When did the civil rights movement begin? Upon being asked that question in the 1980s, native Mississippian and white Baptist minister Will B. Campbell, who had bravely escorted terrified black students through hostile crowds into the previously segregated Little Rock (Ark.) Central High School in 1957, showed no hesitation. For black people, he said, it began the first day an African slave was forcefully brought to North American shores. For southern whites, however, he insisted it was the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955. In the minds of white people, Campbell said, “harmonious race relations” persisted only when they “had their foot on black people’s necks and the blacks weren’t struggling to get up.” Although the Supreme Court had issued its Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring “separate but equal” public schools unconstitutional in 1954, “not many people” in the South “took the decision seriously.” But the bus boycott “was a different thing. I would say the Movement as white people experienced it began with Rosa Parks and ended on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel” when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.1 Civil rights historians often refer to the years 1954–68 as the “Second Reconstruction.”
The first Reconstruction period occurred immediately after the Civil War and involved federal legislation designed to eradicate all vestiges of the previous 250 years of the enslavement of black people in America. During the ten years after the Civil War ended in 1865, the United States adopted three constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Fourteenth Amendment granted black Americans full citizenship: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (emphasis added). The Fifteenth Amendment eliminated voting restrictions for black males: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”2
In addition, Congress passed five civil rights statutes during this ten-year period, all designed to protect former slaves from discriminatory treatment, especially in the South. Although the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, many states had enacted “Black Codes” designed to keep former slaves in a position of servitude. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 guaranteed a number of rights to all citizens: the right to make and enforce contracts; to buy, sell, and own real estate; to sue and serve as trial witnesses; and, perhaps most important, the right to the full and equal benefit of all laws. The law could be enforced against both state and private individual actions, and any person who “under color of law” denied any of these rights would be guilty of a federal crime.
After passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Congress enacted a new Civil Rights Act in 1870, reinforcing the guarantees in the earlier act, and the following year passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, making it a crime to “conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway or upon the premises of another for the purpose . . . of depriving any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” In 1875 Congress passed the Public Accommodations Act, which required all hotels, theaters, “and other places of public amusement” to admit all persons “of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” Together, these legislative acts altered “substantially the balance between state and federal power,” legal historian Eugene Gressman asserts, and “effectively nationalized the civil rights of all inhabitants of the United States, white or colored.” Unfortunately, however, these early efforts to build a firm structure of civil rights for black Americans did not produce long-lasting results. Even before 1875, “corrosive elements were fast at work, elements which were eventually to leave the structure in ruins,” notes Gressman.3
Beginning in 1873 and continuing for the next ten years, the United States Supreme Court interpreted both constitutional and statutory law in such a narrow fashion that private individual actions were immunized from enforcement. Individuals and private actors were free to discriminate at will.4 Then, in 1883, the Court declared unconstitutional the 1875 Public Accommodations Act, in essence holding that individual proprietors could discriminate so long as their actions were private and not state sanctioned.5 “The inevitable effect of these decisions,” says Gressman, “was to transfer back to the states the prime responsibility for the protection of basic civil rights.”6
Nevertheless, state regulations—conduct undertaken by the state or by its subdivisions (cities, counties, agencies)—were actionable under the law. The Fourteenth Amendment in particular provided that a state could not “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Southern states controlled by whites interpreted this provision as permitting segregated facilities. Segregation to them did not equal discrimination. Beginning in the 1880s, they passed a series of laws that permitted, even required, separation of the races. These were often termed “Jim Crow” laws after an early-nineteenth-century minstrel song, “Jump Jim Crow,” popularized by a white comedian in blackface. In the postbellum South, “Jim Crow” became a racial epithet. Jim Crow laws helped support a series of oppressive social practices that had no basis in law and, like the laws, were intended to humiliate and control black Americans.
Some black Americans resisted, however. On June 7, 1892, for example, thirty-year-old Louisiana resident Homer Adolph Plessy took a seat in the all-white passenger car on a Louisiana railway. Although he appeared to be white, he was in fact one-eighth black. When confronted by a railroad employee, he refused to move to the car set aside “for persons not of the white race.” He was then forcibly removed, arrested, and placed in a New Orleans jail for violating a state law that mandated “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” He challenged the law as a violation of his constitutional rights and in 1896 ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court, where he lost. “Laws permitting, and even requiring, [racial] separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other,” the Court reasoned: “We think the enforced separation of the races . . . neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws, within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” “We are unable to see how this statute deprives him of, or in any way affects his right to, such property,” the Court declared. “If he be a white man and assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of his so-called property. Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man and be so assigned, he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.” It concluded: “If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and a voluntary consent of individuals.”7
The Court’s approval of segregated facilities empowered the southern states. By 1900, notes legal historian Joseph William Singer, “every state in the former Confederacy . . . had adopted new statutes instituting the Jim Crow policy of forced racial segregation in public accommodations.”8 For the next half-century, the federal government seemed unwilling to offer even the barest protection to black people living in the South. In her award-winning historical study The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010), Isabel Wilkerson identifies the “facts” of life for southern blacks before midcentury:
There were days when whites could go to the amusement park and a day when blacks could go, if they were permitted at all. There were white elevators and colored elevators (meaning freight elevators in back); white train platforms and colored train platforms. There were white ambulances to ferry the sick, and white hearses and colored hearses for those who didn’t survive whatever was wrong with them. . . . There were white waiting rooms and colored waiting rooms in any conceivable place where a person might have to wait for something, from the bus depot to the doctor’s office. A total of four restrooms had to be constructed and maintained at significant expense in any public establishment that bothered to provide any for colored people: one for white men, one for white women, one for colored men, and one for colored women. In 1958 a new bus station went up in Jacksonville, Florida, with two of everything, including two segregated cocktail lounges, “lest the races brush elbows over a martini,” The Wall Street Journal reported.9
But change did come. Ira Berlin argues that a “new politics” emerged from the Great Depression and World War II experiences of blacks, and they were “quick to seize the celebratory rhetoric of American democracy and turn it against the American apartheid system.”10 Black resistance to Jim Crow laws and practices took a variety of forms over the years, gaining momentum during World War II, when A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened a march on Washington that President Franklin Roosevelt worried would damage the nation’s war effort. In response, Roosevelt issued an executive order banning racial discrimination in war industrial plants.
In 1945, black Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Richard Wright pored over a series of letters that the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Research Center was collecting from blacks serving in the armed services. Reading them “was horrible,” he later recalled, “a sea of despair to swim in.” One man wrote, “I feel deeply and sincerely that the most important roles Negroes are playing in this war are that of hostages to prevent Hitler, Goebbels and company from using our omission from the war effort as propaganda.” Another complained about being exploited: “I’m not afraid to fight when I find something worth fighting for,” but after the war he wondered, “How willing is America to give full measure of democracy to the millions of poor people, white and black, in this country?” A third young man had been raised in the North but posted in the South. “I don’t like it,” he wrote his mother. He met Jim Crow humiliations at the local theater, the local cafeteria, and the main post exchange. “I think I’d just as soon be overseas, or dead, than to stay down here.”11 When black World War II veterans returned home, many were ready to challenge Jim Crow.
By the middle of the twentieth century, other outside pressures were cumulating against segregationist practices. On April 9, 1947, young civil rights activist Bayard Rustin led a group of sixteen black and white members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a Chicago-based interracial group of pacifist students founded in 1942 and dedicated to nonviolence, on a two-week “Journey of Reconciliation” through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. They hoped to test a 1946 Supreme Court decision prohibiting segregation in interstate travel. Less than a week later, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. That same year, a Committee on Civil Rights that President Harry S. Truman appointed recommended states pass laws that guaranteed all citizens equal and free access to public accommodations such as transportation, movie theaters, public parks, and hotels and motels. Some states north of the Mason-Dixon line followed the committee’s recommendation in the early 1950s; southern states did not.
In June 1948 Truman also issued an executive order banishing “separate but equal” practices in all military training and facilities—which had never, in fact, been separate but equal. But reaction from the white establishment was quick. At the Democratic convention in August, southern Democrats angry at the civil rights positions taken by their party platform walked out to form the segregationist Dixiecrat Party and, with Strom Thurmond as its presidential candidate, carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Although Truman won the presidency, civil rights had nonetheless evolved into an issue tearing the Democratic Party apart.
More than Roosevelt’s and Truman’s actions, however, the strongest outside catalyst for challenging the Jim Crow South and initiating the Second Reconstruction was Brown v. Board of Education. After returning home from serving his country in World War II, McKinley Burnett, a Topeka, Kansas, black father, began challenging Topeka’s segregated school system. He showed up at school board meetings armed with signed petitions but met little success. Eventually he contacted local attorneys considering legal action against the board, and together they searched for others in the neighborhood to join in a class action suit. Oliver Brown agreed. In 1950 Brown lived with his wife and children in an integrated Topeka neighborhood. He was a welder for the Santa Fe Railroad and served as an assistant pastor at a local church. Each morning, his children and other black neighborhood kids headed off to school in one direction, the white kids in another.
One day, however, Oliver took his daughter Linda to enroll her at the white school. “I remember going inside and my dad spoke with someone and then he went into the inner office with the principal, and they left me to sit outside with the secretary,” his daughter later recalled. “And while he was in the inner office, I could hear voices and hear his voice raised as the conversation went on. And then he immediately came out of the office, took me by the hand, and we walked home from the school, and I just couldn’t understand what was happening . . . because I was so sure that I was going to get to go to school with Mona, Guinevere, Wanda, and all of my [white] playmates.”12 Days later, Oliver Brown and twelve other parents filed a lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education, challenging school segregation in the state.
In the 1954 Brown decision, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson in no uncertain terms: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”13 “I was home doing the family ironing that day . . . , all the kids were in school, my husband had gone to work,” Brown’s wife, Leola, later recalled. “And when it came over and they said . . . segregation had been defeated, was outlawed, oh, boy, I think I was doing the dance there at home by myself. (Laughs.) I was so elated. I could hardly wait until my kids and my husband got home to relate to them.”14 In a decision often referred to as Brown II a year later, the Court decreed that school systems desegregate with “all deliberate speed.”
Brown I and II increased racial tension throughout the South. Virginia’s Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. quickly issued a “Southern Manifesto” opposing integrated schools; by 1956 it had been signed by over a hundred southern congressmen. Byrd also promoted passage of a group of laws prohibiting desegregation that became known as the “Massive Resistance” movement, and central to its agenda were eliminating state funding for any school that integrated and then closing it. Elsewhere, White Citizens’ Councils formed throughout the South, while membership in the Ku Klux Klan greatly expanded.
And while Byrd was leading the movement to resist Brown in the South, on August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who was visiting his mother’s family in Mississippi, was beaten and lynched for ostensibly whistling at a white woman. Once his body was recovered, his mother chose to have an open-casket funeral in Chicago so that people could see what white racists had done to him. National media noticed. The next month, an all-white jury acquitted two white men responsible for Till’s murder, both of whom later bragged about their act in a Look magazine interview.15
Then, on December 1, NAACP civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and was arrested. Days later, Montgomery’s black community began a thirteen-month boycott of city buses that again drew national media attention. The boycott did not end until a year later, when the city agreed to honor a November 1956 Supreme Court ruling that segregation on buses was illegal. In the interim, racists had bombed the home of boycott leader Martin Luther King Jr., whose Gandhian strategy of nonviolent resistance to Jim Crow had guided the boycott.
On September 9, 1957, under the leadership of Texas senator Lyndon Johnson (who had not signed the Southern Manifesto), Congress passed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. President Dwight Eisenhower—no friend of integration—signed it reluctantly. Although the law created a national Commission on Civil Rights, addressed voting rights, and gave the Justice Department greater powers to pursue civil rights violations, it did little to weaken Jim Crow customs and laws. And less than two weeks after the law passed, the nation’s attention shifted to Little Rock, Arkansas, where efforts to desegregate the all-white Central High School had led to violence following the governor’s order to block nine black students from entering the building. Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops to uphold the law and protect black students while they attended classes.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers who had brought the Brown suit to the Supreme Court had assumed efforts to enforce the law would be aimed primarily at desegregating public schools, where attendance was compulsory and students closely interacted on a regular basis. Founded in 1909 to pursue justice for African Americans largely through the courts, the NAACP represented the oldest black organization involved with African American civil rights. But would this ruling also apply to other public spaces where attendance was voluntary, such as city buses? At the NAACP convention in Dallas shortly after the Brown decision, Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (often referred to in NAACP circles simply as “Ink”) lawyers met to plot strategy. As black New York attorney Constance Baker Motley later recalled, most thought they should directly attack school segregation, first from Mason-Dixon line states, then “work down.” Oliver Hill from Richmond, Virginia, disagreed, however. Almost as if he anticipated Montgomery, he said: “I think what we ought to do is bring suits to desegregate the buses. Because that’s something which black people meet every day, and it just riles them to think that they have to pay money and get on the bus and then stand while some white person sits.” Motley later recalled their negative reaction to Hill’s suggestion. “We felt that we had a purpose, a mission, and that was to desegregate the schools. . . . We thought we had to devote what resources we did have, and the staff, to trying to implement Brown.” But that’s not what happened, Motley noted. Because “we couldn’t control” it, “the revolution got out of hand, so to speak, as far as we were concerned, and went off in many different directions. Southern blacks like Oliver Hill had perceived what it was that really got black people upset.”16
That Hill was right was obvious. During the Second Reconstruction, Brown functioned as an open invitation to southern blacks to serve as plaintiffs in a series of lawsuits to desegregate public facilities across the South, not only in public transportation but also in restaurants, hotels, public parks, public beaches—and public libraries. Just like other public facilities, during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s public libraries frequently became sites for trial-and-error desegregation efforts to see what worked and what didn’t. Protests against Jim Crow humiliations subsequent to the 1954 Brown decision found many other venues, just as Oliver Hill had predicted.
On February 1, 1960, for example, four students from the historically black North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro took seats at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter and were denied service. They refused to leave and remained until closing. The next day they returned with fifteen more students. By the third day, three hundred had joined them, and soon one thousand. Their efforts received wide publicity and subsequently sparked lunch-counter sit-ins in more than a hundred other southern cities. “What demonstrators were saying, and meaning with all impatience and assumed immortality of youth, was ‘Freedom now!’ with the emphasis on the second word,” notes civil rights journalist Fred Powledge. “And suddenly no other option seemed even worth considering.”17
These protests also prompted the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the historically black Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960. SNCC’s style of protest was much more confrontational than that of the NAACP and found substantial support especially among southern black college and high school students. Its members were eager to challenge Jim Crow laws by directly confronting white officials, who predictably often reacted violently to their demonstrations.
Tension increased throughout the South as civil rights activists kept up the pressure to kill Jim Crow. On December 5, 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Boynton v. Virginia that segregating people by race on vehicles traveling between states violated the Interstate Commerce Act. The following summer, CORE organized a series of “Freedom Rides” consisting of black and white activists willing to test Boynton on interstate buses traveling through the South. Fourteen left the nation’s capital on May 4. Days later, they divided into two groups, each of which met violent resistance in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama. In Anniston, white supremacists tossed a firebomb into the bus and beat passengers as they fled the flames. Before intervening in Birmingham, police let Ku Klux Klan members beat Freedom Riders for fifteen minutes after the activists left the buses. Photos of the firebombed bus in Anniston and beaten students there and in Birmingham appeared the next day on the front pages of newspapers across the nation. But the Freedom Riders persisted.
For the remainder of the summer, over one thousand Freedom Riders, black and white, continued to test Boynton. Their actions deeply shook white establishments and segregationists across the South, as the prospect of hundreds of protesters from across the nation invading their Jim Crow states and testing local customs by citing federal laws threatened to flood local jails and overload the local judicial systems. In subsequent months, notes civil rights historian Raymond Arsenault, “the nation’s first mobile nonviolent army expanded the realm of the possible in American political and social insurgency, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage for the escalating demands and rising expectations of the mid- and late 1960s.” Their efforts, according to sociologist James Laue, “broke the charade of silence and with it the monolithic hold of the racist ethos of many Deep South communities.” Freedom Rider Diane McWhorter summarized the rides differently, describing them as “one of history’s rare alchemical phenomena, altering the structural makeup of everything they touched.” At the same time, however, Freedom Rider activities often frightened local black leaders, who considered their actions dangerous and counterproductive.18
When CORE suspended the rides because of the violence, SNCC objected. The group’s reaction sparked other Freedom Ride efforts and ultimately dragged a reluctant President John F. Kennedy into this mix of forces. Through his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the administration had a responsibility to guarantee safe passage for the Freedom Riders, although the federal government failed to protect civil rights activists once they were arrested and thrown into jails, where they were regularly harassed, treated poorly, and often beaten.
For a period of time in 1962, national attention focused on Albany, Georgia, where Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC, formed in 1957 after the Montgomery bus boycott) attempted to flood the jails with activists protesting the Jim Crow practices of local institutions, including the public library. Yet what became known as the “Albany Movement” also witnessed squabbles between the SCLC and local activists, many of whom were also SNCC leaders. The movement also sputtered because local city officials responded to protests relatively peacefully, unlike many other southern cities, such as Oxford, Mississippi, where black activist James Meredith attempted that fall to enroll at the University of Mississippi. When Oxford quickly erupted in violence, the Kennedy administration had to step in with federal troops to restore peace.
The year 1963 proved a turning point in the civil rights movement. On May 2 in Birmingham, Alabama, more than a thousand young people skipped school and met at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where SCLC leaders helped them organize into groups. From the church they marched to downtown, on the way singing hymns and freedom songs, including “We Shall Overcome.” They promised to return the next day and each day thereafter until Birmingham integrated all public accommodations and civic institutions. On May 3, however, Birmingham commissioner of public safety Eugene “Bull” Connor was ready. With a police force of scores of officers armed with clubs, attack dogs, and high-pressure fire hoses strong enough to knock people over and rip the clothes off their bodies, he and his subordinates attacked. News organizations from across the country captured the melee in photos and videos, which then showed up on the front pages of national newspapers and periodicals, and on evening television news broadcasts. The nation was shocked and the city paralyzed. On May 10, Birmingham officials and business owners eager to bring peace to their city negotiated a “Birmingham Truce Agreement” with local civil rights activists that promised to desegregate public water fountains, department store fitting rooms, and local lunch counters. Martin Luther King Jr. called it a “great victory”; Bull Connor hinted that his office might ignore the agreement. If the agreement raised hopes among civil rights activists, however, they were quickly dashed the next evening when, following a mass Ku Klux Klan rally in nearby Bessemer, bombs went off on King’s front porch (he was out of town) and at a black-owned motel that had housed members of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Across the nation, Americans began calling the city “Bombingham.”
That other Alabama officials agreed with Connor’s position on segregation was obvious. On June 11, Alabama governor George Wallace, who had campaigned for the office on a platform of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” stood in front of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium to block entry by two black students seeking admission. There he was met by United States deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach, federal marshals, and members of the Alabama National Guard, which President Kennedy had federalized, and told to step aside. Although he eventually did, the incident made Wallace into a national figure.
The very next day, NAACP Mississippi field secretary Medgar Evers was murdered in his Jackson, Mississippi, driveway. On June 20, his assassination became a subject of discussion in the Oval Office, where President Kennedy met with civil rights leaders (including Martin Luther King Jr.) in an attempt to call off the March on Washington being planned for late August. Kennedy failed. On August 28, more than a quarter-million people gathered on the National Mall to hear King deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which, notes Fred Powledge, “certified” King as the movement’s “single most important leader.” Americans—both white advocates of the Jim Crow system and also black people who had never publicly protested against segregation—now viewed King as the civil rights leader, someone who could be counted on to explain “what Negroes want.”
Then, three weeks after the March on Washington, four black girls attending Sunday school classes lost their lives in the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Again the nation mourned. At the end of 1963, the Southern Regional Council, an Atlanta-based organization that since 1919 had advocated for racial equality (and for nearly one hundred years has produced influential reports on racial conditions in the South), counted 930 protests in eleven southern states that led to twenty thousand arrests, thirty-five bombings, and ten deaths. The violence on public display in the South that summer horrified Americans across the country and led Kennedy not only to condemn the violence publicly but also to propose significant legislation to address Jim Crow laws and customs.19
Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, had a profound effect on civil rights legislation as it elevated Lyndon Johnson to the presidency. “No memorial or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory,” Johnson told a joint session of Congress four days after the assassination, “than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about civil rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is now time to write the next chapter, and write it in a book of law.”20 On July 2, 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, a wide-ranging law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and authorizes punishments and financial penalties for violations. It also bars unequal application of voter registration requirements and outlaws discrimination in employment. Title II prohibits “discrimination or segregation” in “any place of public accommodation,” which by definition includes hotels, restaurants, gas stations, places of entertainment, and public libraries (although they were not listed in the act).21
“In hammering out their legislation, Congress and the president were not aiming for a one-size-fits-all solution,” notes legal historian Bruce Ackerman. “They followed [Chief Justice Earl] Warren’s path. Step by step, they identified additional spheres of social life that were strategic sites for constitutional intervention; public accommodations, private employment, and fair housing.” Federal officials then “set about achieving real-world equality in ways that were tailored to each sphere’s prevailing practices and means—sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.”22 “From Charleston to Dallas, from Memphis to Tallahassee,” Time magazine reported, “segregation walls that had stood for several generations began to tumble in the first week under the new civil rights law.”23 According to an October 1964 survey of fifty-three cities in nineteen states, desegregation had been accomplished in more than two-thirds of the hotels, motels, chain restaurants, theaters, and sports facilities as well as public bars and public libraries.24
Although both the legislative and judicial branches were clear in their commitment to civil rights by 1964, the period of adjustment between the Brown decision and passage of the Civil Rights Act did not go smoothly. In many areas, southern state and local governments had to be brought kicking and screaming into this new era. Some foresaw the inevitable and quietly changed their policies and practices. Others resisted as long as they were able, giving in only when ordered to do so and then not graciously. Some reacted violently, causing bloodshed and loss of life. A 1964 Freedom Summer campaign organized by CORE that brought hundreds of college students and other volunteers to Mississippi to register voters showed an extent of resistance made most obvious when Freedom Summer civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner were murdered in the small town of Philadelphia on June 21 (Chaney was black, Goodman and Schwerner white). Their bodies were not discovered until forty-four days later.
It was in this mix of forces and organizations that southern blacks forced the desegregation of American public libraries in the South. And like other efforts to integrate civic institutions, it was what historian Stephen Tuck calls “the persistence of local activism” that won the battle to integrate these institutions and genuinely make them “free to all.”25 In many respects the movement to desegregate public libraries was a local contest over public space. Many whites chose not to share space with blacks because they believed them dirty, uneducated, and promiscuous (any public space that allowed black men and white women to mix was particularly worrisome to the white establishment). Blacks naturally resented these attitudes, and their decision to contest this particular public space was as much about power and possession, as much about challenging racial hierarchies, as it was about changing white beliefs. Taken together, these local-level stories frame a narrative that demonstrates similarities and differences as individual communities negotiated—mostly peacefully, sometimes violently—the integration of the local public library as a place.26
But the black people who achieved the desegregation of public libraries were also demographically unique. The integration of southern public libraries was almost exclusively the result of “direct action” (a common term civil rights activists used in the 1960s to describe their protests and sit-ins) by a restless generation of very young southern blacks. By refusing to be pushed around, by brazenly defying segregationist practices, risking their lives, and daring local officials to arrest them, they forced local whites to confront questions of freedom, justice, and the democratic ideals the American public library claimed to embody. While the American Library Association, the profession’s national voice, remained mute, a variety of civil rights organizations—including the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and SNCC (though often disagreeing about strategies and competing for funds, members, and publicity)—stepped forward to lead efforts to desegregate southern public libraries. And though these groups offered support and direction, it was primarily because of the energy, courage, and determination of young blacks that these organizations achieved their goals. Black youths were the essential soldiers on the front lines of civil rights battles in segregated public libraries across the South. The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South seeks to document their activities and, by bringing to the present generation the largely untold story of their courage and resolve, finally give them the historical credit they deserve.
The exhilaration this generation of black Americans felt for the battle against segregation in all public places is manifest in the recollections of Charles Jones. On February 2, 1960, he was on his way back to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he was a twenty-two-year-old student at historically black Johnson C. Smith University. He had just finishing testifying as a friendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington, D.C., about his experiences the previous summer as a delegate to the Seventh World Youth Festival in Vienna, where he had initiated a “rather lively exchange” with leftist European students sympathetic to communism by praising the United States for progress in its fight against segregation, specifically citing the 1954 Brown decision and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. “I was feeling pretty strongly about being black,” he later recalled. On August 6, 1959, the Charlotte Observer had even headlined a story about Jones, “Charlotte Negro Shows World American Way of Life,” and started the process that got him invited to Washington.
The hearings had gone well for Jones; although he refused to condone any form of segregation, he acknowledged to committee members that democracy was better than communism. As he drove on rural highways that night, however, he had the car radio on to help him stay awake. Then, about 2:00 a.m., he heard first reports of the February 1 Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. A rush of feelings came over him. “It was like the feelings I had when I first heard about Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.],” he later recalled, “the feelings that I had when I heard about the 1954 [Brown] school desegregation ruling. All of a sudden there was a handle to getting this stuff,” and speaking for his entire generation of young black Americans, he came to a sudden realization: “I knew—intuitively I knew this was our time.”27
Although civil rights historians have evolved a rich literature that addresses the politics of racial discrimination in education, public accommodations, housing, and labor across the country, they have a shallow understanding of racial discrimination in public libraries. A glance at the indexes of most books broadly covering civil rights just in the South between the 1954 Brown decision and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 shows few references to the painful history of the integration of southern public libraries that this book addresses. That public libraries are noncompulsory institutions that people of any color do not have to use may explain why historians of the Second Reconstruction have largely overlooked them.28 Nonetheless, courts eventually included them as part of public accommodations (Title II) law.29
In the North, this discrimination in public library history was forced by real estate redlining supported by local politicians. These efforts isolated urban public library branches serving black populations in the ghettos to which they were effectively confined. In the South, this discrimination was the result of Jim Crow customs and practices. That this book addresses only the desegregation of public libraries in the South should not be taken as supporting the concept of southern exceptionalism against a national civil rights narrative. We are convinced that a historical analysis of segregation in northern public libraries will yield a number of stories (such as we found for the South) that are now “hidden in plain sight.”30
And with rare exceptions, library history literature lacks attention to the reality of racial discrimination in public libraries across the nation in general and to the reality of white violence and black exclusion that many in the South’s public library community supported well into the 1960s in particular. Although American public libraries annually “celebrate” Black History Month with a series of events, almost never have they paid attention to their own participation in the struggles against racial discrimination that occurred between 1954 and 1965. Patterson Toby Graham’s A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama’s Public Libraries, 1900–1965 is the best work on the civil rights protests in public libraries, but it covers only one state.31 Cheryl Knott’s Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow is the definitive history of public library Jim Crow practices before Brown but gives little attention to the sit-ins and violence we cover in depth.32
Another reason for not including these unpleasant events in the history of public libraries may reside in the public history that civic culture has crafted over the years to commemorate the era. Much of this history focuses on high-profile personalities such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, leaders who seldom participated in demonstrations or sit-ins involving the desegregation of public libraries. Thus, young blacks who forced library integration seldom received national media attention.
And yet there is an irony here. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, economic historian Gavin Wright concludes, the civil rights revolution of the 1960s had become “firmly embedded in American civic culture. Accounts and pictures of the Montgomery bus boycott, the Greensboro sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s soaring speech at the Lincoln Memorial feature in textbooks and classrooms throughout the nation, including those in the southern states, where most of these famous events occurred.” And four decades after these events, he notes, “civil rights heritage sites in Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, and other cities attract more than a million tourists each year, who come to see and hear tales of the epic struggle and to absorb lessons in what one historian calls ‘the new regional civic ideology of tolerance.’”33 Unlike public accommodation sites such as public pools, amusement parks, and skating rinks that closed rather than integrate, however, no public library in the South remained closed against integration for long, and many of the civil rights heritage sites putting their civic ideology of tolerance on public display are now located in the very public library systems that denied black Americans access until the 1960s.
In our coverage of the desegregation of public libraries in the American South after 1950, we focus on local stories to identify broader patterns of struggle. We admit to being drawn to stories that primary source documentation could support that also generated headlines (national, state, and local) and contained colorful (and some now famous) personalities. We follow the primary sources, including records for lawsuits filed in federal courts, local white newspapers (many on microfilm at state libraries), and regional and local black newspapers (many now digitized in an easily searchable ProQuest Historical Black Newspapers database). By focusing on the desegregation of public libraries in specific locations such as Memphis, Tennessee; Greenville, South Carolina; Petersburg and Danville, Virginia; and the states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, we recognize that we are telling only part of a much larger story. We hope our efforts here will encourage others to follow the example of Toby Graham’s Right to Read and investigate the history of public library integration in other states and localities that will enable future civil rights or library historians to weave the story of racial discrimination in public libraries into a national narrative.
In chapter 1, we address Jim Crow libraries before Brown—a time when, historian Catherine Barnes notes, “southern blacks attempted only to equalize accommodations, not undo segregation”34—and show how African Americans crafted particular kinds of public library services and places that were safe and welcoming but still within the confines of the Jim Crow laws and practices surrounding them.
In chapter 2, we focus on protests before 1960, some successful, some not. We describe the first public library sit-in in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1939 and cover peaceful public library integration stories in Nashville, Tennessee; Richmond, Virginia; and Louisville, Kentucky, in the early 1950s, all of which preceded the desegregation of other public accommodations. We also discuss several lawsuits blacks filed in the Virginia towns of Newport News (1952), Purcellville (1957), and Portsmouth (1959) to force the integration of local public library services.
The public library desegregation attempts covered in chapters 3 through 8 largely occurred between 1960 and 1965. Chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on four cities: Memphis, Tennessee; Greenville, South Carolina (where Jesse Jackson, now a nationally known civil rights leader, participated in his first sit-in); and Petersburg and Danville, Virginia. At each locale protests were particularly vehement, in large part because they were driven by the “this was our time” feelings the February 1960 Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins generated. Chapter 5 focuses on public library integration activities in Alabama (particularly Mobile, Birmingham, and Montgomery); chapter 6 on Georgia (especially Albany and the “Albany Movement”); chapter 7 on Mississippi (including the “Tougaloo [College] Nine,” and events they forced at the Jackson Public Library that involved Medgar Evers, and the Freedom School students’ 1964 effort to desegregate the Hattiesburg Public Library); and chapter 8 on rural Louisiana, where sit-ins largely escaped national media attention.
In chapter 9, we discuss the limited role library associations played in all these events, particularly the role of the American Library Association, which was largely absent and mostly silent about Jim Crow public libraries until well into the 1960s. An epilogue summarizes our findings, including proof that over time many of the public libraries that practiced Jim Crow services before 1965 eventually became sites of racial reconciliation.