Civil Rights Movement

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Freedom Schools

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These were citizenship schools and more for people of all ages; they functioned during the day and taught a broad range of subjects including civic education and black history (which weren’t taught in mainstream schools). The goal was to make students a force for social change. These schools were resented by Mississippi whites.

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1964 Freedom Summer

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- for the first time, large numbers of white people were involved in the movement (1964)
- Ongoing Reprisals: White Citizens Councils held political power in the South
- but there was a 4/1 ration of Black/Whites in the Delta but still by 1962 no blacks were registered to vote
- in 1964 though, the press came to Mississippi and didn’t leave
- Reprisals become more visible: Louis Allen lynching
- Freedom Summer: Bob Moses decides to ramp up the movement and launches the Freedom Summer to “keep Black Mississippians alive!” This was a new, nationally visible movement, and volunteers came by the thousands came to support it, mainly white students from prestigious schools (which ensured national attention). This attention was the point: to prevent blacks from being killed. The movement had requested help and protection from the federal government but were denied it.

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Goodman, Cheny and Schwerner

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were Freedom Summer volunteers (two white and one black) who went missing after going down to Miss (?) to investigate a burnt-down church (which had held a movement meeting recently). On August 4th they were found shot and buried... this became a national news item- Lynden Johnson sent out a search party and the FBI to investigate (though the FBI claimed it was their job). Klu Klux Klan members admit involvement and 19 people are tried after a long process, years later, 7 people were declared guilty and imprisoned.

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Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), 1964

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60,000 people joined this party, who sent 64 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, hopeful that they would be embraced by the Dem. party at the national level where they weren’t at the local level. The Convention held a “Credentials Committee” to determine if the blacks could join the party. Fannie Lou Hamer gave a powerful speech but Pres. Johnson felt threatened and embarrassed by it and cut her off; though this served only to make it more popular and be replayed on the national evening news. Despite popular outcry the MFDP was not seated... showing how entrenched and systemic racism was in the US.

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March Against Fear, 1966

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James Meredith organized this march to challenge white supremacy in June 1966, but was shot only two days into the march... Carmichael and King continue the march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. As they passed through Greenwood, AL, Carmichael shouted “Its time for Black Power for Black People!”

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Lowndes County Freedom Org. (LCFO) aka Black Panther Party:

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there was a tradition of radicalism in Lowndes County (formerly a strong communist org) and when SNCC passed through here on the march, they organized political education workshops. Stokely Carmichael explains the LCFO: “So that the question stands as to what we are willing to do, how we are willing to say "No" to withdraw from that system and begin within our community to start to function and to build new institutions that will speak to our needs. In Lowndes County, we developed something called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. It is a political party. The Alabama law says that if you have a Party you must have an emblem. We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he's back so far into the wall, he's got nothing to do but spring out. Yeah. And when he springs he does not stop.”

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The Selma to Montgomery marches were three marches in 1965:

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- In 1965, deadly racial violence erupted in Selma, Alabama, as African-Americans were attacked by police while preparing to march to Montgomery to protest voting rights discrimination. Discrimination took the form of literacy, knowledge or character tests administered solely to African-Americans to keep them from registering to vote. Civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King and over 500 supporters planned to march from Selma to Montgomery to register African-Americans to vote. The police violence that erupted resulted in the death of a King supporter, a white Unitarian Minister from Boston named James J. Reeb.
- A second attempt to march to Montgomery was also blocked by police. It took Federal intervention with the 'federalizing' of the Alabama national guard and the addition of over 2000 other guards to ensure protection and allow the march to begin.
- On March 21, 1965 the march to Montgomery finally began with over 3000 participants, under the glare of worldwide news publicity.

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March on Washington, 1963:

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the Albany 9 and Americas 4 demonstrated growing antagonism between law enforcement, federal government and civil rights movement. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a large political rally that took place in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech advocating racial harmony at the Lincoln Memorial during the march.[1] The march was organized by a group of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations,[2] under the theme "jobs, and freedom."[1] The march was initiated by A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council, and vice president of the AFL-CIO. Randolph had planned a similar march in 1941. The threat of the earlier march had convinced President Roosevelt to establish the Committee on Fair Employment Practice and bar discriminatory hiring in the defense industry. Randolph said "I pledge my heart, and my mind, and my body, to the achievement of social peace through social justice." [3] The 1963 march was an important part of the rapidly expanding Civil Rights Movement.

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Malcolm X:

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born Malcolm Little in Michigan; was imprisoned in 1946 and while in prison began a study program and read about the Nation of Islam. When he was released in 1952 he met Muhammad and was inspired, sent to open temples for the Nation. By 1963 he had become the office national spokesperson for the Nation. There was a huge ‘cultural dichotomy’ between Malcolm X and King. The 1959 TV series “The Hate that Hate Produced” misrepresented Malcolm X and the Nation... Though Muhammad was the spiritual leader, Malcolm X was becoming more popular, and controversial, and after a controversial comment by X, he was silenced by Muhammad, and X decided to go it alone. He formed the ‘Organization for African Unity’ and visited Africa, in 1964 becoming a Sunni Muslim. He began to broaden his critique and strategy, linking the struggle for black power to Africa and to those for universal human rights and anti-imperialism. In 1965 his home was firebombed, possibly by thugs hired by Muhammad; and a week later he was shot dead at 39 years old, apparently by the Nation.

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The Nation of Islam:

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The Nation of Islam was founded in the 1931 by E. Muhammad- to teach Af. Am’s to adopt disciplined lifestyle and reject white culture- but didn’t become prominent until the 1960’s. They did not blindly advocate violence but suggested that black people should defend themselves if necessary. Malcolm X put it this way: “by any means necessary.”

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Chicago Movement:

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The Chicago Freedom Movement represented the alliance of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO). In 1965, SCLC, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., was looking for a site to prove that non-violent direct action could bring about social change outside of the South. Since 1962, the CCCO had harnessed anger over racial inequality, especially in the public schools, in the city of Chicago to build the most sustained local civil rights movement in the North. The activism of the CCCO pulled SCLC to Chicago as did the work of Bernard LaFayette and James Bevel, two veterans of the southern civil rights movement, on the city’s west side. The Chicago Freedom Movement declared its intention to end slums in the city. It organized tenants' unions, assumed control of a slum tenement, founded action groups like Operation Breadbasket, and rallied black and white Chicagoans to support its goals. In the early summer of 1966, it focused its attention on housing discrimination. Led by Martin Luther King, a rally was held at Soldier Field on July 10, 1966. As many as 60,000 people came to hear Dr. King as well as Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Peter Paul and Mary. By late July the Chicago Freedom Movement was staging regular marches into all-white neighborhoods on the city’s southwest and northwest sides. The hostile response of local whites and the determination of civil rights activists to continue to crusade for open housing alarmed City Hall and attracted the attention of the national press. In mid-August, high-level negotiations began between city leaders, movement activists, and representatives of the Chicago Real Estate Board. On August 26, after the Chicago Freedom Movement had declared that it would march into Cicero site of a fierce race riot in 1951, an agreement, consisting of positive steps to open up housing opportunities in metropolitan Chicago, was reached. The Summit Agreement was the culmination of months of organizing and direct action. It did not, however, satisfy all activists, some of whom, in early September 1966, marched on Cicero. Furthermore, after the open-housing marches, the Chicago Freedom Movement lost its focus and momentum. By early 1967, Martin Luther King and SCLC had decided to train their energies on other targets (he agreed to stop the launches, this was controversial and some activists continued on without him) thus marking the end of this ambitious campaign.

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the Kerner Commission

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After the riot, the Kerner Commission reported that their survey of blacks in Detroit found that none was “happy” about conditions in the city prior to the event. The areas of discrimination identified by Fine were: policing, housing, employment, spatial segregation within the city, mistreatment by merchants, shortage of recreational facilities, quality of public education, access to medical services, and “the way the war on poverty operated in Detroit”.[28]
- The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner, Jr. of Illinois, was an 11-member commission established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots in the United States and to provide recommendations for the future. Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the commission on July 28, 1967, while rioting was still underway in Detroit, Michigan. The long, hot summers since 1965 had brought riots in the black sections of many major cities, including Los Angeles (Watts Riot of 1965), Chicago (Division Street Riots of 1966), and Newark (1967 Newark riots).[1]
- The Commission's final report found that the riots resulted from black frustration at lack of economic opportunity. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., pronounced the report a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life."[3]The report berated federal and state governments for failed housing, education and social-service policies. The report also aimed some of its sharpest criticism at the mainstream media. "The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and white perspective."
- The report's most infamous passage warned, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—-separate and unequal."
- Its results suggested that one main cause of urban violence was white racism and suggested that white America bore much of the responsibility for black rioting and rebellion. It called to create new jobs, construct new housing, and put a stop to de-facto segregation in order to wipe out the destructive ghetto environment. In order to so, the report recommended for government programs to provide needed services, to hire more diverse and sensitive police forces and, most notably, to invest billions in housing programs aimed at breaking up residential segregation.
- President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had already pushed through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, ignored the report and rejected the Kerner Commission's recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. [5]
- To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Kerner Report, new reports found the racial divide had grown in the subsequent years with inner-city unemployment at crisis levels.[6]The Millenium Breach found that most of the decade that followed the Kerner Report, America made progress on the principal fronts the report dealt with: race, poverty, and inner cities. Then progress stopped and in some ways reversed by a series of economic shocks and trends and the government’s action and inaction. Harris reported, “Today, thirty years after the Kerner Report, there is more poverty in America, it is deeper, blacker and browner than before, and it is more concentrated in the cities, which have become America’s poorhouses.”[7]

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Detroit Riot

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Pres. Johnson’s program for “urban renewal” really meant the destruction of black neighbourhoods through the building of expressways through their neighbourhoods; white flight to the suburbs and slumification for blacks- moving industry and therefore jobs to white suburbs and leaving blacks unemployed, and targeted by police in regular raids. In 1967 the police began to raid a blind pig in Detroit, and a riot erupted lasting for 5 days... of looting, rioting, burning down buildings, and spreading to more than 100 city blocks. Pres. Johnson sent in federal paratroopers; a curfew was created and the looting eventually ended, though 7200 were arrested and 40 something killed and hundreds injured. The Kerner Commission was appointed to figure out why the riots happened, and concluded: “America was becoming two societies, separate and unequal.”

- The Detroit 1967 race riot or the 1967 Detroit rebellion[1][2][3][4] was a multiracial civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed after hours bar then known as a blind pig on the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount on the city's near westside. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in U.S. history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit's 1943 race riot. To help end the disturbance, Governor George Romney ordered the Michigan National Guard into Detroit, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in United States Armytroops. The result was forty-three dead, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 buildings burned down.

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The 1968 Civil Rights Act:

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barred discrimination in sale or rental of housing but also outlawed crossing state lines to ‘incite a riot.’ On April 11, 1968 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, or as CRA '68), which was meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While the Civil Rights Act of 1866[1] prohibited discrimination in housing, there were no federal enforcement provisions. The 1968 act expanded on previous acts and prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and as of 1974, gender; as of 1988, the act protects the disabled and families with children. It also provided protection for civil rights workers.Victims of discrimination may use both the 1968 act and the 1866 act (via section 1983) to seek redress. The 1968 act provides for federal solutions while the 1866 act provides for private solutions (i.e., civil suits)The CR Act of 1968: was not enforced though, and put the burden of combating racism on the victims, who needed to file complaints and seek redress themselves. The anti-riot measure was to appease white racists who were afraid of the rhetoric of black power.

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the 1965 Voters Rights Act:

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The National Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. § 1973–1973aa-6)[1] outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States. Echoing the language of the 15th Amendment, the Act prohibited states from imposing any "voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure ... to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."[2] Specifically, Congress intended the Act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which Southern states had prevented African-Americans from exercising the franchise.[3] The Act was signed into law byPresident Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, who had earlier signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
The Act established extensive federal oversight of elections administration, providing that states with a history of discriminatory voting practices (so-called"covered jurisdictions") could not implement any change affecting voting without first obtaining the approval of the Department of Justice, a process known aspreclearance. These enforcement provisions applied to states and political subdivisions (mostly in the South) that had used a "device" to limit voting and in which less than 50 percent of the population was registered to vote in 1964. Congress has amended and extended the Act several times since its original passage, the most recent being the 25-year extension signed by President George W. Bush in 2006.

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NIXON and Resegregation:

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-growing resistance to the movement turned to full out backlash. In the 1968 Presidential election, Nixon and the Republicans won, voted in by ‘the silent majority’= white conservative, middle/lower class Am’s who felt like they were “making too many sacrifices for the minorities” as if rights were a zero-sum games; Nixon exploited their fear about social and political decay. Nixon ignored Af. Am’s during his early presidency, adopting an official policy of “BENIGN NEGLECT” which reinforced the disillusionment of Af. Am’s; this benign neglect actually included active steps to take rights and gains away from Af. Am’s and give them to whites. He was against reform, “anti-Negro” and opposed forced integration, reversing desegregation policies in 1969 for political bargains with Mississippi governor. The Supreme Court tried to force him to uphold Brown but there was white flight from integrated schools and ... “de facto segregation.” reigned (i.e. segregation in practice not in law). This was all a publicity stunt for Nixon, who was able to at the same time show that he had resisted integration, but that he ultimately complied (he had to!). He said that “forced integration was unnecessary” and in 1972 put a moratorium on forced integration; and limited busing in 1974 (Busing: using school buses to redistribute students, ie bringing black and white kids to integrated schools).