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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. |
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Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement in the US: A Second Look
By Dr. Herschelle S. Challenor
Professor, Clark Atlanta University
United States Embassy, Kinshasa
January 2000
Mr. Ambassador, Distinguished Guests,
It is particularly appropriate in this year 2000 to examine the role of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement in the United States. Although he was assassinated in March 1968, the controversy surrounding his death remains a live issue and the cause for which he gave his life remains unfinished business in the United States.
My remarks will focus on the civil rights movement as one of the most significant popular uprisings of the 20th century, the special dimensions of the civil rights movement in Atlanta, lessons learned, and the work that lies ahead.
On a personal note, I must confess that my involvement as Co-Chair of the Student Sit-in Movement in Atlanta from 1960-1961 had a profound impact not only on my own values and career choices, but also on my understanding about strategies of influence, mass mobilization techniques and practical politics.
Significance of the Civil Rights Movement
There is no doubt that the civil rights movement that began in the late 1950s in the American South pricked the conscience of our nation, transformed black-white political, economic and social relations, and had a profound affect on the rest of the world. I would like to make seven main assertions about this movement.
1. This was the first popular uprising to use the mass media to advance its objectives. This was the first revolution that was televised. Newspaper photographs and television coverage of white brutality against peaceful protestors stimulated similar action throughout the South and galvanized our nation. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood well the importance of the media for the civil rights movement. In a letter written at the end of October 1961, following the Freedom Rides and the Inter-state Commerce Commission order prohibiting segregation in inter-state public transportation, he stated,
Public relations is a very necessary part of any protest of civil disobedience. The main objective is to bring moral pressure to bear upon an unjust system or a particularly unjust law. The public at large must be aware of the inequities involved in such a system. In effect, in the absence of justice in the established courts of the region, nonviolent protestors are asking for a hearing in the court of world opinion. Without the presence of the press, there might have been massacres in the South. The world seldom believes the horror stories of history until they are documented via the mass media. Certainly there would not have been sufficient pressure to warrant a ruling by the ICC had not this situation been so well publicized.
2. While there is a tendency abroad to see the American civil rights movement mainly in terms of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and the subsequent leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. under the aegis of the Southern Christian Leadership conference, (SCLC), it was in effect the student sit-in movement and the subsequent activities of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that led to the desegregation of public accommodations in that part of our nation, ushered in a new confrontation style of politics, and provided the troops to register Negro voters in the deep south. Their actions made it necessary for the traditional and other civil rights organizations to become more activist.
3. The Movement's strategy of passive resistance and civil disobedience inspired by Mohandas Gandhi combined with the direct action and subsequently confrontation politics popularized by the student sit-in movement and SNCC, provided a model for future protest movement in the United States, the anti-Vietnam war movements, the modern feminist movement, and the movement of the disabled and the gays. The 1965 call for Black Power spawned the movement of cultural nationalism in the Black community, the more recent priority accorded to cultural diversity in our nation and presaged concerns about a "clash of civilizations" in the global system. The anthem of the civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome," has replaced the Communist Internationale as the song people seeking freedom the world over sing -- and sang during the popular uprising that brought Corazon Aquino to power in the Philippines, during the Soweto uprising and with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
4. The key weapons of the civil rights movement were moral suasion, total commitment with discipline and economic pressure. In short, the Movement wanted to prick white consciences, but recognized that perhaps a greater response would come from affecting their economic livelihood.
5. The passage of the Voters Right Act in 1965 transformed national politics, enabled hundreds of African Americans to assume local state and congressional office and control the major industrial cities in the US from Newark to San Francisco, and from Houston and Washington, DC to Atlanta. As a result of school desegregation and Black control of city hall, America experienced white flight and the greatest suburbanization movement in its history.
6. Ironically, although Negro protests against racial inequalities led to the now discredited affirmative action policies, white women have been the greatest beneficiaries of such policies.
7. Finally, African Americans learned two main lessons from this experience. One is to recognize what Africans also found out, to wit, despite Kwame Nkrumah's dictum to seek first the political kingdom and all other things will come unto you, political influence cannot be sustained without economic empowerment. Secondly, racial inequalities cannot be eliminated with changes in behavior through enactment of new laws alone, one has to also change racial attitudes.
There was a tendency in the civil rights movement, as American leaders did in Vietnam and in southern Africa, to confuse a genuine, simple quest for freedom to external communist influence. In fact, the civil rights movement was completely indigenous. Negroes drew their inspiration from the years of racial violence and indignities to which they were subjected, their profound religious convictions and the acceptance of non-violence as a tactic. While the Rev Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders were subjected to various forms of surveillance by the U.S. government, it was not until M.L's speech at Riverside Church in 1964 opposing the Vietnam war and raising the commonality of liberation struggles in Southern Africa and other parts of the world that the full weight of the FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) against him was instituted. Despite his assassination in March 1968, this is a story that will not die. In December 1999, after years of abortive attempts to gain a new trial for James Earl Ray, King's alleged assassin, the King family obtained a verdict in a jury trial in Tennessee that Ray was part of a broader conspiracy and did not act alone. The United States government agreed in that same month to finally create a monument to Rev. King on the Mall in Washington.
American History, Its Constitution and System of Government
It is very difficult to understand the legal and political context of the civil rights movement without some knowledge of American history, its Constitution and the realities of its federal system of government. The legacy of racial oppression and injustice in the United States is an outgrowth of the system of slavery and the subsequent political tensions between an agrarian south and industrializing north. Prompted largely by the failure to get a slave plank adopted in the party convention of 1860 and the increasing pressure of the Abolitionist movement, on 8 February 1861 seven southern states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas) meeting in Montgomery, Alabama decided to set up the Confederate States of America and to secede from the Union. South Carolina was the first state to secede on 20 December 1860.
The Civil War that lasted from 1861 to 1865 was our Shaba, our Chechnya. The federal government waged war against the rebel states to end the secession and preserve the Union. Ending slavery was not the purpose of the war, but an important result. The Republican President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the XIIIth Amendment adopted by the Congress in 1865 liberated the slaves de jure, but de facto cast them into a hostile, racist south, unaided, untrained and without full protection of the government. Unlike the secessions in Katanga in 1960 or later of Shaba Province, where external economic interests influenced events, or in present day Kosovo or Chechnya where religious differences play an important role, the Confederate rebellion was completely indigenous, as southern rebels sought to retain their way of life and the "peculiar institution" of slavery.
Only two days after the laying down of arms between the victorious Union soldiers and the confederate army at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia on April 12, 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated at the Ford Theater in Washington, DC by actor John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln died the next morning at 7:22 a.m. As prescribed by the American Constitution, the Vice President, Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, but strong Union supporter and former Governor of Tennessee was sworn in as President.
Principles of the US Constitution
A few comments about the cardinal principles of the US Constitutionare appropriate at this juncture. The Preamble states, We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The federal government is based upon the principle of a balance of power between three institutions, the bicameral Congress, the President and the Executive Branch of government and the Judiciary. Although the preamble speaks of a "Union," Article X indicates that all rights not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution, "nor prohibited by it to the States are reserved for the states or to the people." States control public education; they are responsible for registering voters and organizing elections; they have the authority to levy taxes and pass local ordinances relating to public accommodations. Ours is a presidentialist form of government with clear rules of succession and regularly scheduled elections every 2 years for the House of Representatives, 4 years for the President and 6 years for the Senate. Unlike the Westminister model, there is no Prime Minister who can decide when to hold elections. Although the United States has been a strong advocate of multi party elections in Africa, while independent parties exist in many local jurisdictions, at the federal level we are virtually locked into a two party system of government. However, it is important to note that party orthodoxy is not rigidly enforced and some argue that in fact we have 100 political parties, referring to the Democratic and Republic parties in each of the 50 states of the Union. As is the case with all governments around the world, Party control of the Executive Branch and the legislative branch of government brings extraordinary power, patronage and influence over public policy. It is noteworthy that the American Constitution adopted September 17, 1787 did not provide for universal suffrage of all its people until 130 years later with the adoption of the XIXth Amendment in 1920, which guaranteed women the right to vote.
Post-war Reconstruction
The assassination of President Lincoln placed into jeopardy his conciliatory plans for reabsorbing the rebel states of the old confederacy into the Union. Lincoln had provided that the Executive Branch would appoint provisional civil governors in the old Confederate states and they could rejoin the Union after a mere ten percent of the population has sworn allegiance to the United States. Lincoln's assassination also heightened tensions not only between the north and south, but also between the Republican dominated Congress and the new Democratic President. Hard line Republicans in the Congress faced with the death of their President spoke less of reconciliation, but more of retribution from a recalcitrant South, a region that acquiesced to the end of slavery, but refused to accord racial equality to Blacks.
By January 1866 new civilian governors functioned in every former confederate state except Texas. However, determined to retain white hegemony, the southern states passed the so called Black Codes between late 1865 and 1866, which prohibited the freed slaves from voting, possessing firearms and in some cases from working only as domestic workers or agricultural laborers. They were encouraged to return to their former masters and negotiate a wage. No reparations nor training were provided to assist this mass of people who as slaves had been prohibited by law from learning to read or write. Negro children were forcibly bound out as apprentices to whites in Mississippi.
The Republican hard liners, led by such men as Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senate leader Charles Sumner, wanted to end the oppression of the freed Negroes of the South. But they mainly feared that all of the Southern States would elect Democratic representatives to Congress in the November 1866 mid-term elections, would ally with northern Democrats and end the Republican majority in the legislative branch.
In April 1866, the Joint Congressional Committee reported out their own Reconstruction Plan for the South that would in essence deny reinstatement to the former Confederate states until Negro equality was incorporated into their laws. Only those representatives whose states adopted what became the XIVth and XVth amendment to the Constitution that guaranteed civil and voting rights to Negroes would be admitted into the Congress.
The November 1866 elections for the House of Representatives gave a resounding majority to Republicans. When the new Congress met in March 1867, they adopted the First Reconstruction Act which divided the south into 5 Military Districts led by generals who took instructions from General Grant and not from President Johnson. It was during this period between 1867 and 1870 that the military governors enrolled a new electorate. Black voters outnumbered whites in South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana. Thousands of local officials and the governors of 6 states were removed. Many Negroes, some quite distinguished, were elected to local and congressional offices to the severe consternation of the white electorate. Among them were Jonathan Wright, State Senator in South Carolina, and attorney; Robert B. Elliot, member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and later Member of Congress who had studied at Eton. Hiram R. Revels of Virginia was elected to Jefferson Davis's Senate seat and John Lynch, a self educated slave and professional photographer became Speaker of the State House and later a Congressman from Louisiana. At no point did Black elected officials ever control a state government, nor try to pass vindictive legislation against their former masters. By the summer of 1868, "Reconstructed" governments had been established in eight states. They were not imposed in Mississippi, Texas and Virginia until 1870. Although the Republican Congressional hard liners wanted to accord the freed Negroes the vote on the assumption they would vote Republican, such a move would not be popular even in the north where voting rights of freedman were limited except in New England.
The South strongly opposed sharing power with Negroes. After the Republican hard liners had asserted control over the South, they then sought to limit the powers of the Democratic President Johnson; their influence began to wane. In August 1967 President Johnson ordered Secretary of the Navy Stanton to resign. Stanton, who had been a key ally of the Congressional Republican hard liners refused and on February 24, 1868, the Republican controlled House of Representatives, led by Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Butler, adopted 11 articles of impeachment against President Johnson, 10 of which related to the removal of Stanton. The defection of 7 Republican Senators prevented Johnson's removal from office and began the erosion of support for the Republican hard line policies. Between 1869 and 1871 southern white conservatives began to recapture political control in the State governments in Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia; and by 1874-1875 in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. This Post-Reconstruction period was characterized by the solid control of white conservative governments in the states of the former confederacy, the removal of all Negro elected officials and the resumption of restrictive measures and violence against them. In 1938, the year Hitler invaded Poland, 52 lynchings of Blacks, undoubtedly an undercount, were reported in the American South.
World War II was an important turning point not only for Negroes, but also for Africans. When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, it was initially the territories of the French Federation of Equatorial Africa, under the leadership of Governor General Felix Ebou that responded to General De Gaulle's call for all French to rally to the cause of France. Francophone Africans, particularly le tirailleurs Senegalais, played an important role with the allied forces in Europe and North Africa. Both African and Negro soldiers were intrigued to see the Japanese, a people of color, dare to attack the United States in Peal Harbor and wage such a valiant struggle for their cause, however unjust. These soldiers, who risked their lives for the French and British colonial powers and the American army that still practiced racism, believed that they were entitled to expanded rights and privileges at the end of the war. The Atlantic Charter enunciated by Churchill and Roosevelt spoke of the right to self-determination and the United Nations Trusteeship provisions, greatly influenced by Negro Ralph Bunche, provided a platform for dependent peoples to articulate their grievances. It was in 1954, the year before the establishment of the Non-Aligned movement in Bandung, that the precedent setting Brown vs the Board of Education decision by the United States Supreme Court struck down segregation in the public school system in the United States. The Supreme Court's finding that separate schools were inherently unequal was a fundamental principle. The Supreme Court decision also clearly demonstrated the power of legal remedies.
Organizational Structure of the Civil Rights Movement
Before beginning a discussion of the modern civil rights movement, which began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, it is useful to examine the main institutional players. Four national organizations were instrumental in mounting and sustaining the Negro revolt. Foremost is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was established in 1909 in New York as an outgrowth of the William E. B. DuBois initiated Niagara Movement. Then called the National Negro Committee, it was designed by influential whites and other Negroes to promote racial equality. The NAACP is now based in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was created in Chicago in 1942 mainly by white and black left leaning liberals for the purpose of conducting non-violent direct action against discrimination. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was formed in 1957 in the aftermath of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was created in 1961 to try to rationalize the spontaneous proliferation of student sit-ins. While virtually all of these organizations were led by Negroes and supported mainly by them, several white liberals were integral participants in these groups from their inception.
The NAACP, led by Roy Wilkins during the height of the civil rights movement, was the oldest and best established of the civil rights organizations. The NAACP had an extensive field structure with hundreds of thousands of members throughout the country and offices in most major cities in the South, as well as in the North. Its leaders and the attorneys associated with it and its non-profit arm, the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, provided the vital legal support needed by student activists, other demonstrators and ordinary citizens. Considered by youthful civil rights activists to be the most conservative of the four civil rights organizations, it was the principal beneficiary of financial support during the height of the movement. The NAACP concentrated on legal action to strike down segregation and Roy Wilkins strongly opposed direct action techniques. A largely wholesome, if occasionally tense, rivalry existed among these four organizations, who respected each other's autonomy yet recognized the advantages of cooperation on major demonstrations and activities. Mr. Wilkins initially feared that SCLC involvement in a voter registration campaign would compete with the activities of NAACP's own southern chapters and he ordered his field offices not to participate in any of their demonstrations or meetings without explicit authorization from NAACP headquarters. In large measure the slow startup of SCLC direct action campaigns in the south is in part the lack of support they received at the local level from old line NAACP officials and members.
James Farmer, the leader of CORE during the highpoint of the civil rights movement, was a bright, dedicated activist of unimpeachable integrity. His immediate successor, Roy Innis was seen as a chameleon prepared to change his political ideology as necessary. There were rumors that he worked in later years as an FBI informant.
What the organizational leaders of SNCC leaders, Ed Lewis, Marion Barry, James Forman and John Lewis lacked in wisdom that comes with age or high visibility, they made up for in their unswerving and courageous commitment to change, to direct action, and to a kind of ideological orthodoxy and incorruptibility. In many ways, SNCC's field Secretaries and key supporters were even more extraordinary, such towering figures as Bob Moses, an ascetic Harvard graduate student from Harlem who started voting registration campaigns in McComb Mississippi; Diane Nash and James Bevel, Fisk University graduates and leaders in the Nashville sit in movement; the Rev. James Lawson, a Divinity Student at the historically white Vanderbilt University in Nashville who was expelled by the Board of Trustees three months before his graduation before he refused to leave the movement. There was Stokely Carmichael, AKA, Kwame Tour the Trinidadian born Howard University graduate, who joined the Freedom rides and became a courageous, articulate, confrontation activist in Lowndes County, Alabama. It was Stokely, the sexist, alienated, subsequent cultural nationalist who launched the Black Power movement in 1965. These are just a few of the towering activists, both black and white, who put their lives on hold and in harm's way to become part of the movement to make America's practices live up to its principles.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the most charismatic of all the organizational heads. His firm rooting in the Black Church and the South, his remarkable oratorical skills and exceptional modesty and evolving courage gave him a special legitimacy among Blacks and other Americans of good will. Black leadership traditionally emerged from the Church, the venue during slavery where Blacks, steeped in the oral tradition, could articulate their deepest anxieties, aspire to lead and influence independent financial resources. For all of his talents, Martin was not a political animal. As a result, his closest associates and advisors such as the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, Rev. Andrew Young and Ella Baker had a significant impact on SCLC strategy.
It has been said that some people are born to greatness, while others have it thrust upon them. Although it was the courage and frustration of Rosa Parks, a seamstress who was too tired to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, who unwittingly started the modern civil rights movement, it was the reluctant leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who emerged as its spokesman and towering moral symbol. After Rosa Parks inadvertently started the bus boycott in that city in 1955, King was asked to be the spokesman and later the head of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) that coordinated the bus boycott and other civil rights activities. Speaking at an Omega Psi Phi fraternity banquet in late 1956, where he received the "Citizen of the Year Award," Rev. King said,
If anybody had asked me a year ago to lead this movement, I tell you very honestly that I would run a mile to get away from it. I had no intention of being involved in this way. As I became involved, and as people began to derive inspiration from their involvement, I realized that the choice leaves your own hands. The people expect you to give them leadership. You see them growing as they move into action and you know you no longer have a choice, you can't decide whether to stay in it or get out of it, you must stay in it.
A remarkable man, born in Atlanta as the son of three generations of Baptist preachers, Martin Luther King, Jr. graduated from Morehouse College and received his doctoral degree in Philosophy from Boston University. After completing his course work at Boston University where he met his wife Coretta, who was studying music at the New England Conservatory in Boston, he accepted a position as the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. King had offers from churches in the north and invitations to teach in universities, but despite the rigors of living in the segregated south, he and his wife, who came from Marion, Alabama, both thought this was where they could make the greatest contribution.
The idea to establish SCLC came from Bayard Rustin, a New York based pacifist with socialist leanings, who had been an early member of CORE. He, along with Stanley Levinson, a Jewish attorney from New York with ties to the communist party, and Ella Baker a New York based social worker, believed that such an organization could draw upon the success of the Montgomery bus boycott and be the basis for widespread civil rights activities in the South. He urged King to convene a south wide meeting to discuss the details of what he called a Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation. (Rustin had participated in the CORE led Freedom rides in 1947 to call attention to the need to desegregate inter-state transportation and waiting rooms.) Rustin prepared the agenda and 7 working papers for what was to have been the founding meeting from January 10 and 11, 1957. The Southern Leadership Conference, as it was called initially, was formally established by the 97 persons who attended the second meeting in New Orleans on February 14, 1957.
It was decided that the new organization would be headquartered in Atlanta. However, because of his work as President of the Montgomery Improvement Association, his pastoral responsibilities at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and his extensive travel and speaking schedule, no serious SCLC direct action campaigns took place until the early 1960s after King had returned to Atlanta. Although SCLC continued to hold annual meetings, three years later it had few funds and no major programs. In response to pressure by his SCLC associates to return to Atlanta to devote more time to the organization and from his father Daddy King to become the co-Pastor of Ebeneezer Baptist Church and weary of personal intrigues and infighting in Montgomery, Rev. King announced at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in December 1959 that he would relocate to Atlanta by the end of January 1960. Initially run by Rev. Tilly and Ella Baker, it was not until Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, who had organized successful school desegregation demonstrations in Petersburg, Virginia was hired as SCLC's Executive Director in 1961, and more money flowed in for a voter registration campaign, that SCLC began to have a more active program.
The Student Sit-In Movement
Shortly after King returned to Atlanta, a second and perhaps one of most extraordinary phases of the civil rights movement began. On February 1, 1960, four Black freshman from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina sought service at a Woolworth lunch counter. (Testing the "white only" policy at lunch counters in national chain stores had first been done in Oklahoma and Kansas in 1957 and 1958, but without much publicity). The four A & T students were not served during the four hours they sat-in and finally the lunch counter was shut down. The following day, 24 of their fellow students sat-in. What began as a daring idea soon became a widespread movement. It is important to note that the older civil rights leaders can take no credit for this initiative. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. became a part of the sit-ins only when called in by student leaders.
By Monday, February 8, the peaceful sit-in protest had spread to Durham, NC and Winston-Salem. Two days later similar protests occurred in Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville and Elizabeth City. By the end of the week the sit-ins were taking place in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia and Rock Hill, South Carolina. The Nashville, Tennessee sit-ins began on February 13 with forty students. By the fourth day of the sit-ins, the numbers had risen to 500. Fueled by press and media reports, during the next two weeks student sit-ins spread to fifteen cities in five southern states. The pictures conveyed of Black students quietly studying and waiting in vain to be served while being jeered, threatened and attacked by lower class, foul mouthed whites stunned the nation. By the end of the following year over 50,000 people, mostly Negro, had participated in a sit-in or other kind of demonstration in nearly 100 cities. As a result of these student demonstrations, several hundred lunch counters were desegregated in scores of cities in Texas, Oklahoma, and the border states of the south and Atlanta.
Many students leaders emerged from the sit-ins who would later become the dedicated, courageous activists who led the struggle in the third and most dangerous phase, the campaign in the deep south to attain voting rights, and to desegregate schools and public facilities. Out of Nashville came Diane Nash and James Bevel of Fisk University; Jim Lawson, a divinity student who was expelled from the white Vanderbilt University for his movement activities and John Lewis; Douglas Moore from Durham; Bernard Lee from Alabama; Ruby Doris Smith from Spelman College in Atlanta. While all of the student demonstrators followed the principles of passive resistance and did not retaliate to verbal abuse and physical violence, many were brutally attacked. The student sit-ins galvanized the older organizations into greater activism as the civil disobedience spread to stand-ins at movie theaters, wade-ins at pools and kneel-in at churches.
Case Study of Atlanta
Of all the sit-in movements in the South, the protests in Atlanta were the largest and the best organized. Although Atlanta was as segregated as other southern cities, it had the reputation of being more cosmopolitan and progressive. It had skyscrapers and an active, powerful and white downtown business community, a large Black middle class containing businessmen and influential political and religious leaders and was home to the Atlanta University Center, a unique consortium of six independent Black colleges and universities (Spelman College for women, Morehouse College for men, two co-educational liberal arts colleges, Clark College and Morris Brown and two graduate institutions, Atlanta University and the Interdenominational Theological Center.) The Atlanta movement has special significance, not only because SCLC and SNCC were headquartered there. It was the first place Martin Luther King, Jr. had spent a night in jail, and a number of national leaders such as King, Andy Young, Whitney Young of the Urban League and Vernon Jordan, confident of President Clinton, have all operated out of this city. Often referred to as a city too busy to hate, it is the home of what I call the three most visible exports of America: CNN, Coca Cola and President Carter.
It was Lonnie King, a returning veteran and student at Morehouse College and Joseph Pierce who approached Julian Bond, a fellow Morehouse College student in early March 1960 about mounting sit-in demonstrations in Atlanta. Although Bond would later become one of the first Negro representatives in the Georgia State Legislature since Reconstruction, and is the current Chair of the Board of the NAACP, his response was. "Why us?" They, nevertheless, began to contact students informally on the other campuses. When the Presidents of the six institutions in the AUC learned about these conversations they convened a meeting with Lonnie, Pierce, Julian and the student body Presidents of their respective institutions to try to dissuade them from taking any action. The restraining hand of Roy Wilkins surfaced again. Dr. Benjamin Mays, who was a life member of the NAACP revealed that Wilkins had urged him to persuade the students to stick to their books and let desegregation come about through legal action. When the students rebuffed these entreaties, President Rufus Clement of Atlanta University suggested that if they must act, they should prepare a "bill of particulars" outlining your grievances so whites will understand why you are attacking them. Clements agreed to raise money to place a full page advertisement prepared by the students in the three major daily newspapers.
The document called "An Appeal for Human Rights" was in fact prepared by the students and was published as a paid advertisement in the Atlanta Constitution and other papers on March 9, 1960. In their preambular statement, the students in the document stated inter alia in the ad, that,
We do not intent to wait placidly for those rights which are already legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time. Today's youth will not sit by submissively, while being denied all of the rights privileges, and joys of life. We want to state clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate, in a nation professing democracy and among people professing Christianity, the discriminatory conditions which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia -- supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the South.
They cited statistics on racial inequalities in education, jobs, housing, voting, hospitals, movies, concerts restaurants and law enforcement and concluded that segregation robbed both the segregated and the segregationist of "his human dignity;" that "the social, economic and political progress of Georgia is retarded by segregation and prejudices and that America is fast losing the respect of other nations by the poor example which she sets in the area of race relations." To link their document to their purpose, the Atlanta University Center Students named their local organization the Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR).
Six days later at precisely 11:00 a.m., 200 Atlanta University Center students sat in ten downtown restaurants in city, country and federal government buildings to protest racial segregation. Seventy six students were arrested, but released when leaders of the Black community posted their bond.
After these demonstrations in March, Lonnie King and Julian Bond of Morehouse College and Marion Wright from Spelman met with Martin Luther King, Jr. and asked him to convene a meeting of the all of the student leaders in the south for the purpose of coordinating their efforts. Rev. King instructed Ella Baker, then Executive Secretary of SCLC, to arrange such a meeting. The two hundred students from across the south who participated in the meeting held at Shaw University during the spring break from April 15-17, 1960 agreed to establish the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). However, they resisted attempts by some SCLC -- although not MLK -- to get them to work under the umbrella of SCLC. Marion Barry, later to become the infamous Mayor of Washington, DC, was elected the first Chair of SNCC, Ed King was elected its first Executive Secretary and Jane Stembridge, a white student, was selected as the office secretary. For the first six months, it was the Atlanta Student movement organization, the COAHR, that paid the rent and the meager salaries of the two SNCC staff members, Ed King and Jane Stembridge.
On May 17th the AUC students led a March of a couple thousand to the state Capitol to commemorate the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Once again the President of Morehouse College tried to restrain the students. However, after being reminded of his frequent admonitions to "never sacrifice a principle for peace," Dr. Mays agreed to meet the students at the Wheat Street Baptist Church after the march.
The end of the semester had come and many of the student activists were returning home. However, in order to sustain the momentum of the movement, the Atlanta based student COAHR leaders organized demonstrations and a boycott of a major supermarket chain, Colonel Stores, to get them to hire Blacks as butchers and cash register clerks. They also began a boycott of Rich's Department Store, the largest of two department stores in Atlanta that had segregated lunch counters and refused to allow Blacks to try on clothes in their fitting rooms. They called upon the Black community to turn in their Rich's credit cards and surprisingly hundreds sent their credit cards to the student leaders, who immediately placed them in a bank vault and returned them when the store desegregated.
Each week during the summer, the students printed 20,000 copies of the their news organ, The Student Movement and You. Placed on the windshield of cars during Sunday church services, it became the principal source of information about the movement, which at that time was not being adequately covered by either the establishment or the main Negro newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World owned by old line Black Republicans. During the summer of 1960 the students were instrumental in getting the Black real estate and banking community to shift their paid advertisements from The Daily World, the conservative Black newspaper to The Atlanta Inquirer, a smaller, but more progressive paper. Rich's refused to capitulate during the summer despite the growing support for the boycott.
In September 1960, with the return of the students to the campuses, the sit-in movement resumed for sustained activities that led by September 1961 to the desegregation of all lunch counters and public accommodations in the city of Atlanta. I had been studying at the Sorbonne in Paris during the 1959-1960 academic year, but was elected in absentia as the Student Body President of Spelman College for the 1960-1961 year. As you recall, 1959-1960 was a critical year in France, for after Guinea (Conakry) had opted for independence and voted "no" to the referendum on the Vth French Constitution that would have given Francophone African territories some autonomy within the French Community, it was the eve of the independence for the other 13 territories. These were heady times. Nationalism and euphoria were rife and the African students active in FEANF became my closest friends. That year had reinforced my fascination with Africa and I realized the commonalities in our struggles, but recognized, that we, unlike they, would probably never be ever to lead the nation of our birth.
Upon returning to Atlanta in September 1960 in my capacity as Student Body President of Spelman College, I became the Co-Chair with Lonnie King of the Atlanta student movement. Thus began the second most significant and transforming year of my life. In mid-September we quietly began recruiting students for sit-in demonstrations. Each prospective demonstrator had to participate in workshops on non-violence. We read Gandhi and became steeped in civil disobedience philosophy. This time, the AUC students decided to refuse bail and remain in jail in order to dramatize our grievances and put pressure on the Atlanta prison system.
To fully understand the leap of faith this was for Spelman students, one should be aware of the extraordinary social restrictions imposed on Spelman women. We lived on a campus surrounded by barbed wire and had to be within the gates by 8:00 p.m. Gentleman callers were only allowed in the salons of the residence halls from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. and even seniors could only go out on dates with an adult chaperone. No student was allowed to spend the night off campus without written permission from her parents.
In order to obtain maximum coverage for our demonstration, it was decided to invite Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to sit-in and go to jail with us. I was tasked to call him and he willingly agreed -- not recognizing then that an arrest on a local trespassing ordinance would violate his parole agreement from an earlier trumped up tax and automobile violation charge in Albany, Georgia. On the morning of October 19 at precisely 10:00 a.m. 76 AUC students and Rev. King, armed only with the basic toiletries we would need in jail, sat-in lunch counters in 16 private establishments in the city, such as Woolworth's, Newbury's, Rich's and Davidson Department Store. The press had been alerted around 9:00 a.m. that morning. Unlike the situation in other notorious jails in the deep south, we were not beaten or otherwise abused. Those of us placed in the Atlanta city jail were put together in one huge cell with about 25 other female prisoners, some of whom were convicted murderers. Those remanded to the state prison experienced slightly more difficult conditions. It was song and prayers that sustained us for the week of our imprisonment before we, for reasons unknown to us, were released.
While the story of our release still remains vague, it was related to pressure from the conservative Black community leaders in collusion with the white power structure, and the political opportunism related to the 1960 presidential campaign between Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Harris Wofford, a Kennedy aide and close friend of Baryard Rustin, was concerned about King's welfare and asked local officials to release him and the students. All of the released students gathered at Paschals, a Negro owned restaurant located near the AUC campuses, where leaders of the Adult Student Liaison Committee, some supportive faculty members and parents of some Atlanta based students had gathered. It was only then that we learned that MLK had not been released, but was being remanded to the prison in Albany for violating the conditions of his parole.
Deeply concerned that we had been released against our will, we launched sustained daily picketing of the main department stores and lunch counters in support of our boycott. In many ways this phase, which was unglamorous, tiring and required skilled organization, turned out to be a very critical part of the movement. Students gathered at our offices in Mt. Rushmore Church near the campus to be deployed as either "hit and counter shut-down" teams or picketers. Over several months at least 70 students were picketing every day of the week. I recall picketing Rich's on one side of the street while the Klu Klux Klan covered in their white robes marched on the other side.
While we were heckled, shoved and spat upon, unlike in Birmingham, the Atlanta police never used tear gas, bull whips or dogs to thwart the demonstrators. All students participating in the picketing were obliged to be properly dressed, to take a vow of non-violence and be polite at all times. Team leaders with walkie talkies were deployed downtown to report back to headquarters from the field activities to alert us of any unusual situations that occurred.
The level of organization, demeanor and determination of the students did prick the conscience of the Atlanta community. The Black community broadly supported the student movement. Black taxi drivers volunteered to take students free of charge to the picket lines downtown. Church women prepared sandwiches for the demonstrators and middle class Blacks provided advice and financial resources. We never had time to raise money except for special collections at Sunday services in the Black churches, who kindly allowed us to make appeals to the broader Black community.
As tensions grew and sales margins declined, the white business community urged conservative Black leaders to get the students to negotiate with city and corporate officials and call a moratorium on demonstrations. Although we agreed to do so reluctantly, it soon became clear that our white adversaries had no intention of acceding to our demands to desegregate, but merely hoped to defuse the movement. City, corporate and police officials were placing pressure on the College Presidents, the Black ministers and parents of the students who taught in the Atlanta public school system or worked in any government offices.
In early 1961, the students broke off negotiations and resumed sit-ins and arrests without bail in February. After it was clear that the students could not be talked into a deal negotiated by white leaders and their black surrogates, city and Chamber of Commerce officials reluctantly agreed to desegregate the lunch counters, theaters and all public accommodations in September 1961 when they planned to begin school desegregation. This commitment was honored and by the fall, after eighteen months of demonstrations, Atlanta removed all of its discriminatory ordinances for public accommodations and dropped all trespassing charges against the students.
The Freedom Rides and SNCC Activities in the Deep South
With the desegregation of most of the lunch counters promised or in effect in most areas, except the deep south, by late 1961 the student movement under the leadership of SNCC turned to this violent and dangerous area of redoubt. The deep South was our Southern Africa, not because so many resources were at stake, but because Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Georgia were among the poorest, least well educated, non-industrialized areas of our country with high concentrations of Black populations that still depended upon cheap, pliant Black labor.
The violent reaction of whites in Alabama and Mississippi to the Freedom Rides which began in Washington, DC on May 1, 1961 marked the opening of a new chapter in the civil rights movement. This phase involved more militant activism in response to the greater brutality of the deep south. The Congress of Racial Equality initiated the Freedom Rides. They had first organized Freedom Rides in cooperation with the Fellowship of Reconciliation organization in 1947 to test the Supreme Court Decision to end discrimination in inter-state travel. In 1961 the Supreme Court extended desegregation from carriers to the passenger terminals in the Boynton Case and CORE wanted to test the south's adherence to this decision. James Farmer, then head of CORE, issued a call on March 13th for a Freedom Ride -- and on May 1, 1961, 13 participants, 7 blacks and 6 whites, including Farmer, James Peck, a white activist who had participated in the 1947 Freedom Rides, George Smith, a recent Yale Law School graduate who currently is a judge in New York, and John Lewis, signed up. The group was split between Greyhound and a Trailways bus and they left Washington, DC to travel through the south to New Orleans to test desegregation of bus passenger terminals.
On Sunday May 11, the Greyhound bus left Atlanta without incident. But just outside Anniston, Alabama its tires were slashed and it was surrounded by a mob. Then an incendiary device thrown through the windows set the bus on fire. Twelve passengers were briefly hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Undaunted and determined to complete their journey to New Orleans, the riders soon reassembled and took another bus heading south to Birmingham, Alabama. The Trailways bus arrived later in Anniston and James Peck and a Morehouse College student Charles Person were brutally beaten with fists and pipes by a white mob and had to be hospitalized. Although the Freedom Rides had been widely publicized, the local police were either absent or inactive during such violence. The brutality of these attacks merely stiffened the resolve of the students and other activists who streamed into the south on Freedom rides in May, June and July. By the end of the summer 300 freedom riders had been arrested in Jackson Mississippi. Among those who joined the freedom rides were Diane Nash and Ruby Doris Smith of SNCC, the late Stokely Carmichael and Bill Mahoney from Howard University. Stokely and others were arrested in Mississippi and spent 49 days in the infamous Parchment jail.
It was around this time that Tim Jenkins, a Black Howard University student who had been elected President of the National Student Association, came to Atlanta and tried to convince SNCC to focus on voter registration campaigns. Reminiscent of the positions earlier voiced by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, the SNCC leaders were suspicious. The Field and Taconic Foundations had promised financial support if Tim could refocus SNCC activities on voter registration. While Jenkins recognized that the Justice Department wanted to moderate the student activism, he also understood that they also knew it was easier to intervene in federal courts for injunctive relief against state and local governments who inhibited the right to vote. This proposal led to a split in the SNCC and it was finally decided that they would undertake a two pronged approach with Diane Nash coordinating direct action in the deep south and Charles Jones administering the voter registration campaigns. Thus began in earnest SNCC's and SCLC's field activities in Mississippi, Alabama and South Georgia. In 1962 the civil rights organizations formed the Council of Confederated Organizations (COFO) to prevent conflict over Voter Education Program funds and coordinate their efforts. SNCC provided the personnel and most of the resources for COFO's operation. Bob Moses of SNCC became the Director. David Dennis of CORE was his assistant and Aaron Henry of the Mississippi NAACP was elected President.
It is beyond the scope of this presentation to provide a detailed analysis of this most brutal and violent phase of the civil rights struggle. Concerned about the toll of violence and searching for a new approach to the struggle, in 1966-1967 Martin Luther King began to focus on economic justice and decrying the war in Vietnam and colonialism in Africa. His quest for economic justice took him to the white ethnic suburbs of Cicero outside of Chicago where he faced even greater hatred and opposition than in parts of the deep south. Clearly the move from a racial to a broader class approach to oppression ruffled many private and official feathers. The FBI surveillance and wiretapping of King increased and stories of liaisons with women were leaked to the press to discredit him. It was his effort to breathe life into the poor peoples campaign in Memphis that led to King's death in March 1968.
It is clear that Blacks were virtually never the perpetrators of violence, but were too often its victims. We grew to truly understand the popular saying of the time, that "freedom wasn't free." The bombing of the church in Birmingham that killed three young girls, the murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the abhorrent torture and murder of four black and white civil rights workers during the COFO sponsored Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 were an exorbitantly high, but perhaps necessary, price to pay to attract 100,000 people to the March on Washington in 1963 and to gain the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
By the mid-1970s, as was the case in the Post-Reconstruction period after the civil war in the mid-1870s, public opinion began to see Blacks no longer as the victims but the victimizers. The first chip in the armor was the Supreme Court decision in the Baake case, which held that failure to admit Baake into law school because of preferential admission policies for Negroes violated the XIVth amendment of the Constitution.
The brutal experiences in the deep south and the assassination of Malcolm X and the subsequent killing of Martin Luther King in the late sixties radicalized the Black community. In 1965 Stokely Carmichael called for "Black Power." This movement manifested itself in three main ways: the militant activism of the Black Panther Party and the "burn baby burn" anomic violence that hit many large cities in the nation following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in March 1968. The second reaction was "cultural nationalism," whereby Blacks identified with Africa, changed their names, wore dashikis and created a spate of angry, yet exciting literature. A third response was to seek a separate state for Blacks in America. Throughout the seventies, Black students demanded Black studies programs and the universities and an end to the heretofore Eurocentric curricula. Black caucus and splinter groups emerged in many professional associations. You may recall that Black Africanists took over the platform at the African Studies Association meeting in Montreal in 1971, unfortunately at the time the senior statesman Gabriel d'Arboussier, former Governor-General of Afrique Occidentale Francaise (AOF) in Senegal was speaking, much to the consternation of the Ngritude poet, Leon Damas, who was then teaching at Howard University.
If the 1980s were considered the lost decade for development in the third world, it was also a period of overt racism and erosion of the gains made by Blacks in the late sixties and early seventies in America. By the mid-1990s affirmative action programs related to jobs, university admissions and government contracts were being dismantled in both the private and public sectors.
At the end of the 1990s, we the veterans of the sit-in movement in Atlanta are in the process of taking stalk of the progress made, or lack thereof, over the past 4 decades as we prepare for the 40thanniversary commemorative events. We are drafting a Second Appeal that will cover much of the same ground as the one published in March 9, 1960 with two new sections on affirmative action and environmental justice. Our research has revealed continuing, stark racial inequalities. - While considered the most progressive city in the south, a recent study found that Atlanta is the most segregated city in our nation.
- Seventy percent white and thirty percent black at the time of the 1960s civil rights movement, the city is now more than 70 percent black as whites fled to the suburbs. Public schools have been re-segregated because of residential separation.
- A disproportionately high number of blacks have been incarcerated for crack possession, despite the fact that more whites use cocaine, for which lower sentences are given in our criminal justice system. Although African Americans represent only around 13 percent of the population, they account for 50 persons presently incarcerated.
- Police brutality against blacks is at an all time high and hate crimes are escalating.
- A majority of black children are born to female headed households, a reality that predisposes them to higher levels of poverty.
Conclusion
As we enter a new century, African Americans must adopt new paradigms to address the reality of continuing racial inequality in the United States. While admitting that important progress has been made, much remains to be done. However as a Black preacher from the deep south said during the movement, "we ain't where we wanna be, we ain't where we gonna be, but thank God, we ain't where we were."
Courtesy of The U.S. Department of State's Office of International Information
Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes
Photo Celebration of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday 2003
Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday 2004
Martin Luther King Jr.. 2003 Presidential Proclamation
Martin Luther Jr. Famous Speeches
The Death of Martin Luther King Jr. - A Sad Day For America!Page 2
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