If Elizabeth Eckford’s family had had a phone, she would’ve gotten the evening call that went to the other kids, telling them where to meet their escorts in the morning. But her parents had six children to raise on working people’s wages, and there wasn’t room for extravagances. So Elizabeth got up earlier than normal to give herself time to get dressed in the outfit she’d picked out for the first day of school: a prim blouse, a skirt she’d sewn over the summer—white cotton on the upper half, blue gingham on the lower—and the bobby socks all the other fifteen-year-olds in the country seemed to be wearing. Her mother pulled the family together to recite the Twenty-Seventh Psalm. Once they were done, Elizabeth picked up the binder her mother had bought her, slipped on the sunglasses she hoped would hide how scared she was, and headed out on her own to catch the city bus to Central High.
It dropped her off two blocks north of the school. Right away she could tell that something was wrong, though at first it was hard to know what it was. As she got closer she could see the solid line of National Guardsmen on the sidewalk around the school and the crowd in the street in front of them. Because the guardsmen were letting the white kids through she thought that everything was going to be OK. But when she tried to pass through too they blocked her way.
Later some of the details of that moment slipped away. She seemed to have asked them where she was supposed to go. They pointed her to Central’s main entrance, another block down the street. She followed their directions, walking along the line of troopers, a couple of feet from the curb. Now the crowd was following behind her, teenagers and adults together, the closest of them within arms’ reach, though she didn’t dare look around to see. A couple of the girls were chanting like they were at a football game: “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate!” Some of the grown-ups were calling her racial slurs and other names her family would never use. Others were yelling at her to go back to Africa. And someone was screaming, “Lynch her! Lynch her!”1 The newspapermen fell in with them, the reporters walking next to her with their notepads flipped open, the photographers in front of her clicking away as she stared past them, doing her best not to show any emotion at all.
She stopped about halfway down the block to ask another group of guardsmen to let her through. This time they closed their ranks and crossed their rifles in front of her. The shock of it set her legs to shaking so badly she wasn’t sure she could make it down to the entrance. But somehow she managed to walk the rest of the block as she had the first part, her face set, her binder pressed to her chest, the mob still screaming behind her. When she finally got to the stretch of sidewalk directly in front of the sweeping stairs that led up to Central’s main doors, the troopers stationed there told her that she wasn’t going to school that day and ordered her to step back from the line.
She stood in front of them for a moment more, unsure of what to do. Then she turned away and started walking in the only direction open to her, past the rest of the guardsmen, beyond the far end of the school, to the nearest bus stop. She sat on the edge of the bench, spread out her skirt as a proper young lady was supposed to do, folded her hands over the binder she’d set in her lap, and waited for her bus to arrive. The reporters circled around her in what one of them said later was an informal cordon that Elizabeth didn’t notice, the mob just beyond them, still calling for someone to hang her from a tree.
How long she stayed there she couldn’t say, though others thought it was close to half an hour. At some point an African American man came over to say he’d drive her home. But her parents having told her never to take rides from strangers, she politely declined. Not long after that a middle-aged white woman came out of the crowd to offer her protection. Elizabeth had no idea who she was or why she insisted on standing by her. But the woman’s willingness to scold the mob—to tell them how sorry they’d be one day—made her fear that she was only going to make things worse, when all Elizabeth really wanted was for everyone to leave her alone: a hero of the movement, sitting silently on a bus-stop bench, trying not to cry.
Segregation Now, Segregation Forever
THEY CALLED IT Jim Crow, after a blackface character white audiences had flocked to see in the decades before the revolution southern Democrats wanted to undo.
The enslaved had started the transformation in the war’s first years, when the Republicans still thought that they were fighting for something else. But so many slaves had come pouring toward the Union lines they’d forced the generals and the politicians to think about the contours of freedom, as a matter of practicality if not of principle. The greater the war’s devastation grew, the more radical the Republicans’ vision became. It wasn’t enough to end slavery in the territories Union troops occupied; its complete abolition had to be written into the Constitution. It wasn’t enough to free the enslaved from bondage; the Constitution had to guarantee them equal rights before the law in every state of the nation. And among those rights it had to guarantee was the right to vote, for African American men at least, since women couldn’t vote anywhere at all.
It took three amendments—the thirteenth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth—to secure those guarantees, the last of them ratified just five years after the Confederacy’s defeat. On the ground the constitutional guarantees didn’t always hold. Across the South, where more than 90 percent of African Americans lived, white landowners used the freedmen’s desperate need for work to shape new forms of domination, while white terrorism drove down the Black vote in state after state. As the Democrats clawed back into power in the 1870s and 1880s, they began to harden the South’s racial regime. But they couldn’t destroy the revolutionary changes the war had wrought without staging a counterrevolution.
They built it on the ruthless exploitation of whites’ deep-seated racism. Slavery had kept Blacks in check, southern Democrats said again and again, but two decades of freedom had turned them into the threats whites had long feared them to be. From the many racist tropes available to them, the demagogues turned to the most inflammatory, repeatedly raising the specter of Black men as sexual predators, given to raping white women. “The poor African has become a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour,” proclaimed one-eyed Ben Tillman, the most fearsome of the South’s demagogues, “lurking around to see if some helpless white woman may be murdered or brutalized.”2 Mob violence inevitably followed: whites lynched a thousand African Americans in the 1890s, an average of one racial murder every three and a half days for an entire decade. Behind those lynchings lay all sorts of power dynamics. But it was often the rumor of rape that turned them into spectacles of barbarism, with throngs of whites come to prove their superiority by sharing in the brutality.
Southern Democrats offered a way out of the crisis they’d created with a raft of racist laws. One set aimed to deny African Americans even the smallest share of political power by stripping them of the vote. Since they couldn’t make that disenfranchisement explicitly racial without violating the Fifteenth Amendment, they put in place a series of restrictions designed to prevent African Americans from voting without mentioning race. Almost every southern state imposed a poll tax a voter had to pay before he could cast his ballot, a cost that many African Americans couldn’t afford. Most states required voters to prove that they’d lived at the same address for a couple of years, knowing that poor people tended to move more often than that. And some required anyone who wanted to vote to appear before a registrar, who’d test the applicant’s understanding of state law according to a standard that everyone knew was absolutely arbitrary.
The results were exactly what the Democrats wanted them to be. Mississippi’s laws purged 94 percent of eligible African Americans from the voting rolls, Alabama’s 98 percent. They also purged a lot of poor whites, a side effect the Democrats offset by the other set of laws they passed. Southern schools had been segregated since the 1860s, railroad cars since the 1870s and 1880s. But the color lines were haphazardly drawn and unevenly applied. In the 1890s and 1900s Democratic legislators made them as comprehensive as they could be. African Americans couldn’t eat in the same restaurants as whites; couldn’t drink from the same drinking fountains; couldn’t wait in the same railway station waiting room; couldn’t sit in the same section of a theater or alongside a white person on the streetcar line; couldn’t even try on clothes in the stores, since a white person would then run the risk of buying a dress or a coat that had touched Black skin. Everywhere Blacks were allowed to go, the space was racialized, either explicitly by the “Colored” signs that became ubiquitous across the South or implicitly by understandings of an enforced spatial hierarchy. At the movies Blacks had to sit in the balcony, on buses in the last rows, on trains in the car directly behind the engine where the smoke came pouring in.
Some of the distinctions imposed enormous material costs on Black communities. With many of the laws, though, the placement was the point. Through its segregation of social space, the Jim Crow system imprinted on the southern landscape the inviolable hierarchy of the races. So when an African American did any one of a dozen ordinary things in the course of a day—catching a streetcar to work, taking a sip of water, walking her little boy past a park they couldn’t enter—she would be humiliated. And when a white man took his little boy onto those segregated grounds he’d be reminded that no matter how poor he might be, there was always someone beneath him.
African Americans fought back by appealing to the constitutional rights they’d secured during Reconstruction. The defining case came out of Louisiana, where a group of Black activists fronted by Homer Plessy filed suit against the state’s segregation of its railroad cars. Their segregation imprinted on African Americans a mark of inferiority, they argued, and therefore violated the equal protections the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed. Their case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1896. A month later the justices ruled against them by a margin of seven to one. Louisiana wasn’t stopping Plessy from riding the railroad, their decision said. It was just requiring him to sit in a Black-only car, separate from but equal to the whites-only cars from which he was barred. If that requirement made him feel inferior, the justices said, that was his problem and not the Constitution’s. Louisiana’s law could stand, and with it the rest of Jim Crow.
Once the system’s constitutionality was confirmed, the Democrats could consolidate their counterrevolution. It took some time. Georgia didn’t complete its disenfranchisement of African American voters until 1908. And in the early 1910s legislators were still trying to extend segregation’s boundaries in various directions. But by then the Democrats’ relentless racial politics had turned the South into the one-party state that gave their senators and congressmen such inordinate power in Washington. And the system itself had expanded in the most malignant ways. Some whites rejected the state-sanctioned sense of superiority that Jim Crow created. But far more made it their own, building out from it a social structure of racial domination so complete it even defined how African Americans were supposed to stand in front of them, with their hats in their hands and their eyes downcast. Whites simply wouldn’t tolerate any defiance of their domination, for the good of what they proudly came to call “the southern way of life.”
But defiance there would be. It came through the small, often spontaneous acts of resistance African Americans dared to commit despite the catastrophic consequences they could face. It ran through the massive migration out of the South, even as northern cities hardened their racial regimes. And it took institutional form in the construction of a civil rights movement dedicated to beating back the racist tide.
The movement’s foundational organizations pulled in decidedly different directions. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s inaugural platform of 1909 was so straightforward it fit on a single page. African Americans were citizens of the United States, it said, and therefore must be afforded all the rights that adhere thereto. But behind that demand lay a blistering sense of betrayal. For the white activists who controlled the NAACP in its first decade, the betrayal was often familial, their parents and grandparents having been among the radical Republicans who’d secured the constitutional guarantees that Jim Crow was now destroying. For the African Americans who replaced those activists in the late 1910s it was personal. They were professional men and women of stunning accomplishment, members of that strata of Black America the brilliant W. E. B. Du Bois condescendingly called “the Talented Tenth.” But their elevated positions couldn’t protect them. They’d seen their neighborhoods assaulted, their homes burned, their friends lynched, and, in Du Bois’s case, his eighteen-month-old son killed by a fever that might have been cured had a white hospital been willing to take on his care. A structure that vicious could not be allowed to stand. So they would topple it with protests, political campaigns, and legal challenges to what the platform called “the systematic persecution of law-abiding citizens,” a “crime that will ultimately drag down . . . any nation that allows it to be practiced.”3
No one would have mistaken Marcus Garvey for a member of the Talented Tenth, least of all Du Bois. A printer by trade, born and raised in small-town Jamaica, Garvey had come to New York in 1916 to fundraise for the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a small group he’d recently founded to promote Black self-determination. From Harlem’s famous Speakers’ Corner he sent his message surging across the country; by 1919 the UNIA was enrolling so many members it was on its way to becoming the nation’s largest civil rights organization.
The NAACP’s shocked leadership attributed that success to Garvey’s indisputable charisma, which they considered dangerously close to demagoguery. But the UNIA’s appeal ran far deeper than that. While the NAACP advocated protest marches and court cases as the path to equality, Garvey preached the power African Americans could claim for themselves by building communities completely free of white control, with their own businesses, social groups, political parties, and intense points of pride. It was an idea he’d come to through the Caribbean’s anticolonial politics, and that thousands of African Americans had embraced through the brutal experience of living under Jim Crow’s boot. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the UNIA fused those two perspectives in the century’s first Black nationalist breakthrough.
It didn’t last. As the UNIA expanded, Garvey drew the attention of federal authorities, who saw in his promotion of self-determination a threat to the nation’s order. In 1919 the FBI sent its first undercover agent into the organization to begin gathering the evidence they needed to break Garvey. Four years later Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to a five-year prison term. Without him the UNIA all but collapsed. But the movement’s two poles had been set. On one end stood the NAACP’s dogged defense of equal rights, on the other the promise of Black power.
Between these poles other activists staked their ground. In the 1910s and 1920s a faction of African Americans argued that racial and economic domination were so intertwined that the struggle for civil rights had to be coupled with a fundamental transformation of the economic order. From there the faction split. One group joined the Soviet-inspired Communist Party, whose admittedly minute membership maintained an often-breathtaking commitment to racial egalitarianism. Another group followed the American socialist tradition, with its faith in democratic processes and grassroots organizing. In that faction of a faction no one mattered more than A. Philip Randolph, the dynamic editor of one of Harlem’s most-respected monthly magazines. In 1925 Randolph agreed to lead a unionization campaign among the race men who worked as porters on the railroad’s Pullman sleeping cars. Most of the porters weren’t socialists, and Randolph was no porter. But he saw in the union campaign the fusing of race and class that was central to the socialist vision. So he signed on.
The movement’s socialist strand intertwined with what may have been the most demanding of radical beliefs. American pacifism had its roots in those handful of faiths that rejected war as immoral and expected the devout to work for justice through nonviolent means. But its most profound inspiration came from the great revolutionary Mohandas Gandhi, who in a series of brilliantly orchestrated mass confrontations—in South Africa in the 1910s and in his native India in the 1920s and 1930s—proved that the oppressed could use passive resistance and peaceful defiance to break their oppressors’ grip. In Gandhi’s movement the protests of the powerless could take various forms, from the burning of government-issued identity cards to the widespread refusal to obey unjust laws. At every step they had to be willing to endure, even welcome, the violence the powerful would inflict on them, because it was through their suffering that they demonstrated the “soul force” that Gandhi believed was at the movement’s core. Satyagraha, he called it, though on the Black side of Jim Crow’s color line it would come to be called redemption.4
The Quickening
THE MOVEMENT LIMPED through the 1920s and early 1930s. As the UNIA faded, the NAACP extended its reach: by 1933 it had 100,000 members in 327 branches around the country, a significant number of them in the South. But it had yet to build a sustained challenge to segregation in the courts or the streets. The Communists had won widespread praise for their defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young men imprisoned in Alabama in 1931 on an obviously trumped-up charge of rape. For all the Communists’ efforts, though, the boys were still in prison. Eight years into his campaign, Randolph had yet to force the Pullman Company to recognize its porters’ union. And the few activists attracted to pacifism were still watching Gandhi rather than bringing his protests home.
Then the New Deal came to Washington. FDR wasn’t trying to give the movement the openings it needed, but that’s what he did. Once the administration committed itself to supporting workers’ right to unionize, Randolph could finally push Pullman into negotiations. It took until August 1937 to secure the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters its first contract. With that long-awaited victory Randolph became one of the movement’s leading men, a position he used to build a far larger challenge to the racial order. In January 1941 he announced that come summer he’d be mounting a massive March on Washington to demand equal access to the defense jobs the government was creating. The thought of 100,000 African Americans trooping down Pennsylvania Avenue so appalled FDR that he gave in to Randolph’s demands before anybody arrived, a triumph for union brinksmanship that also had a Gandhian ring.
That was what drew Bayard Rustin in. He’d come to pacifism through his family’s Quakerism and to socialism through a political journey that many engaged young men and women took in the 1930s. In 1942 he brought those commitments together by joining the staff of Randolph’s March on Washington Movement—the inheritor of the previous year’s rescinded protest—and the nonviolent vanguard of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a tiny pacifist group dedicated to bringing Gandhism into the civil rights struggle. To the former Rustin brought organizational skills so superb he quickly became one of Randolph’s most trusted advisers. To the latter he brought the audacity to confront Jim Crow with intimate acts of Gandhian resistance. He and his fellow pacifists demanded to be served in segregated restaurants, picketed segregated stores, and sat in the front row of segregated buses as they crossed the South, an action that in 1947 earned him twenty-two days at hard labor on a North Carolina chain gang.
As the New Dealers made room for protests they didn’t want to see, they also widened the movement’s ability to work within the legal system. FDR had spent his first term constrained by a staunchly conservative Supreme Court. In his second term he remade it with five progressive nominees. His goal was to get the justices’ approval of his economic policies, but the NAACP saw in the Court’s reconfiguration an opening for racial justice too. The fight would be led by the association’s newly established legal department, through cases brought by members willing to risk the danger of demanding the rights denied them, both sides of the campaign—top-down and bottom-up—feeding off each other.
Howard University Law School dean Charles Hamilton Houston set up the legal side and won its first breakthrough cases. In 1940 he turned its operation over to his protégé, thirty-two-year-old Thurgood Marshall, the son of a Pullman porter father and schoolteacher mother who brought to the campaign a common touch and a brilliant legal mind. That same year the association hired thirty-seven-year-old Ella Baker to help invigorate the grassroots side. Raised on the North Carolina farm that was her family’s pride, Baker had carried her intense sense of social justice through her college years at Raleigh’s Shaw University and then to New York City, where she spent the 1930s immersed in the political currents that swirled through Harlem. In December 1940 the NAACP’s leadership brought her on as a “field secretary,” its term for the handful of organizers it had on staff. Back into the South she plunged—to “barber shops, filling stations, grocery stores,” and plenty of churches, she wrote from the road—for continuous rounds of organization-building premised on her faith in ordinary people’s ability to define the issues that mattered to them.5 That deeply democratic vision fed the NAACP’s remarkable rise in membership, which hit almost half a million by 1945. From those numbers came the cases that sustained the campaign’s synergy.
It helped that the association’s lawyers kept winning. From 1938 on they chipped away at the nation’s racial system, from Texas’ all-white primary, which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in 1944, to the racial restrictions developers and homeowners put on their deeds, which the justices declared unenforceable in 1948. From the start, though, the NAACP’s attorneys took as their primary target the legal segregation of schools. They couldn’t have made a more provocative choice. By any measure schools were the nation’s most pervasive public institutions, and the most strongly rooted in traditions of local control. Through that control whites infused their schools with the most egregious forms of discrimination: in the distribution of funding, the maintenance of facilities, the setting of teacher’s salaries, and their dedication to the physical separation of the races, because there was no greater risk than letting kids of different color sit side by side. That was the system that the NAACP lawyers intended to break, if they had their way.
The question was how to get there. For a decade and a half the association’s lawyers used a series of cases to gradually move the justices toward overturning Plessy. In 1950 Marshall finally decided that they’d gotten as close as they needed to be. So in his next school case he would argue that the legal segregation of schools made Black children feel that they were inferior to white children, a psychological burden a state should not be allowed to impose. Marshall wasn’t particularly concerned that the claim was true, though he had to say it was. What mattered was the framing. By insisting on the damage segregation caused, he would be putting before the Court the same argument Homer Plessy had made about his streetcar ride in 1896. If the justices accepted that argument now, they’d be toppling the Plessy precedent, and with it Jim Crow’s legal foundation.
Marshall found five cases to argue. All of them came up from the NAACP’s branches in the pattern Ella Baker had set, though she had left the association by then: two of them from individual families, two from a number of parents banding together, and the fifth from a rural Virginia school strike organized by a remarkable sixteen-year-old, Barbara Johns, whose uncle was a prominent pastor of a church down in Montgomery, Alabama. As the cases worked their way to the Supreme Court, they were subsumed under the first to appear in the docket alphabetically: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Twice Marshall argued the case before the Court, in December 1952 and again in December 1953, a delay driven partly by the Court’s internal politics and partly by Dwight Eisenhower’s appointment of a new chief justice in the intervening year.
Earl Warren was sixty-two when Ike named him to the Court, old enough to be closing in on the end of a fine career. A working-class kid from Bakersfield, California, Warren had put himself through UC Berkeley, stayed on for law school, and then moved on to a life in politics. He spent thirteen years as the Alameda County district attorney, four as California’s attorney general, and ten as governor, all of them marked by his commitment to good government and the Republican version of progressivism: a noble record stained by his unconscionable support for the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. Brown was reargued two months after he joined the Court. “On the merits,” he said afterward, “the only way the case could be decided was clear. The question was how the decision was to be reached.”6 For the rest of the term he used the political skills honed over three decades to bring his fractious colleagues behind the unanimous ruling he thought a case with such explosive implications should have. Only when he had the votes did he issue the decision. On May 17, 1954, the Court ruled by the 9 to 0 margin Warren had created that any state, county, or municipality segregating its public schools by law was in violation of the Constitution.
“Once and for all it’s decided,” Marshall told the press when he had the opinion in his hands. “Completely decided.” But it wasn’t. Within a year about five hundred school boards, including three of the five test cases, agreed to desegregate their schools without further court orders. And the NAACP was working with hundreds of Black communities to demand that their districts do the same. In huge swaths of the South, though, whites were threatening massive resistance. Brown had turned the Constitution into “a mere scrap of paper,” insisted Georgia’s governor, Herman Talmadge. Virginia senator Harry Byrd declared it “the most serious blow that has yet been struck against the rights of the states.” Mississippi’s hyper-segregationist senator James Eastland went further. The South “will not abide by or obey this . . . decision,” he said, a declaration that put him on the edge of rebellion.7
The Court tried to ease the pressure in May 1955 by announcing that its decision ought to be implemented with “all deliberate speed,” a standard so vague it effectively gave the South unlimited time to desegregate its schools.8 By then it was too late to rein in the backlash. From the politicians, talk of resistance had filtered down to the South’s businessmen—a quarter million of them, at least—who’d rushed to form a region-wide network of White Citizens’ Councils they could use to intimidate African Americans into silence with threats of economic retaliation. Below that layer of racist respectability lay the violence that had always been Jim Crow’s default defense. In June 1955 white terrorists murdered Reverend George Lee, a central figure in the Mississippi NAACP. On August 13 three white men gunned down Lamar Smith while he helped Black voters to register at the courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And on August 28 a pair of cousins butchered a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy who had come to the Delta to visit family for a couple of weeks before the start of school. His name was Emmett Till. And he may or may not have whistled at a white woman in a ramshackle general store in Money, Mississippi.
Defiance
TILL WAS DEAD three months when African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, launched a boycott of the city’s buses. The timing wasn’t coincidental. When forty-two-year-old Rosa Parks boarded her bus for the ride home from work on Thursday evening, December 1, 1955, she sat in the first row of the Black section. Gradually the bus filled in, Blacks in the back, whites in the front, with a white man standing. By law Parks’s row belonged to him, so the bus driver told the people sitting there to give up their seats. Three of the four complied. But Parks thought of her grandfather, a loyal member of the UNIA, she said later, and of Emmett Till. And she refused to move.9
From that single act of defiance spun a perfect example of the grassroots action Ella Baker loved. Bus drivers had long used the power the law gave them to abuse African Americans, particularly the working-class women who made up much of the system’s ridership. They’d pushed back with formal complaints, some political organizing, and the occasional act of impromptu resistance. But none of it worked. So one of Montgomery’s most active civil rights groups, the solidly middle-class Women’s Political Council, decided to up the pressure. In May 1954 the WPC’s president Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State, the local Black college, informed the mayor that her organization was planning a bus boycott to demand that conditions be improved. Then she lined up the support of the local branch of the NAACP, whose longtime president, E. D. Nixon—a Pullman porter deeply devoted to his union—knew something about using economic pressure in pursuit of racial change.
What they needed was a galvanizing incident to get the boycott underway. Three times in 1955 the police arrested women for refusing to give up their seats on city buses. The first two were teenagers who, for one reason or another, Robinson and Nixon decided weren’t respectable enough to rally around. The third was Mrs. Parks. She was a quiet, serious, church-going woman, a seamstress by trade, married to a barber who worked on a nearby military base. She was also the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, a title that didn’t come close to capturing the depth of her commitments. For more than a decade she’d taken on some of the branch’s most dangerous assignments, foremost among them its explosive exposé of the sexual violence white men inflicted on Black women, an inversion of the story whites told themselves to justify Jim Crow’s greatest terrors. The boycott hadn’t been on her mind when she defied the bus’s racial rules. But within hours of her arrest, she agreed to be its symbolic center. By the next morning Robinson had the first flyers going up on bus stops across the Black side of the city.
The boycott started on Monday, December 5, with the buses running empty of African American riders. Everyone assumed that the city couldn’t hold out for long, since Blacks made up most of the system’s customers. In the meantime the campaign had to have a coordinating committee. On Monday afternoon Nixon called together the community’s leading figures to choose its chair. They passed over Robinson and Parks without a thought. And in a slight he never forgave, they passed over Nixon too, mostly because he’d made too many enemies over the years. In the place he thought was his they put a young man most of them didn’t know particularly well.
Martin Luther King Jr. had been called to Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in May 1954 to replace the Reverend Vernon Johns, whose niece had organized the Virginia school strike that had led to one of the cases in Brown. Johns was a towering figure. But he was also a hard-driving advocate in a church that wasn’t used to a politicized pastor. So after five tumultuous years the congregation let him go. For his successor they found a quintessential member of the Talented Tenth. Both King’s grandfather and father had held one of Atlanta’s most prestigious pulpits, at Ebenezer Baptist. For college he’d gone to Atlanta’s elite Morehouse College, and from there to Philadelphia’s Crozier Seminary and Boston University, which awarded him a PhD in theology in June 1955. He had a charming, sophisticated wife, the former Coretta Scott, who two weeks before the boycott had given birth to their first baby, Yolanda. While he had the proper political commitments—he expected his congregants to join the NAACP—he didn’t have the hard edge that set people off. Then again, he was still a young man in the making, a fledgling pastor a month shy of twenty-seven, so it was nothing more than a guess what sort of leader he’d be.
He proved to have his share of skills. In front of the mass meeting the coordinating committee used to maintain the boycott’s momentum he was electric, a preacher’s preacher gathering his flock. Though he wasn’t a particularly adept organizer, he was willing to surround himself with people who were; within a week or so the committee had an entire alternative transportation system operating out of Dexter Avenue’s basement. What he couldn’t do was get the city to budge. The economics were clear; a couple of weeks without Black riders and Montgomery’s bus system was plunging toward bankruptcy. But the Brown backlash had choked off local officials’ willingness to compromise. For more than a month King and his committee slogged through a useless set of negotiations, until, in the middle of January 1956, the authorities shut them down entirely in favor of a new wave of economic retaliation and police repression that they thought would break the boycott. In response King’s committee authorized their attorney to ask the NAACP for its help in filing a federal suit against the bus system as the only way to bring the deepening confrontation to an end.
That was the dynamic that Ella Baker had created in the 1940s: ordinary people mobilizing around the issues that mattered to them, shaping a movement from the traditions and talents at hand—imperfectly, to be sure—pressing the cause as far as they could, and then bringing what they’d built to the association’s lawyers so that they could use it to bring down another piece of Jim Crow. There the boycott’s contribution to the struggle might have ended, had it not been for a couple of turns.
King had struggled with the boycott’s burdens from the start. Somehow he was supposed to fit into his schedule night after night of rallies, committee meetings, and strategy sessions. He had to lead the negotiations and manage the politics that came with them. And he had to deal with the mounting harassment; by January he was getting thirty to forty threatening phone calls a day. The city’s turn to intimidation made it worse. On January 26, 1956, he was arrested for the first time in his life: pulled over for speeding, shoved into the back seat of a cruiser, and hustled off to the Montgomery jail for booking. He was in custody for only a few hours in what was clearly a cheap show of force. But force in a system built on violence was a terrifying thing. During the twisting drive to jail King had wondered whether the cops were really just planning to lynch him.
That evening he had to attend seven mass rallies so that the community could see that he was safe. The next day was lost to another round of meetings shaped by the fear that the authorities had created. By the time he got to bed Coretta was already asleep. For a while he lay next to her, until the phone rang—another threatening call—and any hope of sleep was gone. He went into the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, sat at the table to pray. And the silence cracked open. “It seemed at that moment,” he said later, “that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’ . . . I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. All at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared.”10
Of course King had framed the boycott in religious terms before; he was a minister, after all. But this wasn’t a rhetorical turn pulled from the Gospel to inspire the faithful. At his core he believed that God’s only begotten son had given him His blessing and His commission in the words He’d used to send His apostles into the world. In the months that followed King would fit that sacred obligation into the framework the New Testament gave him. White Americans had embraced the sin of racism, he’d come to say. African Americans would walk into the face of that sin. They’d take it on their shoulders. They’d suffer for it. They’d die for it. And with that blood sacrifice they would redeem the soul of America, a vision of the movement formed by revelation.
A month later Bayard Rustin came to town. He’d heard of the boycott through the news stories that were filtering north and the activist networks he knew better than just about anyone else. He saw in it a nascent Gandhism he thought he could nurture. So in late February 1956 he headed down to Montgomery with an introduction from Randolph that was sure to make E. D. Nixon welcome him home. He showed up in a moment of crisis. As part of its hardening response, the authorities had convinced a Montgomery grand jury to indict 115 of the movement’s leading figures for violating a little-used anti-boycott law, a move that sent the fear of mass arrests surging through the Black community. It also attracted the press’s attention; a few of the nation’s major papers had already dispatched reporters to watch the indictments unfold. In that confluence Rustin saw his opportunity.
His first day he spent in a flurry of consultations that Nixon opened up for him. The next morning Nixon appeared at the sheriff’s office and voluntarily presented himself for booking. His pastor came next. Over the next few days a parade of the indicted appeared—Parks, Robinson, King’s friend and associate the Reverend Ralph Abernathy of Montgomery’s First Baptist Church, and eventually King himself—all formally dressed, all politely asking to be charged, all turning the city’s attempt to decapitate the boycott into a demonstration of their resolve. As they left—their arrest photos taken, their fingerprints on file, and their bonds posted—they stepped into a growing crowd of supporters come to celebrate their courage. There stood Rustin too, in the cluster of reporters the indictments had drawn in. By the end of the week his Gandhian moment was on the front page of the New York Times.
He knew that he couldn’t stay. He was a socialist, a pacifist, and a gay man from Harlem—almost a cliché of an outside agitator—and it wouldn’t be long before the authorities figured out how to taint the boycott with his presence. In any case Montgomery wasn’t where he needed to be. Ten days after his arrival he headed back to New York to take the story he’d started to shape up another level. It was fine to talk about the boycott, but a compelling story had to have a central character. Within a few weeks Rustin had ghostwritten the first article to ever appear under King’s name. He published a pamphlet calling King “the American Gandhi” for circulation in his activist circles, and did his best to get the same image into the popular press.11 As the attention intensified, he connected King to the progressive unions that could give the boycott the financial support it needed. He brought in a flood of cash with a summer rally at Madison Square Garden, headlined by the liberal icon Eleanor Roosevelt. He even managed to get King an appearance before the Democratic National Convention, not as the spokesman for a single city’s protest but as the embodiment of a movement ready to sweep the South with the unstoppable force of Gandhi’s satyagraha.
But King wasn’t the head of a southern-wide movement of pacifist intent. He was the leader of an embattled bus boycott that had no hope of victory outside the courts. Through the spring of 1956 white Montgomery’s assaults continued, through the indictments, the police harassment, the racist organizing—a Citizens’ Council rally at the Montgomery Coliseum drew 10,000 people—and a series of bombings that by some miracle never killed anyone. On June 4 the NAACP got its first win in a two-to-one district court decision that declared the segregation of the city’s buses unconstitutional. Montgomery’s officials immediately appealed to the Supreme Court. So the boycott dragged on through King’s summer of celebrity. In the fall the city made one last push to destroy the boycott before the justices ruled. But by then the movement had come too far to break. On November 13 the Court issued a single-sentence statement upholding the district court’s ruling. It took another month for the implementation order to arrive and another little piece of Jim Crow to fall, in Ella Baker’s way, 386 days after Mrs. Parks had refused to give up her seat on her evening ride home.
Momentum
BAYARD RUSTIN RETURNED to Montgomery three days after the buses were integrated to talk to King about building the region-wide movement he’d imagined. From that conversation came King’s invitation to join a handpicked list of ministers in creating a new organization to spread Montgomery’s momentum across the South. Sixty of them came to Daddy King’s Atlanta church for what would be the founding meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) on January 10, 1957. That Martin Luther King Jr. would lead the new group was a given, though exactly where he’d take it wasn’t clear. He had a grand idea—inspired by Billy Graham—of staging a series of political revival meetings across the South to encourage African Americans to register to vote. Out of the revival tents the inspired would stream into workshops on navigating the byzantine requirements the white South had used to bolster disenfranchisement. Then they’d march to the registrars’ offices to bring another piece of Jim Crow down, this one far more important than Montgomery’s buses.
It was a stirring thought. But King’s celebrity had created enormous demands on his time. He had speeches to give, sermons to deliver, interviews to grant—in 1957 Time magazine put him on its cover—articles to write, trips to take, and appearances to make, alongside the demands of running a church and raising a young family. Some of his work was the routine stuff of ministerial life, some of it political. A share of it sounded more like Rustin than King; Time loved the American Gandhi image. But the best of it was fused with the vision of redemptive suffering he’d derived from his kitchen revelation, an idea he honed with such care his wife Coretta thought it was becoming an obsession. Still, in a schedule that crushing something had to give. Almost a year after its founding, SCLC still didn’t have a plan for putting King’s crusade into action, a staff to develop one, or the money to get it up and running. For a while Rustin thought that he might have to take over SCLC’s management himself just to keep it from collapsing, but he also knew that his personal background wasn’t going to fit well with an organization full of ministers.
So, in January 1958 Rustin suggested to King that he hire as SCLC’s executive director the best organizer he could imagine. Ella Baker was willing to take on the job. But when King finally got around to making a hire, his fellow ministers insisted that she be made assistant director, under the supervision of an elderly pastor who didn’t have a tenth of her skills. And King had no more time to spare in 1958 than he’d had the year before. In those conditions Baker couldn’t turn his registration drive into anything more than a shadow of what it ought to have been. More fundamentally, she knew that she was never going to make SCLC the force that King and Rustin wanted it to be until she found a way to link it up to the community activism that made a movement possible.
The first key step came in Little Rock, Arkansas, with a pivotal variation of the dynamic Baker had created inside the NAACP. When the Court handed down Brown in 1954, Little Rock’s school board had been among those districts that decided to comply. Its agreeability wasn’t too surprising. Arkansas was a Jim Crow state, but it wasn’t a particularly rabid one. It had already desegregated its university, and no one saw much reason to make a fight of it at the lower levels of its public schools. By the spring of 1955 the Little Rock schools’ superintendent had put together a painfully gradual plan. It would begin by bringing ten African American students into all-white Central High in September 1957, a step so small it barely marked any progress at all. The local NAACP clearly wasn’t impressed: in February 1956 it helped a set of Black parents bring a federal court suit against the district, demanding the school’s immediate integration. The judge split the difference. The board could follow its plan, he said, but it would do so under the court’s mandate, so that it was now legally required to see the plan through to its implementation.
In the meantime the backlash against the Brown decision had raged across the state. Up went the Citizens’ Councils, the Klan klaverns, the angry editorials, the panicked public meetings, and the intensifying demands that Arkansas’ public officials do their duty in defense of the white race and its beloved children. The state’s senators and congressmen fell into line, as did Orval Faubus, its feckless governor. Faubus had first been elected in 1954 as a moderate Democrat, more interested in economic reform than race-baiting. But when he ran for reelection in 1956 he swung to the right, pledging to protect the color line that Little Rock’s school board planned to inch across.
The run-up to September 1957 was shot through with tension. The Little Rock NAACP took responsibility for identifying the ten kids who were to go to Central High, a selection process they built around the students’ academic standing and their ability to withstand the abuse they were sure to suffer. The Little Rock Citizens’ Council hammered the school board with demands that the desegregation be delayed. A handful of parents’ groups filed restraining orders. Others circulated petitions pleading for the school board to back down. One of them held a very public meeting to discuss the dangers of miscegenation. And on Monday evening, September 2—the last day before schools opened—Governor Faubus went on local television to say that he was ordering the National Guard out to Central High to block those ten African American kids from entering the school.
The kids didn’t try to get into Central High until September 4, when nine of them arrived and were turned away under an escort arranged by the local NAACP. Elizabeth Eckford came on her own. The next day every major paper in the country ran the photo of her walking down the street, the mob howling behind her. “Saw the awful pictures,” Central’s dean of girls wrote that night. “The dignity of the rejected Negro girl, the obscenity of the faces of her tormentors.”12 In that image millions of Americans came face-to-face with the searing moral contrast that the movement wanted them to witness. Not the individual one alone, as powerful as it was, but the systemic one, between a community that could produce a girl of such grace and a racial structure that twisted ordinary people into thugs in defense of the indefensible. That was the force Elizabeth Eckford had released in her terrifying walk along the guardsmen’s line, much as Rosa Parks had with her quiet defiance in Montgomery two years before.
This time the force raced up to the nation’s highest level. Dwight Eisenhower should have responded with federal power that day, since a state had no right to defy a federal court order. But Ike didn’t believe in integrating schools—he’d decided that appointing Earl Warren as chief justice had been one of the biggest mistakes he’d made—and he wanted to avoid a confrontation. For two weeks he tried to talk Faubus into compliance, an approach that danced on the edge of domestic appeasement. Finally, on Friday, September 20, the federal court ordered the governor to stop obstructing Central’s desegregation. Eisenhower assumed that Faubus would now use the guardsmen to protect the kids as they went into the school. But three hours after the court hearing, the governor went back on television to say that he’d be withdrawing the guardsmen and replacing them with a contingent of street cops. “I wouldn’t think the parents of the Negro children would want their children in school with the situation that prevails now,” he told reporters that evening, just in case anyone missed the point.13
The mob didn’t. On Monday morning there were a thousand whites on the street in front of Central High, held back by a rank of policemen they could have easily overrun. Somehow the kids’ handlers slipped them into the school unnoticed. As the word filtered out the crowd grew hysterical. Fearing a frontal assault, school officials pulled the kids out of their classes, rushed them into police cars waiting around back, and sped them out of the neighborhood.
That Eisenhower couldn’t abide. The next day he ordered a thousand troops from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock. On Wednesday morning, September 25, the nine kids who’d made it through the previous weeks’ upheavals walked up the sweeping stairs of Central High—where Elizabeth Eckford had been turned away three weeks before—safe within a phalanx of soldiers in full combat gear. It was a triumph of federal power over state defiance. But it was also something deeper. Since the 1940s Baker’s brand of activism had fed into the courts. This time the Court’s decision had created activism back on the ground. That activism, led by nine teenagers clutching their books in the face of hatred, had then created a crisis so profound that the president of the United States had been forced to intervene. There was a power even Baker hadn’t imagined, on display for the nation to see.
John Lewis saw it. He was a freshman at Nashville’s American Baptist College in the autumn of 1957. “It was that sense of mission, of involvement, of awareness that others were putting themselves on the line for the cause,” he wrote later, “that moved me to do my part. I remember praying for those brave children of Little Rock. . . .”14 He wasn’t alone. Over the next few years there were sporadic community protests around the South: a handful of bus boycotts, a scattering of conflicts over school desegregation, a few singular challenges to restaurant segregation. And among young people there was a great deal of quiet organizing. Some of it was inspirational. After their first traumatic year at Central High was over, the Little Rock kids went on the lecture circuit, speaking to NAACP youth groups all over the South. Some of it was formal: down in Nashville, Lewis joined a cadre of committed college students being trained in Gandhian nonviolence by a charismatic Methodist minister named James Lawson, who’d come south because King had told him that was where he ought to be. And some of it was nothing more than conversation, like the long dorm-room talks four freshmen at North Carolina A&T had with each other through the fall of 1959, pushing and probing around the question of a young man’s responsibility to confront injustice. When they felt they’d said enough, they walked into the Woolworth’s store not far from campus, sat down at the lunch counter, and politely asked to be served four cups of coffee, just as Rustin and his colleagues had done in one of CORE’s first acts twenty years before.
That first day, February 1, 1960, they just sat there, waiting for the service they knew was never coming. That evening almost everybody at A&T was talking about what they’d done. The next day, twenty-five men and four women from the college joined them at the lunch counter, and on the day after that sixty-three. The local newspapers and then the national press picked up the story. By the weekend hundreds of Black students were sitting in at lunch counters across downtown Greensboro. White kids were out too, shoving and shouting at the protesters while they sat in silence, as Elizabeth Eckford had showed them how to do. That night Woolworth’s tried to erase the tension by shutting down its counter. But that just made the company look complicit. Across the country its sales started to tumble so precipitously that the store had to announce that it would desegregate its counters if other local businesses would do the same. One by one they agreed. Another victory for the cause, this one monumental.
Action fed action. Within a week of the A&T protest, African American students were occupying lunch counters in Durham, Charlotte, and Raleigh, North Carolina. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins in Hampton and Richmond, Virginia; Nashville and Chattanooga, Tennessee; Montgomery, Alabama; Lexington, Kentucky; and Baltimore, Maryland. By the end of April, 50,000 young people had joined a protest that no one had planned and no one was coordinating, the ultimate example of grassroots mobilization by young people willing to risk everything for principle. Back in SCLC’s Atlanta headquarters, Ella Baker knew that she’d found exactly what she needed.
A little more than a month after the first sit-in began, she invited the leaders of the local campaigns to attend an Easter weekend retreat at Shaw University, her beloved alma mater. One hundred twenty-six people showed up, most of them students at the historically black colleges (HBCUs) that had been the sit-ins’ incubators. As the featured speaker, King called on them to turn their protests into a mass movement premised on the power of redemptive suffering. But it was Nashville’s Lawson who gave them their charge in an electrifying moment of Christian witness drawn on the vision that King had given him. “Love is the force by which God binds man to Himself and man to man,” he told them. “Such love goes to the extreme. . . . It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love.” With that uncompromising love, he told them, the movement wouldn’t just redeem the nation’s soul. It would create on American soil the Beloved Community.15
Years later John Lewis tried to explain what the phrase meant. “According to this concept all human existence . . . has strived toward community, toward community together,” he said. “Wherever it is interrupted or delayed by forces that would resist it—by evil or hatred, by greed, by the lust for power, by the need for revenge—believers in the Beloved Community insist that it is the moral responsibility of men and women with soul force, people of goodwill, to respond and to struggle nonviolently against the forces that stand between a society and the harmony it naturally seeks.”16 But definitional precision couldn’t capture the emotion of the moment. By the conference’s end Baker had guided her invitees through the intricacies of forming their own organization. They called it the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an oddly functional choice for a vanguard of activists dedicated to creating the new world they believed to be within their reach.
The Lost-Found Nation
THE PASSION THAT ran through SNCC’s founding session had its parallel in the one strand of African American political thought that the movement couldn’t weave together. After Marcus Garvey’s conviction and subsequent deportation back to Jamaica, Black nationalism slipped back to the local level, where it had always had its strongest appeal: to places like Detroit’s African American ghetto, a neighborhood everyone called Black Bottom, where W. D. Fard came to live in 1930.
About Fard there was a great deal of controversy. It seemed that for much of his life his name had been Wallace Ford, that he was a light-skinned Black man—so light he could have passed for white had he been so inclined—that he’d once made his living running a restaurant in Los Angeles, and that he’d spent time in San Quentin Prison before moving to Chicago, where he became a central figure in a tiny African American religious community called the Moorish Science Temple, whose leaders preached that African Americans were descendants of the Moors and therefore Muslims. The connection was more stylistic than substantive. Members dressed in what they took to be North African clothes. They called their holy book the Qur’an, though the group’s central figure had written it himself. And its key message was rooted in the Black separatist tradition more than in Islam. That’s where Ford started his career, as a minister in the faith. But there was some sort of schism in the group in 1929, a split so violent that the temple’s founding figure was convicted of murder. In the midst of the conflict Ford—or Fard—left Chicago for Detroit.
That’s one version of events. The other version says that W. D. Fard appeared miraculously in Black Bottom in 1930. Upon his arrival he began preaching a messianic creed, a vision of history and salvation that combined evolution, genetics, early twentieth-century scientific racism—which he turned on its head—and the Christian story of the Fall. Allah made the first peoples Black, Fard said, and set them to living in the holy city of Mecca. But sixty-six hundred years ago one of their great minds, twisted by hatred, decided to create a devil race that would destroy the peaceful world Blacks had built. Through centuries of genetic manipulation he fashioned new peoples, each one lighter-skinned and therefore morally weaker than the previous: black to brown to red to yellow and finally to white. For two thousand years the white race lived in savagery, until Moses gave them the tools they needed to impose their evil on the world’s other races. Prophecy said that they would do so for six thousand years, “down to our time,” said Fard’s most famous disciple, when “the black original race would give birth to one whose wisdom, knowledge and power would be infinite.”17 So Fard appeared in Black Bottom, come to free the Black race through his new community of faith, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam.
It wasn’t enough to believe, though. To achieve the liberation he promised, Fard preached that Black men and women had to embrace the rigid discipline of traditional Islam. Believers weren’t to drink, smoke, gamble, or fornicate. They were to dress conservatively, men in suits and ties, women in white robes. They were to work incredibly hard in Black-owned businesses, ideally owned by the Nation itself, saving what they could for the support of their families, giving as much as possible to their community. They were to attend the mosque—Fard set up the first in Detroit in 1931 or 1932—several times a week for prayer and instruction. And they were to keep their distance from the white devils, not dealing with them at all if possible and never, ever allowing themselves to be intimidated or abused, a Black separatist faith in word and deed.
That’s what drew in Elijah Muhammad. He was Elijah Poole then, the son of a Baptist minister who made his living as a sharecropper. He’d grown up in Sandersville, Georgia, and came to Detroit in 1923 as part of the first great migration. The move didn’t work out as he’d hoped: he apparently struggled to find work and maintain a stable personal life. But he did find something of value in Detroit. He’d become a devout Garveyite, a commitment he maintained even after the UNIA’s collapse. He came to Fard’s mosque for the first time in 1931 and was immediately entranced. At the end of the service, he said, he went up to Fard to ask him whether he was the redeemer. Fard told him he was, Poole reported, but his time had not yet come: a moment of revelation far more rooted in the New Testament than in Islam. Then again, that was the language of God Poole understood.
That quickly changed. Poole—renamed Elijah Muhammad, in keeping with the Nation’s practice of rejecting slave names and adopting others more empowering—became one of Fard’s most devoted disciples. Within a year he’d been named the Nation’s supreme minister. Two years after that, in 1934, Fard disappeared as mysteriously as he’d come, taken up to Heaven, according to his followers, though there were other theories as well. Again there was something of a power struggle, out of which Muhammad emerged triumphant. But by then the Nation had come to the attention of the Detroit police, who wanted it out of the city. So in 1935 Muhammad moved his operation to South Side Chicago, which became the Nation of Islam’s holy center.
For the rest of the 1930s the Nation of Islam remained a tiny organization, with only four mosques—in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Washington, DC—and a total membership of maybe a thousand people. That’s what the Nation might have remained had it not been for the war. When the Roosevelt administration started the draft, not only did Muhammad refuse to register but he told his followers not to register as well. It was an entirely logical thing to do: why would Black men risk their lives in a white devils’ war? But that refusal made him a criminal, charged not simply with draft evasion but also with sedition. He was convicted in September 1942 and sent off to the federal prison in Milan, Michigan, fifty miles west of Detroit.
The Nation foundered without him: by one count its membership fell to about 500 people while he was serving out his sentence. Inside the penitentiary, though, the Nation flourished. Of course Muhammad spread the Nation’s message to his fellow African American prisoners. As he did so, he found that the Nation’s blend of self-pride, self-discipline, and a well-channeled rage had enormous appeal to the men he found there: almost by definition the most marginal men in America, lower even than the working people Garvey had organized or the poor Fard had recruited. And he found that, in Milan at least, some of them were willing to listen. When he was finally released in 1946, he set out to build his church upon that rock.
So he did. By 1960, as the sit-in movement was sweeping across the South, the Nation had an estimated 60,000 members, almost all of them young, many of them drawn from the urban poor, a share from the Nation’s prison ministry. There were now dozens of mosques. And Muhammad had established himself as a man of wealth, power, and imposing religious authority. But it wasn’t the number of followers that made Muhammad a public figure. It was the brilliance of his most important disciple, Malcolm X.
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His mother was from Granada, his father a southern-born American, a Baptist minister and devoted member of Garvey’s UNIA. Malcolm grew up in Lansing, Michigan, immersed in talk of racial pride channeled through the UNIA’s local branch, where his parents were guiding figures. It was that activism that led to his father’s murder in 1931, the family believed, killed by white supremacists for his separatist ideas, though the details of his death remained murky.
His loss threw the family into a vicious downward spiral. His mother ended up in a mental institution, his sisters and brothers scattered to various aunts and uncles. Malcolm himself drifted into drugs and crime, first in Boston, where he had family, then in Harlem as well. He was convicted of robbery in 1946, at the age of twenty-one, and sentenced to seven years in Boston’s scabrous Charlestown State Prison, though he served most of his time in a prison colony outside of the city. That is to say he was the perfect candidate for the Nation’s missionary work.
Malcolm learned of the faith through letters from his sister, who had become connected to the mosque in Detroit, where she lived. At her urging, Malcolm read some of Muhammad’s teachings. He was so taken he began writing to Muhammad directly. Soon they were regular correspondents. And Malcolm, swept up in the Nation’s ideas, began reading everything he could get his hands on. To everyone’s surprise, he also took to the self-discipline that the Nation preached. The drugs, the women, the attraction of easy money that had defined his life as a young man: all of it Malcolm rejected once he’d discovered the truth.
As soon as he was released in the summer of 1952, Malcolm raced off to Chicago to meet Muhammad. Impressed by the young man’s dedication and obvious ability, Muhammad appointed him assistant minister of the Nation’s Detroit mosque. From there Malcolm began his meteoric rise through the hierarchy. Over the next few years he directed mosques in Boston and Philadelphia, both with great success driven in large part by his electric personality. Better than anyone else in the Nation, Malcolm—now officially Malcolm X—could command the stage, drawing in listeners with his marvelous mix of passion, humor, and bravado, winning converts wherever he went. In Detroit he’d tripled the mosque’s membership, and in Boston and Philadelphia he’d turned deeply divided congregations into functioning, disciplined organizations. He was so successful that in 1954, just two years out of prison, Muhammad gave him one of the most important posts of them all, as minister for Mosque No. 7, in the one place in America where the media was sure to notice him. Muhammad sent him to Harlem.
It was a perfect match. First Malcolm established himself in Harlem’s long-standing tradition of street-corner preachers, proclaiming the Nation’s gospel for whoever cared to listen. Then, on April 26, 1957, he put on a display that made him a Harlem legend. The precipitating event was the sort of thing that happened in America’s center cities all the time. A member of Malcolm’s mosque, Johnson X, was walking down the street when he saw a couple of white policemen shoving around a Black suspect. He tried to intervene and for his trouble had his head split open by a nightstick. He should have been rushed to a hospital. But instead the cops handcuffed him and took him off to Harlem’s precinct house. In short order several hundred angry people were gathered in front of the station to demand Johnson’s release. Fearing that violence was about to break out, an African American newspaperman called Malcolm to help settle the situation. Half an hour later he arrived at the head of his mosque’s paramilitary unit, the Fruit of Islam.
They lined up in precise military formation, fifty men strong standing stock-still across the precinct door, their arms crossed in front of them, while Malcolm went inside to insist that Johnson X be taken to the hospital. There was a good deal of discussion, but in the end the police agreed to Malcolm’s demands. With their commitment secured, Malcolm walked out and whispered a few words to one of the young men standing guard. Immediately the entire unit pivoted and marched away. Suddenly, Malcolm said later, everyone was talking about the Muslims.
Then Malcolm crossed the color line. In July 1959, two years after Little Rock, CBS’s New York affiliate ran a documentary—an exposé, really—on the Nation of Islam. It featured an interview with Elijah Muhammad. But its star was the young, handsome, insistently articulate Malcolm X, a striking figure on the screen, made all the more striking because, from CBS’s perspective, he was saying such outrageous things. Is the white man evil? the interviewer asked him. “By nature he is evil,” Malcolm replied. Do you teach your children that the white man is evil? the interviewer asked. “You can go to any little Muslim child and ask him where is hell and who is the devil,” said Malcolm, “and he wouldn’t tell you that hell was down in the ground and that the devil is something invisible and you can’t see. He’ll tell you that hell is right where he has been catching it and he’ll tell you the one who is responsible for having received this hell is the devil.” And the devil is the white man? asked the interviewer. “Yes,” said Malcolm, without the slightest hesitation.18
The show’s host framed the point he wanted his viewers to see. “While city officials, state agencies, white liberals, and sober-minded Negroes stand idly by,” Mike Wallace said, “a group of Negro dissenters is taking to street-corner stepladders, church pulpits, sports arenas, and ballroom platforms across the United States to preach a gospel of hate that would set off federal investigation if it were preached by southern whites.” There was the exposé CBS was looking for, the flip side of the sacrificial suffering that infused the southern struggle, the Black side of racial supremacy, “the hate,” as the documentary put it, “that hate produced.”19
Within the Nation Malcolm’s star turn triggered talk of excess ambition, a dangerous thing in the byzantine politics that ran through its mosques. But Muhammad seemed well pleased. So Malcolm made the most of his moment. In came a steady stream of requests from the press to comment on the movement surging across the South, along with a slew of invitations to speak to audiences he never would have reached had it not been for his sudden celebrity. He gave the reporters the stinging analyses they wanted, delivered in finely fashioned sound bites. Anyone can sit down, he said of Greensboro. An old woman can sit down. A coward can sit down. It takes a real man to stand up. And he gave the whites in his audiences the chance to see a strand of Black politics many of them didn’t know existed—though it scared them to learn of it—and African Americans to hear the power of that tradition renewed.
Later the writer James Baldwin remembered the first time he met Malcolm. He’d been asked to moderate a radio debate between Malcolm and a young man from the sit-in movement. “I was afraid that Malcolm would eat the boy alive,” he wrote. But “Malcolm understood that child and talked to him as though he were talking to a younger brother, and with that same watchful attention. What struck me was that he wasn’t at all trying to proselytize that child: he was trying to make him think. He was trying to do for that child what he supposed, for too long a time, that the Honorable Elijah had done for him. . . . ‘If you are an American citizen,’ Malcolm asked the boy, ‘why have you got to fight for your rights as a citizen? To be a citizen means you have the rights of a citizen. If you haven’t got the rights of a citizen then you’re not a citizen.’ ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ the boy said. ‘Why not?’ asked Malcolm.”20
New Frontiers
THE SAME QUESTION bled into the 1960 election, albeit in different form. For the Democrats the dilemma was the same as it had been since 1948: whoever the party nominated was going to have to please a liberal wing increasingly supportive of the civil rights movement and a southern wing violently opposed to it. The Republican situation wasn’t much easier. The party didn’t have a substantial southern faction to appease, but it did have an opportunity to exploit. Eisenhower had twice carried the Upper South—Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee—as well as Florida and Texas. If the Republicans could extend their reach in 1960, they could shatter the Democrats’ increasingly fragile coalition.
Richard Nixon was going to have a hard time doing that. He’d been the point man for the Eisenhower administration’s civil rights agenda, as thin as it was. And he carried with him the burden of Ike’s intervention in Little Rock, a show of federal force that still enraged the white South two years after the troops had been withdrawn. His biggest challenge, though, came not from his own record but from Jack Kennedy, who had no intention of letting the Republicans drive any deeper into the South than they already had.
During the campaign JFK played on the themes of tolerance and decency, intended to undercut the idea that a Catholic couldn’t be a loyal American. He was even willing on occasion to act on behalf of civil rights, most dramatically by having his brother Bobby secure Martin Luther King’s release from a Georgia jail in October 1960. But his campaign’s most meaningful move made clear where his strategy lay. In his first decision as the Democratic Party nominee, Kennedy selected as his running mate Texas’ Lyndon Johnson, the Senate’s immensely powerful majority leader. Campaign insiders would later claim that the choice was a mistake. It wasn’t. JFK wanted white southerners to know that they had nothing to fear from his administration. And he wanted to take Texas back from the Republicans, as LBJ was sure to do.
It didn’t quite work. Kennedy won Texas, but he still lost four of the five southern states Eisenhower had carried in the previous two elections. And a hunk of the Deep South fell away when half of Alabama’s electoral votes went to a segregationist who had no party behind him and Mississippi managed the unusual feat of not voting for anyone at all. So JFK came into the Oval Office in January 1961 with the white South slowly slipping out of the Democrats’ control. And the last thing he wanted to do was lose any more of it by letting his administration get tangled up in a movement that had proved its ability to draw a president in.
He got a three-month reprieve. Then, on May 4, thirteen Black and white activists working through CORE—Bayard Rustin’s old organization—boarded two Greyhound buses in Washington, DC, to begin a meandering trip through the South to New Orleans. Their goal was to re-create the 1947 CORE protest that had gotten Rustin his month of hard labor. That trip had been designed to test a Supreme Court decision that outlawed the segregation of buses and trains that crossed state lines. In 1960 the Court had done the same for the stations and restrooms that served those buses and trains. CORE’s volunteers were now going to test that ruling with a classic act of Gandhian disobedience. When the bus rolled into a southern station, the whites would walk into the Black waiting room, the Blacks into the white room. In 1947 CORE had called its challenge the Journey of Reconciliation. This time they called it a Freedom Ride.
Nothing much happened in the Upper South. When the group reached Anniston, Alabama, on May 14, though, a white mob attacked one of their two buses, breaking its windows, setting it on fire, and then mercilessly beating the civil rights workers as they tried to escape the flames. The second bus pulled ahead to the next stop in Birmingham. There another mob descended, more vicious than the first. “Toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors,” the CBS news reporter on the scene told his listeners, “pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists. One passenger was knocked down at my feet by twelve of the hoodlums, and his face was beaten and kicked until it was a bloody pulp.”21 By the next morning photos of Jim Peck’s shattered face had spread across the nation.
CORE promptly called off the rides. As soon as they heard of that decision, SNCC’s most devoted chapter, James Lawson’s Nashville group, decided to step in. “You realize it may be suicide,” CORE’s director told them when they called to tell him that they’d be completing the ride. “We fully realize that,” Lawson’s disciple Diane Nash replied, “but we can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead.”22 Early the next morning eleven new Freedom Riders headed to Birmingham to pick up the protest CORE had abandoned.
Suddenly JFK was trapped in precisely the same predicament that Eisenhower had faced in Little Rock. He couldn’t allow mob violence to block the implementation of a Supreme Court ruling any more than Ike could. But he also didn’t want another show of federal force. A round of presidential pressure and some less-than-subtle threats from the attorney general produced a promise from the governor that the state of Alabama would protect the new volunteers as they made the next leg of their journey, from Birmingham to Montgomery.
But when the buses pulled into the Montgomery station there wasn’t a policeman in sight. Again the riders were assaulted in an attack of astonishing ferocity: one of them was beaten so badly—his attackers repeatedly hit him in the head with a baseball bat and tried to drive a metal spike into his ear—that he suffered permanent brain damage. This time the mob also assaulted a Justice Department official Bobby had sent along to make sure that peace was maintained. The attorney general was at an FBI baseball game when he got the news. Within a couple of hours he had 400 federal marshals heading to Montgomery to restore the order he’d thought the governor had guaranteed.
But the mobs, having tasted blood, simply shifted their target. Martin Luther King hadn’t been a particularly strong supporter of the Freedom Riders. As the crisis escalated, he agreed to come to Montgomery to headline a mass meeting in their support. On Sunday evening, May 21, 1,500 African Americans filled First Baptist—Ralph Abernathy’s church—to hear him and to honor the riders scattered among them. Outside, twice as many whites surrounded the church, their mood growing darker as the evening progressed. Shortly after 8:00 p.m. a group of them set a car on fire. Others started stoning the church. Molotov cocktails followed, the opening volley of a full-on assault that was broken only by the marshals’ arrival and the repeated rounds of tear gas they fired into the mob. Not until four the following morning did the faithful manage to get out of the church, into a street strewn with the rubble of the mob.
A few hours later the Freedom Riders reboarded the buses, this time with the full protection of the federal government.
They got only as far as Jackson, Mississippi, where state authorities arrested them for trying to integrate the station’s waiting rooms. But by then new waves of Freedom Riders were already pouring into the South. That was the last thing the Kennedys wanted to see. Bobby phoned King that afternoon to argue for a break in the campaign, a time for emotions to cool. King wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s a matter of conscience and morality,” he said. “They must use their lives and their bodies to right a wrong. Our conscience tells us that the law is wrong and we must resist.”
“But the problem won’t be settled in Jackson, Mississippi,” Kennedy countered, “but by strong federal action.”23 That wasn’t the point. With the Freedom Rides, CORE and SNCC had created an international incident, forced the president to intervene on the movement’s side, and shattered yet another segment of the South’s racial regime. SNCC’s Freedom Riders might have been stopped—they’d spend most of the summer locked away in Mississippi’s infamous prison farms—but the movement had never had such momentum.
After the Freedom Rides SNCC shifted its focus, establishing several long-term projects in the most violent sections of the South, among them blood-soaked rural Mississippi. In the summer of 1961, SNCC’s young field secretary Robert Moses, who’d come to the movement through Bayard Rustin, established a voter registration campaign in the heart of the Delta. But the campaign quickly morphed into something more than a voting drive: in his quiet, unassuming way, Moses set out to empower the South’s most oppressed people. Whites saw the challenge for what it was. The local folks who rallied around Moses were assaulted, arrested, and imprisoned; their homes and churches attacked, their livelihoods threatened. And at least two of them were murdered, one gunned down by his state representative on the main street of Liberty, Mississippi, the other shot in the head for daring to say that the politician ought to be tried for the crime he’d committed. Instead of backing down, SNCC sent Moses a handful of reinforcements. By 1962 there were roughly twenty-five volunteers there, trying to build the Beloved Community bit by perilous bit.
In September 1962, the confrontation shifted to the all-white University of Mississippi. Eighteen months before, James Meredith, a twenty-seven-year-old air force veteran, decided to transfer from the Black college he had been attending to the state university. When Ole Miss rejected him, he went to court to force his admission, arguing that he had been turned down solely on the color of his skin. On September 10, 1962, Supreme Court justice Hugo Black—himself an Alabamian—ruled that Meredith had a right to be admitted. Three days later Mississippi’s staunchly segregationist governor, Ross Barnett, went on television to announce that he would resist Black’s order, which he claimed was the first step toward racial genocide. And the Kennedys were caught in another constitutional crisis, this one caused by one young veteran’s desire to have his rights observed.
For two weeks Bobby tried to work out a deal with the university. Eventually they agreed that Meredith could register—not on the Oxford campus but at a meeting of the board of trustees in Jackson on September 25. When Meredith arrived, though, accompanied by two Justice Department officials, Barnett personally blocked his way. “I won’t agree to let that boy get to Ole Miss,” the governor told Bobby in a heated phone call that evening. “I will never agree to that. I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than agree to that.”24 That was a thought. On Friday, September 28, a federal court found Governor Barnett in contempt. Under the pressure of prison time, Barnett relented. He’d let Meredith register for classes the following Monday morning.
Meredith arrived on the Ole Miss campus Sunday evening, protected by five hundred federal marshals. They got him safely into a dorm, but they couldn’t control the throng of whites that was gathering on the campus grounds. As darkness fell the violence began. First the mob attacked the newsmen who’d come to cover the next day’s events. Then they turned on the marshals. At the White House the Kennedys received regular battle reports: the marshals were being hit by bricks and bottles; shots had been fired; a marshal had been hit in the neck; more were down. By midnight the news had become so dire that JFK had to order federal troops onto campus. It took another three hours for the 5,000 soldiers to arrive. By then 160 marshals had been wounded, twenty-eight of them by gunfire. Two people, a reporter and a jukebox repairman, had been killed. The next morning Meredith attended his first class—in American history.
For Kennedy, Ole Miss had been a disaster even greater than the Freedom Rides. As terrible as the violence had been in Birmingham and Montgomery, at least no one had been killed. And in its worst moments the administration had resorted only to the use of federal marshals; now JFK had been forced to use federal troops, with the symbolic weight they carried. But the president’s problems extended beyond the immediate fallout. Two years into his term a movement of the marginal—of Baptist ministers, radical pacifists, legal tacticians, militant seamstresses, high school girls in homemade skirts, and young men and women willing to die for the cause—had pushed the question of racial justice into the center of American public life, where the Kennedys did not want it to be.
The pressure mounted through the rest of 1962 and early 1963. The major civil rights organizations called on Kennedy to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by condemning Jim Crow, a suggestion the president studiously ignored, while the movement’s old socialist bloc revived its demand for the sweeping economic reforms that could break the fusion of racial injustice and Black poverty. On Capitol Hill, liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans demanded that JFK introduce vigorous civil rights legislation; when he didn’t, the Republicans presented their own bill instead. Outside of Washington many liberals were growing even more frustrated with Kennedy’s hesitation. “There is a need for a force to be ahead of the administration,” complained Walter Reuther, the formidable president of the United Automobile Workers, one of the nation’s most progressive unions, “to be pointing out that more has to be done toward creating pressure in the right direction to counteract pressure that is in the wrong direction.” King agreed, quoting Saint Augustine for support. “Those that sit at rest while others take pains are tender turtles,” he said, “and buy their quiet with disgrace.”25
But words weren’t enough. It was time to go to Birmingham.