudies.32 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTThe Brooklyn Dodgersarrived at Shibe Park,bringing their newlightning rod of controversyto the baseball stadium inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania— a black player named JackieRobinson. The symbols ofintolerance flew down fromthe crowd, and the wordsof intolerance spilled outfrom the home team’s bench.“Philadelphia was the worst,”said Ralph Branca, whowas there as a pitcher forBrooklyn. “They threw blackcats on the field. They threwwatermelon on the field. BenChapman, the Philadelphiamanager, was very vocal,getting on Jackie.”It was 1947 in the UnitedStates, and for many thecountry still came in twoshades — black and white.Some hearts, including manyfrom the South, were longfilled with hate simply overthe color of a person’s skin.Black people, from theirperspective, didn’t deserveequal civil rights with whites.And that had extended to theunofficial-but-understoodidea among baseball officialsand team owners since beforethe turn of the century thatthe major leagues were forwhite players only. Blackswould have to play on theirown circuit, the Negroleagues.But then came Robinson,bursting past the colorbarrier on April 15, 1947, asan infielder for the team inthe racially diverse New YorkCity borough of Brooklyn. Hebecame a pioneering symbolthat transcended sports, alarge first step on a lengthypath toward driving homethe concept of equality. Histeammate Branca explainedhow Robinson’s achievementtranscended the baseballdiamond:I’ve often said that itchanged baseball, butit also changed thecountry and eventuallychanged the world … ..Jackie made it easier forJackie Robinson:Breaking the Color BarrierFREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 33Top: After a Brooklyn victory over the New York Yankees in the first game of the1952 World Series, Jackie Robinson (front right) celebrates with teammatesJoe Black (back left), Duke Snyder (front left), and Pee Wee Reese (back right).Team manager Chuck Dressen is at center.Above: Jackie Robinson (right) and former boxing heavyweight championFloyd Patterson (left) meet in Birmingham, Alabama with civil rights leadersRalph D. Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr., 1963.Rosa Parks. He made iteasier for Martin LutherKing Jr. And he madeit easier for any blackleader who was going tostrive for racial equality.It basically changed theattitude of the wholecountry as far as lookingat blacks.It happened on the team.We had southern guyswho grew up in that setof mores who lookeddown on blacks. They[African Americans] hadto ride in the back of thebus, and they couldn’tdrink at the same waterfountains, couldn’t go tothe same [bathrooms].They [the white players]eventually changedtheir minds.Born in Cairo, Georgia, onJanuary 31, 1919, Robinsongrew up in Pasadena,California. He excelled atfour sports while in collegeat the nearby University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles— baseball, football,basketball, and track. TheU.S. Army drafted him in1942. The military was stillsegregated (President HarryS. Truman would order itsdesegregation in 1948); whenthe proud Robinson refusedto ride in the back of a bus, hewas brought up on militarycharges of insubordination.But he was acquittedand earned an honorabledischarge. “He was a personof action,” says his widow,Rachel Robinson. “He didn’twant to be complacent aboutour situation.”Meanwhile, the BrooklynDodgers’ general manager,Branch Rickey, decided itwas time to integrate thenational pastime of baseball,not least because he believedthat African-Americanplayers would give his cluba competitive advantage.Rickey understood that hisman would have to possessthe fortitude and strength ofcharacter to withstand theinevitable racist taunts — andworse — of players and fans.Rickey scouted Robinson in1945, playing for Kansas Cityin the Negro leagues, anddecided that he had foundsuch a player, and such a man.Robinson spent the nextseason with the Dodgers’minor-league team inMontreal, and then waspromoted to the Dodgers forthe 1947 season. It wasn’t easybeing a pioneer. Rickey madeRobinson promise for threeyears not to respond to theinsults that came at him fromfans around the league andthe opposing teams. Enduringpressure experienced byno player before or since,Robinson excelled on thefield.In his first major-leagueseason, at the age of 28,Robinson played first baseand compiled a .297 battingaverage. He displayed adynamic style by stealinga National League-leading29 bases, won the league’sRookie of the Year award, andhelped the team reach theWorld Series. It helped thatother teams acknowledgedthat Robinson had giventhe Dodgers a real edge andbegan themselves signingand playing black players. Hisbest season came in 1949:He played second base andbatted .342 with 16 homeruns, 124 runs batted in, and37 stolen bases, earning theleague’s Most Valuable Playeraward.In all, Robinson spent 10seasons with the Dodgersand made six World Seriesappearances, includingBrooklyn’s one and onlychampionship year of 1955.After the following season,the six-time All-Star retiredrather than go along with atrade to the rival New YorkGiants. In 1962, Robinson wasinducted into the BaseballHall of Fame, the first blackplayer so honored.After his playing careerended, Robinson continuedto help in the fight for racialequality, speaking up for civilrights and for the leadingmen and organizationsin the movement. Thisincluded service on theBoard of Directors of theNational Association for theAdvancement of ColoredPeople.In 1972, Jackie Robinsonsuffered a heart attack anddied, age 53. In those 53 years,Robinson impacted millionsof lives. He shamed the bigot,inspired African Americans,and through his unflaggingexample of resilience anddignity moved Americans ofall stripes toward acceptanceof African-American civilrights.“A life is not important,”Robinson himself said,“except in the impact it has onother lives.”By Brian HeymanThe winner of over 30journalism awards, BrianHeyman is a sportswriter atThe Journal-News in WhitePlains, New York.34 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTFREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 35— 5 —“WeHaveaMovement”The successful boycott of segregated busesin Montgomery, Alabama — which beganwith the arrest of Rosa Parks on December1, 1955 — transformed the civil rightscause into a mass political movement. It demonstratedthat African Americans could unite and engage indisciplined political action, and marked the emergence ofMartin Luther King Jr. — the indispensable leader whoinspired millions, held them to the high moral standardof nonviolent resistance, and built bridges betweenAmericans of all races, creeds, and colors. While manybrave activists contributed to the civil rights revolution of the1960s, it was King who, more than any other individual, forcedmillions of white Americans to confront directly the realityof Jim Crow — and shaped the political reality in which thelandmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of1965 could become law.“Tired of Giving In”: The Montgomery Bus BoycottRosa Parks would later say of the day that changed her life:“The only tired I was was tired of giving in.” A secondaryschool graduate at a time when diplomas were hard to comeby for blacks in the South, Parks was active in her localNAACP, a registered voter (another privilege held by fewsouthern blacks), and a respected figure in Montgomery,Alabama. In the summer of 1955, she attended an interracialleadership conference at the Highlander Folk School, aTennessee institution that trained labor organizers anddesegregation advocates. Parks thus knew of efforts toimprove the lot of African Americans and that she was wellsuited to provide a test case should the occasion arise.On December 1, 1955, Parks was employed as aseamstress at a local department store. When she rode homefrom work that afternoon, she sat in the first row of the“colored section” of seats between the “white” and “black”Above: Dr. King outlines strategies for theboycott of Montgomery, Alabama, buses.Among his advisors is Rosa Parks, seatedsecond from left in the front row.Left: After Rosa Parks refused to give upher bus seat, she was arrested, booked,and jailed. Her booking photo wasdiscovered nearly a half-century later,during a house cleaning of the sheriff’soffice.36 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTrows. When the white seats filled, the driver ordered Parks togive up her seat when another white person boarded the bus.Parks refused. She was arrested, jailed, and ultimately fined$10, plus $4 in court costs. Parks was 42 years old; she hadcrossed the line into direct political action.An outraged black community formed the MontgomeryImprovement Association (MIA) to organize a boycott ofthe city bus system. Partly to forestall rivalries among localcommunity leaders, citizens turned to a recent arrival toMontgomery, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The newlyinstalled pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Kingwas just 26 years old but he had been born to leadership:His father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., headed theinfluential Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was active inthe Georgia chapter of the NAACP, and had since the 1920srefused to ride Atlanta’s segregated bus system.In his first speech to MIA, the younger King toldthe group:We have no alternative but to protest. For many years wehave shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes givenour white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we werebeing treated. But we come here tonight to be saved fromthat patience that makes us patient with anything less thanfreedom and justice.Under King’s leadership, boycotters organized carpools,while black taxi drivers charged boycotters the same fare — 10cents — they would have paid on the bus. By auto, by horseand-buggy, and even simply by walking, direct, nonviolentpolitical action forced the city to pay a heavy economic pricefor its segregationist ways.It also made a national figure of King, whose powerfulpresence and unsurpassed oratorical skills drew publicityfor the movement and attracted support from sympatheticwhites, especially those in the North. King, Time magazinelater concluded, had “risen from nowhere to become oneof the nation’s remarkable leaders of men.”Even after his house was attacked and King himself,along with more than 100 boycotters, was arrested for“hindering a bus,” his continued grace and adherence tononviolent tactics earned respect for the movement anddiscredited the segregationists of Montgomery. Whenan explosion shook King’s house with his wife and babydaughter inside, it briefly appeared that a riot wouldensue. But King calmed the crowd:We want to love our enemies — be good to them. Thisis what we must live by, we must meet hate with love.We must love our white brothers no matter what theydo to us.A white Montgomery policeman later told a journalist:“I’ll be honest with you, I was terrified. I owe my life tothat … preacher, and so do all the other white people whowere there.”In the end, the desegregation of the Montgomery bussystem required not only Rosa Parks’s personal initiative andbravery and King’s political leadership, but also an NAACPstyle legal effort. As the boycotters braved segregationistopposition, desegregationist attorneys cited the precedent ofBrown v. Board of Education in their court challenge to theMontgomery bus ordinance. In November 1956, the SupremeCourt of the United States rejected the city’s final appeal, andthe segregation of Montgomery buses ended. Thus fortified,the civil rights movement moved on to new battles.Sit-InsShortly after the successful conclusion of the Montgomerybus boycott, Martin Luther King and a number of seniormovement figures — the Reverends Ralph Abernathy, T.J.Jemison, Joseph Lowery, Fred Shuttlesworth, and C.K. Steele,and the activists Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin — founded theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This newcivil rights organization was devoted to a more aggressiveapproach than that of the legally oriented NAACP. The SCLClaunched “Crusade for Citizenship,” a voter registration effort.Younger activists, meanwhile, were growing impatientwith King’s gradualist tactics. In 1960, some 200 of them,including Howard University student Stokley Carmichael,formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, orSNCC. And in Greensboro, North Carolina, four freshmanat the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and TechnicalCollege took matters into their own hands.At 4:30 p.m. on February 1, 1960, students Ezell BlairJr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin Eugene McCain, JosephAlfred McNeil, and David Leinail took whites-only seats ata local Woolworth department store lunch counter. Theywere denied service, but sat quietly until the store closedA Montgomery, Alabama, sit-in, 1961. Merely by sitting quietly at segregatedlunch counters, civil rights activists risked arrest … and much worse.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 37an hour later. The next morning, 20 Negro students tooklunch-counter seats in groups of three or four. “There wasno disturbance,” the Greensboro Record reported, “and thereappeared to be no conversation except among the groups.Some students pulled out books and appeared to be studying.”Blair told the newspaper that Negro adults “have beencomplacent and fearful. … It is time for someone to wake upand change the situation … and we decided to start here.”The nonviolent occupation of a public space, or sit-in,dated at least to Mahatma Gandhi’s campaigns for Indianindependence from Britain. In the United States, labororganizations and the northern-based Congress of RacialEquality (CORE) had employed sit-ins as well. As events inGreensboro began to draw attention, SNCC moved swiftly toassociate itself with this civil rights tactic, and over the nexttwo months, sit-ins spread to more than 50 cities.Particularly significant were events in Nashville,Tennessee, where the King-affiliated Nashville ChristianLeadership Council had been preparing for this moment. Backin 1955, King had reached out to the Reverend James Lawson,a civil rights activist and missionary who had served inIndia and studied Gandhian satyagraha, or nonviolentresistance. King urged Lawson to relocate to the South:“Come now,” King said. “We don’t have anyone like youdown there.”Working with King’s Southern ChristianLeadership Conference, Lawson in 1958 began totrain a new generation of nonviolent activists. Hisstudents included Diane Nash, James Bevel, and JohnLewis, today a U.S. representative from Georgia. Allsoon would assume prominence in the civil rightsmovement. At these training seminars, they agreed tostage a series of sit-ins at department store restaurants.Blacks were permitted to spend money in those stores,but not to eat at their restaurants.The Nashville activists organized carefully andmoved deliberately. But when the Greensboro sit-inbegan to draw national attention, they were ready. InFebruary 1960, hundreds of their activists began the sitins. Their student-drafted instruction sheets capturedthe personal discipline and dignified commitment tononviolence they would offer the world:Don’t strike back or curse back if abused. … Don’t blockentrances to the stores and aisles.Show yourself friendly and courteous at all times.Sit straight and always face the counter. …Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mohandas K.Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.Remember love and nonviolence, may God bless eachof you.Typically a lunch counter would close when a sit-inbegan, but after the first few incidents, police began to arrestprotestors, and the subsequent trials drew large crowds.When convicted of disorderly conduct, the activists chose toserve jail time rather than pay a fine.Nashville was an early example of how Jim Crowcould not survive exposure. The legendary journalist DavidHalberstam was just beginning his career, and his reportsfor the Nashville Tennessean helped attract national mediaattention. The sit-in movement spread throughout much of thecountry, and soon Americans across the nation were stunnedby photographs like the one that appeared in the February 28,1960 New York Times. The caption read: “A white man swingsan 18-inch-long [46-centimeter-long] bat at a Negro womanin Montgomery. She was injured by the blow. The attackoccurred yesterday after the woman brushed against anotherwhite man. Police, standing near by, made no arrest.”The labor leader A. Philip Randolph (right) founded and ledthe Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which offered many AfricanAmericans a rare pathway to middle-class employment. Randolph’sthreatened 1941 march on Washington forced President Franklin D. Rooseveltto bar racial discrimination by defense contractors and served as the modelfor the famous 1963 march.38 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTOn April 19 of that year, a bomb exploded at the homeof the Nashville students’ chief legal counsel. Some 2,000African Americans swiftly organized a march to the CityHall, where they confronted the mayor. Would he, DianeNash asked, favor ending lunch-counter segregation? Yes,came the reply, but, “I can’t tell a man how to run his business.He has got rights too.”This “right” to discriminate lay at the heart of the struggle.Meanwhile, the bad publicity stung the businessmen ofNashville, as did the stark contrast between the dignified,nonviolent black students and their armed and all-too-violentopponents. Secret negotiations began, and on May 10, 1960,quietly and without fanfare, a number of downtown lunchcounters began serving black customers. There were nofurther incidents, and soon thereafter Nashville became thefirst southern city successfully to begin desegregating itspublic facilities.Freedom RidesSome of the young Nashville sit-in leaders joined up with theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which in 1961helped to launch the “Freedom Rides.” Back in 1946, ThurgoodMarshall’s NAACP lawyers had obtained a Supreme Courtruling that barred segregation in interstate bus travel. (Underthe U.S. federal system of government, it is easier for thenational government to regulate commerce that crossesstate lines.) In the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision, theCourt expanded its ruling to include bus terminals and otherfacilities associated with interstate travel. But possessing aright and exercising it are two very different things.It was widely understood that any African Americanwho exercised his or her constitutional right to sit at thefront of an interstate bus or use the previously whites-onlyfacilities at a southern bus terminal would meet with a violentresponse. Understanding this, an interracial group of 13,including CORE National Director James Farmer, departedWashington, D.C., by bus. Farmer and his companionsplanned to make several stops en route to New Orleans. “Ifthere is arrest, we will accept that arrest,” Farmer said. “Andif there is violence, we are willing to receive that violencewithout responding in kind.”Farmer was right to anticipate violence. Perhaps the worstof it occurred near Anniston, Alabama. Departing Atlanta,the Freedom Riders had split into two groups, one riding ina Greyhound bus, the other in a Trailways bus. When theGreyhound bus reached Anniston, the sidewalks, unusually,were lined with people. The reason soon became clear. Whenthe bus reached the station parking lot, a mob set upon it,using rocks and brass knuckles to shatter some of the buswindows. Two white highway patrolmen in the bus, assignedto spy on the Riders, sealed the door and prevented the KuKlux Klan-led mob from entering.When the local police finally arrived, they bantered withthe crowd, made no arrests, and escorted the bus to the citylimits. The mob, by some accounts now about 200 strong,followed close behind in cars and pickup trucks. About 10kilometers outside Anniston, flat tires brought the bus to ahalt. A crowd of white men attempted to board the bus, andone threw a fire bomb through a bus window. As the historianRaymond Arsenault writes: “The Freedom Riders had beenall but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced themob that the whole bus was about to explode.” The bus wasconsumed by the blaze; the fleeing Freedom Riders, reportedthe Associated Press, “took a brief but bloody beating.”Boarding a June, 1961 Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C., toFlorida are the Rev. Perry A. Smith III, of Brentwood, Maryland,and Rev. Robert Stone of New York City.Left: A Trailways bus with Freedom Riders aboard approaches thebus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 39The second group of Freedom Riders shared theirTrailways bus with a group of Klansmen who boarded atAtlanta. When the black Freedom Riders refused to sit at theback of the bus, more beatings ensued. The white FreedomRiders, among them 61-year-old educator Walter Bergman,were attacked with particular savagery. All of the FreedomRiders held to their Ghandian training; none fought back.When the bus at last arrived in Birmingham, matters onlygrew worse. CBS News commentator Howard K. Smithoffered an eyewitness account: “When the bus arrived, thetoughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors,pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists.”Inside the segregated bus station, the Freedom Ridershesitated momentarily, then entered the whites-only waitingroom. They, too, were beaten, some unconscious, whileBirmingham’s police chief, Eugene “Bull” Connor, refused torestrain the Klansmen and their supporters.Still, the Riders were determined to continue. InWashington, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy askedAlabama Governor John Patterson to guarantee safe passagethrough his state. Patterson declined: “The citizens of the stateare so enraged I cannot guarantee protection for this bunchof rabble-rousers.” A member of Alabama’s congressionaldelegation, Representative George Huddleston Jr., deemed theFreedom Riders “self-anointed merchants of racial hatred.”He said the firebombed Greyhound group “got just what theyasked for.”In Nashville, Diane Nash feared the politicalconsequences. “If the Freedom Ride had been stopped as aresult of violence,” she later said, “I strongly felt that the futureof the movement was going to be just cut short becausethe impression would have been giventhat whenever a movement starts, thatall that has to be done is that you attackit with massive violence and the blackswould stop.” With reinforcements fromthe Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee and other black and whiteactivists supplementing the originalFreedom Riders, a new effort was launched.On May 20, a group of Freedom Ridersboarded a Birmingham-to-Montgomery,Alabama, Greyhound. Their bus wasmet by a mob estimated at 1,000 “withinan instant” of pulling into the station,the Associated Press reported. Amongthe injured were John Seigenthaler, anassistant to Attorney General Kennedy.Kennedy dispatched 400 federal marshals to Montgomery toenforce order, while the Congress of Racial Equality promisedto continue the Freedom Ride, pressing on to Jackson,Mississippi, and then to New Orleans. “Many students arestanding by in other cities to serve as volunteers if needed,”James Farmer told the New York Times. And some 450Americans did step forward, boarding the buses and thenfilling the jails, notably in Jackson, when Farmer and othersrefused to pay fines imposed for “breaching the peace.”On May 29, Attorney General Kennedy directed theInterstate Commerce Commission to adopt stiff regulationsto enforce the integration of interstate transportation. Theagency did so. With this sustained federal effort, Jim Crowfaltered in bus terminals, on buses, and on trains, at least thosethat crossed state lines.The Freedom Riders’ victory set the tone for the greatcivil rights campaigns that followed. Not for the first timeduring these climactic years, a free press forced Americans totake a cold, hard look at the reality of racial oppression. TheBirmingham mob beat Tommy Langston, a photographer forthe local Post-Herald newspaper, and smashed his camera. Butthey forgot to remove the film, and the newspaper’s front pagesubsequently displayed his picture of the savage beating of ablack bystander. Each arrest and each beating attracted moremedia and more coverage. And while many of those accountsstill referred to “Negro militants,” the contrast between raofferwhite mobs and the calm, dignified, biracial Freedom Ridersforced Americans to decide, or at this point at least begindeciding: Who best represented American values?White religious leaders were prominent among thosewho lauded the bravery of the Freedom Riders and thejustice of their cause. The Reverend Billy Graham called forprosecution of their attackers and declared it “deplorablewhen certain people in any society have been treated asFreedom Riders traveling from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson,Mississippi, are escorted by National Guardsmen with bayonets at the ready.Over 20 additional Freedom Riders are behind the guardsmen.40 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTsecond-class citizens.” Rabbi Bernard J.Bamberger denounced white segregationistviolence as “utterly indefensible in terms ofmorality and law” and criticized whites whourged civil rights activists to “go slow.” Andalways there were the righteous: RaymondArsenault writes that while the Greyhoundbus burned outside Anniston, “one little girl,12-year-old Janie Miller, supplied the chokingvictims with water, filling and refilling afive-gallon [19-liter] bucket while braving theinsults and taunts of Klansmen.”The Albany MovementTwo major civil rights campaigns during 1962and 1963 would illustrate both the limitsand the possibilities of nonviolent resistance.African Americans in the segregatedcity of Albany, Georgia, had traditionallyengaged in as much political activism as waspossible in the Jim Crow South. In 1961, SNCC volunteersarrived to beef up an ongoing voter registration effort. Theyestablished a voter-registration center that served as a homebase for a campaign of sit-ins, boycotts, and other protests. InNovember 1961, a number of local black organizations formedthe Albany Movement, under the leadership of WilliamG. Anderson, a young osteopath. The protests accelerated,and by mid-December more than 500 demonstrators hadbeen jailed. Anderson had met both Martin Luther King Jr.and his colleague, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, pastor atMontgomery’s First Baptist Church and King’s chief lieutenantat the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He decidedto invite King’s help, both to maintain the Albany Movement’smomentum and to secure national publicity for its cause.Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett proved a formidableopponent for King and the other activists. Pritchett realizedthat news media coverage of segregationist violence againstdignified, nonviolent civil rights activists already had turnedmany Americans against Jim Crow. Pritchett workedassiduously to deprive the Albany Movement of a similar“media moment.” Albany police officers were warned againstemploying any kind of violence against protestors, especially ifthe press was nearby. While earlier protestors had successfully“filled the jails,” Pritchett scattered them in jails throughoutthe surrounding counties. “In the end,” the New GeorgiaEncyclopedia concluded, “King ran out of willing marchersbefore Pritchett ran out of jail space.”Pritchett also understood that King was the media starand that national press coverage would ebb if there was noKing “angle” to pursue. King returned several times to Albany,and several times was arrested and convicted for breach ofthe peace. When the court offered King and Abernathy theirchoice of jail time or a fine, they chose jail, the option certainto attract press coverage. But they found that an “anonymousbenefactor” — a segregationist recruited by Pritchett — hadpaid their fine.When the media moment finally came, it was not the oneKing had hoped for. By July 24, 1962, many of Albany’s AfricanAmericans had grown frustrated at the lack of progress. Thatevening, a crowd of 2,000 blacks armed with bricks, bottles,and rocks attacked a group of Albany policemen and Georgiahighway patrolmen. One trooper lost two teeth. But LauriePritchett’s well-schooled officers did not retaliate, and thechief was quick to seize the initiative: “Did you see themnonviolent rocks?” he asked.King moved swiftly to limit the damage. He cancelled aplanned mass demonstration and declared a day of penance.But a federal injunction against further demonstrations inAlbany added to the difficulties: Up till then, the civil rightscause had had the law on its side. Further action in Albanywould allow segregationists to portray King and his followersas lawbreakers.King understood that his presence in Albany would nolonger help the wider movement. SNCC, NAACP, CORE, andother local activists continued the fight in Albany and wouldeventually secure real gains for the city’s African Americans.For King and his SCLC team, Albany was a learningexperience. As King explained in his autobiography:Montgomery, Alabama: about 70 clergymen of different creeds anddenominations being arrested after holding an anti-segregation prayer vigilin front of city hall, August 1962.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 41When we planned our strategy for Birmingham monthslater, we spent many hours assessing Albany and tryingto learn from its errors. Our appraisals not only helped tomake our subsequent tactics more effective, but revealedthat Albany was far from an unqualified failure.Arrest in BirminghamIf Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett possessed the politicalsavvy and emotional detachment to fight nonviolence withnonviolence, his Birmingham, Alabama, counterpart, BullConnor, did not. King and the other movement leaders rightlyanticipated that Connor would prove a perfect foil. Kingbiographer Marshall Frady depicted Connor as “a bombasticsegregationist of the old, unapologetically bluff sort — apodgy, strutful, middle-aged bossman in a snap-brim strawhat who … held a famously irascible temper.” Connor didnot represent the views of all white Birmingham residents; arecent municipal election had produced gains for reformistcandidates. But he controlled the police, and the “greeting”that the Freedom Riders had experienced in Birminghamamply illustrated what activists might expect to find there.Albany had taught King and his SCLC team to focus onspecific goals rather than a general desegregation. As Kinglater wrote:We concluded that in hard-core communities, a moreeffective battle could be waged if it was concentratedagainst one aspect of the evil and intricate systemof segregation. We decided, therefore, to center theBirmingham struggle on the business community, for weknew that the Negro population had sufficient buyingpower so that its withdrawal could make the differencebetween profit and loss for many businesses.On April 3, 1963, activists launched a round of lunchcounter sit-ins. A march on Birmingham’s City Hall followedon the 6th. The city’s African Americans began to boycottdowntown businesses, a tactic King deemed “amazinglyeffective.” A number of shops swiftly removed their whitesonly signs, only to be threatened by Bull Connor with the lossof their business licenses. As the numbers of volunteers grew,the Birmingham movement expanded its efforts to “kneel-ins”in local church buildings and library sit-ins. The number ofarrests grew and the jails filled.The police response remained muted to this point. TheNew York Times described a typical incident:Eight Negros entered the segregated library. They strolledthrough three of the four floors and sat at desks readingmagazines and books. The police were present but did notorder them to leave. They left voluntarily after about halfan hour.About 25 whites were in the library when the Negroesentered. Some made derogatory remarks such as, “It stinksin here.” Others asked the Negroes: “Why don’t you gohome?” But there were no incidents.On April 10, Connor followed Pritchett’s example,obtaining a county court injunction barring King, FredShuttlesworth, and 134 other leaders from engaging in boycotts,sit-ins, picketing, and other protest activities. Any violation ofthe injunction would be contempt of court, punishable by moresubstantial jail time than a mere breach of peace.King now faced a choice. He and Abernathy decided theywould violate the injunction. King issued a brief statement:We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunctionwhich is an unjust, undemocratic, and unconstitutionalmisuse of the legal process.We do this not out of any disrespect for the law but out ofthe highest respect for the law. This is not an attempt toevade or defy the law or engage in chaotic anarchy. Just asin all good conscience we cannot obey unjust laws, neithercan we respect the unjust use of the courts.We believe in a system of law based on justice and morality.Out of our great love for the Constitution of the UnitedStates and our desire to purify the judicial system ofthe state of Alabama, we risk this critical move with anawareness of the possible consequences involved.On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King leda protest march toward downtown Birmingham. On the fifthblock, King, Abernathy, and about 60 others, including a whiteclergyman who joined the protest, were arrested. As King wastaken into custody, Connor remarked: “That’s what he camedown here for, to get arrested. Now he’s got it.”Albany, Georgia: African-American demonstrators kneel in prayer during aDecember 1961 hearing for Freedom Riders arrested there.42 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTLetter From Birmingham JailAs King languished in his jail cell, he produced one of themost extraordinary documents in the history of Americanthought. A number of local white clergymen, themselvesfriendly to King’s long-term objectives, disagreed with hisshort-term tactics. They published a public statement callingthe King-led demonstrations “unwise and untimely,” andthey opposed King’s civil disobedience “however technicallypeaceful those actions may be.”King’s reply was the Letter From Birmingham Jail. Lackingwriting paper, he scribbled in the margins of a newspaperpage. King’s handwritten words wrapped around the pestcontrol ads and garden club news, recalled the King aide whosmuggled the newsprint out of the jail. Yet those margins helda powerful condemnation of inaction in the face of injustice,and they displayed an extraordinary faith that in America thecause of freedom necessarily would prevail.King answered the white pastors’ charges with timeless,universal truth. Accused of being an outsider fomentingtension in Birmingham, King replied that, in the face ofoppression, there were no outsiders. “Injustice anywhere is athreat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapablenetwork of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” As forthe tension: “There is a type of constructive, nonviolenttension which is necessary for growth.” For those who do notthemselves suffer from the disease of segregation, King added,no direct action ever seems well timed: “ ‘Wait’ has almostalways meant ‘Never.’” No man, he continued, can “set thetimetable for another man’s freedom.”Acknowledging that he and his followers had indeedviolated the county court injunction, King cited SaintAugustine’s distinction between just and unjust laws. Heasserted that one who breaks an unjust law in order to arousethe consciousness of his community “is in reality expressingthe highest respect for law,” provided he acts “openly, lovingly,and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” Writing from hiscell, King led by example.From that cell, King believed that in the United States,freedom ultimately would —indeed, must — prevail: “Ihave no fear about the outcome of our struggle. … We willreach the goal of freedom ... because the goal of America isfreedom. … Our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny ...the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of Godare embodied in our echoing demands. … One day,” Kingconcluded, “the South will recognize its real heroes.”“We Have a Movement”Because the Birmingham campaign required their leadership,Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy posted bondafter eight days in jail. They turned to an idea credited to theReverend James Bevel, a Nashville sit-in and Freedom Rideveteran recruited by King to serve as Southern ChristianLeadership Conference’s director of direct action andnonviolent education. Knowing that few black families couldafford to have their primary wage earner serve jail time, Bevelbegan to organize the city’s young African Americans. Collegestudents, secondary schoolers, and even elementary schoolpupils were instructed in the principles of nonviolence. Theyprepared to march downtown, there to enter whites-onlylunch counters, use the whites-only drinking fountains, studyin the whites-only libraries, pray in the whites-only churches.In some denominations, at least, white churches welcomedthe young blacks.The decision to use children was a controversial one. TheSCLC’s executive director, the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker,defended it on the grounds that “Negro children will get abetter education in five days in jail than in five months in asegregated school.” In his Autobiography, King related the caseof a black teenager who decided to march in the face of hisfather’s objections:“Daddy,” the boy said, “I don’t want to disobey you, but Ihave made my pledge. If you try to keep me home, I willsneak off. If you think I deserve to be punished for that, I’lljust have to take the punishment. For, you see, I’m not doingthis only because I want to be free. I’m doing it also becauseI want freedom for you and Mama, and I want it to comebefore you die.”That father thought again, and gave his son his blessing.On May 2, 1963, hundreds of young African Americansset out, linked by walkie-talkie, singing “We Shall Overcome.”Hundreds were arrested, swelling the Birmingham jail wellbeyond its capacity. Perhaps most importantly, they stretchedBull Connor’s temper to its breaking point.On May 3, Connor determined to halt thedemonstrations by force. Fire hoses set to full pressure —enough to peel bark from a tree — knocked protestors off theirfeet and rolled them down the asphalt streets. At the policechief’s order, police dogs were used to disperse the crowds,and several demonstrators were bitten.Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activistJames Foreman was at SCLC headquarters when the newscame. He reported that the leaders there were “jumping upand down, elated. … They said over and over again, ‘We’vegot a movement. We’ve got a movement. We had somepolice brutality.’ ” Foreman thought this “very cold, cruel,and calculating,” but, as the historian C. Vann WoodwardFREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 43concluded: “The more seasoned campaigners had learned theprice and worth of photographic opportunities.”The young demonstrators returned each day that week, asdid the hoses and the dogs. The resulting photographs, video,and written accounts dominated the news in the UnitedStates and in much of the world. Faced with the greatestprovocation, most demonstrators remained nonviolent. JamesBevel roamed the streets, shouting through a bullhorn: “Ifyou’re not going to demonstrate in a nonviolent way, thenleave.” By May 6, Bull Connor was housing thousands of childprisoners at the state fairgrounds.A New York Times editorial expressed the feeling ofgrowing numbers of Americans:No American schooled in respect for human dignitycan read without shame of the barbarities committedby Alabama police authorities against Negro and whitedemonstrators for civil rights. The use of police dogsand high-pressure fire hose to subdue schoolchildrenin Birmingham is a national disgrace. The herding ofhundreds of teenagers and many not yet in their teens intojails and detention homes for demanding their birthright offreedom makes a mockery of legal process.In Washington, D.C., one very important reader sharedthis sentiment. As King biographer Marshall Frady relates:One news photo of a policeman clutching the shirtfront of ablack youth with one hand while his other held the leash ofa dog swirling at the youth’s midsection happened to passunder the eyes of the president in the Oval Office, and hetold a group of visitors that day, “It makes me sick.”On May 7, Fred Shuttlesworth was injured by a fire hosestream that hurled him against the side of his church. Arrivinga few minutes later, Bull Connor declared: “I’m sorry I missedit. … I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”By May 9, Birmingham’s business leaders had had enough.They negotiated an agreement with King and Shuttlesworth.Birmingham businesses would desegregate their lunchcounters, restrooms, and drinking fountains. They would hireand promote black employees. The jailed protestors would befreed, and charges dropped. Bull Connor called it “the worstday of my life.”The triumph of the Birmingham movement reflected thebravery and discipline of the African-American protestors. Itspoke to the inspiring and hard-headed leadership of men likeMartin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth,James Bevel, and others. It forced Americans to confrontsquarely — in their newspapers and on their televisionscreens — the reality of Jim Crow brutality. And it reflectedan idealism that had survived both slavery and segregation,and also an impatience over promises long deferred. On May8, a Birmingham juvenile court judge conducted a hearingon the case of a 15-year-old boy arrested during the May 3demonstrations:Judge: I often think of what the Founding Fathers said:“There is no freedom without restraint.” Now I want you togo home and go back to school. Will you do that?Boy: Can I say something?Judge: Anything you like.Boy: Well, you can say that because you’ve got yourfreedom. The Constitution says we’re all equal, but Negroesaren’t equal.Judge: But you people have made great gains and they stillare. It takes time.Boy: We’ve been waiting over 100 years.The March on WashingtonBirmingham was a real victory, but a costly one. The longterm solution could not be for African Americans to defeatsegregation one city at a time or by absorbing beatings, dogbites, and hosings. Even as the civil rights movement scoredreal gains, each advance came over dogged opposition.Federal troops were needed to ensure the admission ofJames Meredith, the first black to study at the University ofMississippi, in 1962. The following year, Alabama’s governor,George Wallace, whose inaugural address promised“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregationforever,” staged a “stand in the schoolhouse door.” Only theintervention of federal marshals ensured the enrollment ofAfrican Americans Vivian Malone and James Hood at theUniversity of Alabama. The very next day, Medgar Evers,leader of the Mississippi NAACP, was murdered outside hisBirmingham, Alabama, May 1963: Fire hoses set to full pressure could stripthe bark from a tree. Sheriff Bull Connor ordered their use against non-violentcivil rights protestors and a horrified nation watched.44 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENThome in Jackson. And in Birmingham itself, on September15, 1963, three Klansmen planted 19 sticks of dynamite inthe basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, theunofficial headquarters of the Birmingham movement. Fouryoung girls — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, CynthiaWesley, and Denise McNair — were killed and 22 injured.On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy toldthe nation that he would submit to Congress legislationprohibiting segregation in all privately owned facilities:hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and the like. “Weare confronted primarily,” the president said, “with a moralissue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the AmericanConstitution.” But the obstacles to passage of effective civilrights laws remained imposing.A number of black leaders were determined to changethe political reality in which members of Congress wouldconsider civil rights legislation. One was A. Philip Randolph.Now well into his 70s, Randolph had earlier organized and fordecades led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union.African Americans had long supplied large numbers of railcar attendants. These were among the best jobs open to blacksin much of the country, and Randolph, as leader of theseporters, had emerged as an important figure in the Americanlabor movement.Back in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had soughtto boost defense production in anticipation of possible U.S.entry into the Second World War. Randolph confrontedRoosevelt, demanding an end to segregation in federalgovernment agencies and among defense contractors.Otherwise, Randolph warned, he would launch a massiveprotest march on Washington, D.C. Roosevelt soon issued anexecutive order barring discrimination in defense industriesand federal bureaus and creating the Fair EmploymentPractices Committee. After the war, pressure from Randolphcontributed to President Harry S Truman’s 1948 orderdesegregating the American armed forces.Now Randolph and his talented assistant Bayard Rustincontemplated a similar march, hoping “to embody in onegesture civil rights as well as national economic demands.” A“Big Six” group of civil rights leaders was formed to organizethe event. Included were Randolph, King, Roy Wilkins(representing the National Association for the Advancementof Colored People), James Farmer (Congress of RacialEquality), John Lewis (Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee), and Whitney Young Jr. (Urban League). Theyfixed a date: August 28, 1963, and site for the main rally: theLincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.The “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” wouldbe the largest political demonstration the nation had everseen. Chartered buses and trains carried participants fromthroughout the nation. A quarter-million Americans, and bysome estimates even more, gathered that day, among them atleast 50,000 whites. On the podium stood a stellar assemblageof civil rights champions, Christian and Jewish religiousleaders, labor chiefs, and entertainers. The black contraltoMarian Anderson, who had performed at the LincolnMemorial in 1939 after being refused permission to sing atWashington’s Constitution Hall, offered the national anthem.Each of the Big Six addressed the crowd that day, except forFarmer, who had been arrested during a protest in Louisiana.The best-remembered moment would be King’s.Considered by many the finest oration ever delivered by anAmerican, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech drew on themesfrom the Bible and from such iconic American texts as theConstitution, the Declaration of Independence, and AbrahamLincoln’s Gettysburg Address. King organized his remarks inthe style and structure of a sermon, the kind he had deliveredat many a Sunday morning church service.The speech began by linking the civil rights causeto earlier promises unfulfilled. Lincoln’s EmancipationProclamation, King said, appeared to the freed slaves as “ajoyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.” But100 years later, he continued, “the Negro … finds himself anexile in his own land.” When the nation’s founders wrote theDeclaration of Independence and the Constitution, “they weresigning a promissory note to which every American was tofall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black menas well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienablerights’ of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”America, King continued, had defaulted on thatpromissory note, at least to her citizens of color.We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. Werefuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the greatvaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come toThe “Big Six” meet in New York to plan the March on Washington. Left toright: John Lewis, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr.,James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 45cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand theriches of freedom and the security of justice.“There will be neither rest nor tranquility in Americauntil the Negro is granted his citizenship rights,” King warned,but he also noted thatin the process of gaining our rightful place, we must notbe guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy ourthirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitternessand hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on thehigh plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow ourcreative protest to degenerate into physical violence.Some believe that King spoke extemporaneously as hedelivered the “dream” portion of his address. The famed gospelsinger Mahalia Jackson was on the stage while King spoke,and she addressed him during the speech: “Tell them aboutthe dream, Martin,” she said. And he did.… and so even though we face the difficulties of today andtomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rootedin the American dream.I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and liveout the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths tobe self-evident, that all men are created equal.”I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, thesons of former slaves and the sons of former slave ownerswill be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi,a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering withthe heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis offreedom and justice.I have a dream that my four little children will one day livein a nation where they will not be judged by the color oftheir skin but by the content of their character.I have a dream today!As the words and images of the day’s events sped acrossthe nation and around the world, momentum for real changeaccelerated. But there were battles still to be fought, andvictory, while ever closer, still lay in the distance.“I have a dream today!” Martin Luther King addresses the largest politicaldemonstration the nation had ever seen. For many, his speech in 1963was the finest ever delivered by an American.46 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTRosa McCauley Parksis known today as the“mother of the civilrights movement” becauseher arrest for refusing togive up her bus seat sparkedthe pivotal Montgomery,Alabama, bus boycott. Shedidn’t set out to make historywhen she left her job as aseamstress to board a bus onthe afternoon of December 1,1955. She was tired, and shejust wanted to go home. Still,when the bus driver asked herto move toward the back ofthe bus so that a white mancould sit, she couldn’t bringherself to do it.“I didn’t get on the buswith the intention of beingarrested,” she said later. “I goton the bus with the intentionof going home.”While she did not knowher act would set in motiona 381-day bus boycott, sheknew one thing. Her ownpersonal bus boycott beganthat day.“I knew that as far as I wasconcerned, I would never rideon a segregated bus again.”The arrest and brief jailingof Rosa Parks, a womanhighly respected in the blackcommunity, and the boycottthat followed led to a U.S.Supreme Court decisionoutlawing segregation oncity buses. The boycott alsoraised to national prominencea youthful, little-knownminister named MartinLuther King Jr. Under hisleadership, the boycott set aRosa Parks:Mother of the Civil Rights MovementAbove: Rosa Parks seated at the front ofthe bus, after the Supreme Court of theUnited States ruled unconstitutional thesegregated seating that had prevailed onthe Montgomery, Alabama, bus system.Parks’s December 1955 refusal to giveup her seat to a white man sparked theMontgomery Bus Boycott and launched thecivil rights career of Martin Luther King Jr.Right: Rosa Parks being fingerprinted afterher arrest.46 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTpattern for nonviolent,community-based protestthat became a successfulstrategy in the civil rightsmovement.There were many forcesin Rosa Parks’s early lifethat helped forge her quietactivism. She was bornRosa Louise McCauley onFebruary 4, 1913, in Tuskegee,Alabama. Her childhoodrevolved around a smallchurch where her unclewas the pastor. There shedeveloped both a strongfaith and a sense of racialpride. Parks later in life spokeproudly of the fact that theAfrican Methodist EpiscopalChurch had for generationsbeen a strong advocate forblack equality.She also was stronglyinfluenced by hergrandparents, especially hergrandfather. He respondedto the family’s fears of theviolent, racist, secret societyknown as the Ku KluxKlan by keeping a loadeddouble-barreled shotgunnearby. While the very realpossibility of Klan violencenever materialized forher immediate family, hergrandfather’s defiant attitudehelped mold her thinking.When she turned 11, Rosawas sent to a school for girlsin Montgomery that had anall-black student body andan all-white teaching staff.At the school, Parks learned“to believe we could do whatwe wanted in life.” She alsolearned from the teachersthat not all white peoplewere bigots.It was there she metJohnnie Carr, and the twogirls started a friendship thatwould last a lifetime. Carrsaid of her friend’s childhood:“I was noisy and talkative,but she was very quiet, andalways stayed out of trouble.But whatever she did, shealways put herself completelyinto it. But she was so quietyou would never havebelieved she would get to thepoint of being arrested.”Parks wanted to be ateacher, but had to dropout of school to care for herailing mother. (She laterreceived her high schooldiploma.) When she was 18,she fell in love with barberRaymond Parks and theylater married. During partof the Second World War,she worked at the raciallydesegregated Maxwell Field(now Maxwell Air ForceBase) in Montgomery.She later attributed herindignation toward thesegregated Montgomerytransportation system to thecontrast with the integratedon-base transportation shehad experienced.After the bus boycottended successfully in 1956,Parks continued workingfor civil rights. On severaloccasions she joined Kingto support his efforts. Thefollowing year, Parks movednorth, to Detroit, Michigan,where she worked forCongressmen John Conyers,who often joked that he hadmore people visit his office tomeet his staff assistant thanto meet him.Parks was inducted intothe National Women’s Hallof Fame in 1993. She waspresented the Medal ofFreedom Award by PresidentBill Clinton in 1996 andthe Congressional GoldMedal in 1999. The SouthernChristian Leadership Councilestablished an annual RosaParks Freedom Award.After her death onOctober 24, 2005, Congressapproved a resolutionallowing her body to lie inhonor in the rotunda of theU.S. Capitol. She was the 31stperson, the first woman, andonly the second black personto be accorded that honorsince the practice beganin 1852.Rosa Parks was alwaysmodest about her role in thecivil rights movement, givingcredit to a higher power forher decision not to give upher seat. “I was fortunateGod provided me with thestrength I needed at theprecise time conditions wereripe for change. I am thankfulto him every day that he gaveme the strength not to move.”By Kenneth M. HareThe Editorial Page Director atThe Montgomery (Alabama)Advertiser, Hare is also theauthor of They Walked toFreedom 1955–1956: TheStory of the Montgomery BusBoycott.Rosa Parks, age 84,displays a program from thededication of the Rosa ParksElementary School in SanFrancisco, California.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 47Civil Rights Workers:Death in MississippiThe murders of civilrights workers JamesChaney, AndrewGoodman, and MichaelSchwerner by a conspiracy ofpolice and Ku Klux Klansmenin Mississippi on June 21,1964, was one of the pivotalevents of the civil rightsmovement. Because twoof the victims were white— and their disappearancebaffled investigators foralmost the entire summerof 1964 — the case becamea national preoccupation,bringing the Federal Bureauof Investigation (FBI) andworld press attention to tinyPhiladelphia, Mississippi, thetown where the young menhad disappeared.Mississippi washistorically a conservativestate where whites exercisedconsiderable control over themajority black population;over the years, it haddeveloped a strong distrustfulattitude toward outsidersor anyone who threatened“the southern way of life,”meaning segregation and thedenial of many basic rightsto black people. As early as1961, civil rights workershad targeted Mississippifor efforts to encourageexpanded voting rights, forin its repressive environment,few blacks were allowed tovote. The voter registrationwork was difficult, however,with volunteers frequentlybeing beaten and arrested.Fearing that the rest of theUnited States did not fullyunderstand the importanceof these events, the civilrights movement hatched aplan to create the MississippiSummer Project, later knownas Freedom Summer, inwhich 1,000 northern collegestudents, mostly white,would flood the state tohelp with voter registrationand, by their presence, makeMississippi’s situation betterknown. At the prospectof such an “invasion,”local resistance stiffened;belligerent state leadersvowed opposition, and the KuKlux Klan, a white vigilantegroup that historically hademployed violence andintimidation to enforceregional racial customs, wasrevived.On the very first day ofFreedom Summer, June 21,the three civil rights workers— Chaney, a local blackMississippian who was 21;Goodman, a 20-year old NewYork college student; andSchwerner, a social workerfrom New York’s Lower EastSide who at 24 was alreadya veteran activist — droveto the remote black hamletof Longdale to investigate arecent Klan assault. They hadvisited previously in the hopeof opening a class to teachblacks how to register to vote.After meeting with theircontacts there and viewingthe charred remains of achurch the Klan had set onfire, the young men wereheading west toward thecounty seat of Philadelphiawhen Deputy Sheriff CecilRay Price stopped them forspeeding. He placed themunder arrest and escortedthem to the Neshoba Countyjail. The civil rights workers,while naturally suspiciousof the local police, did notresist. Like everyone in theirmovement, they believed inthe power of nonviolence andnonconfrontation to attainthe goal of racial equality.A 44-day FBI search in Mississippi discovered the bodies of the murderedcivil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Early Chaney, and MichaelHenry Schwerner.48 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTThey had no way of knowingthat Price was part of a Klanconspiracy to hold themin jail until a mob could beassembled.Later that night the deputyreleased the three boys, whoimmediately returned totheir car and began drivingtoward Meridian, wherethey were based, about ahalf hour’s drive south. Outon the dark rural highway,however, a Klan posse ofvehicles, including that ofDeputy Price, chased downthe civil rights workers.Removing them to a secludedarea nearby, the Klansmenpulled their victims from thecar, shot and killed them, andsecreted their bodies in anearthen dam being built on aneighborhood dairy farm.A 44-day search ensued,as FBI agents dispatched byPresident Lyndon Johnsonscoured the state. All summerlong the world read reports ofthe mystery, while Mississippiofficials refused to eveninvestigate the case, insistingthat the disappearance ofthe men was likely a hoax.When, on August 4, the FBIfinally located the dead civilrights workers, a nationaloutcry demanded that thoseresponsible for so heinousa crime be caught andpunished.In the U.S. justice system,murders are normallyprosecuted under state law,in the courts of the statewhere the crime took place.When Mississippi declinedto press murder charges, thefederal government soughtalternatives. Beginning in the1940s, Washington had triedunsuccessfully to prosecutesouthern lynch mobs underold Reconstruction-era civilrights laws. It had never doneso successfully, but the JusticeDepartment resolved to tryagain. In early December1964, the FBI arrested 21 menin the case — local Klansmenand several police officers,among them the NeshobaCounty sheriff and his deputy— and charged them withconspiracy to violate thethree activists’ civil rights.Prosecutors were forced togo all the way to the U.S.Supreme Court to have thelaws clarified and validatedfor use in this case. But in1967, in a landmark verdict, afederal jury of Mississippiansfound seven of the defendantsguilty, and the federal courthanded down sentences of upto 10 years.The murders of Chaney,Goodman, and Schwernerproved a tipping point inovercoming the doggedresistance of “FortressMississippi.” Whilesome civil rights workerscomplained that it had takenthe deaths of white menfinally to bring nationalscrutiny on Mississippi, thepowerful national reactionhelped topple the state’sparticularly vicious formsof racial discriminationonce and for all. Today,black Mississippians votein large numbers, sit in thestate legislature, and haverepresented their state in theU.S. Congress.In the decades after 1964,many Mississippians grewashamed of their state’sconduct during the civilrights era, and there werecalls for the state to come toterms with its mishandling ofthe affair. On June 21, 2005,exactly 41 years to the daysince the three young menhad vanished, a Mississippistate court convicted EdgarRay Killen, a Klan organizerof the conspiracy who hadlong escaped accountability,of manslaughter. Americansof all races and ethnicitieshailed the event as a symbolicvictory for justice and apartial resolution of a crimethat had long haunted thenation.By Philip DrayThe author of CapitolMen: The Epic Story ofReconstruction Throughthe Lives of the First BlackCongressmen, Dray is alsothe co-author, with SethCagin, of We Are Not Afraid:The Story of Goodman,Schwerner, and Chaney, andthe Civil Rights Campaign forMississippi.In 2005, 41 years after the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner,Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of the murders.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 49Medgar Evers:Martyr of the Mississippi MovementMedgar Evers, headof the NationalAssociationfor the Advancement ofColored People (NAACP) inMississippi, was a dynamicleader whose life was cutshort by assassination in 1963.His loss at age 37 was a tragicreversal for the civil rightsmovement, but it galvanizedfurther protest and drewthe sympathetic concern ofthe federal government tohis cause.Born in rural Mississippiin 1925, Evers served withU.S. armed forces in Europein the Second World War,returning home to attendAlcorn College (a historicallyblack institution located nearLorman, Mississippi), wherehe was an accomplishedstudent and athlete. There hemet his future wife, Myrlie;the couple was marriedin 1951.Evers became a protégéof T.R.M. Howard, a blackphysician and businessmanwho founded both aninsurance agency anda medical clinic in theMississippi Delta. Howardalso established theMississippi Regional Councilof Negro Leadership, a civilrights organization thatemployed a “top-down”approach, encouragingleading African-Americanprofessionals and clergy topromote self-help, businessownership, and, ultimately,the demand for civil rightsamong the broader blackpopulation.Evers determined to seethe freedoms he had foughtfor overseas established athome. He soon emergedas one of the MississippiRegional Council’s mosteffective activists. Like hismentor, he mixed businesswith civil rights campaigning,working as a salesman forHoward’s Magnolia MutualLife Insurance Companywhile organizing localchapters of the NAACPand leading boycotts of gasstations that refused blacksaccess to restrooms. (“Don’tBuy Gas Where You Can’tUse the Restroom” read onebumper sticker.)In 1954, Evers challengedthe segregationist order byapplying for enrollmentat the law school of theall-white University ofMississippi, known as “OleMiss.” Evers was turned away,but his effort won him theadmiration of the NAACP’sLegal Defense Fund, and hewas subsequently namedthe organization’s first fieldsecretary in Mississippi,a dangerous and lonelyassignment.“It may sound funny, butI love the South,” Evers oncesaid. “I don’t choose to liveanywhere else. There’s landhere where a man can raisecattle, and I’m going to doit someday. There are lakeswhere a man can sink a hookand fight a bass. There isroom here for my children toplay and grow and becomegood citizens — if the whiteman will let them.”At the time, however,whites’ cooperation appearedvery much in doubt. Twoof the United States’ mostinfamous modern lynchingsoccurred in Mississippiin those years — the 1955killing of 14-year-oldEmmett Till, and the 1959lynching of Mack CharlesParker in Poplarville. Evershelped investigate the Tillmurder, a case that receivedextensive national attention.Despite strong evidence ofthe defendants’ guilt, an allwhite male jury took only67 minutes to acquit them.One juror later asserted thatthe panel took a “soda break”to stretch deliberationsbeyond one hour, “to makeit look good.” (In May 2004,the Justice Department,calling the 1955 prosecutiona “grotesque miscarriage ofjustice,” reopened the murderinvestigation. But with manypotential witnesses long deadand evidence scattered, agrand jury declined to indictthe last remaining livingsuspect.)Mississippi reacted harshlyto the Supreme Court’s 1954Brown v. Board of Educationruling and its order todesegregate the nation’s publicschools. Local white groupsknown as Citizens Councilsvowed to resist integrationMedgar Evers in 1963. He would be assassinated later that year.50 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTat any cost. Evers, who hadearlier been denied admissionto Ole Miss, assisted otherblacks’ efforts to enroll there.In 1962, Air Force veteranJames Meredith was admittedto the school by a direct orderfrom U.S. Supreme CourtJustice Hugo Black. Stateofficials resisted the order,and Meredith managed tobegin classes only after anight of rioting in whichtwo people were killed andhundreds injured.As his efforts onMeredith’s behalf intensifiedthe segregationist hatred ofEvers, he launched a series ofboycotts, sit-ins, and protestsin Jackson, Mississippi’slargest city. Even the NAACPwas occasionally concernedwith the extent of Evers’sefforts. When Martin LutherKing Jr. led a high-profilecivil rights campaign inBirmingham, Alabama, in thespring of 1963, Evers steppedup his Jackson Movement— demanding the hiring ofblack police, the creation ofa biracial committee, thedesegregation of downtownlunch counters, and theuse of courtesy titles (Mr.,Mrs., Miss) by whites whodealt with black shoppers indowntown stores.The city’s reaction wasominous. Workmen erectedon the nearby MississippiState Fairgrounds a seriesof fenced stockades capableof holding thousands ofprotestors — a blunt messageto those who consideredprotesting. Undeterred, Eversand his supporters foughton. Local blacks, includingmany children, took part inthe subsequent rallies andstore boycotts, marching andjoining picket lines. Thesedemonstrations representeda culmination of Evers’s longyears of civil rights work. Ahigh point came when Eversappeared on local televisionto explain the movement’sobjectives. Whites were notaccustomed to seeing blackpeople on TV, especiallypresenting their case in theirown words, and many wereoutraged.Soon, attempts were madeon Evers’s life: A bomb wasthrown into his carport, avehicle nearly ran him over.As Evers returned home onthe night of June 12, 1963, hewas ambushed and shot as hegot out of his car. He died athis own front door.The murder of so populara leader enraged the blackcommunity. Over severaldays there were numerousconfrontations with police indowntown Jackson. Even thewhites who ran the city wereshocked by Evers’s death, foralthough he was an agitator,he was at least a familiarpresence. The city fathersmade the unusual concessionof allowing a silent marchto honor him, as civil rightsleaders from across the nationarrived to pay tribute. He wasburied at Arlington NationalCemetery in Washington,D.C., with full militaryhonors. Medgar’s brotherCharles assumed some ofhis duties with the Jacksoncampaign, and his widow,Myrlie, became a well-knownactivist and would serve aschairperson of the NAACPfrom 1995 to 1998.It was Medgar Evers’s fateto have his name linked withone of the most frustratinglegal cases of the civil rightsera. His killer, a whitesupremacist named ByronDe La Beckwith, scion ofan old Mississippi family,was put on trial twice in the1960s, but in each instancewas acquitted by white juries.Not until 1994, a full threedecades after Evers had ledhis fellow Mississippians in acrusade against bigotry andintolerance, was Beckwithconvicted and sentenced tolife in prison, where he diedin 2001.Ultimately, Everstriumphed, even in death. Theyear he was murdered, only28,000 black Mississippianshad successfully registeredto vote. By 1971, that numberhad risen to over a quartermillion and, by 1982, to half amillion. By 2006, Mississippihad the highest number ofblack elected officials in thecountry, including a quarterof its delegation in the U.S.House of Representatives andsome 27 percent of its statelegislature.By Philip DrayThe author of CapitolMen: The Epic Story ofReconstruction Throughthe Lives of the First BlackCongressmen, Dray is alsothe co-author, with SethCagin, of We Are Not Afraid:The Story of Goodman,Schwerner, and Chaney, andthe Civil Rights Campaign forMississippi.Myrlie Evers addresses a Howard University rally after the murder of herhusband, Medgar Evers. Myrlie Evers would emerge as a prominent civil rightsactivist, and later would serve as chairperson of the NAACP.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 5152 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT— 6 —“ItCannotContinue”Establishing Legal EqualityThe civil rights movement led by MartinLuther King Jr. and others was theindispensable catalyst for the passage oftwo new laws of unparalleled importance.The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting RightsAct of 1965 at last would establish firmly the legalequality of African Americans. They were enactedpartly because of a structural transformation ofAmerican politics, including the unexpected elevationof a powerful, pro-civil-rights southern president whohelped overcome the forces that had defeated earliercivil rights legislation. Above all, support for theselaws came from the growing political constituency forchange — the millions of Americans horrified by theactions of segregationists in the South.Changing PoliticsEver since post-Civil War Reconstruction failed to ensurethe civil rights of blacks in the American South, two greatobstacles had blocked efforts at the national level to endTop to bottom: The Rev. Hosea Williams addresses a 1965 Selma, Alabamavoter registration rally.1966: With the Voting Rights Act now law, Alabama African Americans queueup to register as voters.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 53Jim Crow: the political party system and the rules of theU.S. Congress. When the United States acquired vast andpotentially slaveholding territories (including Californiaand much of today’s American Southwest) in the MexicanWar of 1846-1848, the nation’s political parties increasinglyformulated their positions on sectional lines: Democratsfavored the South, and the expansion of slavery; Whigs, andlater Republicans, favored the North, opposed the extension ofslavery into the newly acquired territories, and often believedthat complete abolition was only a matter of time. Whigs andRepublicans in this era favored the aggressive use of federalpower to promote economic development. Southernersand Democrats — fearing federal action against slavery —favored the supremacy of individual states against a federalgovernment properly limited to only those powers specificallygranted by the Constitution. This “states’ rights” concept hasdeep roots in American history. Early in the 19th century,however, it became entangled with the issues of slavery,segregation, and civil rights.These patterns persisted after the Civil War. As wehave seen, the post-war Radical Republicans pressed fora Reconstruction that would ensure African-Americanrights. After Reconstruction, the “Party of Lincoln” — theRepublicans — continued to enjoy the support of most blacks.The Democratic Party, meanwhile, evolved into an allianceof southern segregationists and northern urban residents,often immigrants and industrial workers. As the 20th centuryprogressed, the party’s northern wing became more politicallyliberal, and, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Dealeconomic policies, more accepting of broad federal powers.Liberal northern Democrats often chafed against southernracism, but their party could not compete nationally withoutthe support of the “solid South.”The rules of the U.S. Senate were another formidableobstacle to civil rights legislation. While passing a billrequired only a simple majority, any senator could blocka vote simply by declining to stop speaking during Senatedebate, refusing to relinquish the floor. At that time, a twothirds majority of senators could vote “cloture” of debate. Inpractical terms, then, no significant legislation could pass theSenate without the support of two-thirds of its members. Thismeant that southern senators, elected in states where blackswere routinely deprived of the right to vote, could — and did— block civil rights bills.Anti-civil-rights filibusters, as these lengthy senatorialspeeches came to be known, blocked much legislation overthe years. In 1946, a weeks-long filibuster defeated a billthat enjoyed majority support and would have preventedworkplace discrimination. In 1957, Senator Strom Thurmond(then a Democratic senator from South Carolina) filibusteredfor 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful effort to blockthe mild Civil Rights Act of 1957.But slowly the constellation of political forces was shiftingin ways that would prove helpful to the civil rights movement.The black vote, at least in the North, had grown moreimportant. For most of the nation’s history, the overwhelmingmajority of African Americans resided in the South. Duringthe first half of the 20th century, many African Americansbegan to move from the South to Chicago and other northerncities. An estimated 6 million blacks would head north duringthis “Great Migration.” The North was not free of racialprejudice, but blacks there could vote, and they became anincreasingly attractive target for ambitious politicians.In 1960, the Democratic candidate for president, SenatorJohn F. Kennedy, was determined to increase his share of thehistorically Republican African-American vote. When MartinLuther King Jr. was jailed following an Atlanta sit-in, Kennedyphoned King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to offer his sympathy,even as his brother, the future attorney general, Robert F.Kennedy, worked to secure King’s release. Freed on bail, Kingacknowledged a “great debt of gratitude to Senator Kennedyand his family.” Kennedy carried an estimated 70 percent ofthe African-American vote in a tight election in which heprevailed over Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixonby less than 1 percent of the popular vote.While historians differ over the Kennedy administration’scivil rights record, it is not unfair to remark that it was betterthan that of its 20th-century predecessors, but not as strong ascivil rights activists would have liked. John and Robert Kennedyrepeatedly urged King not to press too hard. But when Kingwould forge ahead, the Kennedys generally would follow.As previously described, President Kennedy introducedbroad civil rights legislation in the aftermath of the eventsin Birmingham. With Kennedy’s assassination in November1963, responsibility for that legislation would fall to his vicepresident and successor, Lyndon Johnson.Lyndon Baines JohnsonThe new president possessed two enormous assets: asingularly powerful personality and a mastery of theprocedures and personalities of the U.S. Congress perhapsunparalleled in American history. From 1954 to 1960, Johnsonhad served, in the words of biographer Robert Dallek, as“the most effective majority leader in Senate history.” To hiscommand of the Senate’s often arcane rules and traditions,Johnson added what one might call intense powers ofpersonal persuasion. “He’d come on just like a tidal wave,”said Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. “He wentthrough walls. … He’d take the whole room over.”The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who served as aWhite House fellow under Johnson, recalled Johnson’s ability54 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTto focus all his energies on extracting a needed vote froma recalcitrant senator. She called it “The Treatment.” Kingbiographer Marshall Frady described it as… a ferocious manner of persuasion that proceeded bya kind of progressive physical engulfment: wrapping onegiant arm around a colleague’s shoulder with his otherhand clenching his lapel, then straightening the senator’s tieknot, then nudging and punching his chest and sticking aforefinger into his shirt. Johnson would lower his face closerand closer to his subject’s in escalating exhortation until theman would be bowed backward like a parenthesis mark.Johnson had been born poor in Texas and understoodintimately the conditions under which African Americansand Mexican Americans labored. As a congressman andthen senator from a southern state, electoral realities obligedJohnson to mute some of his progressive views on civilrights and racial equality. But elevated unexpectedly to thepresidency, Johnson placed the full measure of his politicalskills to work for the passage of the landmark civil rights laws.As the new president told Richard Russell, an influentialsenator from Georgia whose opposition to civil rightslegislation posed a formidable obstacle: “I’m not going to caviland I’m not going to compromise. I’m going to pass it just as itis, Dick, and if you get in my way I’m going to run you down. Ijust want you to know that because I care about you.”The Civil Rights Act of 1964For nearly a century, many states had managed to escape theobvious mandate of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.Constitution:No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridgethe privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, orproperty, without due process of law; nor deny to any personwithin its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Educationand the many others won by Thurgood Marshall and theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoplefinally established that government, even state governmentsin the Deep South, could not discriminate against AfricanAmericans or anyone else. Civil rights activists like theFreedom Riders risked their lives, but at least there was nodoubt that the law was on their side and that those whoattacked them were lawbreakers.But the owners of a movie theater or a department storelunch counter were not the government. As a result, the civilrights movement was obliged to wage battles one city andone business at a time. While Rosa Parks’s brave refusal tomove to the back of the bus led to the desegregation of publictransportation in Montgomery, Alabama, hundreds or eventhousands more Rosa Parks — and Martin Luther Kings— would be needed to desegregate fully the South.Plainly, legislation was needed to prohibit acts of privatediscrimination in public places. Such a law would representa dramatic expansion of federal authority. The AmericanConstitution explains what the federal — and, in the postCivil War amendments the state governments — may andmay not do. It does not speak of Woolworth’s lunch counter.In the end, proponents of what became the Civil RightsAct of 1964 would assert, and the courts subsequentlywould accept, that Congress possessed the authority to bandiscrimination in employment, public accommodations,and other aspects of life. They pointed to the constitutionalprovision (Article I, Section 8) authorizing Congress “toregulate Commerce … among the several States.” By the mid20th century, nearly every economic transaction involved someform of interstate commerce, were one to look closely enough.In 1969, for instance, the Supreme Court, in Daniel v. Paul,rejected a discriminatory “entertainment club’s” claim that itslack of interstate activity exempted it from the Civil Rights Act.Among the Court’s findings: The snack bar served hamburgersand hot dogs on rolls, and the “principal ingredients going intothe bread were produced and processed in other States.”President Johnson’s introduction of the Civil Rights Actof 1964 provoked one of the nation’s great political contests.The act prevailed because much of the nation had looked hardinto Bull Connor’s eyes and had not liked what it saw. Butpassage also would require all of Johnson’s formidable skills. Itwas understood that majorities of Republicans and northernDemocrats would support the bill, but that Johnson wouldhave to engineer a two-thirds Senate majority to overcome theinevitable filibuster by southern Democrats.Johnson, in his first State of the Union Address onJanuary 8, 1964, urged Congress to “let this session … beknown as the session which did more for civil rights than thelast hundred sessions combined.” The months that followedsaw intense congressional fact-finding and debate over theact. The House of Representatives held more than 70 days ofpublic hearings, during which some 275 witnesses offerednearly 6,000 pages of testimony. At the end of this process, theHouse passed the bill by a vote of 290 to 130.The Senate filibuster would last for 57 days, during whichtime the Senate conducted virtually no other business. Asthe speeches continued (one senator carried a 1,500-pagespeech onto the floor), President Johnson subjected many asenator to “The Treatment,” and a variety of labor, religious,and civil rights groups lobbied for cloture and a final vote.Finally, on June 10, 1964, the Senate voted 71 to 29 to enddebate — the first time cloture had ever been successfullyinvoked in a civil rights matter. A week later, the Senate passedFREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 55its version of the civil rights bill. On July 2, 1964, the Houseof Representatives agreed to the Senate version, sending thebill to the White House.President Johnson affixed his signature that evening,in the course of a nationally televised address. “Americansof every race and color have died in battle to protect ourfreedom,” he told the nation. He continued,Americans of every race and color have worked to build anation of widening opportunities. Now our generation ofAmericans has been called on to continue the unendingsearch for justice within our own borders.We believe that all men are created equal. Yet many aredenied equal treatment.We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yetmany Americans do not enjoy those rights.We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings ofliberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings— not because of their own failures, but because of the colorof their skin.The reasons are deeply imbedded in history and traditionand the nature of man. We can understand — withoutrancor or hatred — how this all happened.But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation ofour Republic, foroffers it. … The purpose of the law is simple.It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long ashe respects the rights of others.It does not give special treatment to any citizen.It does say the only limit to a man’s hope for happiness, andfor the future of his children, shall be his own ability.It does say that there are those who are equal beforeGod shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in theclassrooms, in the factories …My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing.We must not fail.Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray forwise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevantdifferences and make our nation whole. Let us hasten thatday when our unmeasured strength and our unboundedspirit will be free.“It cannot continue … .” President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the CivilRights Act of 1964, in the presence of congressional leaders, and AttorneyGeneral Robert F. Kennedy (at rear, directly behind Johnson).56 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTThe Act’s PowersAfter two centuries of slavery, segregation, and legalinequality, and the resulting economic disadvantage, the CivilRights Act of 1964 gave the federal government and privateindividuals the legal authority they needed to attack squarelyracial (and gender — the act also bars discrimination on thebasis of sex) discrimination.This authority is spelled out in broad provisions, called“titles.” The major points include:• Title I, which abolished unequal application of voterregistration requirements.• Title II, which prohibited discrimination in publicaccommodations. The title authorized individuals to filelawsuits to obtain injunctive relief (a court order orderingsomeone to do or not to do something) and allowed theattorney general of the United States to intervene in thoselawsuits he deemed “of general public importance.”• Title III, which authorized the U.S. attorney general tofile a lawsuit, provided the case would “materially furtherthe orderly progress of desegregation in public facilities,”where an aggrieved person was unable himself or herself tomaintain such a suit.• Title IV, which authorized the attorney general to file suitto force the desegregation of public schools. This provisionaimed to accelerate the slow progress made during thedecade since Brown v. Board of Education.• Title VI, which extended the act’s provisions to “anyprogram or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Itauthorized the federal government to withhold federal fundsfrom any such program that practiced discrimination.• Title VII, which prohibited employment discrimination byany business employing more than 25 people. It establishedthe Equal Employment Opportunity Commission toreview complaints of discrimination in recruitment, hiring,compensation, and advancement.The Voting Rights Act of 1965: The BackgroundCourt decisions and civil rights statutes were crucial toolsin establishing, protecting, and enforcing the civil rightsof African Americans. The surest way to guarantee thepermanence of these rights, however, was to empower blackspolitically to assert themselves as full participants in thedemocratic system. The right to vote, then, was arguablythe most fundamental right of all, and one that, practicallyClockwise from above: “We shall overcome.” A newlyregistered voter in Selma, Alabama, August 1965.Civil rights marchers approach Montgomery, Alabama,on the fourth day of the Selma-to-Montgomery march.Americans from across the nation joined in the effort. Thefour protestors at front hailed from (left to right) New York(first two), Michigan, and Selma, Alabama.March 1965: A federal marshal reads a court orderenjoining a planned voter registration protest march atSelma, Alabama. Dr. King is at right, Andrew Young, a futureAmbassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta,Georgia, is at left with arms folded.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 57speaking, African Americans in the South had not enjoyedsince the failure of Reconstruction.Looking back, after the withdrawal of northern armiesfrom the South in 1877, white southern elites re-imposed theirpolitical dominance. Suppressing the African-American votewas crucial to this objective and was achieved by a numberof methods. At first, raw violence was the preferred tool. Anumber of other practices developed.One such practice was the “poll tax.” This was a specialtax levied equally on every member of a community. Citizenswho failed to pay were deemed ineligible to vote. Manysouthern states introduced poll taxes between 1889 and 1910.Given the extent of African-American poverty, the poll taxdisenfranchised large numbers of black voters, and poorwhites as well. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the U.S.Constitution (1964) prohibited denying any citizen the rightto vote in an election for federal office for failure to pay a polltax. A Supreme Court decision two years later extended thisprohibition to state and local elections.Another practice was the “literacy requirement” for voterregistration. Highly subjective oral and written examinationsnearly always were applied with special vigor to AfricanAmerican applicants. Some states would not even permit anapplicant to take the examination unless an already-registeredvoter would vouch for him or her. It was nearly impossible formany black applicants even to take the test, since there werevery few African Americans on the southern voting rolls,and few southern whites would risk social ostracism or worseto vouch-in a prospective black voter. The examination wasoften blatantly unfair. It might require an applicant to writeout a passage from the Constitution as dictated by the countyregistrar — dictated clearly to white applicants, mumbledto blacks.Southern election officials adopted any number of tacticsto prevent black applicants from qualifying. In Alabama, forinstance, the decision whether an applicant passed or failedwas made in secret, and there was no method for challengingthe decisions. Not surprisingly, at least one Alabama board ofregistrars “qualified” each and every white applicant and not asingle black.Whatever tactic was employed, the threat of violencealways lurked in the background. Election officials mightpublish in local newspapers the names of black voterapplicants. This alerted local white Citizens Councils andKu Klux Klan chapters to blacks who might need to be“persuaded” to withdraw their applications.Against this background of violent intimidation, activistsfrom the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee andthe Congress of Racial Equality, among others, launched voterregistration campaigns in rural and heavily black parts of theDeep South in 1961. The work took incredible courage. Asan early volunteer, the plantation worker Fannie Lou Hamer,memorably explained: “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d havebeen scared — but what was the point of being scared? Theonly thing they [white people] could do was kill me, and itseemed they’d been trying to do that a little at a time since Icould remember.”In 1964, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Associationfor the Advancement of Colored People, and the StudentNonviolent Coordinating Committee launched the “FreedomSummer.” More than 1,000 northern whites, mostly collegestudents, volunteered to travel to Mississippi and help blackvoters register. Their presence also was intended to drawnational attention to the violent suppression of blackvoting rights.On June 21, the very first day of Freedom Summer, thevolunteers achieved this goal in a tragic manner. Three civilrights workers, African American James Chaney and twowhite Jewish Americans, Michael Schwerner and AndrewGoodman, were reported missing and later found murdered.Their murder forced Americans to confront more directly therelated issues of voting rights and violence. While the bravevolunteers persuaded some 17,000 equally brave AfricanAmericans to complete voter registration applications,election officials ultimately accepted less than 10 percentof these. Blacks, more and more Americans understood,comprised nearly half of Mississippi’s population but only 5percent of its registered voters.Bloody Sunday in SelmaThe following year, civil rights organizations launched aregistration drive in Selma, Alabama, a small city about 50miles west of Montgomery. There were about 15,000 blacksresiding in Selma, but only 350 had successfully registered tovote. At a February 1965 voting rights rally in nearby Marion,police shot and killed a young black man named Jimmie LeeJackson.In response, activists called a March 7 march from Selmato the Alabama state capitol at Montgomery. Led by JohnLewis of SNCC and Martin Luther King’s aide, the ReverendHosea Williams, some 525 marchers were met on the PettusBridge over the Alabama River by Alabama state troopers andlocal lawmen. They had gas masks at hand and nightsticksat the ready. The trooper leader (Major John Cloud) orderedthe marchers to return to their church. Reverend Williamsanswered: “May we have a word with the major?” “There is noword to be had,” came the reply.The suppression of the march, the New York Timesreported, “was swift and thorough.” The paper described aflying wedge of troopers and recounted how “the first 10 or20 Negroes were swept to the ground screaming, arms and58 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTlegs flying.” With the news media on hand and recordingtheir actions for a horrified national audience, the troopersfired tear gas canisters. Local law enforcement pursued theretreating protestors with whips and nightsticks. “I was hit inthe head by a state trooper with a nightstick ... I thought I sawdeath,” said Lewis, hospitalized with a concussion.For millions of Americans, March 7, 1965, would beknown simply as Bloody Sunday. Typical was the reaction ofU.S. Representative James G. O’Hara of Michigan, who calledthe day’s events “a savage action, storm-trooper style, underdirection of a reckless demagogue [a reference to Alabama’sgovernor, George Wallace].”From Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr. announced thathe and Ralph Abernathy would lead a second Selma-toMontgomery march that Tuesday. He called on “religiousleaders from all over the nation to join us on Tuesday in ourpeaceful, nonviolent march for freedom.” Before the marchcould occur, a federal judge, not unfriendly to the activistsbut determined to hold hearings before acting, issued a courtorder temporarily forofferding the march.King was under intense political pressure from everycorner. Federal officials urged him to delay the march. Withthe judge’s injunction now in place, King and his followerswould be the lawbreakers should the march proceed. ButMarchers cross the Edmund Pettis bridge over the Alabama River, March 21,1965, the beginning of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march.“Bloody Sunday,” Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965. The suppression of thefirst Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march was swift and thorough.“I thought I saw death,” said future U.S. Representative John Lewis.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 59younger activists, many affiliated with SNCC, wanted tomove faster. King risked losing his place at the head of themovement were he unable to satisfy their demands.On March 9, King and Abernathy led some 3,000peaceful protestors — their black followers joined byhundreds of white religious leaders — on the secondSelma-to-Montgomery march. Troopers again met themat the Pettus Bridge. The marchers stopped, then sang themovement’s anthem: “We Shall Overcome.” The group thenprayed, and Abernathy thanked God for the marchers who“came to present their bodies as a living sacrifice.” King thendirected his followers to turn back. “As a nonviolent, I couldn’tmove people into a potentially violent situation,” he told theWashington Post.King’s decision disappointed some of the more zealousactivists. But King had been conferring quietly with federalofficials. The events of Bloody Sunday also had exerted greatpressure on an already sympathetic President Johnson.Too many Americans at long last had seen enough. Fromreligious groups and state legislatures, youthful protestorsand members of Congress, the demand for federal action wasgrowing. The two leaders appear to have struck a tacit bargain:King would not violate the injunction, and the Johnsonadministration quietly suggested it would soon be lifted.On March 15, Johnson introduced the legislation thatwould become the Voting Rights Act. Addressing the nationthat night, President Johnson employed the plainest oflanguage in the service of a basic American value — the rightto vote:There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem.There is no northern problem. There is only an Americanproblem.And we are met here tonight as Americans … to solve thatproblem.The Constitution says that no person shall be kept fromvoting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn anoath before God to support and to defend that Constitution.We must now act in obedience to that oath. …There is no constitutional issue here. The command of theConstitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong— deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americansthe right to vote in this country. There is no issue of Statesrights or National rights. There is only the struggle forhuman rights. …What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movementwhich reaches into every section and State of America. It isthe effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves thefull blessings of American life.Their cause must be our cause too, because it is not justNegroes but really it is all of us who must overcome thecrippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shallovercome.Two days later, the federal court lifted the injunctionagainst the marchers. U.S. District Judge Frank M. JohnsonJr. further ordered that state and county authorities notinterfere and indeed take affirmative measures to protect theactivists. “The law is clear,” the judge wrote, “that the right topetition one’s government for the redress of grievances may beexercised in large groups … and these rights may be exercisedby marching, even along public highways.”The Selma-to-Montgomery MarchBy March 21, thousands of Americans from all walks oflife began to assemble in Selma for the third Selma-toMontgomery march. The marchers planned to cover theentire 87-kilometer route over the course of five days and fournights, with marchers sleeping under the stars. The route theyfollowed is today a National Historic Trail.“We have come from three centuries of suffering and hardship.” The marchersarrive at Montgomery.60 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTWith the support of the Johnson administration andan aroused American people, the difference from the earlierefforts could not be more apparent. Major John Cloud ofthe Alabama State Troopers had ordered the beatings andgassings two weeks earlier. Now he was obliged to occupythe lead car accompanying the protestors across the PettusBridge. Federal military police were on hand to provideprotection, and elements of the Alabama National Guard weretemporarily placed under federal command. As more than3,000 marchers began the first leg of their quest, Abernathytold them, “When we get to Montgomery, we are going to goup to Governor Wallace’s door and say, ‘George, it’s all overnow. We’ve got the ballot.’ ”“Walk together, children,” King instructed, “and don’t youget weary, and it will lead us to a Promised Land.”The New York Times offered this description of the crowdas it set out along U.S. Highway 80:There were civil rights leaders and rabbis, pretty coeds andbearded representatives of the student left, movie stars andinfants in strollers. There were two blind people and a manwith one leg. But mostly there were the Negroes who believethey have been denied the vote too long.The marchers covered a bit over 11 kilometers that firstday, then pitched two large circus tents and slept in sleepingbags and blankets. The next morning King announced: “I amhappy to say that I have slept in a sleeping bag for the first timein my life. I feel fine.” By the second day, though, blisters andsunburn were common.Because the highway narrowed in rural areas, the federalcourt had ruled that only 300 marchers could participateuntil the road widened again outside Montgomery. But a fairnumber of “extras” chose to tag along, even during the thirdday, which was marked by torrential rains. The marchersresponded in song; among their selections: “Ain’t Gonna LetNobody Turn Me ‘Round” and “We Shall Overcome.”King briefly left the march to deliver a long-scheduledaddress in Cleveland, Ohio. There King made explicit hisdebt to Mahatma Gandhi, whose famous march to thesea anticipated the Selma-to-Montgomery trek. “We arechallenged to make the world one in terms of brotherhood,”King said. “We must learn to live together as brothers, or wewill all perish as fools.”As the marchers approached Montgomery, the crowdswelled to 25,000 or more. They came by chartered plane, bybus, and by rail. A delegation of leading American historiansarrived to participate in the final leg. They issued a statement:“We believe it is high time for the issues over which the CivilWar was fought to be finally resolved.” The singer and civilrights activist Harry Belafonte enlisted an all-star group ofHollywood entertainers.On March 25, with Martin Luther King at the head,the activists entered Montgomery. They marched up DexterAvenue, tracing the path traversed a century ago by theinaugural parade of Jefferson Davis, first and only presidentof the Confederate States of America, the would-be nationwhose championing of slavery sparked the Civil War. Now, acentury later, the descendants of black slaves approached thestate house to demand the rights to which they had long beenentitled, and long been denied. Their petition read:We have come not only five days and 50 miles [80kilometers], but we have come from three centuries ofsuffering and hardship. We have come to you, the Governorof Alabama, to declare that we must have our freedomNOW. We must have the right to vote; we must have equalprotection of the law, and an end to police brutality.Governor Wallace had already fled the scene. It didn’tmatter.King delivered that day one of his most famous speeches,one in which he quoted a 70-year-old participant in theMontgomery bus boycott. Asked one day whether she wouldnot have preferred riding to walking, Mother Pollard replied:“My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”“How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever,” said Martin LutherKing, Jr. at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Pictured here: Kingdelivering a sermon at his Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 61The just concluded march, King said, was “a shiningmoment in the conscience of man.” He singled out ashonorable and inspiring “the pilgrimage of clergymenand laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma toface danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.” “Like anidea whose time has come,” King continued, “not even themarching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to theland of freedom.”We must come to see that the end we seek is a society atpeace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.That will be a day not of the white man, not of the blackman. That will be the day of man as man.I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” I cometo say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment,however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, becausetruth pressed to earth will rise again.How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow.How long? Not long. Because the arm of the moral universeis long but it bends toward justice.The Voting Rights Act EnactedFive months later, the Congress passed and President Johnsonsigned into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Shortly beforenoon on August 6, 1965, Johnson drove to the U.S. Capitolbuilding. Waiting for him were the leaders of Congress andof the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and JohnLewis among them. In signing the act into law, Johnson toldthe nation:The central fact of American civilization ... is that freedomand justice and the dignity of man are not just words to us.We believe in them. Under all the growth, and the tumult,and abundance, we believe. And so, as long as some amongus are oppressed and we are part of that oppression, it mustblunt our faith and sap the strength of our high purpose.Thus this is a victory for the freedom of the AmericanNegro, but it is also a victory for the freedom of theAmerican nation. And every family across this greatentire searching land will live stronger in liberty, will livemore splendid in expectation, and will be prouder to beAmerican because of the act that you have passed that Iwill sign today.What the Act DoesThe Fifteenth Amendment already barred racialdiscrimination in voting rights, so the problem was not thatAfrican Americans lacked the legal right to vote. It was thatsome state and local officials had systematically deprivedblacks of those rights. The Voting Rights Act accordinglyauthorized the federal government to assume control ofthe voter registration process in any state or voting districtthat had in 1964 employed a literacy or other qualifying testand in which fewer than half of voting age residents hadeither registered or voted. Six entire southern states werethus “covered,” as were a number of counties in several otherstates. Covered jurisdictions were prohibited from modifyingtheir voting rules and regulations without first affordingfederal officials the opportunity to review the change fordiscriminatory intent or effect. Other provisions barred thefuture use of literacy tests and directed the attorney general ofthe United States to commence legal action to end the use ofpoll taxes in state elections. (The Twenty-Fourth Amendmentto the U.S. Constitution, ratified in January 1964, alreadybarred the poll tax in elections for federal office.)The introduction of federal “examiners” ended the massintimidation of potential minority voters. The results weredramatic. By the end of 1965, the five states of the Deep Southalone registered 160,000 new African-American voters. By2000, African-American registration rates trailed that ofwhites by only 2 percent. In the South, where in 1965 only twoAfrican Americans served either in the U.S. Congress or astate legislature, the number today is 160.The Voting Rights Act was originally enacted for a fiveyear period, but it has been both extended and expanded tointroduce new requirements, such as the provision of bilingualelection materials.In 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-yearextension: “The right to vote is the crown jewel of Americanliberties,” he said, “and we will not see its luster diminished.”President George W. Bush signed another 25-year extensionin 2006.White Southerners’ Reactions tothe Civil Rights MovementAfrican Americanswho waged epicstruggles for civilrights also altered whiteSoutherners’ worlds. Somewhites embraced theprospect of a new interracialland. Many more reactedwith hostility. They fearedsocial and political change,and grappled uncomfortablywith the fact that their way oflife seemed gone for good.The “Southern way of life”encompassed a distinctivemix of economic, social,and cultural practices —symbolized by the fragrantmagnolia, the slow paceof life, and the sweet mintjulep, a popular alcoholicbeverage. It also containedimplications about theregion’s racial order — one inwhich whites wielded powerand blacks accommodated.Centuries of slavery anddecades of segregationcemented a legal and politicalsystem characterized bywhite dominance. By the20th century, “Jim Crow”had become a shorthand forlegalized segregation. (Thatphrase derived from thename of a character in a 19thcentury minstrel show inwhich whites wore blackfacemakeup and caricatured slaveculture.) Massive inequalitiesmarked every facet of dailylife. Blacks always addressedwhites as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,”though whites seldombestowed such courtesy titleson African Americans. Blackslabored in white homes asnannies, cooks, maids, andyardmen. Whites expecteddocility; black resistanceseemed unfathomable.Through the long years ofslavery and segregation, whiteSoutherners produced andabsorbed cruel stereotypesabout African Americans:that they were unclean andshiftless, unintelligent andoversexed. Blacks becameeither clowns or savages, withno area in between. Whitesoften defined themselves —their status, identities, dailylives, and self-worth — inrelation to these concoctednotions about AfricanAmericans. If blacks weresubmissive and infantile,whites were strong anddignified. Blackness meantdegradation; to be free wasto be white. The civil rightsstruggle threatened to hoistAfrican Americans up andout of this social “place” thatwhites had created for them.White Southerners wouldfind blacks in their schoolsand neighborhoods, theirrestaurants, and pollingplaces. Many whites fearedthis vision of the Southernfuture.Many white Southernerscame to believe that AfricanAmericans aoffered — andeven enjoyed — their roles assecond-class citizens. Whenthe civil rights movementtore through the South in the1950s and 1960s, it exposedthe falsity of such beliefs. Atlong last, African Americansvoiced their discontent anddemanded dignity. Blackrebellion clashed so sharplywith white perceptions thatmany disbelieved their owneyes. And as grassrootsorganizers led a massmovement for black equality,whites rose up in resistance.The U.S. Supreme Court,with its 1954 decision inBrown v. Board of Education,ensured that Southernschools would become thefirst battlegrounds. The courtruled that segregated schoolsstamped black children witha “badge of inferiority,” andthat Southern states mustintegrate their schools “withall deliberate speed.”Southern politiciansdenounced the court ruling.In language that played uponwhites’ underlying racialfears and stoked contemptfor the federal government,senators such as Harry Byrdof Virginia claimed thecourt had overstepped itsbounds. White Southernerstried to circumvent theorder, and rallied to beatback desegregation at everyturn. Local leaders andbusinessmen organizedthemselves into CitizensCouncils, groups that visitedeconomic reprisal upon anyblacks — or whites — whodared advocate integration.62 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTDemonstrators protesting the integration of a New Orleans, Louisiana, publicelementary school, 1960.In 1957, a federal courtordered integration of theLittle Rock, Arkansas, publicschools. Nine blacks wereselected to enroll in LittleRock’s Central High School,but Governor Orval Faubusblocked the students fromthe schoolhouse door. Afterinitial reluctance, PresidentDwight Eisenhower mobilizeda battle group of the U.S.Army’s 101st AirborneDivision to enforce the courtorder by escorting the “LittleRock Nine” to class. Whenseveral African-Americanteenagers finally arrived atCentral, they encountered avicious white mob. Parentsjeered the incoming studentsand the federal marshals whoprotected them. Enragedwhite Southerners deplored ascene they thought had diedwith Reconstruction: thatof federal troops protectingblacks’ civil rights in theSouth.A similar conflagrationerupted in New Orleanswhen that city became thefirst in the Deep South todesegregate. In November1960, four African-Americangirls integrated FrantzElementary School in thecity’s Ninth Ward. Thatneighborhood was one of thecity’s poorest. In addition togrievances against organizedblacks and an activefederal government, whiteSoutherners also felt deepclass divides. White NinthWard residents believed thatthe city’s rich and powerfulhad foisted integrationupon them — and themalone. Across the region,poor whites shouldered the“burden” of integration. Ifthe upper classes maintainedsocial safety valves likecountry clubs, private schools,and exclusive suburbs,poorer whites confrontedthe fact that their publicschools, swimming pools,and neighborhoods wereoften the first to experiencedesegregation.Millions of whiteSoutherners foundchampions in politicianssuch as Alabama’s governor,George Wallace, who bothcultivated and exploited forpolitical gain a deep anti-civilrights sentiment. In his 1963inaugural address, Wallacedeclared: “Segregation now,segregation tomorrow,segregation forever.” Hebecame the very picture ofwhite resistance. Membersof the Ku Klux Klan — aviolent organization drivenby racism, anti-Semitism,and nativism — persistedin a similar delusion: thatthe bloodshed they inflictedcould postpone the day ofracial equality. In 1963 inBirmingham, Alabama,Klansmen bombed a blackBaptist church and killed fourgirls. The next year, Klansmenin Philadelphia, Mississippi,murdered three civil rightsworkers and buried themunder an earthen dam. Suchgruesome violence sickenedmany white Southerners,and rifts emerged within thewhite South. Still, a majoritydesired the same end — areturn to the nostalgic dayswhen blacks doffed their hatsto whites and acquiesced totheir roles in the segregatedJim Crow order.Extremism on one sideoften handed victory to theother. The Klan’s horrifyingviolence pricked whiteAmerica’s conscience and,ultimately, moved the nationcloser to passage of epic civilrights legislation — the 1964Civil Rights Act and the 1965Voting Rights Act. WhenPresident Lyndon Johnson,himself a native Texan and aSoutherner, helped usher thelegislation through Congress,white Southerners feltbetrayed.The Civil Rights Actintegrated businesses andpublic facilities. Suddenly,whites had to serve blacksin their stores and dinebeside them at restaurants.Such changes shattered therhythm of white southerners’daily lives. Many whitesdenounced the “Civil WrongsBill,” holding that such federallaws imperiled their ownrights. They clung to thenotion that rights were finite,and that as blacks gainedfreedom, whites must suffera loss of their own liberties.On the precarious seesawof Southern race relations,whites thought they wouldplummet if blacks ascended.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 63Often hooded, members of the Ku Klux Klan advocated white supremacy andemployed terrorism, violence, and lynching against African Americans, Jews,and Roman Catholics, among others.Throughout black-majorityareas, the Voting Rights Actgranted African Americansa stunning new power. Inthese citadels of the oldslave South, where whiteswere outnumbered by aratio of almost four-to-one,blacks voted some of theirown into political office. Inseveral rural locales, likeMacon County and GreeneCounty, Alabama, AfricanAmericans suddenly wieldedpolitical power. Before thecivil rights years, few whitescould have conceived ofsuch transformations. Bythe 1970s, the previouslyunthinkable became politicalreality.The civil rights movementforever altered whiteSoutherners’ everyday lives,upended their traditionalattitudes about blacks, and,in some towns, shifted thebalance of political power.It stripped the veneersof docility from AfricanAmericans and investedthem with a new dignity.Life seemed unrecognizableto many white Southerners.Confronted with a realitythey had barely contemplated,some whites retaliated withany weapons at their disposal.Others attempted to avoidthe upheaval; they tried tomaintain cherished ways oflife even as the ground shiftedbeneath their feet. In the end,evasion proved impossible.While whites fought thecivil rights movementwith varying strategies ofresistance, few escaped itslong reach.In the end, the civil rightsmovement transformedthe South and the nation.As it changed Southerners’lives and minds, somewhites felt they had beenliberated — freed fromthe mandate to degradeand oppress, free from theroles they assumed in theconstricting racial hierarchy.Into the 21st century,however, racial inequalitycontinues to haunt Americanlife. Black Americansremain disproportionatelyimpoverished, imprisoned,and undereducated. Yet manyghosts of the Jim Crow Southhave vanished. After the civilrights movement, AfricanAmericans could attendintegrated schools, they ranfor — and won — politicaloffice, and they lived witha dignity that the cultureof Jim Crow had denied.These changes also seepedinto white Southern life andreshaped its very contours.The civil rights movementpushed Southerners, blackand white alike, furtheralong the path toward racialequality.By Jason SokolA Mellon PostdoctoralFellow at the University ofPennsylvania, Sokol is alsothe author of There Goes MyEverything: White Southernersin the Age of Civil Rights.Lunchtime in an integrated public school.64 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTFREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 65EpilogueOn March 21, 1965,as civil rightsadvocates and theirsupporters gathered in Selma,a local Southern ChristianLeadership Conferenceleader warned the pressthat the “irresponsibility” ofthe more militant activistsmight cause the movementenormous harm. TheReverend Jefferson P. Rogerswas referring to the StudentNonviolent CoordinatingCommittee, whose leadershipwas growing increasinglyimpatient with the gradualiststrategy of Martin LutherKing and the mainstreamcivil rights movement. Nearlyevery broad-based socialmovement faces similartensions, but the years anddecades that followed wouldprove the wisdom of thestrategy pursued by ThurgoodMarshall, King, and theothers. The great triumphsof the civil rights movementwere evidence that, in anation of laws, the key toprogress lay in establishingthe real legal equality ofAfrican Americans — inpublic facilities, in places ofeducation, and, most of all, atthe voting booth.But this truth was notyet apparent. By May1966, Stokley Carmichael,veteran of numerous voterregistration drives, hadestablished himself as thenew head of SNCC. Ina speech at Greenwood,Mississippi, Carmichaelraised a call for “BlackPower.” Where ThurgoodMarshall and MartinLuther King Jr. had soughtintegration, Carmichaelinstead sought separation.Integration, he said, was “aninsidious subterfuge, forthe maintenance of whitesupremacy.” Meanwhile,the Black Panther Party,(some accounts trace thename to a visual emblem forilliterate voters used in anAlabama voter registrationdrive) founded in Oakland,California, in October 1966by activists Huey P. Newtonand Bobby Seale, employedarmed members — “Panthers”— to shadow police officerswhom they believed unfairlytargeted blacks. Whilethe party briefly enjoyeda measure of popularity,particularly through its socialservices programs, armedaltercations with local policeresulted in the death orjailing of prominent Panthers,turned many Americansagainst its violent ways, andfragmented the Panthermovement. It petered out ina maze of factionalism andmutual recriminations.The year 1968 was one ofpolitical upheaval throughoutmuch of the Western world.In the United States, that yearwould see the assassinationof Senator Robert F. Kennedy,who as attorney general hadprovided timely assistance tocivil rights activists. And itwould see the end of King’sremarkable career.It was a measure of thecivil rights movement’saccomplishments in securinglegal equality that Kingdedicated his last yearsto fighting for economicequality. On April 3, 1968,he campaigned in Memphis,Tennessee, on behalf ofMore than at any time in our nation’shistory, we are all Americans.66 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTstriking — and primarilyblack — sanitation workers.King’s last address drewstrongly on his lifelong studyof the Bible. It would proveprophetic:Well, I don’t know whatwill happen now; we’vegot some difficult daysahead. But it reallydoesn’t matter with menow, because I’ve beento the mountaintop.And I don’t mind. Likeanybody, I would liketo live a long life —longevity has its place.But I’m not concernedabout that now. I justwant to do God’s will.And He’s allowed me togo up to the mountain.And I’ve looked over, andI’ve seen the PromisedLand. I may not get therewith you. But I want youto know tonight that we,as a people, will get tothe Promised Land. Andso I’m happy tonight;I’m not worried aboutanything; I’m not fearingany man. Mine eyeshave seen the glory of thecoming of the Lord.An assassin’s bullet tookKing’s life the very next day.He was 39 years old. Themedical examiners said hedied with the heart of a 60year old, because King hadfor so long carried the burdenof so many. Some 300,000Americans attendedhis funeral.The murder of MartinLuther King Jr. set off riotsin Washington, D.C., andin more than 100 otherAmerican cities. At thatmoment, the short of visionand the faint of heart mighthave questioned King’s lifework. But the Promised Landthat King described was inmany ways far closer than itseemed on those angry, fire-litnights of April 1968.The Triumphs of the CivilRights MovementThe historical experienceof African Americanswill always be unique.But meaningful federalenforcement of the rightto vote equipped blackAmericans with the toolsthat immigrants and otherminority groups long haveused to pursue — and achieve— the American Dream. Inthe United States, peoplewho vote wield real politicalpower. With the vote — andthe passage of time — legaland political equality forAfrican Americans hasproduced gains in nearlyevery walk of life.John R. Lewis, for example,was one of the FreedomRiders beaten bloody by theMontgomery mob in 1961.Today he represents Georgia’sFifth District in the U.S.House of Representatives.Nearly 50 of his colleaguesare African Americans,and several of them wieldgreat political power aschairpersons of influentialcongressional committees.Owning a home long has been alarge part of the American Dream.Left: Forty-two years after her friendDenise McNair was murdered byracist vigilantes, Condoleezza Ricetook office as the nation’s Secretaryof State.FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 67In 1963, Denise McNairwas among the girls killedwhen racist vigilantesbombed Birmingham’sSixteenth Street BaptistChurch. In 2005, her friendCondoleezza Rice took officeas the nation’s secretaryof state.Black secondary schoolgraduation rates have nearlytripled since 1966, and therate of poverty has beennearly halved in that time.The emergence of a blackmiddle class is a widely notedsocial development, as arethe many successful AfricanAmerican entrepreneurs,scholars, and literary andartistic achievers.Although Americanscontinue to wrestle withracial issues, those issuesdiffer profoundly from thoseaddressed by ThurgoodMarshall, Martin LutherKing, and the civil rightsmovement. While today’squestions are no less real,they also reflect the genuineprogress achieved over thedecades that followed.Consider education, thesubject of the Brown v. Boardof Education decision. RecentSupreme Court decisionsexplore the permissiblelimits of “affirmative action”policies that seek to redresspast discrimination andto require or encouragethat public institutionsreflect demographically thecommunities they serve.Judges are now asked todecide the competing needsin, for example, a schooldistrict that allows all parentsto select their children’sschool. If too many request aparticular school, only somestudents may attend theirfirst-choice institution. Inthat case, may the districtassert, even as a “tiebreaker,”its desire to maintain a racialbalance in that popularschool to determine whichrequests will be honored?Should governmentintervene when schools areeffectively segregated becauseof new housing patterns, andnot, as in Linda Brown’s day,because millions of AfricanAmerican students werepurposely segregated andrelegated to shabby, inferiorschools?Americans of all stripescan and do disagree overissues like this. And fewAmerican leaders haveanswers to these dilemmas.As this book goes to press,Barack Obama, the son of ablack man from Kenya and awhite woman from Kansas,has been elected Presidentof the United States. In acampaign speech on race inAmerica, Obama said thatthe answer to the slaveryquestion was alreadyembedded withinour Constitution — aConstitution that had atits very core the ideal ofequal citizenship underthe law; a Constitutionthat promised its peopleliberty, and justice, anda union that could beand should be perfectedover time.And, as the President-electtold the nation on the night ofhis electoral triumphIf there is anyone outthere who still doubtsthat America is aplace where all thingsare possible; who stillwonders if the dreamof our founders is alivein our time; who stillquestions the power ofour democracy, tonight isyour answer.Obama’s victory is onemeasure of the nation’sprogress. Another measure,surely the most importantof all, is the emergence, notleast among the youngerAmericans who will buildthe nation’s future, of a broadand deep consensus that theshameful histories of slavery,segregation, and disadvantagemust be relegated to the past.President-elect BarackObama addresses aChicago crowd on thenight of his election tothe presidency .Exec
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