Topic 8.10: The African American Civil Rights Movement (1960s)

Receipts

February 1, 1960

Key terms: Jim Crow, Public accommodations, Civil rights movement

February 1, 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina

Four freshmen from North Carolina A&T walked into the Woolworth's downtown.

They bought toothpaste and school supplies. They kept the receipts.

At 4:30, they sat down at the lunch counter, which served white customers only. They asked for coffee. Franklin McCain remembered the answer: "I'm sorry, we don't serve you here."

A police officer walked in and paced behind them with his club. Nobody arrested them.

An older white woman walked over. As McCain remembered it, she said she was proud of them, and wished they'd done it ten years sooner.

They sat until the store closed at 5:30. The next day, more students came. The store would take their money but not pour their coffee.

For the next eight years, the movement kept putting that contradiction in front of the whole country. How do you make a country choose?

Bigger Than a Hamburger

February–July 1960

Key terms: Sit-in, Civil disobedience, Jail, no bail, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)

The next day, twenty students came and did their homework at the counter. By the end of the week, hundreds had joined, three white students among them.

Within two months, sit-ins had spread across the South. Equal protection had been in the Constitution since 1868. It still didn't reach a store's lunch counter.

Their rule card covered everything. Don't strike back. Sit straight. Always face the counter. And, under “do not”: laugh out.

In April, after someone bombed their lawyer's home, thousands marched in silence to City Hall.

A student named Diane Nash asked Mayor Ben West if it was wrong to discriminate by race. By both their accounts, he agreed. Three weeks later, Nashville's counters opened.

In Tallahassee, Patricia Stephens chose forty-nine days in jail over paying a fine.

Patricia Stephens

We made it clear that we want to serve-out our full time.

At Easter, a veteran organizer named Ella Baker had called the sit-in leaders to Raleigh. She urged them to stay independent, not become anyone's youth wing. They formed SNCC.

Ella Baker

…current sit-ins and other demonstrations are concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke.

On July 25, the Greensboro counter finally served Black customers. The first four customers were its own employees. Geneva Tisdale ordered an egg salad sandwich. She had made it herself.

07·25·60 GREENSBORO

Freedom Ride

1960–1962

Key terms: Boynton v. Virginia (1960), Freedom Rides (1961), Bailey v. Patterson (1962), Legal challenges

In December 1960, the Supreme Court banned segregation in bus terminals serving interstate travelers. Nobody enforced it.

So in May 1961, CORE sent thirteen riders south from Washington, seven Black and six white.

On Mother’s Day, outside Anniston, Alabama, a mob firebombed their bus. The riders escaped and were beaten. In Birmingham, police let a mob beat the second bus’s riders.

CORE was ready to stop. Diane Nash and the Nashville students weren’t. They sent new riders south.

After another mob attacked them in Montgomery, Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked for a cooling-off period. As CORE’s James Farmer told it, he answered that they’d been cooling off for 350 years. Any more, and they’d be in a deep freeze.

Mississippi jailed riders as they stepped off the buses. More kept coming, 436 in all. Hundreds served time, many in Parchman prison. They sang.

That fall, the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered the signs down. In 1962, the Supreme Court made it plain:

no State may require racial segregation of interstate or intrastate transportation facilities.

In court, Constance Baker Motley won James Meredith, an Air Force veteran, a place at Ole Miss. Brown was eight years old. Ole Miss was still all white.

When federal officers brought him to campus, a mob attacked them all night. Two men were killed. Kennedy mobilized nearly 31,000 troops for one student.

That morning, Meredith went to class.

Project C

1961–June 1963

Key terms: Nonviolent direct action, Birmingham campaign (1963), Letter from Birmingham Jail, Massive resistance

In Albany, Georgia, police chief Laurie Pritchett had studied Martin Luther King's methods. He arrested marchers politely, jailed them in other counties, and gave the cameras nothing. Albany stayed segregated.

So the movement chose Birmingham. Its police commissioner was Bull Connor. The plan was Project C, for Confrontation.

On Good Friday, King was jailed for marching. White clergymen called the protests “unwise and untimely.” King answered in the margins of the newspaper that printed them.

He addressed it to eight ministers. He wrote it for the whole country.

On May 2, more than a thousand Birmingham students marched. Many were younger than you. Police filled school buses with them.

The next day, Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on them. The pictures ran on front pages around the world.

Within a week, Birmingham's businessmen agreed to open their lunch counters.

Alabama's new governor, George Wallace, had promised:

George C. Wallace

segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

On June 11 he blocked a doorway at the University of Alabama. Kennedy federalized the Guard, and Wallace stepped aside.

That evening, Kennedy went on television.

John F. Kennedy

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

He said he would ask Congress for a civil rights law.

Hours later, in Jackson, Mississippi, the NAACP's Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway. He was carrying T-shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go.” He was 37.

June 12, 1963

Jobs and Freedom

July–September 1963

Key terms: Executive Order 8802, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, SNCC, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing

In 1941, union leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on Washington. Roosevelt opened defense jobs to Black workers instead. In 1963, Randolph called the march again.

Bayard Rustin had eight weeks to organize it. He'd been jailed as a pacifist, and he was gay. Senator Thurmond attacked him for both. Randolph kept him.

Washington braced. Bars closed, the baseball Senators postponed two games, and four thousand extra troops stood by.

At 6:30 that morning, the Mall was nearly empty.

A. Philip Randolph

We are not a pressure group … we are not a mob. We are the advanced guard of a massive, moral revolution for jobs and freedom.

Every featured speaker was a man. Daisy Bates, who guided the Little Rock Nine, got a few sentences at the women's tribute.

John Lewis, 23, had written a harder speech. His draft asked:

John Lewis

I want to know, which side is the federal government on?

The archbishop threatened to pull out. Behind Lincoln's statue, Lewis rewrote it.

John Lewis

Wake up America! Wake up! For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.

King gave the last speech. Early on, he talked about money.

By dark, the buses were gone. The bill was still stuck in Congress.

Eighteen days later, on a Sunday morning, a bomb planted by Klansmen exploded at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

That afternoon, a police officer shot Johnny Robinson, 16, in the back. A white teenager shot Virgil Ware, 13, off his brother's bicycle.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

1963–1969

Key terms: Black nationalism, Civil Rights Act of 1964, EEOC, Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), Warren Court (1953–1969)

Five days after Kennedy was killed, Lyndon Johnson went before Congress.

Lyndon B. Johnson

No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.

In the House, Howard Smith of Virginia, a segregationist, added one word to the job-discrimination ban: sex. The House laughed, then voted it in. Historians still argue whether he meant to sink the bill or meant it.

A Southern-led filibuster kept the bill from a vote for sixty working days. West Virginia's Robert Byrd alone spoke for fourteen hours.

Malcolm X, weeks after leaving the Nation of Islam, called it something else.

Malcolm X

This is a government filibuster. It's not a segregationist filibuster, it's a government filibuster.

Malcolm X

It's the ballot or the bullet.

In June, the Senate ended the filibuster, a first for a civil rights bill.

Everett Dirksen

Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.

Outside the old Confederacy, senators voted 72 to 6 for it. Inside, 21 to 1 against.

Title II banned discrimination in hotels, restaurants and theaters. It names the 'lunch counter' outright. Title VII banned job discrimination by race, color, religion, national origin and, by Smith's amendment, sex.

An Atlanta motel owner argued his own case: Congress couldn't tell him whom to serve. Three-quarters of his guests came from other states. That's interstate commerce. He lost, 9 to 0.

Congress passed the law, the president signed it, and the Court upheld it. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court kept widening what the Constitution protected.

Freedom Summer

1962–1964

Key terms: Sharecropper, Literacy test, Freedom Summer (1964), Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)

In Mississippi, only about seven percent of Black adults were registered to vote.

In 1962, a sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer tried. The registrar asked her to interpret a section of the state constitution.

Fannie Lou Hamer

I knowed as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day.

She failed. That night, she had to leave the plantation.

In 1964, SNCC brought nearly a thousand volunteers, mostly white college students, to run Freedom Schools and register voters.

On June 21, three civil rights workers disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Six weeks later, the FBI found them buried in an earthen dam.

The search also found Henry Dee and Charles Moore, killed that spring. Nobody had been searching for them.

In August, Hamer's Freedom Democratic Party asked the convention to seat it instead of Mississippi's all-white delegation.

Fannie Lou Hamer

If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?

The party offered two at-large seats, and chose who would fill them. Hamer said they hadn't come all this way for two seats.

Many young activists stopped trusting their liberal allies.

1870 · 1964 Ninety-four years after the 15th Amendment

How Long? Not Long

February–August 1965

Key terms: Bloody Sunday, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Literacy test, Preclearance

In Selma's county, about two percent of Black adults were registered to vote.

In nearby Marion, a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26. He died eight days later. Organizers planned a march to Montgomery, fifty-four miles away.

On March 7, about six hundred marchers climbed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers and the sheriff's posse waited on the far side.

They attacked with clubs and tear gas. John Lewis's skull was fractured. Amelia Boynton was beaten unconscious.

Sunday night March 7, 1965

That night, ABC interrupted its movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, to show the footage.

Ministers came from across the country. On March 9, white men beat one of them, James Reeb, from Boston. He died two days later.

On March 15, Johnson went before Congress.

Lyndon B. Johnson

So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

Lyndon B. Johnson

And we shall overcome.

He had quoted the movement's own song.

On March 21 the march set out again, protected by nearly two thousand federalized Guardsmen and about a thousand soldiers.

Through Lowndes County the road narrowed to two lanes, and a judge's order let only three hundred march.

On March 25, about 25,000 people reached the state Capitol.

That night, Klansmen killed Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit mother driving marchers back to Selma. An FBI informant was in their car.

On August 6, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. It suspended literacy tests and sent federal examiners to register voters.

Places with a record of shutting Black voters out now needed Washington's approval to change voting rules. It enforced a promise the Fifteenth Amendment made in 1870.

In Mississippi, Black registration went from under seven percent to nearly sixty in three years.

Two Societies

1965–1968

Key terms: De jure vs. de facto segregation, Nation of Islam, Black Power, COINTELPRO, Kerner Commission (1968)

Five days after the Voting Rights Act, a traffic stop near Watts set off six days of riots. Thirty-four people died.

Watts had no “Whites Only” signs. It had crowded housing, too few jobs and a police force residents didn’t trust.

Not everyone thought nonviolence was enough. Malcolm X had argued for self-defense and Black control of Black communities. He was assassinated in February 1965.

In June 1966, SNCC’s new chairman, Stokely Carmichael, got out of a Mississippi jail. He gave the crowd a new slogan: Black Power.

Stokely Carmichael

Now we are engaged in a psychological struggle in this country.

Stokely Carmichael

And that is whether or not black people have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction to it.

December 1966 SNCC votes 19 to 18, with 24 abstaining, to remove its white members

That December, SNCC voted its white members out.

King took nonviolence north, marching for open housing in Chicago. A rock hit him in the head.

In Oakland, the new Black Panther Party trailed police patrols with guns. It also ran a free breakfast for children. The FBI worked to destroy the Party.

In 1967, riots in Newark and Detroit killed 23 and 43 people. A white backlash was building.

Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.

I Am a Man

February 1–April 11, 1968

Key terms: Memphis sanitation strike (1968), Poor People's Campaign, Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Fair Housing Act), Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968)

February 1, 1968. Eight years to the day after Greensboro. Two Memphis sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in a garbage truck.

Thirteen hundred workers walked out. Their signs said four words.

King came to Memphis to march with them.

The next evening, a white man shot King on that balcony. He was 39.

Riots broke out in more than a hundred cities.

A week later, Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act. The Memphis strikers won five days after that.

Eight years earlier, four freshmen had sat down here with their receipts.

In Montgomery in 1965, King asked the crowd how long. His answer: “Not long.” For the laws, he was close: about five years from the sit-in.

For housing, jobs, schools and the police, people are still arguing about how long. Other Americans had been watching how it was done.