4
The Civil Rights Movement
World War II brought the Great Depression to a rapid end. Booming war production was followed by rapid economic expansion in the postwar years which, together with Keynesian macroeconomic policies, produced a degree of stability and prosperity in the lives of many American workers. These improved economic conditions, coupled with the growth of industrial unionism, moderated unrest among the industrial working class. The next great struggles occurred among blacks, many of whom were outside, or at the very bottom of, the industrial working class.
The black struggle was waged for two main goals. One was to secure formal political rights in the South, especially the right to the franchise; the other was to secure economic advances. In retrospect it is clear that the main victory was the extension of political rights to southern blacks (together with a larger degree of black political representation in the northern cities).
Beginning in the 1940s the federal courts reversed historic doctrines and began to undercut the legality of southern caste arrangements, a trend that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision which declared racially separate schools unconstitutional because they were inherently unequal. Then, between 1957 and 1965, four civil rights bills were enacted which, taken together, finally granted a broad range of democratic political rights to blacks, and provided the mechanisms to enforce those rights. As a consequence, public accommodations were desegregated, blacks began to serve on the southern juries which had for so long provided immunity to southern whites employing terror against blacks, and the franchise was finally granted. From a historical perspective, a long leap forward had been made.
In the South the deepest meaning of the winning of democratic political rights is that the historical primacy of terror as a means of social control has been substantially diminished.1 The reduction of terror in the everyday life of a people is always in itself an important gain. Myrdal has emphasized that “threats, whippings, and even serious forms of violence have been customary caste sanctions utilized to maintain a strict discipline over Negro labor” (229). But now, with the winning of formal political rights, the reliance on terror—on police violence, on the lynch mob, on arbitrary imprisonment—has greatly diminished as the method of controlling blacks. Why this historic transformation came about, and the role of the civil rights movement in producing it, is the subject of this chapter.
By contrast, economic gains were limited. Many blacks entered the middle class, taking advantage of the liberal employment policies of both public and private institutions which the turbulence of the period produced. For most poor blacks, however, occupational conditions did not much improve. For many of them the main gain was the winning of liberalized welfare practices to insure their survival despite widespread unemployment and underemployment. That gain, and the movement which won it, will be discussed in the next chapter.
In the largest sense, political modernization in the South followed from economic modernization. Throughout the twentieth century industrialization had been advancing in the states of the Outer South and in some cities of the Deep South.2 Meanwhile, in the rural areas of the Deep South, mechanization and new agricultural technologies swept over the traditional plantation system, especially in the post-World War II period. These economic transformations rendered the semifeudal political order that prevailed in much of the South obsolete, the vestige of a labor-intensive plantation system that was passing into history.
The economic changes that made traditional patterns of political domination archaic also generated the force to bring new political arrangements into being. Changing economic circumstances, and the demographic and social ramifications that soon followed, created mounting unrest among masses of blacks, eventually culminating in a black struggle against the southern caste system. By the mid-1960s national political leaders finally responded to the rising tide of black protest and imposed modernizing political reforms on the South. That they could do so was a measure both of the underlying economic transformation which had occurred, and of the force of black insurgency.
In the analysis which follows, we have focused on the relationship between economic change, mass unrest, and the national electoral system. If political reforms throughout the South were made possible by change in the southern economy, and if economic change, by producing mass unrest, also made those reforms imperative, it was the electoral system that registered and mediated the pressures and which yielded the reforms. Political rights were finally conceded to southern blacks by a national Democratic Party whose leaders had for decades consistently refused to interfere with caste arrangements in the South. Then, in a series of actions culminating in the mid-1960s, Democratic presidents and a Congress dominated by Democratic majorities forced political reforms on the southern wing of their party.
It is our view that the civil rights movement was a vital force in this process because of the impact of its disruptive tactics on the electoral system. By defying caste domination, and by thus provoking southern whites to employ terroristic methods that were losing legitimacy, the civil rights movement succeeded in exacerbating electoral instabilities which had already been set in motion by economic modernization in the South. The national Democratic Party bore the brunt of these electoral conflicts and weakening party allegiances. The party’s electoral majority had been eroding in the postwar years as polarization between southern whites on the one hand, and blacks and northern white liberals on the other, worsened. Consequently when the black assault against the caste system took form in the 1950s, polarizing northern and southern sentiments all the more, the leaders of the national Democratic Party maneuvered to reduce their electoral losses by imposing political reforms on the South. By this time there was no other way that the profound conflicts dividing the northern and southern wings of the party could be lessened. Nor, except by enfranchising blacks and incorporating them in the southern wing of the party, could Democratic strength in the South be regained.3 We turn, then, to an amplification of these points.
No group in American society has been as subjected to the extremes of economic exploitation as blacks. Each change in their relationship to the economic system has mainly represented a shift from one form of extreme economic subjugation to another: from slaves to cash tenants and sharecroppers; from cash tenants and sharecroppers to the lowest stratum in an emerging southern rural free labor system; and, finally, to the status of an urban proletariat characterized by low wages and high unemployment. In effect, the black poor progressed from slave labor to cheap labor to (for many) no labor at all.
In one period of American history after another, conflict has broken out among white dominants for control over the changing forms of economic exploitation of blacks; from the debate among the framers of the Constitution as to whether blacks were men or property; to the “free soil” conflict which brought on the Civil War; to the inconclusive Hayes-Tilden election and the Compromise of 1877, which restored southern white hegemony and the Democratic Party in the South; to the “massive resistance” movement led by southern elites against the national government in the post-World War II era.
In each period ascendant elites employed the powers of the national and local governments to enforce the subjugation of blacks. The entire apparatus of government—its legislatures, its judiciaries, its executive branches—has been mobilized to perpetuate caste arrangements in the South and segregation and discrimination in the North. Legislatures enacted laws to deprive blacks of political rights and refused to prevent private institutions from depriving blacks of economic and social rights; the courts wove a net of opinions which legitimized the actions of other branches of government and of private institutions; and the executive levels of government employed their powers, especially police powers, to enforce the interests of private elites in exploiting the black labor force.
The particular arrangements by which government buttressed the economic subjugation of blacks during the last hundred years had their origins in the post-Reconstruction period. The gains of the Civil War and of Reconstruction had, in principle, been considerable. Blacks were freed from slavery by the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1868 to provide due process and equal protection of the law. Two years later the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed all citizens the right to vote regardless of race or other characteristics. In 1875 the Civil Rights Bill was enacted to provide “equal enjoyment” of public accommodations and other facilities. But, by the turn of the century, most gains had been lost, and all would be by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.
“Racism grew up as an American ideology,” Arnold Rose has said, “partly in response to the need to maintain a reliable and permanent work force in the difficult job of growing cotton …” (xviii). That economic imperative was not lessened with the emancipation of the slaves. The southern economy was in a shambles; the restoration of the plantation system depended on once again securing a reliable and permanent work force, and one that could be made to work on terms not much different than those which had prevailed during slavery. Although legal slavery was no longer possible, a roughly equivalent status of economic serfdom was. During the last third of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, southern elites, with the acquiescence of their northern counterparts, forged the system of political domination required to return blacks to servitude. Moreover, the resolution of the black’s economic role vitally affected the place of the poor white in the southern economy.
For all practical purposes the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877 freed the South to restore caste relations between blacks and whites. This transformation was achieved at the state and local level through mob and police violence, through legislative measures, and through court rulings—all tacitly or explicitly condoned in the North and by the federal government.
The hallmark of white violence against blacks has been the lynch mob. Mob violence was among the most fundamental means by which the black was restored to servitude in the post-Reconstruction era, for “the evidence of race conflict and violence, brutality and exploitation in this period is overwhelming. It was, after all, in the eighties and early nineties that lynching attained the most staggering proportions ever reached in the history of that crime” (Woodward, 1974, 43). (During the next seventy years the NAACP would record nearly 5,000 known cases of lynching.) The mobs, of course, were composed mainly of poor whites, leading Cox to conclude that “poor whites themselves may be thought of as the primary instrument of the ruling class in subjugating the Negroes” (536).4 It was also the case that the police agents of the South achieved national renown for their tactics of terror against blacks. Sometimes they led lynch mobs. More commonly they simply made it known that they would not interfere with mob actions led by others. (And the Congress refused to make lynching a federal crime until after World War II.)
As the nineteenth century came to a close, legislation was widely enacted to isolate and stigmatize blacks, thus legitimizing their economic exploitation.5 Segregated arrangements soon pervaded every aspect of southern life, from schools to cemeteries. These legislative enactments were approved by the Supreme Court, which found in 1883 that the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 was unconstitutional; and in 1896, in an opinion that was to affirm the validity of segregation for more than half a century, the Court established the legal fiction that racial segregation was not in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment provided the facilities afforded blacks were equal. Finally, the vote was gradually denied to blacks by a variety of measures, including literacy and property tests, poll taxes, and “grandfather clauses” (which allowed persons to vote only if their ancestors had voted), and these actions were spurred by the Supreme Court which found in 1898 that a plan advanced by Mississippi to disenfranchise blacks was not unconstitutional.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the movement to restore caste arrangements had succeeded. It was a movement which, by then, found support in virtually all walks of southern life; from the disillusioned agrarian radicals to the most conservative leaders of the planter class. Most important of all, it found favor among the mass of poor whites who were led by their various leaders to endorse measures to disenfranchise blacks—such as poll taxes and literacy tests—which disenfranchised many of them as well. That this could be so is owed to the great success with which the southern ruling class played upon economic competition among blacks and whites, for “the Southern ‘aristocracy’ … could not endure without the hatred which it perpetuates among the white and black masses, and it [has been] by no means unmindful of that fact” (Cox, 577). Poor whites paid dearly for that hatred, for many of them not only lost certain political rights, but they permitted themselves to be relegated to a condition of economic servitude not much different than that to which they condemned blacks. Thus Perlo points out:
While the planters lost much from the Civil War, they had certain compensations.… The new system of exploitation, involving “free” labor, could and was extended to the poor whites as well. As agriculture in the South became more concentrated, hundreds of thousands of small white farmers lost their land. Many became city workers. But many others became wage laborers or sharecroppers on the plantations. They became subject to the same type of extreme exploitation as the Negro farm population (71).
If the Compromise of 1877 marked the beginning of northern tolerance for southern practices, that tolerance was not shaken by the renewed subjugation of blacks as the nineteenth century drew to a close. In part this was because northern capitalism had entered a new imperialist phase, and racism as an ideology became more important in the North as well:
… in the year 1898, the United States plunged into imperialistic adventures overseas under the leadership of the Republican Party. These adventures in the Pacific and the Caribbean suddenly brought under the jurisdiction of the United States some eight million people of the colored races.… As America shouldered the White Man’s Burden, she took up at the same time many southern attitudes on the subject of race.… At the dawn of the new century the wave of Southern racism came in as a swell upon a mounting tide of national sentiment and was very much a part of that sentiment (Woodward, 1974, 72–74).
Landless, illiterate, and without recourse in the law or the political process, blacks were effectively returned to servitude as the twentieth century dawned. All of this was made possible by national acquiescence in the full range of mechanisms which made up the southern caste system. The federal government would not intervene to prevent the harsh exploitation of black labor, nor to alter the social and political structures by which that exploitation was achieved. The result was the consolidation in the South of a ruling class which could easily control the whole of southern life and which faced little opposition until the post-World War II years. “The one party South … and the low political participation of even the white people favor a de facto oligarchic regime,” Myrdal points out. “The oligarchy consists of the big landowners, the industrialists, the bankers, and the merchants. Northern corporate business with big investments in the region has been sharing in the political control by this oligarchy” (453).
Given the totalitarian system which prevailed in the South until World War II, no defiant movement could either emerge or succeed in winning concessions. Economic interests could fire and evict and withhold credit at will; white mobs could lynch and burn at will; police agents could beat, maim, and kill at will; political leaders could call up the militia at will; the courts could imprison at will. All of the coercive measures available to public and private elites were employed in their most untrammeled and undisguised form to compel acquiescence by blacks to their station. As Lomax put it, the “Negro world was an enclave of terror” (40). Nor were the occasions frequent when force needed to be applied. Defiance was largely precluded by the socializing structures of southern society—its educational system, its religious institutions, its media, and a culture in which symbols of white supremacy were the hallmark. All were organized to inculcate the belief among blacks that their lot in life was the only rightful one or, at least, the only possible one. The structure of coercion and of socialization was so formidable that defiance simply could not be contemplated.
Even had black insurgency developed on any scale, it would have resulted in bloody repression as long as the national government accommodated to these sectional arrangements. The alliance of the national government and southern state and local governments was an overwhelming force. It would require some fundamental change, some large transformation, to disrupt this collusion. That transforming force was economic modernization in the South, a force that gradually altered national politics and, by doing so, helped give rise to an insurgent black movement.
Even as caste arrangements were being consolidated in the South at the beginning of the twentieth century, large-scale economic forces were at work that would, in time, disrupt those arrangements. The most important effect of these economic forces, for our analysis, was the dramatic shift in the character of black participation in the labor force, together with mass migration out of the South. As to the first: “During slavery, practically all Negroes were engaged in southern agriculture or were household servants. This was still true of 87 percent in 1900 and 80 percent in 1910. But in 1960 less than 10 percent were in agriculture and 15 percent in domestic services” (Ross, 31). Regarding migration, more than 90 percent of blacks lived in the South at the beginning of the twentieth century; by 1960 about half lived in the North. In the course of slightly more than a half century the occupational position of blacks was transformed, and great numbers were redistributed from the agricultural South to the industrial North.
In the broadest terms, these shifts were caused by industrial expansion in the North during the first part of the twentieth century, by the decline in agricultural markets after World War I, together with federal agricultural policies originating in the 1930s, which took great masses of land out of production, and by the rapid pace of agricultural and industrial modernization in the South during and after World War II. Northern industrial expansion began to draw many blacks out of agriculture and out of the South in the early part of the century. “After the turn of the century,” Ross points out, “American industrialism came into full flower. From an annual average of $13 billion in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the gross national product increased … to $40 billion in the 1909–1918 period. Total employment rose from an average of 27 million in 1889–1898 to 39 million in 1908–1918” (11). With the outbreak of war in Europe, the waves of immigration which had provided the labor supply for industrial expansion were sharply diminished, causing northern industry to look to the South for a source of labor. With these changes the first massive migration of blacks out of the South began; between 1910 and 1920 about half a million blacks moved to northern and western states.6
The post-World War I years brought a sharp reduction in the need for agricultural products, both because of curtailed wartime exports and curtailed immigration; the result was the beginning of a long period of intense hardship for agricultural workers. This trend reached catastrophic proportions in the Great Depression. The collapse of agricultural markets, together with New Deal policies which attempted to deal with agricultural surpluses by reducing production, forced millions off the land throughout the United States. In the South, where the vast majority of blacks were still located, “Cotton land in cultivation declined from 43 million acres in 1929 to 23 million acres in 1939. Negroes in every status—landowners, cash tenants, share tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers—were displaced in large numbers …” (Ross, 14). Under the circumstances, migration was the only choice for many. By 1940 almost one-quarter (23 percent) of blacks had come to live outside the South.
World War II reversed the decline in agriculture, but it also provided the impetus for a large-scale modernizing trend:7
The boom of World War II and subsequent war preparations gave southern landlordism a new lease on life by raising the price of cotton and increasing the profit from the exploitation of sharecroppers and wage labor. At the same time this boom accelerated the technical development of southern agriculture. As large-scale purely capitalist farming grew at an unprecedented pace for the South … the anachronism of semi-slave, hand and mule labor on the sharecropper units became more acute (Perlo, 113).
The modernization of southern agriculture also stimulated increasing concentration of land ownership. Although the amount of southern acreage in farm production declined only slightly between 1940 and 1960, the number of farms dropped by nearly half, and the average farm size increased from 123 acres to 217 acres.8 Taken together, mechanization, new agricultural technologies, federal policies which removed land from production, and the enlargement of land holdings dramatically altered the labor requirements of southern agriculture.
The traditional tenant labor force of the South thus found itself increasingly obsolete, forced to search elsewhere for the means to subsist. White surplus farm labor found employment in the developing southern textiles mills and related industries. But blacks continued to be excluded from such employment. This pattern of segregated employment served the southern (and the northern) employing classes well. The availability of a huge black labor surplus could be used as a threat to impede demands by whites for higher wages and for unionization. By excluding blacks the manufacturing class made “the underpaid white worker satisfied with his ‘superior’ status” and “threatens implicitly to bring in the Negro in case of ‘difficulties’ with the white workers” (Perlo, 99). Low wages and docile workers, in turn, helped to spur industrial expansion all the more, for the cheap labor pools available in the South led northern capital to make increasingly heavy investments in that region.
The relative exclusion of blacks from southern industry had a further consequence of great importance for the analysis being developed in this chapter—it gave many blacks little choice but to migrate northward. To be sure, a good many blacks migrated to southern cities, with the result that by 1960 only about 40 percent of the blacks who remained in the South still lived in rural areas. But their experience in the southern cities was one of intense economic hardship: they occupied the very bottom rung of the urban proletariat, finding employment mainly available in those forms of work that were considered “unsuitable” for whites (e.g., domestic service, and other unskilled service jobs). Consequently their economic circumstances both in agriculture and in the southern cities created an inexorable pressure upon blacks to migrate northward, producing the greatest exodus of southern black agricultural workers in the nation’s history: “During the decade of 1940-50 over 1.5 million Negroes left the South and 1.5 million left during the next decade.… On the other hand, the net outmigration of whites from the South was only 0.1 percent in the 1940s and 1.7 percent during the 1950s” (Henderson, 83).9 With this trend growing, the proportion of blacks living outside of the South rose from 23 percent to almost 50 percent between 1940 and the mid-sixties. For all practical purposes, then, the South succeeded in redistributing a substantial part of its surplus labor to other regions of the country.
Taking all of these changes together, the results are striking: “In 1910, 75 percent of the nation’s blacks lived in rural areas and nine-tenths lived in the South. [By the mid-sixties] three quarters were in cities and half resided outside of the southern states” (Foner, 325). In the course of a few decades a depressed southern rural peasantry had been transformed into a depressed urban proletariat.
With a massive agricultural and industrial transformation underway, a system of political domination based on terror and disen-franchisement was no longer essential to the southern ruling class in order to insure their labor needs on terms favorable to them. In other words economic modernization had made the South susceptible to political modernization. In the large-scale mechanized agriculture that was developing in the rural South, market incentives were slowly substituted for the older system of serf labor. A wage labor supply—one that was somewhat more skilled (especially in the use of machinery)—was coming to be required. This transition to wage labor was greatly facilitated by the huge labor surpluses which were continually thrown up by the process of agricultural modernization itself. The constant threat of unemployment was a powerful inducement for rural workers to accept wage work on terms dictated by the planter class.
In the industrializing areas of the South a new capitalist class was emerging, especially during and following World War II. In large part it was tied to northern corporate power, for a considerable segment of southern industrial enterprise was initiated and controlled by northern capital. This new urban-based industrial class relied mainly on market mechanisms to insure its labor needs. To be sure, the inferior status of blacks continued to be a useful mechanism to insure maximum profits. But the deliberate exacerbation of racial competition for jobs was a strategy long used by employers to control labor both in the North and in the South, and was far from being equivalent to a system of caste. As a social system to allocate and control labor, in short, southern caste arrangements were becoming obsolete.
It was also the case that the southern white, whatever his class, had less reason in the post-World War II years to fear the extension of political rights to blacks, including the granting of the franchise. An extensive depopulation of the black belt South was well under way as a result of the large northward movement of blacks. Whatever electoral threat blacks might once have represented, migration greatly lessened it.
As economic modernization overtook the South, other changes were taking place in the North which also weakened opposition to the extension of formal rights to blacks. As we noted in an earlier section the imperialistic adventures launched by northern capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century were in part justified by a racist ideology which borrowed much from the South. But with the rise of communism the United States was thrown into intense competition for world domination, a circumstance that demanded an ideology of “democracy” and “freedom.” By the post-World War II period and the outbreak of the “cold war,” this ideology reached full flower in international relations. Increasingly the circumstances prevailing in the South constituted a national embarrassment and support for these arrangements by dominant economic elites weakened. Imperialistic requirements which had in one era helped return blacks to servitude thus helped in another era to release them from servitude.
The stakes of northern capitalism in domestic racism also weakened after World War II. Early in the century, as black numbers in the northern industrial centers grew, employers had relentlessly pitted blacks against whites, exacerbating racial tensions in order to weaken working-class solidarity. One measure of the success of this strategy was the outbreak of white mob violence against blacks in the post-World War I period, for “some twenty-five race riots were touched off in American cities during the last six months of 1919,” as an upsurge of unemployment followed the slowing of war production and the demobilizing of the armed forces. “Mobs took over cities for days at a time, flogging, burning, shooting, and torturing at will.… During the first year following the war more than seventy Negroes were lynched, several of them veterans still in uniform” (Woodward, 1974, 114). Blacks were slowly forced out of many of the industries where they had obtained wartime employment, and they were excluded from unions as well. To survive, they were pressed all the more to cooperate with nonunion employers against white workers. The problem was so extreme that the National Urban League found it necessary in 1919 to enact policies broad enough “to permit the autonomous local Leagues to proceed as they deemed best—to endorse and work with unions, to refer Negroes as strikebreakers, or to remain neutral” in the struggle between the employing and working classes (Meier, 1967, 175).
By the World War II period, however, northern capitalism had largely acceded to the unionization of the industrial working class, and to that extent the exploitation of racial cleavages had begun to lose its former utility. This change, together with the growing requirement for a liberal racial ideology with which to meet the threat of Communism in international affairs, eroded support for the southern social system among economic dominants in the North. As the nation approached mid-century, then, the leaders of northern capitalism and their counterparts in the South no longer had great cause to resist modernizing political trends in the southern region. Arnold Rose surely overstated the point when he remarked that caste arrangements had become “an expression merely of a traditional psychology,” but the remark nevertheless contained much truth (xxvi).
Economic change, by weakening the stakes of agricultural and industrial leaders in the maintenance of caste arrangements, also freed national political leaders to act against those arrangements. By the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century, the perpetuation of caste arrangements was being reduced to a question of public opinion. In the absence of significant opposition from economic dominants, the question was whether shifts in the alignments of broad electoral groupings would create the necessary pressures to compel national leaders to act. The Democratic Party was the main arena in which this drama of gradually intensifying electoral conflict and realignment was played out.
Since the post-Reconstruction period, the one-party South has constituted the regional foundation of the national Democratic Party. Periodic efforts by the Republican Party to revive its political fortunes by mounting a “southern strategy”—either to forge a coalition between southern whites and blacks, or simply to garner conservative white voters—have foundered on the shoals of a virulent racism inculcated by the Democratic political leaders of the South and by the economic elites whom they served. The poor whites of the South, whatever their populist inclinations, continued in the twentieth century to be deeply moved by racial fears and by the slight advantages in economic position and social status which caste arrangements afforded them. Consequently poor whites continued to align themselves with the ruling class of the South, submerging their own class interests in a political alliance against blacks.
The realignment of the Democratic Party in 1932 did not change the politics of the South, for a national coalition was formed that joined together the industrial working class in the North and the one-party agrarian South. But two sources of strain were in the making even as that alliance was formed.
For one, northern urban blacks joined that coalition in 1936. With that shift, the “American dilemma” became a Democratic dilemma, as it had been a Republican dilemma for more than half a century. Just as the race question had plagued the party of Lincoln (it especially plagued Republican presidential contenders who had to deal with a delegation of northern and southern blacks at nominating conventions), now it was to plague the party of the New Deal and ultimately to divide it along regional lines.
But that division would be several decades in the making. In the meanwhile blacks got little, as a racial group, for their participation in Democratic politics: a few leavings of municipal patronage from the local parties, a few symbolic gestures from Democratic presidents. In 1936 the Democratic Party removed the rule that required a two-thirds majority for nominations and thereby also removed the South’s veto power over presidential candidates. In the early 1940s a Roosevelt-oriented Supreme Court declared the white primary unconstitutional, and Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Commission (in response to the threat that blacks, led by A. Phillip Randolph, would mount a march on Washington). Even such minor concessions, however, marked the beginning of a new posture by national Democratic leaders toward the black cause, and engendered intense antagonism among southern leaders, thus creating a deep strain between the northern and southern wings of the party.
The social and economic policies of the New Deal generated a second source of regional strain. New Deal programs to spur recovery and to solidify popular support provoked open conflict with the traditional elites of the South, whose power was based on the plantation economy. This “banker-merchant-farmer-lawyer-doctor-governing class” considered the New Deal a threat to its pervasive control over the structure of southern rural and smalltown life:
For these people, the New Deal jeopardized a power that rested on the control of property, labor, credit and local government. Relief projects reduced dependency [on employers]; labor standards raised wages; farm programs upset landlord-tenant relationships; government credit bypassed bankers; new federal programs skirted county commissioners and sometimes even state agencies (Tindall, 31).
Southern economic interests did not, of course, eschew the New Deal programs that were of direct benefit to them; they opposed only those programs whose impact would weaken their power. Thus, for example, New Deal agricultural policies paid plantation owners generously to take land out of production, and the owners were glad for the subsidies. But, at the same moment, they opposed the giving of federal emergency relief to the superfluous work force resulting from the reduction of agricultural activity:
The share tenant’s situation is the impossible one of being forced by the inadequacies of the present system, on the one hand, to seek relief as the only means of keeping alive; and, on the other hand, of having this relief opposed by the landlord because it may spoil him as a tenant, if and when he can be used again. There are other fears back of the landlord’s attitude; the fear that the tenant will be removed from the influence of the landowner and learn that he is not entirely dependent on him; and the fear that the relief will raise the standard of living to the extent that bargaining on the old basis will be difficult. It can readily be seen that from the point of view of the landlord government relief is demoralizing (Johnson, Embree, and Alexander, 52).
In response to these two basic sources of strain, independent electors appeared on the ballots of several southern states in 1936. Although it was another decade before the movement toward independent or unpledged electors gathered momentum, the election of 1936 was a harbinger of the deep strains in Democratic presidential politics that would soon split the party.
But whatever their antagonism toward New Deal programs, southern leaders were in no position to bolt the party, for they had little hope of carrying the southern rank and file with them. Roosevelt’s policies for economic recovery and social reform resonated with a long tradition of economic populism among the southern white masses, and thus solidified his electoral strength throughout the South. However, the tensions originating in the New Deal period led southern congressional delegates to coalesce with the Republicans; in exchange for opposition by southern Democrats to many progressive economic and social welfare measures put forward by the Democratic leadership (measures which, in any case, conservative southerners were quite prepared to oppose for their own reasons), the Republicans in turn withheld support from civil rights proposals which were so repugnant to the South.
To cope with this strain in the party, Roosevelt chose to avoid head-on clashes with the South over the race issue (by refusing support to anti-lynching legislation, for example). Instead he argued that blacks could best progress by being loyal to the New Deal, thus benefitting from the array of social and economic legislation sponsored by the New Deal. There can be no doubt that blacks did benefit from many of these programs (although they were badly hurt by some, especially federal agricultural policies). But as an excluded and exploited racial group, they got virtually nothing. In effect, the civil rights issue was submerged in order to maintain greater party unity.
By 1940 blacks began leaving the South in great numbers. Year by year the impact of this demographic revolution on the northern electoral system was immense, for blacks were concentrating in the northern cities of the most populous, industrialized states. In other words they were concentrated in the electoral strongholds of the Democratic Party. And as their voting numbers swelled, leaders in the northern wing of the party began to acknowledge that concessions to blacks would have to be made.
The race issue emerged in the election of 1948. It probably would not have emerged so early as a presidential campaign issue were it not for the formation of the Progressive Party led by Henry Wallace: Wallace directed his appeals to northern liberals and to blacks. Clark Clifford, Truman’s chief campaign strategist, was worried about the president’s strength among blacks, and not just because of Wallace. The Republicans were also making symbolic appeals to the black voter. Thus Clifford warned Truman that
the Republicans were doing everything they could to win back this electorate. He predicted that the Republicans would “offer an FEPC, an anti-poll tax bill, and an anti-lynching bill” in the next Congressional session. To counter, the president had to push for whatever action he felt necessary “to protect the rights of minority groups.” Although the South might not like this action, it was the “lesser of two evils” (Yarnell, 44).10
At the same time, Clifford advised Truman that “as always, the South can be considered safely Democratic. And in formulating national policy, it can be safely ignored” (Cochran, 1973, 230).
Accordingly Truman gave the appearance of championing civil rights. “Although he went much further than any previous President … he failed to match rhetoric with concrete efforts …” (Hartmann, 150–151). Thus Truman called for a broad range of civil rights measures in an address to Congress on January 7, and on February 2, he delivered a special civil rights message to Congress which outlined a ten-point program, including outlawing the poll tax, establishing a permanent FEPC, and making lynching a federal crime. But having promised to issue executive orders abolishing segregation in the armed forces and discrimination in federal employment—actions which were within his immediate power—he did neither (not, at least, until after the unanticipated and turbulent events of the nominating convention in the summer).
The nominating convention scuttled Truman’s essentially rhetorical civil rights strategy. Liberal leaders intent on securing a strong civil rights plank despite Truman’s opposition were joined by influential northern machine leaders who believed Truman would lose the election. They “were less concerned with Southern diehards bolting than with solidifying the Negro vote behind their local and state candidates. Henry Wallace was making a powerful appeal to this constituency in major cities. Any spectacular demonstration of the Democrats as resolute defenders of Negro interests that would head off the Wallace threat was to be welcomed” (Cochran, 1973, 230). Consequently a strong civil rights plank was pushed through on the floor of the convention, leading Alabama and Mississippi to walk out. The Dixiecrat forces, drawing upon dissident elements throughout the South, convened two days later in Birmingham to form a States’ Rights Party with Senator J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as its presidential nominee. With these events Truman was pushed all the more to the left on the race question, and he immediately issued the executive orders he had promised months earlier. “Thus a border-state politician intent on pursuing an ambiguous racial policy had the torch of civil rights unexpectedly thrust into his hands” (Cochran, 1973, 231). In the ensuing election, Truman won (with the aid of the black vote) despite the loss of four Deep South states—Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi—to the States’ Rights Party.
The militancy of southern leaders in 1948 reflected the continuing, though rapidly diminishing, political and economic stakes in the exploitation of blacks, especially in the Deep South. Moreover the hoisting of the States’ Rights banner afforded southern leaders an opportunity to mobilize opposition to the offensive social and economic policies of the New Deal and the Fair Deal. Lubell refers to this as “a double insurgency: an economic revolt aimed at checking government spending and the power of labor unions, and a racial reaction designed to counter the influence of Negro voting in the North” (1966, 186).11
Thus it cannot be said that the cause of securing civil rights legislation was immediately advanced by these events. Southern defections in the election of 1948 foreshadowed the possible dissolution of that regional base, and so concessions to the South—namely, maintaining the racial status quo—became the order of the day, as Stevenson’s posture in campaigning for the Democratic nomination in 1952 revealed. In one speech prior to the convention Stevenson declared that “I reject as contemptible the reckless assertions that the South is a prison in which half the people are prisoners and the other half are wardens” (Cochran, 1969, 222). During the nominating convention he expressed great concern that the fight over civil rights “might drive the South out of the party—the party needed unity” (Martin, 1976, 589). With his acquiescence, the delegation from Illinois voted to seat the Dixiecrat delegations without a “loyalty pledge,” a position which antagonized many northern advocates of civil rights. By reason of his personal convictions and his concern that the South had to be kept within the framework of the Democratic Party, Stevenson emerged as a compromise candidate, defeating Kefauver and Harriman after several ballots. He then named Senator John Sparkman of Alabama as his running mate.
Throughout the campaign Stevenson continued to appease the South, and gave relatively little attention to the black vote in the northern cities (Cochran, 1969, 221–222). “He repeatedly indicated concern about losing the South” (Martin, 1976, 597), and time and again he asserted that the responsibility for dealing with the race problem properly resided with the states:
He fell back on an old proposal that the federal FEPC relinquish jurisdiction to states that had FEPC’s of their own. What about the filibuster? “I suppose the President might properly be concerned with the rules of the Senate.… I should certainly want to study it.… I am told that it has disadvantages as well as advantages. There are other considerations involved in unlimited and free debate that must not be overlooked in our anxiety to advance in one field alone” (Martin, 1976, 611).12
As it happens, this policy of conciliation did not stem the tide of defections in the subsequent election because an entirely different force was also at work. To be sure, the Dixiecrat states, where race was the preeminent issue, returned to the Democratic ranks, although South Carolina and Louisiana did so by very slim majorities. But in the Outer South the Republicans made big gains; Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas delivered their electoral votes to Eisenhower. Republican strength in the Outer South was especially noticeable among the growing white middle classes in the cities, while Democratic strength tended to be concentrated among whites in the declining small towns and rural areas of the Deep South (Lubell, 1956, 179 ff.).
The election of 1952 thus revealed the political effects of a second form of economic change that was sweeping the South: industrial modernization. This modernizing trend was casting up a new white middle class in the cities and suburbs (especially in the states of the Outer South) whose political sympathies inclined toward the Republican Party. These changes in the class structure became apparent in the election of 1952, which “marked a turning point in Republican fortunes, the beginnings of a southern Republicanism that would contest elections, first at the presidential level, then at the state and local levels, evolving gradually into a credible opposition party everywhere except the inner core of the Deep South—and even there sporadically” (Tindall, 49).
In other words, the rupture between the northern and southern wings of the Democratic party which occurred in 1948 was no transient phenomenon. Both agricultural and industrial modernization were contributing to a deep and widening fissure. Each of these economic forces was eroding the Democratic Party’s base in the South in a different way. Indeed some political analysts even reached the conclusion at the time that the Democratic Party might not survive. Lubell was one:
The most heavily Democratic districts in the North … are becoming those which are poorest economically and which have the largest Negro populations—two characteristics which tend to pull the representatives of these districts back to the old appeals of the New Deal. If this trend continues, as seems likely, the Congressmen from these districts will find themselves in sharpening conflict with the Southern districts, both with the anti-Negro sentiments, so strong in the rural South, and the economic conservatism of the rising middle-class elements in the Southern cities.… The underlying tensions between these two wings of “sure” Democratic seats are sufficiently intense so that the cracking apart of the Democratic party must be rated a possibility (1956, 215–216).
In this prediction, of course, Lubell was wrong. His mistake was partly in failing to take account of the large stakes the dominant leadership of the South, its congressional delegation, had in the Democratic party. From the start of party splintering in 1948 the southern congressional delegation kept its distance from third-party adventurism. “Continued agitation for an independent political movement came primarily from the Citizens’ Councils and aging Dixiecrat forces” at the state and local level (Bartley, 290). As a result of its longevity in Congress the southern delegation enjoyed tremendous power in national affairs; it had a large claim on federal patronage, and had a decisive impact on the allocation of billions of dollars in defense funds for the construction of military, space, and industrial complexes, many of which came to be located in the South. Nor were shifts in party identification free of risks to electoral incumbency itself. The mystique of the Democratic Party still held sway below the Mason-Dixon line despite the racial tensions of the times. Consequently southern congressional leaders confined themselves to encouraging presidential Republicanism, unpledged electors, and other stratagems to threaten the national Democratic Party, but they did not bolt. In effect they defined the limits of the southern white resistance movement and thereby weakened it. But within these limits they helped the North-South fissure grow.
Because of this fissure, blacks did not benefit much at this stage from their growing voting numbers in the North. Black loyalty to the Democratic Party was not in doubt; in fact it had been intensifying. Referring to the trends in black voting with migration to the North, Lubell observed that “as their numbers have increased so has their Democratic party loyalty.… Truman got a heavier proportion of the Negro vote than did Roosevelt, while Stevenson [in the election of 1952] did even better among the Negroes than Truman” (1956, 214). The firm allegiance of black voters thus encouraged Democratic strategists to decide that it was defections among southern voters which constituted the main problem of the party. For this reason the civil rights issue continued to be sacrificed to the goal of regional unity. It was the South, in short, that initially benefitted from electoral instability. But that was to change, for if the South was becoming antagonized and restive over the race issue, so too were blacks.
As economic modernization thrust blacks out of one socioeconomic system and into another, their capacity to resist caste controls was substantially enlarged. Controls which were so readily enforced in a rural society characterized by dispersion and face-to-face interaction could not be well enforced in the urban community where ghettoization produced concentration and separation. Consequently, “behind the walls of segregated isolation, Negroes were better able to build resistance to subordination” (Rose, xviii).
The historical process of building “resistance to subordination” was initiated in the North where there was no tradition of caste controls and no socially sanctioned tradition of terror against blacks. Since industrialists had encouraged migration to cope with labor shortages and to combat labor insurgency, they entered into a certain kind of alliance with blacks that provided a measure of protection. Political leaders were also restrained from the more extreme forms of racist demagoguery by incipient black electoral influence. The northern urban environment was harsh, to be sure, but it did not preclude protest.
Protest emerged simultaneously with mass migration. Freed from feudal controls, blacks began to protest the oppression they had always known. Moreover, segregation in the northern ghettos provided a degree of security and concentrated numbers provided a sense of strength. Thus with the first large migratory wave in the World War I period, Marcus Garvey was able to draw a million northern blacks into his Universal Negro Improvement Association by appeals that converted “the Negro-American’s stigmatized identity into the source of his personal worthiness” (Michael Lewis, 158).13 have their sense of worth affirmed. At the same time and in many of the same ghettos “Negroes showed a new disposition to fight and defend themselves” against the white mobs that terrorized blacks in several dozen American cities as the war ended (Woodward, 1974,114). Cast in the role of scabs, blacks repeatedly fought white workers for the right to work. During the depression they confronted the police in eviction actions and joined in the struggles of the unemployed against the relief system. In the great uprisings that led to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, they united with white workers in strikes against those mass production industries where they had gotten an occupational foothold. They combined during World War II to challenge Roosevelt’s wartime government with a mass “March on Washington Movement” to protest discrimination in war industry and segregation in the armed forces. In the southern military camps and surrounding communities they engaged in armed combat against whites who attacked them. In other words, once they were free to do so, blacks acted “beyond the limits of institutionalized politics” to protest their condition (Michael Lewis, 151).
Concentration and separation also generated a black economic base, despite the poverty of most of the black urban wage workers who contributed to that base. One significant result was the gradual emergence of a black occupational sector which was relatively invulnerable to white power, a sector consisting of clergymen, small entrepreneurs, professionals, and labor leaders. In an earlier period, and particularly in southern rural society, very few—if any—blacks were located in these occupations, and those few were usually dependent on whites. The emergence of an independent leadership sector was accompanied by institutional expansion and diversification, and by greater institutional independence of the white community. This development, too, was made possible by the economic base which resulted from concentration and segregation. Churches acquired mass memberships, fraternal and other communal associations proliferated, small businesses could be sustained, segregated union locals were formed, and a black press could be nourished. These institutions provided the vehicles to forge solidarity, to define common goals, and to mobilize collective action.
In the evolving history of black protest these developing occupational and institutional resources were of crucial importance. The March on Washington Movement instigated by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, is an outstanding example. Head of a segregated international union, Randolph could act with considerable immunity from white sanctions and his union afforded financial resources and organizing talent. Acting as couriers and organizers in the northeastern and midwestern cities where they stopped over, his trainmen instigated rallies and marches to pressure Roosevelt into issuing an executive order establishing a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to insure blacks access to wartime defense employment. The black press, too, was of critical importance, for it almost uniformly supported Randolph and continually featured the movement’s activities. With this mobilization under way, greater solidarity across class lines was forged:
[Middle-class black leaders] were unable to withstand the militant mood of the frustrated group they sought to lead. However reluctantly, the organizing of masses of Negroes [by Randolph] to engage in a national direct-action demonstration came to be widely agreed upon as a necessary action. It was viewed as a last resort, a dramatic gesture to force the white majority to take notice of the dire distress of its Negro brothers (Garfinkel, 42).
In these ways economic modernization, coupled with separation and concentration, both freed blacks from feudal constraints and enabled them to construct the occupational and institutional foundation from which to mount resistance to white oppression.
Urbanization had another important effect: blacks at the bottom of the urban social order were not only loosened from racial controls, they were loosened from social controls more generally. Social disorganization usually accompanies rapid agricultural modernization and the result of southern modernization was no different. The fundamental cause was unemployment and underemployment. In the rural South people may have lived close to the margin of subsistence, but they were nevertheless enmeshed in an economic system; they were also deeply enmeshed in a semifeudal system of social relations. But with modernization, unemployment spread, driving people into the cities where unemployment and underemployment became a more or less chronic condition for many.14 In turn, persistent unemployment shredded the social fabric. The impact could be sensed in the gradually rising proportion of families headed by females, for men without work were unable to form and sustain families. As for the men themselves, unemployment deprived them of the meaning of work and removed them from the discipline of work. In this way agricultural modernization created a depressed and deregulated class and thus a potentially volatile class from whose ranks civil disorder could erupt. One form that disorder took was rioting: a major riot broke out in Harlem as early as 1935 and again during World War II.
As the numbers of blacks in the cities grew, their protests began to produce concessions from political leaders. Each concession, however rhetorical, conferred legitimacy on the goals of the struggle and gave reason for hope that the goals could be reached, with the result that protest was stimulated all the more. The concessions were yielded by northern political leaders, especially in the Democratic Party and in the federal judiciary. The Great Depression probably marked the beginnings of this new posture by political leaders. Although Roosevelt did all that he could to avoid the civil rights issue directly for fear of antagonizing the South, he gave blacks “a sense of national recognition. He did so more in terms of their interests in economic and social injustice than of their title to equal rights. Yet he threw open the gates of hope” (Schlesinger, 935). But the number of blacks in the North was mounting and protest was intensifying. By World War II racial concessions had to be made. Despite his uneasiness over how an FEPC would affect defense industries in the South, and the possibility of alienating the southern congressional delegation, Roosevelt was confronted by the prospect of a march on Washington that would cause considerable national and international embarrassment to a country identified with the struggle for “freedom abroad.” With the scheduled march only days away, he conceded and signed an executive order establishing an FEPC on June 25, 1941.
In the presidential campaign of 1948 the issue of granting blacks basic rights emerged directly and forcefully, thrusting the issue of race to the very center of national politics. With both Truman and Wallace aligned against segregation and discrimination and with southern leaders aligned to defend the caste system, the rhetoric of race became more inflamed than during any period since the Civil War.
Other segments of the national political leadership stratum also responded in this period. This was nowhere better exemplified than in the opinions of the U. S. Supreme Court. After 1940 the Court upheld the rights of blacks to eat in unsegregated dining cars on interstate carriers, to register and vote in southern white primaries, and to enroll in publicly supported institutions of higher education. This assault on racism through the courts had been many years in the making by the NAACP, and in a growing climate of black protest the courts granted concessions. By the early 1950s:
The legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had developed a nearly completed brief against the principle of separate but equal, plus a staff of lawyers with the skill and acumen to plead their case. In the Sipuel, Sweatt and McLaurin cases during the first five years after the end of the war, they had persuaded the Supreme Court to narrow the definition of equality, so that there remained only the bare principle that segregation was constitutional only if there were real equality. Now the NAACP was ready to attack that principle (Killian, 39).
The culmination of this judicial repudiation of southern racism came in 1954 with the striking down of the “separate but equal” doctrine in public education. It was a sweeping victory, one that was destined to unleash the forces of reaction throughout the South, giving rise to campaigns of massive resistance against federal power by the political leaders of the southern states. But it had equally large consequences in the black community; the highest court in the land had been compelled to yield the struggle against racism a new and large measure of legitimacy.15
The concessions forced from northern leaders by northern blacks reverberated in the southern ghettos. By mid-century, southern ghettos were also swollen with the displaced agricultural poor. Protest had become possible; victories had become possible. Except for freedom from caste relations, all of the structural developments essential to a protest movement that were present in the northern ghettos were also to be found in the southern ghettos: the economic base formed by a wage laboring class; the consequent occupational and institutional expansion and diversification; the volatile underclass produced by unemployment and underemployment. Concentrated, separated, more independent of white domination than ever before, and with more cause for hope than ever before, southern urban blacks burst forth in protest.16
The most dramatic early protest occurred in Montgomery, Alabama.17 On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress in a local department store, refused to sit in the section of a bus restricted to blacks and was arrested under local segregation ordinances. She was the fifth person arrested that year for violating segregated seating arrangements on the Montgomery buses. Indignation over segregation had been mounting, with the bus company a particular target of anger. Not only were blacks subjected to the indignities of segregated seating but armed drivers were notoriously abusive and had killed several blacks. There had been some talk of a boycott and even some concrete planning by the Women’s Political Council, an organization of middle-class black women (formed when the local League of Women Voters refused to admit blacks) who had been influenced by the example of a successful boycott staged in Baton Rouge a year earlier. Various meetings to discuss grievances had been held with the bus company managers, but to no avail.
As word of the arrest spread, a remarkably instantaneous mobilization of the black leadership took place, spurred by the heads of the Women’s Political Council and by E. D. Nixon, a well-known activist who was both an influential member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a resident of Montgomery. The black ministerial alliance joined in and preparations advanced rapidly. By mid-afternoon on Friday 40,000 leaflets calling for a boycott the following Monday morning were being distributed througout the black community of 50,000 persons. Much of the distribution was done by the drivers for a black taxi company who also agreed to transport passengers for the price of the bus fare. A newspaper reporter who was sympathetic to the black cause managed to place a boycott story on the front page of the Sunday edition of a local white newspaper and black ministers throughout the community exhorted people from the pulpits to join the boycott.
On Monday morning, only four days after the triggering arrest, the boycott was nearly 100 percent effective. In the afternoon Martin Luther King, a newcomer to the community and thus a figure still not marred by factional identifications, was elected to head a permanent boycott committee, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). That night 4,000 blacks—8 percent of Montgomery’s black population—assembled in a local church to wonder at and to celebrate what they had done.
The struggle in Montgomery had begun. In the year before it ended, all of the elements in the upheaval that dominated the South for the next ten years were revealed. The bus company and local city officials were adamant in refusing to make concessions, and so the black community dug in for a long fight. A car pool, with forty-eight dispatch points and forty-two collection points, was organized and it operated with remarkable efficiency throughout the year. City officials and white citizen groups, for their part, mounted a campaign of harassment. Riders waiting at the car pool dispatching and collection points were arrested for vagrancy, for hitchhiking, and on other grounds; car insurance was cancelled; leaders of the movement lived with constant telephoned threats of assassination.
The dynamiting of King’s home in late January nearly set off a race riot. When King was also arrested for speeding, he was refused bail until hundreds gathered before the jail. City officials tried to prevent MIA from establishing an office to coordinate the affairs of the boycott. Using the excuse of local building and fire ordinances of one kind or another, they forced MIA to move its offices repeatedly until a haven was finally found in a building built and owned by a local union of black brick layers.
Moderate elements in Montgomery were effectively silenced during these events. Even the downtown merchants who were hard hit by the boycott brought only half-hearted pressure for a settlement, for they were immobilized by the openly displayed anger of the white community. When the White Citizens’ Council invited Senator Eastland to speak in Montgomery in mid-February, some 12,000 people assembled to hear him. And local business leaders had been warned that white boycotts would follow any gestures of conciliation toward the black movement.
If positions in Montgomery were thus frozen, the opinions of others beyond Montgomery were not. The Montgomery struggle attracted attention throughout the country and the world. Money poured in from the NAACP, from the United Automobile Workers (which had a substantial black membership), and from thousands of individuals, especially in the North. National opinion was all the more aroused when the leaders of the movement were indicted in late February for conspiring to interfere with business. The trial itself attracted worldwide press attention, providing dozens of black witnesses with an opportunity to denounce the southern caste system before an international audience. The leaders were found guilty in Alabama, of course, but the verdict brought with it invitations for speaking engagements in many northern cities and thus the opportunity to garner northern support.
The struggle wore on until, in November, a local court enjoined the car pool. Had that action been taken much earlier, it might have broken the boycott (the boycott leaders believed they could not defy the courts without tainting their claims to moral justification in the eyes of the nation). But midway through the trial, with MIA leaders awaiting the inevitable negative decision, word was received that the U.S. Supreme Court had declared Alabama’s state and local bus segregation laws unconstitutional.
The reprisals in the wake of victory were staggering: four churches and several homes were dynamited; several shootings occurred; and there were many beatings. The atmosphere of violence so alarmed businessmen whose economic losses were by then considerable that they finally brought effective pressure to bear on the city administration with the result that seven whites were arrested for terrorist acts and violence began to subside. The black movement of the post-World War II period had staged its first major battle and won its first major victory.
The white extremism and violence so characteristic of the South historically and so evident during the course of both the Montgomery boycott and other protests of the period hardly needed encouragement from elites. But it was provided in any case, for as the caste system came under assault, traditional southern white leaders rose up in outrage. Respected and influential figures denounced the courts, the federal government, and civil rights organizers for unwarranted infringements upon states’ rights. They did more than denounce: Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia called for a program of “massive resistance” by state and local governments to nullify the power of the courts. The most dramatic symbol of this elite movement was the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles”—the so-called “Southern Manifesto”—which was sponsored by Senator J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. When it was issued in 1956 it bore the signature of 82 Representatives and 19 Senators or 101 of the 128 national legislators from states in the former Confederacy. The statement called the Brown decision a “clear abuse of judicial powers” that was being exploited by “outside agitators.” The Supreme Court, it was said, “undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.” And the document ended with a pledge to “use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution.” These and other pronouncements by white southern leaders (Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia proclaimed that the Supreme Court’s decision was “national suicide”) had considerable impact; virtually every state in the former Confederacy, for example, enacted legislation to prevent or hamper enforcement of the Brown decision, including closing and padlocking the public schools.
The legitimacy which southern leaders thus conferred on defiance of the federal courts encouraged the emergence of a movement of massive resistance among whites. New South-wide segregationist organizations mushroomed (some estimates put the number as high as fifty), their membership drawn mainly from the small towns and rural areas of the black belt. Most of them were eventually swept into the better-organized and financed White Citizens’ Council movement which, at its height in 1956, could claim 250,000 members. But these
organized segregationists exercised an influence far more pervading than membership rolls implied. Their ranks included the … cadres of massive resistance. Effective leadership and organization … [enabled] … Council spokesmen to usurp the voice of the white community. An uneasy but workable alliance with powerful political figures gave its leaders influence at the highest policy levels (Bartley, 84).18
At the local level, Citizens’ Councils turned out massive amounts of propaganda in support of segregation, denounced and intimidated whites who spoke up in support of court compliance, and instigated systematic retaliation against black activists. The boycott in Montgomery had been followed by a similarly successful campaign in Tallahassee in June 1956, and boycotts against white businesses were spreading to other parts of the South. In response, Citizens’ Councils organized or supported the use of economic sanctions against blacks. Blacks as well as civil rights sympathizers were evicted from tenant farm shacks, were fired from jobs, were denied loans, and had their mortgages foreclosed. With black boycotts spreading and economic reprisals against blacks worsening, it could be fairly said that economic warfare was being waged in the South in the latter half of the 1950s.
In the presidential campaign of 1956 national political leaders attempted to play down the divisive race issue, particularly avoiding the inflammatory Brown decision. The Republican platform said that the party “accepts the [Brown] decision”; the Democrats said that the decision had generated “consequences of vast importance.”19 During the campaign Eisenhower declared, “I don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions,” and Stevenson, in response to the question of whether he would employ federal troops to enforce the orders of the courts, replied “I think that would be a great mistake. That is exactly what brought on the Civil War. It can’t be done by troops, or bayonets. We must proceed gradually, not upsetting habits or traditions that are older than the Republic” (Anthony Lewis, 1964, 108). In other words, the civil rights stance of the Democrats in 1956 was designed to regain the insurgent South.
Although both parties avoided the school desegregation issue, the Republicans saw opportunities in the difficulties being experienced by the Democratic Party over the race question. There was the possibility of playing upon this issue to make further gains among whites in the South,20 or of making equally important gains among blacks in the ghettos of the North. In some measure Republican strategists were uncertain of the proper course:
Like the Democrats, the Republicans were torn between conflicting strategies. Some GOP leaders looked longingly toward the Negro vote in the northern states and recommended a vigorous civil rights policy. Other party strategists, watching the disintegrating position of the national Democratic party in the South, visualized further Republican gains among white voters below the Potomac and counseled a cautious approach to the problems of desegregation (Anthony Lewis, 1964, 62).
However, the Republicans finally cast their lot with the potential for gain among northern blacks, for the congressional Republicans were all from northern states where blacks were concentrating. Under the urging of Herbert Brownell, the attorney general, and of other party leaders, Eisenhower sent a civil rights bill to Congress in 1956 and Republicans pushed for it, prodded as they were by a president “who was demanding party support for a civil rights bill that conceivably could revolutionize Negro politics and bring the Negro vote back to the party of Lincoln” (Evans and Novak, 126).21 For northern Democrats the Republican action presented a major dilemma, especially in an election year. Many felt it was essential to take decisive action on civil rights; others feared the impact of such action on southern support. In the end Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader, conspired with other southern congressmen to kill the bill, and the Congress adjourned.
The election of 1956 indicated that the Democratic strategy of avoiding civil rights issues was not succeeding. The basis of the North-South Democratic coalition was inexorably weakening. On the one side, southern defections continued. When the returns were in Stevenson fared slightly worse than he had in the election of 1952. Four states in the Outer South—Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas—remained in the Republican column, a reflection in part of the two-party system developing as a result of industrial modernization. And in the Deep South, Louisiana defected. The Democrats, despite a policy of conciliation on the race question, thus suffered a net loss of one additional southern state over the election of 1952 and analysts began to speculate that the two-party system in the south might be reviving.
On the other side, the election of 1956 revealed that black allegiance to the Democratic Party was also weakening. “Partisan as well as non-political spokesmen for the race had warned [in advance of the election] that resurgence of racial bigotry in the South endangered the old alliance. Polls indicated that the Democrats could not count on the overwhelming majorities from Negro districts which had been returned consistently during the past 20 years” (Moon, 1957, 219). When the ballots were counted, a Gallup poll reported that “of all the major groups in the nation’s population, the one that shifted most to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket … was the Negro voter.” Stevenson had won about 80 percent of the black vote in 1952, but he won only about 60 percent in 1956. The upward trend of black support for the Democratic Party initiated in the election of 1936 was broken.
Analysts of the election of 1956 uniformly attribute the falloff in the Democratic black vote to Stevenson’s efforts to maintain party unity at the expense of the civil rights issue. Matthews and Protho state: “The significant shift to Eisenhower in 1956 was caused by the belief that neither Stevenson nor the Democratic party was sound, from the Negro viewpoint, on the race issue” (391–392). Considerable support for this view derives from the regional pattern of defections: “Significantly, the closer the Negro lived to the resurgent terror, the sharper was his defection from the dominant party” (Moon, 1957, 226). In many southern precincts the dropoff in black Democratic votes was startling. For example, “In 1952 the Illinois governor carried Atlanta Negro precincts better than 2 to 1. Four years later he received less than 15 percent of the vote in these same precincts” (Moon, 1957, 221).22
Although the sharpest black defections occurred in the South, many northern black voters signaled their disapproval of the Democratic Party in another way:
There was a sharp decline in balloting in many Negro districts throughout the country, but particularly in Northern industrial centers from which, in previous years, the Democrats had received huge majorities. This, despite an increased Negro population in most of these cities.…
In Philadelphia, 27,000 fewer votes were cast than in 1952 for a loss of 14.7 percent. Voting in the Negro wards of Kansas City, Mo., was off a fifth for a decline of 5,900 in the number of ballots cast. The percentage loss was even higher in Boston where the vote was down 28.5. The Negro vote declined 19 percent in Atlantic City; 15.6 in Toledo; 15.4 in Pittsburgh; 12 in Chicago; 9.3 in Brooklyn; 9.1 in Youngstown, Ohio; 6.4 in Cleveland; and 5.9 in Harlem (Moon, 1957, 228).
In addition to black discontent over the civil rights question, defections and low turnout may also have reflected the fact that the northern urban Democratic Party apparatus was doing little to assure black allegiance. Blacks were not being quickly absorbed into the political organizations in the northern cities. Northern urban political organizations, which drew their main support from working-class and middle-class white groups, were hardly prepared to yield much to their enlarging black constituency. In part this was because racial antagonism among whites in the cities was intensifying as black numbers grew. In part it was because Democratic control of many large cities was assured and did not depend on black votes, so that few urban Democratic leaders felt compelled to mount voter registration campaigns in the ghettos, or to draw blacks into party councils, or to encourage and reward their political participation with patronage.23 And so, as the numbers of northern blacks swelled, the reins which urban politicians held over the otherwise steadfastly Democratic ghettos fell slack.
Black voting defections in 1956 were a cause for alarm, however, among national Democratic political leaders. By the mid-fifties, migration had brought a great many blacks into the North; moreover, some 90 percent of them settled in the central cities of the ten most populous industrial states, and thus in states of crucial importance in presidential contests. In a number of these cities blacks had come to be the largest “ethnic” bloc. From the perspective of potential electoral influence in presidential contests, blacks were strategically concentrated. Moreover as southern defections developed in the elections of 1948 and 1952, the Democratic Party became all the more dependent on the northern vote.
Despite the growing importance of the black vote, Democratic leaders had continued to resist granting civil rights concessions. “The northern Democratic leaders recognized that historic injustices had to end,” Schlesinger suggests, “but they thought that steady and rational progress step by step over a period of years would suffice to satisfy the victims of injustice and contain their incipient revolution” (926). More likely, Democratic leaders simply did not want to further endanger electoral allegiances in the South. Nor, until 1956, did they have to take that risk, for blacks had remained steadfastly loyal. But once the black vote, like the southern white vote, also became unstable, the Democratic strategy of proceeding cautiously in order not to antagonize the South could no longer succeed. It was not, contrary to what other analysts have said, the rise of a substantial black electoral bloc in the northern states that finally set the stage for civil rights concessions; it was the rise of black defections.
One of these concessions was to come in the year immediately following the election of 1956, when Congress enacted the first Civil Rights Act since 1875. Electoral instability played a significant role in the formation of the coalition in Congress which brought about passage of the bill. For the Democrats, there was little choice but to champion the measure; perhaps the party could afford southern de-defections, or black defections, but it could not afford both. For the Republicans, black defections confirmed the potential of their modest civil rights appeals prior to the election. Consequently the Republicans again seized the initiative and resubmitted the previously rejected civil rights bill. In doing so, they broke ranks again with southern Democrats. The cleaving of this alliance, which had previously thwarted all efforts to secure civil rights legislation, was a direct consequence of voting defections among northern blacks.
With a civil rights bill once again before Congress, Johnson quickly seized control, and it was he who engineered the necessary compromises to forestall a southern filibuster. Johnson’s evolution on the civil rights question was itself a reflection of the impact of electoral dissensus on the Democratic Party, for until the mid-fifties Johnson had consistently refused to support civil rights legislation:
Ever since 1937, when he first entered the House, Johnson had voted no on civil rights 100 percent of the time; no on an anti-lynching bill in 1940; no on a Democratic leadership amendment in 1940 eliminating segregation in the armed services; no on anti-poll-tax bills in 1942, 1943, 1945; no in 1946 on an anti-discrimination amendment offered by Representative Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem to the federal school-lunch program; yes in 1949 on an anti-Negro amendment proposed by Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland to the perennial District of Columbia home rule bill. The list was long, the record unbroken (Evans and Novak, 121).
For Johnson the rise of the civil rights issue, and of Republican efforts to profit from it, posed an excruciating dilemma. Although his power in the Senate was based on the southern bloc, he had strong presidential ambitions. To achieve that ambition he had to decide whether he was “a Westerner and national Democrat,” or “a Southerner and regional Democrat” (Evans and Novak, 122). By 1956 Johnson’s decision was no longer seriously in doubt; he did not, for example, sign the “Southern Manifesto.” To continue a course of opposition to civil rights was to foreclose a larger career in national Democratic politics.
The evolution of Johnson as the mock champion of civil rights began after the splintering of his hopes in 1956 [in which he lost a bid for the Vice-Presidential nomination owing largely to northern opposition]. He got the message: victory lay in the cities, victory lay within the union blocs, the black blocs, the immigrant blocs, the big city bosses, with the independent voters, and if possible with farm blocs, though that was the last to worry about. Johnson saw that he who gets the South gets naught.… LBJ saw that he had to get the magnolia blossom out of his lapel, and he coolly set about it. He would pass a civil rights act. If necessary, he would pass two … (Sherrill, 193).
The chief problem confronting Johnson was the prospect of a southern filibuster—it would have to be forestalled. The bill contained provisions (and an amendment) which angered the South; on the other hand, Republicans and northern Democrats were prepared to press for Senate rule changes that would weaken the power of the filibuster if the South obstructed passage of the bill. With each camp fearful of the other’s power, Johnson was able to gain support for a compromise bill that was essentially symbolic and it passed (without a filibuster) by an overwhelming margin (72 to 18, with Lyndon Johnson and four other southerners in the majority).
In other words the Democratic Party had once again weathered the deep division within its ranks. But there was this difference: it had done so only by enacting a civil rights measure, however weak its provisions may have been. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was significant for that reason, for it presaged the end of an older strategy of coping with regional divisions by avoiding the civil rights issue. The growing size and instability of the black vote had forced the beginning of a new mode of adaptation to those divisions, an adaptation in which concessions would be made to blacks. Henceforth the struggle would be over the substance of those concessions.
Even as the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was being debated and enacted, the massive resistance strategy of southern whites intensified, for it was clearly the intent of “the dominant political leadership in the deep South … [to] … force all hesitant communities into irreconcilable opposition to the Supreme Court” (Lubell, 1956, 196). Considering the outright defiance of the federal courts which this entailed, a major crisis was inevitable. Little Rock, Arkansas, was one of those hesitant communities, and it became a major locus of the looming crisis.
Governor Faubus, a moderate on race, gradually lost control over the white populace in Arkansas as the ideology of massive resistance swept the South. Faced with overwhelming evidence that white violence would be provoked if the Little Rock school board implemented its court-ordered desegregation plans, Faubus appealed to Eisenhower for federal support.24 When that appeal failed, he ordered out the Arkansas National Guard on September 2, 1957, to prevent desegregation. The beleaguered school board turned to the federal courts for instructions and was promptly ordered to persist in carrying out the desegregation plan. Nine black students then braved violent white mobs to enter Central High School, but were turned back by Guardsmen. School officials again appealed to the federal courts for a temporary suspension of desegregation plans, but were refused. The court also ordered the U. S. Justice Department to file for an injunction against Governor Faubus and top officials in the National Guard, and on September 20, hearings were held on that petition. That same day the court ordered Governor Faubus and the National Guard to desist from obstructing desegregation, and the governor promptly withdrew the Guardsmen. Little Rock officials were horrified by the prospect of mob violence which would surely follow and appealed for federal marshals, but Eisenhower again refused to intervene. Finally, as mob violence worsened during the next few days, Eisenhower had to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and send in paratroops to restore order.
The Little Rock episode went far toward polarizing racial sentiments across the country. At the time both camps in the civil rights struggle probably drew comfort from it. For blacks and their allies federal intervention could be defined as a triumph of federal power over sectional racism. On the other hand white southern leaders could not fail to recognize the deep reluctance of the federal executive branch to be drawn into the controversy, except under the most extreme conditions, thus suggesting that other methods of circumventing the courts might well continue to succeed.
There were many forms such resistance could take. In 1958 for example, a concerted attack on the Supreme Court “reached its height … when the House of Representatives passed five bills designed to curb the Court’s authority. These measures failed to receive Senate approval, but the anti-Court coalition evidenced substantial strength in the upper chamber” (Bartley, 291). The militancy of southern resistance to desegregation, the passage of anti-integration laws in one state after another (including closing the public schools), and the anti-Court movement within Congress combined “to bring the Supreme Court under the heaviest attack it had experienced since [the court-packing episode] in 1937” (Bartley, 291). One result was that the Court moderated its views: while continuing to affirm the general principle of equal protection of the laws as stated in Brown, it upheld the concept of discretionary pupil placement, and thus granted southern school officials the means to engage in tokenistic modes of school desegregation. Massive resistance, in short, still had momentum.
Nevertheless, mounting regional tensions, together with the tentative and fumbling efforts by the Republicans to exploit them, were beginning to produce some gains for blacks. A modest gain was made in 1960 with the passage of a second civil rights act:
Johnson realized from the start of the 86th Congress that the massive Democratic majorities elected in 1958 would demand another civil rights bill to close loopholes in Negro voting protection. Consequently, he hoped to pass a minimal bill as quickly as possible in 1959, again avoiding a Southern filibuster, and well in advance of the 1960 election. On January 20, 1959, Lyndon Johnson introduced his first civil rights bill. A four-part measure, it featured the racial conciliation service he had considered in 1957 but discarded. The reaction was uniformly unfavorable, from civil rights advocates and segregationists alike. A much broader civil rights bill sponsored by President Eisenhower became the framework for debate (Evans and Novak, 220).
Eisenhower’s bill was debated in early 1960. There was no way Johnson could persuade the southern delegation to accept the bill, and no way he could persuade the Senate liberals to modify it. The result was a filibuster that dragged on for months, and could not be beaten. Finally, “to appease the triumphant Southerners, Johnson and Eisenhower’s Attorney General, William P. Rogers, agreed to delete the bill’s two toughest sections (aimed at the desegregation of schools and jobs),” and that assured the bill’s passage (Evans and Novak, 221). What remained of the original bill were criminal penalties for bombings, bomb threats, and mob action designed to obstruct court orders, especially school desegregation orders, and an ineffective provision for court-appointed voting referees. Every Republican Senator voted affirmatively, and Eisenhower signed the bill on May 6.
Just as the Democrats were to regain the presidency in 1960, defiance by blacks erupted again, and on an increasingly massive scale. It was no longer mainly the white leaders of the South who provoked confrontations with the federal government; in this period, civil rights activists began to embrace a “strategy of using civil disobedience to force local governments into conflict with federal authority” (Killian, 63). In reaction white violence worsened, spurred by southern leaders, especially governors, and acted out by police agents and white mobs.
On February 1, 1960, four students from the Negro Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered a variety store and were refused service at the lunch counter where they sat in violation of caste rules. Fueled by “the discrepancy between the promise of desegregation and the reality of tokenism” (Killian, 59), the sit-in movement swept like a brush fire from one locale to another. By the second and third weeks of February similar actions were occurring throughout the state, organized by students from Duke University and North Carolina College. Despite arrests and violence Fisk University students in Tennessee quickly took up the tactic, as did students from universities located in Atlanta. Within those first few weeks, “sit-ins spread to fifteen cities in five southern states” (Zinn, 6).25
The spread of the movement to Atlanta was of special significance, for after a series of organizational meetings following the Montgomery boycott, King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and located its offices in Atlanta, where he also took a new pastorate. Quick to see the significance of the student-initiated sit-in movement, SCLC officials offered moral and financial support (despite the opposition, it should be noted, of officials in several established national civil rights organizations). In April, with SCLC aid, student delegates from dozens of universities assembled at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The students who composed SNCC were animated by a belief in the efficacy of civil disobedience. Zinn described them as having “tremendous respect for the potency of the demonstration, an eagerness to move out of the political maze of normal parliamentary procedure and to confront policy-makers directly with a power beyond orthodox politics—the power of people in the streets and on the picket line” (13). And Clark said that “SNCC seems restless with long-term negotiation and the methods of persuasion of the Urban League, and it assumes that the legislative and litigation approach of the NAACP” had exhausted its possibilities (259).
Through the summer and fall of 1960 militant SNCC activities mushroomed. No one could say what precisely was happening, or who was involved. There was no organization to monitor protest activities,26 one participant said, “because the students were too busy protesting.… No one really needed ‘organization’ because we then had a movement” (Zinn, 36). Following the earlier organizing meeting several hundred delegates assembled in Atlanta in October, ostensibly to bring some semblance of structure to the movement which they had created. Even then, little by way of structure resulted. SNCC “was not … a membership organization. This left the adhesion of individuals to the group fluid and functional, based simply on who was carrying on activity.… The twig was bent, and the tree grew that way” (Zinn, 37–38). In this same vein Clark remarked: “Instead of a single leader, SNCC has many ‘leaders’ ” (259–260). (Among these many leaders, Bob Moses, Jim Forman, Stokely Carmichael, and John Lewis were perhaps the best known.)
Indeed none of the direct-action organizations in this struggle were either much organized or much oriented toward building formal membership. CORE also typified this point. Although its money-contributing membership rose from a few thousand in 1959 to 80,000 in 1964, the active members never exceeded 3,000–5,000, distributed among over one hundred chapters (Rich, 124; Meier and Rudwick, 227). The point is that “direct action … requires only small numbers of persons, but these must be so highly motivated and involved that they are willing to risk the great hardships involved in direct action.… Southern CORE typified this generalization” (Bell, 90). In short, the direct-action organizations which developed during the civil rights struggle were cadre organizations.27
The cadres—whether in SNCC or CORE or SCLC—at first engaged in exemplary actions. Thus “the essence of SNCC leadership appears to be this willingness to assume personal risks, to expose oneself to imprisonment and brutality. Its members play the important role of commando raiders on the more dangerous and exposed fronts of the racial struggle” (Clark, 260). Often in groups of just two or three or a half dozen, the cadres were the most active demonstrators. “The first sit-in students who actually served their full jail terms in the 1960 sit-ins,” for example, “were members of Tallahassee CORE. The first of the Freedom Riders to serve their full jail terms rather than appeal were members of New Orleans CORE’ ” (Rich, 116). SNCC participants called this tactic “Jail-no-bail”:
When ten students were arrested in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in February 1961, the SNCC steering committee, meeting in Atlanta, made its boldest organization decision up to that date. Four people, it was agreed, would go to Rock Hill to sit in, would be arrested, and would refuse bail, as the first ten students had done, in order to dramatize the injustice to the nation.… “Jail-no-bail” spread. In Atlanta, in February, 1961, eighty students from the Negro colleges went to jail and refused to come out (Zinn, 38–39).
Such exemplary actions, in turn, inspired a mass mobilization. “All over, the number of people on [CORE] picket lines skyrocketed,” but only a few were CORE members (Meier and Rudwick, 227). And although SCLC had sixty-five chapters throughout the South, its formal structure was “amorphous and symbolic” so that the large numbers of people drawn to its demonstrations were not members (Clark, 255–256). This mobilization took place mainly through segregated institutions where people were already “organized”: the black colleges, churches, and ghetto neighborhoods. In the 1960–1961 period, the activists from SNCC, CORE, and SCLC were extremely successful in arousing black college students throughout the South. Twenty-five percent of the black students in the predominantly black colleges in the eleven states of the South participated in the sit-in movement during the first year, according to Matthews and Prothro. And they did so despite constant retaliation. Of these active students, “One out of every 6 … was arrested; one of every 20 was thrown in jail. About 1 in every 10 reported having been pushed, jostled, or spat upon; the same proportion was either clubbed, beaten, gassed, or burned; another 8 percent were run out of town. Only 11 percent of the protestors reported that nothing untoward had happened to them” (412–415). The cadres also mobilized large numbers of poor and middle-class blacks throughout the South for civil disobedience. As a result, “Over 50,000 people—most were Negroes, some were white—participated in one demonstration or another in a hundred cities, and over 3,600 demonstrators spent time in jail” in the first year following the lunch counter sit-ins (Zinn, 16).
The arrests, the mob violence, and the police brutality that were provoked by these protest activities rapidly created major dilemmas for national political leaders. For example, on October 25—a few days before the presidential election of 1960—King was arrested and convicted for violating a twelve-months’ term of parole which had been meted out for an earlier and minor infraction of the traffic codes. The parole violation consisted of joining students in a sit-in and the sentence was four months at hard labor in the Reidsville State Prison, a penal camp in rural Georgia. Overnight the White House was deluged with telegrams and letters from governors, congressmen, citizens, and foreign dignitaries, all of whom feared for King’s safety at the hands of rural southern penal officials.
President Eisenhower and candidate Nixon weighed the potential electoral gains and losses of intervening, deciding against taking action. Kennedy decided otherwise and it was that decision which has since been credited by some observers with having turned the election to him (Schlesinger, 930). His call to King’s wife, together with a call by Robert Kennedy to the judge who had committed King to prison, caused little short of delirium in black communities throughout the nation. Within days of King’s prompt release from prison two million copies of a brochure condemning Republican inaction and exalting Kennedy’s action were being circulated in the ghettos.
On the whole, however, the Democratic presidential campaign was marked by ambivalence on the race issue. Nothing in Kennedy’s career suggested that he held strong feelings about the race question:
Since Negro rights played so important and dramatic a part in his Presidency, historians will always be interested in Kennedy’s earlier stand on civil rights. Until the Presidential campaign of 1960, Kennedy was not an aggressive fighter for the Negro. During his quest for the vice-presidential nomination in 1956, he wooed the Southern delegations and stressed his moderation. After 1956, he sought to keep alive the South’s benevolent feeling for him, and his speeches in that region, sprinkled with unflattering references to carpetbaggers like Mississippi Governor Alcorn and praise for L. Q. C. Lamar and other Bourbon “redeemers,” had a faint ring of Claude Bowers’ Tragic Era. In 1957, during the fight in the Senate over the Civil Rights Bill, Kennedy lined up for the O’Mahoney amendment to give trials to those held in criminal contempt of court. Civil rights militants regarded this as emasculating, since those accused of impeding Negro voting would find more leniency in Southern juries than in federal judges (Carleton, 279).28
At the nominating convention a major confrontation with southern extremists was carefully prevented, for “the Kennedy forces avoided antagonizing southerners with any action beyond a strong civil rights plank” (Tindall, 42).29 The Republican campaign was marked by a similar ambivalence. Nixon, despite a plank endorsing civil rights in strong language, campaigned vigorously among whites in the South, probably counting on southern defections in response to the Catholic issue, but also appealing covertly to the segregationist vote.30 In this muddy situation Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia defected to the Republicans, and Alabama and Mississippi voted for unpledged electors. As for the black vote, it moved back to the Democratic Party; Kennedy received 68 percent, up about eight points from the election of 1956.
Moreover, it must be said that the black vote moved back in just the right places. Landslide majorities in some of the nation’s largest ghettos helped Kennedy carry key states by razor-thin majorities:
It had been Kennedy’s strength in the great Northern cities to which Southern Negroes had migrated that produced hairline victories for the Democrats in the eight states experts consider crucial to success in any close election—New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, Missouri, Minnesota, and New Jersey. All but one—Missouri—went to Eisenhower in 1956. All eight went for Kennedy in 1960, on the strength of the big-city vote. The Republican National Committee, using Philadelphia as a laboratory, made a precinct-by-precinct study of why this happened. The study revealed, among other things, that their candidate won only 18 percent of the Negro vote, leaving 82 percent for Kennedy (Fuller, 113).
If any group had reason to expect presidential action on its behalf, it was blacks following the election of 1960. Without the huge black majorities in the key industrial centers of the nation, Kennedy could not have been elected.31 Still, “Almost two years were to pass before Kennedy telephoned again” (David Lewis, 1970, 130). He had won office, but narrowly, and white southern defections had been no small cause of his near defeat. A policy of conciliation toward the South still appeared to be the expedient course of action.
Moreover, Kennedy (like earlier Democratic presidents) was concerned that a confrontation with Congress over civil rights would cost him support on other domestic legislation. “The reason was arithmetic.… To solidify the conservative coalition—by presenting an issue on which Southerners had traditionally sought Republican support in exchange for Southern opposition to other measures—would doom his whole program” (Sorensen, 475–476; see also Schlesinger, 93). Instead of legislative action, therefore, the president opted for a strategy of executive action:
Kennedy’s task was to accomplish so much by Executive action that the demand for immediate legislation could be kept under control. Power to enforce existing civil-rights law lay in the Department of Justice. And the hand that would wield it was the Attorney General’s. A Kennedy in that position could convey not only the color of Presidential authority but the personal moral force of the President as well.… If Kennedy’s Attorney General won the confidence of those chiefly concerned with civil rights and maintained a strong impression of forward motion in this field, the President could stall on supporting new civil-rights legislation until after Congress had approved his social and economic program—and that required Southern votes (Fuller, 112, 116).32
The Justice Department thus became the chief instrument of civil rights action by the administration. Civil rights litigation was given higher priority within the department and more litigation was undertaken than had previously been the case, especially in school desegregation and on voting rights. At the same time, however, Kennedy appointed southerners to the federal bench who caused great dismay among blacks. James Farmer reflected the sentiments of activists:
To be sure, the Justice Department was more active in initiating voter registration suits in the South than it had been under Eisenhower, but, presumably with the concurrence of the Justice Department, Kennedy had appointed three known racists to the federal bench: William Harold Cox of Mississippi (who described two hundred voter applicants as a “bunch of niggers … chimpanzees who ought to be in the movies rather than being registered to vote”); J. Robert Elliott of Georgia (“I don’t want those pinks, radicals, and black voters to outvote those who are trying to preserve our segregation laws and traditions”); and E. Gordon West of Louisiana (who called the 1954 school desegregation decision “one of the truly regrettable decisions of all time”). Racist federal judges are perhaps the greatest obstacle to federally enforced equal rights in the South today (40).
In the field of employment Kennedy issued an executive order against discrimination in federal employment, and hired more blacks than any previous administration, including the appointment of a number of blacks to top positions in the administration. He also instructed all departments to systematically upgrade blacks. Consequently, “The number of Negroes holding jobs in the middle grades of the civil service increased 36.6 percent from June 1961 to June 1963; in the top grades, 88.2 percent” (Schlesinger, 933). The president also strengthened federal efforts to reduce private discrimination in employment through the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, headed by Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, although no federal contracts with private employers were canceled as a result of this committee’s efforts.
But the Kennedy Administration’s activity on the civil rights front was both too much for southern leaders and far too little for civil rights activists. Consequently both camps escalated tactics of defiance, one seeking to weaken efforts by the federal government to enforce the law, the other to strengthen the federal role in enforcing the law. The most dramatic tactics in this period were the “freedom rides” organized by civil rights activists, and the confrontations over the desegregation of institutions of higher education precipitated by several southern governors.
One of the most conspicuous symbols of southern caste arrangements was the segregation of bus and train terminals—from waiting areas, to eating facilities, to restrooms. Since these public areas were under the jurisdiction of a federal agency—the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)—they were a logical arena in which to force confrontations over the segregation issue. In the spring of 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality, under the leadership of its new executive director, James Farmer,33 decided to send “freedom riders” into the South.34 The freedom rides (which were subsequently joined in by SCLC, SNCC, and the Nashville Student Movement) brought on some of the worst mob violence of the era. There were in all about a dozen different freedom rides involving about one thousand persons (Lomax, 144; Schlesinger, 936). With each outbreak of arrests and mob violence, the federal government was faced with the decision whether to intervene, for it was clear that the civil rights activists would not desist. James Farmer expressed the spirit of the freedom rides when he declared that “Jails are not a new experience for the Riders, but the Freedom Riders were definitely a new experience for Mississippi jails” (Zinn, 57). In fact many of the participants in the various freedom rides were already familiar with the jails of the South; they were veterans of the sit-ins and “jail-no-bail” protests. The southern jails had become the crucible in which the cadres of civil disobedience were being formed.
The Kennedy Administration was continually drawn into the conflict created by the clashing forces throughout the South. Its actions, in turn, added fuel to the fire, for when the federal government supported the goals of the movement—either symbolically or through various executive actions—the participants in the movement gained encouragement, however frustrated they may have also felt with delays and compromises in the federal government’s responses. For example, when the president was asked about the freedom rides during a press conference, he replied: “The Attorney General has made it clear that we believe that everyone who travels, for whatever reason they travel (sic), should enjoy the full constitutional protection given to them by the law and the Constitution” (Schlesinger, 936). Moreover the attorney general intervened to protect the freedom riders in Montgomery, for the events there were too violent to be ignored:
The violence became so intense and open that Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent 400 U. S. marshals to Montgomery to maintain order. On the evening of May 21, Dr. King held a mass meeting in Montgomery’s First Baptist Church. As the mass meeting proceeded, a mob of white segregationists gathered outside the church. Standing between the 1,000 Negroes in the church and the mob was a squad of U.S. marshals and a few Montgomery city policemen. Someone in the mob shouted, “We want to integrate, too. Let us at them.” Then a barrage of bottles and bricks was rained on the church. The marshals countered with tear gas. A battle raged for most of the night.
Inside the church the Negroes linked arms and sang the marching song of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”
We are not afraid … We are not afraid … We are not afraid today … Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe … We shall overcome someday (Bleiweiss, 84–85).
Within a matter of months the federal courts and the ICC ordered the desegregation of all terminal facilities for both interstate and intrastate passengers.
In the wake of the student sit-ins and the freedom rides, the Kennedy Administration attempted to divert the civil rights forces from tactics of confrontation to the building of a black electoral presence in the South. The Kennedy Administration’s posture on these matters is not difficult to understand. Tactics of confrontation, together with the police and mob violence which they provoked, were polarizing national sentiments. The excesses of southern police violence and of white mob violence generated one excruciating political dilemma after another for the Kennedy Administration as to whether it should intervene to protect civil rights demonstrators and uphold the law. Each intervention, or the lack of it, angered one or the other major constituency in the civil rights struggle, thus worsening the electoral lesion in the Democratic Party.
Consequently the Kennedy Administration moved to reduce the level of conflict by attempting to divert civil rights activists away from confrontations over desegregation of schools, waiting rooms, rest rooms, parks, and pools which so inflamed white southerners. They suggested instead that activists concentrate on voter registration for the reason, Schlesinger says, that “Negro voting did not incite social and sexual anxieties; and white southerners could not argue against suffrage for their Negro fellow citizens with quite the same moral fervor they applied to the mingling of the races in the schools. Concentration on the right to vote, in short, seemed the best available means of carrying the mind of the white South” (935). (It was a view that failed, inexplicably, to take into account the deep vested interest of the existing stratum of white southern political leaders in the disenfranchisement of the black; nor did it take into account the stakes—declining but still important—of the black belt plantation leaders in the subordination of blacks.)
At the same time, the extension of the franchise to blacks—as both Sorensen and Schlesinger make plain—was gradually coming to be seen by the Kennedy Administration as a way of regaining Democratic strength in the South. The southern blacks represented a huge untapped pool of potential Democratic voters; their numbers could offset southern white defections. It was a strategy that called for giving more emphasis to voting rights. Thus when
the ban on poll taxes in Federal elections, which had been sought for twenty years … finally passed both houses, [it] was pushed by the President and Democratic National Committee in the state legislatures, and became the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The number of Negroes and less affluent whites enabled to vote by that measure alone, the President believed, could make a difference in his 1964 re-election race in Texas and Virginia (Sorensen, 475).
By the same token, when the president reviewed his attorney general’s report on two years of voting progress, he wrote, “Keep pushing the cases” (Sorensen, 479). Schlesinger thought he saw in these events a parallel with the early years of the New Deal: “A generation ago Roosevelt had absorbed the energy and hope of the labor revolution into the New Deal. [Likewise] Kennedy moved to incorporate the Negro revolution into the Democratic coalition and thereby help it serve the future of American freedom” (977). The question of helping to serve the future of American freedom aside, there is little doubt that incorporating southern blacks into the New Deal coalition would help to serve the future of the Democratic Party.
Consistent with this political strategy, the Kennedy Administration argued in its dealings with civil rights groups that the franchise was “the open-sesame of all other rights” (Navasky, 169; see also Sorensen, 478; Schlesinger, 935). Accordingly the proper role of the federal government was to litigate to enfranchise blacks, and the proper role of the civil rights movement was to register blacks to vote. In these dealings, however, the Kennedy Administration did more than try to persuade civil rights leaders of the wisdom of this approach. It also mobilized financial inducements in what Schlesinger calls “a behind-the-scenes effort” of such urgency as to be “reminiscent of the campaign to save the Bay of Pigs prisoners” (935). In June 1961 “representatives of SNCC, SCLC, the National Student Association, and CORE met with the Attorney General” at his invitation. “Kennedy asserted that in his opinion voter registration projects would be far more constructive activity than freedom rides or other demonstrations. He assured the conferees that necessary funds would be available through private foundations, and that Justice Department personnel, including FBI teams, would provide all possible aid and cooperation” (Meier and Rudwick, 1973, 173; Zinn, 58).35
Within the civil rights movement these presidential channeling efforts caused both considerable dismay and considerable enthusiasm. “While many activists in CORE, SNCC and SCLC were suspicious of Kennedy’s proposal, seeing it as a calculated attempt to divert them from direct action, others had already concluded that direct action was no panacea, and that voter registration would provide a necessary basis for further progress” (Meier and Rudwick, 1974, 172). Others, like King, felt that both approaches were essential: “We would agree with the importance of voting rights, but would patiently seek to explain that Negroes did not want to neglect all other rights while one was selected for concentrated attention” (1963, 20).
This issue nearly split SNCC apart. One faction, which stressed the importance of direct action, was convinced that the Kennedy Administration’s interest in voter registration was a disguised effort “to cool the militancy of the student movement,” while the other faction was convinced that voter registration was the key to toppling the caste system in the South (Zinn, 59). A split was finally averted by insulating each program strategy in a separate division of the organization; one faction continued to pursue confrontation tactics (directed particularly at segregated public accommodations) and the other faction undertook voter registration drives. With all of the civil rights organizations responding in some measure to the lure of the ballot and with federal assurances of both funding and protection, a voter registration drive was inevitable. By early spring 1962
the Voter Education Project finally got underway.… Designed to last two and a half years, it cost $870,000, nearly all of which came from the Taconic and Field Foundations and the Stern Family Fund. With less than 25 percent of the southern blacks registered at VEP’s start, the drive was expected to achieve substantial change in time for the 1964 presidential election (Meier and Rudwick, 175).
Although the Kennedy Administration succeeded in turning many in SNCC and in other civil rights organizations toward voter registration, it did not, as it turned out, succeed in diverting them from the tactics of confrontation. No matter how orthodox their beliefs about the electoral system, the cadres who went out to register the black poor were nevertheless animated by the élan of the sit-ins and freedom rides, by the tactics of confrontation. Moreover, given their objective of building power through the ballot, it was natural enough that they would choose counties in the heart of the black belt where potential black electoral majorities existed. But for just that reason they confronted the most embittered and threatened local political leaders, backed by police agencies whose capacity for unrestrained terror was unique in the nation. Moreover, these leaders brought every available form of economic pressure to bear on the black poor to prevent voter registration, including firings, evictions, and cutting off federal food supplies:
As the stream of voting applicants in Greenwood [Mississippi] increased (though in SNCC’s first six months there, only five Negroes were actually declared by the registrar to have passed the test), the economic screws were tightened on the Negro community. Winters were always lean in the farming towns of Mississippi, and people depended on surplus food supplied by the Government to keep them going. In October, 1962, the Board of Supervisors of Leflore County stopped distributing surplus food, cutting off 22,000 people—mostly Negro—who depended on it (Zinn, 86).
Voter registration activists thus entered some southern rural counties where, at the close of a year’s work, they could count innumerable arrests and beatings, and even some killings, but they could count no registered black voters.
Confronted with this miscalculation the administration reneged on its promises of federal protection for the voter rights activists. The administration hoped to gain votes in the South, to be sure, but not at the price of worsening the southern white rebellion (especially in Congress) against the national Democratic Party. Given this choice the civil rights activists were sacrificed. Despite extensive documentation of voter rights violations and extensive documentation of violence inflicted upon civil rights activists, the Kennedy Administration failed time and again to intervene.
To justify its continuing political concern with conciliating the South, the Kennedy Administration argued that the federal government lacked the authority to act against southern governors, law enforcement officials, and other political leaders (Navasky, 221). In the end even the Kennedy Administration’s strategy of litigation foundered, for federal judges in the South (and not least of all Kennedy’s own appointees) were often among the most intransigent:
The demonstrable damage these judges inflicted was threefold. First, they cruelly postponed justice—thus further delaying the enforcement of Constitutional rights already one hundred years overdue. Second, they dealt a severe blow to the civil rights movement, which became increasingly frustrated, fragmentized and radicalized as a direct result of the open injustice exhibited by the official, federal justice-dispensing instrument.… Third, through deceit, delay and direct, extralegal challenges to federal authority, they undermined the Justice Department’s fundamental strategy of litigate-rather-than-legislate (Navasky, 247-248).
As a result the white massive resistance movement in the South continued to be given wide latitude to fend off the civil rights challenge.
As it turned out the civil rights movement had also miscalculated. Voter registration activities were widely dispersed and many were conducted in relatively isolated rural areas by activists working in twos and threes. The resulting confrontations were many, but on a small scale, and usually unpublicized. They could thus be ignored by the White House. In this unexpected way the channeling efforts of the Kennedy Administration had succeeded.
It remained, then, for the civil rights movement to continue to provoke mass civil disorder, for it was only when mass civil disorder erupted in its most extreme forms (and sometimes not even then) that the federal government did what it claimed it did not have the authority to do. “We put on pressure and create a crisis,” James Farmer said, “and then they react.” One important crisis occurred in Albany, Georgia, although it, too, failed to provoke federal intervention.
The precipitating incident in Albany was an order issued by the Interstate Commerce Commission. Responding to the turbulence caused by the freedom rides, Robert Kennedy petitioned the ICC to ban segregated terminal facilities in interstate travel. The ICC issued the necessary order on September 22, 1961, to become effective on November 1. But many southern communities ignored the order or desegregated interstate passenger facilities and left intrastate facilities segregated as before. The same month that the ICC order was to become effective SNCC organizers in Albany, who had developed wide-ranging connections in the black community, boarded a bus in Atlanta bound for Albany where they intended to test the ban on desegregated terminal facilities and test the readiness of the black community for direct action.36 The anticipated arrests did in fact occur. Several additional tests followed, with the Department of Justice being notified in each case. But there was no response from Washington. On December 10, SNCC members again traveled by train toward Albany and hundreds of blacks gathered to meet them. Eight out of nine riders were quickly arrested and that was enough to galvanize the community. Over the next few days mass marches were staged by hundreds of blacks to protest the arrests of the preceding weeks. “By December 15, nearly five hundred people were in jail” (David Lewis, 1970, 146).
When negotiations with city officials failed, the leaders of the Albany Movement (a confederation of black organizations which had formed as part of the civil rights upheaval) called upon SCLC for help. Two days later mass marches, led by King, began again and were met by large contingents of police. Upwards of one thousand demonstrators were subsequently arrested and jailed, including King, who refused bond. He then appealed for clergymen throughout the country to come and join in a vigil while he remained jailed over the Christmas period. Through what was apparently a misunderstanding, however, King accepted release a few days later, only to learn that the concessions from local political and business leaders which he thought had been won had not in fact been granted. Despite the bitterness of this defeat and the embarrassment in the national press which the incident created, the struggle in Albany continued through the spring and summer of 1962. The campaign included all forms of direct action, from boycotts to sit-ins to marches and mass demonstrations. During one week in August 1962, 1,000 demonstrators were imprisoned. Many were injured by the police; still others suffered economic reprisals of various kinds. But it was all to no avail, at least in the sense that mass demonstrations and mass arrests yielded no concessions from city officials. “Negroes won nothing in Albany.… It was not until the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 that even token integration came to Albany, Georgia” (Bleiweiss, 86).
Two explanations of that failure have been advanced. On the one hand, “There is universal agreement among the Movement leaders that they were mistaken in simultaneously attacking all the manifestations of segregation in the city instead of concentrating on one or two—employment, bus segregation, an integrated police force, or free access to places of entertainment” (David Lewis 1970, 169). On the other hand, some observers and participants felt that the campaign had been haphazardly managed owing in part to internecine factional strife. King himself seemed to agree with both of these explanations, for he said at the close of the campaign that the movement had “jumped too far, too soon, and with improper preparation” (Bleiweiss, 86).
But whatever the reasons that the Albany Movement won nothing from the local white leadership, there is another vantage point from which that experience was an extraordinary success. Victories or not, Albany had shown that large masses of southern blacks could be mobilized for marches and demonstrations; Albany “represented a permanent turn from the lunch counter and the bus terminal to the streets, from hit-and-run attacks by students and professional civil rights activists to populist rebellion by lower-class Negroes … [and thus became] … the prototype for demonstrations that later rocked Birmingham and dozens of other cities throughout the nation” (Zinn, 123).
The tactics also differed significantly from those employed in Montgomery and in similar boycotts elsewhere in the South in the late 1950s. Boycotts required of people that they avoid transportation facilities, or avoid various white businesses. There were surely inconveniences and some hardships as a result; moreover, people also had to be prepared for retaliatory measures—such as threats to jobs—which such boycotts provoked. But they did not generally have to be prepared to suffer the brutality inflicted by the police and the possibility of injury or even death. Albany proved that the movement could arouse masses of blacks to confront the police and to fill the jails of the South and that was its chief significance, or so it seems to us.
The campaign in Albany also demonstrated that southern whites were far more recalcitrant than most had imagined and that white moderates—if they existed at all—had been effectively muzzled by the rising tide of extremist sentiment and coercion. White extremism continued unabated.
When sufficiently provoked by that extremism, the Kennedy Administration did intervene. In this period some of the most celebrated actions taken by the Kennedy Administration were in the field of higher education and they were taken because of the same kind of mob violence which had forced Eisenhower’s hand in Little Rock. Thus in September 1962, when Governor Ross Barnett refused to allow James Meredith to enroll at the University of Mississippi, in defiance of the Supreme Court decision, Kennedy sent in federal marshals and federalized the Mississippi National Guard, largely to maintain order:
In the battle-scarred history of the Negro revolution since the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Oxford was a nightmare. For two horrible days—Sunday, September 30 and Monday, October 1, 1962—the battle raged, with upward of 2,500 frenzied whites repeatedly charging the Federal marshals, the federalized Mississippi National Guard and the Regular Army troops who protected the seething campus.… The campus trembled now to exploding tear-gas bombs and the screams of the whites: “Give us the Nigger!” In the holocaust two men, a French journalist and a local Oxford resident, fell dead and at least 375 were injured. But in the end, defiant Governor Ross Barnett yielded and James Meredith entered the university (Brink and Harris, 1964, 40).
Similar action was taken by the Kennedy Administration when Governor Wallace, “standing in the schoolhouse door,” made the flamboyant gesture of refusing to desegregate the University of Alabama. (It was Wallace who declared, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”) Such a flagrant challenge to federal authority by a southern governor was not intended to be ignored, and it was not.
In the years 1963 through 1965 the balance of electoral considerations shifted decisively to favor the granting of black rights in the South. In this period, as in no other, the civil rights movement proved its capacity to incite large numbers of southern blacks to join the struggle and their actions, in turn, aroused favorable public opinion throughout the country.
The main elements in the changing political balance were these. First, the civil rights movement was contributing to the rising tide of anger in the ghettos, and that was an acute problem for the Kennedy Administration. With a presidential election less than two years away the potential instability of the black vote was a cause for concern. Indeed the potential instability of the ghettos themselves had become a cause for concern. Kennedy officials were fearful that “the nonviolent resistance strategy … was not deeply rooted in Negro traditions and there were signs that it might give way to a more violent strategy uncontrolled by responsible leaders” (Sorensen, 495).
The events in the South also provoked broad support for civil rights demands among northern whites. Despite worsening conflict between blacks and working-class whites in the northern cities, the most insistent black demand was for political rights in the South and that was no threat to the northern white working class. The huge white middle class which had developed in the affluent post-World War II years gave its support more readily, for this class was largely insulated from blacks as a result of suburbanization and of its privileged occupational position.
At the same time, resistance in much of the South was collapsing. This was especially the case in the states of the Outer South. In addition to all of the forces which had weakened economic stakes in the caste system, the perpetuation of these arrangements was beginning to exact certain costs. Many southern communities, for example, wanted to attract northern industry, but northern industry shied away from locations in which white intransigence and racial turmoil were intense. Northern executives explained that their employees did not want to relocate in communities where the schools might be closed, or where continued civil disorder was likely. This message was not lost on many white communities. Consequently business leaders brought pressure on local political leaders to make concessions that would either prevent disorder or restore order.
In Charlotte, as in Memphis and Dallas and Atlanta, and a dozen other communities throughout the South, the powerful white leaders recognized that the revolution on their streets was full of danger. They were afraid of losing money. They were afraid that Northern industry would not want to set up its regional offices in their towns. They could add up on paper the money they might lose from convention business. They may have had moments of sober reflection on the moral issues at stake, but their actions didn’t show it. In the end, those among them who were fairly intelligent, and those who were not under pressures from tyrannical governors or legislatures, and those who had not been made afraid of vigilante groups, decided to seek settlements that would produce peace in the city and money in their pockets (Powledge, 117).
This division among southern leaders—particularly between those of the inner and outer states of the South—went far toward weakening the capacity of the South to ward off threats to its traditional social structure.
The Deep South, in short, had become isolated from significant sources of support. Being isolated, it had become vulnerable. But still its political leaders could not give way to racial change without risking office. In a few years a new and more moderate leadership stratum would emerge; meanwhile the older leadership persisted in a futile strategy of resistance. This resistance was met with a mass black mobilization: the civil rights forces drew increasing numbers to demonstrations and inspired greater militancy and courage in the demonstrations.
Following the defeat in Albany, SCLC leaders turned to Birmingham. In the campaign that followed blacks confronted the police and were arrested by the hundreds. However improved the coordination and focus of the Birmingham campaign may or may not have been compared to the campaign in Albany, it was the confrontation between the people and the police that was its distinguishing feature and the source of its influence on the national government.
From the perspective of SCLC leaders Birmingham was an ideal locale to draw the battle lines with the Kennedy Administration, for Birmingham was easily among the least racially advanced of major southern cities. The Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had established himself as a bulwark of the southern racist creed. The city administration had responded to the civil rights challenge by such actions as closing public parks and the city had experienced a virtual epidemic of bombings of black churches, an omen of the violence that would surely follow if Birmingham were made into a civil rights battlefield. For just these reasons the SCLC leadership believed that a campaign in Birmingham would provoke and expose southern racism and extremism as no other campaign had.
The planning for Project “C” (confrontation) was extensive, much more so than in any previous campaign, with hundreds of volunteer cadres schooling masses of people in the philosophy and tactics of nonviolent offensives.37 Targets for sit-ins, demonstrations, and selective boycotts were picked from among the city’s businesses. Influential people in the North were briefed, particularly those in a position to provide funds for bail.
Lunch counter sit-ins, selective boycotts, and other small-scale demonstrations began on Tuesday, April 2, 1963. The police, anticipating an injunction, made peaceful arrests. By Friday thirty-five had been jailed. On Saturday forty-five more were arrested during a silent march on City Hall. The expected injunction was issued on Wednesday, April 10, and fifty volunteers were designated to demonstrate on Friday in defiance of it. All were arrested, including King, who was placed in solitary confinement. SCLC leaders decided “that one historic phone call deserved another,” and so on Sunday Coretta King telephoned the president (David Lewis, 1970, 186). The call was returned that evening by the attorney general who gave assurances that her husband was safe. By Monday bail money began to arrive and the White House was deluged with mail and telegrams protesting the events in Birmingham. From prison, King issued his now famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” addressed especially to southern clergymen who had attacked him, SCLC, and the direct action tactics of the movement. It was a document that provided moral and theological justification for nonviolent protest against unjust laws and practices and it went far toward galvanizing churchmen and others in the North.
On Thursday, May 2, the battle worsened as “959 of some 6,000 children … ranging in age from six to sixteen, were arrested as they marched, singing, wave upon wave from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church into town.… More would have been taken away if the police had not run out of wagons” (David Lewis, 1970, 192). The next day police restraint, such as it was, broke. As 1,000 demonstrators were preparing to march, the police sealed off the exits of the church where they were assembling, with the result that only half got out, there to meet unleashed police dogs, flailing nightsticks, and jet-streams from high-pressure water hoses. Only a handful reached the intended target, City Hall. With television cameras everywhere, the hoped-for crisis was finally in the making.
On Saturday, Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall arrived in Birmingham to restore calm, but both sides were unmovable. Marches continued for several days and were marked by police violence; younger blacks abandoned song and prayer to throw rocks and bottles. More than 2,000 people had been imprisoned; the jails, both regular facilities and improvised ones, were filled. Still, several thousand people were ready to resume the marches.
Officials in the Kennedy Administration, trying desperately to avoid open intervention with all of its attendant political ramifications, unsuccessfully maneuvered behind the scenes to persuade and coerce civil rights activists and Birmingham’s political leaders to settle. They brought pressure directly to bear on local officials, and they buttressed it indirectly by inducing northern leaders in business, industry, religion, philanthropy, law, and other institutional areas to telephone their southern counterparts in Birmingham to urge them to intervene.
The demonstrations on Monday, May 6, were again marked by police violence, and when marches resumed on Tuesday morning, high-pressure water hoses broke legs and caved in rib cages. By afternoon, while masses of demonstrators were scattered throughout the business district praying and singing before the deserted stores, younger participants began to throw rocks and bottles. The black community was exhausting its capacity for nonviolent discipline. As rioting spread, business leaders called for a truce to which SCLC agreed.
Outraged by these flanking maneuvers, Commissioner Connor called for and received 500 state troopers from Governor Wallace, and then arrested King. SCLC ordered immediate demonstrations, knowing that law enforcement officials were awaiting them. Little but unparalleled carnage could result. To avert it the attorney general called local officials to declare that the federal government had reached the limits of its tolerance, and to threaten decisive action if a settlement was not made. On May 10 an agreement was reached that provided for the desegregation of lunch counters, rest rooms, and drinking fountains, for less racist hiring and promotion practices in local businesses, and for the immediate release of 3,000 imprisoned demonstrators.
And then the bombings began: first King’s brother’s house, followed by a motel where SCLC was headquartered. Although no deaths resulted, the black community seethed into tumult, leading to mob rioting on May 11. For five hours “the Negroes boiled into the streets, wielding knives, overturning cars, hurling rocks and bricks at anyone who moved, even other Negroes. One wounded Negro moaned: ‘They were insane’ ” (Brink and Harris, 1964, 44).
Unable to temporize any longer, the president ordered in federal troops and brought Governor Wallace into line by threatening to federalize the Alabama National Guard. In public statements he praised the courage and restraint of the movement and gave assurance that the federal government would stand behind the terms of the agreement negotiated with Birmingham’s white officials. (A few days later the Birmingham Board of Education expelled 1,100 students for their role in the demonstrations, although the federal courts later reinstated them.) With these events, protests burst forth across the country: “During the week of May 18, the Department of Justice noted forty-three major and minor demonstrations, ten of them in northern cities” (Franklin, 631).
The final victory of the Birmingham campaign came on June 11 when President Kennedy, in a televised address to the nation, announced that he was requesting the Congress to enact as expeditiously as possible a comprehensive civil rights bill. In February he had submitted a relatively weak bill and had done little to secure its passage. As James Farmer aptly said, “It is clear that … the President intended to drop civil rights legislation from the agenda of urgent business in order to safeguard other parts of his legislative program. But he had not reckoned on Birmingham” (40-41). By June, however, Kennedy admitted to civil rights leaders privately “that the demonstrations in the streets had brought results, they had made the executive branch act faster and were now forcing Congress to entertain legislation which a few weeks before would have had no chance” (Schlesinger, 970). Mass protest had forced federal action. It was a point the attorney general also conceded: “The Administration’s Civil Rights Bill … is designed to alleviate some of the principal causes of the serious and unsettling racial unrest now prevailing in many of the states” (Navasky, 205).
In his nationally televised address, the president referred to the “rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety” and said, “It cannot be met by repressive police action.… It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is time to act in the Congress.… ” According to the results of a Newsweek poll, “Almost nothing that had happened to the Negroes in the last ten years heartened them quite so much as the President’s speech.… Finally and irrevocably the leader of their country had told the nation that their cause was right and just and should be fulfilled” (Brink and Harris, 1974, 46).
Just hours after Kennedy spoke to the nation, Medgar Evers, secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, was shot in his driveway. His funeral in Jackson on June 15 turned into a riot. The New York Times reported:
After the last of the four-block-long line of marchers had reached the funeral home … the younger Negroes apparently decided to make an attempt to demonstrate in the white business district.… Four motorcycle patrolmen let them through one intersection, but [they were met] with twenty officers as they approached the main thoroughfare.… [Now numbering approximately one thousand, they chanted] “We want the killer! We want the killer! We want equality! We want Freedom!”
Officers using police dogs moved in.… One demonstrator after another was grabbed and hustled into waiting patrol wagons.… They began throwing rocks, bottles and other missiles at the police. … The crowd screamed.… The growling and barking of the police dogs, the crash of the bottles on the pavement and the cursing of the policemen added to the uproar.…
[When it was over] the mood of the Negroes was still one of bitterness and anger. “The only way to stop evil here is to have a revolution,” muttered a young man in a doorway. “Somebody have to die” (Anthony Lewis, 1964, 227-228).
Throughout the country, demonstrations multiplied: “In a three month period during the summer of 1963, the U. S. Justice Department counted 1,412 separate demonstrations. The newspaper pictures showing the limp bodies of Negroes being carried to police wagons became a great tapestry of the times. Over the land echoed the Negro hymn, ‘We Shall Overcome’ ” (Brink and Harris, 1964, 46).
Despite Kennedy’s announcement that he would press Congress for a greatly strengthened civil rights program, there was every reason to believe it would be filibustered into oblivion. Prodded by the restless mood of the black community, civil rights leaders had already decided that a demonstration of national support for civil rights legislation was both possible and necessary. Earlier, in November 1962, A. Philip Randolph had proposed a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Many in the northern civil rights community at first greeted the proposal with something less than enthusiasm; the National Urban League simply opposed it. In part black leaders were stalemated by chronic competition for leadership; some were also edgy about demonstrations, fearing that their access to high government officials and private elites would be impaired. By the late spring of 1963, however, their mood had changed in response to the changing mood in the black community together with the victory in Birmingham and evidence that the Kennedy Administration was finally prepared to act more decisively in the field of civil rights. A planning conference was set for early July and support came from many quarters. The president, of course, opposed the march, fearing the repercussions in Congress if the march turned violent or if the turnout was disappointing. On the other hand, “Negroes had discovered that demonstrations had accomplished what other measures had not” (Franklin, 630). The heads of some major unions pledged support and the leaders of some of the largest northern religious denominations made commitments to what was to be the largest demonstration in the history of the movement and the largest demonstration of any kind staged in Washington up to that time. When August 23 dawned, the streets of Washington rapidly filled; by afternoon more than 250,000 had assembled to demand the passage of civil rights legislation as well as economic measures to ease the poverty of blacks.
On September 15, just three weeks following the march, a church in Birmingham was bombed, killing four little girls. It was an act of southern terror that resounded throughout the world and was denounced by the president the following day on national television. Just two months later, Kennedy was assassinated.
Lyndon Johnson had little choice but to commit his administration to the cause of civil rights. On November 27, 1963, he told Congress: “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter—and to write it in the book of law.” The main problem was to secure the votes for cloture in the Senate, for a filibuster (which lasted eighty-three days) immobilized Congress. Northern Republicans again made the difference. The Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, rose on the Senate floor to proclaim: “This is an idea whose time has come. It will not be stayed. It will not be denied.” As in 1957 and in 1960, northern Republicans responded to the masses of aroused blacks and whites in the North. When cloture was finally invoked and the bill came to a vote, 27 of 31 Republican Senators voted affirmatively and the president signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2.
In the fall Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory over Gold-water in an election that revealed how completely isolated the Deep South had become. Johnson received 61 percent of the popular vote. Aside from Arizona his losses were limited to the five states of the Deep South where the most stubborn and virulent resistance to black voting rights persisted. In the northern urban ghettos, black Democratic majorities ran as high as 95 percent. “Behind the statistics was a revolution in American politics. The first Southern President since the Civil War captured 90 percent of the Negro vote and lost the Deep South by large margins” (Evans and Novak, 481). In the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, where the number of black registered voters had increased from 1.4 million in 1962 to 2.2 million in 1964, the black vote was beginning to play a role in Democratic fortunes: “Of the six southern states carried by the Democratic Party, four (Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia) clearly would have gone Republican had it not been for the Negro vote. Only in President Johnson’s home state of Texas among the eleven states of the South did the Democratic Party clearly receive the majority of white votes.”38 There was, in short, no longer any reason to suffer the intransigence of the Deep South.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ostensibly guaranteed blacks the right to vote and ostensibly signified the federal government’s resolve to enforce that right. Even before the act was passed, however, there was skepticism among civil rights groups that voting officials in the South would comply with the law and that in the absence of compliance the federal government would intervene forcefully. CORE and SNCC’s voter registration drives had already provided substantial basis for that skepticism. Moreover, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party which was formed in late 1963 to challenge the regular Mississippi Democratic organization had met with no success; during the spring of 1964 blacks were barred from the primaries, denied access to regular party caucuses, and otherwise prevented from participating in regular party functions.39 Consequently, direct action campaigns were planned in the spring to force the voting rights issue despite the imminent passage of the civil rights act.
Under an umbrella organization called the Council of Confederated Organizations (which had been operating voter negotiation campaigns) SNCC, CORE, and the Mississippi branch of the NAACP prepared hundreds of northern white students to help mobilize blacks for marches on the offices of voting registrars where local law enforcement officials could be expected to press them back. Even before most of the students reached the field, three disappeared, to be found murdered and buried beneath an earthen dam two months later.40 The bodies of two murdered blacks were also found floating in the Mississippi River. Between June and October twenty-four black churches were bombed in Mississippi alone.
Simultaneously with the killings and bombings in the South, the northern ghettos erupted in rioting. Rioting broke out in Cambridge, Maryland, in June, just before the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In mid-July riots erupted in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant; then as the summer wore on the rioting spread to Rochester, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, a suburb of Chicago, and Philadelphia. It was the beginning of a series of riot-torn summers unlike any period in the nation’s history. The black masses joined the protest in the only way they could, given their institutional circumstances. As King aptly said, “A riot is the language of the unheard” (Killian, 109). In some part, rioting was probably precipitated by civil rights demonstrations in the North, for activists had also brought the struggle to the northern cities.41
The southern voter registration drive thus gave continued evidence of southern intransigence, even while black protest was spreading to the northern ghettos. Consequently, a solution which had been considered and rejected by presidents and Congresses for a decade—the use of federal voting registrars—seemed the only means by which the right to vote could be ensured. But the solution required new legislation. To generate the necessary pressure on the president and the Congress, civil rights leaders decided to stage new demonstrations on the order of Albany and Birmingham.
The target chosen was Selma, Alabama, where SNCC voter registration activities had already provoked white violence, much of it by the police under the command of Sheriff James Clark. The campaign began in early January, 1965, with a succession of marches to the courthouse. As the weeks passed the numbers joining the demonstrations increased and so did the numbers jailed. On February 1, King led a demonstration which resulted in more than 700 arrests; on February 2 some 550 more demonstrators were imprisoned:
“[T]he great majority, as the day before, were school children. Defiantly, they sang ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Jim Clark Turn Me Around’ ” (David Lewis, 1970, 268). During the first four days of February more than 3,000 demonstrators were arrested. “Jim Clark is another Bull Connor,” an SCLC staff member said. “We should put him on the staff” (Bleiweiss, 125). On February 4 a federal court banned literacy tests and other technical devices by which voter applicants were rejected, thus adding one more declaration of legitimacy for the voting rights cause. But securing compliance by southern voter registrars was another matter.
On February 9 King met with Vice-President Humphrey and Attorney General-designate Nicholas Katzenbach in Washington, D.C., and “was given firm assurance that a strong voting act would be sent to Congress ‘in the near future’ ” (David Lewis, 1970, 269). The demonstrations in Selma continued. Congressmen and other dignitaries came to see at firsthand the denial of voting rights; some joined in demonstrations. In a neighboring county 400 blacks marched on February 18 to protest the jailing of a civil rights activist, and one of them—a boy named Jimmie Lee Jackson—was shot in the stomach. He died a week later, whereupon King called for a massive march from Selma to Montgomery.
Governor Wallace issued a statement prohibiting the march; the attorney general of the United States pleaded with the leaders of SCLC to cancel it. On Sunday, March 7, 500 marchers set out for Montgomery. At the Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, they confronted “a blue line of Alabama’s troopers”:
First there was gas, then the posse on horseback galloped into the swarm of fleeing blacks with cattle prods and clubs flailing maniacally. The marchers were driven back across the bridge and into their houses and those of friends who dared to open their doors to shelter them.… At one point, a number of blacks retaliated, hurling rocks and bricks at the police, even forcing Clark and his men momentarily to retreat. But the combat was unequal. While the white spectators whooped approval of the rout and gave the piercing rebel yell, Sheriff Clark bellowed, “Get those God damn niggers!” Protected by masks, the police and troopers hurled tear-gas cannisters into the panic-stricken mob.… [A] high school student recalls that “the gas was so thick that you could almost reach up and grab it.… ” A Southern newspaperman saw Clark repeatedly charging the demonstrators who had retreated to the church, even though he was bloodied by a rock. With their anger rising, and feeling more secure in this section of town, many of the marchers were becoming belligerent, seizing whatever objects could be made to serve as weapons (David Lewis, 1970, 274-275).
A groundswell of northern support followed these events, probably larger than in any earlier period. Demonstrations were organized in one city after another. Northern dignitaries—and if not they, then their wives and sons and daughters—converged on Selma by the hundreds. Their names read like a Who’s Who in the North. With intensive negotiations being pursued by members of the national administration, the Alabama governor’s office, the federal court, the police officials and political leaders of Selma, and the civil rights forces, a compromise was apparently reached that would allow the marchers to proceed once again to the bridge, whereupon they were to turn back. Just who had been a party to the arrangement is to this day unclear and there are conflicting accounts. In any event, many in the throng of 1,500 on Tuesday, March 9, believed they were going straight through to Montgomery and King apparently did nothing to dispel that belief. At the bridge, beyond which the police were massed, he called for the march to continue, only seconds later to reverse himself, much to the dismay and anger of younger activists, especially in SNCC and CORE. That same night, three white northern clergymen were attacked on a Selma street by a white gang; one, Reverend James Reeb, died of his injuries on Thursday.
With the country in an uproar, Wallace asked for a meeting with the president. On Saturday, March 13, he assured the president that the state of Alabama could manage the disorder without the intervention of federal troops. For the moment Johnson accepted those assurances. On Monday, appearing before an extraordinary evening session of Congress, Johnson called for the passage of a voting rights act:
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
The president’s speech was interrupted by several standing ovations and more than thirty intervals of applause, an unmistakable sign that congressional approval of a voting rights act would quickly result. On Thursday, March 18, Governor Wallace tried to shift the onus of dealing with the conflict to the White House by wiring that he could not protect the Selma marchers and requesting “sufficiently adequate federal civil authorities”:
That was all Johnson needed. He set the stage with a statement deploring the need for federal intervention. “It is not a welcome duty for the federal government to ever assume a state government’s own responsibility for assuring the protection of citizens in the exercise of their constitutional rights,” said Johnson. He immediately federalized the Alabama National Guard and 1,862 guardsmen, as well as regular soldiers and federal marshals were ordered to guard the route of march from Selma to Montgomery. Johnson was delighted that Wallace’s blunder had enabled him to intervene, thereby satisfying civil rights protestors, and at the same time placed the responsibility squarely on Wallace, the champion of the bitter-end segregationists (Evans and Novak, 495).
On March 21, the march began. Some 8,000 people, their ranks sprinkled with the powerful and prestigious, walked singing to the Pettus Bridge, where a smaller band continued on to Montgomery. “It was a miniature March on Washington” (David Lewis, 1970, 290). When the marchers reached the outskirts of Montgomery five days later, they were joined by 30,000 sympathizers in a triumphal march to George Wallace’s capitol building. That night Viola Liuzzo, a housewife from Detroit who had participated in the march, was shot to death by members of the Ku Klux Klan as she drove back to Selma.
Beginning in April, as Congress deliberated on the president’s call for a voting rights act, intensified voter registration drives were staged in some 120 counties from Virginia to Louisiana where few blacks had been permitted to register. Considerable violence followed, dramatizing the need for the pending legislative remedy. Congress acted with extraordinary dispatch: the bill that had been introduced on March 17 was signed into law by the president on August 6. Every Republican Senator except J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina voted affirmatively. Its main provision authorized the attorney general to place federal voting registrars in counties where it was determined that blacks were being denied the vote, the criteria being that a state or county “maintained a test or device as a prerequisite to registration or voting as of November 1, 1964, and had a total voting age population of which less than 50 percent were registered or actually voted in the 1964 Presidential election.” The states covered by this act included Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and approximately twenty-six counties in North Carolina.
With this legislation, national Democratic leaders finally dismantled the feudal apparatus of the post-Reconstruction era. By the time they acted, there were specific political advantages in doing so. Not only did civil rights concessions cement existing black voters to the Democratic Party, but the provisions extending the franchise to five million potential black voters in the South (over two million had been registered by the election of 1964) created a substantial bloc whose allegiance to the Democratic Party could also be counted on. That bloc, in turn, would help to offset permanent defections among the more racially intransigent southern whites in the Deep South, and to offset the trend toward Republicanism in the industrializing states of the Outer South as well. The basis was thus laid for rebuilding southern Democratic majorities by combining white moderates, many poor whites who would vote their economic interests over their prejudices, and newly enfranchised blacks. By finally endorsing and pressing hard for civil rights measures, in other words, national Democratic’ leaders promoted the means to heal the fissures in their party. That they were free to do so is a measure of the diminished importance which caste arrangements had come to have, first in the national economy, and then in the southern economy.
The civil rights movement was not, then, the fundamental cause of this political transformation; the fundamental cause was economic change, and the political forces set in motion by economic change. Still, it took a long, arduous, and courageous struggle to force the political transformation which economic conditions had made ready.
With this transformation under way, the coalition of groups composing the southern civil rights movement began to fragment. In most accounts of the period the fragmenting is attributed to divisions within the movement, especially to the growing frustration and militancy of the younger members in SNCC and CORE. A precipitating incident that is widely pointed to occurred on June 6, 1966, when James Meredith, while staging a one-man march through the Deep South, was wounded by a sniper on a road just inside the Mississippi state line. A small number of leading civil rights leaders then converged on the spot to complete the march, during which the younger militants (especially from SNCC) denounced nonviolence and racial cooperation and raised their fists for “Black Power.” For them, there had been one bullet too many and one federal betrayal too many.
Divisiveness is endemic in movements and it always has a weakening effect. But as an explanation of the demise of the black movement, we find it less than satisfactory. The disintegration of the movement was inevitable given the integrative impact of the very concessions won. If anything, the “black power” ideology aided in that transformation by providing a justification for the leadership stratum (and a growing black middle class more generally) to move aggressively to take advantage of these new opportunities. Despite the initial identification of the concept with nationalistic “extremism” and political “radicalism,” it came quickly to have a much more moderate and conventional meaning for most movement participants, as expressed by Carmichael and Hamilton: “The concept of black power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks … solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society” (44; their emphasis). Defined this way the concept was especially suited to the ideological needs of a black leadership stratum seeking to exploit the new possibilities for electoral and bureaucratic influence.
Of the various concessions granted the movement none had a greater integrative effect than the right to vote, for activists were rapidly channeled into traditional electoral politics. The extension of the franchise and the guarantees of federal enforcement of the right to vote held out the promise that blacks could finally make substantial progress toward full equality through regular electoral processes. As a result protest lost legitimacy, undermined by the force of American electoral beliefs and traditions. The turn from protest was also promoted by northern liberals who defined the intelligent use of the vote as the true salvation of blacks and who (acting through private foundations, religious institutions, and the Democratic Party) provided the funds to further voter registration and related electoral efforts. Furthermore, for the leadership stratum, the incentives of public office were compelling, leading them to turn away from protest, and even to denounce it. An incident associated with the rise of the “black power” controversy illustrates the point. After civil rights leaders had converged on Mississippi to complete the “Meredith March,” Charles Evers, director of the Mississippi NAACP, strongly objected that he did not “see how walking up and down a hot highway helps; I’m for walking house to house and fence to fence to get Negroes registered” (David Lewis, 1970, 321). The march leaders agreed and the marchers emphasized voter registration in various towns along the way. Subsequently Evers was elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi.
The point is that even as the controversy over “black power” broke out, resistance in the South to political modernization had finally collapsed. On July 6, 1967—just two years after the signing of the Voting Rights Act—the Department of Justice reported that more than 50 percent of all eligible black voters were registered in the five states of the Deep South. By every measure the process of electoral change in the South accelerated even as factionalism in the black movement worsened. In 1964 three southern states—Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina—numbered blacks among their national Democratic convention delegates; in 1968 every southern state did so. With blacks voting in enlarging numbers, southern Democratic governors of moderate persuasion on the race question began to be elected; Republican governors tended to be similarly moderate. Upwards of 900 blacks had been elected to office in the South by 1972. And with some 3.5 million blacks registered throughout the South by the election of 1976, the black vote turned out to be the decisive factor in the election of Jimmy Carter to the presidency, for Carter won in the South (he could not have won without the South) despite the fact that Ford took 55 percent of the southern white vote. The reorganization of the southern wing of the Democratic Party had succeeded. In virtually no time at all the movement had been incorporated into the electoral system, its leaders running for office throughout the South and its constituencies enjoined to devote their energies to making these bids for office a success in the name of “black power.”
The socioeconomic programs of the Kennedy-Johnson years also helped to absorb and divert the civil rights movement. More will be said about these programs in the next chapter. For now it need simply be noted that the Kennedy Administration attempted to ward off pressures for civil rights legislation by stressing the need for socioeconomic legislation to deal with the poverty of blacks. The “Great Society” programs were the result, notably the antipoverty program, and large numbers of civil rights activists took the new federally financed jobs that became available, presumably as a way of wielding black power. In their account of CORE’S demise, for example, Meier and Rudwick take particular pains to show how the antipoverty program diverted activists from direct action and undermined the fragile cohesion of existing CORE chapters:
Leaders who accepted the well-paying positions with CAP programs found it difficult to maintain active connections with their local affiliates, and since they were generally the most experienced chapter members, the loss was substantial.… People on [CORE’s National Action Commmittee] even began to complain that the anti-poverty program “has been used to buy off militant civil rights leaders.” Equally important, CORE’s efforts with the CAP projects absorbed considerable energy, thus deflecting activity away from specifically CORE projects.… On both counts the War on Poverty proved to be a significant contributing factor in the decline of chapter activity (363–364).
The antipoverty program was only one of a number of “Great Society” programs in which blacks came to play a role. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was another, as was the “Model Cities” program. Each helped to integrate the leadership stratum of the black movement (and each also provided the services and benefits which helped to quiet the black masses).
The movement was not absorbed by the electoral system and related governmental institutions alone. Many other institutions in the society also began to admit blacks: business and industry responded to mass unrest by hiring blacks; institutions of higher education, themselves rocked by the struggles of the period, revised their admissions policies to admit more minority group members, some of whom had been in the front ranks of the civil rights struggle. Having gained entry to these institutions, blacks frequently formed “caucuses” or developed other intra-institutional subgroups in order to exert “black power.” In short, the society overtook the movement, depleting its strength by incorporating its cadres and by organizing blacks for bureaucratic and electoral politics.
The weakening of caste arrangements in the South has brought with it some important gains. Chief among these is the reduction of terror as the principle means of social control. On this count, if on no other, the successful struggle for political modernization in the South represents a large victory for the mass of blacks. (On May 4, 1966, for example, more than 80 percent of Alabama’s registered blacks voted in the Democratic primary, with the result that sheriffs James Clark (Selma) and Al Lingo (Birmingham) failed to secure renomination.)
But many blacks in the South continue to suffer economic exploitation and the manifold forms of social oppression which make them vulnerable to exploitation. The crucial question is whether the winning of formal political rights will now enable blacks to progress economically. It was a question put by John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, as he addressed the tens of thousands assembled at the March on Washington in 1963: “What is in [Kennedy’s civil rights bill] that will protect the homeless and starving people of this nation? What is there in this bill to insure the equality of a maid who earns $5.00 per week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year?” Put another way, the question is whether the exercise of the franchise and the now virtually exclusive emphasis upon electoral strategies by southern black leaders will produce a meaningful improvement in the conditions of life of the southern black poor. We think not.
The election of a modest number of southern black officials will clearly not create the political power necessary to secure national full employment policies; nor to secure substantial changes in the hiring and wage and promotion practices of private industry; nor the huge subsidies required to house the southern urban minority poor decently; nor any measures, such as land reform coupled with federal subsidies, that might enable some of the rural black (and white) poor to remain in independent farming in an era of agribusiness; nor reform of the welfare system to insure an adequate minimum income for all who cannot or should not work; nor any one of a dozen other policies and programs that might improve the living conditions of the black poor.
Others have made the same point. At the very moment that the Voting Rights Act was being enacted, for example, Sindler wrote: “The ability and willingness of whites to use the political process to resist and confine Negro political influence will make of the latter something less than the critical lever for racial advance it is assumed to be” (1965, 53). The conclusion, in short, is hardly a radical one. Even James Q. Wilson has written that
Negro political activity must be judged as a strategy of limited objectives. Where Negroes can and do vote, they have it in their power to end the indifference or hostility of their elected representatives, but these representatives do not have it in their power to alter fundamentally the lot of the Negro: the vote … can force … the removal from office of race-baiters and avowed segregationists. [But] it can only marginally affect the income, housing, occupation, or life chances of Negro electorates (456; our emphasis).
Aside from a general affirmation of the traditional American belief in the efficacy of electoral politics, the proponents of a black electoral strategy employ the argument that blacks can now successfully engage in “swing vote” politics because of their concentration in key northern states together with their growing vote in the South. That, it seems to us, is a potential for power much more apparent than real. The success of swing vote politics simultaneously requires not only an extraordinary unity, but an extraordinary independence. The elections since 1936 (with the exception of the election of 1956 and to a lesser extent that of 1960) amply demonstrate that black unity is more than possible. The trend in loyalty to the Democratic Party has risen steadily since the New Deal period, and is, if anything, stronger today than at any time in the past three decades. In the elections of 1968 and 1972, for example, blacks voted Democratic 87 and 86 percent, respectively. And in the election of 1976 some 6.6 million black voters delivered 94 percent of their votes to the Democrats.
These data on black unity do not suggest the possibility for electoral independence; they clearly suggest the reverse. If there was some weakening of black allegiance to the Democratic Party in the elections of 1956 and 1960, the concessions of the civil rights era have more than shored up those loyalties. By any measure blacks are now the most steadfast bloc in the Democratic coalition. How black political leaders might regularly induce these voters to shift allegiance from one election to another is, therefore, far from clear.
Nor is it clear that most minority political leaders would want to foster shifting black allegiances, even were they able to do so. Black leaders are not themselves independent; many owe their positions less to the resources offered by the black community than to those provided by white party officials. Moreover, the positions of most black political leaders depend on the Democratic Party and its continued ability to command a majority of the electorate. To the extent that a deregulated black vote might jeopardize the ability of the Democratic Party to maintain power, to that same extent would many black officials find their hold on public office jeopardized.
None of this is to say that the black vote may not at some future time become volatile. But should that occur, we suspect that the cause will not be the exhortations of minority political leaders, but new social and economic changes and the eruption of a new period of mass defiance.
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1 Among some on the left, there is a tendency to ignore this gain. Robert L. Allen, a spokesman on the black left, typifies this attitude when he remarks: “In its heyday the integrationist civil rights movement cast an aura which encompassed nearly the whole of the black population, but the black bourgeoisie was the primary beneficiary of that movement” (26). This statement is clearly true for the economic gains made during the civil rights era: the existing and the new black middle classes were the chief beneficiaries. But this said, we believe that the diminution of terroristic methods of social control was a major gain for the mass of southern black poor.
2 Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina.
3 As this book went to press, we came across a monograph by C. L. R. James and his colleagues, first published in 1958 and then reissued in 1974, containing a passage which anticipated the electoral aspects of the analysis to be developed in this chapter. Though brief, the remarks were prescient, and we wish to acknowledge them: “The Negroes in the North and West, by their ceaseless agitation and their votes, are now a wedge jammed in between the Northern Democrats and the Southern. At any moment this wedge can split the party into two and thereby compel the total reorganization of American politics. They have cracked the alliance between the right wing of the Republicans and the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. By patient strategy and immense labor, they have taken the lead in the movement which resulted in the declaration of the Supreme Court that racial segregation is illegal. Now the people of Montgomery, by organizing a bus boycott which for a year was maintained at a level of over 99 percent, have struck a resounding blow at racial discrimination all over the United States and written a new chapter of world-wide significance in the history of struggle against irrational prejudices” (150).
4 Myrdal, who tends to underplay the role of class relations in understanding the American “dilemma,” nevertheless reaches a similar conclusion regarding the role played by poor whites in maintaining black subjugation: “Plantation owners and employers, who use Negro labor as cheaper and more docile, have at times been observed to tolerate, or cooperate in, the periodic aggression of poor whites against Negroes. It is a plausible thesis that they do so in the interest of upholding the caste system which is so effective in keeping the Negro docile” (598).
5 In the political chaos created by the war and Reconstruction, the possession of the franchise by blacks at first posed an obstacle to the restoration of white domination. But as the political parties—Republican, Populists, and Democrats—struggled to build political support, each came to view the political rights of blacks as a serious impediment to their success. Republicans, burdened by their identification with both northern and black interests, simply adopted a “lily-white” strategy. The radical agrarians in the various state populist parties at first stressed the similarity of interests between poor whites and poor blacks and tried to build coalitions with blacks; but that alliance could not survive southern racism and the Populists subsequently repudiated blacks in an effort to hold the support of poor whites. In any case, the planter-backed Democrats soon overwhelmed the Populists by casting blacks in the role of the common enemy and by this strategy generated broad popular support for the political hegemony of the white planter, banker, and merchant class over both poor blacks and whites in the South.
6 Population Reference Bureau, 72.
7 There were many reasons for the slow progress of mechanization in southern agriculture prior to World War II. Among the most important has been the abundance of cheap labor, which enabled the South to compete despite mechanization in other agricultural regions. But “under the stimulus of high incomes and a shortage of manpower” during World War II, mechanization began to sweep the South (Hoover and Ratchford, 110).
8 Bureau of the Census, 1976, 460–461.
9 Just how great an upheaval this was for blacks is suggested by the Department of Agriculture which estimated “that 42 percent of the Negro farm people of 1940 who were still living in 1950 had left the farm during the 1940’s” (Population Reference Bureau, 73). In the 1950s, the largest migration occurred in the post-Korean period: “Between 1954-59, the number of Negro-operated farms declined by 35 percent—a measure of how greatly cuts in acreage allotments on cotton and tobacco and how the use of machinery had curtailed the need for the tenant farmer in only five years” (Population Reference Bureau, 73).
10 There is considerable dispute among analysts of the election of 1948 over the question of whether Truman’s rhetorical position on civil rights during the campaign was owed to the Wallace threat, or to the threat that the Republicans would capture votes among blacks. Among those who make a strong case that Wallace was the primary force are Bernstein, Berman, and Vaughan. By contrast, Yarnell reaches the conclusion that the Republicans were the much greater threat (see especially 35, 44, and 69). For the purposes of our analysis, this dispute is not crucial. What is crucial is that the civil rights question was gradually emerging as an electoral issue.
11 On this point see also Sindler, 1962, 141.
12 As a matter of principle, Stevenson spoke strongly in favor of civil rights: “In the South he talked of the necessity of civil rights for Negroes, if anything more emphatically than he had in Harlem” (Muller, 101). But the point is that he steadfastly resisted suggestions that he advocate federal actions designed to impose these principles upon the South.
13 Black protest was sometimes directed against white society and was sometimes a reaction away from it, for “American Negro history is basically a history of the conflict between integrationist and nationalist forces in politics, economics, and culture, no matter what leaders are involved and what slogans are used” (Cruse, 564). We pass over this important distinction, which is useful for other purposes; but for the purpose of understanding the evolution of black protest, each movement—whatever its specific direction—nurtured the capacity for collective action. He succeeded in attracting this huge constituency because a people just recently released from a station of enforced inferiority needed to
14 When blacks were located in agriculture, their unemployment rates were lower than white rates. With migration, this relationship was reversed. “By the late 1940s the black unemployment rate was about 60 percent higher than the white rate and since 1954 it has been double the white rate, which itself has risen ” (Killingsworth, 50). Moreover there is substantial reason to think that a good deal of black unemployment is “hidden” —undetected because of biases in official reporting procedures. Some authorities believe that blacks generally suffered a rate of unemployment three times that of whites in the years following the Korean War (Killingsworth, 62; Ross, 22 and 26). With white rates regularly reaching 6 percent during that recessionary period, it could well have been the case that true black unemployment rates were running as high as 20 percent. In the central city ghettos the rates were even higher. Additional data on black unemployment will be presented in chapter five.
15 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League were developed before World War I by black intellectuals and professionals, liberal whites, and corporate leaders. Their emergence represented a form of institutional and leadership development in the black community, although “neither organization has ever had anything approaching a mass constituency among the Negroes themselves. In spite of their significant contributions to the Negro’s welfare … neither organization has ever fired the loyalties of the rank and file. Court tests, behind-the-scenes negotiations, and educational efforts are not the kinds of activities which evoke passionate commitments from those who live their lives outside of the middle-class context. For the Negro masses, these organizations have represented a somewhat vague benevolence bestowed from beyond the boundaries of their personal world” (Michael Lewis, 156). The legal talent represented by the NAACP was a resource in the black struggle, although the role of legal talent as a factor in winning couit victories against segiegation tends to be exaggerated. Such factors as modernization, migration, concentration, the rise of protest, and the cold war struggle against Communism had the decisive impact on political opinion, including judicial opinion.
16 In contrast to the factors we stress to explain the rise of black insurgency, other analysts point to the frustration generated by “rising expectations,” which in turn were generated by rising incomes. In the period under study the data to confirm a theory of rising expectations are abundant. In fact, evidence is available to confirm several variants of the theory as well.
Referring just to overall economic improvement, blacks made their greatest advance between 1939 and 1951, when the income of male black wage and salary workers rose from 37 percent to 62 percent of the income of male white wage and salary workers.
There is also support for the notion that rapid economic improvement, followed by an abrupt downturn, is at the root of unrest. Between the apex of black prosperity in 1951 and the early 1960s, male black wage and salary income as a percentage of male white wage and salary income fell from 62 to about 53.
Finally, there can be no doubt that a rising class of blacks experienced extreme status inconsistency, for despite their improved income which gave them a claim to middle-class status, caste and racial degradation still afflicted them. Of the several variations of the rising expectations theory, we would incline most, in explaining the postwar black movement, towards the discontents originating in status inconsistency. However, we think the variables we employ in the text have much greater explanatory power. For the studies from which these generalizations about income changes are taken, see Ross; Killingsworth; and Henderson.
17 As John Walton has recently pointed out, Floyd Hunter’s work on Atlanta based on research conducted as early as 1950 noted the changing mood of blacks. Hunter judged that blacks were becoming increasingly demanding and that “traditional methods of suppression and coercion are failing” (149). Hunter attributed this change to the emergence of a black leadership stratum that had become somewhat more economically secure. For several of many descriptions of the Montgomery bus boycott, see King, 1958; Reddick; Lewis, 1964; and Lewis, 1970.
18 In Deep South Says Never, John Barlow Martin also vividly portrays the ideology and activities of the White Citizen’s Councils.
19 As Muller has said, the Democratic platform “wobbled on civil rights. While pledging continued efforts to eradicate all discrimination the key plank added: ‘We reject all proposals for the use of force to interfere with orderly determination of these matters by the courts’ ” (177). During the campaign Stevenson continued to reiterate his general support for civil rights, but also continued to resist advocating specific remedies, such as the use of federal force to compel compliance with court orders.
20 For more than two decades the South was the only region of the country where Republicans had been making gains. In the election of 1932 they polled 18 percent of the vote in the eleven southern states; by 1948, they polled 27 percent. (In 1956, they would poll half of the southern vote.) See Lubell (1966, 226).
21 Eisenhower had been deeply upset by the Brown decision; he told aides that he thought “the decision was wrong.” But he did appear to believe that “every American citizen was entitled to the right to vote” (Alexander, 118, 194).
22 Lubell (1966) also describes these extreme reversals among black voters in a number of southern cities. For a detailed examination of black voting patterns in northern cities which shows that “the peak of Negro allegiance to the Democratic Party … was reached in 1952,” see Glantz.
23 Just how little blacks benefited from municipal politics, despite their enlarging numbers in many cities, is revealed by a study conducted in the 1960s in Chicago, where blacks had been a substantial bloc for years: “What we found was that in 1965 some 20 percent of the people in Cook County were Negro, and 28 percent of the people in Chicago were Negro.… Out of a total of 1,088 policy-making positions in government Negroes held just 58” (Baron, 28–29). For an exhaustive historical study of racist patterns in the distribution of municipal patronage in Chicago and New York, see Katznelson.
24 Eisenhower’s clear displeasure with the Brown decision, and his repeated statements that the race problem was a problem to be solved in the states and “in men’s hearts” must have encouraged southerners to believe that resistance could succeed, even outright defiance of the courts. As late as July 1957, as the crisis in Little Rock took form, Eisenhower told a press conference that “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops into an area to enforce the orders of a federal court.” As Dunbar has remarked, “To calculate … the violence done to the public peace by the President’s six-year-long policy of neutrality would be neither easy nor unfair” (20).
25 Graphic descriptions of the sit-ins and related direct action campaigns are available in a number of sources. For example, Patrick discusses the actions in Winston-Salem; Proudfoot discusses Knoxville; Walker discusses Atlanta; and Killian and Smith discuss Tallahassee. See also the Southern Regional Council (1961).
26 Except, of course, for the FBI.
27 These cadres had their origins in the new southern urban black working class being produced by economic modernization. “If one were to generalize roughly about the SNCC staff in the Deep South, one would say they are Negro, they come from the South, their families are poor and of the working class, but they have been to college” (Zinn, 10). Bell’s analysis of a southern CORE chapter yielded a similar conclusion: “Clearly then, these CORE members stemmed from the ‘upper lower’ class within the Negro community’s system of social stratification. Their parents were members of the unskilled but steady and respectable working class. The CORE members themselves were upwardly mobile … being college students” (89). See Ladd (218–223) and Meier (1970) for additional confirming data. For a discussion of the way in which these activist cadres spurred the more traditional leadership into action, see Walker.
28 On the other hand, Kennedy appeared to understand that a transformation was occurring in the Democratic Party. In the late 1950s, responding to a question as to how he would manage North-South divisions in the party were he to become president, Kennedy made this comment: “My judgment is that with the industrialization of the South you are going to find greater uniformity in the Democratic party than you had in the past” (Burns, 276).
29 For a discussion of the intraparty struggles which afflicted the Democratic Party throughout this period, see Sindler (1962).
30 “As a smart politician, [Nixon] could make fatal errors. The plainest example in the campaign was his stand—or failure to take a stand—on the issue of civil rights. Having fought hard for a strong plank in his party’s platform, which might win the Negro vote in the North, he proceeded to talk out of the other side of his mouth in the South, hoping to win its vote too.… In his shocked inability to understand why his protégé lost to Kennedy, Eisenhower might have thought a bit about the obvious reasons why [Nixon] lost both the South and the Negro vote in the North” (Muller, 258).
31 Thus Theodore F. White writes that Kennedy “felt that he must campaign personally for the big Northeastern industrial states.… These grand calculations worked. Of the nine big states … Kennedy carried seven.… The most precise response of result to strategy lay, however, in the Negro vote.… In analyzing the Negro vote, almost all dissections agree that seven out of ten Negroes voted for Kennedy for President.… It is difficult to see how Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, South Carolina, or Delaware (with 74 electoral votes) could have been won had the Republican-Democratic split of the Negro wards and precincts remained as it was, unchanged from the Eisenhower charm of 1956” (1961, 384–386). See also Schlesinger, 930.
32 Fuller describes the strategy of executive action in some detail. So too do Schlesinger; Sorensen; Fleming; Navasky’s account is the fullest and the most useful.
33 Farmer had been the prime mover in the formation of CORE in 1942, while Race Relations Secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
34 CORE had organized two freedom rides through the Upper South in 1947, both of which are described in Freedom Ride by James Peck. In this as in other ways CORE anticipated the direct action tactics of the southern phase of the civil rights movement. It had employed sit-ins and other tactics to force desegregation for two decades before the sit-ins and freedom rides of the early 1960s.
35 Meier and Rudwick also express the opinion that there was a direct relationship between these channeling efforts and the planning by the Kennedy Administration for the election of 1964: “Kennedy Administration officials had been impressed by the results of voter registration drives that they had encouraged in several northern black communities prior to the 1960 election; they perceived possibilities for creating an enlarged bloc of black voters in the South who would support Kennedy in 1964. It was in this milieu of heightened interest in voter registration, combined with the sense of crisis produced by the Freedom Rides that the idea of a foundation-financed voter-registration campaign developed” (172-173). Matthews and Prothro make the same point: “As more southern Negroes vote in the future, they can be expected to swell the Democratic ranks … a fact that has not escaped the attention of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ civil rights strategists” (391-392).
36 Accounts of the events in Albany during 1961-1962 are available in some detail. See, for example, Zinn; Watters; Anthony Lewis (1964), and David Lewis (1970).
37 The campaign in Birmingham has been described in such accounts as David Lewis (1970) and Zinn. The reactions of the federal government are described in Sorensen, Schlesinger, and Navasky.
38 Southern Regional Council, Press Release, November 15, 1964.
39 And when the delegates from this party mounted a challenge to the seating of the regular Mississippi delegates at the Democratic convention in the summer, they were rebuffed by national party leaders for the obvious reason that national party leaders did not want to encourage black splinter parties in the South. The Democratic state parties in the South had to be reorganized and strengthened; incorporating blacks into those parties was the key to achieving that objective because blacks could be expected to be loyal to the national party.
40 The slain young people were Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both whites from New York, and James Chaney, a black from Meridian, Mississippi. These highly publicized deaths, as well as earlier ones, helped greatly to build pressure for the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.
41 Franklin describes a number of these demonstrations: “There were about as many demonstrations in the North and West as in the South. The emphasis was on increased job opportunities and an end to de facto segregation in housing and education. In New York and Philadelphia demonstrators sought to block tax-supported construction of schools in all-negro neighborhoods. They staged sit-ins in the offices of Mayor Robert Wagner of New York City and Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. In Boston, Chicago, New York, and Englewood, New Jersey, they sat-in at schools or staged school strikes to protest racial imbalances. In Los Angeles and San Francisco crowds of more than 20,000 held rallies to protest the slaying of Medgar Evers and of William Moore, a Baltimore postal employee who was shot from ambush while making a one-man freedom march to Mississippi” (631).