Part Three
WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
THE PASSAGE FROM THE GREAT MIGRATION TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Aerial view of marchers on the National Mall during the Million Man March, looking toward the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995.
The Battle of the Color Line
It seemed, at least for some in this nation, that the good times would never end. It was the 1920s. World War I was over; America had saved the world for democracy. The economy was booming: jobs were plenty, Model T’s rolled off the Ford assembly line at a rate of one every ninety-three minutes. The twenties were roaring: gangsters and bootleggers made money, the good folks fought for prohibition, women gained the right to vote.
Even my people—at least those in the urban centers of the North—had a chance to make good. Harlem boasted a black cultural renaissance. Black intelligentsia—writers, artists, journalists, and more—articulated my people’s struggle for equality in ways that troubled and entertained Americans. Our music, plays, protest pieces, and novels reflected black life—the good times and the bad, the racism, the blues. Black folks in Chicago flexed their political muscle, electing the first black man since 1899 to the United States House of Representatives. Black men gathered in juke joints and black-owned barbershops, recalling with pride how they had helped beat the Germans. Black women worked in the factories, established women’s clubs, tucked away money to start businesses of their own. Delta blues moved up to Chicago; jazz took the country by storm. Father Divine called for a feeding of all people; fiery black nationalist Marcus Garvey proclaimed Africa for the Africans at home and abroad.
Writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were among the “New Negro” voices.
For the artist, the poet, and the bon vivant, Harlem, New York, was the place to be during the renaissance. The men and women who wrote, performed painted, and analyzed were heralded as “New Negroes”—educated, bold, and astute, ready to express their culture whether whites approved or not. The “New Negro” was not really new. Black men and women had been speaking for themselves since they were brought in chains to this shore. But in the 1920s they did it with a new boldness and pizzazz. Poet Claude McKay became widely known for powerful poems like “The Lynching” and “If We Must Die.” Countee Cullen penned Color. Rhodes scholar Alain Locke edited the New Negro. Harlem was home to jazz musicians Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and Joseph “King” Oliver; composers Eubie Blake and Duke Ellington; and artists Augusta Savage, Aaron Douglas, and Archibald Motley. It was the era of Crisis, the house organ of the NAACP, and Opportunity of the National Urban League, which chronicled the gains and struggles of the masses and published works of the great artists of the age. “It was the period,” observed writer Langston Hughes, “when the Negro was en vogue.”1
No one raised the hopes and dreams of the forgotten black man in America in the 1920s as powerfully as Marcus Mosiah Garvey. A short man of ebony hue, Garvey arrived in New York from his native Jamaica in 1916, bringing his organization Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and a message of racial pride with him. Within ten years, Garvey had won the hearts and following of thousands of black men and women. According to Garvey, at its height the UNIA had more than 700 branches and six million members worldwide. Garvey sought to build a black nation that would be respected the world over. He brought black crowds to their feet with the mantra “Africa for the Africans.”
Marcus Garvey was a Pan-Africanist who organized the UNIA.
Black people stood tall when he unfurled the banner of the Red, Black, and Green. Garvey envisioned a black nation capable of providing for itself. He established black laundries, groceries, and other businesses, encouraging blacks to build economic power. By the mid-1920s the organization’s newspaper, The Negro World, had a circulation of 50,000. At UNIA conventions and pomp-filled parades UNIA’s Black Star Nurses, Universal African Motor Corps, and Black Eagle Flying Corps marched proudly before cheering thousands. In 1921 Garvey launched his biggest venture, the Black Star shipping line, which sold and transported goods to and from Africa. Garvey’s appeal to the common black man was magnetic, but his outspokenness and flamboyance angered conservative black leadership. When Garvey was charged by the U.S. government with mail fraud in raising money for the Black Star Line, W.E.B. Du Bois and Robert Abbott, editor of The Chicago Defender, were among black leaders calling for his conviction. Perhaps more guilty of bad business skills than of fraud, Garvey was convicted nevertheless and sentenced to five years in prison. After serving two years, he was deported in 1927. He died in London in 1940, never able to revive the UNIA to its former glory. Despite his demise, Garvey remained a hero, admired for his vision and remembered for his call: “Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will.”
Times seemed good, but history had taught my people to approach America’s good mood with caution. Any day, the tenor could change. There were blatant signs that white America did not want black citizens included in the time of plenty. Whites could take a notion to lynch blacks or torch black towns. Housing officers could declare there were “no vacancies” for “coloreds.” Politicians could break promises after getting the black vote; discriminatory legislation—poll taxes and literacy tests—and threats of violence could bar blacks from voting. Landowners in the South could turn out black sharecroppers without pay, without reasons, without a second thought. Black workers were barred from unions; job vacancies were suddenly “filled” when a black person asked for an application. Black children learned from outdated textbooks, or didn’t learn at all.
Throughout the twentieth century, my people would be tested again and again by the nation—seeing just how much they would bear. Warren Harding the first president elected after World War I, spoke of the nation returning to “normalcy”—the prewar days of isolation, economic comfort, and progress. Some took “normalcy” to mean something else—a time when all that was “American” was good, a time when blacks and immigrants knew their places.
At black-owned barbershops like this one in Harlem, black folks gathered to share the news of the day.
For my people, violence ushered in the 1920s. During the Red Summer of 1919, race riots erupted in twenty-six cities; the newly revived Ku Klux Klan lynched at least eighty-three blacks. In 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, white mobs burned black homes and killed sixty black residents. The National Guard, called in to restore peace, dropped bombs that completely leveled a once-thriving black community. Similar riots broke out in Springfield, Ohio; Rosewood, Florida; and East St. Louis, Missouri, leaving scores of dead, hundreds homeless. Segregation was so entrenched that few whites gave it a second thought. Southern whites felt they had a firm hold on “their” Negroes, many of whom had worked for them or their families for two or three generations.
Somehow, in the midst of its economic upswing, the nation must have forgotten my people. Somehow it must have thought that all was well with us. But it wasn’t. And the waters of discontent kept stirring. In the decades that followed, black folks would speak out en masse. There was a new spirit of fight in our eyes and our souls. Black men would fight back when attacked by an angry mob. Black lawyers would argue landmark civil rights cases. My people would successfully challenge and bring an end to Jim Crow laws. “Law abiding” blacks stubbornly refused to give up their seats on segregated city buses. Black youth faced jail and angry mobs. Death took to the streets—becoming part of both peaceful demonstration and violent rebellion. College students of all colors would give up their education to travel to Mississippi to help register black voters. Day laborers, domestics, churchgoers, and black elite joined hands and forces to battle two hundred years of segregation and discrimination. It was time, they said, for America to give us our due.
Madam C.J. Walker started her own cosmetic company and became a successful black businesswoman and the first self-made female millionaire in American history.
The twentieth century would be entrenched in struggle. My people waged battles in the courts and in the streets, on deserted dirt roads and before the national media, with the eyes of the world watching. My people vowed that “separate but equal” must go, noting that public places were separate but rarely equal. There would be an end to discrimination in government jobs, schools would be desegregated, voting rights and civil rights legislation passed. Children would die, millions of people would march on the nation, whites and blacks would be brutally clubbed—or left dead in a ditch or shallow grave. Cities would burn. Leaders would be assassinated. Blacks and whites would join hands for justice, and young people would eventually abandon nonviolent direct action for armed confrontation. New organizations took root: Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Black Panther Party. There would be no peace until there was equality.
African Americans would trouble the waters of America—agitating, challenging, and defying the status quo. There would be the hope of “Free at Last” and demands for “Freedom Now!” From the First World War to Vietnam, from disenfranchised sharecroppers in Mississippi casting their first votes to the election in Virginia of the first black governor, from the March on Washington to the Million Man March, black people would unite and articulate their struggle. They would move in great masses until the nation heard them loud and clear. Their minds were stayed on freedom.
Interior of Walter’s Tavern showing owners and family-members behind the bar, in Chicago, Illinois, circa 1933. The bar opened in the late 1920s or early 1930s at 1147 West 47th Street, and did not discriminate against African American customers, one of the few taverns in the neighborhood that served African Americans and Polish people, as well as whites at the time.
The Retirement of Prosperity
There were signs that prosperity was about to end. Perhaps the country, still buoyant from the roaring twenties, chose not to notice. Even when the economy dipped, a confident President Hoover assured the nation good times were just around the corner. But on October 29, 1929, the bottom fell out: the stock market crashed, signaling the beginning of America’s Great Depression.
Already challenged with making ends meet, some black people didn’t notice the stock market. Some viewed the Depression as the white folks’ problem. But when businesses closed, when banks fell, when mines shut down, when white folks couldn’t get work, my people knew they, too, were in trouble. “Get fixed,” The Chicago Defender warned on August 23, 1930. “Times are not what they used to be. Prosperity has gone into retirement.”
The myth of the “American Way,” depicted in this billboard, sharply contrasts the lives these black Americans were living; they wait in a relief line during the Great Depression.
By the presidential election of 1932, America needed a change. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated a Depression-weary Hoover by a landslide. Under President Roosevelt, the federal government stepped in to give relief. But even programs with good ideas somehow left blacks wanting. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) increased wages and limited hours to forty per week. However, NRA codes excluded domestic and textile workers—jobs held by thousands of African Americans. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the government paid farmers to plow under their crops or pull acres out of production. Dishonest landowners kept the money, refusing to give sharecroppers their rightful share. Some evicted tenant farmers or fired black workers as they reduced their acres. Even the Social Security Act, which the nation adored, worked against blacks. Farmers and domestic servants were excluded from the insurance program, a blow to thousands.
Times were tough in the cities as well. In October 1933, between 26 and 40 percent of African Americans in several urban centers were on relief; within two years approximately 375,000 black domestic workers were on relief. In 1935, 65 percent of the black population in Atlanta needed public assistance, as did 80 percent in Norfolk, Virginia.2 By 1937, 26 percent of black males and 32 percent of black females were out of work.3 Everywhere, unemployment rates for blacks exceeded that for whites.
Civil rights groups were furious. Big government contracts were being handed to defense industries, 90 percent of which refused to hire or train blacks. In January 1941, A. Philip Randolph spearheaded the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) to bring 50,000 to 100,000 blacks to the nation’s capital on July 1 to demand immediate action. President and Mrs. Roosevelt and other top officials tried to prevent the march. Randolph was adamant. He wanted jobs, or black people would descend upon the capital. “Something will be done,” assured Roosevelt. Randolph responded, “Mr. President, something must be done now!”4 With the march two weeks away and Randolph standing firm, Roosevelt yielded. On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in war industries. Randolph called off the march. The president would later create the Fair Employment Practices Committee to implement the order’s provisions. With the signing of 8802, the nation had its first official policy against discrimination in employment and its first official stance on race since the Emancipation Proclamation.
Under the Farm Security Administration (FSA) black farmers were able to get loans to purchase land or rehabilitate their acreage. Through the National Youth Administration of the Civilian Conservation Corps, thousands of black youth learned trades and received jobs. Under the United States Housing Authority, needy African Americans benefited from federally subsidized housing.
Understanding the growing power of black voters and the importance of my people’s support, Roosevelt appointed black men and women to advisory positions within his administration and New Deal programs. Robert Vann served as special assistant to the attorney general, William H. Hastie, faculty member of Howard University Law School, as assistant solicitor in the Department of the Interior and later as judge of the Virgin Islands. Robert Weaver was the first black to become a racial adviser in the Department of the Interior. Educator Mary McLeod Bethune served as director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration (NYA). These and other top blacks made it possible for African Americans to reap some benefits of the New Deal programs.
Heroic athlete Joe Louis raised my people’s spirits with each victory.
Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, also aided the president’s standing among blacks. A member of the NAACP, Mrs. Roosevelt met with and supported my people, often to the chagrin of whites. She was close to Mrs. Bethune and invited her, as president of the National Council of Negro Women, to tea at the White House. The first Lady also visited black schools and housing projects, was photographed being escorted by cadets from Howard University, and spoke at numerous functions. Upon learning that the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow African American opera great Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall, the First Lady withdrew her membership.
Although thankful for the benefits that filtered down, my people knew they could not wait on the government to keep them afloat. In 1929 the Colored Merchants Association organized in New York to purchase goods collectively. The Urban League organized the jobs for the Negro movement in St. Louis, boycotting white-owned stores that refused to hire black workers. In 1932 black and white WWI veterans marched on Washington, demanding payment of a promised bonus. In Arkansas, struggling farmers put aside race and organized the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. In New York City in 1933, blacks organized the Citizens’ League for Fair Play. Efforts included picketing stores and carrying signs that stated “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work.”
Athlete Jesse Owens broke racial barriers in track-and-field.
The policies of the Roosevelt administration did not cure all ills. My people suffered discrimination in times of want as they had in times of plenty. But they had come through as union workers and organizers, as advisers to the president, as food soldiers who used boycotts and protest activities to their advantage. They had pushed, and the powers that be begrudgingly responded with jobs and relief. It was enough to assure us we were citizens, albeit second class. It was enough to inspire us to fight for more.
Despite the Depression, there were a few things in the 1930s my people cheered. Black athletes defied theories of inferiority, beating white opponents and winning medals. To the white world, the cheering may have been an overly emotional response to sports; to my people, black athletes’ victories ran deeper. In 1936 Jesse Owens stunned the world at the Berlin Olympics, winning gold medals in the 100- and 200-meter dashes, the long jump, and on America’s relay team. When Owens and other black athletes received their medals, Hitler left his seat and refused to acknowledge them. Perhaps no athlete captured the hopes and dreams of blacks as did heavyweight world boxing champ (1937–1949) Joe Louis. Black people went wild when “the Brown Bomber” won a fight. My people rejoiced in the streets when he defeated Primo Carnera in 1935. They wept when he lost to German Max Schmeling in 1936; they were jubilant when he knocked out Schmeling in the first round of their rematch. To my people, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis were “us” against “them.” When Owens or Louis won, black America won.
Heavyweight boxer Joe Louis puts his arm around Jesse Owens, Ohio State University track star and holder of three world records. They were introduced during a boxing program sponsored by the Colored Elks, Washington, D.C., August 27, 1935.
Fighting for a Double Victory
December 7, 1941, would go down in history. The Japanese bombed Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, the major U.S. naval base in the Pacific. Caught unprepared in the early morning attack, the United States suffered humiliating losses. The country was at war.
As before, my people would rally behind the nation, but this time they spoke loudly on what they expected in return: a double victory—freedom for oppressed people abroad and equality for blacks in America.
In October 1940 the War Department had outlined its policy on Negro soldiers. Black men would be accepted into the armed forces in numbers proportionate to their population; officer training school would be opened to blacks, but black graduates could only serve in units where white officers remained in charge. On the question of “mixing the races,” the War Department remained adamant: units would remain segregated.
Approximately one million black men and women served in World War II. More than 700,000 black men served in the army. In 1942 the army activated the 93rd Infantry, the first black division of World War II. Deployed to the Pacific near the end of the war, the 93rd accumulated more than 800 military awards. The 92nd Division performed well in its first offensive action in Italy, but suffered serious setbacks in subsequent battles. By the war’s end, the division had received more than 12,000 decorations and citations. The 761st Tank Battalion, under General George Patton, fought at the Battle of the Bulge. They won 391 battles in 183 days, inflicting 129,540 casualties. They captured a German radio station and seven enemy towns. Although four generals and the undersecretary of the army recommended the unit for presidential citation, it was repeatedly denied until 1978.
Other battalions made names for themselves. The 614th Tank Destroyer stopped a German attack at Chimbach, France. The 969th Field Artillery Battalion earned a Distinguished Unit Citation for its support of Bastogne; the 333rd fought through Brittany and northern France against German attacks. The 452nd Anti-Aircraft supported the Allies’ drive in Germany. In January 1945, when the army asked for African American volunteers to join white troops to halt Nazi advancement at the Bulge, 5,500 volunteered; more than half were accepted. Black and white soldiers fought side by side until the Germans surrendered.
After stern criticism and lawsuits filed with the assistance of the NAACP, the War Department authorized training of the nation’s first black fighter pilots on January 9, 1941. By the end of the war, more than 600 black cadets received their wings, many trained at Tuskegee, Alabama. The 99th Pursuit Squadron, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, flew its first combat mission in North Africa in 1943. By 1944, the 99th had engaged the enemy in more than 80 percent of its mission and had downed eight German aircraft at the Anzio invasion, more than any other squadron. The all-black 332nd Bomber Escorts, consisting of the 100th, 301st, 302nd, and later the 99th, flew more than 1,500 missions, destroyed 261 enemy aircraft, helped sink an enemy destroyer, and protected the white 15th Air Force Bomber in German territory. Black pilots received more than ninety-five distinguished medals; the 332nd was awarded the Presidential Citation for “outstanding courage, aggressiveness, and combat technique.”
The all-black crews of the navy’s USS Mason and PC-1264 proved that blacks could do more than serve as mess attendants. In one heroic feat, the Mason and two British destroyers led a convoy to safe harbor in the midst of a storm. When the British decided that it was too dangerous to return for remaining ships, the Mason returned, leading the vessels to safety. The submarine chaser PC-1264 made history in 1944 when black petty officers were promoted and replaced white noncommissioned officers. That same year the navy commissioned its first black officers, “The Golden Thirteen.”
“The Golden Thirteen” were the first black men to be commissioned as officers in the U.S. Navy, in February 1944.
The marines accepted black volunteers in June 1942, the first time in its 167-year history. Black marines of the 51st Battalion defended installations in the Pacific Islands; the 52nd defended posts in the Marshall Islands and on Guam, Eniwetok, and Kwajalein. Their bravery in combat on the island of Saipan on June 15, 1944, caused the commander of the corps to remark: “Negro marines are no longer on trial. They are marines, period.”5
Approximately 24,000 African Americans served in the Merchant Marine, where they seemed to face less discrimination. Four black captains commanded Liberty ships manned by crews of different races. Four ships were named for black colleges, fourteen for African Americans, among them the SS Frederick Douglass, the Sojourner Truth, and the Booker T. Washington.
But the discrimination my people faced in civilian life was echoed in the military. When transported to camp, black soldiers frequently had to wait until whites were loaded before they could board. At post exchanges, black soldiers were given inferior merchandise; entertainment facilities were segregated. Riots broke out in Fort Bragg, Camp Robinson, and Camp Davis when black soldiers resisted racist treatment. At Port Chicago, California, the navy charged black sailors with mutiny when, for safety reasons, they refused to load ammunition after an explosion killed 302 men.
As black servicemen combated racism in the armed services, black men and women fought for respect and for their lives on the home front. Deadly battles raged in Los Angeles, Harlem, Mobile, and Beaumont, Texas. A race riot in Detroit, in which whites roamed the streets burning property and beating black citizens, claimed the lives of thirty-three people, twenty-five of whom were African Americans. In Salina, Kansas, a black soldier stood in disbelief as German prisoners ate lunch in a restaurant that “didn’t serve coloreds.”
Demonstrators picket the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 12, 1948. Later that month, The Chicago Defender announces the desegregation of the armed forces.
On September 2, 1945, in a war that cost 38 million lives, 300,000 of them American, the Japanese surrendered. America may have won victory for world freedom, but the war for democracy at home was still being waged.
Executive Order 9981 in which President Harry S. Truman bans the segregation of the Armed Forces, on July 26, 1948.
Few know the name of Doris (Dorie) Miller, a black mess attendant and the first American hero of World War II. A board-shouldered young man, Miller had no training for the marksmanship he was about to perform. On December 7, 1941, his ship, the West Virginia, was bombed during the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor. Amid fire, dying men, and sinking vessels, Miller sprang into action. He pulled his wounded captain to safety, commandeered a machine gun, and downed four Japanese aircraft before the ship sank. On May 27, 1942, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz awarded Miller the Navy Cross for distinguished devotion to duty with courage and disregard for his own safety. Despite Miller’s bravery and his demonstrated ability to handle an antiaircraft gun, he remained a mess attendant. He went down with his new ship, the Liscome Bay, attacked by Japan on November 25, 1943. In June 1973 the navy paid further tribute to the heroic young sailor by commissioning the USS Miller, a destroyer escort.
Black women demonstrated their desire to serve in the war, volunteering for the women’s auxiliary units. More than 4,000 served in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). With one exception, the WAC served stateside. The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion served in England and France, ensuring mail was delivered to soldiers on the frontline. At home, the WAC were assigned several nontraditional jobs, including performing routine maintenance on trucks. Black nurses of the Army Nurse Corps served at stations with black hospitals. They treated black servicemen stationed in Liberia. In England they cared for German soldiers. By the end of the war, 3,941 black enlisted women and 120 black women officers were on active duty in the WAC. In 1944 the navy announced it would accept black women into the WAVES. Because so few white women responded and because the war was near its end, black and white WAVES were low. Of the 78,000 enlisted women, only seventy were black, two of whom were officers. Fewer women served in the Coast Guard’s SPARS (Semper Paratus, “Always Ready”). Several trained in the air force at Tuskegee, with no women going on to train other pilots. No black women were accepted into the army.
Members of the Women’s Army Corps were among the first black women to be sent overseas. This photo was taken on February 2, 1945, at Camp Shank, New York.
Lieutenant Sammie Rice, stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, was with the first group of lack army nurses sent overseas during the war. “That’s history, you know,” she tells her sister in her letter. (See full transcription shown here.)
With All Deliberate Speed
Black people huddled around radios and televisions to hear the news. They snapped up newspapers that bore the headlines. The Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas) that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
My people were joyous. But the South would fight the Supreme Court with all its might. Georgia governor Herman Talmadge rightly predicted “blood will flow in the streets like rivers” before the South would yield to integration.6
The victory of Brown was long in coming. My people had worked hard, agitated and protested to end segregation. In 1947 Jackie Robinson became the first black baseball player to play for a major-league baseball team in the twentieth century. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. Later that year, Ralph Bunche, director of the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations, received the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the 1948 Arab-Israeli dispute.
There were legal victories. In 1944 the court ruled that primaries that excluded blacks from voting were unconstitutional. In 1948 in Sipuel v. University of Oklahoma, the court declared states must provide legal education for black students as it did for any other group. In 1950 in Sweatt v. Painter, the court decided equality involved identical facilities and comparable programs. The same year in McLaurin v. Oklahoma, it was determined that once black students were admitted there could be no segregations within the classroom.
Lawyers George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision to end public school segregation.
When Thurgood Marshall and other members of the NAACP legal defense team stood before the Supreme Court on behalf of black plaintiffs in Brown, my people were hungry for a resounding victory. If the court struck down segregation in schools, segregation would soon fall in all public institutions. Marshall wasn’t just arguing that separate facilities were inherently unequal and therefore deprived people of equal protection under the law. He contended that separate facilities meted psychological damage on those locked out, sending a message that black people were inferior to white.
On May 17, 1954, the justices delivered their decision. Chief Justice Warren wrote on behalf of the Court, “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe it does.…We conclude unanimously, that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”
It was a solemn moment for my people. No doubt they looked back on all the years they were forced to attend inferior schools—schools that lacked funding, books, supplies, heat—because they were black. They must have reflected on how often they had to walk or ride past a closer, better school because of the color of their skin. They remembered how Jim Crow laws of “white and colored” had governed their lives. For my people, the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was more than a legal victory. It was a moral one.
There was virulent resistance to integration in the Deep South. Two weeks after the Brown decision, civic leaders in Indianola, Mississippi, formed the White Citizens’ Council (WCC). The organization made it impossible for blacks who supported desegregation to get a loan, a job, even a second mortgage on their home. By the end of the year, the WCC claimed at least 80,000 members, with branches in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Virginia, and Texas. Other groups emerged—the National Association of White People, the American States Rights Association, and the National Citizens’ Protective Association among them—to keep black people in their place. In March 1956, ninety-six Southern congressmen issued a Southern Manifesto to Congress denouncing the Brown decision. They vowed to use “all lawful means to bring about a reversal” of the decision. Governors threatened to turn schools over to private hands. White parents yanked their children out of school. In 1955, Mississippi’s NAACP leader, Reverend George W. Lee, was killed by unknown assailants, and St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Lake City, North Carolina, was torched. The minister, instrumental in Clarion County’s effort to desegregate schools, fled for his life after killing two men who fired shots at his home. In August 1955 fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was abducted, tortured, and murdered in Money, Mississippi, for “talking fresh” to a white woman. There was, as A. Philip Randolph described, a “wave of terrorism against Negroes” throughout the South.7
But just as my people had hoped, Brown chipped away at segregation in other public arenas. In 1955 public pools in Baltimore, Atlanta, and two state parks in Maryland opened to black citizens. That year the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) prohibited segregation in waiting rooms and on public vehicles traveling across state lines. The Supreme Court ruled that restaurants could not refuse to serve Negroes. Slowly, things were changing.
Justice Thurgood Marshall left a legacy that made him known as “Mr. Civil Rights.” He attended Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), where he graduated with high honors. Denied admission in the law school of the University of Maryland because of his race, Marshall entered Howard University Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1933. In 1934 he became the assistant to Charles Houston, then special counsel of the NAACP. Together Houston and Marshall developed strategies to attack segregation at the graduate school level. In 1938 Marshall succeeded Houston as special counsel to the NAACP. Marshall became the organization’s legal director in 1940, a post he would hold for twenty years. He proved to be a shrewd, brilliant lawyer, winning twenty-nine of the thirty-two cases he brought before the Supreme Court. In 1961 Marshall was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. During his four years on the district court bench, he wrote 112 opinions, none of which were overturned by the Supreme Court. In 1965 he became the first African American appointed solicitor general, where he helped secure the acceptance of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court, making Justice Marshall the first African American to sit on the bench of the nation’s highest court. In 1991, after twenty-four years as Supreme Court Justice, Mr. Marshall retired, citing health reasons. He died in 1993.
Linda Brown, age ten, and her sister Terry Lynn, age six, walk six blocks to catch a bus to take them to their all-black school in 1953. Their dad, Oliver Brown, was the plaintiff in the famous case that ended school segregation.
People Don’t Ride Buses Today
As long as black people could remember, the law in Montgomery, Alabama, relegated black passengers to ride in the back of the bus. Day after day my people, mostly black women who worked as servants for well-to-do whites, paid their fares, got off the bus, and re-entered through its back door. They had to stand in the back, even if there were seats available in the “white only section.”
It was this unfairness that prompted Rosa Parks and others before her to refuse to give up their seats. On December 1, 1955, when Mrs. Parks boarded the bus, she and three other African Americans took seats in the fifth row, the first row for black commuters. As the bus continued to fill, one white man was left standing. The driver asked those in Mrs. Park’s row to move back, allowing the white passenger to sit. The others reluctantly complied; Mrs. Parks quietly refused to move.
The driver called the police; Mrs. Parks was removed from the bus and arrested. Her arrest angered those who rode with her every day; it alarmed the professionals she knew through social action groups. College-educated, secretary of the local NAACP, churchgoer, and NAACP Youth Council adviser, Mrs. Parks had touched many lives in the black community. E.D. Nixon, a leader in the Montgomery NAACP, arranged bail for her release. Knowing an attack on segregation could cost Mrs. Parks and her family their jobs or their lives, Nixon asked her permission to use her arrest to fight Jim Crow transportation laws. After consulting with her family, Mrs. Parks agreed.
Immediately Nixon and others contacted political leaders. They decided on a one-day bus boycott for Monday, December 5, the day Mrs. Parks was to appear before a judge. More than 35,000 flyers were drawn up and circulated throughout the black community. Ministers and other community and civic leaders met Friday evening to discuss mobilizing their members to support the effort. Not everyone wanted to boycott. Some wanted to debate the issue; half walked out of the meeting in anger. But the flyers had circulated; the boycott would take place.
Within twenty-four hours of Mrs. Parks’s arrest, organizers—mostly black women—got the word out about a one-day boycott of Montgomery city buses. Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College and president of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), would leave no stone unturned. She stayed up all night, cutting stencils and running off 35,000 flyers. She called WPC members and told them to have someone at the school to receive the handbills. The next morning she and some of her students dropped them off to waiting schoolchildren, who took them home to parents. Although she did not put her name on the flyers, segregationists soon targeted her. She received threatening telephone calls, a brick was thrown through her window, white policemen poured acid on her new car. At first, when looking at her car, she viewed its defacing as a tragedy. She later considered the acid-eaten holes beauty marks. As the others, Mrs. Robinson would not be discouraged. The day the boycott ended, she joined her neighbors in rejoicing. Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson, the WPC, women of all walks of life, proved that women could inspire, take charge, and be leaders in the civil rights movement.
While signs designating sections as “white” or “black” have been removed, a city bus in Montgomery in 1956 is still devoid of any black passengers.
Organizers were concerned. The boycott would be a bold move; there was no guarantee that black people would support it. The morning of December 5, their fears were allayed. A homemade cardboard sign rested on a bus shelter at a main bus stop. It read, “People don’t ride buses today. Don’t ride it for freedom.” Organizers watched and waited. They were exhilarated when city buses drove by virtually empty of black riders. Leaders felt the one-day boycott would be successful if 60 percent of black commuters refused to ride the bus. Bus receipts that day showed nearly 90 percent of the buses were empty.
Monday night, more than 5,000 people filled Holt Street Baptist Church; several hundred more stood outside listening to loudspeakers. It was here the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., elected president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), urged his people to protest with dignity and Christian love, assuring them they would be victorious in the end. There was a spirit in that church, a spirit of determination and faith—power that filled and electrified the edifice through singing and prayer. There were men and women who all their lives had submitted to unfair laws. “No more!” they said. When the vote came on whether to continue the boycott, there was a resounding yes!
Rosa Parks, whose bold refusal to give up her seat to a white man ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
It would not be an easy year. On December 8, the MIA met with city commissioners and bus company representatives. They asked for courtesy toward black riders, hiring of black bus drivers, and seating on a first-come, first-served basis, with a section reserved for blacks and one for whites. When the bus company rejected the demands, my people dug in for the long haul.
Whites, stunned by the boycott’s success, sought to thwart the boycotters’ efforts. Upon hearing that black taxi drivers supported the boycott by charging black riders less than half fare, city officials announced they would prosecute them. When the MIA asked those with cars to form a carpool to take boycotters to work, companies canceled the drivers’ insurance. Drivers were given tickets if they waited too long at a stop sign and if they didn’t wait long enough. Hate groups resorted to violence. On January 30 Dr. King’s home was bombed. On February 1 a bomb exploded in Mr. Nixon’s residence. Membership in Montgomery’s White Citizens’ Council doubled to more than 12,000.
This excerpt from the Montgomery City Code outlines the city’s requirement to separate blacks and whites on buses.
The boycott continued throughout 1956; by February 1 downtown merchants estimated they lost over $1 million, as blacks no longer rode downtown to shop. The Montgomery City Lines laid off drivers and cut routes to stay financially afloat. By April, the company said it would no longer enforce segregation. But the city threatened to arrest drivers who did not abide by Jim Crow laws. In June 1956 in a 2-1 decision, the federal district court ruled in favor of five women who challenged the constitutionality of segregated buses. The city appealed; the boycott continued. On November 13 the Supreme Court upheld the decision to end segregated public transportation. On December 20, 1956, more than a year after the boycott began, the court’s mandate reached Montgomery. On December 21 Montgomery’s buses were integrated. The boycott was over.
The Little Rock Nine
Little Rock seemed an unlikely place for turmoil in response to a federal mandate to integrate the nation’s public schools. The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville had accepted black students since 1948. Little Rock’s parks, library, and public transportation were integrated. Thirty-three percent of the city’s African Americans were registered voters. But Little Rock was still a segregated city at heart.
As early as 1954, Virgil Blossom, superintendent of Little Rock schools, presented his integration plans to the school board. He called for the integration of two new high schools in 1956. Junior high schools would be integrated the next year, the grade schools desegregated by an unspecified date. The school board rejected Blossom’s plan, devising its own. The board limited desegregation to one school, Central High, which would be integrated in 1957. Lower grades would be integrated over six years.
Until the fall of 1956, Little Rock balked at Brown’s integration order. Churches raised fears of black and white students socializing at school dances and extracurricular activities. The school board banned activities that promoted race mixing. In January 1956, Governor Orval Faubus announced a poll showing 85 percent of Arkansans opposed integration. He stated he could “not be party to any attempt to force acceptance” to a plan people so vehemently rejected.
Parents of thirty-three black students and the NAACP took the school to court, charging the system denied black children entry because of their race. The district judge dismissed the suit, saying the board had shown “good faith” toward integration. An appellate court, however, warned the school board against further delays. The board advised black parents their children would have better opportunities at black schools than at Central, where their skills might be overlooked. Seventy-five black youths were slated to attend Central. By the start of the semester, the number interested dwindled to twenty-five. In the end, the school board selected only nine.
The Arkansas National Guard, federalized by President Eisenhower, escorts the Little Rock Nine at the end of a school day at Central High, in October 1957.
On August 22, 1957, just a few weeks before the start of the school year, a brick smashed a window of state NAACP director Daisy Bates’s home. The note tied to it read, “Stone this time, dynamite next.” Governor Faubus stated under oath that he had confiscated knives from students who had planned to carry them on the first day of class. Although he presented no evidence, a judge granted a temporary injunction to delay desegregation. The NAACP challenged the ruling; a federal court ordered that the integration proceed.
Just days before the 1957–58 school year began, Governor Faubus again tried to block desegregation efforts. The governor went on statewide television, ordering the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school to prevent disorder and protect property. Stated the governor, “blood will run in the streets like rivers” if black students attempted to enter the school. Under the school board’s advice, the nine did not go to school the next day.
On September 4, the nine prepared to enter Central. Superintendent Blossom promised the children would be protected, but asked parents to stay home, as their presence might incite the mob. Mrs. Bates would take the children to school. She called them, telling them to meet her at 8:30 a.m. Elizabeth Eckford’s parents did not have a telephone; she did not get the message. The next day eight students, along with Daisy Bates, faced the angry mob together. Elizabeth faced them alone. “The crowd began to follow me, calling me names. Then my knees started to shake. All of a sudden I wondered if I could make it to the entrance a block away. It was the longest block I had ever walked in my whole life.”8
The guards allowed a few white students to enter, then raised their bayonets as Elizabeth tried to enter, staring right through her. She recalls someone yelling, “lynch her, lynch her.” Elizabeth saw a bench down the block. She ran to it and sat down. She heard the approaching mob. “Drag her over to the tree.” A white reporter from The New York Times put his arm around her and gently told her, “Don’t let them see you cry.” Finally a white woman, whose husband taught at a black college, reached Elizabeth and guided her to safety.
On September 20, the district court ordered Faubus to remove the National Guard, leaving an ill-equipped city police force to handle hundreds of violent demonstrators. The next Monday, the nine—under police escort—entered the school through a side door. The mob, now numbering about a thousand, threated to riot. For their safety, the nine were spirited out of the school.
The Little Rock Nine, students who were barred from entering high school by the Arkansas National Guard and a white mob. For their bravery, they were awarded the 1958 Spingarn Medal.
On September 25, President Eisenhower, who many said had been two slow to act, addressed the nation. Concerned with America’s image and angry with Faubus, who had repeatedly defied federal orders, Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and announced he was dispatching more than 1,000 troops of the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas. Under the watch of a convoy of disciplined and heavily armed federal troops the nine finally entered Central.
The 101st Airborne remained at the school until September 31. When the 101st was withdrawn, the federalized Arkansas State Guard was assigned to monitor the school’s halls. But they couldn’t be everywhere. The nine were tortured daily—tripped, taunted, told they would have acid thrown on them. Classmates poured food on them, splashed ink on their clothes, refused to sit next to them. Some white students befriended them, but most made the black students’ lives miserable.
In May 1958 Ernest Green became the first black student, and only one of three of the nine, to graduate from Central High. He recalled the commencement exercise. “[Once I had my] diploma, I had cracked the wall.…When they called my name there was nothing, just the name, and there was this eerie silence. Nobody clapped. But I figured they didn’t have to…I had accomplished what I had come there for.”9
Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Nine, is harassed by desegregation opponents.
Sittin’ in for Our Rights
The 1960s saw a growth in the number of college students immersed in the civil rights movement. These young black people were the first generation to benefit from desegregated schools. But they wanted more. They wanted freedom and they wanted it now.
On February 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College in Greensboro entered the F.W. Woolworth five-and-dime store. They purchased a few items, then sat at the segregated lunch counter and asked to be served. The waitress refused, reminding them that Woolworth didn’t serve Negroes. Ezell Blair Jr., one of the four, informed her they had been served at the counter where they purchased their items. The waitress walked way. The four remained at the lunch counter until the store closed.
The next day they returned with twenty students, who also were denied service, who also remained until closing. On the third day, more than sixty students sat at the counter. Soon an overflowing crowd filled Woolworth and spilled over to the S.H. Kress store nearby. News of the sit-in made national headlines. Within two months, sit-ins had spread to fifty-four cities in nine states, garnering nationwide support from students black and white. A movement was ignited. Polite, well-dressed, orderly college students sat at lunch counters and requested service. When refused, they remained at the counter, sometimes speaking quietly among themselves, oftentimes studying. If necessary, students came in shifts, relieving fellow demonstrators. They generally left a few vacant seats so as not to obstruct business.
Sit-in protesters are harassed, hit on the head and back, and showered with condiments at a lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi.
The students decided early to commit to nonviolence. Divinity student James Lawson, a member of the interracial Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), conducted numerous workshops on nonviolent demonstrations. He issued guidelines for the Nashville demonstrators. Do show yourself friendly at all times. Do sit straight and always face the counter. Don’t strike back or curse back.10 Lawson conducted role-playing sessions in which “attackers” called protesters names, blew smoke in their faces, pulled their hair, and shoved them. At all times, Lawson cautioned the students, “[R]emember the teaching of Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King.”11 It was a difficult lesson, but one that ultimately would save many from serious injury.
On February 27, 200 students sat in at Nashville’s Woolworth. White hecklers taunted the students, threw food and drinks at them, yanked them off their seats, called the white sympathizers “nigger lovers.” Avowed to remain nonviolent, none of the demonstrators retaliated. The police arrested eighty-one protesters for disorderly conduct, none of them white. In Atlanta, scores of students sat in at Rich’s segregated lunch counter. A protestor told of the stubbornness of one demonstrator who refused to be moved by the store manager. “She put her hands under the counter and shelf. He was rough and strong. She just held.… All of a sudden he let go and left. I thought he knew he could not move that girl—ever.”12
As the protests continued, so too did reprisals. In Nashville on March 16, four demonstrators were viciously attacked at the newly integrated Greyhound bus station. In late April, a bomb destroyed the home of a seventy-two-year-old civil rights attorney who helped the students. In Montgomery, mobs, a police force (many members of which were Klan members), and a chief law enforcer popular with the White Citizens’ Council used repeated violence to end sit-in campaigns. White protesters were hounded, arrested, and ostracized.
By April, two thousand had been arrested in demonstrations throughout the South. Students were hauled off to jail. Parents and organizations scurried to raise bail money. Most adults understood young people’s concern for social justice; they just believed they were going about it wrong. Parents feared for their children’s safety, education, and job opportunities, and for the family’s standing in the community. Students, too, began to feel pressure from upbringing and home. Nashville student John Lewis recalled: “A lifetime of taboos from my parents rushed through my mind as the officer gripped me by the bicep of my left arm. Don’t get in trouble. Stay away from Love Street. Only bad people go to jail. I could see my mother’s face. Now. I could hear her voice: Shameful. Disgraceful.”13 Like many students, Lewis understood his parents’ concern but, led by his convictions, continued to stay in the struggle.
“We Shall Overcome” button from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
On April 15, 1960, 145 students met at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to discuss strategies and share experiences. Under the guidance of fifty-five-year-old SCLC worker Ella Baker, the students formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Inevitably, the SNCC and older organizations would clash. But initially youths and elder statesmen found common ground. The NAACP and SCLC would assist the SNCC as they could when asked, and the youths would chart their own course for the future. Young people, black and white college students, made a difference in the struggle. From the spur-of-the-moment decision by four freshmen to sit at a Woolworth counter to the thousands who organized sit-ins, protests, and boycotts, there rose a new energy to fight for justice. The student movement, in the words of Nashville SNCC leader Diane Nash, was an “idea whose time had come.”14
A longtime community activist, Ella Baker shone best when working with grassroots organizations. On Easter weekend, 1960, she invited student leaders to Shaw University to effect change. The youths formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an interracial group whose interests encompassed issues facing the black community. The SNCC would be a major force in efforts throughout the South. Students participated in Freedom Rides, challenged segregation in public facilities, organized voter registration in the rural South. They set up community schools, recruited teachers to assist poor blacks. The young people supped with sharecroppers, stayed in their homes, became a part of the local community. From SNCC’s membership rose future leaders: John Lewis, U.S. Congressman, and Julian bond, state legislator from Georgia; Marion Barry, mayor of Washington, D.C.; Stokely Carmichael, a leader in the Black Power movement. In later years the organization changed its name (Student National Coordinating Committee) and suffered internal conflicts. It pushed away whites who wanted to join, became openly hostile to NAACP and SCLC leaders, whom they felt reaped the glory after students had done all the work. But SNCC members made a mark on the country as leaders and not merely followers.
Nashville student John Lewis printed and distributed a list of rules for sit-ins, as learned in one of James Lawson’s workshops.
Riding for Freedom
James Farmer, executive director of CORE, was vexed. Letters from black people who had been denied transportation on interstate buses piled on his desk. In 1948 my people had won the right to ride buses and trains without being relegated to the back. Yet the government was slow to enforce the law. Farmer chose to revive the “Journey of Reconciliation” of 1947, this time testing the Kennedy administration’s commitment to enforcing the civil rights of the nation’s black citizens.
On May 4, 1961, seven black and six white CORE volunteers boarded a bus in Washington, D.C., bound for New Orleans. They were scheduled to arrive May 17, for the seventh anniversary celebration of the Brown decision. White volunteers sat in the back of the bus; black Freedom Riders sat in the front. At stops, black and white CORE workers entered the “whites only” restrooms, waiting rooms, and eating facilities. Their tactics met minor resistance in their travels through the upper South.
On May 14 Freedom Riders formed two groups on the way from Atlanta to Alabama. One rode Greyhound, the other a Trailways bus. As the Greyhound pulled into the Anniston, Alabama, station, a mob stood waiting with weapons in plain view. The crowd pelted the bus with rocks; someone slashed its tires. The bus barreled down the highway; thugs jumped in cars and pursued it. Six miles down the road, the tires went flat. Within minutes, a mob surrounded the bus. Someone hurled a firebomb into the bus. Smoke filled the vehicle; riders trapped inside gasped for air. Passengers managed to get out, the last rider escaping just as the bus burst into flames.
Freedom Riders wait for transportation at the bus terminal in Montgomery, Alabama.
The Trailways bus carrying the second group of Freedom Riders was also attacked in Anniston, but the worst violence was in Birmingham. Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor had given many officers the day off, as it was Mother’s Day. It had been no secret that a mob was waiting at the station. An FBI informant alerted his superiors early that week. FBI director Herbert Hoover had full knowledge, but never informed U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Thirty young men armed with pipes, baseball bats, and chains beat the riders mercilessly. There was no police protection. Alabama governor John M. Patterson expressed no sympathy for the Freedom Riders, remarking, “When you go somewhere looking for trouble, you usually find it.”15 For two days, riders negotiated with Greyhound to provide them with a bus to New Orleans, but drivers refused. The riders had no choice but to fly to New Orleans.
Freedom Riders stage a sit-in at a waiting room reserved for white customers, in Montgomery, Alabama, 1961.
SNCC leaders in Nashville and Atlanta took up the mission of completing the journey. Diane Nash expressed, “If the Freedom Riders had been stopped as a result of violence, I strongly felt that the future of the movement was going to be cut short. The impression would have been that whenever a movement starts, all [you have to do] is attack it with massive violence and the blacks [will] stop.”16
On May 20, after planning and setbacks, eight black students and two whites boarded a bus in Birmingham for Montgomery. The Freedom Riders were the only ones aboard. They were promised a state patrol escort and a plane flying overhead until they reached Montgomery. As soon as the bus pulled into town, the police and the airplane disappeared. There was an eerie silence at the station. “[T]he moment we started down the steps of that bus, there was an angry mob,” recalls John Lewis. “People came out of nowhere—men, women, children, with baseball bats, clubs, chains—and there was no police official around.”17 Lewis was hit with a heavy wooden crate, knocking him unconscious. White Freedom Riders were pummeled. The mob seized the camera of an NBC reporter and bashed him in the head, leaving him unconscious. John Doar, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s newly created Civil Rights Division, frantically relayed the mayhem and bloodshed to Robert Kennedy from a pay phone across the street.
This map denotes the routes for the 1961 Freedom Rides. In several cities, the riders were met with violent resistance or were arrested.
After the riders are repeatedly met with violence in Alabama, troops are sent by President Kennedy to protect them.
Kennedy called in 600 federal troops to restore order. Again, the riders tried to complete their journey to New Orleans. Kennedy asked civil rights leaders for a cooling-off period. Farmer exploded that black people “have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off any more, we will be in a deep freeze.”18 Unable to stop them, Kennedy asked Senator James Eastland of Mississippi to assure the riders protection from Montgomery to Jackson. Eastland agreed, under the assurance that the federal government would not interfere with riders being arrested for “the avowed purpose of inflaming public opinion.”19
Police met the riders as the bus pulled into the Jackson, Mississippi, station and herded them straight to jail. Freedom Riders continued to pour in, more than the city’s jails could handle. State officials responded by setting high bail and dragging out trials, straining the financial reserves of CORE. Others stepped in. Roy Wilkins gave $1,000 from the NAACP, enough for a down payment on a bus to bring some of the young people home. Thurgood Marshall offered money from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Throughout the summer, more than three hundred Freedom Riders traveled the South. The fight to end segregated accommodations on interstate transportation continued. In late September, Robert Kennedy convinced the Interstate Commerce Commission to tighten its regulations. By November, it was agreed the law would be upheld.
The Freedom Riders from Nashville found their efforts impeded on every end. They moved boldly from Nashville to Birmingham, only to be gathered up in police cars, taken back across the Tennessee border, and put out at a railroad crossing in a small, dark town. None of the students knew where they were. Night was falling; they were sure they were in Klan territory. In places such as this, whites usually lived in the town. The students knew to go to the surrounding countryside to find where black people lived. They went from door to door, hoping to find black people who would take them in. John Lewis would later tell their story. “[W]e knocked on the door of a small, weather-beaten light house, and an elderly black man opened the door. He looked very puzzled, very frightened. Here were seven young men and women standing on his front step with suitcases in their hands at three in the morning. ‘We’re the Freedom Riders,’ I told him. ‘We are in trouble, and we need your help. Would you help us?’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t let you in,’ he said. He looked sad and scared. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’ ‘Please sir,’ I said. ‘We really need your help. If you could just let us make a telephone call.’ The door opened wider and a small woman stepped up beside him. Like him, she looked to be in her seventies.… You could tell they had both worked very hard all their lives. ‘Honey,’ she said to her husband. ‘Let them in.’”20 The couple brought two small tin tubs filled with water so the students could freshen up. At daybreak, the students gave money to the man of the house to help buy food. “[T]he man went to different stores—about three or four stores—buying [small portions] from different places to keep the people in the community from being suspicious. He said, ‘If anyone asks, say you’re my cousins from Nashville, who came down to visit me, my sister’s children.’”21 The Freedom Riders ate their first meal in more than three days. They called Nashville and got a car to take them back to Birmingham to again board the bus. The students never learned the couple’s names. But to seven hungry, frightened, lost college students, the elderly man and his wife were angels, there to help them continue their ride for freedom.
The Freedom Riders willingly paid a high price to sit on a bus and travel the country free of segregation. Their journey affected a generation of riders. The Freedom Riders had fought for more than a seat. They had fought for dignity and freedom.
Freedom Riders John Lewis and James Zwerg nurse their wounds at a stop in Alabama, May 20, 1961.
A Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders goes up in flames after a bomb explodes the vehicle.
Suffer the Little Children
When is one too young to fight for freedom? Should parents send their kids out of the room so they won’t hear talk of marches, police beatings, arrests, and disrespect? Or should young people be placed in the throes of the struggle? After all, aren’t they, too, affected by laws that deem their race inferior?
SCLC field organizer James Bevel had been conducting nonviolent workshops for high school students. Attendance had been high; youths wanted an opportunity to take part in the struggle. In a move that drew criticism and praise, Bevel organized a student march. The SCLC hierarchy was divided on whether to allow children younger than college age to face Bull Connor, public safety commissioner. Bevel argued that young people had a right to participate, that children could not be fired from jobs as could their parents, that the sight of black youths herded off to jail would stir the nation’s consciousness. Dr. King was hesitant. He also knew the adults’ enthusiasm for mass demonstration in Birmingham was waning. Dr. King and the SCLC supported Bevel. In the end, children as young as six marched.
Word of the children marching for justice spread quickly through the city. Bevel wanted the youths to understand the reasons and dangers of the student march. Bevel explained to the young people, “In the school you’ve been going to, they haven’t taught you to be proud of yourselves.… They haven’t taught you the price of freedom.… The most important thing in the struggle is to stay together. We’ve got to start learning to love one another enough to say: as long as one Negro kid is in jail, we all want to be in jail. If everybody in town would be arrested, everybody will be free, wouldn’t they?”22
Birmingham police use a vicious combination of police dogs and high-pressure water hoses (at a force of one hundred pounds per inch) to subdue peaceful demonstrators.
News of the youth demonstration even reached the White House. An FBI agent told Birmingham police about several thousand leaflets circulated at black high schools. The leaflets told the young people to leave school at noon on Thursday, to go to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. There they would prepare for the Thursday afternoon march. There was hardly a black child who didn’t know about the demonstration. A local black disc jockey broadcast announcements about the “big party” to take place in Kelly Ingram Park. D-Day, as Bevel had called it, was coming. On May 2, Birmingham’s black children would be there.
The scene stunned police. At 1 p.m., fifty students singing “We Shall Overcome,” marching two abreast, filed out of Sixteenth Street Baptist. Police halted the line. They advised the youths they were breaking a court-ordered injunction prohibiting the march. When the youths refused to disperse, officers directed them into the paddy wagons. Within minutes, a second wave of students stood at the church doors. They too came forward; they too were arrested. Another wave of students quickly outnumbered police. Young people soon filled paddy wagons and patrol cars. Lacking enough department vehicles to transport the students, police called for school buses to take those arrested to jail. By 4 p.m., more than 900 children had been arrested.
On May 3, the peaceful demonstration turned violent. As young people gathered in downtown Birmingham, the police struck. At Kelly Ingram Park, firemen turned on high-powered water hoses. The force was so strong, it ripped bark from trees, dislodged bricks from buildings. The water tore into demonstrators, tossing them into the air, leaving them bloodied on the ground. Police turned K-9 dogs loose. Three children were so badly bitten that they needed hospital treatment. The photo of a police dog that lunged to sink its teeth into the abdomen of a young man shocked the world. Police brutality against children was too much. Onlookers threw rocks and bottles at the police. They began organizing, promising to use bricks, knives, and guns. In the face of black children being brutalized, leaders’ pleas to the crowd to remain nonviolent fell on deaf ears. The demonstration they had created could no longer be controlled.
While the property destruction outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church could be repaired, the brutal murder of four little girls could never be.
Whites feared an all-out race riot; black leaders feared black youths would be killed. By May 6 more than 1,200 children had been crammed into the city jail, 600 more at a temporary camp at the fairgrounds. On May 7, the SCLC agreed to a twenty-four-hour truce. At mass meetings, Dr. King tried to calm parents. Many were angry over the tactic of using children in the “war.” Adults worried for the children’s safety. Dr. King spoke to an anxious crowd. “Don’t worry about them. They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation.”23 It was a difficult time for black parents, an age of lost innocence for Birmingham’s black youth.
On May 11, bombs exploded at the home of A.D. King, Martin Luther King’s brother, and at the Gaston Motel where Dr. King and others had been staying. Rioting erupted, downtown stores were set ablaze. State troopers attacked; thirty-five blacks and whites were injured. Birmingham would quiet down. Eventually my people and white business owners worked out agreements. There would be an end to segregated lunch counters and dressing rooms, the hiring of blacks in custodial and sales positions, release of those imprisoned, and the creation of an interracial committee for permanent communication between blacks and whites. Some people thought the concessions were not enough; others thought they at last cracked segregation in one of the nation’s most racially polarized cities.
Was it necessary to expose children to the police, fire hoses, jails, and vicious dogs? Parents remained torn. But whether it was for desegregation of an amusement park closed to black children or for the justice spoke of by parents in hushed tones, children knew they were marching for change. When asked by a towering policeman what she wanted, an eight-year-old girl stood her ground and firmly responded: “F’eedom.”24
On April 12, 1963, Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy were arrested in Birmingham for leading demonstrators and were placed in solitary confinement. The day of his arrest, white clergymen wrote King a letter that appeared in the Birmingham News. It criticized the demonstration, concluding, “We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.”25 In his jail cell, writing in the margins of newspapers and on toilet paper smuggled in by supporters, King penned a letter. He wrote in part: “We all know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was ‘well-timed,’ according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.…’ We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”26 The 6,500-word letter was published in pamphlet form and reprinted in newspapers and journals. With more than one million copies in circulation, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” became one of Dr. King’s most noted writings. It forced liberals to see their inaction was as damaging as the racists’ actions. In a battle against injustice, there is no room for silence, no comfortable timetable for change.
African American children participating in a civil rights protest wait for a police van to take them to jail in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963.
Walk Together: The Marches
It was the march that veteran organizer A. Philip Randolph had waited more than twenty years for: the great March on Washington. In 1963, black unemployment—at 11 percent—was more than twice that of whites. My people’s average yearly family income was $3,500, while the average white family’s was $6,500. African Americans still were not free to vote. Intimidation and literacy tests kept many Southern blacks from registering. Randolph would convince Dr. King, SCLC, CORE, and other leading civil rights organizations it was time to march.
Despite President Kennedy’s attempt to discourage the event, the march received broad support. Bayard Rustin, a founder of SCLC, was chief organizer. He had to orchestrate getting thousands of people into Washington, D.C., by 9 a.m. and out by sundown; determine when and where speakers would enter; arrange for drinking water, medical emergencies, a sound system, and more. For the sake of unity, there would be compromises. King agreed to move the rally from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. SNCC chairman John Lewis had planned a fiery speech, critical of President Kennedy and the 1963 civil rights bill. Randolph and others pleaded with Lewis to tone down his speech. Out of respect for elder statesman Randolph, Lewis conceded.
Alabama State Troopers, led by Major John Cloud, approach marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge linking Selma to Montgomery.
Word of the march circulated. On August 28, 250,000 people arrived at the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. They were black and white, privileged and poor. One by one, singers and speakers graced the podium. But it was Dr. King’s speech “I Have a Dream” that captured the audience and stirred their hearts.
My people would continue marching for votes and freedom. In Selma, Alabama, the march to Montgomery took on a different tenor. Angered by the February 1965 shooting death of young black man Jimmie Lee Jackson and ready to claim their voting rights, black people in Selma wanted to take their anger straight to Governor Wallace in Montgomery. “We was infuriated to the point that we wanted to carry Jimmy’s body to George Wallace and dump it on the steps of the capital,” told Albert Turner, a civil rights leader in Marion. “We had decided that we were going to get killed or we was going to be free.”27
SCLC’s Hosea Williams would lead the march, as Dr. King was taking care of pastoral needs in his Atlanta church. SNCC chairman John Lewis would walk beside Williams. On Sunday, March 7, 600 people lined up at Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma for the fifty-mile walk to Montgomery. Their journey would become known as “Bloody Sunday.”
The police who lined the route did not deter the marchers. As they marched across Edmund Pettus Bridge that linked Selma to Montgomery, the scene changed dramatically. A swarm of Alabama state troopers appeared, dressed in riot gear. Some were mounted on horses. Major John Cloud issued the demonstrators a two-minute warning to turn around and go back to the church. He waited, then gave the order for the state troopers to advance.
Demonstrators panicked as troopers attacked. Many were overcome by tear gas, others beaten with clubs. Marchers fled for fear of being trampled by horses. Men, women, and children were slugged. Sixteen marchers ended up in the hospital, another fifty received emergency treatment. Reporters covering the march caught the brutality on camera. The scene stirred the nation. When Dr. King announced the march would resume on Tuesday, March 9, hundreds of sympathizers arrived in Selma to walk with my people. SCLC had asked a federal judge to keep Wallace from interfering with Tuesday’s march. The court asked SCLC to postpone the march until Thursday, when the court would hold a hearing. King did not want to defy a federal order, but people were coming.
Marchers ignore the rain as they get soaked on day three of the march from Selma to Montgomery.
Tuesday’s marchers numbered 1,500. Dr. King led the demonstration. Again, Cloud ordered them to stop. To everyone’s surprise, the leaders halted. Dr. King and others knelt in prayer, then turned around and led the demonstrators back to the church. Marchers were confused and angered at Dr. King’s apparent “retreat.” Dr. King later explained he had only promised to march to the point where violence was imminent, hoping Washington would respond. SNCC leaders believed King had sold out.
The brutal murder of a white Unitarian minister who had joined the march drew eyes again to Selma. President Johnson appealed to Governor Wallace to support the march for the sake of decency; to do so would make history. Wallace listened politely to the president but made no promise to give marchers police protection. The next day, a federal judge ruled the Selma to Montgomery March could take place. President Johnson federalized the Alabama State Guard, providing the demonstrators with 2,000 troops to oversee the march.
On March 21, the march began again: 3,200 demonstrators, black and white, gathered at Brown Chapel. It would take three days to move that many people to Montgomery on foot. The demonstrators kept their spirits high, even though rain soaked them on the third day. Dr. King, Reverend Abernathy, and U.N. Representative Ralph Bunche led. The marchers were met with jeers from white racists and with praise from rural blacks who cheered as marchers walked by. “We have a new song to sing,” King encouraged the demonstrators as they neared the Alabama capital. “We have overcome.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joyously addresses a mass audience in Washington, DC, 1963.
It was a Sunday morning, just weeks after the 1963 Great March on Washington. Children at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church were preparing for youth Sunday services. Five girls dressed in white put the final touches on their hair, pilling their sashes, preparing to officiate service. The topic: “The Love that Forgives.” A deafening noise rocked the church as a bomb planted inside the building exploded. The force was so great it knocked out the stairwell and tore a gaping hole in the wall, causing bricks, glass, and debris to rain on five girls in the basement. Minutes later, ten-year-old Sarah Collins, partially blinded by twenty-one pieces of glass, staggered from the debris. She was calling for her sister, Addie Mae, still trapped in the rubble. Sarah would be the only one in the room to survive. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley lay dead, the victims of a heinous racist bombing. Outpourings of grief and outrage came from around the world. Hate in Birmingham had reached a new low level. A fitting tribute to the girls was made by Welsh artist John Petts. He created a stained-glass portrait of a black Christ, with His left hand raised in protest, His right extended in reconciliation. The window, installed in the church in 1965, bears the inscription “You Do It to Me.”
The battle for rights was far from over. In June 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act; the Voting Rights Act was on the horizon. The March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery March had given my people hope, and they would march on, fighting until justice was won.
Martin Luther King Jr. being shoved back by patrolmen during the 220-mile “March Against Fear” from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, on June 8, 1966.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joins other leaders during the March on Washington. With locked hands and joined arms they move along Constitution Avenue, on August 28, 1963.
Freedom Summer, Black Power
To many civil rights workers, Mississippi was beyond redemption. It was one of the nation’s poorest states. Only 5 percent of black people were registered voters; those who tried to exercise that right would be shot dead by the whites who, if arrested, were always acquitted.
Since 1962 the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) had worked on the Voters Education Project (VEP), registering more than 30 percent of eligible black voters in the South by 1964. COFO had made gains in every Southern state except one: Mississippi. In the fall of 1963 it organized the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and named SNCC leader Bob Moses project director. COFO’s goal was to bring hundreds of college students to the South to educate Mississippi’s poor black people, register them to vote, and to create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, an alternative political party to challenge the state’s all-white Democratic party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
The National Council of Churches sponsored workshops in Oxford, Ohio, to train students for their summer in Mississippi. Seven hundred students came forth. Volunteers had to be at least eighteen, able to pay their own way and living expenses, and willing to live and share life with black families. Because of the expenses, most of the volunteers were white, many from affluent families. They had no idea what awaited them.
By the end of 1965, the year the Voting Rights Act was passed, 250,000 new black voters had been registered.
White Mississippi was not happy at the “invasion” of outsiders, be they black or white. Crosses burned on April 24, 1964, in more than two-thirds of the state’s eighty-two counties. Jackson mayor Allen Thompson fortified the city—expanding the police force from 200 to 300, buying 250 shotguns and a bullet-proof armored car with a submachine gun mounted on top—and declared martial law.
Freedom Summer would be dangerous, deadly. “I may be killed and you may be killed,” warned SNCC executive secretary Jim Forman.29 His omen proved true. On the second day of the students’ arrival, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were reported missing. Their bodies would be found in August in an earthen dam outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. The three had all been shot in the head at close range. Chaney, the one black victim, suffered a fractured skull from the severe beating he received before being shot.
Demonstrators challenge the all-white delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Though their hopes of seating a delegate from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party were dashed in 1964, the bid was successful in 1968.
Despite the deaths of their coworkers, and the bombings and attacks on their offices, the students stayed. They began to see their efforts pay off. My people registered in droves and responded positively to the Freedom schools for local children and to the law and health clinics established by volunteers. By summer’s end, the students had helped establish forty-two Freedom schools, educating 25,000 students, and had helped register nearly 60,000 blacks to vote.
In other parts of the country, the mid-1060s were a time of high frustration. Urban blacks in the North still awaited fulfillment of the American Dream. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had passed. The Brown decision was ten years old, and blacks—who had served in every war—were again called to send their sons into action, this time in Vietnam. Despite bills and laws, too many of my people were trapped—in segregated, overcrowded living conditions, poorly paying jobs, inadequate schools, poverty, hopelessness. They could not see where marches had made a difference. America was still a divided nation: one white and wealthy, the other black and poor. Urban black youths began listening to new leaders—Malcolm X speaking out for the Nations of Islam, Stokely Carmichael proclaiming Black Power, the Black Panther party bearing arms and carrying a ten-point platform for freedom. The new call was for black pride, self-determination, and, if necessary, armed struggled for freedom.
SNCC field organizer Willie Ricks understood what many young black people wanted. He told SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael that black people needed power. Having been arrested during a protest march in Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael emerged from jail with a new message. With raised arm and clinched fist, he told the waiting crowd of 3,000 supporters, “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested—and I ain’t going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years—and we ain’t got nothin’. What are we gonna start sayin’ now is ‘Black Power!’”30 Ricks jumped onto a platform, shouting, “What do you want?” The crowd roared back, “Black Power!” The cry made headlines across the nation.
Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information for the Black Panther Party, speaks in Washington, D.C., October 1968.
Black anger spilled into the streets. In August 1965, the Watts area of Los Angeles erupted as rumors of a police beating of a black man raced through black neighborhoods. The governor of California called out 60 percent of its National Guard. For six days the city was engulfed in looting, burning, shootings, and fire. Property damage approached $40 million. Watts was contagious. There were more than forty riots in the summer of 1966: in Cleveland, four blacks were killed; in Chicago, police were attacked by sniper fire. Racial outbreaks reached a new high in 1967, with more than 150 incidents that left eighty-three dead and more than 16,000 people arrested. Detroit was hit the hardest. Four days of rioting ended in forty-three deaths, all but ten white, and millions in property damage.
Black America was changing. Young black people adopted African names, wore their hair natural, spoke of separatism, learned African and African American history. SNCC changed its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee. Black men and women spoke of liberation and revolution. They supported armed struggles in Africa; they sought political and economic power in America. It was a new generation taking up the call for freedom—by any means necessary.
Deaths of Our Leaders
America was bleeding. She was losing her sons and daughters, black and white, to the war against racism, to riots in the streets, to bullets fired on students and radicals who threated the status quo. For a time, young whites and blacks worked together. They protested for social change, for justice, for laws and opportunities that benefited all. But assassins stalked and fear overtook hope. Death hovered over the nation, taking with it men and women who dreamed of a better America.
Medgar Evers would die, shot down in his driveway by Byron De La Beckwith. The field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP who had overseen successful economic boycotts and rallies, Evers knew his life was in constant danger. He kept the blinds drawn at his home. He taught his wife and children what to do if they heard shooting. Evers’s home was firebombed; he received harassing telephone calls daily; there were death threats in the mail. One June 12, 1963, an assassin took Evers’s life. As a World War II veteran, Evers was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. A crowd of 2,000 people lined the streets singing, “We Shall Overcome.” In 1994 Byron De La Beckwith, twice acquitted by a hung jury, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for Evers’s murder. De La Beckwith died in 2001 at age eighty while serving out his sentence.
On November 22, 1963, shots rang out from the Texas Book Depository in Dallas. At least three bullets ripped through a Secret Service automobile carrying President John F. Kennedy, Texas governor John Connally, and their wives. President Kennedy was struck by a bullet to the head. A half-hour later, at 1 p.m., the president was pronounced dead. The nation mourned. Kennedy had been America’s King Arthur; his administration, Camelot. He was the hope that a president would ensure justice for all Americans. Black leaders saw the president’s flaws, knew at times he was a reluctant friend, and were stunned that this administration had set up wiretaps and FBI “files” on them and movement supporters. Yet in him, black leaders found a president with whom they could reason and, in many cases, on whom they could depend. Watching the funeral, Dr. King’s son Marty asked, “Daddy, President Kennedy was your best friend, wasn’t he, Daddy?” A thoughtful Mrs. King, perhaps knowing that JFK’s strengths outweighed his weaknesses, answered, “In a way, he was.”31
Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., comforts her daughter as they attend the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther “Daddy” King Sr. at King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 14, 1984.
My people would mourn in 1965 for one of their leaders. A controversial figure, Malcolm X captivated thousands with his razor-sharp mind and searing criticism of America’s hypocrisy. He broke away from the Nation of Islam after being censured by its founder, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, for comments made on President Kennedy’s assassination. Following his spiritual journey to Mecca, Malcolm X relaxed his sweeping condemnation of whites. He would change his name to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and lay the foundation for a new group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Malcolm’s life was cut short on February 21, when three black men shot him as he spoke at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. To some, Malcolm X was a radical who died by the sword he once believed in. Others saw him as something more. In eulogizing Malcolm, writer, actor, and activist Ossie Davis asked, “Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance?… He was and is a prince—our own black shining prince—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”32
On April 4, 1968, the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was silenced. America and the world shuddered at the monumental loss. The recognized leader of America’s civil rights movement and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Dr. King had given his life for nonviolent social change. He knew the righteous labored hard and that death was always imminent. Dr. King’s stance against the Vietnam War, his march to secure better employment conditions for black sanitation workers in Memphis, and his efforts to improve housing and schools in Chicago’s black community made him an enemy not only of the South but of racist conservative whites in the North. On April 3, 1968, in a prophetic voice, King told the hundreds at the Mason Temple in Memphis, “I’ve been to the mountain top…and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.… I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”33 Dr. King was killed the following day as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Rioting broke out in one hundred cities. A white man, James Earl Ray, was later convicted of the killing.
Robert Kennedy would be next. In 1968, after capturing the crucial California primary in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, the former U.S. attorney general fell, mortally wounded on June 6 by Sirhan B. Sirhan. Thousands lined the streets and the tracks as his body was transported by train from California to Washington, D.C. Over the years, civil rights leaders had worked hard with Robert. They had disagreed in heated arguments, pushed him hard to protect the rights and lives of marchers and demonstrators. Even after Kennedy resigned from the Johnson administration in 1964 and was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, he continued to grow in his understanding and commitment to the nation’s poor, disenfranchised, and hungry. His death shattered a nation that had placed in him hopes for a better America.
Memorial service for Medgar Evers in New York City, who was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith on June 12, 1963.
The Struggle Continues
Even after the turbulent ’60s, black people kept the fires of freedom burning. Black voter registration drives of the 1960s and early 1970s brought my people to the polls in unprecedented numbers, increasing the number of black elected officials. In 1967 in Cleveland, Carl Stokes became the first black mayor of a major city. That same year, Gary, Indiana, elected its first black mayor, Richard Hatcher. By 1973 there were more than two hundred blacks in state legislatures and sixteen in the U.S. Congress, including one senator, Republican Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, and four black Congresswomen.
Between 1965 and 1969, my people were making breakthroughs in health, education, and employment. By 1970, 38 percent of black families’ annual income was above $10,000 compared to 11 percent in 1960. In 1969 the U.S. Department of Labor instituted the Philadelphia Plan, requiring contractors with federal contracts greater than $500,000 to hire a specific number of minorities. In 1971, 18 percent of young blacks were in college, compared to 10 percent in 1965.
But by the mid-1970s the gains began eroding. The country’s economic recession and loss of semiskilled jobs to automation and technology hit my people hardest. In 1971 the NAACP reported employment of urban blacks was worse than at any time since the Great Depression. The 1968 Kerner report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders stated what my people already knew: “the nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
Reverend Jesse Jackson (center, second row), leads a march for jobs around the White House, while protesters carry signs advocating support for the Hawkins-Humphrey Bill for employment, in Washington D.C.
There was a growing mood of conservatism in white America—an attitude that the nation had “done enough” for my people in correcting the wrongs of the past. Cries of “reverse discrimination” toppled civil rights legislation. Four of the next six presidents were Republicans who chipped away at rights for which my people had bled. Richard Nixon instituted a “get tough” policy on welfare and made a sweeping attack on past social legislation. He attacked “forced busing, forced integration” quotas. Nixon signed a bill extending the Voting Rights Act, but only after Congress overrode his veto. President Gerald Ford seemed more approachable, but my people found he shared Nixon’s coolness regarding fair housing and equal opportunity programs. Any hopes my people had with Democratic President Jimmy Carter were short-lived. Although he appointed blacks to key positions—including Andrew Young as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and thirty-eight African American judges—he failed to curb unemployment and inflation and was defeated in his bid for reelection.
The Reagan years were by far the worst for black and disadvantaged people. Reagan reduced the number of families eligible for food stamps, Medicaid, and student loans, and appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court. His criticism of big governments, “welfare queens,” and preferential treatment for those previously discriminated against appealed to the white blue-collar workers who opposed affirmative action and government handouts. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall would call Reagan “the worst civil rights president of the century.” There was no relief with President George Bush. He filled the federal courts with judges opposed to civil rights gains and named black conservatives to key posts, including Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court to succeed the ailing Marshall.
In 1992 the nation elected Democrat William Clinton. Under his administration my people fared better because the economy improved. Home ownership among my people increased during Clinton’s tenure, crime dropped to its lowest rate in thirty years, unemployment hit a record low for my people. President Clinton appointed more African Americans to his cabinet than had any previous president, making his administration the most diverse. Nonetheless his 1994 crime bill left a bitter taste in the mouths of many in the black community. He would later admit that it “cast too wide a net and put too many people in prison.”
Despite the conservative presidents and administrations, my people still moved forward. In 1972 Representative Shirley Chisholm became the first African American of a major party to campaign for president. In 1983 President Reagan signed the King Holiday bill, making the civil rights leader’s birthday a national holiday. Jesse Jackson sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. In the latter bid, Jackson garnered 300 delegates at the Democratic National Convention as blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities embraced his Rainbow Coalition and urged, “Run, Jesse, Run!” General Colin Powell was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989. In 1990 L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the first African American elected governor since Reconstruction. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
A copy of Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured and sold into slavery and transported to North America, published in 1976.
My people rejoiced as they reconnected to their history and heritage. In 1977 Roots, based on Alex Haley’s novel tracing his family from Africa to slavery and freedom in America, became the most successful miniseries in television history. African Americans in New York rallied to protect the remains of enslaved Africans and free blacks found in a mid-eighteenth-century burial ground in Manhattan. Black scuba divers placed a monument at the site of the sunken slave vessel the Henrietta Marie in memory of the millions of lives lost in the transatlantic slave trade.
Marches continued. In 1995 the Million Man March called by Minister Louis Farrakhan, a controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, brought nearly one million black men of all faiths, economic backgrounds, and political beliefs to Washington pledging to uplift the black community. It was followed by a Million Woman March and a Million Family March. Unlike past marches on Washington, this one was not to petition the government, not to ask it to pay a debt or correct a wrong. My people came together to speak to one another, to set an agenda for our communities, and to renew the commitment to serve our families and our race.
Sparked by the Grand Jury verdicts in Ferguson and the Eric Garner murder in New York City, thousands march in New York City against police racial bias, on December 13, 2014.
We gathered ourselves to set a new course. My people embraced Afrocentricity, reminding ourselves and telling a skeptical world that Africa is the birthplace of life, religion, civilization, and science. We cheered when South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years—his crime, opposing apartheid. We gave our children African names, honoring the ancestors forcibly brought to this country in chains, lest we forget. My people fought hard to breathe when the world was again closing in around us. Black men were being incarcerated at a rate of five times higher than whites. Urban renewal became “Negro removal,” as private property was confiscated by eminent domain and granted to wealthy developers for less than cost. We watched in horror at the beating of Rodney King and set a city on fire when the four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted. And we saw that scene play again and again, at different times and different places, spilling over into the twenty-first century and taking us back to “day one” when the first slave shipped arrived on these shores.
My people face the new millennium strengthened by the battles of the twentieth century. The war for freedom is not over—it has not yet been won. As long as there is injustice, my people will rally, protest, organize, vote, and demand. The methods will vary; the roads will not always be the same. But years upon years of struggle in America have taught my people to persevere, even in the darkest hours. We will lean on each other, gather strength from our ancestors. Firmly planted, deeply rooted, we shall not be moved.
The Million Man March was organized by the National African American Leadership Summit and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. On October 16, 1995, an estimated 837,000 people, made up mostly of grassroots groups of civil right groups and many social activists, marched in Washington, D.C., to “convey to the world a vastly different picture of the Black male” and to unite in self-help and self-defense against economic and social ills plaguing the African American community.