The civil rights movement continues its march (2023)

For many people inspired by the victories ofBrown v. Board of Educationand the Montgomery bus boycott, the glacial pace of progress in the segregated South was frustrating, if not intolerable. In some places, such as Greensboro, North Carolina, local NAACP chapters were influenced by whites who provided funding for the organization. This help, along with the belief that stronger reform efforts would only increase white resistance, persuaded some African-American organizations to pursue a "policy of containment" rather than trying to radically alter the status quo. However, the inspirational appeal of Martin Luther King Jr. for peaceful change in the city of Greensboro in 1958 planted the seeds for a more assertive civil rights movement.

On February 1, 1960, four sophomores at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro (Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, and Franklin McCain) entered the Woolworth premises and sat down at the cafeteria counter. The cafeteria counter was segregated and they were denied service as they knew it would be. They had specifically chosen Woolworth's because it was a national chain and therefore considered especially vulnerable to negative publicity. In the following days, more protesters joined the four sophomores. The hostile whites responded with threats and insulted the students by throwing sugar and ketchup on their heads. The successful six-month demonstration in Greensboro launched the student phase of the African American civil rights movement, and within two months the demonstration had spread to fifty-four cities in nine states.

In the words of civil rights activist Ella Baker, Woolworth students wanted more than a hamburger; the movement they helped launch was about empowerment. Baker pushed for a "participatory democracy" that relied on the popular campaigns of active citizens rather than yielding to the leadership of educated and expert elites. As a result of her actions, in April 1960, theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)formed to continue the battle. Within a year, more than 100 cities had desegregated at least some public places in response to student-led protests. Sit-ins have inspired other forms of non-violent protest aimed at disrupting public spaces. "Rooms" occupied motel lobbies, "readings" filled public libraries, and churches became places of "prayers."

Students also participated in the 1961 “freedom rides” sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SNCC. The intent of the African-American and white volunteers who conducted these southbound bus trips was to test the enforcement of a US Supreme Court ruling banning segregation in interstate transportation and to protest segregated waiting at southern terminals. Leaving Washington, DC, on May 4, the volunteers headed south on buses that defied the Jim Crow seat segregation order. Whites rode in the back, African Americans sat in the front, and at other times, cyclists of different races shared the same seat. The Freedom Riders encountered little difficulty until they reached Rock Hill, South Carolina, where John Lewis, a Freedom Rider who later became president of SNCC, was severely beaten by a mob. The danger increased as passengers continued through Georgia towards Alabama, where one of the two buses was set on fire outside the town of Anniston. The second group continued on to Birmingham, where passengers were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan as they tried to disembark at the city's bus station. The remaining volunteers made their way to Mississippi, where they were arrested when they tried to desegregate Jackson's bus terminal waiting rooms.

Popular efforts by people like the Freedom Riders to change discriminatory laws and longstanding racist traditions became better known in the mid-1960s. The upcoming centenary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation spawned the slogan "Free for the 63" among activists of civil rights. As African Americans have increased their calls for full rights for all Americans, many civil rights groups have changed their tactics to reflect this new urgency.

Perhaps the most famous of the civil rights-era demonstrations was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held in August 1963, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Their aim was to pressure President Kennedy to keep his promises regarding civil rights. The date was the eighth anniversary of the brutal racist murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. As the crowd gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial and spilled onto the National Mall, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his most famous speech. In "I Have a Dream", King called for an end to racial injustice in the United States and envisioned a harmonious, integrated society. The speech marked the high point of the civil rights movement and established the legitimacy of its goals. However, it did not stop white terrorism in the South, nor did it permanently support nonviolent civil disobedience tactics.

Other meetings of civil rights activists ended tragically, and some demonstrations were aimed at provoking a hostile response from whites and thus revealing the inhumanity of Jim Crow laws and their supporters. In 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by Martin Luther King Jr. organized protests in about 186 cities in the south. However, the campaign in Birmingham that began in April and lasted until the autumn of 1963 attracted more attention when a peaceful protest was met with violence by the police, who attacked demonstrators, including children, with fire hoses and dogs. The world watched in horror as innocent people were assaulted and thousands arrested. King himself was arrested on Easter Sunday 1963 and, in response to the white clergy's pleas for peace and patience, wrote one of the most significant documents of the struggle: "Letter from a Birmingham Jail". In the letter, King argued that African Americans had patiently waited for over three hundred years to receive the rights that all human beings deserved; waiting time is over.

Some of the greatest violence during this era was directed at those trying to register African Americans to vote. In 1964, SNCC, working with other civil rights groups, started its Mississippi Summer Project, also known as Freedom Summer. The goal was to register African American voters in one of the most racist states in the country. Volunteers also built “freedom schools” and community centers. SNCC invited hundreds of mostly northern, middle-class white students to help with homework. Many volunteers were harassed, beaten and arrested, and African-American homes and churches were burned. Three civil rights defenders, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were killed by the Ku Klux Klan. That summer, civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Robert Parris Moses formally organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. However, the organizers of the Democratic National Convention allowed only two MFDP delegates to attend and were limited to non-voting observer roles.

The vision of blacks and whites working together peacefully to end racial injustice was dealt a severe blow by the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968. King had gone there to support health workers. They were trying to unionize. In the city, he found a divided civil rights movement; older activists who supported his nonviolent policy were being challenged by younger African Americans who advocated a more militant approach. On April 4, King was shot and killed while standing on his motel porch. Within hours, cities across the country erupted into violence as angry African Americans, shocked by his murder, burned and looted inner-city neighborhoods across the country. While whites recoiled in fear and dismay at news of the riots, they also criticized African Americans for destroying their own neighborhoods; they failed to realize that most of the violence was directed against non-Black businesses that treated African American customers with distrust and hostility.

The violent episodes that accompanied the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. they were the latest in a series of urban riots that have rocked the United States since the mid-1960s. Between 1964 and 1968, there were 329 riots in 257 cities across the country. 🇧🇷 In 1964, riots broke out in Harlem and other African American neighborhoods. In 1965, a traffic stop triggered a chain of events that culminated in riots in Watts, an African-American neighborhood in Los Angeles. Thousands of businesses were destroyed, and by the time the violence ended, thirty-four people had been killed, mostly African Americans killed by Los Angeles police and the National Guard. More riots occurred in 1966 and 1967.

Frustration and anger were at the heart of these interruptions. Despite Great Society programs, good health care, employment opportunities, and safe housing were sorely lacking in urban African American neighborhoods in cities across the country, even in the North and West, where discrimination was less obvious but equally paralyzing. In the eyes of many protesters, the federal government was unable or unwilling to end their suffering, and most existing civil rights groups and their leaders were unable to achieve meaningful results regarding racial justice and equality. Disillusioned, many African Americans turned to those who had more radical ideas about how best to achieve equality and justice.

Within the chorus of voices calling for integration and legal equality, many were those who called most vehemently for empowerment and, therefore, supportedBlack Power🇧🇷 Black Power meant a variety of things. One of the most famous users of the term was Stokely Carmichael, president of SNCC, who later changed its name to Kwame Ture. For Carmichael, Black Power was the power of African Americans to come together as a political force and create their own institutions beyond those dominated by whites, an idea first suggested in the 1920s by political leader and orator Marcus Garvey. Like Garvey, Carmichael became an advocate ofblack separatism, arguing that African Americans should live separately from whites and work out their problems on their own. Following this philosophy, Carmichael expelled white members from SNCC. He left SNCC in 1967 and later joined the Black Panthers (see below).

Long before Carmichael started championing separatism, the Nation of Islam, founded in 1930, championed the same. In the 1960s, its most famous member was Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little. The Nation of Islam advocated for the separation of white Americans and African Americans due to the belief that African Americans could not thrive in an atmosphere of white racism. Indeed, in a 1963 interview, Malcolm X, discussing the teachings of the head of the Nation of Islam in America, Elijah Muhammad, referred to white people as "demons" more than a dozen times. Rejecting the nonviolent strategy of other civil rights activists, he argued that violence against violence was appropriate.

In 1964, after a trip to Africa, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam to found the Organization for African American Unity with the aim of achieving freedom, justice and equality "by all means necessary". His views on black-white relations changed somewhat after that, but he remained strongly committed to the cause of African-American empowerment. On February 21, 1965, he was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam. Stokely Carmichael later recalled that Malcolm X provided an intellectual foundation for Black nationalism and gave legitimacy to the use of violence to achieve Black Power's goals.

Unlike Stokely Carmichael and the Nation of Islam, most Black Power advocates did not believe that African Americans needed to separate themselves from white society. The Black Panther Party, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, believed that African Americans were victims of both capitalism and white racism. Consequently, the group embraced Marxist teachings and called for jobs, housing and education, as well as protection from police brutality and exemption from military service in its Ten Points Program. The Black Panthers also patrolled the streets of African American neighborhoods to protect residents from police brutality, but they sometimes beat and killed those who disagreed with their cause and tactics. His militant attitude and advocacy of armed self-defense appealed to many young people, but it also led to many run-ins with the police, sometimes including arrests and even shootings, such as those that occurred in Los Angeles, Chicago and Carbondale, Illinois. 🇧🇷

Black Power's philosophy of self-empowerment influenced major civil rights groups such as the National Organization for Reconstruction for Economic Growth (BLACK), which sold bonds and operated a clothing factory and construction company in New York, and the Center for Opportunities Industrialization in Philadelphia, which provided job training and placement - by 1969 had branches in seventy cities. Black Power was also part of a much larger process of cultural change. The 1960s was a decade not only of Black Power but also ofblack pride🇧🇷 African-American abolitionist John S. Rock coined the phrase "Black Is Beautiful" in 1858, but by the 1960s it had become an important part of the African-American community's efforts to increase self-esteem and promote pride in ancestors. Africans. Black Pride urged African Americans to reclaim their African heritage and, to promote group solidarity, replace African and African-inspired cultural practices, such as handshakes, hairstyles, and clothing, with white practices. One of the many cultural products of this movement was the popular television music programsoul train, created by Don Cornelius in 1969, which celebrated black culture and aesthetics.

The African American attempt at full citizenship was arguably the most visible of the civil rights battles that took place in the United States. However, other minority groups who had been legally discriminated against or denied access to economic and educational opportunities began to increase efforts to secure their rights in the 1960s. Like the African American movement, the Mexican American civil rights movement gained his first victories in federal courts. In 1947, inMendez x Westminster, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the segregation of children of Hispanic descent was unconstitutional. In 1954, the same year thatBrown v. Board of Education, Mexican-Americans prevailed inHernández v. Texas, when the United States Supreme Court extended Fourteenth Amendment protections to all ethnic groups in the United States.

The most visible struggle of the Mexican-American civil rights movement was waged by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta in the fields of California to organize migrant rural workers. In 1962, Chávez and Huerta founded the National Association of Agricultural Workers (NFWA). In 1965, when Filipino grape pickers led by Filipino-American Larry Itliong went on strike to draw attention to their plight, Chávez lent his support. Workers organized by the NFWA also went on strike, and the two organizations merged to form the United Farm Workers. When Chávez urged American consumers to boycott grapes, politically aware people across the country heeded his plea, and many union dockers refused to unload shipments of grapes. In 1966, Chávez led striking workers to the state capital in Sacramento, further publicizing the cause. Martin Luther King Jr. telegraphed words of encouragement to Chávez, calling him "brother." The strike ended in 1970 when California farmers recognized the right of farm workers to unionize. However, the farmers didn't get everything they wanted and the biggest fight wasn't over.

The equivalent of the Black Power movement among Mexican Americans was the Chicano Movement. Proudly adopting a derogatory term for Mexican Americans, Chicano activists demanded greater political power for Mexican Americans, an education that recognized their cultural heritage, and the restoration of lands taken from them at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. One of the founding members, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, launched the Crusade for Justice in Denver in 1965 to provide Mexican-Americans with jobs, legal services, and health care. Out of this movement emerged La Raza Unida, a political party that attracted many Mexican-American college students. Elsewhere, Reies López Tijerina has struggled for years to recover lost and illegally expropriated ancestral lands in New Mexico; he was one of the co-sponsors of the March of the Poor on Washington in 1967.