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(1.) From Juneteenth to the Tulsa massacre: What isn’t taught in classrooms has a profound impact. Educators said the history of systemic racism in this country and the contributions of Black people have been erased. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/juneteenth-tulsa-massacre-what-isn-t-taught-classrooms-has-profound-n1231442

(2.) Racism in America: Resources to Help You Understand America’s Long History of Injustice & Equality. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/08/understanding-racism-inequality-america/?arc404=true

(3.) Reparations for Slavery. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2019082300

Prepare a speech that would explain to all of America why African American History from after Reconstruction to the present should be taught.

Explain why every American should know African American history. You will be expected to use specific facts, events and people that you have learned from this course.

ALL LINKS AND ATTACHMENTS have to be incorporated in to the speech using in text citations

600 words minimum

poverty

CHAPTER

We Changed the World

1 9 4 5 _ 1 9 7 0

Vincent Harding

Robin D. C. Kelley

Earl Lewis

ear the end of the Second World War, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., one of
black America’s most internationally conscious spokesmen, tried to place
the ongoing African-American freedom movement into the context of

the anticolonial struggles that were rising explosively out of the discontent of the
nonwhite world. Already, movements for independence had begun in British
colonies in West Africa and French colonies in West and Equatorial Africa. Later,
colonies in North Africa and British East Africa joined the freedom struggle.
Powell, who was both a flamboyant and effective congressman from Harlem and
the pastor of that community’s best-known Christian congregation, the Abyssinian
Baptist Church, declared:

The black man continues on his way. He plods wearily no longer—he is
striding freedom road with the knowledge that if he hasn’t got the world in
a jug, at least he has the stopper in his hand He is ready to throw him-
self into the struggle to make the dream of America become flesh and blood,
bread and butter, freedom and equality. He walks conscious of the fact that
he is no longer alone no longer a minority.

Although they might not have been able to express it in Powell’s colorful lan-
guage, many black Americans were quite aware of the changes taking place. There
were glaring differences, for instance, between where they grew up in the South
and the Northern cities where they were trying to establish themselves for the first
time.

Most of the new arrivals realized that the North was not heaven, but they
believed that it was a place where they could escape some of the most hellish
aspects of their life in the South. For instance, they did not expect ever again to
have to see the bodies of men hanging from trees after they had been riddled with

167

To Make Our World Anew : A History of African Americans, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press
USA – OSO, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615.
Created from apus on 2021-02-23 17:48:53.

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168

To Make Our World Anew

A member of the 12th Armored Division stands guard over Nazi prisoners who were captured
by U.S. forces in 1945.

bullets and often mutilated. They did not expect that women would be vulnerable
to rape and exploitation simply because they were black and defenseless. In the
Northern cities they did not expect to have to teach their children to move out of
the path when white people were approaching.

Blacks also migrated to the West and settled in cities such as Los Angeles and
Seattle. One of the most exciting gifts that these new locales offered was the oppor-
tunity for black people to vote as free men and free women for the first time in
their lives. Registering to vote in Philadelphia, Detroit, or Oakland did not mean
risking your life and the lives of your family, risking your job or your home. In
those postwar years, black people took significant advantage of this new freedom
and became voters in even larger proportions than white Southerners who had
migrated North. As a result, black voters in some Northern cities like Chicago and
New York held the balance of power in close municipal elections.

This new political involvement brought with it another change. In most of the
Northern cities where the black Southerners settled, the political structures were
largely dominated by the Democratic party. Generally, the men who controlled
these tightly organized political machines were eager to add the newly arrived
black people to their voting tallies as long as they thought they could control their
votes. And, in fact, millions of African Americans eventually broke away from their
generations-long allegiance to the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, the Great

We Changed the World 169

Emancipator. Ironically enough, this transfer of allegiance meant that Northern
blacks were now aligned with the same Democratic party that had long been dom-
inated on the national scene by the white racist sons of the slaveholders, men who
kept their control of the party largely through terrorist acts to deny black voting
rights in the South. In the North, black voters were now part of that Democratic
party structure and were in a position to begin to challenge its worst traditions.

Despite such rewards as finding better jobs and educational opportunities, and
gaining the right to vote, this liberating movement into the Northern cities carried
some clear penalties. Racism lived in many white urban neighborhoods and post-
war suburbs. The rising black middle class, anxious to buy property in a “nice”
neighborhood with good schools and efficient services, often bumped up against a
threatening white mob and its racist rhetoric. Sometimes white resistance to black
neighbors turned deadly. In Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and several other cities
(in both the North and the South), newly purchased homes were burned, vandal-
ized, or had crosses burned on their lawns—a common tactic adopted by white
supremacist organizations, notably the Ku Klux Klan.

Of course, there were real estate agents and white residents who insisted that
their form of segregation was not racist but driven by economic realities. They
claimed to have nothing against black people but were simply worried about their
homes declining in value. Sadly, their arguments were tacitly backed by the feder-
al government, notably the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the agency
that insured homeowners’ loans to low-income Americans and set housing stan-
dards. Indeed, after the Second World War, the FHA refused to provide mortgages
to blacks moving into white neighborhoods and claimed that African Americans
were regarded as poor risks for loans. The FHA also claimed that the future value
of homes owned by blacks was uncertain.

Most of the new migrants could not afford to buy homes immediately, espe-
cially in the sprawling suburbs. No matter where they ended up, however, primar-
ily the inner areas of urban centers like Chicago and Detroit, they sought to create
the rich sense of community they had left behind. For even in the midst of harsh
white oppression and poverty, black people, nurtured by their extended families
and by their churches, had managed to build astonishing reservoirs of love, faith,
and hope in the South. Such support was not readily available in the North.

Reflecting on his own Harlem childhood in Nobody Knows My Name (1961),
James Baldwin caught some of the perplexing dilemma of a city block in the long-
anticipated “Promised Land” of the North.

They work in the white man’s world all day and come home in the evening
to this fetid block. They struggle to instill in their children some private
sense of honor or dignity which will help the child to survive. This means,
of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense
alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifference, and the cruelty

170 To Make Our World Anew

they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat
the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands
prodigious patience, nor is patience usually enough Such frustration so
long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and women whose
only crime is color to the very gates of paranoia….

It required the sensitivity and skills of gifted artists to capture the complexities
of the changes that millions of black women, men and children were experiencing
in their movement North. Baldwin was only one of the writers who tried to explain
that complexity to the world. Ann Petry provided a painfully honest account of
a young woman’s encounter with the Northern urban reality in her novel The
Street. Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man reflected the humor, anger, hope,
and the search for new beginnings that the urban experience represented for the
transplanted black Southerners. Ellison’s protagonist discovers a major difference
between the South and the North when he first arrives in Harlem and begins to
mingle with the evening crowds who have gathered to listen to the street-corner
teachers and lecturers. Most of the rousing speeches eventually turn to the injus-
tices of white people against people of color at home and abroad, and the young
man in the novel, who has come North from Alabama, says, “I never saw so many
Negroes angry in public before.”

The expanding ability to be angry in public was a major part of the change that
black people found in the North. In his novels, short stories, and essays, Richard
Wright, who had originally gone to Chicago from Mississippi in the twenties,
expressed this anger and its consequences more vividly and consistently than any-
one else in his novel Native Son (1940).

Still, there were emotions and experiences that could never be captured by the
written word. The music surging out of black communities became a powerful
vehicle for communicating these feelings. The blues that had come up with the
solitary old guitars from Memphis and the Mississippi Delta took on the new elec-
tricity and complexity of the cities, eventually becoming the music of small com-
bos and big bands, pressing on toward what would soon be known as rhythm and
blues. At the same time, out of the familiar settings of classic African-American
jazz, piercing new sounds began to break through, offering unexpected, unre-
solved, and often jagged tonal edges in place of the smoother flows of the music
from which it sprang. This was called “bebop” or “bop” for short. The names of its
practitioners—Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie (“Yardbird”) Parker,
and the young Miles Davis—and the boldness of their lifestyles soon became as
well known in the black community and among white jazz fans as their predeces-
sors Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, and Coleman Hawkins.

Whatever else bop was, it was the music of change. Everything in it sounded
protest, marked a determination to break out of the older, predictable harmonies.
Based in places like Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, the 52nd Street jazz strip fur-

We Changed the World 171

ther downtown in New York City, and Los Angeles’s famed Central Avenue, the
irrepressible music grew out of the urgency of a postwar generation to sing its new
songs, to wail and scream when necessary.

Nowhere were the songs more important than in the thousands of black
churches in the Northern cities. Following the lead of vibrant women vocalists
such as Mahalia Jackson, Sallie and Roberta Martin, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe,
supplied with a stream of songs by the prolific gospel songwriter Rev. Thomas A.
Dorsey, the churches were filled with resounding, rhythmic witness to the new
time, as gospel singers shouted, “There’s been a great change since I been born.”

In the decade following the Second World War, more than sixty percent of the
black population was still living in the South, however. And the nation’s attention
focused on that region as the African-American community won a series of signif-
icant battles in the courts and at the executive level of the federal government. In
1946, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was uncon-
stitutional. Two years later, the Court outlawed the use of “restrictive covenants”—
codicils added on to a deed to limit the sale of a home to specific racial groups.
Restrictive covenants were generally used to keep African Americans from buying
homes in all-white neighborhoods. Although these gains were long overdue, they
were partial outgrowths of national and international circumstances that forced
President Harry S. Truman and the Democrats to pay attention to blacks.

First, Truman, his cabinet, and Congress were all concerned about America’s
image abroad, especially now that the United States was competing with the Soviet
Union for influence over the new nations in Asia and Africa, for example, created
by the collapse of European colonialism. They could not promote their version of
democracy abroad as long as the United States treated its own black citizens so
badly. Second, Truman’s reelection in 1948 depended on black votes more than
ever. This time around, the Democratic party was in utter disarray. On one side
stood former Vice President Henry Wallace, who decided to run for president as a
member of the newly formed Progressive party. Wallace was highly regarded in the
black community; his civil rights record was impeccable, and he sought to bring
the Cold War with the Soviet Union to an end through cooperation rather than
military threats.

On the other side were the Southern Democrats led by South Carolina senator
Strom Thurmond. Their break from the Democrats further divided the vote, cre-
ating a situation in which black voters would have a decisive role in the elections.
Calling themselves the States’ Rights party (also known as the Dixiecrats), these
Southern Democrats believed Truman’s civil rights agenda had gone too far.

Because Truman had to respond to African-American and international pres-
sure, he and his cabinet contributed to the Southern white flight from the Demo-
cratic party. The main catalyst was Truman’s decision to create the first Civil Rights
Commission. The commission’s report, To Secure These Rights (1947), proposed
some specific ways in which the federal government might respond to the demands

172 To Make Our World Anew

of the postwar black community. For example, the report called for the establish-
ment of a permanent federal civil rights commission—a bold and progressive pro-
posal in those days. The report urged an end to segregation in the U.S. armed
forces and pressed for laws to protect the voting rights of black people.

To Secure These Rights provided solid evidence to black people that their needs
were finally being dealt with at the highest level of U.S. political life. Meanwhile,
almost every year in the crucial postwar decade seemed to produce new, affirming
responses from the federal courts to the dozens of challenges to segregation and
disenfranchisement that the NAACP and thousands of black plaintiffs were press-
ing in the courts.

One of the most important of these cases, Morgan v. Virginia, was heard by the
U.S. Supreme Court in 1946. Irene Morgan had firmly refused to move to the back
of a Virginia-to-Baltimore Greyhound bus, as Virginia law required. She was con-
victed of a misdemeanor. The Court declared that the practice of segregated seat-
ing in interstate public transportation was unconstitutional and that black people
traveling across state lines could not be legally forced into segregated rear seats
when they arrived in a Southern state. The “back of the bus” experience was one of
the most humiliating and widely known manifestations of legalized white
supremacy, so word of the decision was welcomed in the nation’s black communi-
ties. Irene Morgan became a hero among black Americans. But a Supreme Court
decision did not guarantee change. Neither the bus companies nor the Southern
states leaped to comply with the ruling. So others had to take up Irene Morgan’s
initiative and move it forward.

That was precisely what happened in the spring of 1947 when a group of sixteen
men, evenly divided between black and white, began what they called a Journey of
Reconciliation. The trip was organized by a Chicago-based interracial organization
known as the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. A relatively new offshoot from
the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—a Christian pacifist organization, found-
ed during the First World War, that advocated nonviolent social change through
civil disobedience—CORE was deeply committed to nonviolent direct action. Its
members took inspiration from the spirit of the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma
Gandhi in their quest for racial justice and reconciliation. At the same time, with
the black members of the team sitting in front and the whites in back of the two
Greyhound and Trailways buses that they rode from Washington, D.C., to stops in
Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, they were testing compliance with the
recent Morgan decision and urging federal enforcement of the ruling. The major
immediate result of the journey was that some other black passengers felt encour-
aged to move toward the front of the buses. In one incident during the fifteen-city
trip through the South, three members of the CORE team were arrested and sen-
tenced to twenty-one days of hard labor on a North Carolina prison farm. The
Journey of Reconciliation provided the model for the later Freedom Rides in 1961.

Probably no legal victory of the immediate postwar years could match the over-
all significance of the 1944 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright. This

We Changed the World 173

decision essentially destroyed one of the major legal obstacles to black political
participation in the South—the white primaries of the Democratic party.

Earlier in the twentieth century, having claimed that their party primary voting
process was the activity of private associations, Democrats managed to exclude
African Americans from participating in this “private” activity. As a result, black
citizens were left with little voice in government, since the Southern Democratic
primaries often determined the outcome of the general elections. African
Americans refused to accept this situation, and in state after state they brought law-
suits challenging these exclusively white primaries.

In July 1940, Lonnie Smith, an African-American resident of Harris County,
Texas, was stopped from voting in the Democratic party’s primary election. Though
he met all the legal requirements to vote, Smith was forbidden to vote because of his
race. With the assistance of an NAACP legal team that included attorney Thurgood
Marshall, Smith sued election judge Allwright. Finally, in Smith v. Allwright, the
Supreme Court responded to the black challengers with a judgment outlawing the
white primary process. When that happened, everyone knew that a new era was
beginning: blacks across the South took that decision regarding the Texas primary
as a signal to expand and intensify their voter registration activity.

With the help of a ruling by a South Carolina federal judge, J. Waties Waring,
black plaintiffs won a crucial victory in that state. When South Carolina attempt-
ed to circumvent the Smith v. Allwright decision by removing all statutes relating
to primaries—on the assumption that without state involvement, the Democratic
primaries would be a private matter—George Elmore challenged the state’s move.
In the case of Rice v. Elmore (1947), Waring ruled that as long as the Democratic
primary constituted the only real election in the state, blacks were entitled to par-
ticipate in it.

In many places this was a dangerous resolve to take, especially in the rural
South’s “Black Belt”—a line of counties stretching from North Carolina to Texas,
where the flat and fertile land had been dominated by cotton plantations. There,
the legacy of plantation-based slavery had created counties where black people
outnumbered whites in proportions of three-, four-, and five-to-one—sometimes
more. The obvious implications of this human arithmetic were clearly stated by
one distressed white cotton-gin owner. Speaking to a New York Times reporter, he
tried to imagine what would happen if black people gained full access to the ballot
box in his Tennessee county: “The niggers would take over the county if they could
vote in full numbers. They’d stick together and vote blacks into every office in the
county. Why you’d have a nigger judge, nigger sheriff, a nigger tax assessor—think
what the black SOB’s would do to you.”

Ever since the days of slavery such fears were common to many white South-
erners who wondered what black people would do if the racial tables were turned.
Many whites found it easy to rally around the virulently racist rhetoric of a politi-
cian like Theodore G. Bilbo, U.S. senator from Mississippi. He voiced the fears of
many Southern whites, especially the poorer ones, when he declared that the

174 To Make Our World Anew

Second World War “and all of its great victories will not in any way or in any man-
ner change the views and sentiments of white America on the question of social
equality . . . of the negro and white race.” In a time when so much was changing,
Bilbo and his fellow white supremacists were seeking guarantees that they would
continue to dominate.

Throughout the South, white supremacists were desperate to preserve an old
world that was coming to an end. They had no intention of giving up their control
of the region and would use all legal means of undermining the constitutional
defenses on which black people increasingly depended. Many also conspired to use
illegal means, from economic coercion to acts of terrorism, to keep their black fel-
low Southerners “in their place.”

Nowhere was this new world more evident than in the ranks of the thousands
of African Americans who returned from the battlegrounds of the Second World
War. They were the ones who seemed most ready to demonstrate the truth of
Adam Clayton Powell’s statement that black people were “ready to throw [them-
selves] into the struggle to make the dream of America become flesh and blood.” A
recently discharged army corporal from Alabama spoke for many of his black com-
rades in 1945 when he declared, “I spent four years in the army to free a bunch of
Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version
of the Germans kick me around when I get home. No sirree-bob! I went into the
Army a nigger; I’m comin’ out a man.”

Among those determined to win voting rights for blacks in the South was a solid
core of veterans who felt like they had earned the right to vote after risking their
lives for democracy overseas. In 1946, brothers Charles and Medgar Evers returned
home from the war to their town of Decatur, Mississippi, determined to vote. But
they were driven away from the registrar’s desk, and one of the white men predict-
ed that there would be “trouble” if these black citizens persisted in their attempts
to register and vote. But he could never have guessed the nature of the coming
trouble. For the Evers brothers and thousands like them would return all over the
South to challenge the keepers of the old terror.

The powerful thrusts of postwar change were not confined to politics. A
remarkable change in the world of sports captured the attention of the rest of the
nation. Jackie Robinson, another veteran of the war and a baseball player with the
Kansas City Monarchs of the segregated Negro Leagues, was signed by the Brook-
lyn Dodgers in 1945. The action broke the racial barrier in major league baseball,
the “national pastime.” An outstanding athlete who had lettered in baseball, bas-
ketball, track, and football at the University of California at Los Angeles, an out-
spoken critic of America’s racial betrayals of democracy, the twenty-eight-year-old
Robinson spent a year with the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal before finally join-
ing the Brooklyn lineup in the spring of 1947. Black people were ecstatic.

The black community followed local and national developments in civil rights
by reading African-American newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, the

We Changed the World 175

Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide.
These papers were circulated through many hands in households, barbershops,
beauty parlors, churches, and restaurants. In the hands of Pullman car porters,
they found their way into the Deep South as well.

By reading the papers, black people followed the anticolonial, independence-
oriented exploits of the darker-skinned majority of the world in places like India,
Africa, and China. There were constant references to Gandhi, who had spent
decades challenging his people in India to wage a nonviolent struggle for indepen-
dence against the great British Empire that governed them. Repeatedly, the black
newspapers carried letters and editorials contending that Gandhi’s movement
offered a model for black America, especially in the South. Mordecai Johnson,
president of Howard University in Washington, D.C.; Howard Thurman, mystical-
ly oriented preacher and dean of Howard University’s chapel; and Benjamin Mays,
president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, were some of the best-known black
Americans who had made the pilgrimage to the ashrams, the humble communal
villages where Gandhi based himself.

Gandhi’s life and teaching mirrored some of the best African-American tradi-
tions. Like the nineteenth-century abolitionists David Walker and Frederick
Douglass, like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Howard Thurman,
Gandhi believed that the despised of the earth actually carried within their own
lives and history the seeds of healing transformation for themselves, their oppres-
sors, and their world. So when black Americans identified their struggle as part of
a larger, worldwide movement, it was not simply the idea “that [we are] no longer
alone” that compelled them. It was also the vision that as the rising children of
their enslaved forbears, they—like Gandhi’s masses—might have some liberating
gift to offer to the world.

While blacks were developing an understanding of worldwide repression, the
U.S. government seemed to be, in some instances, supporting that repression. On
the one hand, U.S. foreign policy appeared to link the United States with the inter-
ests and points of view of its white, Western allies, such as England, France, Portu-
gal, and white South Africa, countries still identified with colonial domination. On
the other hand, as part of the deepening Cold War against the Soviet Union, the
United States was also projecting itself as “the leader of the free world,” avowedly
concerned for the rights of oppressed people everywhere, especially people of color
who might be tempted to turn to the Soviet Union and to other socialist and com-
munist movements for assistance in their freedom struggles.

So when black leaders with socialist sympathies, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and
the politically active actor, singer, and scholar Paul Robeson, spoke out on behalf
of the nonwhite peoples and their freedom struggles, when they articulated too
positive a view of the Russian Revolution’s social and economic ambitions, when
they sharply criticized U. S. foreign and domestic policy, the U.S. government
considered them un-American and dangerous. The passports of both men were

176 To Make Our World Anew

confiscated to prevent them from traveling and speaking abroad on behalf of the
anticolonial movements and against the reign of white supremacy in America. Still,
both men continued to speak out. But the price they paid was very high. Robeson
essentially lost his lucrative concert career, and ultimately his health. Du Bois, in
the fearful climate of anticommunism in America, found himself deserted by many
people who had benefited from his decades of unstinting service to the cause of
freedom, justice, and democratic hope, and he moved permanently to Africa.

Anticommunist fervor virtually crushed these two intellectual giants, but it
could not crush the movement. In the streets and in the courts, black activists
forced the federal government to admit that segregation was wrong and must be
remedied. By 1954, it became evident to all that African Americans, like their coun-
terparts in the colonial world, would no longer wait for the birth of a new freedom.

Jim Crow Must Co!: The Road from
Brown to Montgomery

Revolutions always exact a price from their participants. People have lost their
livelihoods, lost friends and family, lost their connection to community, even lost
their lives. The movement to end segregation and press America to live up to its
creed of justice for all was no different. Nowhere was this personal cost more obvi-
ous than in the five legal cases that would force their way into the U.S. Supreme
Court and become known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education. The case
known as Briggs v. Elliott provided the legal bedrock on which the entire set of
Brown cases was built.

The setting for this initial drama was Clarendon County, South Carolina,
known for its bitter resistance to any attempts at changing the brutal traditions of
white supremacy. There, love for their children drove black parents to take the
simple but dangerous risk of confronting the school board with their children’s
need for bus transportation to their segregated school. The white children had sev-
eral buses, while the black children, who outnumbered the others, had no buses at
all. Of course, the black parents and their supporters were also aware that the all-
white school board spent more money on each white child in the county than on
each black one. What the adults had to figure out was how to deal with the rude
and repeated rebuffs from the school board and its chairman, R. W. Elliott, who
said at a meeting with black people, “We ain’t got no money to buy a bus for your
nigger children.”

Then Rev. J. A. Delaine, a local black pastor and school superintendent in
Summerton, met Rev. James A. Hinton, a regional representative for the NAACP,
at a meeting at Allen College, one of the black colleges in Columbia, about sixty
miles from Summerton. Hinton told the gathering that the NAACP was trying to
find men and women to become plaintiffs in a case that would challenge the legal-
ity of the segregated schools. Delaine knew after the meeting that he had to become
the bridge between the unrelenting but frustrated neighbor parents and the
national organization.

We Changed the World 177

Delaine and his wife worked for the school board they were suing, and both lost
their jobs. They also lost their home and their church when the buildings were
burned to the ground. Meanwhile, in Farmville, Virginia, in 1951, a courageous
sixteen-year-old high-school junior organized her fellow students to fight for equal
facilities for black schools. Under Barbara Rose Johns’s dynamic leadership, the
black students at the woefully inadequate Moton High not only went on strike but
arranged with the NAACP to file a desegregation lawsuit in their county. That suit
was eventually tied to the one initiated by Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas, on
behalf of his daughter Linda and all the black children of their city.

The Topeka school board had denied Linda Brown admission to a school just
five blocks from her home, forcing her to make a long commute across town,
because her neighborhood school was for whites only. Charles Houston and
Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund were the
attorneys for the Browns. In his Supreme Court argument, Marshall presented evi-
dence that separating black and white students placed the blacks at a great disad-
vantage. Marshall’s strategy was to force the Supreme Court to overturn the 1896
Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which upheld the legality of segregation as long as states
provided “separate but equal” facilities to African Americans. Such practices, he
said, violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal
protection of the laws. Once he was able to get the Court to overturn Plessy,
Marshall did not have to prove that facilities set aside for “colored only” were
unequal to those set aside for whites. To buttress his argument, Marshall brought
in pioneering black psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, whose research
demonstrated that African-American children in inferior, segregated schools had a
negative self-image and generally performed poorly as a result.

When the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in Brown on
Monday, May 17, 1954, it was a stunning accomplishment. All eyes focused on the
solemn announcement that “in the field of public education the doctrine of’sepa-
rate but equal’ has no place.” After more than half a century of determined strug-
gle, black people and their allies had finally turned the Supreme Court around.
Two days after Brown, the Washington Post declared, “It is not too much to speak
of the court’s decision as a new birth of freedom.”

Perhaps it was only the opening of a new chapter in the long black struggle for
authentic democracy in America. But it forced individual men and women to make
hard, exciting choices about how they would lead their own lives. In Boston,
Martin Luther King, Jr., and his new bride, the former Coretta Scott, had been fac-
ing such choices together ever since their marriage in June 1953, and his comple-
tion of the coursework for his doctorate in theology at Boston University. Soon
Coretta would complete her three years of work in music education at the New
England Conservatory of Music, and the choices they had been wrestling with were
now leading to a move from Boston to Montgomery, Alabama.

Born in Atlanta in January 1929, Martin was the beloved first son of Martin
Luther King, Sr., one of that city’s leading Baptist ministers, and his wife, Alberta

178 To Make Our World Anew

Williams King, whose father had been the founding pastor of Ebenezer Baptist
Church, the congregation now headed by King Senior. The younger King entered
Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the most respected black colleges in the
nation, when he was only fifteen. He became a popular student leader and a seri-
ous student.

When he was eighteen, not long before he graduated from Morehouse with a
B.A. in sociology, King decided to stop resisting an inner calling to the Christian
ministry. So his father proudly ordained the young man who had finally decided
that he would not take the path of law or medicine, possibilities that had intrigued
him for a while. At that point in his life young “M.L.” was often torn between the
image of ministry he saw in his father, a pietistic man with an engaging, emotion-
ally charged approach, and the one he found in Benjamin Mays, Morehouse’s pres-
ident. Mays’s combination of profound spirituality, intellect, and commitment to
social justice left a deep mark on the lives of many of his “Morehouse Men.”

Martin King, Jr., left Atlanta in 1948 to enroll at Crozer Theological Seminary
in Chester, Pennsylvania (one of the few white theological schools that accepted
more than one or two black men in each entering class). He carried with him a pro-
found sense of identity with the black church, community, and extended family
that had done so much to shape and nurture him. Although he knew that he did
not want to be the kind of preacher that his father was, King was deeply apprecia-
tive of the older man’s unwavering religious faith and his readiness to confront
racism.

So although Crozer was King’s first extended experience in an overwhelmingly
white institution, he was spiritually and mentally prepared for it. By now the young
Atlantan, whose eloquence was praised by his professors, was firmly grounded in
the way of thinking that marked the lives of many young black people in those
days. He knew that his life and career were not simply matters of personal success
and advancement. Instead, he recognized and acknowledged an inextricable con-
nection to the “cause” of black advancement, to the responsibility he bore for fight-
ing for “the uplift of the race.” King graduated from Crozer in 1951 as valedictori-
an of his class and received a coveted fellowship to pursue his doctorate at Boston
University. The decision to do doctoral work reflected King’s continuing explo-
ration of the possibility that he might somehow combine his love for academic
work with his passion for the Christian ministry.

In Boston, King was introduced to Coretta Scott, a bright, attractive young
woman who had grown up not far from Selma, Alabama. Living in the rural South
of the thirties and forties, Coretta saw many instances of violently enforced white
domination, including the beating of her father. With these disturbing memories
of the past and her own professional ambitions on her mind, Coretta King was
strongly inclined to stay out of the South. And King was attracted by invitations to
consider positions in the North. But, King later remembered, “The south, after all,
was our home. Despite its shortcomings we loved it as home….” At the same time,

We Changed the World 179

Martin and Coretta King were part of the long black Southern tradition that called
on its educated young people to work to change the South they had known.

So Coretta was neither very surprised nor very resistant when her husband
finally declared that they were going to live in the South. By the spring of 1954 King
had accepted an invitation to the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Alabama, the city known as “The Cradle of the Confederacy.” Mont-
gomery was where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the pro-slav-
ery states that seceded from the Union in 1861. By the time King began his official
tenure as pastor of Dexter’s middle-class congregation in September 1954, it was
clear that the city’s black population of close to fifty thousand was on the brink of
a new time.

Like their counterparts throughout the South, many of the most activist-ori-
ented members of Montgomery’s black population had been prodded into new
forms of organizing. For instance, the expanding, state-by-state defeat of the seg-
regated white primary system inspired the creation of a number of voter registra-
tion organizations and campaigns in Montgomery. It also encouraged a variety of
risky experiments to challenge the humiliating segregation of everyday life.

One of the most important of these experiments was the formation of the
Women’s Political Council (WPC), a well-organized group of black, middle-class
women. They developed an important telephone communications link (called a
“telephone tree” in those days) among their members, initially used for voter reg-
istration campaigns. But eventually the group expanded its concerns to other
issues faced by a black community in a white-dominated segregated city. In the
early fifties these issues ranged from black citizens’ seeking access to the public
parks that their taxes helped to maintain to the constantly vexing matter of the
harsh treatment black people received on the local buses.

It was not long before King discovered that the creative and outspoken chair-
person of the WPC, JoAnn Robinson, a faculty member at Alabama State College,
the local black college, was a member of Dexter’s congregation. He quickly recruit-
ed her to lead the church’s Social and Political Action Committee, which he had
organized. In turn, as Robinson and her conscientious group of women took their
concerns into the chambers of the Montgomery City Council, she often called on
her young pastor to go with them to add his sharp mind, eloquent voice, and pas-
sionate commitment to justice to their arguments for change.

In Montgomery, as elsewhere in the South, those black citizens demanding jus-
tice included many military veterans. The Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, pas-
tor of First Baptist Church, was one of the best known of these veterans. He had
served with the U.S. Army in Europe, then returned to study at Montgomery’s
Alabama State College and earn his master’s degree in sociology at Atlanta
University. As Abernathy later recalled of those days in Montgomery, “Many of the
older clergy were in favor of sweeping social change, but they were willing for it to
come about slowly, when white society was ready to accept it.” He also remembered

180 To Make Our World Anew

that “those of us in our twenties were less patient and less afraid of making trou-
ble. … As we talked with one another, we began saying that we were willing to help
tear down the old walls, even if it meant a genuine uprising.”

Another highly regarded veteran freedom worker who was ready for change was
E. D. Nixon, the gruff-voiced, outspoken Pullman car porter who had worked for
years with the legendary A. Philip Randolph organizing the Brotherhood of Sleep-
ing Car Porters. Now in his fifties, Nixon was probably best known for his role as
president of the Alabama branch of the NAACP and as an unrelenting campaign-
er for black citizenship rights, especially the right to vote. In his NAACP role,
Nixon was quietly and efficiently assisted by a highly respected woman in her early
forties who served as secretary to the local NAACP branch and as adviser to the
organization’s youth council. A seamstress by profession, she was named Rosa
Parks, and she turned out to be less patient than she sometimes seemed.

By 1955, it was not just Montgomery’s black pastors, NAACP members, and
community leaders who sensed with Martin and Coretta King that something
remarkable was happening. Many of the city’s ordinary black citizens recognized
that they were entering a new time.

Of course, they (and the rest of the nation, even the world) also knew about the
brutal lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was beaten and killed in
Mississippi in 1955 by two white men after Till made the mistake of speaking
familiarly to a white woman, the wife of one of the men. The black newspapers and
journals spread the word (and the photos) of the murdered teenager whose Chi-
cago upbringing had not prepared him for the proper approach to a white woman
in rural Mississippi. The papers also reported that black Congressman Charles
Diggs, Jr., of Michigan, and national NAACP officials went to Money, Mississippi,
to attend the trial of Till’s accused killers, along with Till’s mother, Mamie Till, who
helped to turn the tragedy of her son’s death into a rallying point for the Civil
Rights movement. Because she insisted on an open casket, and allowed pho-
tographs, people nationwide saw firsthand the horrors of Southern lynching.

In spite of the predictable not-guilty verdict in the Till murder case that sum-
mer, the black people of Montgomery realized they had seen signals of a new time:
In the heart of Bilbo’s Mississippi, keepers of the past had been forced to hold a
trial and to face a black member of the U.S. House of Representatives; they had
been pressed to recognize the rising power of an inflamed black community at
home and to answer hard questions from people of color and of conscience from
around the world.

For many ordinary black citizens, some of their most painful and consistently
humiliating encounters with white power and injustice took place in public, espe-
cially on city buses. In the mid-fifties the automobile had not yet become the ubiq-
uitous presence that it is now especially not for the thousands of black people in
Montgomery who earned their living as maids, cooks, janitors, porters, and the
like. High-school and college students were also part of the seventeen thousand or

We Changed the World 181

so black people who made up some seventy-five percent of the passengers on the
segregated buses. During their daily rides, blacks were relegated to the often-
crowded back area and were forbidden to take vacant seats in the forward white
section, even if no white passengers were present. Beyond this were the all-too-
common encounters with rude and hostile white bus drivers (there were no black
ones) who often called their black passengers “apes,” “niggers,” “black cows,” and
other demeaning names. Often they demanded that blacks get up and surrender
their seats to white passengers when the white section was full. Black passengers
were also required to pay their fare in front and then get off to re-board through
the rear door.

Such practices were common on the buses in cities all over the South, but that
did not make them any more palatable. In the spring of 1955 a teenaged Mont-
gomery high-school student named Claudette Colvin loudly resisted both the dri-
ver’s orders to give up her seat and the police who were called to arrest her. Colvin’s
screams and curses were not quite what leaders like Robinson and Nixon had in
mind as they searched for a case that could be used to challenge the constitution-
ality of Montgomery’s segregated seating. Their aim was to rally the black com-
munity to experiment with a brief boycott of the buses that would focus not only
on the segregated seating but on the humiliating treatment. Colvin was not the test
case they needed, but Nixon and the waiting WPC forces knew that someone else
would eventually be pressed beyond the limit and would resist. Evicted in the early
forties for sitting too far forward, Rosa Parks, who had long served as a freedom
worker, provided the opportunity that Nixon and the WPC needed.

On December 1, 1955, quiet, soft-spoken Rosa Parks did what she had to do.
After all, she was a veteran freedom worker and in many ways one of the most pre-
pared for this historic moment. During the previous decade, she had served as sec-
retary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, worked on voter-registration
campaigns, and had run the local NAACP Youth Council. Because of her earlier
challenge to bus segregation ordinances, a few bus drivers refused to stop for her.
Perhaps she remembered how right she had felt the previous summer at the
Tennessee training center for social change called Highlander Folk School, as she
talked with other black and white participants about Montgomery and what was
needed there. They talked about their South and how they might contribute to the
powerful transformation unfolding everywhere. Perhaps she remembered the
young people of her NAACP Youth Council and the models they needed.

So when a bus driver told Parks and three other black people in her row to get
up and relinquish their seats to a white man who was standing, she had to say no.
There were no shouts, no curses, no accusations, just an inwardly powerful woman
sensing the strength of her conviction and refusing to move. When, inevitably,
policemen boarded the bus and one ordered her to get up, she still had to say no,
realizing that arrest would be the next step. Rosa Parks, the magnificently proper
and respectable church member, prepared to go to jail, in a time when such people

182 To Make Our World Anew

Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, was accompanied by
NAACP activist E. D. Nixon (second from left) as she appealed her conviction.

did not go to such places. But first she responded to the policeman who asked her
why she did not obey the driver. She said, “I didn’t think I should have to.” Then
she asked the officer, “Why do you push us around?” His response may have been
the only one he could give: “I don’t know.” Yet he revealed his own entrapment in
the system: “But the law is the law, and you are under arrest.” And he took Rosa
Parks to the police station.

At the station Parks called her friend and NAACP coworker, E. D. Nixon. For the
veteran freedom worker, the shock of Parks’s arrest was immediately mixed with the
conviction that this was the test case that would challenge the city’s bus segregation
laws. After informing Parks’s husband, Raymond, and her mother, Nixon immedi-
ately contacted two local whites he knew he could depend on, Clifford and Virginia
Durr. Clifford Durr was a white lawyer in private practice, and he and Nixon went
to the station to bail out Rosa Parks. Immediately they began discussing with her the
possibility that her arrest could develop into the test case they all needed, and that
she needed to recognize the physical and economic risks this might entail. After
some hesitation on the part of her husband, Parks and her family were ready.

But history, JoAnn Robinson, and the black people of Montgomery soon over-
took those original plans. For when Robinson heard the news of Parks’s adventure

We Changed the World 183

she realized that the arrest of her friend was potentially more powerful than a legal
case. She began to use the telephone tree that her WPC had developed for its voter-
registration work, and soon dozens of black people knew that the highly respected
Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to cooperate with the humiliating bus
segregation practices that troubled them all. Working all that night and into the
next morning, Robinson managed to compose, type the stencil, and run off more
than thirty thousand mimeographed copies of a leaflet that said:

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she
refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down.
It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has
been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have
rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate.
Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand
over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will
continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This
woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every
Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t
ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can
afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except
by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take
a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all
on Monday. Please stay off all buses Monday.

That morning, Friday, December 2, with the assistance of some of her students
and WPC coworkers, Robinson blanketed the black community with the leaflets.
By then, Nixon had begun to mobilize the traditional black community leaders,
especially the ministers. It soon became clear that both his and Robinson’s best
instincts had been right: There was a powerful and positive reaction to the call for
the leaders to meet and respond both to Parks’s arrest and to Robinson’s call for a
boycott.

By that evening the local community leaders, including King, had decided to
confirm Robinson’s initiative and agreed that the next Monday, December 5, would
be the day for a one-day experimental boycott. Since that was also the day for
which Parks’s trial was scheduled, it seemed logical to call for a mass community
meeting that evening. In order to spread the word of Monday’s boycott and mass
meeting, the leadership group was depending upon another leaflet, many phone
calls, and crucially, the dozens of black church services scheduled for Sunday,
December 4. Then, when one of the leaflets got into the hands of a white employ-
er and was passed on to the Montgomery Advertiser, the city’s daily newspaper, a
great gift of publicity was handed to the planners: a Sunday-morning front-page
story on the planned boycott and mass meeting.

184 To Make Our World Anew

Of course, no one could be certain how the black community would respond to
the call. There was significant fear among the leaders, including King, that a com-
bination of apathy and fear might overwhelm the sense of righteous indignation
that people felt. Nor could anyone predict how white people, especially the more
rigid and violence-prone segregationists, would respond. All over the South, many
white men and women had been eagerly rallying to the calls of the White Citizens
Council to defend segregation by any means necessary. The local Ku Klux Klan was
also very much alive and well, carrying on its periodic marches and car caravans
through Montgomery’s black community, knowing that their reputation for lynch-
ings, beatings, and bombings was enough to drive most blacks off the streets and
porches behind the relative safety of closed doors. It was clear to blacks that there
was real physical danger involved in the simple act of not riding the buses. But for
a lot of black riders there might also be economic danger if their employers object-
ed to such black initiative and protest.

As a result, it was impossible to predict what the results of the boycott attempt
would be. The leaders of the courageous experiment felt the action would be suc-
cessful if sixty percent of the riders stayed off the buses. That cold and cloudy
morning, as Martin and Coretta King looked out their front window toward a
nearby bus stop, the uncertain victory now seemed clear. Most of the buses mov-
ing by were empty. Neither apathy nor fear had prevailed. Then, as King went out
to drive along the black community bus routes, he saw an extraordinary scene:
everywhere, black people were walking, thumbing rides, riding mules, resurrecting
old horse and buggy contraptions, taking taxis. Some older men and women were
walking more than five miles each way, at times saying, “I’m walking for my grand-
children.” Meanwhile, all the buses from the black communities were at least
ninety-five percent empty.

King recognized instinctively that more than bus seating, more than painful
memories of humiliation, even more than solidarity with Rosa Parks was at stake
here. As he said later, “A miracle had taken place. The once dormant and quiescent
Negro community was now fully awake.” At the same time, King’s own personal
awakening, inextricably tied to the rising of the people of Montgomery, was still in
process. That Monday afternoon, he gathered with twenty or so other local leaders
to assess and celebrate the overwhelming success of the almost spontaneous boy-
cott and to plan for the evening’s mass meeting. King was then surprised to find
himself—one of the youngest and newest community leaders—nominated and
elected president of the new organization that they had just brought into being at
that session, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).

The immediate task of the new MIA leaders was to build on the powerful
momentum of the one-day boycott. They decided to move rather slowly, to focus
first on the simple need for more courteous and humane treatment of black bus
riders. They also called for what Coretta King and later others ruefully described as
“a more humane form of segregation,” which would allow white riders to fill the

We Changed the World 185

buses from the front to the middle, black riders from back to middle, with no need
for anyone to have to give up a seat. They also pressed for the hiring of black dri-
vers in black neighborhoods. The new MIA leadership decided to call for black
people to continue the boycott until these changes were made.

That night at the first mass meeting at the large Holt Street Baptist Church, the
leaders immediately recognized that an extraordinary spirit was taking hold. The
crowd was so dense and animated that King and the other speakers had a hard time
pushing their way to the pulpit. One of the few white reporters on hand, Joe Azbell
of the Advertiser, was almost awestruck by the experience he witnessed, including
the consideration shown to him as a white person. The next day he wrote, “The
meeting was much like an old-fashioned revival with loud applause added It
proved beyond any doubt that there was a discipline among Negroes that many
whites had doubted. It was almost a military discipline combined with emotion.”

As the new MIA president and featured speaker, King had to decide how to posi-
tion himself in the midst of the dynamic power he had recognized among the peo-
ple since early in the morning. The twenty-six-year-old pastor later described his
struggle to figure out the correct approach:

How could I make a speech that would be militant enough to keep my peo-
ple aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor
within controllable and Christian bounds? I knew that many of the Negro
people were victims of bitterness that could easily rise to flood proportions.
What could I say to keep them courageous and prepared for positive action
and yet devoid of hate and resentment? Could the militant and the moder-
ate be combined in a single speech?

In what might be called a freedom sermon, combining the vivid preaching style
found in the black churches with the content of the freedom movement, the young
pastor set the people and their movement in their largest context that night. He
identified them “first and foremost” as American citizens, citizens who had the
right and the responsibility to protest injustice and to work for a better society. At
every point he grounded himself in the concrete experience of Montgomery’s black
people and their experiences on the buses and elsewhere in their unjust, humiliat-
ing, and segregated city. So there was constant enthusiastic and empathetic verbal
response all through his presentation, particularly when King uttered the words,
“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet
of oppression.” He pushed even further, pressing on the audience a sense of identi-
ty beyond their status as victims of oppression, declaring, “I want to say that we’re
not here advocating violence We have never done that 1 want it to be known
throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are a Christian peo-
ple We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. The
only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.” All
through that statement of their central religious identity the people shouted and

186 To Make Our World Anew

applauded, moved with King, pressed him forward even as he urged them toward
their own best possibilities. He said, “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have
been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And
now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.”

So the issue was already far beyond the buses, encompassing freedom, justice,
and equality. Calling upon the people to continue to work together for much more
than a desegregated bus seat, King set an example for the freedom movement lead-
ership. For he declared to his community:

Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future

… somebody will have to say, “There lived a race of people … who had the

moral courage to stand up for their rights And thereby they injected a

new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization.” And we’re going

to do that. God grant that we will do it before it is too late.

The excited, inspired people hardly had time to consider this grand calling to be
the bearers of new universal values when they were brought right back to the con-
crete realities of their new movement. Right there in the meeting they were called
upon to vote their approval of the proposals the MIA leadership was using as a
basis for their negotiating with the city administration and the bus company. They
were also told that private automobiles and black-owned taxis had to be volun-
teered, along with drivers, for use in a car pool that would soon become the most
highly organized element of the boycott movement. And, of course, money had to
be collected, for gas, for maintenance, and for all the other expenses connected to
the development of an essentially volunteer organization. So the marvelously ordi-
nary black men and women who were just being called upon by King to inject “a
new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization” were also being asked to
drop their hard-earned quarters and dollars into the MIA collection baskets.

The sense that something new was being born in Montgomery’s black church-
es had drawn black leaders from other parts of Alabama to the initial meeting that
night. They came from such places as Birmingham, Mobile, Tuskegee, and Tusca-
loosa, both to encourage the people of Montgomery and to gain new inspiration
for their own struggles. Still, it is quite possible that the expansion of the boycott’s
inspiring potential might have simply been confined to Alabama if its white oppo-
nents had not made a series of mistakes, mistakes based on their stubborn refusal
to realize that a new time and a new black community were emerging.

First, in the earliest attempts at negotiation, the representatives of the city and
the bus company refused to make even the slightest accommodation to the rela-
tively modest changes the MIA leadership was proposing. This stiff resistance on
the part of the white leaders helped to steel the resolve of the aroused and walking
people. Then the city commissioners inaugurated what they called a “get tough”
policy with the boycotters and their leadership. Legal harassment of the crucial
cabs and car pool, and an unjustified arrest of King for speeding were part of the

We Changed the World 187

strategy of intimidation. This was soon followed by a publicly announced decision
by all three city commissioners to join the local White Citizens Council, a slightly
more respectable version of the Klan.

Such actions only compelled black Montgomery to form a deeper resolve to stay
off the buses. Then the most important of the early opposition mistakes took place
on Monday night, January 30, 1956, almost two months into the boycott. That
night, while King was at one of the mass meetings, his wife and young child were
at home accompanied by a member of Dexter Church. The two women heard
something hit the front porch. They ran to the back room where three-month-old
Yolanda Denise was sleeping. What they had heard was a stick of dynamite landing
on the front porch, and its explosion blew a hole in the porch floor, shattered four
windows, and damaged a porch column. Running to the back had saved Coretta
King and her friend from possible injury.

Called out of the mass meeting, King arrived at his house some fifteen minutes
after the blast. There he found hundreds of angry black people, some of them
armed, milling around his front porch. After determining that his family was safe,
he came back out to address the crowd, some of whom were fiercely challenging
the chief of police and the mayor to match them gun for gun, and defiantly refus-
ing to obey police orders to disperse. “Getting tough” was obviously an approach
that had epidemic possibilities, but when King appeared he maintained an extra-
ordinary and crucial composure that transformed the situation. After assuring the
crowd that his family had not been harmed, he said,

We believe in law and order. Don’t get panicky…. Don’t get your weapons.
He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember, that is what
God said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. Be
good to them. Love them and let them know you love them.

After urging that stern and demanding post-dynamite discipline upon himself
and the crowd, pressing them to apply the tenets of their religion to the crisis of
that night, King went on to remind the quieting crowd, “I did not start this boy-
cott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman.” Then he added, “I want it to
be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped this movement
will not stop…. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.” The gathered peo-
ple responded by spontaneously breaking into song, including hymns and “My
country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.”

It was the terrorist bombing and King’s mature and challenging response to it
that effectively began to push the Montgomery story beyond the confines of the
African-American press and the local newspapers into the nation’s mainstream
mass media and into the consciousness (and consciences) of hundred of thousands
of its citizens, irrespective of color.

Meanwhile, the white defenders of Montgomery continued to misread the times
and the people with whom they were dealing. Shortly after the dynamite attack on

188 To Make Our World Anew

King’s house, a bomb was thrown into the front yard of MIA treasurer and move-
ment stalwart E. D. Nixon. Two weeks later eleven thousand white people gathered
in Montgomery for a White Citizens Council rally, where they cheered the mayor
and police chief for holding the line in the cause of bus segregation. Perhaps
encouraged by their own mass meeting, the city officials decided to ask a grand
jury to indict nearly one hundred leaders of the MIA on charges of conspiracy.
That broadside approach and the refusal of the MIA leadership to be intimidated
by it only intensified the national media interest in Montgomery and in King.

The first time that the Montgomery story appeared on the front page of the
internationally respected New York Times and New York Herald Tribune was when
these papers reported the mass meeting held the evening after the leaders were
arrested, and immediately bailed out, on the conspiracy charge. Readers around
the world were able to catch the spirit of determined, nonviolent resistance as
thousands of boycotters gathered to hear the news from the courtroom and to
stand in solidarity with their leaders. Thus the nation received King’s message:
“This is not a war between the white and the Negro but a conflict between justice
and injustice.” Expanding his vision to include the largest possible participation,
King went on, “If our victory is won—and it will be won—it will be a victory for
Negroes, a victory for justice, a victory for free people, and a victory for democra-
cy.” In a sense, there were hundreds of thousands of distant listeners as he pro-
claimed, “If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are tram-
pled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must
use the weapon of love.”

The nation began to respond in a variety of ways. The proprietor of Sadie’s
Beauty Shop in the black community of Gastonia, North Carolina, took up a col-
lection in her shop for Montgomery’s walkers. The first African-American winner
of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ralph Bunche, who served as an official of the United
Nations, wrote to praise and encourage King and the people of the movement:
“Your patient determination, your wisdom and quiet courage are constituting an
inspiring chapter in the history of human dignity.” In hundreds of black churches
across the country the combination of praying and organizing produced scenes
like the one in Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, where a collection
of four thousand dollars was taken up for Montgomery in trash cans and cake
boxes after the collection plates were filled.

This vital connection between King and Montgomery’s church-based move-
ment and the black churches throughout the country was crucial in transforming
the nation after the Second World War. Supplementing the news that came from
black newspapers and magazines like Jet, Ebony, and Sepia, as well as from the
newly attentive white-owned media, black churches served as a massive network
for information and mobilization regarding Montgomery. Other committed
groups—the skycaps at Newark Airport and some longshoremen in San Francisco,
for example—made their own contributions, sometimes just an hour’s pay.

We Changed the World 189

King and the movement attracted the attention of two of the most important
religiously based pacifist groups in the country: The Fellowship of Reconciliation
(FOR) and the American Friends Service Committee, better known as Quakers.
Many of their members had hoped and worked for a long time to see Mahatma
Gandhi’s religiously inspired organizing combined with the courageous, nonvio-
lent spirit of Jesus in the cause of racial justice and equality in the United States.
Though predominantly white, they were often joined and even led by a number of
African Americans, such as Howard and Sue Thurman, Benjamin Mays, Mordecai
Johnson, and Bayard Rustin, the radical Quaker and peace activist. Indeed, when
Montgomery broke into the mainstream news, the national chairman of the FOR
was Charles Lawrence, a 1936 Morehouse College graduate who was then teaching
sociology at Brooklyn College in New York. Lawrence, a firm, articulate, and jovial
believer in the nonviolent struggle for justice, wrote to King as soon as he saw the
newspaper reports on the post-indictment mass meeting and claimed that he
found the stories “among the most thrilling documents I have ever read.” He wrote,
“Who knows? Providence may have given the Negroes of Montgomery the historic
mission of demonstrating to the world the practical power of Christianity, the
unmatched vitality of a nonviolent loving approach to social protest.”

Inspired by such grand hopes, Lawrence and his FOR colleagues sent their
national field secretary, Glenn Smiley, on an exploratory visit to Montgomery that
winter. Smiley, a white Texan who was an ordained minister in the Southern
Methodist Church, had been involved with the Fellowship since the early forties
and had been a conscientious objector on religious grounds during the Second
World War. According to Lawrence’s instructions, Smiley’s FOR mission in
Montgomery would be “primarily that of finding out what those of you who are
involved directly would have those of us who are ‘on the outside’ do.”

Meanwhile, Rustin, one of the best-known activists in the pacifist movement,
also went independently to offer his services to King and the Montgomery strug-
gle. A personable, brilliant, nonviolent strategist and writer, Rustin did not, unfor-
tunately, stay long in Montgomery. Ironically, in the eyes of some of the MIA offi-
cers, Rustin’s past involvement with communist-related organizations and his
prior arrest for a homosexual liaison made him more of a risk than Smiley.
Nevertheless, both men helped King on what he later called his “pilgrimage to non-
violence,” introducing him to leading religious pacifists, such as Howard Thurman
and Harry Emerson Fosdick; introducing him to the classic published writings on
nonviolence, such as Fosdick’s Hope of the World; and assisting the MIA in devel-
oping its own training workshops in nonviolence. Rustin, in particular, helped
King prepare important articles on the Montgomery struggle for a number of reli-
gious journals.

By the end of the winter of 1956, as the boycott moved into its fourth month,
King’s picture had appeared on the cover of a number of national magazines, and
his name and message were familiar in many other parts of the world. He carried

190 To Make Our World Anew

the message across the nation, his powerful baritone voice reverberating in scores
of large churches, on college and university campuses, in municipal auditoriums,
at conventions of the NAACP and the National Urban League, at fraternal and reli-
gious conventions, even at a black funeral directors’ convention.

By the fall of 1956 Montgomery had become the unmistakable symbol of trans-
formation in the nation, a symbol of its African-American citizens and its
Southern-based traditions of legal segregation, white domination, and the subver-
sion of democratic hope. That symbol belonged to all the licensed practical nurs-
es, the maids and skycaps, the scholars and Nobel laureates, the prisoners, students,
artists, and pastors who would eventually create their own versions of Mont-
gomery across the nation.

By this time the Montgomery movement had also provided a crucial set of
opportunities for King and his coworkers to experiment with Gandhian nonvio-
lent action (or “passive resistance,” as King sometimes described it) on behalf of
freedom and justice. King could now announce with confidence, “We in Mont-
gomery have discovered a method that can be used by the Negroes in their fight for
political and economic equality…. We fight injustice with passive resistance
Mohandas G a n d h i . . . used it to topple the British military machine Let’s now
use this method in the United States.”

At the same time, while he increasingly referred to Gandhi, King kept returning
to his fundamental grounding in the black church experience. “The spirit of pas-
sive resistance came to me from the Bible,” he said, “from the teachings of Jesus.
The techniques came from Gandhi.” Summing up what the events in Montgomery
meant for a religiously sensitive region and nation, King continued to affirm that
“This is a spiritual movement, depending on moral and spiritual forces.”

But such a spiritual vision did not exclude the use of practical methods. For
instance, the white authorities’ unwillingness to negotiate and the continued
harassment and violence directed at the black community compelled the MIA
leaders to take their struggle into the courts. In consultation with the local and
national NAACP lawyers, the MIA initiated a legal suit to challenge the consti-
tutionality of Montgomery’s segregated bus system. They had moved far beyond
the initial quest for “a more humane form of segregation.” Now they were chal-
lenging the Jim Crow transportation system itself. The case was identified as Gayle
v. Browder (1956). And when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the black
citizens of Montgomery, it was clear the South was about to change forever.

The Court’s ruling in Gayle v. Browder was announced on November 13, 1956,
but no one knew when the official papers of notification would reach Montgomery.
The city commission refused to allow the bus company to make any changes in its
practices until the court documents actually arrived in their offices. But the people
of the movement prepared themselves for the next phase of the journey they had
begun on December 5, 1955. On the night when the Supreme Court decision was
announced, a caravan of forty cars of Klan members drove through the city’s black

We Changed the World 191

neighborhoods. But no one ran into their houses. No one pulled down the shades.
Instead, many “New Negroes” stood and watched calmly. Some even waved to the
disconcerted white-robed visitors, and soon the visitors drove away.

The next night there were two mass meetings to accommodate all the peo-
ple full of courage who had come to give thanks for the past and plan for the
future. It was natural that the MIA executive committee called on King to address
the meetings that night. Speaking at Holt Street Church, where they had begun
together, King said, “These eleven months have not all been easy…. We have lived
with this protest so long that we have learned the meaning of sacrifice and suffer-
ing. But somehow we feel that our suffering is redemptive.” Forever the teacher,
King felt that he had to encourage the people to consider what it would mean
to “press on” to their next steps “in the spirit of the movement.” For him, two
elements were crucial. One was the need to avoid arrogance as they made their vic-
torious return to the buses. Taking on a personal tone, he said to the people, “I
would be terribly disappointed if anybody goes back to the buses bragging about,
we, the Negroes, have won a victory over the white people.” Instead, King called on
them to remember the need to open both the struggle and the victory beyond
racial lines. So he said that when the legal papers finally arrived, “it will be a victo-
ry for justice and a victory for goodwill and a victory for the forces of light. So
let us not limit this decision to a victory for Negroes. Let us go back to the buses in
all humility and with gratitude to the Almighty God for making this [court] deci-
sion possible.”

Even at such a high point in their struggle, King knew that he was pressing his
people toward a fiercely demanding discipline. He said, “I know it’s hard” but keep
pushing: “the strong man is the man … who can stand up for his rights and yet not
hit back.”

King knew they were on a dangerous path. They were poised at a crucial
moment in history, a moment that required disciplined courage and disciplined
love, especially in the light of the South’s long history of violence against black
attempts to gain justice. Finally, King faced his people with the ultimate encour-
agement—his willingness to sacrifice his own life. Normally not given to this kind
of self-focus, it was a clear sign that he saw the moment as a moment of crisis, one
similar to that January night on his bombed-out porch. So he said to the visibly
moved assembly:

I’m not telling you something that I don’t live. [Someone yelled, “That’s
right!”] I’m aware of the fact that the Ku Klux Klan is riding in Mont-
gomery. I’m aware of the fact that a week never passes that somebody’s not
telling me to get out of town, or that I’m going to be killed next place I move.
But I don’t have any guns in my pockets. I don’t have any guards on my side.

But I have the God of the Universe on my side. I’m serious about that. I
can walk the streets of Montgomery without fear. I don’t worry about a

192 To Make Our World Anew

thing. They can bomb my house. They can kill my body. But they can never

kill the spirit of freedom that is in my people.

Finally, on December 20, the Supreme Court mandate made its way to
Montgomery, affirming the people and their audacious struggle. The next morn-
ing a restrained but happy group, including King, Abernathy, and Smiley, boarded
the first desegregated bus, beginning a new phase of the long journey toward free-
dom and justice for all.

Old Order, New Order

By the time the victory was won in Montgomery, the struggle had lasted for more
than a year. All along the way there were dramatic, compelling new events, bomb-
ings, indictments, rallies in other cities, and courtroom trials reminding people,
especially black people, that the Montgomery movement was alive. Black folks had
stuck together and grown together in the longest sustained campaign for justice
that the nation had ever seen.

And, of course, the movement’s prime symbol, Martin Luther King, Jr., seemed
to be everywhere, proclaiming and exemplifying the emergence of a new people
and a new time. By the time the legal victory was announced in Montgomery, it
appeared that King was right: It was far more than a victory for the black walkers
of Montgomery (although that victory certainly needed to be savored and cele-
brated), and wherever people claimed the fruits of the long ordeal, a powerful ener-
gy of hope and a sense of new possibilities appeared.

Sometimes the Montgomery connections to other places in the nation was
obvious. In cities such as Mobile and Birmingham, Alabama, and nearby Talla-
hassee, Florida, ministers tried to repeat the Montgomery success with their own
bus boycotts. In January 1957 King and the Fellowship of Reconciliation brought
together some sixty representatives of these and other boycott movements to a
conference in Atlanta. They discussed the possibility of forming a regional organi-
zation based on the Montgomery experience. Before the summer of 1957 was over,
King and his fellow black ministers had established the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC).

The major early accomplishments of SCLC were the sponsorship of several con-
ferences and organizing, with Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, a “prayer pil-
grimage” of about twenty thousand people in Washington, D.C., who were calling
for civil rights legislation. SCLC also hoped to undertake a “Crusade for Citizen-
ship,” projected as a massive Southwide voter-registration campaign based in the
black churches. Due to lack of personnel, planning, and finances, this campaign
never materialized.

Even with its provocative founding announcement that “we have come to
redeem the soul of America” and the predictable choice of King as president,
the mostly Baptist group was not, however, able to focus and mobilize the new

We Changed the World 193

energies in the ways that King, his Alabama comrades, and his Northern allies had
hoped. This was partly because the approximately one hundred men (there were
only men in mainstream black church leadership) who formed the core of the
SCLC were only a small minority of the black ministers of the South. And, besides,
SCLC’s ministers had had no real experience in forming a regional organization
that would be both flexible and open to new strategies yet also structured enough
to mount a sustained challenge to the system of legal segregation.

So for a number of years after the Montgomery victory, the energies that were
released there had to be channeled into less obvious places than the Southern black
churches that had anchored the celebrated boycott. As a result, the expansion of the
Southern freedom movement depended on unlikely groups of people, emerging
from unexpected places.

For instance, there was the teenager John Lewis, a short, slightly built, slow-
speaking country boy from Troy, Alabama, who had first heard King’s pre-boycott
preaching on a local black radio station. The unassuming but religiously rooted
Lewis had been training himself for his own calling by preaching to the live-
stock in his family’s yard, and baptizing some of them too. Regardless of his uncon-
ventional training and practice congregation, Lewis knew that there was work for
him to do, and King and the people of Montgomery were his models. Through-
out the post-Montgomery decade, John Lewis took that work and those models
into some of the most dangerous frontiers of the Southern-based struggle for free-
dom, accumulating many scars and much honor in the process. As a Freedom
Rider in 1961, Lewis rode buses throughout the South, testing the law that made
segregated buses and station facilities illegal. He became the first Freedom Rider
to meet with violence when he was struck by some white men as he attempted
to go through the white entrance to the Rock Hill, South Carolina, Greyhound
bus station.

In the same way, few people would have predicted that a matronly, middle-aged
black South Carolinian named Septima Poinsette Clark would be one of the most
effective carriers of Montgomery’s best spirit. In her fifties when the victory was
won, the Charleston woman was not too old to be a “new Negro.” A veteran teacher
in the public school system of Charleston, she had led important struggles for the
equalizing of salaries for black and white teachers.

Then, on April 19, 1956, a law was passed prohibiting state and city employees
from having an affiliation with any civil rights group, including the NAACR Clark
refused to obey the law and lost her job. She now joined forces with the white
Southerners who had founded the Highlander Folk School in the mountains of
eastern Tennessee. Highlander was established in the thirties as a nontraditional
educational center to encourage local citizens and others to build a more just and
democratic society across racial lines.

At Highlander the soft-spoken but iron-willed Clark created a program based
on work she had been doing for decades. She called it Citizenship Education, and

194 To Make Our World Anew

it involved an informal but carefully crafted workshop combination of storytelling,
political analysis, American and African-American history, religious education,
autobiographical sharing, careful study of arcane voter-registration laws and
forms, and much singing and mutual encouragement. With such deceptively sim-
ple methods, Clark and her expanding group of coworkers performed an almost
unbelievable task. They helped thousands of marginally literate (and sometimes
illiterate) black people not only learn to read and write their way to voter-registra-
tion skills, but also to teach others, and to become committed believers in the free-
dom movement.

By that time many people had discovered that the path blazed by Rosa Parks,
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery boycotters was not meant to be
duplicated exactly. That was clear not only in efforts of people like John Lewis and
Septima Clark. It could also be seen in the failed attempts to build Montgomery
copycat boycotts in places like Mobile and Tallahassee, failures that inspired peo-
ple to search for other methods. Indeed when King had declared near the close of
the Montgomery boycott that “nothing can kill the spirit of my people,” he proba-
bly understood that the spirit needed to take many different forms.

That spirit was seen, for instance, in the fiery determination of Fred
Shuttlesworth, the Birmingham pastor who became a staunch comrade to Martin
King in the next stages of the Southern freedom movement. A contrast to King in
almost every conceivable way, Shuttlesworth was a native of Alabama’s back-
woods—a wiry, volatile, and gritty man. Before he answered the inner call to the
Christian ministry, he had been a truck driver, cement worker, and operator of the
family’s whiskey still. Indeed, he was just the kind of utterly courageous, sharp-
tongued, quick-tempered believer in nonviolence that the movement needed.
Though profoundly inspired by King and Montgomery, Shuttlesworth was his own
man. When white-led governments across the South responded to black assertive-
ness by banning established organizations such as the NAACP, Shuttlesworth’s
independence proved invaluable.

In Alabama the white authorities formally blamed the national organization
and its local branches for organizing an illegal boycott by black residents of
Montgomery and used that as their excuse for outlawing the organization in the
state. The state demanded its membership lists (a demand that the NAACP man-
aged successfully to resist for the eight years that it took to get the state action
reversed in federal courts). Just a few days after the NAACP ban went into effect,
Fred Shuttlesworth angered the local authorities when he formed a new, replace-
ment organization from his Birmingham base, calling it the Alabama Christian
Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). Led essentially (and somewhat autocrat-
ically) by Shuttlesworth, the ACMHR became one of the most vital affiliates of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, temporarily providing a mass move-
ment-oriented substitute for the NAACP and eventually carrying the spirit of
Montgomery to another level of confrontation. The ACMHR fought against bus

We Changed the World 195

segregation in December 1956 and October 1958, using direct-action tactics. It also
tried to integrate Birmingham schools and train stations in 1957.

In other states, such as Mississippi and Florida, courageous NAACP officials
and those who tried to stand with them were sometimes run out of the state or
assassinated. On Christmas night 1951, Harry T. Moore, executive secretary of
NAACP branches in Florida, and his wife were killed when their house was
bombed in Mims, Florida. Shuttlesworth himself was subjected to everything from
midday beatings by mobs of white segregationists to the nighttime bombing of his
house and church. The attacks intensified after the intrepid pastor insisted on per-
sonally desegregating the Birmingham city buses and on trying to enroll his chil-
dren in an all-white school in the stubbornly segregated city school system.

Indeed, public opinion polls revealed that eighty percent of white Southerners
were opposed to school desegregation in the immediate post-Brown period.
Although the terms of opposition were framed in various ways, so much finally
came down to the basic truth that South Carolina Governor James Byrnes had
expressed. If taken seriously, desegregation marked “the beginning of the end of
civilization in the South” as white people, especially privileged white people, had
known it. In the same way, there was no room for misinterpreting the so-called
“Southern manifesto” that had been signed in March 1956 by ninety Southern
members of the House of Representatives and by all of the senators except Estes
Kefauver and Albert Gore of Tennessee and Senate majority leader Lyndon
Johnson. In this document these respected senators and representatives denied that
the Supreme Court had a right to rule on racial issues in the realm of public edu-
cation, as it had in the Brown decision, and called upon their constituents to dis-
obey the court’s order, offering “massive resistance” to the ruling.

In addition, the person who might have been expected to provide some firm
guidance to the nation in this crucial time of transition was offering a version of
his own resistance. The widely admired military hero Dwight D. Eisenhower had
been elected president in 1952 and again in 1956. He probably had more leverage
to lead the nation down the path of peaceful change than any other public figure,
but he never really came to the aid of African Americans. Rather, the president
chose to condemn what he called “the extremists on both sides” of the school
desegregation question, thereby equating courageous children and their commu-
nities who were working for democratic change with men and women who defied
the Supreme Court, dynamited buildings, and assassinated leaders.

Though Eisenhower never made a clear public statement of opposition to the
Court’s action in Brown, neither did he ever publicly support it. He felt that “forc-
ing” desegregation would raise white resistance. But as the nature of the battle for
desegregation progressed, Eisenhower was forced to take action on behalf of the
federal government.

Faced with such a range of opposition midnight bombers, an uncommitted
president, members of Congress urging “massive resistance,” and the Supreme

196 To Make Our World Anew

Court’s own ambiguous 1955 call for school districts to move to implement the
Brown decision not by any certain date but “with all deliberate speed,” it would not
have been surprising if Southern blacks had given up the quest for desegregated
schools. But they were constantly reminding each other that “we’ve come too far to
turn back.”

Children, ranging in ages from six to seventeen, were on the front lines of this
phase of the struggle. In hundreds of schools across the South, the children had to
face hatred, ignorance, and fear. As they arrived at newly desegregated schools, they
had to face screaming, cursing, threatening presences of white men, children, and
women who had appointed themselves as protectors of the social and educational
bastions of white supremacy.

Still, the black children went into the schools—sometimes to the accompani-
ment of white rioting in the streets, sometimes under the protection of federal
marshals or troops.

Eventually, all the possibilities and complications of the post-Montgomery
struggles for a desegregated nation seemed to gather around Little Rock’s Central
High. Little Rock was considered a city that was reasonably open to the powerful
surges of change that were mounting in the South, and in 1954 it had been the first
Southern city to respond positively to the Brown decision. Less than a week after
the decision was announced, the Little Rock school board declared its intention to
voluntarily desegregate its public schools, beginning with the two-thousand-
student Central High, located in a working-class white neighborhood. However, it
was not until 1957 that the board announced that it would actually begin the
desegregation process on a rather timid level that fall. Then seventy-five students
volunteered to lead the way. Of those, twenty-five were chosen. The all-white
school board, worried about a brewing politically inspired white reaction, soon
pared the number down to nine. Six young women and three young men were cho-
sen to “carry the banner.”

Unfortunately, the white community of Little Rock and the state of Arkansas
once again lacked the kind of courageous moral leadership that would have helped
guide them. Instead the confused and searching citizens were subjected to the mer-
curial and election-driven performance of Governor Orville Faubus. A racial
“moderate” in pre-1954 Southern white terms, he had become convinced that in
order to be reelected, he had to respond to the worst fears of the white parents and
politicians who were busy galvanizing opposition to the school board’s modest
desegregation plan. This led to the spectacle of Faubus calling out the Arkansas
National Guard that fall to block the way of the black students as they—with amaz-
ing poise—moved past a crowd of screaming adults and young people and tried to
enter Central High.

Such a use of state troops to resist a U.S. Supreme Court order, carried out in
front of national network television cameras, finally pushed Eisenhower to action.
But his initial attempt to use his personal powers of persuasion on Faubus turned

We Changed the World 197

Armed soldiers confront white students at Central High School in Little Rock. Because of the seri-
ous challenge to federal authority in Arkansas, President Eisenhower sent one thousand U.S.
Army troops to protect the nine black students who had defied white protests and threats of
violence to enroll at the school.

out to be too little too late and served only to help heighten the crisis. Ten days after
the beginning of the Little Rock crisis, Eisenhower summoned Faubus to a private
conference. The governor left his conversation with the president to return to Little
Rock and pull away the Arkansas National Guard, leaving only the local police to
deal with the constantly expanding crowd of white adult opponents at the school
building. Their hysterical calls for resistance to integration finally erupted into
violence against several black journalists. At the same time there were reckless

198 To Make Our World Anew

threats from the mob to lynch one or more of the black students. The scenes of
white crowds surging against the overwhelmed and under-committed local police
moved across the nation’s television screens. (The medium was new, and the black
struggle for freedom in the South was its first major ongoing story.) Many people
also saw the electrifying image of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the black students
in Little Rock, accidentally cut off from the rest of the group of students, sur-
rounded by the hostile mob, moving in silent, terrified dignity, finally joined by a
tall white woman, Grace Lorch, who stood by her side and then helped her board
a bus to safety.

Eisenhower finally did what he had pledged never to do: send federal troops to
Little Rock “to aid in the execution of federal law,” he said to the nation. But he also
sent more than a thousand riot-trained troops from the 101st Airborne Division to
protect the right of nine young citizens to make use of the opportunity that the
Supreme Court had guaranteed to them.

The Little Rock pioneers stayed the course, managed to live through an aca-
demic year of hateful taunts and actual assaults, managed also to find a few friends.
For a while each student was accompanied in the school by a soldier, but these mil-
itary companions could not go into locker rooms, lavatories, classrooms, the cafe-
teria, and other spaces that had become danger spots. There came a time when one
of the nine, Minnie Jean Brown, finally gave in to the deep frustration they were all
feeling and one day poured her bowl of chili on the head of a persistent tormenter.
Her unexpected action evoked a spontaneous round of applause from the black
cafeteria workers, but it also led to a suspension from school, and Minnie Jean fin-
ished her academic year in New York City. Meanwhile the other students contin-
ued, making their way through Central High’s school year, carrying the banner—
and the pain—all the way. Crucial to their endurance was the community support
that they found.

Many people in both the South and the North, however, were not convinced
that a just and humane new nation could be born on this bloody ground. These
reluctant unbelievers simply could not convince themselves that American democ-
racy could ever become a reality for black people.

As a matter of fact, even as the Little Rock struggle was going on in the 1957-58
academic year, in Monroe, North Carolina, a rather different scenario was devel-
oping. Ex-Marine Robert Williams, who had been so ecstatic with hope at the time
of the Brown decision, had returned to his hometown of Monroe after the Korean
War. He soon became president of the local branch of the NAACP and also became
convinced that his military training provided a better alternative for dealing with
the terrorists of the Klan and other white groups than King’s way of nonviolent
resistance. With the help of the National Rifle Association, Williams created a rifle
club within his NAACP branch and began talking of the need to “meet lynching
with lynching.” But by the middle of 1959 Williams found himself attacked and

We Changed the World 199

disowned by the national NAACP organization and hounded as a fugitive by local
and national law enforcement agencies. Two years later, he was forced to flee the
country altogether as a result of trumped-up kidnapping charges. Eventually he
became an exile from the land that once inspired his hope, finding political asylum
in Cuba, which had just undergone its own socialist revolution. He later went to
China and then the East African nation of Tanzania before returning to America
almost a decade later.

Nevertheless, Williams’s demand for an alternative to nonviolent resistance did
not end with his departure. His calls for armed self-defense and physical retaliation
were familiar themes in the traditions of black American resistance. Indeed, even
then an important variation on this theme was rising up in the northern cities of
the nation.

When all eyes seemed to be on Montgomery, in the black communities of
Detroit, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere a growing number of
young black men, impeccably dressed in suits and bow ties, and young women,
wrapped in long, flowing white dresses, became a regular part of the urban land-
scape. These quiet, dignified, disciplined black folk were practicing Muslims, mem-
bers of the Nation of Islam (NOI). The NOI was founded by an obscure self-styled
prophet named W. D. Fard in the thirties. Fard and his handpicked successor, Elijah
Poole (who would later take the name Elijah Muhammad), preached a modified
version of Islam. It combined claims of black racial supremacy (such as the idea
that black people were the original people and whites were “devils” invented by a
mad scientist named Yacub) with elements of the orthodox Islamic tradition and
borrowed heavily from the style and structure of black Christian churches. Despite
their reputation for being a radical sect, the NOI promoted fairly conservative
ideas and values. It sought to “uplift” the race by establishing black-owned busi-
nesses and “teaching” black ghetto dwellers the importance of discipline, self-help,
and cleanliness. It imposed strict rules about personal behavior: Alcohol, drugs,
tobacco, gambling, dancing, adultery, premarital sex, profanity, or watching movies
with sex or “coarse speech,” for example, were simply not allowed. The NOI even
impressed black conservative George Schuyler, managing editor of the New York
office of the black-owned Pittsburgh Courier, who praised them for their values
and moral vision. “Mr. Muhammad may be a rogue and a charlatan,” wrote
Schuyler in 1959, “but when anybody can get tens of thousands of Negroes to prac-
tice economic solidarity, respect their women, alter their atrocious diet, give up
liquor, stop crime, juvenile delinquency and adultery, he is doing more for the
Negro’s welfare than any current Negro leader I know.” Although the NOI official-
ly stayed out of politics, focusing its energies on the spiritual uplift of African
Americans and offering an alternative to the “white man’s religion,” it did practice
self-defense and did not shy away from violence. During the thirties in Detroit, for
example, black Muslims, as members of the NOI were known, attracted attention

200 To Make Our World Anew

The Nation of Islam attracted thousands of urban blacks to the disciplined life of abstinence,
prayer, and black self-determination.

during a bloody shootout with police. And under Fard’s leadership, the NOI even
established a paramilitary organization known as the Fruit of Islam. They kept
order at big gatherings, served as bodyguards for “the Messenger” (Muhammad),
and were trained to defend NOI institutions at any cost.

The NOI remained a fairly small religious sect until the Second World War. Its
membership began to increase after Elijah Muhammad and about one hundred
other Muslims were jailed for resisting the draft. As a result, the NOI not only gar-
nered more national publicity but it began to recruit members from the ranks of
black prisoners. One of those prisoners who discovered the Nation was Malcolm
Little, whose name was changed to Malcolm X by Elijah Muhammad. He wrote in
his autobiography that he received the X from the Nation of Islam as a symbol of
his unknown African ancestry. More than any other figure, Malcolm X was respon-
sible for turning the NOI into a national force to be reckoned with. And more than
anyone else, he embodied the NOI’s militant, uncompromising, and, when need-
ed, violent image, one that would scare many white liberals and nurture a new gen-
eration of black radicals.

The son of Earl Little, a Baptist preacher, and his wife, Louisa, Malcolm and his
siblings experienced dramatic confrontations with racism. According to his auto-
biography, hooded Klansmen burned their home in Lansing, Michigan. Earl Little
was killed under mysterious circumstances, welfare agencies split up the children
and eventually had Louisa Little committed to a mental institution, and Malcolm

We Changed the World 201

was forced to live in a detention home run by a racist white couple. By the eighth
grade he had left school, moved to Boston to live with his half-sister Ella, and dis-
covered the underground world of African-American hipsters and petty criminals.
His downward spiral ended in 1946, when he was sentenced to ten years in jail
for burglary.

After discovering Islam, Malcolm Little submitted to the discipline and guid-
ance of the NOI and became a voracious reader of the Koran and the Bible. He also
immersed himself in works of literature and history in the prison library. Upon his
release in 1952, Malcolm X, a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammad, rose quickly
within the NOI ranks, serving as minister of Harlem’s Temple No. 7, where he went
in 1954. He later ministered to temples in Detroit and Philadelphia. Through
speaking engagements, television appearances, and by establishing Muhammad
Speaks—the NOI’s first nationally distributed newspaper—Malcolm X called
America’s attention to the Nation of Islam. His criticisms of civil rights leaders for
advocating integration into white society instead of building black institutions and
defending themselves from racist violence generated opposition from both conser-
vatives and liberals.

But Malcolm showed signs of independence from the NOI line. During the
mid-fifties, for example, he privately scoffed at Elijah Muhammad’s interpretation
of the genesis of the “white race” and seemed uncomfortable with the idea that all
white people were literally devils. More significantly, Malcolm clearly disagreed
with the NOI’s policy of not participating in politics. He not only believed that
political mobilization was indispensable but occasionally defied the rule by sup-
porting boycotts and other forms of protest. He had begun developing a Third
World political perspective during the fifties, when anticolonial wars and decolo-
nization were pressing public issues. Indeed, Africa remained his primary political
interest outside black America: In 1959 he toured Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, and
Ghana to develop ties between African Americans and the newly independent
African states.

African Americans had long seen themselves as part of a larger world, as more
than “minorities” within the confines of the United States. But there was never a
time like this, when every corner of the earth seemed engaged in a struggle for free-
dom, and the black freedom movement in America seemed to be at the eye of the
international storm.

Freedom Now!: The Student Revolutionaries

On a Sunday morning late in November 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr., announced
to his congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama,
that he had decided to leave the city and return to his native Atlanta. The major
reason was the need to connect himself more firmly to the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, which had been headquartered in Atlanta since its found-
ing in 1957. In the years since its establishment, SCLC had been having a hard time

202 To Make Our World Anew

getting organized. In the statement he made to the Dexter congregation that
Sunday, King seemed to be trying to rally himself, his organization, and the larger
developing freedom movement to a new state of activity. He said, “The time has
come for a broad, bold advance of the Southern campaign for equality…. Not only
will it include a stepped-up campaign of voter registration, but a full-scale assault
will be made upon discrimination and segregation in all f o r m s . . . . We must
employ new methods of struggle involving the masses of our people.”

In this “bold advance” King envisioned SCLC as a crucial force, and he was con-
vinced that a great deal of the energy that was needed would come from black
young people. Indeed, King said, “We must train our youth … in the techniques of
social change through nonviolent resistance.” It is likely that King was envisioning
a youth movement that would be firmly based in the SCLC organization. But by
the time King moved to Atlanta in January 1960, SCLC had not yet done anything
to organize a youth movement. Fortunately, the young people were not waiting.
Beginning independently from several Southern bases, an ever-expanding nonvio-
lent army of black young people and their white allies began to put an indelible
mark on the sixties.

On January 31, 1960, at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College
(known as A&T), one of the South’s many black colleges, four freshmen decided to
move from words to deeds. Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, Franklin McClain, and
David Richmond decided that they were going to confront one of the most
demeaning symbols of segregation: the all-white lunch counter at the local Wool-
worth’s department store. Like all the chain stores in the South, the Greensboro
store accepted the money of its African-American customers at the various mer-
chandise counters, but the lunch counter was a different story. Black people were
not permitted to sit for a snack, a meal, or even a drink of water. Usually, such seg-
regationist practices were enforced by local ordinances, state laws, and coercion by
whites acting almost out of habit. Whites considered public space theirs to control
and define, and they were especially sensitive about public eating places, where
white employees might be perceived as serving blacks (as opposed to merely
accepting their payments at other store counters).

The young men from A&T planned to go into Woolworth’s on Monday morn-
ing, February 1, shop for some small items in other parts of the store, and then go
to the lunch counter. They would sit there quietly, with dignity and with a firm
insistence on their right to be served. For these students the central issue was not
the hamburgers or Cokes. The issues were justice, human dignity, fairness, equali-
ty, and freedom. They were all driven by the desire to reach the fundamental goal:
“Jim Crow Must Go.”

The three young men who had grown up in Greensboro (McNeil came from
Wilmington) were fully aware of a strong local tradition of challenging segre-
gation. They and their parents had been active in the NAACP, and they had heard
of blacks who fought to desegregate the local schools. They attended NAACP-

We Changed the World 203

sponsored public presentations by black student pioneers of the effort to desegre-
gate Central High in Little Rock. And, of course, they all had as an example the
noble actions of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., the best-known public
heroes of the successful Montgomery bus boycott. When King spoke in Greensboro
in 1959, Ezell Blair, Jr., remembered that his sermon was “so strong” that “I could
feel my heart palpitating. It brought tears to my eyes.” The young men knew that
they could go to jail. Or there could be violence. So it was not surprising that David
Richmond later recalled that “all of us were afraid” that Sunday night before their
planned action; yet, he added, “We went ahead and did it.”

Monday morning, February 1, 1960, was the day they “did it.” When they sat
down and asked clearly for coffee and snacks and were told that they could not be
served, they refused to get up from their seats. Like Rosa Parks, they believed that
holding their seats was essential to affirming their dignity and their place as citi-
zens. So Blair, their chosen spokesman, responded to the refusal of service with a
polite but probing inquiry: “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but you just served us [at
the other counters], why can’t we be served here?”

By that time other customers were noticing the four neatly dressed, quietly
determined young black men. The manager asked them to leave, but they refused,
still quiet, still polite. As a matter of fact, not only did they say they would stay until
the store closed, but they announced that they would return again the next day, and
the days after that, until they were served, until all black people could be served and
their humanity duly recognized—at least at that lunch counter.

When McClain recalled that first sit-in in an interview more than twenty years
later, he reported, “If it’s possible to know what it means to have your soul cleansed,
I felt pretty clean at that time. I probably felt better on that day than I’ve ever felt
in my life I felt as though I had gained my manhood, so to speak, and not only
gained it, but had developed quite a lot of respect for it.”

That afternoon’s action concluded when the manager ordered the store closed.
By the time the four freshmen returned to the campus, word of their action had
streaked through the classrooms, dormitories, dining halls, and gymnasiums.
Many of their fellow students soon pledged their determination to return to the
lunch counter the next day.

The example set by the freshmen was so powerful that the new excitement
could not be confined to one campus or one city. The students at Bennett College,
a private, black women’s school nearby, heard the news and joined the fight. Within
a few days this powerful moral action had also become a challenge to local white
undergraduates, starting with students at the elite Women’s College of the Univer-
sity of North Carolina, located in Greensboro. Beginning on Thursday, February 4,
small groups of them decided to join the demonstration and risk all the protection
of their whiteness, to risk their social and family connections, and to reconsider the
meaning of democracy, Christianity, and human dignity.

Before the week was over, the relatively low-key action of the four sit-in leaders

204 To Make Our World Anew

To occupy their time while they were waiting to be served, students participating in sit-ins did their home-
work and wrote letters.

had escalated to unexpected levels. Nineteen students came to Woolworth’s on the
second day, and more than eighty were present on Wednesday. Now there were
more students ready to sit in than there were seats at Woolworth’s lunch counter.
So, the nearby S. H. Kress store became the next target, and by Saturday of that first
week hundreds of students from A&T were streaming into the downtown area to
participate in what had become a kind of student crusade. Even members of the
A&T football team—including a quarterback named Jesse Jackson—abandoned
the apolitical, disengaged stance that marked so many college athletes. They were
on the scene when gangs of young white men, waving Confederate flags, began to
harass the black students, attempting to block their access to the lunch counters.
On at least one occasion, members of the A&T football team, waving small U.S.
flags, opened a path through the threatening white crowd for the sit-in squads.

By the next week the new, youth-led movement had spilled over into other
North Carolina cities, as students in Durham, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Chapel
Hill, and elsewhere began their own sit-in campaigns. In Chapel Hill, as in other
cities, there were demonstrators with picket signs on the streets as well as students
sitting at the lunch counters. Several of the Chapel Hill demonstrators carried signs

We Changed the World 205

that expressed the message they wanted all Americans to hear: “We do not picket
just because we want to eat. We can eat at home or walking down the street. We do
picket to protest the lack of dignity and respect shown to us as human beings.”

None of this activity had been pre-planned or coordinated. But, as one Char-
lotte student put it, the sit-ins provided a “means of expressing something that had
been on our minds for a long time.” Speaking for his generation of activists,
Greensboro’s Joseph McNeil said, “I guess everybody was pretty well fed up at the
same time.”

By the middle of February 1960, the nation had begun to discover that “every-
body” really meant everybody and not just the North Carolina students. Within
weeks the sit-ins had become a powerful social movement, ranging across the
South and evoking imaginative responses of support from many places in the
North. Students organized sit-ins at the New York affiliates of Woolworth’s, for
example. Longtime black social activist Bayard Rustin and singer and actor Harry
Belafonte helped organize the Struggle for Freedom in the South, which raised
funds to cover legal fees of arrested sit-in participants. Television helped to spread
what people called “sit-in fever” across the South and demanded the nation’s atten-
tion. But there were also human networks tiiat carried the news. All over the South,
adult veterans of the long struggle for justice and equality made phone calls, wrote
letters, traveled by car to make sure that others knew what had begun in North
Carolina and encouraged them to consider what needed to be done in their own
communities.

The students themselves contacted friends, relatives, and members of their fra-
ternities and sororities on other campuses in other states. Lunch counters were usu-
ally the focus of the action, but the students soon turned their attention to other
forms of public accommodations as well. They created “wade-ins” at segregated
public pools and beaches, “kneel-ins” at churches, “read-ins” at public libraries, and
“bowl-ins” and “skate-ins” at segregated recreation centers. Usually, the students
combined those nonviolent “direct action” challenges with marches and picketing
at local city halls, seeking negotiations, demanding that the white elected officials
take responsibility and take action to change the segregation statutes.

After the initial white surprise at these challenges to the laws and traditions of
segregation, resistance to the student actions became very real. In some places it
came in the form of arrests by the local police. In other situations the police stood
by as white citizens took affairs in their own hands. Angry, frightened, and deter-
mined to maintain their historic positions of domination and control, white peo-
ple frequently attacked the students. Sometimes sit-in participants were dragged
from the lunch-counter stools and beaten. Ketchup was poured on their heads.
Lighted cigarettes were pressed into their hair and on their exposed necks and
shoulders. Women swung handbags at them, and men and boys used sticks and
bats. Consistently, the students refused to allow themselves to be diverted from

206 To Make Our World Anew

their central purpose or from their nonviolent stance, and they chose not to strike
back at their attackers.

In Atlanta, one of the early targets of the demonstrating black students was the
cafeteria in City Hall, where a sign announced, “Public Is Welcome.” Julian Bond,
a Morehouse College student leader and son of Dr. Horace Mann Bond, an inter-
nationally known scholar, led a student contingent into the cafeteria on March 15,
1960. There, they were greeted by the manager, who asked, “What do you want?”
When Bond replied, “We want to eat,” the manager’s response was, “We can’t serve
you here.” Bond then said, “The sign outside says the public is welcome and we’re
the public and we want to eat.” They got their food, but the cashier refused to take
their money. Bond and seventy-five of his companions did not get a meal in the
public cafeteria that day but a cell in the nearby city jail. However, when they were
bailed out of jail the next day, the group immediately organized themselves and
other students in the Atlanta University complex (which included Spelman
College, Clark College, Gammon Theological Seminary, Morehouse, and Morris
Brown College) into what became known as the Committee on an Appeal for
Human Rights. This turned out to be the first step toward its emergence as one of
the most important student movement groups in the South. Its eloquent and
thoughtful “Appeal for Human Rights” eventually appeared in the Congressional
Record, the New York Times, and publications in many other parts of the world:

We … have joined our hearts, minds, and bodies in the cause of gaining
those rights which are inherently ours as members of the human race and as
citizens of the United States.

We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are already legal-
ly and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time— We want to state
clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate, in a nation professing
democracy and among people professing Christianity, the discriminatory
conditions under which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia.

People who knew Southern black communities of that time would have expect-
ed Georgia’s capital city to produce a significant student movement. Its six black
institutions of higher education, the presence of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the
SCLC, the tradition of a distinguished and relatively progressive African-American
middle class, and the existence of a white leadership group that was concerned
about maintaining its reputation for moderation (exemplified by Ralph McGill
and his Atlanta Constitution, the best-known Southern newspaper)—all of these
factors could have led contemporary observers to predict that Atlanta students
would rise to the occasion of the new movement. They did, but it was actually the
student sit-in leadership of Nashville, Tennessee, not Atlanta, that provided the
focal point for the emerging student movement.

Nashville was home to one of the nation’s oldest and best-known black schools,

We Changed the World 207

Fisk University, alma mater of W. E. B. Du Bois. In the largely segregated city, black
students were also enrolled at Meharry Medical School, the American Baptist
Theological Seminary, and Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College, a large,
all-black state school. But it was one of the first black students at Vanderbilt Uni-
versity who played the central role. James Lawson, son of a Methodist minister and
a strong and devout mother, had originally gone to Nashville from Ohio in 1958 as
Southern field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The FOR was a most-
ly white organization of religious pacifists that had long been involved in a quiet
search for nonviolent methods of fighting for racial justice in America. Lawson
first met Martin Luther King, Jr., when King was visiting Oberlin College in Ohio
and Lawson was one of its older undergraduates. When King learned about the
impressive personal history and Gandhian commitments of the articulate, self-
assured, and spiritually grounded young man, he urged Lawson to come South and
work with him in the expanding freedom movement.

Lawson, a year older than King, had already explored many aspects of the world
of nonviolent action. In 1951, while active in organized Methodist youth work,
Lawson had refused to register for the military draft that was then gathering young
men for service in the Korean War. Basing his objection to participation in the war
on the nonviolent teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, and his own mother, Lawson had
been arrested for resisting the draft after he was denied conscientious objector sta-
tus. He spent more than a year in jail. While in prison he met other black and white
men who were refusing military service based on their religious and philosophical
commitment to pacifism and nonviolence. Eventually, Lawson was released on
parole in the care of the Methodist Board of Overseas Missions, and he spent three
years as a Christian fraternal worker in India under the board’s auspices. During
this time, while teaching and coaching sports in Methodist schools, Lawson was
able to explore more deeply his strong interest in Gandhian nonviolent action. He
had already decided that he wanted to help create an American version of Gandhi’s
spiritually based liberation movement when he happened to see the first story
about the Montgomery bus boycott in an Indian newspaper. As he read the article,
Lawson literally jumped for joy and vowed to deepen his own commitment to
work for racial justice and reconciliation in the United States. So King’s later invi-
tation was a powerful affirmation of what Jim Lawson had long been preparing for.

Responding to King’s challenge, Lawson decided to explore an earlier invitation
from the Fellowship of Reconciliation to become its Southern field secretary, pos-
sibly based in Nashville. Lawson also accepted an invitation to develop workshops
on nonviolence from the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), an
affiliate of King’s SCLC that was led by the outspoken black Baptist pastor Kelly
Miller Smith. Joined by his white FOR colleague and fellow Methodist minister
Glenn Smiley, Lawson began his Nashville responsibilities by leading a workshop
on nonviolent action for the NCLC in March 1958. By the fall of that year, he

208 To Make Our World Anew

had decided to enroll as a student at the Divinity School of Nashville’s all-white,
Methodist-affiliated Vanderbilt University. He was soon offering extended versions
of his initial workshop, focused now on ways in which Nashville’s segregated world
of public accommodations could be challenged and changed by well-trained,
committed teams of nonviolent volunteers.

By the beginning of 1960 there were some seventy-five regular participants in
Lawson’s weekly workshops at First Baptist Church. Some of them had even exper-
imented with sitting in at some of the downtown lunch counters and then leaving
when refused service. They set up role-playing situations, anticipating what they
would do and say when they encountered the expected violent opposition in words
or deeds.

Then the word came from North Carolina. It appeared as if the action they were
preparing for in Nashville had actually begun several hundred miles away. That
Friday night at their usual meeting time, the regular Nashville participants were
overwhelmed by some five hundred students and adults who wanted to join the
fight. Because Lawson’s corps of nonviolent trainees had been getting ready, they
quickly decided to sit in at the segregated Nashville outlets of Woolworth’s and
Kress, and they wanted to begin the next morning, Saturday, February 6.

The students who became the heart of the Nashville movement included
Marion Barry, a Mississippi native who was a graduate student in chemistry at Fisk
University (and later became mayor of Washington, D.C.); Diane Nash and Angela
Butler, two student leaders from the Fisk campus; and a trio of students from
the all-black American Baptist Seminary, James Bevel, John Lewis, and Bernard
Lafayette. After two weeks of almost daily sit-ins without arrests, attacks, or lunch-
counter service, they began to hear that the police were ready to begin arresting
them and that local white troublemakers were prepared to attack them physically.
Undeterred, the Nashville students (joined by several white exchange students on
their campuses) were determined to continue their campaign.

When the Nashville students went back downtown, at the start of the third
week, the jailing, the ridicule, the spit, the fierce attacks were all waiting for them—
and eventually the world saw it. Perhaps even more important, the black commu-
nity began to experience a new level of solidarity. Adults rallied to the side of their
children and students. Such solidarity became one of the hallmarks of the sit-in
phase of the movement, providing an important source of strength for the ongo-
ing freedom struggle. Thousands of black citizens showed their willingness to
come forward with every needed kind of assistance, from bail money, to food for
the imprisoned students, to the impassioned offering of long and deep prayers on
behalf of their young freedom fighters.

At the same time, there were some black adults who thought the students were
too brash, too uncompromising, too dangerously provocative, and these various
points of view led to significant tensions. But the college students’ spirit of bold,
nonviolent defiance was infectious, and its effect on an even younger generation

We Changed the World 209

may have been at least as significant as its challenge to the elders. One of Nashville’s
high-school students from those days later recalled that when the sit-ins began, he
paid relatively little attention to them, for he was very wrapped up in his private
ambition of becoming a famous and wealthy rock star. So even when the college
students started marching right past his high school, Cordell Reagon was still
“unconscious,” as he put it. Then, Reagon said, “One day they came by, and just on
impulse I got some friends together and said, ‘Let’s go.’ We weren’t committed to the
cause or anything. We just wanted to see what they were up to—it looked exciting.”

That day the marching students had a stop to make on their way to the lunch
counters, a stop that opened new possibilities for young Cordell Reagon’s life.
He said,

They were marching to the jail, where Diane Nash, one of the main student
leaders in the movement, was being kept. We go down to the jail, and we’re
all singing. There up in the jail cell we could see Diane. And everyone was
shouting and waving. And I’m just looking. There is something amazing—
a black woman only a couple of years older than me, up in this cell. There
was some spirit, some power there, I had never seen before. Suddenly, I real-
ized that everyone had marched down the street, and I was all alone staring
at the cell. I ran down and caught up with the end of the march. But I fig-
ured then I better not let these people go. There is some power here that I
never experienced before.

Responding to that power, holding on to those people, Reagon eventually
moved toward the center of the movement, becoming one of the first full-time
field secretaries for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pro-
nounced “snick”). He was also a member of SNCC’s Freedom Singers, carrying the
music, the stories, and the action of the movement around the world. There were
young people like Cordell Reagon all over the South. Not long after Reagon caught
up with the end of the powerful line in Nashville, students in downtown Orange-
burg, South Carolina, demonstrated. There, they faced tear gas, high-powered fire
hoses, and police beatings. In Tallahassee, Florida, the students from Florida
Agricultural and Mechanical College also encountered tear gas and violence, but
they met up at the lunch counters with white students from neighboring Florida
State University who had pledged to arrive before them and to share their food if
the black students were refused service.

Everywhere in the South black students were meeting these mixed realities:
harsh resistance, some overly cautious elders, new self-confidence and transforma-
tion, the emergence of new, sometimes unexpectedly courageous white allies, the
beginning of some desegregation victories, and a fresh sense of themselves and the
meaning of their movement. At the same time, in spite of the growing sense of sol-
idarity, other black adults were troubled and frightened by the unprecedented
boldness of the student action. Too familiar with the world of white violence and

210 To Make Our World Anew

intimidation, these adults wondered what harsh reactions the student uprising
would bring. What jobs would be lost, what homes and churches bombed, what
bank loans canceled, what licenses revoked, which young careers aborted, which
lives lost? Because of such understandably adult concerns, the students especially
appreciated the consistent support and encouragement from Martin King’s public
statements.

Indeed, it seemed as if King clearly recognized that these students embodied
some of his own best dreams for the future of a nonviolent, mass-based freedom
movement. So he offered great encouragement to their activities whenever possi-
ble and tried to interpret them to the world. Speaking in Durham, North Carolina,
King said, “What is fresh, what is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated,
led and sustained by students. What is new is that American students have come of
age. You now take your honored places in the world-wide struggle for freedom.”

Then he urged them to move ahead and “fill up the jails.” Ever since the days of
Gandhi in India, resistance leaders had issued the call to fill up the jails as both a
personal and strategic challenge. On the personal level in America, it urged nonvi-
olent warriors to overcome their justifiable fear of dangerous Southern jails as well
as the sense of shame that respectable families experienced when their children
ended up there. On the strategic level, it was a call to present so many challengers
to the legal system that its machinery would be blocked, making it difficult to carry
on business as usual.

By the end of the winter of 1960 the mostly black contingent of Southern stu-
dents was taking King—and their own consciences—seriously; their sit-ins were
reaching into every Southern state except Mississippi, which was too harsh in its
resistance; they were filling up at least some of the jails of the region, and their
sophisticated political consciousness and courageous action were catching the
attention of the nation and the world. In March some of the leaders of the local
movements got a much-needed opportunity to meet together for the first time to
catch their breath. The occasion was what had originally been an annual confer-
ence of mostly white Southern college student activists. The 1960 session at High-
lander Folk School in Tennessee reflected the rapidly changing nature of the
Southern student leadership scene. Now, more than half of the eighty-five partici-
pants in the Annual Leadership Workshop for College Students were black student
sit-in leaders.

Highlander Folk School, established in the thirties, was run by a white couple,
Myles and Zilphia Horton. Highlander’s adult education programs, sometimes
conducted by an interracial staff, included interracial conferences and workshops
to train citizens to work for social change. It was an extraordinary and risky set of
activities in the South in those days.

As a result of its nonconformist agenda and its left-wing friends, the school had
experienced much harassment and persecution from local and state government

We Changed the World 211

authorities. Nevertheless, the Hortons persisted in their work, making Highlander
a well-known resource center for labor movement organizers and for Southern
freedom movement workers such as Septima Clark of Charleston, E. D. Nixon,
Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fred Shuttlesworth.

Since 1953 Highlander had held an annual workshop for college student lead-
ers. For the 1960 workshop, the Hortons chose a new, post-Greensboro theme:
“The New Generation Fights for Equality.” In that retreatlike mountainside setting,
leaders from the sit-in movements and their potential white allies shared experi-
ences, exchanged strategies, and recognized fellow pioneers. They considered long-
range goals, explored new meanings of nonviolence, and talked about not only sur-
viving but prevailing while in jail.

And there was time for singing, singing, singing—the flooding soulful glue that
held everything and everyone together. By now it was obvious that this was to be a
singing movement, especially as it developed in Nashville, where James Bevel,
Bernard Lafayette, and the young Cordell Reagon had taken their love for rhythm
and blues street-corner singing and moved right into the hymns and spirituals of
their home churches.

At Highlander, Zilphia Horton had discovered anew the power of song in social
movements. In her work with union organizers, she had heard the old nineteenth-
century African-American religious song “I’ll Be Alright,” which became “I Will
Overcome.” Then she heard the song transformed by black women labor organizers
in the forties, who took it to the picket lines of the justice-seeking Food and Tobacco
Workers Union in Charleston, South Carolina, as a great rallying call: “We shall
overcome Oh yes, down in my heart I do believe, we shall overcome some day.”
Eventually, it became a kind of community anthem at Highlander. Spontaneously
developing new verses out of their own sit-in experiences (“We are not afraid; We
shall live in peace; Black and White together”), students sang it into the night, feel-
ing the power of the expanding interracial band of sisters and brothers.

The gathering at Highlander was a valuable development in the necessary
process of turning a set of semi-spontaneous, creative, youthful challenges into a
powerful, sustained, insurgent mass movement that would eventually break the
decades-old bondage of legal segregation in the South. Indeed, some adult veter-
ans of the long black struggle for freedom had already begun to plan for a more
formal meeting of the sit-in leaders.

Central among the movement veterans was Ella Baker, a native North Caro-
linian who in the twenties had dreamed of becoming a medical missionary. Un-
fortunately, the financial pressures of the Great Depresssion made her medical
school dream unattainable. So after graduation from Shaw University, a black
Baptist institution in Raleigh, North Carolina, she moved to Harlem. Soon, she be-
came involved in a number of political and economic organizing activities. These
included the development of a consumers’ cooperative organization and attempts

212 To Make Our World Anew

at organizing African-American domestic workers, who badly needed better wages
and working conditions. By the beginning of the forties, Baker was on the nation-
al staff of the NAACP, serving an important and often dangerous role as a roving
organizer of NAACP chapters in the hostile South.

Later, when the Montgomery movement began to catch the attention of the
world, Baker became part of a small group of New York-based social activists who
called themselves “In Friendship.” They initially focused their attention on raising
funds to assist black and white Southerners who had suffered economic losses
because of their freedom movement activities or sympathies. As a result of her
work with “In Friendship,” Baker met King and was later encouraged by her New
York colleagues—including Bayard Rustin—to return to the South and help SCLC
as its temporary executive director, operating from its Atlanta office.

A brilliant grassroots organizer, Baker was also an articulate and outspoken
woman with a feminist consciousness far ahead of her time. Baker therefore found
it difficult to work effectively in a leadership role in an organization made up of
black pastors who were too often accustomed to seeing women only as compliant
subordinates. Nevertheless, as a result of her SCLC position, Baker was strategical-
ly located when the Southern student sit-in movement erupted. And as soon as she
began to grasp what was happening among the young people, she decided to find
a way to bring their leaders together.

Later Baker said that she wanted to encourage their interests “not in being lead-
ers as much as in developing leadership among other people.” So she convinced
administrators at Shaw University that they should host a conference of the sit-in
leaders. She convinced Martin Luther King, Jr., and other SCLC leaders that the
organization should put up eight hundred dollars to cover the basic expenses for
what was officially called a Southwide Youth Leadership Conference on Non-
violence, to be held April 15-17, 1960, the Easter weekend break.

Baker and King signed a letter of invitation and sent it out to student activists
and their allies all over the nation. The letter called the sit-in movement and its
accompanying nonviolent actions “tremendously significant developments in the
drive for Freedom and Human Dignity in America.” (Many of the more active lead-
ers and grassroots participants in the Southern movement used “freedom” and
“human dignity” to describe the goals of their struggle much more often than “civil
rights”) Now, according to King and Baker, it was time to come together for an
evaluation of the burgeoning movement, “in terms of where do we go from here.”

The young student leaders were ready for such a gathering. Responding to let-
ters, phone calls, and other personal contacts, more than two hundred students
and adult observers made their way to Raleigh. Of these, about one hundred twen-
ty came from more than fifty black colleges and high schools in twelve Southern
states. They brought with them a rich treasury of experiences and stories about
organizing, about marching, about opposition forces and their weapons, about

We Changed the World 213

nonviolent resistance, about jails, about the jokes that made it possible for them to
laugh in some of the most perilous situations. And of course they brought their
songs of defiance, of empowerment, of hope.

In an opening address to the conference on Friday night, April 15, the eloquent
and insightful Baker spoke pointedly to the adults present when she said, “The
younger generation is challenging you and m e . . . . They are asking us to forget our
laziness and doubt and fear, and follow our dedication to the truth to the bitter
end.” King, who was only thirty-one years old himself, picked up a similar theme
in another address when he declared that the student movement “is also a revolt
against the apathy and complacency of adults in the Negro community; against
Negroes in the middle class who indulge in buying cars and homes instead of tak-
ing on the great cause that will really solve their problems; against those who have
become so afraid they have yielded to the system.” In the post-Raleigh years, this
double-edged role of the young warriors would continue: inspiration and tough
challenge to the adult community.

Because he was the freedom movement leader best known to the press, King was
initially the focus of attention for the small press contingent at Shaw. But in the
course of the first evening’s speeches, they had to deal with the powerful presences
of James Lawson and Ella Baker. Baker was acknowledged by the students as their
prime mentor. Lawson, the official coordinator of the conference, and Baker both
encouraged the students to think about forming an independent organization of
their own. By the time the evening was over, the students had become the center of
the weekend.

And they were eager to seize the opportunities presented to them. Well-attended
workshops ranged from discussions of nonviolence to the political and economic
implications of their crusade. They discussed and debated proposals for future
organizational structure and spent much time and energy exploring the moral and
strategic significance of refusing bail. One of the ten discussion groups that day
focused on the role of “white supporters” in the rising movement. From the heart of
that discussion a powerful insight emerged, one that would mark the student-led
campaigns for several years. According to the notes kept by one of the participants,
the workshop participants declared, “This movement should not be considered one
for Negroes but one for people who consider this a movement against injustice. This
would include members of all races.”

By welcoming idealistic, non-black participants into their struggle, blacks con-
firmed one of the best self-definitions of the Southern-based freedom movement:
Freedom for black Americans freed all Americans. This vision was a central reason
why so many socially committed whites were attracted to the movement at large
and particularly to the politically conscious and religiously motivated nonviolent
student workers. It was not surprising to find among the “observers” at Shaw rep-
resentatives from such groups as the ecumenical National Council of Churches; the

214 To Make Our World Anew

Northern-based Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which fought for integra-
tion; the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR); and the overwhelmingly white
National Students Association, which represented college students.

The conference concluded with the birth of the Student Nonviolent Coor-
dinating Committee. Conferees elected Marion Barry as the new organization’s
first chairman. Barry held that post through the fall of 1961, when he returned to
graduate school in Nashville. During his brief tenure, he established a tone that
characterized the group well into the late sixties. He professed SNCC’s intention of
directly and forcefully confronting segregation and injustice, even vowing to go to
jail to achieve results.

The Arduous Task: Rooting Out Fear and
Getting Out Votes

In one of his characteristically insightful essays on the American condition, Ralph
Ellison wrote, “The business of being an American is an arduous task.” In the con-
text of the African-American struggles of the sixties, this was perhaps an under-
statement. For what emerged from the Southern freedom struggle by the beginning
of the sixties was the clear recognition that the arduous task for black people would
be redefining what it means to be an American. Nowhere was this work of re-
creation more evident than in the battles for justice that took place in Alabama,
Georgia, and Mississippi in 1961.

In May of that year, CORE organized an interracial group of activists to chal-
lenge a Supreme Court order outlawing segregation in bus terminals. Calling
themselves Freedom Riders, they set out across the South to see if they could inte-
grate all bus terminal facilities, including lunch counters, waiting rooms, and rest
rooms. They began their ride in Washington, D.C., and originally hoped to end it
in New Orleans. Where they failed, they hoped to draw attention to the continued
racism in the South and the need for federal intervention to protect black rights.
All was relatively peaceful until they entered Alabama. But the riders met with vio-
lence in almost every city they stopped in throughout that state. In Anniston, for
example, mobs actually threw a bomb on the bus and set it on fire.

As a result of international publicity, President John F. Kennedy and Attorney
General Robert Kennedy tried to persuade the riders to stop their journey. When
they refused, the Kennedys struck a deal with Mississippi officials, allowing them to
maintain segregated facilities as long as the Freedom Riders were not harmed.
Instead of being attacked, riders in Mississippi were simply arrested. Altogether, at
least 328 Freedom Riders served time in Mississippi’s jails. Realizing that the nega-
tive publicity would not die down and that CORE would continue to challenge seg-
regation, Robert Kennedy asked the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to
issue an order banning segregation in terminals that catered to interstate trans-
portation. That September, the ICC complied with the attorney general’s request,
issuing a statement that all interstate facilities must obey the Supreme Court ruling.

We Changed the World

The next battle took place in Albany, Georgia, a city of approximately sixty
thousand people that was intimately shaped by its agricultural setting and the
racial attitudes of its Black Belt location. Bernice Johnson, who later married
Cordell Reagon, was one of the most powerful participants in the Albany move-
ment. She was a student at the segregated Albany State College in 1961 when the
emerging Southern movement began to take hold in Albany.

As an officer of the Youth Council of the local NAACP, Johnson had been one
of the students who marched in 1961 on the college president’s house to protest the
administration’s failure to develop adequate security measures against white
intruders from town. Such men regularly harassed students on the campus and
more than once sneaked into women’s dormitories in an attempt to intimidate and
sexually threaten the students.

So Johnson, many of her fellow students, and some of their parents were already
preparing to challenge the system when representatives of SNCC appeared in
Albany that fall of 1961. Recognizing that it was really not able to coordinate a
widely scattered Southern student movement that had already begun to change its
character, the fledgling organization had decided to become essentially a commit-
ted group of antisegregation organizers. More than a dozen of the core group of
SNCC people announced late that spring and summer that they were dropping out
of school for a year in order to commit themselves to the struggle for justice, dig-
nity, and hope. It was also during this summer of 1961 that the group decided that
it would send out “field secretaries” to do grassroots organizing, especially educat-
ing and preparing potential voters across the South, working for SNCC at subsis-
tence wages of twenty-five to forty dollars per week, depending on whether they
were single or married. It was during that same period that the young freedom
workers engaged in a series of very long and piercing debates with each other about
whether the organization should continue to commit itself to nonviolent direct
action or focus instead on voter registration in the Deep South.

SNCC’s ongoing internal debates became so heated at times during that sum-
mer of 1961 that the new organization seemed in danger of breaking apart. One of
the major forces pushing the organization to focus on voter registration was
President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, the U.S. attorney general. They
were urging the Southern freedom movement organizations to take their primary
action “out of the street” and focus on what the Kennedy brothers assumed would
be a less volatile, and therefore less internationally embarrassing, action of regis-
tering black voters. As a part of their proposal, the Kennedys promised to round
up foundation funds for the voter-registration campaigns and to ensure federal
protection for its participants. Of course, not only were the Kennedys and their
friends hoping to get the movement off the front pages of the world’s newspapers,
but they expected that the vast majority of any new black registered voters would
be ready to cast their votes for the Democratic party, especially if that party
appeared to be committed to securing their rights.

215

To Make Our World Anew

Many of SNCC’s young people brought a high level of moral sensitivity and
political savvy to their work. So it was not surprising that in the course of the long
meetings, many of them thought they saw political and financial bribery at work
in the Kennedys’ offers. For some who had recently come out of the terror of the
Freedom Rides and the resultant rigors of Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary, any
call to turn away from such direct action was a call to betray their history. So the
internal battle was a hard one, and it was only the wisdom of their trusted mentor,
Ella Baker, that finally led the students to the decision that avoided a split. The
“band of brothers,” as they had begun to call themselves, reflecting both the sexism
of the time and the deep love and respect these young men and women shared for
each other, decided to set up a “direct action” project and a “voter registration” pro-
ject within the one organization.

That fall two SNCC voter-registration organizers headed into Southwest Geor-
gia, considered by black people to be a region of the state most resistant to such
activities. SNCC had already begun to develop its risky practice of choosing the
most difficult and dangerous places to start its projects, working on the assump-
tion that once the “hardest nuts” in a state were cracked, it would be possible to
assure local people and their own members that they could take on anything
else. But “Terrible” Terrell County, SNCC’s chosen starting point, proved to be too
much at first. It was a place too filled with the fear and the bloody memories of its
black people and the brutality of its white citizens to be ready for the voter-regis-
tration action that Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon had in mind. Sherrod was
a seminary student from Virginia who had left school to join SNCC’s crusade. His
eighteen-year-old companion was the same Cordell Reagon who had been drawn
out of his Nashville classroom the previous year by the sheer power of that city’s
student movement.

So they turned toward Albany, the largest town in the area. Because an order of
the Interstate Commerce Commission banning segregation in all interstate travel
facilities (notably, bus terminals and train stations) was scheduled to take effect on
November 1, 1961, Sherrod and Reagon decided that they should encourage the
local black young people of Albany to test the ICC mandate. In this way they could
take “direct action.”

As the first SNCC people on the scene in Albany, Sherrod and Reagon had to
improvise in organizing the black people there. The two men also had to figure out
a way to reach the most receptive young people in the African-American commu-
nity without seeming to compete with the local NAACP chapter and its own Youth
Council. Reagon later remembered: “We would sit in the student union building
on the college campus all day long, drinking soda, talking with the students, trying
to convince them to test the public accommodations at the bus station.” SNCC
organizers like Reagon and Sherrod were key in bringing teenagers into the center
of the freedom movement of the sixties.

The SNCC workers and their young student compatriots appeared at the Trailways

216

We Changed the World 217

bus terminal in Albany on November 1,1961, ready to test the new federal desegrega-
tion mandate. On that same day, other bus terminals in scores of Southern and bor-
der cities were tested in a CORE-inspired follow-up to the Freedom Rides. The Albany
action that day marked the beginning of a rising tide of student-led nonviolent con-
frontations with the city’s police force as blacks met an incoming train carrying an
interracial group of Freedom Riders. Although the passengers disembarked without
incident, the confrontation inspired the formation of a coalition among SNCC, the
local NAACP, a local ministers group, and others, which became known as the Albany
Movement.

Albany’s young people staged their challenge to the bus system on Wednesday,
November 22, the day before Thanksgiving. Normally, on that day, Albany State’s
many out-of-town students would file dutifully into the “colored” side of the bus
and train terminals to travel home for the holiday break. This time, even before the
crowd of college students arrived, three high-school students from the SNCC-
revived NAACP Youth Council walked into the white side of the bus terminal.
When the police ordered them to move, they refused, and were arrested. Although
they were quickly bailed out by the head of the local NAACP branch, who was not
happy about the path on which Reagon and Sherrod were leading his youth, their
audacious action was like the first crack in a dam.

Before long the college students arrived at the terminal. They had heard about
the arrest of the high-school students, and their college dean was there to try to
make sure his students were not carried away by their new sense of duty. He direct-
ed them to the “colored” side. Nevertheless, two Albany State students from the
SNCC workshop, Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall, refused. A detective informed
them that their presence in the white ticket line was creating a disturbance, and
when Gober and Hall did not leave, they were arrested.

Their presence in Albany’s dirty jail over the holiday became the magnet that
drew the larger black community of the city together. Not only did people bring
Gober and Hall a steady stream of Thanksgiving dinners, but the Albany Move-
ment leaders took the arrests, along with those of the high-school students, as a
sign that they had to join their children in the challenge to the old ways. The city
and its youth-inspired movement caught the attention of the national press, and
the Albany Movement held its first Montgomery-like mass meeting on the
Saturday evening after Thanksgiving, November 25. By then Gober and Hall had
been bailed out of jail, but they had also been suspended from college by their eas-
ily intimidated administrators, a decision that only solidified black community
support for the students. At the Saturday-night mass meeting, all the religious fer-
vor of Albany’s black people was poured into the songs that the students had
brought out of their workshops and their jail cells and transformed for the occa-
sion. The Albany Singers, including Bernice Johnson, were principally responsible
for defining the music of the Civil Rights movement. Later, Johnson founded the
women’s singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

218 To Make Our World Anew

By now the people at the meeting were ready to do more than sing and listen to
testimonies. They were prepared to march on City Hall to demand enforcement of
federal law, the reinstatement of the Albany State students, and the end of segrega-
tion. Over the next two weeks, at least three groups marched, praying for and
demanding change, and when they did, they were arrested in scores. The steady ris-
ing of their inspired people actually surprised the leaders of the Albany Movement,
among them movement President Dr. William Anderson, a local osteopath, and
Vice President Slater King, a local realtor. They were not prepared for a situation in
which nearly a thousand people, including parents and breadwinners, were at one
point stranded in jail with no bail money available and no significant response to
their call for desegregation of public transportation facilities.

It was at this point that some of the leadership, especially Anderson, decided
that they needed the help of Martin Luther King, Jr. Anderson was a college friend
of Ralph Abernathy and a fraternity brother of King. He decided to use these con-
nections to bring in the best-known hero of the Southern movement to see if his
presence could bring greater national attention to their struggle, and thereby shake
the resistance of the white establishment.

This determination to call in King and SCLC widened divisions that were
already present in the Albany Movement leadership. For instance, additional SNCC
forces had come in to help Sherrod and Reagon as the work expanded, and SNCC
adamantly opposed calling in King and SCLC. Its leaders argued that the media
attention King would attract might well suffocate the creative development of a
local grassroots leadership and that they could become too dependent on the star
of the freedom struggle.

Nevertheless, King, Abernathy, and some of their SCLC staff arrived in Albany
for a December 16 mass meeting that they understood to be a one-night inspira-
tional event. But at the meeting Anderson publicly maneuvered King into leading
a march the next day. As a result, King and his organization became enmeshed in
a very difficult situation.

Increasingly, Albany attracted black and white allies from across the nation.
Religious communities were especially attracted to the strong church component
of the movement’s mass meetings, marches, and mass jailing. But Albany’s black
leaders, now joined by King and the SCLC, were working for something that had
never been attempted in the South before. They had moved beyond the immediate
confrontational settings of the bus and train terminals and were pressing for the
desegregation of the entire city, beginning with its municipally owned public
accommodations and its local bus lines. Such a development was a necessary and
inevitable step in the burgeoning Southern struggle, but no one knew how to orga-
nize for it or to develop a citywide strategy.

The movement’s task was complicated by the fact that Laurie Pritchett, the chief
of police, was not a volatile loose cannon like some of his counterparts in other

We Changed the World 219

Southern communities. Instead, Pritchett was very concerned about public rela-
tions and insisted that his officers rein in their tendencies toward violent treatment
of the black community, especially when they were under the scrutiny of the mass
media. This strategy was meant to deprive the movement of emotional rallying
points and to deprive an already recalcitrant federal government of any reasons for
entering the Albany situation. Partly because of Pritchett’s strategy, partly because
of divisions within the Albany Movement, partly because of the unprecedented
demands that they were pressing on the segregated city, and partly because of their
own inexperience with such a setting, King, SNCC, and the Albany Movement
leaders were unable to reach their immediate goals of achieving the desegregation
of public facilities. Pritchett undermined the very basis of nonviolent passive resis-
tance by refusing to respond with violence. There were no dramatic images of
activists being attacked or beaten by mobs. Instead, they were peacefully arrested
for breaking the law.

There was no victorious breakthrough in Albany for several reasons. The
Kennedy administration agreed not to intervene directly, either to enforce the ICC
ruling or to protect the civil rights activists, as long as the Albany authorities could
keep the peace. Pritchett succeeded not only in keeping the peace and reducing
publicity, but in defeating the movement there. By the end of 1962, a year after the
Albany campaign started, SCLC called the campaign off, although SNCC activists
remained in Albany for another six years. Segregation was still firmly in place, and
only a handful of African Americans could vote.

Nevertheless, even in failure, the movement gained a new vision, a new voice.
Partly by accident it had chosen to try to challenge the segregation patterns of an
entire Southern city. This was the first time in the post-Montgomery years of the
freedom movement that young people and their elders had marched and gone to
jail together, had together shaped an organization to challenge segregation. As
important, the movement had discovered its capacity to take on more than a boy-
cott, or a sit-in, or a voter-registration project. It had learned something through
failure. These lessons would be important when King and the forces of SCLC even-
tually responded to the invitation from their fearless comrade, Fred Shuttlesworth,
and moved in the spring of 1963 toward Birmingham, perhaps the toughest, most
terrifying city in America in which to stage a fight for desegregation.

The road to Birmingham was not the only path that the Southern movement
took in those years following the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides. Even while the
Albany Movement was at its height, a small but steady stream of SNCC’s voter-reg-
istration workers arrived in the counties that Sherrod and Reagon had originally
targeted. As the Albany campaign slowed down in 1962, Sherrod himself went back
into the nearby rural areas to lead the work on the voter-registration project in
Baker, Terrell, Lee, and Dougherty counties.

Although it rarely received the same kind of media attention as the dramatic

220 To Make Our World Anew

public confrontation of marches, demonstrations, and sit-ins, this sort of tedious,
demanding, unglamorous, and dangerous day-to-day work of voter registration
was an essential step in providing blacks with the tools, and the power, to trans-
form the nation.

The work of these voter-registration campaigners began simply: They made
themselves known in the local black community—where they were often identified
as “Freedom Riders.” They visited homes, churches, schools, individuals, and fam-
ilies, and they sought out black community leaders. Central to their strategy was
always the work of “canvassing.” Moving on foot, on bicycles, in cars, on mules, the
young men and women went from house to house, often at night, asking if people
were registered or if they wanted to register, telling them about the benefits of vot-
ing, letting them know that classes were being set up to help people deal with the
intentionally complicated registration process, and calming their fears.

The atmosphere of confrontation and overcoming fear became most evident in
a meeting in Sasser, a country town in Terrell County. On Monday night, July 25,
1962, Sherrod, some of his interracial SNCC comrades, and several of the local
black leaders and participants were carrying on their weekly voter-registration
meeting at Mount Olive Baptist Church. There were some thirty or thirty-five peo-
ple in the building. Attendance was lower than usual partly because of a threat
from whites that the gathering would be broken up.

But the meeting went on, likely encouraged by the presence of three national
newspaper reporters who had also heard about the threat. The session began, as
usual, with a hymn, a prayer, and a Bible reading, the necessary ingredients for
starting a meeting anywhere in the black South. Sherrod was in charge of this part
of the meeting. The anxiety level was higher than usual that night, but the SNCC
organizer kept his voice even and calm as he opened the session. They sang, “Pass
me not/O gentle Savior,” and then repeated the Lord’s Prayer together. Sherrod led
them in repeating the Twenty-third Psalm, slowing down on the words, “Yea,
though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Just
then they heard the sound of car doors slamming in the driveway.

Sherrod had begun to read one of his favorite passages from the New Testament.
When he heard the car doors, he said quietly, firmly, “They are standing just out-
side now. If they come in I’m going to read this over again.” He read from Romans
8:31, “If God be for us, then who can be against us?” At that point about fifteen
white men from Sasser walked in, including one in a deputy sheriff’s uniform,
along with Sheriff Mathews, in plain clothes. They lined up against the wall in the
back of the church while Sherrod completed the reading. Then, without missing a
beat, the young freedom minister began to pray: “Into thy hand do we commend
our minds and souls and our lives every day…. We’ve been abused so long….
We’ve been down so long.” The “Amens” and “Uh-huhs” of the people had begun
to roll into place between his phrases, and they came again when Sherrod went on.

We Changed the World 221

“All we want,” he said, “is for our white brothers to understand that Thou who
made us, made us all…. And in Thy sight we are all one.” Sheriff Mathews had
bowed his head and closed his eyes.

Sherrod led the strangely mixed congregation in the Lord’s Prayer, and then
someone began singing, “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder.” Soon after the song
began, the men in the back filed out. At the end of the song Sheriff Mathews,
accompanied by two of his deputies and the sheriff of neighboring Sumter County,
walked back in. One deputy now had a large revolver holstered on his belt, and the
other one was brandishing a two-foot-long flashlight, a familiar weapon.

By this time, Lucius Holloway, the local chairman of the voter-registration drive,
had begun to lead the meeting, and he called out to the lawmen, “Everybody is wel-
come. This is a voter-registration meeting.” Sheriff Mathews responded:

We are a little fed up with this registering business. Niggers down here have
been happy for a hundred years, and now this has started. We want our col-
ored people to live like they’ve been living. There never was any trouble
before all this started. It’s caused great dislike between colored and white.

Then the deputies began taking the names of everyone present, and they told
the local black people that they did not need the outsiders from SNCC in order
to register. They also issued ominous threats about what could happen to blacks
after their outsider allies left the area. In the midst of the lawmen’s performance,
someone began humming “We Shall Overcome.” Others picked up the song.
The lawmen retreated to the back of the church and the people continued their
meeting, giving reports of registration attempts, testimonies of beatings, and state-
ments of hope.

At the end of the meeting, they gathered in a circle at the church door to sing
“We are not afraid.” That night there was no violence, except to the tires of one of
the reporters’ cars. But several nights later, the church was burned to the ground.
Eventually, most of the SNCC workers and community leaders who were at the
meeting found themselves thrown in jail, and beaten, as usual. Still, the organizing
and overcoming continued in Terrell County and elsewhere in the Deep South.

In these settings it had usually been so long since black people had voted that
many local black people did not even know that the nation’s laws guaranteed them
that right. Voting and politics generally were considered “white folks’ business,”
and there were terrible memories that reminded them of what could happen to
blacks who tried to participate in that business. In addition to the physical terror
that stood between African Americans and the ballot box, everyone knew of the
economic intimidation that was often used against them, sometimes forcing them
off the land they were farming as sharecroppers, putting them out of the misera-
ble shacks they lived in, making it impossible to get jobs with local employers,

222 To Make Our World Anew

ultimately forcing them to leave the area. These were the settings that had pro-
duced black registered voting percentages of zero to five percent in many places
where black people made up more than fifty percent of the population.

But in every such setting, there were always people willing to work for a new day.
That was certainly what Bob Moses found when he went into Mississippi. Moses
had been working in Atlanta as a volunteer in the SNCC office staff in the summer
of 1960. He was sent to Alabama and Mississippi that summer to recruit partici-
pants for the next SNCC organizing conference, scheduled for the fall. In prepara-
tion for the trip, Ella Baker supplied Moses with the names of people she had
worked with during her days as an NAACP organizer in the South.

One such person was Amzie Moore, president of the local, somewhat bedrag-
gled NAACP chapter in Cleveland, Mississippi. When Moses met Moore, the forty-
nine-year-old Mississippi movement veteran was farming part-time, working a few
hours each day in the local post office, and running his own gas station. Because
Moore had insisted on trying to develop a voter-registration campaign in Cleve-
land in the mid-fifties, and because he refused to put up the legally required “col-
ored” and “white” signs in his station, he had almost lost his business and his life.
But he was still there when Moses arrived, looking for recruits for SNCC.

Moore convinced Moses that what Mississippi needed more than a group of
young SNCC-like recruits going off to Atlanta was a band of SNCC’s arduous free-
dom workers coming to Mississippi to create a major voter-registration campaign,
starting right there in Cleveland. Moses said he would take the message back to
Atlanta. But Moses promised that regardless of what SNCC formally decided, he
would personally return to Cleveland the following summer. When Moses
returned South in the summer of 1961, much had changed throughout the nation.
Most important among the changes was the influence of the Freedom Rides and
the hope they inspired. And in Mississippi itself, Medgar Evers, the head of that
state’s NAACP organization, was openly calling for the city government of Jackson,
the capital city, to desegregate public facilities.

But the time was still not quite right for a voter-registration campaign in
Moore’s Delta area. White reaction to black assertiveness was swift and violently
brutal, federal protection could not be assured, and many blacks questioned the
wisdom of “stirring up trouble.” Instead, some local NAACP leaders in Southwest
Mississippi had heard about the possibility of a SNCC team coming to the state to
work on voter registration, and they asked their friend Moore to put them in touch
with Moses. As a result, SNCC’s voter education wing began its Mississippi de-
velopment in a small town called McComb, near another town named Liberty.
Courageous older NAACP veterans from the area, like C. C. Bryant, E. W. Steptoe,
and Webb Owens helped to open the way for Moses, who was soon joined by two
former Freedom Riders, John Hardy and Reginald Robinson.

The SNCC forces started in the usual way. With the help of the committed older
men and women in the town, they began to introduce themselves to other local

We Changed the World 223

Poll taxes, literacy tests, and citizenship exams—as well as other, more brutal methods—were
routinely used to keep blacks away from the polls in the South.

leaders and soon sought out the young people as well. Many of the teenage group
were fascinated by the fact that these activists had come to their town, and they
were ready for any kind of exciting direct action. Their elders, however, knew that
people in their area had been beaten, killed, or driven out of town for trying to reg-
ister to vote. So when Moses and his team began to set up a “school” to help peo-
ple prepare for the intimidating moment when they might face a hostile registrar,
the response was slow. Moses made it a practice never to pressure local people to
register, because he knew, and they also knew, that he was asking them to risk their
lives, a decision that they had to make themselves.

But when the first group of three local volunteers, an older man and two middle-
aged women, were finally ready, it was Moses whose life was most at risk. After help-
ing his frightened candidates break their silence as they faced the registrar, Moses
was attacked on the main street of McComb by a man who was the sheriff’s cousin.
He split Moses’s scalp with the heavy handle of a hunting knife. About a week later
Moses felt a different kind of pain when he had to identify the body of Herbert Lee,
a black farmer who had risked his life to volunteer as a driver for the SNCC voter-
registration team. Because of his movement association, Lee had been shot to death
in daylight by a white segregationist—a Mississippi state legislator.

Meanwhile in McComb, the committed high-school students were too young to

224 To Make Our World Anew

register and too impatient to wait. They wanted to enter the freedom struggle more
directly than by teaching older people to read the registration materials. By now,
SNCC people from the “direct action” contingent, like Marion Barry and Diane
Nash, had also begun to gather in McComb, and they were leading workshops for
the teenagers on nonviolent direct action. As soon as they could, the students put
their training into action with a sit-in at a local lunch counter, the first in that part
of Mississippi, an action for which SNCC had not planned. The sit-in squad was
put in jail, and some of them were suspended from school. That led to a student-
organized walkout from their school and a march to City Hall.

Sensing that the teenagers were moving into a dangerous action that they could
not handle, Moses and some of his coworkers decided to march with them. The
youngsters decided that they wanted to pray on the steps of City Hall. The police
thought prayers belonged only in churches or homes, and they began to arrest
the young people. The students were repeating the Lord’s Prayer, and each time
one was interrupted and arrested, another walked up the steps to continue the
prayer. Finally, the police arrested more than one hundred young people and took
them to jail. By then the spectacle had attracted a crowd of curious and angry
white people.

Moses and his two SNCC companions offered a striking testimony to the spirit
of SNCC. One of them was Charles “Chuck” McDew, an Ohio-born black college
student who became a sit-in leader at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg.
The other was Bob Zellner, the organization’s first full-time field secretary assigned
to recruiting white students. A native of Alabama, Zellner was the son of a white
Southern Methodist minister, and he went to McComb instead of traveling to
white campuses because he wanted to know what SNCC was actually doing in
order to be an effective recruiter for the cause.

However, the white people of McComb wanted to know what he was doing
there in the midst of the black troublemakers. Here, and in many future situations,
Zellner was considered “a traitor to the white race.” So as he came down the City
Hall steps on his way to jail, several men rushed to attack him. There were many
beatings and jailings in McComb that fall. At one point, all but one of the SNCC
organizers were in jail. But it was the death of Herbert Lee that haunted people
more than anything else. Despite the harsh white resistance that had forced the
adults of McComb to temporarily slow down their attempts at voter registration,
leading to SNCC’s temporary withdrawal, still no one could miss the tremors of
change throughout the state.

In 1962, the most spectacular tremor in Mississippi was the decision of black Air
Force veteran James Meredith, with the support of the NAACP, to apply for admis-
sion to Ole Miss. Few institutions were considered more quintessentially white
Mississippian, more worthy of defense against the black challenge than the
University of Mississippi at Oxford. When Meredith first tried to enroll in the uni-
versity, Governor Ross Barnett barred him from admission, a power that a federal

We Changed the World 225

court ruled Barnett did not possess. Barnett then encouraged white people in the
state to believe that their active, armed resistance—even to a court-ordered
change—could halt desegregation.

So by the end of September 1962, when it was time for Meredith to appear on
campus to register for his first classes, thousands of white Mississippians—both
students and others—believed that they could physically guard the university
against the newly defined black presence that Meredith represented. Students and
their segregationist allies rioted against the federal marshals who had slipped onto
the Meredith campus the Sunday afternoon before registration. The rioters hurled
rocks, bricks, lead pipes, and tear gas at the marshals, and finally even shot at them
in a one-sided battle in which the marshals were ordered not to return the fire. In
the course of the uproar, a foreign reporter and a local white worker were shot and
killed, and some 350 others, mostly marshals, were wounded. The Kennedys had
been trying to negotiate their way to a settlement with Barnett that would not
require them to send in federal troops to protect Meredith’s rights. However, in the
end, the Kennedys decided they had to send in the troops. Though late, this feder-
al intervention finally ended the white resistance.

The next day, James Meredith finally registered as the first black student at Ole
Miss and became a powerful symbol to the black people of the nation.

As the SNCC workers reflected on their experiences in southwest Georgia and
southwest Mississippi, they moved to the northwest area of Mississippi, known as
the Delta. They stopped in Jackson to work out the details of a new coalition. Now
they would coordinate their work with the activities of the NAACP, SCLC, and
CORE, and together they formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).
This coalition was largely Bob Moses’ idea, and it served as an important pipeline
for the funds that supported registration work.

Ultimately, this united front was important for the morale of Mississippi’s black
people, providing them with a sense of the joint strength that was needed to break
open the “closed society” of their state. Nevertheless, the essential energies and
people power of the next stages of the COFO campaign came from SNCC, which
was the heart of COFO. SNCC realized that the dangerous and essentially under-
ground work of registering blacks had to become more visible to the world, not
only to provide protection and build morale but also to prod the federal govern-
ment into action.

From the spring of 1962 to the fall of 1963 the Mississippi voting-rights work
was focused on the Delta region. It was known as one of the most terror-filled
sections of a violence-prone state. Partly because of this reputation, partly because
this was the area where Amzie Moore lived, Bob Moses, as the new COFO program
director, took his voter-registration forces there, working to make Moore’s old
dream come true.

The reality of voter registration in the Delta was harsher than the dreams, how-
ever. Once again, the violence was persistent and nerve-wracking. As in every other

226 To Make Our World Anew

voter-registration campaign in the Black Belt, however, SNCC and other groups
were constantly meeting such men and women as Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville,
a town not far from Greenwood. The forty-seven-year-old sharecropper with a
sixth-grade education went to a mass meeting one night in 1962 and heard James
Bevel, the charismatic leader who had emerged from the Nashville student move-
ment, holding forth like an evangelist, calling people to a new life of struggle for
freedom. Hamer later said, “Until then I’d never heard of no mass meeting and I
didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote.” But when she found out, she was
one of the first volunteers to go to the courthouse the next day.

Hamer knew she was volunteering for danger, and later she said, “I guess if I’d
had any sense I’d a-been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared. The
only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to
do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.” From that day on Hamer
was at the heart of the movement.

While in Greenwood, Bob Moses wrote about how to face the long, hard, dan-
gerous times when it was easy to give in to fear:

You dig into yourself and the community and prepare to wage psychologi-

cal warfare; you combat your own fears about beatings, shootings, and pos-

sible mob violence; you stymie by your own physical presence the anxious

fear of the Negro community … you organize, pound by pound, small

bands of people who gradually focus in the eyes of Negroes and whites as

people tied up in “that mess”; you create a small striking force capable of
moving out when the time comes, which it must, whether we help it or not.

Of course no one could predict how and when the time would come, again and
again, in these life-changing campaigns. But for people on the front lines, like
Moses, the testing time was always nearby. This was the testimony of one of his
coworkers, Marian Wright, a Spelman College graduate who was taking some time
from her Yale Law School studies to join the forces of hope in Greenwood. She
wrote,

I had been with Bob Moses one evening and dogs kept following us down
the street. Bob was saying that he wasn’t used to dogs, that he wasn’t brought
up around dogs, and he was really afraid of them. Then came the march, and
the dogs growling and the police pushing us back. And there was Bob, refus-
ing to move back, walking, walking towards the dogs.

Neither Moses nor the dogs backed down, and one of the animals tore a piece
out of his trousers before the dog’s police handler finally pulled him away. Bob
Moses kept walking.

In Greenwood, in 1962 and early 1963, no one knew how long they would have
to walk and work, facing dogs, facing death, facing fear. But one thing began to be

We Changed the World 227

clear: They were not walking alone. For instance, in response to appeals from
SNCC, communities in the North were donating truckloads of food and clothing
for desperate Delta families. Dick Gregory, the socially concerned comedian, came
to stand in solidarity and mordant humor with the people who continued to walk
toward the courthouse and the registrar’s office. Folksinger Bob Dylan arrived for
his baptism in the work of the movement, sharing his songs and hope.

In the early spring of 1963, many of the full-time SNCC workers took time out
from Greenwood’s battleground to attend the annual SNCC staff meeting in
Atlanta. The organization’s full-time staff was now up to sixty people, and they
came in from all over the South. Some 350 people attended the April gathering
held at one of Atlanta’s black theological schools, Gammon Seminary.

Reflecting later on the session, James Forman, who was the organization’s inde-
fatigable executive secretary during those crucial years, summed up the spirit and
meaning of the experience: “The meeting was permeated by an intense comrade-
ship, born of sacrifice and suffering and a commitment to the future, and out of a
knowledge that our basic strength rested in the energy, love, and warmth of the
group. The band of sisters and brothers, in a circle of trust, felt complete at last.”

In the midst of a throbbing social movement nothing remained “complete” for
long. Even as the SNCC meeting was going on, its companion and slightly elder
organization, SCLC, was opening another front of the expanding Southern free-
dom movement. Responding to repeated invitations from Fred Shuttlesworth,
leader of the Birmingham Civil Rights movement, and determined to learn crucial
lessons from the many difficulties and experiments in Albany, in the spring of 1963
Martin Luther King, Jr., and his staff had gone to Birmingham, Alabama.

Birmingham: The Days beyond “Forever”

When SCLC decided to challenge segregation in Birmingham, it was taking on a
city with one of the worst records of anti-labor and anti-civil rights violence in the
country. Because of its surrounding coal and steel industries, the city had always
attracted labor-organizing activities. In 1931, the police force established the “Red
Squad” to handle communist and other Left-Wing organizers with force, and from
then on Birmingham’s law-enforcement agencies—with much assistance from pri-
vate citizens—were infamous for their brutal tactics. During the thirties, many
black and white labor organizers were arrested, kidnapped, beaten, or even killed.
And in 1941, Birmingham experienced a wave of police killings and beatings. The
best-known incidents involved the deaths of two young black men, O’Dee
Henderson and John Jackson. Henderson, who was arrested and jailed for merely
arguing with a white man, was found handcuffed and shot the next morning in his
jail cell. A few weeks later, Jackson, a metalworker in his early twenties, was shot to
death as he lay in the backseat of a police car. He had made the fatal mistake of
arguing with the arresting officers in front of a crowd of blacks lined up outside a
movie theater.

228 To Make Our World Anew

After the Second World War, blacks often referred to the rigidly segregated city
as “Bombingham.” The name called attention to the frequent bombings of the
homes and churches of those African Americans who dared to take even tentative
steps toward the establishment of racial justice. This was the setting in which Bir-
mingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth and his family had been beaten, bombed,
attacked, and jailed. Many people agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr., when he
said, “As Birmingham goes, so goes the South.” Later, when he reflected on the
Birmingham campaign, King wrote:

We believed that while a campaign in Birmingham would surely be the
toughest fight of our civil-rights careers, it could, if successful, break the
back of segregation all over the nation. This city had been the country’s chief
symbol of racial intolerance. A victory there might well set forces in motion
to change the entire course of the drive for freedom and justice.

After exploring the situation, SCLC moved into action in Birmingham during
the first days of April 1963. This was a period of intense freedom movement activ-
ity all across the South, with thousands of demonstrators challenging segregation
from Maryland to Louisiana. In Birmingham, SCLC and Shuttlesworth’s Alabama
Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) focused on breaking the hold
of legalized segregation in all the public facilities, starting with its downtown stores
and its municipal facilities, such as city-owned parks, pools, and drinking foun-
tains. They also hoped to open up the police force to black officers. To work out
details and to keep the process moving beyond the demonstrations, the black orga-
nizations pressed for the establishment of a city-sponsored biracial committee.

In light of Birmingham’s history—and in the presence of Alabama’s new gover-
nor, George Wallace, who had declared in his 1963 inaugural address, “Segregation
now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”—this relatively modest set of
goals appeared to most white residents to be undesirable, and impossible.
Complicating the situation was the fact that the white leadership of Birmingham
was deeply divided. When SCLC came on the scene that spring, the city was await-
ing a judicial decision concerning a recent, disputed municipal election. The deci-
sion would either establish Bull Connor, the police commissioner, as mayor or
place in office a more moderate segregationist named Albert Boutwell. At the same
time there was a white business community of expanding influence whose mem-
bers were greatly concerned about their city’s image, an image they were trying to
refurbish “to look like Atlanta,” the liberal showcase city of the region. But in the
midst of all of this the Ku Klux Klan and its adherents were still dangerously active,
rallying behind their new governor.

For most of April, SCLC’s challenge to Birmingham seemed to have a hard time
capturing the full energy and interest of local black people or the national press.
Even when King and Abernathy were arrested and jailed for marching on Good
Friday, April 12, the best of the nightly mass meetings could not produce more

We Changed the World 229

than fifty or sixty volunteers for the next morning’s demonstrations, which were
designed to demand an immediate end to racist employment practices and segre-
gation in public accommodations.

It was important to note who did show up to march. At the outset of the cam-
paign it was the older people who stepped forward. Eventually, the Birmingham
grandchildren would respond to the elders.

While King sat in the isolation cell of Bull Connor’s jail, one of his lawyers man-
aged to smuggle in some newspapers. In one of the Birmingham papers King came
across a statement signed by a group of local white clergymen who considered
themselves friends of black people and open to “moderate” racial change. Ex-
pressing concern that the desegregation campaign could play into Bull Connor’s
hands, they urged King and SCLC to leave Birmingham’s future in the hands of
its moderate black and white leaders. King seized the opportunity to respond.
After a yellow, legal-sized pad was passed on to him, King ended up with a lengthy
handwritten document that attempted to lay out the justification for his presence
in Birmingham, to express the meaning and purpose of nonviolent direct action,
and to provide a statement concerning the role of the churches in the quest for
racial justice. However, the single most powerful section of his long letter arose
out of his determination to let the white clergymen—and any other readers—
know something about what it meant to be a black person in the segregated South,
and what it meant to be told by white “friends” and Christian brothers to wait
for a more convenient time to protest and challenge the injustice and inhumanity
of segregation.

King wrote, “I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of
segregation to say, ‘Wait.'” Then in the longest sentence he had ever written, or
would ever write again, he poured out a statement that was more than a moan or
a plea for understanding.

When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will
and drown your sisters and brothers at whim, when you have seen hate-
filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and
sisters with impunity, when you see the vast majority of your twenty million
Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an
affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your
speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why
she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on
television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that
Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of infe-
riority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort he
little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white
people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking
in agonizing pathos, ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so

230 To Make Our World Anew

mean?’; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep
night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because
no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by
nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes
“nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (no matter how old you are)
and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are
never given the respected title “Mrs”; when you are harried by day and
haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at a
tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with
inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degener-
ating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it diffi-
cult to wait.

King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, one of the classic statements of the freedom
movement, did not begin to reach the outside world until more than a month after
it was written. It was published in a number of newspapers and magazines and in
book form in 1964 as Why We Can’t Wait.

As the Birmingham demonstrations grew larger and more public, young people
were eager to join in. Soon, young people regularly attended the nightly mass meet-
ings and begged their parents to let them join the marches. But the movement
leaders debated about encouraging students to miss school for an almost certain
rendezvous with prison, or worse. Marchers were attacked by police dogs, shot with
high-power water hoses, and beaten with clubs. In that debate the views of SNCC
leaders Diane Nash Bevel and her husband, SCLC staff member James Bevel, pre-
vailed. James Bevel, who played a major role as a strategist for the Birmingham
protests, argued that since the young people did not carry the burden of their fam-
ily’s economic responsibilities on them, they were free to meet the challenge of
going to jail. But the situation soon became more complicated. For as soon as the
announcement was made in mass meeting that Thursday, May 2, 1963, would be
the day for high-school demonstrations, dozens of elementary schoolchildren
declared their own readiness to march.

Now there was another debate among the leaders. What should be the mini-
mum age for their freedom marchers? They decided that anyone who was old
enough to volunteer to become a church member should be old enough to volun-
teer to become a member of the freedom corps. In that black Baptist-dominated
setting, such a decision meant that children as young as six might be on the march-
ing line when Thursday morning came.

That morning Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the usual meeting place, was
filled with hundreds of children. Shuttlesworth offered the morning send-off
prayers, and the recently released King told the young people how important they
were. Before the day was over, more than six hundred of the children discovered
that the way to freedom led directly through Birmingham’s jail.

We Changed the World 231

The Birmingham fire hoses knocked protesters to the ground with enough force to take the bark
off trees.

Bull Connor had been caught off-guard on Thursday by the surge of young
marchers, moving around the police lines. He did not intend to be upstaged again by
a flood of singing black children. So on Friday, May 3, when the young marchers came
singing down the steps of Sixteenth Street Church, they saw fire trucks in the park
facing the church. Andrew Young, who oversaw SCLC’s fledgling voter-registration
drive and was a chief negotiator in the Birmingham campaign, later described what
happened:

As groups of kids marched past the park headed for downtown, Connor
issued the order to the firemen to uncoil their hoses. Police dogs had been
seen before, and once again they were brought to the front of the barricades,
straining at their leashes. But until now, the fire trucks had remained on
the sidelines. Suddenly fire hoses didn’t seem like fun anymore, and the
kids watched with trepidation as the firehoses were unwound. They kept
marching and their voices grew stronger with the comforting tunes of the
freedom songs. It never ceased to amaze me, the strength that people drew
from the singing of those old songs…. Suddenly, Connor ordered the fire-
men to open the hoses on both the marchers and the large crowd of onlook-
ers who had gathered in the park. The water was so powerful it knocked
people down and the line began to break as marchers ran screaming
through the park to escape the water. Connor then ordered the police to

232 To Make Our World Anew

pursue the terrified kids with angry dogs, and to our horror actually
unleashed some of them. The police ran through the park, swinging their
billy clubs at marchers, onlookers, and newsmen—anyone in the way.

As the tension escalated, an international audience watched. By now it was clear
that the nation’s leaders could not continue to avoid direct engagement with the
situation in Birmingham and still claim to be “leaders of the free world.” The
Kennedys, after some initial annoyance with SCLC’s timing and methods, let it be
known, first privately, then publicly, that they believed a negotiated way should be
found through Birmingham’s troubles. They sent personal emissaries to the city,
especially to urge the business leaders to take responsibility for moving toward
desegregation. Robert Kennedy himself made dozens of phone calls to corporate
leaders nationwide whose Southern subsidiaries were located in the Birmingham
area. He urged them to put pressure on their local people to cooperate with the
movement’s demands for desegregation.

With the rising pressure of the federal government, negotiations based on the
movement’s basic demands were finally begun. The negotiations were difficult, but
they lasted less than a week. They led to an agreement that was announced on May
7, 1963, about a month after the demonstrations had begun. Under the agreement,
an irreversible process of desegregation was begun in public accommodations and
municipal facilities. SCLC won its demands for desegregated lunch counters, rest
rooms, fitting rooms, and drinking fountains. Downtown store owners agreed to
hire African-American clerks. Expanded hiring and promotion of black people had
begun throughout the industrial community of Birmingham. All the imprisoned
demonstrators were released on bail that was supplied from various local and
national sources, and the cases against the released prisoners were soon dismissed.
But there was a compromise: SCLC agreed to a timetable of planned stages rather
than demanding that these changes take place immediately. It also agreed to the
release of arrested demonstrators on bail rather than insist that the charges be
dismissed outright.

But it would not be a simple matter to extricate Birmingham from its past. On
the evening after the announcement, the Ku Klux Klan leadership bitterly con-
demned the arrangement at a rally on the edge of the city. Later that night a bomb
badly damaged the home of A. D. King, Martin’s younger brother, who was an
activist pastor in the city and a participant in the movement. Soon, a second bomb
exploded at the Gaston Motel, practically demolishing Room 30, the modest suite
that King normally used as his headquarters. Fortunately, A. D. King’s family was
not hurt, Martin King had already left the city, and no one else was injured at the
motel. But the bombings drew hundreds of outraged black people into the streets.
Without waiting for a request from the new mayor, Albert Boutwell, Governor
Wallace sent in state troopers to maintain order. However, the pushing, attacking,
cursing troopers seemed intent on provoking the leaderless crowd into violence. In

We Changed the World 233

response, black people threw rocks and bottles and set some stores and cars on fire.
For a moment it seemed as if a major explosion would blow apart the new agree-
ment. Instead, some of the SCLC and local Birmingham leaders were able to work
out a truce between the enraged black people and the brutally aggressive troopers.

The Birmingham campaign, saved from catastrophe, had not only energized the
Civil Rights movement, but it had made the world aware of segregation’s ugliness.
Television was a critical factor. The new technology enabled millions of viewers to
watch with rapt horror as the police attacked the youthful demonstrators. There
was no mistaking the haunting scenes of Birmingham police dogs snapping at the
legs of children. Nor could even the most casual viewer ignore the fire depart-
ment’s role in the daily confrontations.

It became clear to the White House that the civil rights activists would not aban-
don their cause without fundamental changes. An angry encounter between
Attorney General Robert Kennedy and African Americans gathered by black writer
James Baldwin highlighted the rawness of race relations in the country. Blacks
bluntly told Kennedy that they expected more from him and his brother, the pres-
ident. Robert Kennedy left the room angered by their demands, yet he later reflect-
ed that the encounter forever changed his views about race and the race problem
in American life. Even the politically pragmatic John Kennedy would understand
very soon that he could not shrink from the demands for full inclusion. To his
credit, President Kennedy tried to get a new civil rights bill through the Congress.
The new bill was stronger than all previous ones. It would end discrimination in
all interstate transportation, at hotels, and in other public places; it ensured all who
had a sixth-grade education the right to vote; and it gave the attorney general the
power to cut off government funds to states and communities that continued to
practice racial discrimination. It would be more than a year before Congress passed
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the meantime, President Kennedy worried that any
further demonstrations threatened his ability to secure sufficient bipartisan sup-
port for the legislation.

King and others sensed that it was time to bring the strategies of the Southern
Civil Rights movement to the nation’s capital. In a private conversation with friends
Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones, recorded by an FBI wiretap, King broached the
idea of a huge, one-hundred-thousand person march on Washington. The FBI had
begun to tap King’s phone lines after FBI director J. Edgar Hoover convinced Robert
Kennedy that Levison, who was white, was a member of the Communist party and
had too much influence over King. Hoover, in fact, had a difficult time believing
that blacks had initiated the movement and that it was led by blacks. Unaware that
others were listening, King and his friends added other names to the list of possible
organizers, including the venerable labor leader A. Philip Randolph, whose earlier
threats to march on Washington had led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue
Executive Order 8802, which banned hiring discrimination at military facilities and
government agencies during the Second World War.

234 To Make Our World Anew

The planning committee brought together representatives from civil rights
organizations and the labor movement, interested clergy, and entertainment fig-
ures. The logistics of putting together the August 28, 1963, event were an enor-
mous challenge. Organizers had to plan, for example, for inclement weather, med-
ical emergencies, transportation, sanitation, drinking water, and food. They also
needed to coordinate speakers and to mobilize members of black communities
nationwide who would attend. In the meantime, ever worried by the prospect of
social disturbances, President Kennedy readied several thousand soldiers for riot
control.

The response from Americans staggered the organizers. By the morning of the
march, more than a quarter million people had descended on Washington from
every state in the Union. They arrived in twenty-one chartered trains, in caravans
of buses and cars, on bicycles, and on foot. One fellow rollerskated to the march
from Chicago. Men and women, old and young, black and white, made their way
to the summertime shadows of the Washington Monument. Although the occasion
was sometimes festive, the mood was serious. Few knew of the behind-the-scenes
crisis threatening to destroy the semblance of unity among sometimes rival civil
rights groups.

But as folk singers such as Joan Baez, Odetta, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Bob
Dylan entertained the estimated quarter of a million people who assembled, march
organizers worked to get SNCC leader John Lewis to temper his speech. Lewis’s
prepared text bristled with anger. In a shorthand fashion he recalled the painful
lessons sandwiched between the Birmingham campaign and the Washington
march. In that period bombs had exploded in Birmingham; civil rights workers
June Johnson, Annell Ponder, and Fannie Lou Hamer endured a tortuous beating
at the hands of Winona, Mississippi, police; Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar
Evers was assassinated in his own driveway; and the Highlander Folk School in
Tennessee was burned to the ground.

Lewis eventually agreed to the pleadings of Randolph, not because Washington
area clergy threatened to boycott the affair, but because he respected and un-
derstood the power of the moment. Nonetheless Lewis advised those watching
and listening that blacks would not go slow. He told the gathering, “We shall crack
the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of
democracy.”

Though Lewis offered perhaps the most forceful message of the day, it was
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech that became a sort of national motto. Fusing clas-
sical philosophy to the oral traditions of the black Baptist Church, King preached
that day about an America that could be. He shared his dream of a day when race
did not matter: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content
of their character. I have a dream today!”

King’s speech—and the entire march—energized the black community with the

We Changed the World 235

hope of justice. Then on Sunday, September 15, 1963, little more than two weeks
after the March on Washington, a package of dynamite ripped through the Six-
teenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham while worshipers were preparing for
church services. When the smoke cleared, four young girls—ages eleven to four-
teen—lay dead. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia
Wesley had not taken part in earlier demonstrations, but their young faces, appear-
ing in newspapers worldwide, became instant symbols of both the tragedy of
racism and the hope of the civil rights struggle.

Two months later, violence of another kind erupted in Dallas, and the victim
this time was President Kennedy, who had gone to Texas to shore up his South-
ern base in the Democratic party. The 1964 election was a year away, and signs
indicated that the Republicans might nominate the very conservative Barry
Goldwater, a senator from Arizona. As his motorcade traveled the streets of Dallas
on November 22, the sound of rifle fire rang out. The open limousine carrying
Kennedy made him a ready target.

With Kennedy’s death, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan and former majority
leader in the Senate, was sworn in as the country’s new president. Among his first
acts was to call for passage of the Civil Rights Act proposed by Kennedy. He told a
joint session of Congress, “No memorial or eulogy could more eloquently honor
President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights
bill for which he fought.”

As Congress debated the merits of the legislation, blacks in Mississippi were
continuing to demand their voting rights. In the fall of 1963, activists launched a
Freedom Vote campaign to register voters statewide and to demonstrate the impor-
tance of black electoral participation. With help from sixty white students drawn
from Northern colleges, canvassers went door-to-door, enduring beatings, intimi-
dation, and the fear of physical injury, to get black Mississippians to vote in a mock
election. Nearly one hundred thousand voted for a Freedom party slate, thereby
indicating what they could do if they had the right to vote.

Following this campaign, longtime SNCC worker Bob Moses proposed an
expansion of the earlier effort. He and others had in mind a Freedom Summer,
during which white college students, in alliance with local black leadership and
blacks active in SNCC, would canvass Mississippi, registering voters and teaching
in Freedom Schools. Moses had in mind something other than another mock vote;
this time he would register blacks for the coming presidential election in No-
vember 1964. Freedom Summer lasted three months, June, July, and August. About
one thousand volunteers participated, three-quarters of whom were white and
three hundred of whom were women. The students hailed from Western and
Northern colleges and universities. After spending a week in a training session
directed by SNCC Executive Director James Forman in Oxford, Ohio, the first two
hundred volunteers embarked for Mississippi and the forty-three project sites scat-
tered across the state.

236 To Make Our World Anew

Tragically, within the first two days of Freedom Summer, law-enforcement offi-
cials in Philadelphia, Mississippi, added three new names to the list of martyrs who
made the supreme sacrifice on behalf of civil rights. Andrew Goodman was a
college student at Queens College in New York and a Freedom Summer volunteer.
Michael Schwerner had recently opened the CORE office in Meridian with his wife,
Rita. CORE worker James Chaney was the only one who was black and a native
Mississipian.

On June 21,1964, the three had set out for Lawndale to investigate another church
burning. Near Philadelphia they were arrested for speeding, but the police let them
go. That was the last time anyone other than their murderers saw them alive. One
hundred fifty FBI agents, aided by sailors, searched woods and rivers. Investigators
did not locate the three men until August 4, after they received a tip from an infor-
mant motivated by a thirty-thousand-dollar reward. The three decomposed bodies
were found buried under a manmade dam. Later testimony revealed that the bull-
dozer operator at the dam had been paid by Klan members to hide the bodies there.
Each had been shot by a .38-caliber gun; and clearly Chaney had been severely beat-
en before being shot. The U.S. Justice Department indicted nineteen men, including
police officers and Klansmen, for the murders; only seven were found guilty.

The horrifying events caused a few volunteers to drop out, but not many. Many
would later recall that the summer of 1964 was a pivotal time in their lives. Many
whites experienced the warm fellowship of local black Southerners, who freely
adopted them into their lives and communities. Black and white participants
struggled with the perceptions and realities of power. Some SNCC and CORE
activists complained, for example, that white volunteers too quickly assumed they
were experts and leaders. Each group had to be educated and reeducated about the
other’s abilities and sensibilities. But the politics of leadership was no small matter.
The tension soon grew into calls for black control of civil rights groups.

More than anything, however, Freedom Summer highlighted the potential
political empowerment of black Mississippians. And it turned the national spot-
light on racial violence and voting injustices in the state, forcing the federal gov-
ernment to respond. As August came to a close, more than eighty thousand blacks
joined the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP). They would use
this new strength to wrest changes from the national Democratic party, forcing the
national body to undo, reluctantly, the practice of locking blacks out of the
Mississippi party.

The Fire This Time

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964.
It not only outlawed segregation in public accommodations of every kind through-
out the country, but it laid the foundation for federal affirmative action policy.
Affirmative action programs were meant to ensure that victims of past discrimi-
nation would have greater opportunities to find jobs, earn promotions, and gain

We Changed the World 237

The 1966 “March Against Fear” in Mississippi was initiated by James Meredith. After Meredith
was shot, Martin Luther King, Jr., (front center) and others took over the march. Black militants
denounced their tactics of nonviolence and urged blacks to defend themselves against attack.

admission to colleges and universities. In particular, Title VII of the Civil Rights
Act outlawed employment discrimination by creating the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce the law. It not only applied to both
governmental and nongovernmental employers but covered labor unions and
employment agencies as well. Workers who believed they were discriminated
against in the workplace because of their race, sex, creed, color, or religion could
file a complaint with the federal government.

But the new law did not dismantle the obstacles to voting that blacks in the
South still faced. In the summer of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
party (MFDP) filed a lawsuit against the Democratic party for discrimination and
used the television cameras to take their story to the nation. Fannie Lou Hamer
told the world how she had been beaten and tortured by white supremacists sim-
ply because “we want to register,” and she pointed out that the white Democrats
were not even loyal to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Those Democrats vehement-
ly attacked Johnson’s candidacy because of his commitment to civil rights and
equal opportunity for all. Yet, while Johnson agreed with the MFDP’s assessment,
he and his party would not recognize its delegates as the legitimate representatives
of the state of Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention.

Questioning both the horrors at home and the Democratic party’s refusal to

238 To Make Our World Anew

take their delegation seriously, Hamer asked, “Is this America? The land of the free
and the home of the brave?” Johnson’s response was to strike a deal: He signaled
that he was prepared to select the liberal Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey
as his running mate, if MFDP delegates and their surrogates cooperated by allow-
ing the delegation to remain intact, with one modification. Two members of the
MFDP would sit as members of the Mississippi delegation, while other MFDP del-
egates would attend the convention as observers. Although Martin Luther King,
Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, and several mainstream black lead-
ers urged the MFDP to accept the compromise, they refused. Most MFDP delegates
felt the compromise minimized their claim of truly representing Democrats in
Mississippi.

When election day arrived, all of Mississippi’s electoral votes went to archcon-
servative Republican Barry Goldwater. Indeed, the Republican party made history,
not only winning the state of Mississippi for the first time but also declaring victo-
ries in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. The Democratic party’s
failure to fully embrace Mississippi’s black voters signaled the beginning of the end
of the solid Democratic South.

Johnson won by a landslide, but the failure of the capital-D Democratic party
to support small-d democratic forces in the South and the willingness of Martin
Luther King and other national civil rights figures to go along with Johnson struck
a blow to the movement. Increasingly, local activists in the rural South, SNCC
activists, and urban activists associated compromise with weakness.

Less than a year later King supported another compromise that would further
damage and divide the movement. It involved a struggle in Selma, Alabama, where
SNCC activists had been locked in a battle with local forces and Governor George
Wallace, who used brutal violence to suppress the movement there. After SNCC
organizer Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by a state trooper as he tried to shield
his mother from officers’ billy clubs during a civil rights demonstration, SNCC
and SCLC decided to hold a march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7,
1965. After calling for the march, however, King reconsidered after a tortuous con-
versation with Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. It was clear that President
Johnson did not want the march to happen, because the potential violence would
generate bad publicity and, from his perspective, jeopardize his relations with
Southern Democrats. Worried that his defiance of Johnson’s wishes might under-
mine the goal of passing a voting rights bill, King decided to cancel the march at
the very last minute. He and Ralph Abernathy left town, announcing that they had
to minister to their congregations.

But the young people of SNCC were not about to postpone the march. They
convinced SCLC leader Hosea Williams to go on with it, with or without King.
(Many marchers, however, did not know what had happened and were surprised
by King’s absence.) But they never made it; the police and state troopers brutally

We Changed the World 239

attacked the racially mixed crowd as it reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, forcing
the marchers to turn back. Three days later, amidst criticism for his absence, King
decided to lead another group of three thousand people, who had answered the call
to go to Selma and complete the march, across the bridge. But unbeknownst to the
crowd he had made a secret agreement with Attorney General Katzenbach to
retreat as soon as they came up against the state troopers. So when King and the
march leaders got within fifty feet of the troopers’ blockade, they kneeled, prayed,
and, as they rose, called on the marchers to retreat. Angry and confused, the
marchers did what they were told. The march was eventually held a few weeks later,
after much negotiation with the Johnson administration and Governor Wallace.

Despite its fits and starts, the Selma march contributed to the passage of an
important piece of legislation by the federal government: the Voting Rights Act
of 1965. Signed into law on August 6, 1965, the act prohibited states from impos-
ing literacy requirements, poll taxes, and similar obstacles to the registration of
black voters. Of course, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, passed almost a
century earlier, was supposed to guarantee this right to vote, but a federal system
of “states’ rights” had allowed Southern states to deny black people voting privi-
leges through such measures as the poll tax, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses
(until 1939).

With the Voting Rights Act, however, blacks could not be denied the vote any
more. Federal examiners were now sent South to safeguard black citizens’ right to
register and vote. The impact of the act was dramatic: Between 1964 and 1969, the
number of black adults registered to vote increased from 19.3 percent to 61.3 per-
cent in Alabama, 27.4 percent to 60.4 percent in Georgia, and 6.7 percent to 66.5
percent in Mississippi. It took several more years before blacks turned the right to
vote into electoral might.

The victory was bittersweet. King’s role in the Selma march tarnished his rep-
utation in the eyes of his followers. As respect for King’s ideas and strategies began
to wane among young people, groups such as SNCC began to envision new, more
militant strategies. It became clear—from the failure of the MFDP at the 1964
Democratic National Convention to the Selma fiasco—that African Americans
could not always rely on the federal government for support. A new generation of
activists realized that black people needed more than friends in high places; they
needed power.

Within SNCC, a recent Howard University graduate named Stokely Carmichael
quickly emerged as a voice of uncompromising militancy and, later, black nation-
alism. Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City, Carmichael had been associ-
ated with interracial radical movements since high school. Like many of his
contemporaries, he joined the Civil Rights movement but never fully embraced
the philosophy of nonviolence. He and several other SNCC activists began carry-
ing guns to protect themselves from violence. Carmichael led a militant voter-

240 To Make Our World Anew

registration campaign, organizing open rallies and marches for black rights in the
heart of the Black Belt—with its long history of white violence and terrorism
against black sharecroppers. In Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1965, he founded the
Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). An all-black group (mainly be-
cause whites would not join), the LCFO adopted the symbol of the black panther
because, according to its chairman, John Hulett, the panther will come out fight-
ing for its life when cornered.

The LCFO was only the beginning of the new black militancy. A few months
later, a group of black SNCC activists in Atlanta circulated a position paper calling
on white members to leave the organization and devote their attention to organiz-
ing white people in their own communities. Although most SNCC members, black
and white, opposed this position, it became clear to many white activists that the
character of the movement had changed profoundly. Several leading white figures
resigned voluntarily or were forced to leave because, in their view at least, the polit-
ical climate had become intolerable. Carmichael had successfully contested John
Lewis for the chairmanship of SNCC and he, along with other SNCC militants
such as veteran organizer Willie Ricks, began questioning the movement’s integra-
tionist agenda. Then, during the summer of 1966, the slogan Black Power emerged
full-blown within SNCC as well as within the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

On June 5, James Meredith, the first black student admitted to the University
of Mississippi, initiated a march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi,
in order to mobilize black Mississippians to register to vote. A few hours into
the march, however, Meredith was shot and the march came to an abrupt end.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Carmichael, and CORE leader Floyd McKissick decided
to go to Memphis in order to finish the march to Jackson. From the very begin-
ning, however, tensions between King and Carmichael created tensions within the
ranks. Carmichael insisted that the Deacons for Defense, an armed black self-
defense group based in Louisiana, provide cover for the marchers, a request to
which King reluctantly agreed. At the same time, SNCC activist Willie Ricks began
to promote the slogan Black Power among the membership, who seemed to
embrace it enthusiastically. While King called it “an unfortunate choice of words,”
McKissick embraced it. As he explained, “Black Power is not Black supremacy; it
is a united Black voice reflecting racial pride in the tradition of our heterogeneous
nation. Black Power does not mean the exclusion of White Americans from the
Negro Revolution; it means the inclusion of all men in a common moral and polit-
ical struggle.”

Not everyone agreed with this definition, of course, but it quickly became clear
during the summer of 1966 that the issue of Black Power would transform the
movement in multiple ways. Tired and impatient with the slow pace of the civil
rights establishment, a new attitude overtook the movement: no more compromise,
no more “deals” with white liberals, no more subordinating the movement to the
needs of the Democratic party. Out of bitter disappointment rose this new slogan.

We Changed the World 241

The Black Power of the sixties had roots in the Southern freedom movement, in
the many compromises made by mainstream leaders, and in the recognition
that ending Jim Crow was not enough to win full equality or political power. It
also had roots in the increasingly black cities of the North and South, where pov-
erty and police brutality were becoming increasingly visible. And it was nourished
by the growing popularity of black nationalism—the idea that black people con-
stitute a single community, if not a “nation,” within the United States and therefore
have a right to determine their destiny—as expressed by people such as former
North Carolina NAACP leader Robert Williams, as well as SNCC leaders such as
H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael.

Perhaps the most important and controversial progenitor of the Black Power
movement was Malcolm X. For many young people, particularly those in the Civil
Rights movement, Malcolm’s uncompromising stance toward white supremacy
and his plainspoken oratory on black history, culture, and racism deeply affected a
new generation of activists. Even efforts to portray Malcolm in a negative light,
such as the special 1959 television documentary on the Nation of Islam called “The
Hate That Hate Produced” revealed to many black viewers Malcolm’s critique of
nonviolence and of the strategy to ally with white liberals. He clearly saw the need
for a movement in the urban North, one that would focus on the needs of the poor
and deal with pressing issues such as police brutality, crumbling schools, and the
lack of jobs. While preaching black self-reliance, he also attacked mainstream civil
rights leaders for being sellouts. “The black masses,” he argued, “are tired of fol-
lowing these hand-picked Negro ‘leaders’ who sound like professional beggars, as
they cry year after year for white America to accept us as first-class citizens.”

These civil rights leaders, Malcolm said, were leading a nonviolent Negro revo-
lution, when what was needed was a black revolution. Whereas the Negro wants to
desegregate, he said, the black demands land, power, and freedom. Whereas the
Negro adopts a Christian philosophy of “love thy enemy,” the black has no love or
respect for the oppressor.

As long as Malcolm remained in the Nation of Islam, he was compelled to con-
ceal his differences with Elijah Muhammad. But as Malcolm became more pop-
ular, the tensions between the two men became increasingly evident. The final
blow came when Malcolm discovered that the NOI’s moral and spiritual leader had
fathered children by two former secretaries. The tensions became publicly visible
when Muhammad silenced Malcolm for remarking after the assassination of
President John E Kennedy that it was a case of the “chickens coming home to
roost.” Malcolm’s point was that the federal government’s inaction toward racist
violence in the South had come back to strike the president. When Malcolm
learned that Muhammad had planned to have him assassinated, he decided to leave
the NOI. On March 8,1964, he announced his resignation and formed the Muslim
Mosque, Inc., an Islamic movement devoted to working in the political sphere and
cooperating with civil rights leaders. Despite his criticisms of black leadership,

242 To Make Our World Anew

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X met accidentally and amicably in Washington, D.C., in 1964. Despite
their differences in style and philosophy, they shared many of the concerns, goals, and risks involved in free-
dom-movement leadership.

Malcolm had always said that he should be actively involved in the struggles in the
South and elsewhere, but Elijah Muhammad’s rule that NOI members not partic-
ipate in politics had hampered Malcolm. Free of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm
sought alliances with those willing to work with him.

That same year he made his first pilgrimage to Mecca—the holy city of Islam,
in Saudi Arabia. During his trip he changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz
and embraced the multiracial Islam he found during his pilgrimage. He publicly
acknowledged that whites were no longer devils, though he still remained a black
nationalist and staunch believer in black self-determination and self-organization.

During the summer of 1964 Malcolm formed the Organization of Afro-
American Unity (OAAU). Inspired by the Organization of African Unity, made up
of the independent African states, the OAAU’s program combined advocacy for
independent black institutions (for example, schools and cultural centers) with
support for black participation in mainstream politics, including electoral cam-
paigns. Following the example of Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, who had sub-
mitted a petition to the United Nations in 1948 claiming that black people in the
United States were victims of genocide, Malcolm planned to submit a similar peti-
tion in 1965. The UN petition documented human rights violations and acts of
genocide against African Americans. Unfortunately, Malcolm and members of the

We Changed the World 243

OAAU never had a chance to submit the petition: On February 21, 1965, he was
assassinated by gunmen affiliated with the NOI.

Malcolm had known he was in danger ever since he had left the NOI. He
received regular death threats and was constantly followed by suspicious charac-
ters. One week before his murder, his home in Queens, New York, was firebombed.
He had even begun to carry a gun for protection. But on Sunday, February 21, as
he took the stage to speak to a small audience at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem,
two gunmen stood up and opened fire. One got away, but the crowd stopped the
other, a Muslim named Talmadge Hayer. (One year later, Hayer was convicted of
the murder of Malcolm.) The OAAU died with Malcolm X.

Although Malcolm left no permanent organizations (the Muslim Mosque, Inc.,
collapsed soon after his death), he did exert a notable impact on the Civil Rights
movement in the last year of his life. Black activists in SNCC and CORE who had
heard him speak to organizers in Selma just weeks before his death began to support
some of his ideas, especially on armed self-defense, racial pride, and the creation of
black-run institutions. Ironically, Malcolm’s impact on black politics and culture was
greater after his death than before it. In fact, not long thereafter, the Black Power
movement and his ideas about community control, African liberation, and race pride
became extremely influential. His autobiography, written with Alex Haley—the
future author of Roots—become a movement standard. Malcolm’s life story proved
to movements such as the Black Panther party, founded in 1966, that ex-criminals
and hustlers can be turned into revolutionaries. And arguments in favor of armed
self-defense—certainly not a new idea in African-American communities—were
renewed by the publication of Malcolm’s autobiography and speeches.

One of the first radical organizations to be inspired by Malcolm’s ideas was the
Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). It originated neither in the South nor in
the Northeast. Rather, its founders were a group of black Ohio students at Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Central State College, and Wilberforce
University. Active in SNCC, CORE, and local chapters of Students for a Demo-
cratic Society (SDS), a predominantly white national student group that emerged
during the Vietnam War protests, this gathering began meeting in 1961 to discuss
the significance of Robert Williams’s armed self-defense campaign in North
Carolina and his subsequent flight to Cuba. Led by Donald Freeman, a student at
Case Western Reserve, the group agreed that armed self-defense was a necessary
component of the black freedom movement and that activists had to link them-
selves to anticolonial movements around the world. Freeman was influenced by
Malcolm X’s speeches and the writings of an independent black Marxist intellec-
tual named Harold Cruse, who argued that African Americans themselves lived
under colonialism inside the United States. Freeman hoped to transform the group
into a revolutionary movement akin to the Nation of Islam but one that would
adopt the direct action tactics of SNCC. By the spring of 1962, they became the
Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM).

244 To Make Our World Anew

Although RAM’s leaders decided to organize it as an underground movement,
it did attract activists across the nation. In the South, RAM built a small but
significant following at Fisk University in Nashville, the training ground for many
leading SNCC activists. In northern California, RAM grew primarily out of the
Afro-American Association, a student group founded in 1962 based at Oakland’s
Merritt College and the University of California at Berkeley. Never a mass move-
ment, RAM had a radical agenda that anticipated many of the goals of the left wing
of the Black Power movement. Its twelve-point program called for the develop-
ment of freedom schools, national black student organizations, rifle clubs, a guer-
rilla army made up of youth and the unemployed, and black farmer cooperatives
not just for economic development but to keep “community and guerrilla forces
going for a while.” They also pledged support for national liberation movements in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as the adoption of socialism to replace cap-
italism across the globe.

After RAM spent years as an underground organization, a series of “exposes”
that ran in Life magazine and Esquire in 1966 identified it as one of the leading
extremist groups “Plotting a War on ‘Whitey.'” RAM members were not only con-
sidered armed and dangerous but “impressively well read in revolutionary litera-
ture.” Not surprisingly, these highly publicized articles were followed by a series of
police raids on the homes of RAM members in Philadelphia and New York City. In
June 1967, RAM members were rounded up and charged with conspiracy to insti-
gate a riot, poison police officers with potassium cyanide, and assassinate NAACP
leader Roy Wilkins and National Urban League Director Whitney Young. Though
the charges did not stick, the FBI’s surveillance of RAM intensified. By 1969, RAM
had essentially dissolved itself, though its members opted to infiltrate existing
black organizations, continue to push the twelve-point program, and develop
study groups that focused on the “Science of Black Internationalism.”

RAM’s movement was, in part, based on the assumption that black people had
the potential to launch a war against the U.S. government. Writing in exile from
Cuba and later China, Robert Williams anticipated black urban uprisings in a
spring 1964 edition of The Crusader, a publication RAM members regarded as an
unofficial organ of their movement. Entitled “USA: The Potential of a Minority
Revolution,” Williams’s article announced, “This year, 1964 is going to be a violent
one, the storm will reach hurricane proportions by 1965 and the eye of the hurri-
cane will hover over America by 1966. America is a house on fire—FREEDOM
NOW!—or let it burn, let it burn. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!!”

Williams was not alone in this assessment. A year earlier, the writer James
Baldwin had predicted that in the coming years race riots would “spread to every
metropolitan center in the nation which has a significant Negro population.” The
next six years proved them right. With riots erupting in the black communities of
Rochester, New York City, Jersey City, and Philadelphia, 1964 was indeed a “vio-
lent” year. By 1965, these revolts had indeed reached “hurricane proportions.”

We Changed the World 245

The hurricane also touched the West Coast in the black Los Angeles commu-
nity of Watts. Sparked when a resident witnessed a black driver being harrassed
by white police officers, a frequent occurrence on the streets of Los Angeles, the
Watts rebellion turned out to be the worst urban disturbance in nearly twenty
years. When the smoke cleared, thirty-four people had died, and more than $35
million in property had been destroyed or damaged. The remainder of the decade
witnessed the spread of this hurricane across America: Violence erupted in some
three hundred cities, including Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Cambridge,
Maryland; Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Conneticut; San Francisco; and
Phoenix. Altogether, the urban uprisings involved close to half a million African
Americans, resulted in millions of dollars in property damage, and left two hun-
dred fifty people (mostly African Americans) dead, ten thousand seriously
injured, and countless black people homeless. Police and the National Guard
turned black neighborhoods into war zones, arresting at least sixty thousand peo-
ple and employing tanks, machine guns, and tear gas to pacify the community. In
Detroit in 1967, for instance, forty-three people were killed, two thousand were
wounded, and five thousand watched their homes destroyed by flames that
engulfed fourteen square miles of the inner city.

Robert Williams was not too far off the mark: A real war erupted in America’s
inner cities. Elected officials, from the mayor’s office to the Oval Office, must have
seen these uprisings as a war of sorts because they responded to the crisis with
military might at first. Later they turned to a battery of social science investiga-
tors, community programs, and short-lived economic development projects to
pacify urban blacks. Just as the American military advisers in Southeast Asia could
not understand why so many North Vietnamese supported the communists, liber-
al social scientists wanted to find out why African Americans rioted. Why burn
buildings in “their own” communities? What did they want? Were these “distur-
bances” merely a series of violent orgies led by young hoodlums out for television
sets and a good time, or were they protest movements? To the surprise of several
research teams, those who rioted tended to be better educated and more political-
ly aware than those who did not. One survey of Detroit black residents after the
1967 riot revealed that eighty-six percent of the respondents identified discrimi-
nation and deprivation as the main reasons behind the uprising. Hostility to police
brutality was at the top of the list.

Although Robert Williams, James Baldwin, and many African Americans who
survived each day in the crumbling ghettoes of North America knew the storm was
on the horizon, government officials and policymakers were unprepared. After all,
things seemed to be looking up for black folk: Between 1964 and 1969, the medi-
an black family income rose from $5,921 to $8,074; the percentage of black fami-
lies below the poverty line declined from 48.1 percent in 1959 to 27.9 percent in
1969. However, these statistics also reveal a growing chasm between members of a
black middle class who were beginning to benefit from integration, affirmative

246 To Make Our World Anew

action policies, and a strong economy, and the black poor left behind in deterio-
rating urban centers. Dilapidated, rat-infested housing, poor and overcrowded
schools, the lack of city services, and the disappearance of high-wage jobs in inner-
city communities all contributed to the expansion of urban poverty and depriva-
tion. But there is more to the story: The black freedom movement and the hope it
engendered in black communities convinced many blacks that change was
inevitable. Some historians have called it “rising expectations”; others simply iden-
tified it as “rights consciousness.” Either way, an increasing number of African
Americans, including the poor, adopted a new attitude for a new day. They
demanded respect and basic human rights, expected decent housing and decent
jobs as a matter of rights, and understood that social movements and protests were
the way to achieve these things. This attitude manifested itself in the daily interac-
tions between blacks and whites. For example, after buses had been desegregated
in the South, white residents complained frequently of the growing impudence and
discourtesy of black passengers. As one white Birmingham woman complained,
“Can’t get on the bus and ride to town because the colored have taken the buses.”

But the same circumstances that unleashed such fervent opposition to segrega-
tion and emboldened ordinary black people to assert their rights also unleashed a
more sustained effort on the part of the police to put things back in order. Police
repression reached an all-time high between 1963 and the early seventies and black
male youths from poor communities were involved in the majority of incidents.

There is a similar paradox evident in the growth in the number of welfare recip-
ients during the sixties. In 1960, 745,000 families received assistance; by 1968 that
figure had grown to 1.5 million. The most dramatic increase took place between
1968 and 1972, when the welfare rolls grew to three million. On the one hand, the
surge in the welfare rolls reflects the expansion of poverty amidst plenty, the grow-
ing numbers of poor people (particularly among minority women and children)
who needed assistance to survive. But the growth also reflects a “rights conscious-
ness” among welfare recipients inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Power move-
ments of the period. In 1966, the former associate director of CORE, George Wiley,
created the Poverty Rights Action Center (PRAC) in order to help coordinate the
activities of numerous local welfare rights organizations that had begun appearing
during the early sixties. Out of discussions within PRAC, Wiley helped found the
National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) a year later. Led primarily by black
female welfare recipients, the NWRO educated the poor about eligibility for assis-
tance under existing laws and pressured welfare agencies to provide benefits with-
out stigmatizing applicants. They demanded adequate day-care facilities and criti-
cized poorly planned job-training programs. They attacked degrading, low-wage
employment and the practice of scrutinizing women’s lives as a precondition for
support (such as investigations to determine whether recipients were unwed moth-
ers, had a man living with them, or spent their meager welfare check on things a
social worker might find unnecessary, such as makeup). Moreover, they viewed

We Changed the World 247

welfare not merely as a gift from the government or a handout but as a right. By
emphasizing that welfare was a right, the NWRO stripped welfare of its stigma in
the eyes of many poor women and convinced them that they could receive assis-
tance and retain their dignity.

The NWRO was not the only advocate for the increased demands of the black
poor. Under President Lyndon Johnson, the federal government launched a “War
on Poverty” as part of his overall vision of transforming America into a “Great
Society.” Most of the programs that fell under the broad title of the “War on
Poverty” were created by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Agencies such as
the Job Corps, administered by the Department of Labor, sought to create employ-
ment opportunities for the poor. And through the newly created Office of Eco-
nomic Opportunity (OEO), agencies such as the Legal Services Corporation, to
provide civil legal assistance; the Community Action Program; Head Start, a
preschool education program; and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA)
sought to provide services for the poor and incorporate them in the decision-mak-
ing and policymaking process at the local level. The OEO’s director, Sargent
Shriver, called for the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in these agen-
cies and, more generally, in the process of solving the problems of poverty.

The only program that actively tried to implement “maximum feasible par-
ticipation” was the Community Action Program (CAP). CAP’s mission was to
coordinate the work of more than a thousand federally funded, neighborhood-
based antipoverty agencies and to make new services more accessible to the poor.
Unlike other antipoverty agencies, CAP focused its efforts on rehabilitating the
entire community rather than poor families or individuals who happened to fall
below the poverty line. Although CAP quickly earned a reputation for “stirring up
the poor,” it mainly worked with prosperous local blacks and established black
middle-class leadership. Indeed, despite directives from on high calling for maxi-
mum feasible participation, urban rebellions from below turned out to be what got
the black activists and community people into the antipoverty agencies.

The bureaucrats and planners who implemented these poverty programs con-
ceived of “maximum feasible participation” very differently from groups like the
NWRO or leaders of the Civil Rights movement. After all, they were planned
almost entirely by middle-class white men in the Johnson administration who set
out to provide “a hand up” to the poorest segment of society, from the ghetto res-
idents in America’s sprawling cities, to the Mexican migrants on farms and in bar-
rios in the Southwest, to the poor whites scratching out a living in Appalachia.

Overall, Johnson’s Great Society programs did begin to reduce poverty ever so
slightly. Ironically, the greatest successes were not products of the Equal Oppor-
tunity Act of 1964 but of other programs, notably the expansion of the food stamp
program, free school meals and other nutrition projects, and the creation of
Medicaid and Medicare programs (which provided the poor and elderly with free
health care). But Johnson’s War on Poverty fell short of the mark. First, agencies

248 To Make Our World Anew

such as the Job Corps focused on job training rather than creating new, decent-pay-
ing jobs. Second, Johnson refused to raise taxes in order to pay for these programs,
which proved disastrous because he had given the middle class a huge tax cut in
1964 and there was not enough money available. Besides, the cost of fighting the
Vietnam War steadily drained federal resources away from the War on Poverty and
contributed to rising inflation. Third, the War on Poverty operated from a very lim-
ited definition of poverty, one that included only families who fell below a fixed
poverty line. The goal was not to change the structure of poverty, to reduce income
inequality or help the working poor earn more money; rather, it was to change the
behaviors that officials believed led to poverty by providing educational, legal, and
job-training services to the very poor in order to give them the resources to rise up
out of poverty. In other words, the Johnson administration believed the causes of
poverty to be culture and behavior rather than political and economic forces.
Rather than deal with issues such as low wages, a shortage of well-paying jobs, and
blatant racism in employment and labor unions, the proponents of the War on
Poverty sought to “correct” poor people’s behavior or improve their social skills.
The administrators and intellectuals working in these federal programs saw their
task in terms of reversing “community pathology,” breaking the “culture of pover-
ty,” or restoring the “broken family.” The poor, especially the black poor, were con-
sidered “disadvantaged.”

Most black activists did not believe liberal goodwill, as they viewed it, could
eliminate poverty. They viewed the problem in terms of power and unequal distri-
bution of wealth. As NWRO leader George Wiley put it: “I am not at all convinced
that comfortable, affluent, middle-class Americans are going to move over and
share their wealth and resources with the people who have none. But I do have faith
that if the poor people who have the problems can organize, can exert their polit-
ical muscle, they can have a chance to have their voices and their weight felt in the
political process of this country, and there is hope.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., concurred. In his book Where Do We Go From Here?,
King wrote: “The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power
both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness.
The problem of transforming the ghetto is, therefore, a problem of power.”

So King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took the movement
to the urban North, settling in Chicago in 1966. They initially tried to build a grass-
roots union of poor black residents rather than opening their efforts with a direct-
action campaign that would draw media attention, as King and his associates
had done in Birmingham three years earlier. When the organizing drive failed to
generate much support, King decided to lead a march through a white Chicago
neighborhood to demand an end to racial discrimination in housing. King and
the SCLC had gone there to appeal to the city, the state, and the nation for open
housing for all, and to use the power of love to persuade white racists that segre-
gation was immoral. Instead, King met an angry white crowd raining rocks and

We Changed the World 249

bottles on the protesters. In all of his years fighting racism and injustice in the
South, he had never seen anything like this before.

The Chicago campaign marked another failure for King. To compound matters,
his increasing opposition to the Vietnam War drew fire from nearly every major
older mainstream black leader in the country, who feared alienating the volatile
president, and further distanced him from the Johnson administration.

Given King’s deep and abiding commitment to nonviolence, he was bound to
come out openly against the war. And militants in CORE and SNCC had begun
issuing antiwar statements as early as 1966. SNCC openly endorsed resistance to
the draft. It declared: “Vietnamese are being murdered because the United States is
pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law.” King understood
the link between the war abroad and the failure to wage a real war on poverty at
home. He pointed out that the United States was spending close to five hundred
thousand dollars to kill each enemy soldier but spent only a paltry thirty-five dol-
lars a year to help a needy American in poverty. The more he criticized the war, the
more isolated he became in mainstream civil rights circles. His longtime allies
Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young denounced him publicly, and they
were joined by a chorus of distinguished black spokesmen, including Ralph
Bunche, Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, and former baseball star Jackie
Robinson. And, of course, this diminished his standing with the White House. But
King’s national, and international, reputation after winning the 1964 Nobel Peace
Prize meant he could not be ignored entirely.

As he endured criticism from white and black friends, King became more radi-
cal in key respects. He became more committed than ever to organizing the poor
and he openly rejected liberal reform as the strategy for change. King and his aides
at SCLC planned a massive Poor People’s Campaign on Washington to take place
in the spring of 1968. The march was to bring thousands of poor people from all
ethnic and racial backgrounds to demand, among other things, a federally sup-
ported guaranteed income policy.

Despite plans for a new campaign, the movement and the criticisms had taken
their toll on King. Many friends and associates described him as tired and
depressed. He talked openly of death, his own death. As he fretted in the first
months of 1968, behind the scenes King and his associates vigorously debated the
wisdom of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. A few encouraged King to
support their call for a civil disobedience campaign that would close key streets in
the nation’s capital. Bayard Rustin, among others, considered such a strategy pure
folly, given the outbreaks of violence that had marred the public landscape since
1965. King, moreover, worried that too little had been done to recruit those of all
races who were very poor and chronically unemployed.

Meanwhile, in February 1968, in Memphis, another battle erupted, this one
between municipal workers who sought union recognition and city officials
who refused such recognition. Black garbage collectors in the city fumed when

250 To Make Our World Anew

twenty-two of them were sent home without pay due to bad weather, while white
workers were allowed to stay and were paid. The 1,300 members of AFSCME Local
1733, a nearly all-black local union representing the sanitation workers, refused to
let the issue die; they demanded that the city acknowledge their union and refused
to work otherwise. Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb refused to negotiate with the men
or anyone else. Residents of the black community joined the men, boycotting down-
town merchants and triggering a thirty-five percent loss of profit. Still the mayor
refused to budge. And following an unsuccessful public meeting, a confrontation
with police resulted in an ugly moment of violence, onlookers overturned police
cars, and the police indiscriminately maced and clubbed everyone in their way.

Seeking to dramatize the plight of black workers and force the city to the bar-
gaining table, longtime civil rights activist and minister of Centenary Methodist
Church James Lawson placed a call to King for assistance. The fusing of race and
economics had by now been a chief concern for King for several years. Still he put
Lawson off at first, pleading fatigue and a tight schedule. King did go to Memphis
and addressed more than fifteen thousand on the evening of March 18. He then
promised to return the next week, a promise broken only by a rare foot of snow
that forced a postponement of the march he was to have joined. In the interim, fur-
ther negoitations with city officials produced little. On March 28 he did return,
prepared to fight until victory was won.

Speaking before a black audience on April 3, King predicted that the Memphis
sanitation workers’ struggle would succeed. But in midstream, when the audience
rose with his inspirational tone, King’s speech changed rather abruptly. Sweat
pouring down his face, he closed with these famous and fateful words:

I don’t know what will happen now. But it really doesn’t matter to me now.
Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. I won’t mind. Like anybody, I would
like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about
that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the
mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land I may
not get there with you but I want you to know tonight that we as a people
will get to the promised land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about
anything. I’m not fearing any man. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord.”

The following evening, April 4, 1968, King was fatally shot by a white man
named James Earl Ray. For some inexplicable reason, the police who had been
guarding King’s hotel happened to be absent at the time of his assassination.
Although they caught the assailant, America lost a visionary.

The response to King’s death was immediate and varied. Some white students at
the University of Texas at Arlington screamed with glee, joyous that an assassin’s
bullet had taken out the “troublemaker” King. At the same time the New York Times
editorialized, “Dr. King’s murder is a national disaster.” And that it was: Major
riots engulfed Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago. All told, more than one

We Changed the World 251

hundred cities suffered from rioting after the assassination of King, leaving thirty-
nine people dead and millions of dollars’ worth of property destroyed. President
Johnson declared April 7, 1968, a day of mourning, and in tribute to the man
whose death brought condolences from leaders and citizens around the world, the
country flew its flag at half mast. Between King’s death and his funeral on April 9,
Coretta Scott King and her children led a silent, peaceful march through the streets
of Memphis.

On the hot, humid April day of the funeral, thousands of schoolchildren sat
transfixed as black-and-white televisions were hauled into classrooms so that the
nation could collectively mourn King’s passing. What they witnessed that day was
a unique assembly. In the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta sat Vice President
Hubert Humphrey, presidential aspirants Democrat Robert Kennedy and Repub-
lican Richard Nixon, civil rights warriors young and old, Jacqueline Kennedy, who
a few years earlier had suffered the loss of her own husband, as well as an assort-
ment of friends, acquaintances, and loved ones. Ralph David Abernathy eulogized
his old and dear friend. At Coretta King’s insistence, Martin offered his own eulo-
gy, too, as a tape recording of his “A Drum Major for Justice” sermon played for all
to hear. That voice, deep and rich, so full of vitality, reminded all of the man who
was made by the needs of his time.

A simple cart pulled by two mules hauled King’s draped casket to its final resting
place. His grave marker told the world what his life had come to symbolize:

F R E E AT LAST, F R E E AT LAST
T H A N K G O D A L M I G H T Y

I’M F R E E AT LAST.

Where Do We Go from Here?

One year before his murder in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., published the book
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? More than the title itself, the
subtitle captured what the year 1968 felt like to many Americans. With increasing
regularity young men were fleeing the nation to escape the draft or returning from
Vietnam in body bags.

Thousands of miles from that war, American support for a declining Portugal
as it struggled to hang on to its African colonies in Mozambique, Angola, and
Guinea-Bissau produced another kind of chaos. For those African Americans pay-
ing attention to liberation campaigns on the African continent, the support
revealed the degree to which the United States would resort to violence to prop up
an aging colonial power. The U.S. government supplied the Portuguese with mili-
tary advisors and many weapons, including napalm bombs that were dropped on
towns and villages where African nationalists had established bases.

Back in the United States, 1968 was a year of unprecedented chaos and con-
siderable violence. Inner-city neighborhoods, such as Washington, D.C., Chi-
cago, and Memphis, visited by race riots, continued to burn; incidents of police

252 To Make Our World Anew

brutality rose steadily; dozens of black activists committed to protecting their com-
munities from police violence were embroiled in several shoot-outs with law-
enforcement officials; and political assassinations continued. Just weeks after the
country watched the burial of Martin Luther King, Jr., a gunman named Sirhan
Sirhan fatally shot Democratic party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

Liberals sought to turn this chaos into “community,” to stem the country’s divi-
sion into two nations, one black and the other white. This was certainly the goal
outlined in the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, a
presidentially appointed committee whose study of the causes of urban uprisings
was also published in 1968. Better known as the Kerner Commission (named after
Ohio Governor Otto Kerner, the commission’s head), its report acknowledged the
urgent need for the government to bridge the widening gulf between blacks and
whites. The report recommended massive job-training and employment pro-
grams, educational improvements, an overhaul of the welfare system, and a plan
for integrating blacks into the nation’s mainstream.

The authors of the report, a predominantly white group of liberal social scien-
tists and policymakers committed to racial integration and ending poverty, made
what seemed to many Americans a bold and startling claim: that racism was
endemic to U.S. society. Racism was not merely the bad behavior of a few individ-
uals but operated through institutions and forces of power. Thus in order to elim-
inate racism, massive changes in American institutions needed to take place. As the
authors wrote, “The essential fact is that neither existing conditions nor the garri-
son state [referring to the massive numbers of police and National Guardsmen in
riot-plagued communities] offered acceptable alternatives for the future of this
country. Only a greatly enlarged commitment to national action, compassionate,
massive, and sustained, backed by the will and resources of the most powerful and
the richest nation on this earth, can shape a future that is compatible with the his-
toric ideals of American society.”

While the Kerner Commission proposed a plan to turn “chaos” into “commu-
nity,” African-American activists who embraced the politics of Black Power saw
themselves already as community builders. They had previously viewed racism as
institutionalized, and most had lost faith in the American creed of justice for all,
the goal of integration, or the kindness of white liberals. Instead, they sought to
build alternative institutions within black communities, to strengthen the black
community itself, and to fight for political and economic power. Of course, pre-
cisely what Black Power meant was always open to debate. For some it was a move-
ment for black political power with the hope of making American democracy
more open and inclusive for all. For others it meant building black businesses. For
many grassroots activists, Black Power meant creating separate, autonomous insti-
tutions within black communities.

The leadership of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a leading force in the
Civil Rights movement, had begun to embrace Black Power around the same time

We Changed the World 253

it shifted its focus from large, highly visible direct-action campaigns against segre-
gation to less visible community organizing in poor African-American neighbor-
hoods, especially in the urban North. CORE underwent a change in leadership
when Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as executive director in January
1966. Farmer, who had been a charter member of the group and took over its lead-
ership in 1961, had been a longtime proponent of integration and direct action,
while McKissick had been among the early advocates of Black Power.

With the shift to a focus on building up black communities, CORE’s black
membership increased dramatically. Some of the increase can be attributed to
McKissick. Among his many symbolic and substantive actions, he moved the
national office from downtown New York City to Harlem. There, he combined an
interest in economic development and an appreciation of cultural training, espe-
cially the teaching of African languages. Though he never advocated complete
racial separation, CORE’s new leader did preach a message of black autonomy and
self-determination.

It was Roy Innis, who took over CORE in 1968, who linked black self-deter-
mination and black capitalism, that is, getting a fair share of the economic pie,
especially control of businesses in urban ghettos. In some ways he saw the black
community as a colony within the United States that could become independent
only if it had a strong economic base. Innis therefore called for federal funds to
establish black businesses. He envisioned a federal system in which black commu-
nities would be linked together in a federation, constituting a black “nation within
a nation.” The U.S. Constitution made no allowances for such a possibility, howev-
er. Innis eventually lost faith in black nationalism as a strategy of liberation. By
1972, he had thrown his support behind conservative Republican Richard Nixon
and promoted a limited strategy of black enterprise and assimilation.

Others embraced a more conventional, if not conservative, form of economic
black nationalism. A small but dominant group came from the rising black middle
class. Many college-educated blacks who were nonetheless concerned about affairs
within black communities interpreted Black Power to mean black capitalism. In
fact, in an age when Black Power evoked fears of bomb-throwing militants and
radicals with Afro hairstyles, it is interesting to note that the first Black Power con-
ference was organized by conservative Republican Nathan Wright, and the second
was cosponsored by Clairol, a manufacturer of hair-care products. Even
Republican Richard Nixon, who won the 1968 presidential election, praised Black
Power, since he, like the conservative business daily the Wall Street Journal, con-
nected Black Power to black economic self-sufficiency.

Nixon was not the only symbol of the white mainstream who embraced black
capitalism. A number of corporations promoted a black managerial class and
supported black capitalism: Xerox sponsored the TV series “Of Black America”;
Chrysler put a little money in a black-owned bank; and the lumber and paper
products giant Crown Zellerbach set up subsidiaries run by black management.

254 To Make Our World Anew

Companies that to date had viewed blacks as no more than consumers even mod-
ified their lending policies in the years between 1968 and 1970. Prudential, the
large life insurance conglomerate, made more than $85 million in loans to blacks
in urban communities, after much of the property it owned and insured in New-
ark, New Jersey, was destroyed after the 1967 rebellion. Throughout 1968 and 1969,
Nixon and other white conservatives supported black economic advancement as
an alternative to rebellion or revolution. They believed if people had a real stake in
society they would be less inclined to seek its overthrow.

In 1968 and 1969 the federal government and many average citizens openly
worried about the overthrow of the government. Many saw chaos and feared true
anarchy. College campuses, especially, were sites of antiwar demonstrations, calls
for changes in curriculum, attempts to ban the Reserve Officers Training Corps
(ROTC, a military training program), and other actions. Campuses became a caul-
dron of black protest, too. In the years 1968-69, fifty-seven percent of all campus
protests involved black students. This level reflects both the growing numbers of
black students on campuses and the increasing numbers who ended up at pre-
dominantly white colleges. Between 1964 and 1970, the number of black college
students nearly doubled, from 234,000 to half a million, while the percentage
attending black colleges dropped from fifty-one to thirty-four percent.

Black students often faced attacks from some white students who were uncom-
fortable with their increasing numbers on previously nearly all-white campuses;
they found the campus environment hostile, given their small numbers, isolation
from other students, discrimination by various student groups, and lack of
African-American faculty and administrators; and they judged their classes as lack-
ing relevance to their own lives.

Out of this atmosphere emerged the black studies movement. On campuses
nationwide, Black Student Unions (BSUs) were formed to advocate further social
and curricular changes, especially the introduction of black studies programs. Of
course, scholars at many of these institutions and at historically black colleges have
taught some aspects of African-American history or studies, but no department
committed to developing a broad curriculum based on the lives of African peoples
had ever been established. Students took the initiative, first forming political and
cultural organizations such as the Afro-American Students Association at Berkeley
and Merritt College in Oakland, California, and the Black Student Congress at
Columbia University in New York. As early as 1967 students at Howard University
called for the creation of a concentrated program in the study of African Americans.

Black students at Cornell University in 1969 launched their own effort to force
substantial curricular changes. Since 1967, scores of colleges and universities, both
black- and white-dominated, had to address the demands of blacks. In fact, be-
tween 1960 and 1969, the scene of the sit-in shifted from the lunch counter to the
university president’s office. Protests visited campuses as varied as the University of
Massachusetts, Duke, Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Simmons College, and Antioch.

We Changed the World 255

At Cornell, a particularly dramatic episode transfixed the nation. Through the
mid-sixties Cornell had had a dismal record of attracting and graduating African-
American students. But beginning around mid-decade the school began in earnest
to recruit blacks. Once there, however, the black students complained of overtly
racist acts and general alienation. They also sought to institute a black studies
department. After a series of incidents, including the tossing of a burning cross into
a dormitory, tensions reached a critical phase, and black students took over part of
the student union during Parents Week in April. Fearing more violence, especially
given their small numbers (only two hundred and fifty of the more than ten thou-
sand students on campus were black), a few black students managed to smuggle
guns into the union. After long negotiations, which ultimately led to Cornell’s first
black studies program, the students filed out peacefully and ended the standoff.
When the incident ended without loss of life, the country recalled only the image of
gun-toting black students. What many outside commentators failed to realize was
that students wanted more than freedom by 1969; they wanted liberation, and they
were willing to fight for their demands, educational or otherwise.

The link between liberation and education was not confined to the university.
By 1968 the struggle for Black Power in education had reached down to public
schools in many locales. More and more community activists began demanding
control over local schools. Black parents and teachers objected to a curriculum that
excluded Third World cultural perspectives. They objected, too, to the tracking of
their children into remedial and special education classrooms, which they consid-
ered just another form of segregation; and they objected to the failure to funnel
blacks and Latinos into college preparatory classes. More than anything, they
objected to the fact that they had so little control over what their children learned.

For some blacks, the fight to transform education was merely a small part of a
larger revolutionary movement. Organizations sprang up during this period that
sought to transform the whole country, to eliminate all forms of inequality and
racial discrimination. Perhaps the best-known of the radical black organizations
was the Black Panther party (BPP). Although it is often identified as a proponent
of Black Power, the BPP was essentially a Marxist organization. Embracing the ide-
ology of the nineteenth-century German political philosopher Karl Marx, BPP
members believed that the poor and oppressed peoples of the world would even-
tually mount a revolution to overthrow capitalism.

Calling itself the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, it was founded in
October 1966 in Oakland, California. The group was led by Huey P. Newton and
Bobby Scale, former student activists at Merritt College in Oakland. At its found-
ing, the party issued a ten-point program calling for, among other things, full
employment, decent housing, relevant education, black exemption from military
service, an end to police brutality, freedom for all black prisoners, and trials with
juries of their peers. Seeing themselves as part of a global liberation movement, the
Panthers also spoke of the black community as a colony inside the United States.

256 To Make Our World Anew

A 1968 Black Panther rally in New York. Carrying guns and wearing their trademark berets, the
Panthers believed blacks should arm themselves against police brutality. Over the next few years,
shoot-outs with police officers and FBI agents were frequent.

Yet, unlike many other black or interracial radical groups of their day, they never
advocated secession or the creation of a separate state. Instead, they preferred
interracial coalitions when possible. They joined forces with the predominantly
white Peace and Freedom party (a third party of socialists and peace activists) and
developed strong ties with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

In alliance with the Peace and Freedom party, the Black Panther party put up
candidates in both the national and California state elections of 1968. The coali-
tion’s presidential candidate was Eldridge Cleaver, an ex-prisoner who wrote the
best-selling book Soul on Ice (1968). He had joined the party in February 1967. As
a writer and speaker, Cleaver emerged as the main spokesperson for the Panthers
after Bobby Scale was arrested for armed invasion of the State Assembly chamber
in Sacramento and Newton was jailed for allegedly shooting an Oakland police
officer. The charges against Newton were eventually dropped, but only after a long
national campaign to free him.

The Black Panthers felt that armed struggle was the only way to defend the black
community from police repression. By carrying loaded firearms in public (which
was legal in California at the time), the Panthers drew a great deal of attention from
the media and wrath from the police and FBI. Perhaps because of their notoriety,
their ranks grew; by 1970 Panther chapters had taken root in nineteen states and
in more than thirty cities, and eventually in England, Israel, and France.

A deft combination of style and substance accounted for the party’s popularity.
Early BPP members looked sharp in their all-black outfits of jeans, shirt, beret, and

We Changed the World 257

sunglasses. They affected a politics of style, making themselves look daring, myste-
rious, dangerous, and powerful. But style alone would fail, they quickly realized.
As a result, the Panthers sponsored several community-based initiatives in most
cities in the country, including clothing drives, a community day-care center, a
Panther school, and a free breakfast program. Their free breakfast program pro-
vided meals to two hundred thousand children daily. Most amazingly, they proved
that grassroots movements could make a difference, even when the U.S. govern-
ment vowed to eliminate the organization by any means necessary.

Federal law enforcement officers, especially the FBI, targeted a growing list of
black-run organizations in the late sixties. Since the mid-sixties the agency had
spied on Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and other notable black leaders. By
1968 spying had come to include an active policy of group infiltration, in which
FBI informants posed as members of radical or militant organizations. Local and
federal police began a crackdown. In 1969, for example, police arrested 348
Panthers for a range of offenses, among them murder, rape, robbery, and assault.

The FBI and local police declared war on the Panthers. In 1968 alone, at least
eight Black Panthers were killed by police in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Seattle.
And the during the following year, two Chicago Panther leaders, Mark Clark and
Fred Hampton, were killed in their sleep during an early morning police raid. The
violence and constant surveillance by the FBI reflected the position of FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover: The only good Panther was a dead Panther. Without question, the
FBI helped destroy the Black Panther party.

Yet it was much more difficult to snuff out all who were swayed by the appeal of
Black Power. In Detroit, for example, radical Black Power ideology influenced one
of the most militant labor movements in the country. Eventually calling themselves
the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), the group was founded by
several young black auto workers, many of whom worked at Detroit’s Dodge Main
Plant. Led by activists such as Luke Tripp, General Baker, John Watson, Mike
Hamlin, and Ken Cockrel, they were a unique bunch. All had been students at
Wayne State University and had worked together in a black nationalist organiza-
tion called Uhuru (Swahili for “Freedom”). Uhuru had been loosely associated
with RAM—the same organization from which several founding members of the
Black Panther party came.

Two events spurred the creation of the league. The first was the Detroit riots of
1967, which revealed the degree of unrest, poverty, and police brutality in the
“Motor City.” The Detroit chapter of the NAACP was flooded with complaints
about police treatment of African Americans. Even black police officers were sub-
jected to brutality.

The second event was more immediate: On May 2,1968, General Baker and sev-
eral other black militants in the Dodge Main Plant led a walkout of four thousand
workers, the first in that factory in fourteen years and the first organized and led
entirely by black workers. The strike was over a speedup of the assembly line, which

258 To Make Our World Anew

in the previous week had increased from forty-nine to fifty-eight cars per hour.
Out of this strike emerged the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM).
It was the first of several Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) that popped
up at auto plants in and around Detroit, and which subsequently led to the for-
mation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

DRUM’s specific demands—safer workplaces, lower production demands, an
end to racist hiring practices—echoed past grievances. Of course they wanted to
win better working conditions and wages for black workers, but their ultimate goal
was freedom for all workers, and that meant, in their view, the end of capitalism.
DRUM members knew that racism limited the ability of workers to unite, and that
white workers, as well as black workers, were hurt by this. But they also argued that
white workers benefited from racism in the form of higher wages, cleaner and safer
jobs, and greater union representation.

Not everyone in the league agreed as to the best way to achieve Black Power and
workers’ power. One group, led by General Baker, believed the movement should
focus on shop-floor struggles, while Watson, Hamlin, and Cockrel felt that the
league needed to organize black communities beyond the factories. Thus, the lat-
ter got together and organized the Black Economic Development Conference
(BEDC) in the spring of 1969. At the urging of former SNCC leader James Forman,
who had recently arrived in Detroit, the league became heavily involved in the
planning and running of the conference.

Out of BEDC came Forman’s proposal for a Black Manifesto, which demanded,
among other things, $500 million in reparations from white churches and syna-
gogues to be used to purchase land in the South, fund black publishing companies,
a research skills center, a black Southern university, and a national black labor
strike fund. The work in BEDC took the league leadership, of which Forman was
now a part, away from its local emphasis. Their efforts led to the founding of the
Black Workers Congress (BWC) in 1970. The BWC called for workers’ control over
the economy and the state to be brought about through cooperatives, neighbor-
hood centers, student organizations, and ultimately a revolutionary party. And
they demanded better wages and working conditions for all workers.

Meanwhile, the league’s local base began to disintegrate. Dodge had fired sever-
al league activists, including General Baker. The General Policy Statement of the
league, which based everything on the need for vibrant DRUM-type organizations,
seemed to have fallen by the wayside. Divisions between the leadership groups were
so entrenched that no one could cooperate any more.

Influenced by events on the factory floor and in the universities, writers laid
claim to their own interpretations of Black Power. Starting with John Oliver
Killen’s 1954 novel Youngblood, and increasing in frequency by the mid-sixties,
black writers debated whether there was something distinctive about black culture,
something that made it different from “white” or European-American culture. The
debate had less to do with whether black writers would write about black life—

We Changed the World 259

they had been doing so since the days of the first slave narratives in the United
States—and more to do with a universal definition of a black aesthetic. In the
midst of the debates and disagreements that ensued, some sense of a general con-
sensus did emerge. Black was not only powerful, it was beautiful. And it was up to
black people to express and celebrate both the power and the beauty.

Thus, the political revolution in black America was accompanied by a profound
cultural revolution. A new generation of artists created literature, art, and music
that celebrated black people and promoted rebellion against racism and poverty
throughout the world. They encouraged African Americans to celebrate their
African heritage and to embrace their blackness not as a mark of shame but as a
symbol of beauty.

To understand this revolution, however, we need to go back to the fifties,
when Africans declared war on European colonialism and began to win their inde-
pendence. Inspired by Africa’s example, jazz pianist Randy Weston recorded the
album Uhuru Afrika (1960); drummer Max Roach brought together African and
African-American musicians to produce We Insist: Freedom Now Suite (1960); and
the brilliant saxophonist John Coltrane recorded songs such as “Dahomey Dance”
(1961), “Africa” (1961), and “Liberia” (1964). African Americans even began to
emulate African styles or create new styles that, in their mind, represented African
culture. During the early sixties a number of black women artists, most notably the
folk singer Odetta, the jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln, and the exiled South African
singer Miriam Makeba, styled their hair in medium to short Afros. They refused to
straighten their hair and instead allowed it to grow naturally.

All of these independent cultural developments emerging out of the late fif-
ties and early sixties began to coalesce into a full-blown movement just when
America’s cities began to explode. In 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm
X, the poet and playwright Leroi Jones and several other black writers, namely
Larry Neal, Clarence Reed, and Askia Muhammad Toure, founded the Black
Arts Repertory Theater School (BART) in an old brownstone building on 130th
Street in Harlem. With meager support from federal War on Poverty programs,
they held classes for Harlem residents and launched a summer arts and culture
program that brought music, drama, and the visual arts to the community virtu-
ally every day of the week.

Like many artists of his generation, Leroi Jones could not ignore the black free-
dom movement in his midst. Before founding BART, he was the senior member of
the downtown New York literary scene. Born to a working-class family in Newark,
New Jersey, Jones attended Howard University (a historically black college), served
briefly in the Air Force, and ended up a struggling writer in New York’s Greenwich
Village. After the success of his first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume
Suicide Note (1961), his first book of prose, Blues People: Negro Music in White
America (1963), and his first play, Dutchman (1964), he no longer had to struggle.
Indeed Dutchman, a surreal encounter between an educated black man and a white

260 To Make Our World Anew

woman who, as a symbolic representative of the racist state, taunts the man and
eventually kills him, earned him many awards and accolades. After Dutchman,
Jones could have pursued a lucrative career as a writer but chose instead to use his
artistic insights to build a political movement.

In 1966, a year after founding BART, Jones moved back to his hometown of
Newark, started a similar institution called Spirit House, and changed his name to
Imamu Amiri Baraka. Although Spirit House also sponsored community arts pro-
grams, it developed a more explicit political orientation after Newark’s ghettos
exploded in 1967. In the aftermath of the riots, Spirit House held a Black Power
conference that attracted several national black leaders, including Stokely
Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther party, and Imari
Obadele of the newly formed Republic of New Africa (a black nationalist organi-
zation that demanded land on which African Americans could settle and form an
independent nation, and was partly an outgrowth of RAM). Shortly thereafter,
Spirit House became the base for the Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN). In
addition to attracting black nationalists, Black Muslims, and even a few Marxists,
CFUN bore the mark of Maulana Karenga’s US Organization.

Karenga, originally a West Coast leader of RAM, insisted that the crisis facing
black America was first and foremost a cultural crisis. He envisioned “US” as a
movement of cultural reconstruction, creating a new synthesis between tradition-
al African culture and African-American culture. Drawing on African religions,
philosophies, and ideas about family and kin relations, US attempted to create a
political movement rooted in communal ties between people of African descent
rather than competition or individualism. Although tensions arose between
Karenga and some of the Newark activists over his treatment of women and the
overly centralized leadership structure CFUN had imported from the US Organi-
zation, the movement continued to grow.

In this setting, the search for artistic expression became known as the Black Arts
Movement. In addition to Baraka, other leading lights included poets Nikki
Giovanni, Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Jayne Cortez, and Sonia Sanchez; play-
wrights Ed Bullins, Ben Caldwell, and Jimmy Garrett, to name a few. Although
openly critical of whites and brutally critical of blacks who seemed to go along with
a system of white supremacy, the members of the Black Arts Movement were
important for the innovations they introduced in literary form. Determined to
bring poetry and prose to the people, they experimented with freer forms and drew
heavily on jazz rhythms and the everyday vernacular language of black folk. They
often turned the hip, cool phrases of black youth into hot, angry declarations of
war against American racism and exploitation.

While literary artists made an appeal for the hearts and souls of the black
majority, it was musicians who achieved mass appeal in the late sixties, a time of
intense experimentation and political expression. Some of them, such as James

We Changed the World 261

Brown (known as the “godfather of soul”) and poet/singer Gil Scott-Heron, adopt-
ed a Black Power stance more clearly than others. Within jazz circles, artists such
as saxo phonists Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Archie Shepp,
pianists Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, and many others, lauded a new sound, variously
known as “free jazz,” “the new thing,” the “jazz avant-garde,” or the “new black
music.” Detractors, on the other hand, called the music “anti-jazz” or “nihilism.”
Essentially, the new jazz musicians began playing free form, breaking out of tradi-
tional harmonies, rhythms, and song structures. Inspired by music from Africa and
Asia, they often improvised freely over a single musical phrase. Furthermore, many
of these musicians identified with the black arts movement; Ayler, Shepp, Sun Ra,
and others performed frequently at BART, and the jazz avant-garde even had its
own publications calling for the creation of revolutionary music. The key journal
at the time was called the Grade: Improvised Music in Transition. In the Grade,
black musicians debated the music’s relationship to the movement, thought about
ways to fuse music and literature, and discussed the importance of political educa-
tion for black artists.

Although the jazz avant-garde sought to establish direct ties to black communi-
ties, its music never achieved the popularity of “soul” music. The creators of soul
consciously searched for black roots; their products reflected gospel’s major influ-
ence. Aretha Franklin’s early music, for example, was characterized by gospel-style
piano playing.

A product of mid- to late-sixties transformations, soul was also much more
political than rock and roll. Its themes have to do with more than equality; they
deal with conditions in the urban North such as poverty, the powerlessness of black
folk, and drug use. The titles tell the story: James Carr’s “Freedom Train,” the Chi-
Lites’ “Give More Power to the People,” and Tony Clarke’s “Ghetto Man.”

Still, there was no single ideology of Black Power in soul music. Singers Curtis
Mayfield and James Brown simultaneously promoted reform of the system and
acceptance into it. While recording songs promoting black pride like “Say it Loud,
I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and “Soul Brother No. 1,” Brown also came out with th
patriotic assimilationist tune “America is My Home.” After King was assassinated
and riots began erupting, Brown went on national television to urge blacks to go
back home. He even came out in support of the conservative and sometimes open-
ly racist President Richard Nixon, mainly because of Nixon’s advocacy of black
capitalism as a way of achieving racial equality.

The Temptations and Marvin Gaye were also politically conscious, but unlike
Mayfield, whose songs were of hope and possibility, theirs were songs of pessimism:
Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” and “What’s Coin’ On?” and the Temptations’ “Message
from a Black Man,” “Cloud Nine,” and “Ball of Confusion.” In the last, before the
chorus, “Ball of Confusion, that’s what the world is today,” we hear a baritone voice
sing-ing “And the band plays on,” signaling business-as-usual politics, indifference,

262 To Make Our World Anew

and apathy. The “band” is symbolically drowning out the noise of poverty and
resistance. The irony of this world as described by the Temptations is captured in
the line “The only safe place to live is on an Indian reservation.”

As millions of black Americans tuned in to the sounds of soul and jazz, they
also tuned in to the dramatic television broadcast from the 1968 Mexico City
Olympics. What happened there represented the most international expression of
Black Power. To call attention to racism in sports here and abroad, former San Jose
State basketball and track and field star Harry Edwards formed the Olympic
Project for Human Rights. Its intent was to organize an international boycott of
the 1968 games.

Edwards hoped to draw attention both to the treatment of black athletes as well
as to the general condition of black people throughout the world. As he put it,
“What value is it to a black man to win a medal if he returns to the hell of Harlem?”
Specifically, he and others sought to ban athletes from South Africa and Southern
Rhodesia (both at the time were white-dominated African countries that segregat-
ed and exploited the African population) from the Olympics, the appointment of
a black member to the U.S. Olympic Committee, appointment of an additional
black coach on the U.S. team, the desegregation of the New York Athletic Club, and
the removal of the International Olympic Committee’s president, Avery Brundage.
Among other things, Brundage was quoted as saying he would sell his exclusive
Santa Barbara, California, country club membership before admitting “niggers and
kikes” as members.

Instead of boycotting the Olympics, however, black athletes decided to use the
event as a way to draw attention to racism and the black struggle. They agreed to
wear black armbands and developed strategies to protest during the victory cere-
monies. The most famous demonstration involved track stars Tommie Smith and
John Carlos, who mounted the awards platform wearing knee-length black socks,
no shoes, and a black glove on one hand (Smith also wore a black scarf around his
neck). When the band played the U.S. national anthem, they bowed their heads and
raised their gloved fists toward the sky in the Black Power salute. In an interview
with sportscaster Howard Cosell, the pair explained that the closed-fisted salute
symbolized black power and unity; the socks with no shoes represented the pover-
ty most black people must endure; and Smith’s scarf symbolized black pride. They
bowed their heads in memory of fallen warriors in the black liberation movement,
notably Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Although their actions did not harm anyone or incite violence, the U.S. Olympic
Committee decided to suspend Smith and Carlos from the games and strip them
of their medals for being overtly political. Angered by the decision, many of their
fellow black athletes continued to protest. The three U.S. medalists who swept the
400-meter dash wore black berets on the victory stand, as did the 1600-meter relay
team (which also broke the world record). Bob Beamon and Ralph Boston, medal

We Changed the World 263

winners in the long jump, wore black socks without shoes to protest both the con-
dition of black people and the treatment of their teammates. And Wyomia Tyus,
anchor in the women’s four-hundred-meter relay team, dedicated her gold medal
to Carlos and Smith.

The political stance of black athletes in Mexico City combined with other exam-
ples of forceful advocacy of Black Power to provoke fear and a backlash. By 1969,
after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the
Fair Housing Act of 1968, many white Americans began to ask: What more does
the Negro want? Dissatisfied with the responses they heard to that question, more
and more whites found their own answers in the politics of rage endorsed first by
George Wallace and then by Richard Nixon.

George Wallace had surfaced as a national political force in the early sixties, after
he made a highly publicized effort to block the desegregation of the University of
Alabama. He had been active in Alabama politics since before the start of the
Second World War. Steeped in the traditions of Alabama and the South, he held
views on race that were neither enlightened nor particularly regressive. Each race
had its own genius and place in the life of country, he asserted at the time. To him
this was less a disputable fact than merely an obvious truth.

He held fast to that view through the Alabama gubernatorial campaign of his
mentor “Big Jim” Folsom in the mid-fifties. With the Brown v. Board of Education
decision fresh in people’s minds, with Montgomery roiling from the effects of the
bus boycott and news of similar boycotts forming across the region, Wallace staked
out a new political image. It was an image that distanced him from his mentor,
ensured his own selection as governor of Alabama in 1962, and forever solidified
his reputation as the embodiment of Southern obstruction of black rights.

But it was Wallace the presidential candidate rather than Wallace the governor
who attracted more attention. George Wallace’s ascendancy as a legitimate third-
party candidate in 1968 signaled a clear backlash. He openly courted whites who
felt disenfranchised by governmental policy. For his efforts he won five Southern
states in 1968 and between eight and fifteen percent of the vote in more than a
dozen Northern and Western states. Before an assassin’s bullet nearly killed him in
1972, Wallace had received nearly as many popular votes in the Democratic presi-
dential primaries as George McGovern, the Democratic party’s eventual candidate.
Wallace’s most important influence, however, may have been inspiring the
Republican party to adopt a strategy that catered to white fears of social equality
for blacks.

Richard Nixon quickly moved into the political space Wallace had created.
Aided by the conservative push in his own party, the electoral appeal of law and
order themes in 1968, and his own realization that Republicans could use race as
an issue to drive Southern whites into their party, he outlined a plan for what
became the Republican party’s Southern strategy. Heading into the spring of 1968,

264 To Make Our World Anew

polls showed Nixon tying either Robert F. Kennedy or Hubert H. Humphrey, the
two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy’s assassination
left Humphrey, the old liberal now too closely aligned with Lyndon Johnson’s failed
social and military policies. Nixon won the election in part due to his ability to
channel a racial backlash. This backlash came just as black Americans intensified
their demands for social, economic, and political action.

Despite backlash politics and the rising tide of racism, this was also the moment
Black Power in some ways entered the realm of electoral politics. Nearly a genera-
tion after a new wave of black migrants moved into urban areas, during what
became known as the Second Great Migration, their numbers had grown suf-
ficiently—and whites had fled city centers in large enough numbers—to give blacks
electoral majorities, or at the very least working margins. This change in the racial
makeup of cities improved the likelihood that African Americans could gain a
stronger political foothold in major urban centers. In some cases, they were suc-
cessful. The mayoral victories of Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in
Gary, Indiana, in 1967 raised black hopes that electoral politics might offer real
opportunities, at least at the municipal level. However, despite a growing black
electorate in the nation’s cities, African Americans held few really important polit-
ical offices.

During the early seventies, for example, black elected officials tended to hold
low-level city and county jobs, especially in law enforcement, on school boards, and
on some city councils. Most of these black elected officials were in the South. The
lack of more significant black political representation in big Northern cities where
African Americans made up forty to fifty percent of the population was particular-
ly striking. To pave the way for participation at higher levels of city government,
black political leaders worked hard on devising strategies to win local elections.

When the clock ticked off the last minute of 1969 and African Americans took
stock of the last few years, they thought not only about the changes they had wit-
nessed but also about the ones they still hoped to see. They knew they were the
caretakers of King’s dream of living in a nation where character was more impor-
tant than color. And they knew they had to take charge of their community. After
all, the civil rights and Black Power eras had forged change through community
action. Although many blacks may have sensed that all progress was tempered by
the social, economic, and political realities of a government and a white public
often resistant to change, they could not ignore the power of their own past
actions. America in 1969 was not the America of 1960 or 1965. At the end of the
decade, a chorus could be heard rising from the black community proclaiming,
“We changed the world.”

CHAPTER

From a Raw Deal
to a New Deal?
1 9 2 9 – 1 9 4 5

Joe William Trotter, Jr.

ong before the stock market crash in October 1929, African Americans had
experienced hard times. The “last hired and the first fired,” African Ameri-
cans entered the Great Depression earlier and more deeply than other racial

and ethnic groups. Sociologists St. Glair Drake and Horace R. Cayton believed that
the black community served as a “barometer sensitive to the approaching storm.”
Months before the stock market crash, the Chicago Defender warned, “Something
is happening… and it should no longer go unnoticed. During the past three weeks
hardly a day has ended that there has not been a report of another firm discharg-
ing its employees, many of whom have been faithful workers at these places for
years.”

The depression brought mass suffering to the country as a whole. National
income dropped by nearly fifty percent, from $81 billion in 1929 to $40 billion in
1932; unemployment rose to an estimated twenty-five percent of the labor force;
and nearly twenty million Americans turned to public and private relief agencies
to prevent starvation and destitution. Still, African Americans suffered more than
their white counterparts, received less from their government, and got what they
called a “raw deal” rather than a “new deal.”

The depression took its toll on virtually every facet of African American life.
As unemployment rose, membership in churches, clubs, and fraternal orders
dropped. Blacks frequently related the pain of this separation from friends and
acquaintances. “I don’t attend church as often as I used to. You know I am not fixed
like I want to be—haven’t got the clothes I need.”

Blacks in the rural South faced the most devastating impact of the Great
Depression. As cotton prices dropped from eighteen cents per pound to less
than six cents by early 1933, an estimated two million black farmers faced hard
times. The number of black sharecroppers dropped from nearly 392,000 in 1930
to under 300,000 as the depression spread. All categories of rural black labor—

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132

To Make Our World Anew

The Great Depression forced growing numbers of white women to enter the work force, where they com-
peted with black women for jobs. Here, blacks and whites work side by side at a cannery in North Carolina.

landowners, cash tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers—suffered from declin-
ing incomes. Mechanical devices had already reduced the number of workers need-
ed for plowing, hoeing, and weeding, but planters now experimented with
mechanical cotton pickers as well. As one black woman put it, many jobs had “gone
to machines, gone to white people or gone out of style.” Public and private relief
efforts were virtually nonexistent in the rural South, forcing farm families to con-
tinue their trek to the city.

Despite declining opportunities to work in southern and northern cities, black
migration continued during the depression years. The percentage of urban blacks
rose from about forty-four percent in 1930 to nearly fifty percent during the
depression years. The black population in northern cities increased by nearly
twenty-five percent; the number of cities with black populations of over one hun-
dred thousand increased from one in 1930 to eleven in 1935. Public social services
played an increasing role in decisions to move. As the Swedish economist Gunnar
Myrdal noted in his classic study of black life during the period, “It was much
harder for Negroes who needed it to get relief in the South than in the North.”

The increasing migration of blacks to cities intensified the poverty of estab-
lished residents. Before the stock market crash of 1929, urban blacks had already
faced the impact of increasing mechanization, declining demand for manufactured

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 133

goods, and loss of employment to whites. The stock market crash further undercut
the economic position of African Americans. By 1932, black urban unemployment
reached well over fifty percent, more than twice the rate of whites. In northern and
southern cities, black workers faced special difficulties trying to hold on to their
jobs. In Pittsburgh, for example, some black workers were fired when they refused
to give kickbacks to the foreman for being permitted to keep their jobs. At the same
time, unemployed whites made increasing inroads on the so-called “Negro jobs,”
lower-level positions that blacks had occupied during good times. Not only in fac-
tories but in street cleaning, garbage collection, and domestic service work, whites
competed for the traditionally black jobs.

As the depression intensified, many white women entered the labor force for the
first time. They competed with black women for jobs as maids, cooks, and house-
keepers. In northern cities, unemployment and destitution forced many black
women to participate in the notorious “slave market.” Congregating on the side-
walks of major cities, these women offered their services to white women, who
drove up in their cars seeking domestic help. Some of the employers were working-
class women themselves and paid as little as five dollars weekly for full-time house-
hold workers. The work was difficult indeed. One young black woman, Millie Jones,
offered a detailed description of her work for one family for five dollars a week.

Each and every week, believe it or not, I had to wash every one of those win-
dows [fifteen in a six-room apartment]. If that old hag found as much as the
teeniest speck on any one of ’em, she’d make me do it over. I guess I would
do anything rather than wash windows. On Mondays I washed and did as
much of the ironing as I could. The rest waited over for Tuesday. There were
two grown sons in the family and her husband. That meant that I would
have at least twenty-one shirts to do every week. Yeah, and ten sheets and at
least two blankets, besides. They all had to be done just so, too.

In urban factories and commercial laundries, black women also faced difficult
times. In a New York laundry, black women worked fifty hours each week. Ac-
cording to one employee, “it was speed up, speed up, eating lunch on the fly.”
Women working in the starching department stood on their feet for ten hours each
day, “sticking their hands into almost boiling starch.” When the employees com-
plained, the boss threatened to fire and replace them with workers from the large
pool of unemployed women. But black women did not accept these conditions
without a fight.

Racism and job competition helped to narrow the margin between bare survival
and destitution. Evidence of racism abounded. In the South, white workers rallied
around such slogans as, “No Jobs for Niggers Until Every White Man Has a Job”
and “Niggers, back to the cotton fields—city jobs are for white folks.” The most
violent efforts to displace black workers occurred on southern railroads, where
the white brotherhoods, as their unions were called, intimidated, attacked, and

134 To Make Our World Anew

murdered black workers in order to take their jobs. By early 1933, nearly a dozen
black firemen had lost their lives in various parts of the country. Although the Ku
Klux Klan had declined by the mid-1920s, it now renewed attacks on African
Americans.

The discriminatory policies of employers and labor unions also affected African
Americans in northern cities. Employers maintained their views that African
Americans were fit only for dirty, unpleasant, low-paying, and heavy work. As
blacks sought employment, employers again frequently claimed that, “We don’t
have a foundry in our plant and that’s the kind of work Negroes are best suited for.”
In Milwaukee, one firm justified its exclusion of black workers in familial and
paternalistic terms: “We just sort of work like a family here and to bring in Negro
workers would cause confusion and cause white workers to feel that their jobs had
lost in dignity if being done by Negroes.” White workers reinforced and frequently
demanded such policies. Twenty-four unions, ten of them affiliates of the Ameri-
can Federation of Labor (AFL), barred blacks completely and others practiced
other forms of discrimination and exclusion. Thus, disproportionately large num-
bers of African Americans entered the bread lines, sold their belongings, and faced
eviction from their homes.

It was a difficult time, but the Republican administration of Herbert Hoover did
little to relieve the suffering. Hoover resisted proposals for aiding the nation’s poor
and destitute. Instead, he pursued a policy of indirect relief through the establish-
ment of agencies like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which provided
loans to relieve the credit problems of huge corporations like railroads, banks, and
insurance companies. By “priming the pump” of big business, Hoover believed that
federal aid to corporations would stimulate production, create new jobs, and
increase consumer spending—that is, that wealth would “trickle down” to the rest
of the economy and end the depression. Unfortunately, these policies provided lit-
tle help to African Americans.

Despite their suffering under the Hoover administration, African Americans
rallied to the slogan “who but Hoover” in the presidential election of 1932. Hoover
had not only failed to advance effective policies for dealing with the depression; he
had also offended African Americans in a variety of ways, including refusing to be
photographed with black leaders. Still, he received about sixty-six percent of the
black votes. Only in New York and Kansas City, Missouri, did the majority of blacks
vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Republican party of Abraham Lincoln was
still seen as the party of emancipation.

From the black vantage point Roosevelt looked little better than Hoover. As assis-
tant secretary of the navy during the First World War, he had supported the racial
segregation of the armed forces. He had also adopted Warm Springs, Georgia, as his
home and accepted the system of racial segregation in that state. Moreover, during
its national convention, the Democratic party rejected an NAACP proposal for a
civil rights plank that called for an end to racial discrimination.

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 135

Unemployed blacks line up outside the State Employment Service in Memphis, Tennessee,
in 1938. During the depression blacks received far less aid than their white counterparts.

Once in office, FDR did little to build confidence among African Americans.
The new president depended on Southern segregationists to pass and implement
his “New Deal” programs. FDR saw the depression as an economic disaster that
required massive federal aid and planning. The president formulated his New Deal
programs accordingly, giving close attention to the needs of big business, agricul-
ture, and labor. Roosevelt opposed federal anti-lynching legislation, prevented
black delegations from visiting the White House, and refused to make civil rights
and racial equity a priority. FDR repeatedly justified his actions on the grounds
that he needed Southern white support for his economic relief and recovery pro-
grams. In a conversation with an NAACP official, he confided that, “If I come out
for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to
keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”

African-American rights were placed on hold. Each piece of New Deal legislation
failed to safeguard African Americans against racial discrimination. The National
Recovery Administration (NRA), Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA),
the Works Progress [later Projects] Administration (WPA), the Tennessee Valley
Authority (TVA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Federal Energy
Relief Administration (FERA), to name only a few, all left blacks vulnerable to dis-
criminatory employers, agency officials, and local whites. Despite the initiation of

136 To Make Our World Anew

New Deal relief measures, African Americans repeatedly complained of their in-
ability to secure relief. When a father of six lost his job and sought relief in the city
of Pittsburgh, relief officials denied his request. Only when he deserted his family,
his wife reported, did she and the children receive aid. According to the woman’s
testimony: “He told me once that if he wasn’t living at home the welfare people
would help me and the kids, and maybe he just went away on that account.” South-
ern state and local officials disregarded federal guidelines and paid African-
American relief recipients less than their white counterparts. In Atlanta, blacks on
relief received an average of $19.29 per month compared to $32.66 for whites. In
Jacksonville, Florida, about five thousand whites received forty-five percent of the
relief funds, while the fifteen thousand blacks on relief received the remaining fifty-
five percent. Southern politicians defended the practice, arguing that the low living
standard of blacks enabled them to live on less than whites.

The local Federal Emergency Relief Administration was not alone in discrimi-
nating against blacks. The Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers to withdraw
cotton land from production, create a shortage, and drive up the price of cotton on
the market. Set up to administer the law at the local level, AAA county committees
excluded African Americans from participation. By depriving African Americans
of representation white landowners were able to institute policies that drove black
landowners into the ranks of sharecroppers and forced growing numbers of share-
croppers off the land altogether. During its first year, for example, the AAA encour-
aged farmers to plow under cotton that was already planted. Landowners took gov-
ernment checks, plowed up cotton, and denied tenants a share of the government
income.

At the same time that planters removed increasing acres of land from cultiva-
tion, the largest landowners turned increasingly to scientific and mechanized farm-
ing. Tractors and cotton-picking machines rendered black labor more and more
dispensable. Although their numbers dwindled, the remaining black sharecroppers
earned less than their white counterparts. White sharecroppers received a mean net
income of $417 per year compared to only $295 for blacks. Whites receiving hourly
wages made $232 per year, compared to only $175 for blacks.

Lower earnings aggravated other forms of racial inequality. In his survey of 612
black farm families in Macon County, Alabama, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson
found that more than half lived in one- and two-room weatherworn shacks. When
asked if her house leaked when it rained, a black woman said, “No, it don’t leak in
here, it just rains in here and leaks outdoors.” Another tenant complained that the
landlord refused to provide lumber for repairs: “All he’s give us … is a few planks.
. . . It’s nothin doin’. We just living outdoors.” Food was also difficult for farm fam-
ilies to come by. Black tenants had good reasons to view these early years of the
New Deal with skepticism.

The National Recovery Act also discriminated against black workers. Partly by
exempting domestic service and unskilled laborers from its provisions, the NRA

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 137

removed most blacks from its minimum wage and participatory requirements.
Since over sixty percent of African Americans worked in these sectors, the measure
had little meaning for most blacks, especially women. Nonetheless, other blacks
who held on to their precarious footing in the industrial labor force, despite hard
times, faced new pressures from employers and white workers. In 1934, the
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Urban League reported a strike at the Wehr Steel Foundry.
The chief aim of the strike, the League reported, was the “dismissal of Negroes
from the plant.” When black workers decided to cross the picket line, police joined
strikers in attacks on them. The Milwaukee Urban League reported that: “The first
few days of the strike brought considerable violence between the Negroes who
attempted to continue on the jobs and the white pickets Police had been sum-
moned [by management] to protect those who cared to enter but in turn joined
with the strikers in overturning an automobile filled with Negro workers.”

Even on construction projects for black institutions, white workers rallied to bar
African American workers. In St. Louis, for example, when the General Tile Com-
pany hired a black tile setter on the $2 million Homer Phillips Hospital for blacks,
all the white AFL union men quit and delayed construction for two months. In
Long Island and Manhattan, the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Building
Service Employees’ Union pursued similar practices. When African Americans
were brought under the provisions of the law in southern textile firms, employers
reclassified African American jobs, in order to remove them from the protection of
the NRA codes. Some firms simply argued that blacks were less efficient than
whites and thus deserved low wages. In Atlanta, for example, the Scripto Manu-
facturing company told black workers, “This company does not base wages on
color but entirely on efficiency. Our records show that the efficiency of colored
help is only fifty percent of that of white help in similar plants.”

Where the codes did upgrade the pay of black workers, many firms replaced
their African American workforces with white employees. It is no wonder that
blacks frequently called the NRA, the “Negro Run Around,” “Negroes Ruined
Again”, and “Negro Rarely Allowed.” In short, NRA legislation (particularly section
7a, which gave workers the right to collective bargaining with employers) enabled
labor unions to strengthen their hand at the expense of blacks in the North and
South. As late as 1935, organized white labor also blocked the inclusion of a non-
discrimination clause in the National Labor Relations Act, sponsored by Senator
Robert Wagner of New York. The new Wagner law gave workers and their unions
extended protection in their effort to bargain collectively with management.

African Americans not only faced discrimination in industrial, agricultural, and
relief programs but confronted racial bias in federal housing, social security, and
regional planning and youth programs as well. The Federal Housing Administration
refused to guarantee mortgages (homeloans) in racially integrated neighborhoods;
the Social Security Act excluded farm laborers and domestic service employees;
and the TVA and CCC developed along segregationist and unequal lines.

138 To Make Our World Anew

Established in 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority was promoted by the
Roosevelt administration as a model of social planning to improve the lives of mil-
lions of Americans in seven states in the Tennessee River Valley. It was hoped that
the TVA would stimulate economic development and reduce poverty by establish-
ing a massive program of rural electrification at dramatically reduced rates. African
Americans comprised eleven percent of the two million residents of the region,
and the project promised “nondiscrimination” in its official design.

African Americans took heart at the promise of benefits from TVA. Yet, the pro-
ject soon accepted the racial status quo for black workers and their families in the
valley. The agency barred blacks from skilled and managerial positions, excluded
them from vocational training programs, and reinforced patterns of segregation in
housing. When queried about the exclusion of blacks from its model town of
Norris, Tennessee, TVA chairman Arthur Morgan referred to a long “lilly white”
waiting list and suggested that it was unlikely that blacks would be able to move to
Norris. Even more important, African Americans received inadequate benefits
from the reduced rates for electrical power for their homes. In an essay on the
“Plight of the Negro in the Tennessee Valley,” the NAACP magazine The Crisis
reported: “For Negroes the introduction of cheaper electric rates into Lee County
as result of the TVA power policy has meant nothing. Landlords, whether of Negro
slum dwellers in Tupelo or of Negro tenant farmers in the rural section of the
county, have not found it to their advantage to wire their Negro tenants’ homes at
the cost of $15 to $25, when already they are squeezing all the rent possible from
these tenants.”

In the face of blatant forms of discrimination during the early New Deal,
African Americans found little to praise in the government’s relief efforts. They
were acutely aware that they suffered disproportionately from unemployment, but
faced the greatest discrimination and received the least benefits from government
relief, work, housing, and social security programs. All Americans gained increas-
ing assistance from the federal government, but such assistance would only slowly
reach African Americans and help to reverse the impact of hard times on their fam-
ilies and communities. By the mid-1930s, however, a variety of new forces would
gradually transform the “raw deal” into a “new deal.”

A New Deal, 1935-1939

Between the stock market crash of 1929 and the early years of the New Deal, the
condition of African Americans moved from bad to worse. Neither the Hoover
administration nor the first efforts of the Democratic regime of Franklin Roosevelt
did much to lessen the suffering of African Americans. By 1935, however, a variety
of forces helped to transform the relationship between blacks and the New Deal.
Changes in American attitudes toward race and class, the emergence of new
interracial alliances, and the growing political mobilization of African Americans

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 139

themselves all put pressure on the federal government to address the needs of African
Americans. In a nationwide radio broadcast, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sym-
bolized the shift. In a speech before a conference of the Churches of Christ in
America, he condemned lynching as murder: “Lynch law is murder, a deliberate and
definite disobedience of the high command, ‘Thou shall not kill.’ We do not excuse
those in high places or low who condone lynch law.” Following the president’s pro-
nouncement, the NAACP’s Crisis magazine exclaimed that FDR was the only presi-
dent to declare “frankly that lynching is murder. We all knew it, but it is unusual to
have a president of the United States admit it. These things give us hope.”

As the federal government increasingly affirmed its responsibility for the social
welfare of all Americans, it helped to change the context of the African-American
struggle for social justice. By 1939, African Americans had gradually gained a
larger share of New Deal social programs and improved their economic situation.
African-American income from New Deal work and relief programs—Public
Works Administration, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation
Corps—now nearly equaled their income from employment in agriculture and
domestic service. On CCC projects, African Americans increased their percentage
from less than six percent in 1935 to eleven percent in 1939. African Americans also
occupied about one-third of all low-income PWA housing units, obtained a rising
share of Federal Farm Security Loans, and access to a variety of new WPA educa-
tional and cultural programs. Because the government spent more money on edu-
cation, including the building of new facilities, black illiteracy dropped ten percent
during the 1930s. The number of African Americans on relief and the amount of
money available to them rose steadily. African Americans increasingly hailed such
New Deal social programs as “a godsend.” Some even suggested that God “will lead
me” but relief “will feed me.”

The changing relationship between blacks and the New Deal was not merely
a matter of the government’s shifting attitude toward the social welfare of all
Americans. The Roosevelt administration also responded to the growing impor-
tance of the black vote on national elections, the emergence of an interracial
alliance of black and white New Dealers, and especially a rising core of black fed-
eral appointees. Roosevelt acted to the growing importance of the black vote by
appointing increasing numbers of African Americans to federal posts. By the mid-
1930s, some forty-five blacks had received appointments in various New Deal
agencies and cabinet departments. The “Black Cabinet,” as these black advisers
were called, included Robert L. Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, in the office
of the Attorney General; William H. Hastie, a civil rights attorney, in the Depart-
ment of the Interior; Robert C. Weaver, an economist, also in the Interior
Department; Lawrence A. Oxley, a social worker, in the Department of Labor;
Edgar Brown, president of the United Government Employees, in the Civilian
Conservation Corps; and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman

140 To Make Our World Anew

President Franklin Roosevelt responded to the growing importance of the black vote in national elections by
appointing increasing numbers of blacks to federal posts. Members of the “Black Cabinet,” as these
appointees came to be called, gathered for a photograph in 1938.

College, head of the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration. The
“Black Cabinet” enabled African Americans to improve their position in a variety
of New Deal programs.

The first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, played a key role in helping these black New
Dealers improve the federal response to the needs of African Americans. Although
Mrs. Roosevelt had little contact with African Americans before early 1933,
she soon befriended Walter White of the NAACP and Mary McLeod Bethune.
Through her frequent interactions with black leaders Eleanor Roosevelt gradually
increased her support of civil rights issues. Following the election of 1936, for
example, she endorsed legislation designed to abolish the poll tax, make lynching
a federal offense, and increase aid to black institutions, particularly schools.
Historians credit Mrs. Roosevelt with helping to push FDR’s position on civil
rights from one of caution and aloofness to one of significant support. FDR even-
tually allowed himself to be photographed with black leaders, conferred with civil
rights delegations at the White House, and sent greetings to African American
organizations.

As the White House seemed to escalate its support for racial justice, other New
Dealers took heart and advanced the cause of African Americans. The policies of
Harold Ickes, Secretary of Interior and administrator of the PWA; Harry Hopkins,
head of the WPA; and a few others exemplified the growing support that African
Americans received in some New Deal agencies. Before taking his post as Secretary
of the Interior, Ickes had served as president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP.
Upon assuming his duties, he ended segregation in the department’s rest rooms
and cafeteria. Although local whites often ignored his policies, Ickes advocated the

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 141

employment of skilled and unskilled black laborers on PWA construction projects.
The secretary insisted that all PWA contractors agree to hire blacks in proportion
to their percentage in the 1930 occupational census.

Under the leadership of Harry Hopkins, the WPA established policies making it
illegal for any relief official to discriminate “on account of race, creed, or color.”
FDR had strengthened his hand, by issuing Executive Order 7046, which mandat-
ed that the WPA would assign persons “qualified by training and experience” to
work projects without discrimination “on any grounds whatsoever.”

Under Hopkins’s leadership, the WPA also promoted black adult education,
hired unemployed black professionals, and stimulated the arts within the black
community. The WPA Education program employed over 5,000 blacks as leaders
and supervisors, taught nearly 250,000 blacks to read and write, and trained many
for skilled jobs. The Federal Music Project staged concerts involving the works of
black composers; the Federal Art Project employed hundreds of black artists; and,
under the direction of Hallie Flanagan, the Federal Theater Project (FTP) estab-
lished an African American unit.

Supplementing the artistic work of the FTP was the Federal Writers Project.
Young writers and scholars like St. Clair Drake, Horace R. Cayton, Richard Wright,
and Ralph Ellison gained opportunities and early training on the Federal Writers
Project. Both the FWP and FTP developed activities designed to increase inter-
racial understanding, which provoked an investigation by the U.S. House of Rep-
resentatives Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The HUAC helped to
undercut the growth of their programs by charging them with “conspiracy and
subversion” of American ideas, beliefs, and institutions.

Although most southern New Dealers resisted equal treatment for blacks, oth-
ers supported efforts to improve the status of African Americans. Born in Alabama,
Aubrey Willis Williams, served as Deputy Works Progress Administrator and head
of the National Youth Administration (NYA). At the NYA, Williams resisted the
establishment of racial differentials in wages paid to blacks and whites. He repeat-
edly stated the belief that African American youth should be prepared for jobs that
would move them beyond the usual categories of maid and janitor. Will Alexander,
director of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), was another Southern white
who befriended African Americans during the period. Under his leadership, the
FSA appointed a larger percentage of black supervisors than any other agency and
gradually improved benefits for African Americans.

There were other reasons why federal policies toward blacks began to change for
the better. Across the land, American attitudes toward race and class had begun to
change. This was reflected in the emergence of new intellectual, cultural, and polit-
ical currents. Increasing numbers of Americans criticized industrial elites—corpo-
rate executives, bankers, and Wall Street financiers—for eliminating their jobs and
placing them in bread lines. Working Americans launched mass movements for

The Farm Security Administration highlights its efforts to aid black farmers in this 1939 poster. The
FSA sought to increase the number of black farmers who owned the land they worked.

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 143

greater government support of their interests during the 1930s. This increased
activism could be seen in the rise of the Communist party, the resurgence of orga-
nized labor, and increasing efforts to attract African Americans to the ranks of both
of these types of organizations.

An unpopular minority, the Communist party was especially eager to attract
black members. Although the party often used the race issue to foster its own spe-
cific ideological attacks on capitalist institutions, such as the two-party system, it
nonetheless played a key role in publicizing racial injustice and placing civil rights
before the nation.

Few blacks joined the Communist party, but its activities on behalf of Afri-
can Americans soon got their attention. The party’s most famous campaigns cen-
tered on efforts to free one of its own members, the black communist Angelo
Herndon, from a Georgia chain gang and the attempt to win aquittal on rape
charges for nine blacks held in Scottsboro, Alabama, known as the Scottsboro Boys.

The case of the Scottsboro Boys was perhaps the most infamous instance of
racial injustice in the courts of the 1930s. During the depression years, blacks and
whites routinely “hoboed” the nation’s freight trains, traveling from place to place
looking for work and the means to survive. In March 1931, a group of black
and white youths boarded a freight train, southbound from Chattanooga, Ten-
nessee, to Alabama. A fight eventually broke out and the blacks forced the whites
off the train.

The white youths reported the incident to local authorities who stopped the
train near Scottsboro, Alabama. Nine young black men and two white women
were removed from the train by the local sheriff. Fearing arrest, the young
women accused the black youths of rape at knife point. Although the black defen-
dants pleaded “not guilty,” the court failed to appoint proper legal representa-
tion for the young men. An all-white jury ignored the different versions of events
on the train given in the testimony of the two women and found the defen-
dants guilty of rape and the court sentenced all but the youngest to death in the
electric chair.

The Communist party soon took up the case. The party’s Central Committee
issued a statement describing the sentence as a “legal lynching,” and within a few
days, launched a national and international crusade to save the young men. As
protest rallies emerged in major cities across the nation, non-Communist organi-
zations like the NAACP soon joined communists in demanding justice. At the
same time, the party’s International Labor Defense pressed the legal case through
the Alabama Supreme Court, which upheld the convictions. On two separate occa-
sions the party carried the case forward to the U. S. Supreme Court, which over-
turned the convictions and ordered retrials, which in both cases, Powell v. Alabama
(1932), and Norrisv. Alabama (1935), led not to release but to new death sentences.
However, the execution dates kept being postponed and eventually all defendants

144 To Make Our World Anew

were cleared of the charges brought against them. After having spent more than fif-
teen years in jail for a crime he did not commit, the last defendant was released
after the Second World War.

The Communist party not only staged demonstrations and legal actions to free
blacks like Herndon and the Scottsboro boys, it also carried out day-to-day activi-
ties designed to improve the economic status of African Americans. The party orga-
nized hunger marches, unemployed councils, farm labor unions, and rent strikes to
aid unemployed and destitute workers. In Chicago, when families received eviction
notices, mothers would sometimes shout to the children, “Run quick find the
Reds!” On one occasion, when communists attempted to prevent the eviction of a
black family in Chicago, police shot and killed three African Americans. The
Communist party responded by distributing nearly five thousand leaflets, urging
black and white workers to unite and demand justice for the deceased.

During the 1930s the Socialist party also campaigned against racial injustice. In
1929, the party established the United Colored Socialists of America. Socialist party
head Norman Thomas appointed a special black organizer for the South and sup-
ported a resolution condemning racial discrimination by trade unions. By 1933 the
Socialist party endorsed federal anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation; the party
also organized sharecroppers unions, and elevated blacks to leadership positions.

Launched in 1934, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) represented the
Socialist party’s strongest effort to organize workers across racial lines. Founded
near the town of Tyronza, Arkansas, the STFU resolved to organize black and white
tenant farmers in the same union. Under the leadership of H. L. Mitchell, a white
associate of Norman Thomas, and two ministers, Howard Lester and Claude
Williams, the organization advocated both economic justice for all sharecroppers
and racial justice for African Americans. A white organizer for the STFU empha-
sized the futility of separate organizations and appealed to what he called “belly
hunger” to help erase the color line among farmers. “If we organize only a Union
of Negro sharecroppers then the Negroes will be evicted and white sharecroppers
from the hill country or the unemployed in Memphis will take their places. If on
the other hand we organize only a Union of white sharecroppers then the white
men will be evicted and Negro sharecroppers from Mississippi and the unem-
ployed in Memphis will take their places.” Although the organization failed to
bring landowners to the bargaining table, it demonstrated how the American Left
pushed the Roosevelt administration to create a “new deal.”

The economic slump of the 1930s and the Roosevelt administration’s liberalized
labor laws energized the organized labor movement. However, the movement split
over the issue of whether to organize workers along broad industrial lines or on a
narrow, craft-by-craft basis. Impatient with the exclusionary policies of the Ameri-
can Federation of Labor (AFL), the Committee for Industrial Organization broke
from the AFL at the 1935 convention. Under the leadership of John L. Lewis, head
of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW), the CIO (renamed the Congress

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 145

of Industrial Organizations in 1938) embarked upon an aggressive organizing
drive. This change was especially significant for blacks because they were disporo-
portionately represented in mass production industries.

– Learning from its failure to organize southern black miners in the coal strikes of
1927, the UMW made a firm commitment to organize black and white workers.
Following the “UMW formula,” the CIO soon launched the Steel Workers Organiz-
ing Committee (SWOC), the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee
(PWOC), and the United Automobile Workers (UAW). In each case, the union
appealed to black organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League;
employed black organizers; placed African Americans in key union offices; and
advocated an end to racially biased pay scales. Under the prodding of black labor
leaders like A. Philip Randolph, competition from the emerging CIO, and the
growing influence of blacks in the New Deal political coalition, the AFL also mod-
ified its position on organizing black workers. AFL President William Green even-
tually supported the move to free Angelo Herndon and the Scottsboro Boys, to
obtain federal anti-lynching legislation, and to abolish poll taxes that disfranchised
black voters. By 1939, African Americans had moved into the meeting rooms of the
“house of labor.”

Reinforcing the lowering of racial barriers in the Labor movement were new
intellectual and cultural perspectives on race in American society. Scholars, artists,
and the popular media gradually changed their views on race. Social scientists
rejected the notion of the inborn inferiority of races and developed a new consen-
sus. Most intellectuals and social scientists agreed that African Americans were not
inferior to whites, that racism injured its victims both psychologically and social-
ly, and that racism itself was a mental illness that damaged the health of the indi-
vidual and the nation as a whole. These views gained currency in the ongoing
research of Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, his students, and asso-
ciates, who questioned the long-held assumption that racial and ethnic group dif-
ferences were inherited through the genes. Boas and his associates challenged the
racists to prove that African Americans suffered a lower plane of living because
they were intellectually inferior to their white counterparts. In short, he forced the
social scientific community, which prided itself on attending to the “facts,” to rec-
ognize that it had little evidence to support some of its most cherished theories. As
one scholar put it, “We do not yet know scientifically what the relative intellectual
ability of the various races is. Some different tests, equally valid, might give the
Negro a higher score that the white. Until we do know, probably the best thing is
to act as if all races had equivalent mental ability.”

The intellectual assault on racism reached its high point in 1937 when the
Carnegie Corporation invited the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to the
United States to head “a comprehensive study of the Negro.” The Myrdal study
resulted in the publication of the monumental An American Dilemma: The
Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Myrdal brought together numerous

146 To Make Our World Anew

scholars to work on different aspects of race relations. All defined the “Negro prob-
lem” as a problem of white racism, immorality, and inequality. An American Di-
lemma concluded that “The American Negro problem is in the heart of the [white]
American. It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the
decisive struggle goes on. This is the central viewpoint of this treatise. Though our
study includes economic, social, and political race relations, at bottom our prob-
lem is the moral dilemma of the American—the conflict between his moral valua-
tions on various levels of consciousness and generality.”

Although legal change came only slowly, the U.S. Supreme Court also issued
rulings that weakened the hold of racism in American society. As early as 1935,
legal opinions on race started to change, Donald Murray, a black graduate of
Amherst College in Massachusetts, applied for admission to the University of
Maryland Law School. When the school denied him admission based upon his
race, he took the case to court and challenged racial discrimination in graduate
education. Like most southern states, Maryland set up a tuition grant program that
“assisted” blacks who sought graduate study and professional training by steering
them elsewhere. But the Maryland Court of Appeals ordered the University of
Maryland to set up a separate law school for blacks or admit them to the white one.
Rather than contesting the court’s decision, university officials quietly admitted
blacks to the law school. In the case of Missouri exrel. Gainesv. Canada (1938), the
U.S. Supreme Court reinforced the Maryland precedent by ruling that law schools
in the various states had to admit blacks or establish separate law schools.

The courts reinforced these decisions with others that slowly began to help
blacks achieve full protection under the law. On two occasions (1932, 1935), the
U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Alabama Supreme Court in the Scottsboro Case
and insisted on due process of law for black defendants. In the case of Hale v.
Kentucky (1938), the court noted the systematic exclusion of blacks from jury ser-
vice and overturned the conviction of a black man accused of murder. Over the
next three years, the U. S. Supreme Court also strengthened the economic position
of African Americans. It upheld the right of African Americans to boycott busi-
nesses that discriminated in their employment practices; struck down a Georgia
peonage law that permitted the virtual enslavement of blacks as sharecroppers; and
upheld the elimination of unequal salaries for black and white teachers in Norfolk,
Virginia. In short, by 1939 the court slowly undermined the historic Plessy v.
Ferguson decision of 1896 that permitted a “separate but equal” society for blacks
and whites.

Despite shifting conceptions of race and the New Deal’s growing response to the
needs of blacks, by 1939 poverty, unemployment, and racial discrimination con-
tinued to affect the African American community. Even the most egalitarian pro-
grams experienced a huge gap in policy and practice. The Farm Securities
Administration, which secured homeloans for farm families, for example, operat-
ed with limited funds and used a tought credit-rating system that disqualified most

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 147

Despite the many opportunities offered to blacks by the New Deal, this sign for a “colored wait-
ing room” at a bus station in Durham, North Carolina, attests to the racial discrimination that
was still a part of daily life for the majority of blacks.

black tenants and sharecroppers from qualifiying for loans. Low-income federal
housing programs reinforced the racial segregation of urban communities, adding
federal policy to the ongoing historical forces—discriminatory real estate agents,
restrictive covenants (regulations in many suburban neighborhoods that required
resale of properties only to whites), and white neighborhood opposition—in the
rise and expansion of the black ghetto.

The Works Progress Administration established regulations ending racial dis-
crimination in its programs, but southern whites continued to evade the rules and
made it more difficult for blacks than whites to gain adequate public works jobs
and relief. Black women faced special forms of discrimination on WPA projects
in the South. They were often forced to perform “men’s jobs” at a time that white
women received jobs defined as “clean” or “easy.” In a South Carolina town, a
local physician reported, “The Beautification project appears to be ‘For Negro
Women Only.’ This project is a type of work that should be assigned to men.
Women are worked in ‘gangs’ in connection with the City’s dump pile, incinerator
and ditch piles. Illnesses traced to such exposure as these women must face do not
entitle them to medical aid at the expense of the WPA.”

By the late 1930s, as whites returned to full-time employment in private indus-
try in growing numbers, most blacks continued to depend on public service and
relief programs. Despite the various interracial alliances and growing sensitivity to
the destructive impact of class and racial inequality, white Americans continued to

148 To Make Our World Anew

insist that their needs be met first. While the CIO helped to organize blacks who
were fortunate enough to maintain their jobs during the depression years, as the
country lifted itself out of the depression it did little to promote the equitable
return of employment of black and white wokers in equal numbers. For their part,
although the socialists and communists helped to change attitudes toward interra-
cial cooperation, the benefits of these efforts remained largely symbolic rather than
material. Blacks continued to suffer racial injustice. African Americans, in short,
would have to attend to their own interests, unite, and wage an even stronger offen-
sive against the barriers of racial and class inequality.

Family, Community, and Politics, 1933-1939

A variety of factors shaped the experiences of African Americans during the Great
Depression. The impact of economic hard times, the emergence of New Deal social
programs, and changing perspectives on race and class helped to define the black
experience. Despite widespread deprivation and suffering, African Americans de-
veloped a variety of strategies for coping with the depression on their own. They
deepened their connections with family, friends, and the African American com-
munity. At the same time, they strengthened their links with organized labor and
broadened their participation in the political process, particularly the New Deal
coalition of the Democratic party. As early as 1932, Robert Vann, editor of the
Pittsburgh Courier had urged African Americans to abandon the party of Lincoln.
“My friends, go turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall. That debt has been paid in full.”

As the depression took its toll on their lives, African Americans developed a
variety of strategies for making ends meet. For many black women the depression
was an old experience with a new name. As black men lost jobs in increasing num-
bers, African-American women helped keep their families in tact by relying on
black kin and friendship networks.

African-American families took in boarders, cared for each other’s children, and
creatively manipulated their resources. In rural areas, they maintained gardens,
canned fruits and vegetables, fished, hunted, and gathered wild nuts and berries.
And blacks adapted these rural responses to the realities of life in cities. In small
urban spaces, for example, some continued to maintain gardens to supply certain
southern staples, particularly collard greens, cabbage, potatoes, and tomatoes.
Under the impact of the depression, such activities became even more important.

Since the threat of eviction weighed so heavily on the minds of urban blacks, the
“rent party” represented a significant source of income. Sometimes described as
“chittlin’s struts,” these parties had deep roots in the rural South. “Down home”
food—chittlins, corn bread, collard greens, hogmaws, pig feet, and so on—was on
the menu. Sponsors charged a small admission fee and sometimes offered printed
or handwritten tickets.

A key component in the survival of urban blacks during the 1930s, the rent par-
ties also served as a training ground for the next generation of black blues artists—

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 149

the blues men who followed in the wake of such classical blues recording artists as
Bessie Smith, LeRoy Carr, Jimmy Yancey, Cripple Clarence Lofton, Big Maceo
Merriweather, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Big Bill Broonzy among others moved
to the fore with lyrics familiar to the house parties.

How Long, how long has that evening train been gone
How long, how long, baby, how long?
Standing at the station, watch my baby leaving town
Feeling disgusted, nowhere could she be found.
How long, how long, baby, how long?

Such parties became even more lucrative when sponsors added gambling and
liquor to food, music, and dancing. The “policy” or numbers game was also an
adaptation to poverty that African Americans brought to the city and used to help
weather the storm during the depression years. The game had its roots in the mid-
nineteenth century, but it gained increasing popularity among the poor because it
allowed bets as low as a penny. On the South Side of Chicago, one black resident
tried to imagine a world without policy. It was so important to Chicago’s black
community that without it he believed, “seven thousand people would be unem-
ployed and business in general would be crippled, especially taverns and even gro-
ceries, shoestores, and many other business enterprises who depend on the buying
power of the South Side.”

The church provided another arena in which African Americans sought to make
ends meet. Established Baptist, Methodist, and Holiness (Church of God in Christ)
churches struggled to assist their parishioners to survive hard times. New religious
movements also increased their following, partly as a result of their success in feed-
ing their parishioners. For example, the Peace Mission of Father Divine (George
Baker) whose efforts on behalf of the unemployed started during the 1920s, ex-
panded dramatically during the depression. In 1932, he moved the mission from
New Jersey to Harlem and gained credit for feeding the masses and offering hope
in a time of widespread despair.

At the same time, Bishop Charles Emmanuel Grace, known as “Daddy Grace,”
established the United House of Prayer of All People with headquarters in Wash-
ington, D.C. The organization spread to more than twenty cities and provided
thousands of people respite from hard times.

Black religious services featured music that sometimes resembled the music of
the “rent party.” It was in 1932 that the Gospel pioneer Thomas Dorsey broke from
his growing reputation as a blues pianist and dedicated himself to Gospel song
writing, which led to his most popular tune, “Precious Lord.” Dorsey’s swinging,
rocking, and blueslike melodies eventually caught on and stirred the entire world.
Over and over again, whether in religious or secular settings, black children of the
depression recalled how their families struggled, to place food on the table and
clothing on their backs.

To Make Our World Anew

The pastor of the Church of God in Christ in Washington, D.C., preaches during a service in
1942. Black churches also featured music that mirrored the growing influence of urban life.

In order to improve the circumstances of their families and communities,
African Americans also moved increasingly toward the Labor movement, which
had dramatically expanded under the impact of New Deal legislation. The new CIO
increasingly displaced the older, more racially restrictive AFL. Under these new
conditions, African Americans took the initiative to expand their place within
labor’s ranks. In Milwaukee, for example, LeRoy Johnson, a black butcher and pack-
inghouse worker, became a major figure in the organization of the local United
Packinghouse Union. Described by an associate as an “aggressive sort of guy and
quite articulate,” Johnson helped to make the CIO campaign in the city a success.

Perhaps more than any other single figure during the 1930s, however, A. Philip
Randolph epitomized the persistent effort of black workers to organize in their
own interest. During that decade, when new federal legislation (the Railway Labor
Act of 1934) recognized the rights of workers to organize, Randolph and the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (BSCP)—which he had helped
form in 1925—increased their organizing drive among black porters. Randolph’s
rhetoric and actions inspired the rank and file during the hard days of the depres-
sion. At one convention, he exclaimed, “The lesson that Pullman porters in partic-
ular and Negroes in general must learn is that salvation must and can only come
from within.”

Black pullman porters rallied to the BSCP, which, by 1933, claimed to represent
some 35,000 members. Two years later the BSCP defeated a Pullman company
union and gained the right to represent porters in negotiations with manage-
ment, which, in 1937, signed a contract with the union. In the meantime, the
AFL had grudgingly approved a full international charter for the brotherhood,

150

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 151

placing it upon an equal footing with other member unions. The BSCP victory had
extraordinary significance: It not only helped to make blacks more union con-
scious, but increased their influence on national labor policy, and the larger civil
rights struggle.

As black workers increased their organizing activities, the major civil rights
organizations also moved toward a sharper focus on the economic plight of
African Americans. In 1933, the NAACP, the Urban League, and other interracial
organizations formed the Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR). Al-
though underfunded and ill staffed, the JCNR lobbied in Washington, D.C., on
behalf of blacks and helped to publicize the plight of African Americans in the
relief and recovery programs. The Urban League also formed Emergency Advisory
Councils and Negro workers councils in major cities across the country and played
a major role in promoting closer ties between blacks and organized labor. Although
the League had earlier supported black strikebreaking activities and emphasized
amicable relations with employers, it now urged black workers to organize and “get
into somebody’s union and stay there.” For its part, the NAACP formed a Com-
mittee on Economic Problems Affecting the Negro; invited representatives of the
CIO to serve on its board; and worked with organized labor to gain housing, wages,
hours, and Social Security benefits for black workers.

The major civil rights organizations also supported the “Don’t Buy Where You
Can’t Work” campaign. Aimed at white merchants who served the African Ameri-
can community but refused to employ blacks, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”
galvanized the black urban community. In New York, Chicago, Washington D.C.,
and other cities, blacks boycotted stores that refused to hire African Americans, or
hired them only as low-paying domestic and common laborers.

New York launched its “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign under the
leadership of Reverend John H. Johnson of St. Martin’s Protestant Episcopal
Church. When white Harlem store owners refused to negotiate, Johnson and his
supporters formed the Citizens League for Fair Play, which set up picket lines
around Blumstein’s Department Store, took pictures of blacks who crossed the
line, and published photos in the black newspaper, the New York Age. After six
weeks, the store gave in and hired black clerical and professional staff. As a result
of such actions, New York blacks obtained the nation’s first black affirmative action
plan—a pattern of hiring that gave preference to previously excluded groups. In
1938, the New York Uptown Chamber of Commerce negotiated with the Greater
New York Coordinating Committee for Employment and agreed to grant African
Americans one-third of all retail executive, clerical, and sales jobs. The businesses
would not fire whites to make room for blacks, but agreed to give blacks preference
in all new openings.

Although African Americans expressed their resentment toward discrimination
in formally organized and peaceful group actions, they sometimes despaired and
adopted violent responses. On March 25, 1935, a race riot broke out in Harlem,
when a rumor spread that a black youth had been brutally beaten and nearly killed

152 To Make Our World Anew

by the police. Flyers soon appeared: “Child Brutally Beaten—near death,” “One
Hour Ago Negro Boy Was Brutally Beaten,” “The Boy Is Near Death.” Although the
youth in question had been released unharmed, outrage had already spread and
African Americans smashed buildings and looted stores, in a night of violence that
resulted in at least one death, more than fifty injuries, and thousands of dollars
worth of property damage.

In the volatile climate of the 1930s, some blacks gravitated toward the Com-
munist and Socialist parties. They perceived radicalism as the most appropriate
response to the deepening plight of African Americans. In 1931, aided by the
Communist party, blacks in rural Alabama founded the Alabama Sharecroppers
Union. The organization developed an underground network of communications
that enabled them to maintain secrecy. Meetings took place in black churches,
where their plans were disguised as religious undertakings. The union’s member-
ship increased to an estimated three thousand in 1934. Its efforts soon attracted the
attention of local authorities and violence broke out when law officers tried to con-
fiscate the livestock of union members, who allegedly owed money to landowners.
In 1932, Ned Cobb (referred to as Nate Shaw in the published oral history of his
life) joined the sharecroppers union and fought the system that oppressed him. As
he recalled, he had to act because he had labored “under many rulins, just like the
other Negro, that I knowed was injurious to man and displeasin to God and still I
had to fall back.” One cold morning in December 1932, Shaw refused to “fall back.”
When deputy sheriffs came to take his neighbor’s livestock, he took part in a
shootout with local law officers.

Nate Shaw’s action underscored the increasing militancy of rural black workers.
Despite violence and intimidation, black workers also took an active part in the
formation of the socialist Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). A black farmer
helped to inspire the organization when he spoke up at the initial meeting of the
group: “For a long time now the white folks and the colored folks have been fight-
ing each other and both of us has been getting whipped all the time. We don’t have
nothing against one another but we got plenty against the landlord. The same
chain that holds my people holds your people too. If we’re chained together on the
outside, ought to stay chained together in the union.” When white landowners
evicted sharecroppers in Arkansas, the black STFU vice president, Owen H.
Whitfield, led some 500 black and white farmers onto the main highway between
Memphis and St. Louis and vowed to remain there until the federal government
intervened. The Missouri State Highway patrol soon moved in and loaded families
and their possessions on trucks and scattered them on back country roads.
Although these radical actions produced few results, they highlighted the increas-
ing activism of rural black workers in their own behalf.

A small number of blacks joined the Communist party and played a role in the
party’s League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR). According to a recent study of
the party in depression-era Alabama, blacks made up the majority of the party’s

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?

membership during most of the period. The party’s fight on behalf of the Scotts-
boro Boys attracted local black workers.

Most African Americans, however, shunned membership in radical parties and
worked hard to broaden their participation in the New Deal coalition. In 1936,
African Americans formed the National Negro Congress (NNC). Spearheaded by
Ralph Bunche of Howard University and John Davis, executive secretary of the
Joint Committee on National Recovery, the organization aimed to unite all exist-
ing organizations—political, fraternal, and religious—and press for the full socio-
economic recovery of the black community from the ravages of the depression.
Nearly six hundred organizations attended the founding meeting, which selected
A. Philip Randolph as its first president.

The National Negro Congress demonstrated a new level of African-American
political organization and mobilization. Because of the dramatic growth of the
black population in most cities, black voter registration drives picked up momen-
tum during the 1930s. The proportion of the black population that had registered
to vote had risen rapidly in the major industrial cities—from less than thirty
percent to sixty-six percent in Detroit. In Philadelphia the number of registered
black voters rose by more than ninety percent. In Chicago the rate of black voter
registration exceeded the percentage of white. In the South as well—Durham,
Raleigh, Birmingham, Atlanta, Savannah, and Charleston—African Americans
formed political clubs to fight for the franchise and increase the number of black
voters in that region.

As Republicans continued to ignore the pleas of black voters, blacks increasing-
ly turned toward the Democratic party. In the election of 1936, African Americans
voted for the Democratic party in record numbers, giving Roosevelt seventy-six
percent of the Northern black vote. Following that election, African Americans
used their growing support of the Democratic party to demand greater considera-
tion from federal policymakers.

African Americans placed justice before the law high on their list of priorities. In
1933, the NAACP organized a Writers League Against Lynching and launched a
nationwide movement to secure a federal anti-lynching law. Sponsored in the
House of Representatives by Edward Costigan of Colorado and in the Senate by
Robert Wagner of New York, the anti-lynching bill gained little support from FDR
and failed when Southern senators killed the measure in 1934,1935,1937,1938, and
1940. Despite its failure, the campaign against lynchings produced results. The
number of lynchings dropped from eighteen in 1935 to two in 1939. Under the lead-
ership of black attorneys William Hastie, Charles Hamilton Houston, and
Thurgood Marshall, African Americans won important cases before the U.S. Su-
preme Court: selection of blacks for jury duty; admission to previously all-white law
schools; and greater access to employment, housing, and public accommodations.
Houston, Marshall, and Hastie carefully planned an overall strategy, emphasizing
test cases with broad implications for dismantling the entire segregationist system.

153

154 To Make Our World Anew

Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was one of the most celebrated of these
cases. Houston’s decision to take the case represented a tactical maneuver to dis-
mantle the separate but equal principle that the Court established in an earlier
case, Plessyv. Ferguson (1896). Lloyd Gaines, a black graduate of Lincoln University
in Missouri, was denied admission to the University of Missouri Law School
because the school did not accept blacks. The university advised Gaines to take
advantage of state funds provided to support black legal training in other states.
Supported by the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP, Gaines sued, demanding access
to training at the all-white law school. Houston argued the case in the Missouri
courts where Gaines lost. Then Huston argued the case to the U.S. Supreme Court,
where Gaines won a major victory. The Court’s decision outlawed the practice of
giving blacks subsidies to receive legal training at out-of-state schools. It also sup-
ported the admission of blacks to all-white schools in the absence of fully equal
facilities for blacks.

As black lawyers attacked the system of legalized racial segregation, black social
scientists and artists assaulted its intellectual underpinnings. E. Franklin Frazier,
W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and other black social scientists and histori-
ans had worked for years counteracting racist stereotypes. Under the leadership of
Carter G. Woodson, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History
(founded in 1915) continued to promote the study of African-American history,
emphasizing the role of blacks in the development of the nation. While the orga-
nization continued to publish the scholarly Journal of Negro History founded in
1916, in 1933 it added the Negro History Bulletin as a publication designed for
broader circulation. Launched in 1926, Negro History Week also became a regular
feature of African-American community life across the country.

E. Franklin Frazier conducted seminal studies of black community and family
life, which culminated in the publication of his The Negro Family in the United
States (1939). Although he underestimated the role that poor and working-class
blacks played in shaping their own experience, Frazier emphasized environmental
over racial factors in explaining poverty. In his scholarship on African-American
history, W.E.B Du Bois also called attention to the impact of class and racial dis-
crimination in his massive reinterpretation of the emancipation period, Black
Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935). Gunnar Myrdal’s An American
Dilemma built upon the scholarship of some thirty black scholars, including young
men like Charles S. Johnson, St. Clair Drake, Horace R. Cayton, and Ralph Bunche
among others.

Reinforcing the work of black social scientists and historians were the contri-
butions of black artists. Concert singers Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, and Marian
Anderson frequently appeared on stage and on national radio broadcasts. Born to
a working-class family in Philadelphia in 1902, Marian Anderson had pursued
advanced musical training in Europe and had performed widely in Sweden,
Norway, and Denmark. As a result of her growing success in Europe, Anderson

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?

returned to the United States in 1935. The New York Times reported, “Marian
Anderson has returned to her native land one of the great singers of our time.”

In 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned Constitution
Hall in Washington, D.C., barred Anderson from giving a concert there. For her
part, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR over the incident. In her popular
newspaper column, “My Day,” she explained that she could no longer belong to an
organization that maintained the color line. African Americans and their white
allies formed a committee of protest and got permission from Secretary of the
Interior Harold Ickes to hold the concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Nearly 75,000
people stood in the cold open air to hear her sing, and millions more heard her on
radio. Her repertoire included Negro spirituals, bringing them to a wide audience
for the first time, along with the works of classical European composers.

Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, William Attaway, and others expressed the
experiences of African Americans through novels and plays. In 1938, Richard
Wright won a WPA writing prize for his book Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of
short stories on black life in the rural South. Two years later he published his most
famous novel Native Son, which characterized the Great Migration of blacks to
American cities and the destructive impact of racism on their lives. One observer
later recalled, “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed for-
ever.” Wright’s book was a phenomenal success. It set a sales record for Harper
and Brothers and soon surpassed John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath on the best-
seller lists. Born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi in 1908, Wright later
wrote that his head was “full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity,
that the personalities of others should not be violated.” The Mississippi-born
writer William Attaway expressed similar sentiments in his powerful portrayal of
black site workers in his novel, Blood on the Forge (1941).

Adding to the artistic portrayal of black life were the dramatic productions of
black theater groups like the Rose McClendon players, the Harlem Players, and the
Negro People’s Theatre; the music of jazz artists like Fletcher Henderson, Duke
Ellington, Bessie Smith, and Jimmie Lunceford; the paintings of Romare Bearden;
and the films of the pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. African Americans
also gained greater access to mainstream radio and film and gradually used these
media to project more positive images of themselves than was previously possible.
The blues singer Ethel Waters had her own radio show and the film industry broke
new ground by giving Paul Robeson the lead role in the movie version of the stage
play The Emperor Jones, with whites serving as supporting cast.

African Americans developed a variety of responses to life during the Great
Depression. The depression offered different problems and prospects for educated
black professional people on the one hand and the masses of working-class and
poor people on the other. Yet all were linked to each other through the persistence
of racial inequality. The emergence of prizefighter Joe Louis as a folk hero for all
African Americans is perhaps the most potent evidence of their sense of a common

155

Lying Lips, a 1939 movie produced and directed by the pioneering black filmmaker Oscar
Micheaux, featured an all-black cast.

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 157

plight, kinship, and future. Indeed, Joe Louis helped to unify black people during
the period and gave them hope that they could topple the segregationist system.
When he lost they cried, as in his first bout against the German Max Schmeling in
1936. They were especially heartbroken because Hitler preached the doctrine of
Aryan supremacy, which claimed the physical and intellectual superiority of all
white people, and the German people in particular.

On the other hand, when Joe Louis won, black people celebrated. After he
knocked out Schmeling in the first round of their rematch, black people everywhere
applauded, celebrated, and danced in the streets. Similarly, when Louis knocked out
the Italian heavyweight Primo Camera, black people were also elated and felt that
they had to some degree avenged Benito Mussolini’s invasion and bombing of
Ethiopia in 1935. The singer Lena Home offers a powerful statement on Joe Louis
as a black folk hero: “Joe was the one invincible Negro, the one who stood up to the
white man and beat him down with his fists. He in a sense carried so many of our
hopes, maybe even dreams of vengeance.”

The depression, New Deal, and social change sent a mixed message to African
Americans. On the one hand, they experienced the gradual growth of new and more
egalitarian ideas and practices on race; on the other, they suffered persistent eco-
nomic deprivation and discrimination. Because they faced a dual process of pover-
ty and progress, African-American responses were likewise complex and varied. At
times, they despaired and exploded into violence, as in the Harlem riot of 1935. At
other times, they gave up on mainstream institutions and turned toward alternative
visions and strategies, as reflected in their growing connections with the
Communist and Socialist parties. Their music also reflected a similar range of
responses—blues, gospel, and jazz. Above all, however, as symbolized in the boxing
career of Joe Louis, they deepened their struggle to break down barriers to their full
participation in American society. They launched movements to break the back of
Jim Crow and broaden their access to the larger economic, political, social, and cul-
tural life of the nation. Their struggle would gain even greater fruits during the cri-
sis of the Second World War, another epic fight that lay only a few years ahead.

The Second World War, 1940-1945

Under the impact of the Second World War, African Americans gained new indus-
trial opportunities as the nation mobilized for war and called men into the mili-
tary in rising numbers. It was during this period that African Americans regained
a foothold in the industrial economy and broke the unskilled “job ceiling,” moving
into semiskilled and skilled jobs. Yet, the movement of African Americans into
defense industry jobs was a slow process. Employers, labor unions, and govern-
ment agencies, all discriminated against blacks and undermined their participation
in the war effort. The Chicago Defender captured the frustrations of many African
Americans in an editorial. “Why die for democracy for some foreign country when
we don’t even have it here?”

158 To Make Our World Anew

Most African Americans nonetheless supported the nation’s declaration of war
against Germany and Japan. Black servicemen and women fought in the European,
Pacific, and Mediterranean theaters of war. Unlike the First World War, however,
African Americans refused to simply “close ranks” and postpone their own strug-
gle for full citizenship and recognition of their rights at home. They now used the
war emergency, as well as their growing influence in the Democratic party and the
new unions, to wage a “Double V” campaign—for victory at home as well as
abroad. Their campaign received its most powerful expression in the militant
March on Washington, which led to the federal Fair Employment Practices
Committee. By war’s end African Americans and their white allies had set the stage
for the emergence of the modern Civil Rights movement.

As the nation edged toward war in the years after 1939, African Americans con-
tinued to face a pattern of racial discrimination. Despite growing U. S. protests
against the racism of Nazi Germany, African Americans confronted racial injustice
at home and abroad. In the defense industries and armed services, African
Americans complained of racial bias. In 1940 blacks made up less than two percent
of employees in the nation’s expanding aircraft industry, and management officials
in that industry often stated overtly their determination to keep blacks out. At the
large North American Aviation firm, for example, the company’s president report-
ed that black applicants would be considered only for janitorial jobs. In Milwaukee,
the A. O. Smith Company, producer of auto frames and tanks for the military,
stated that they “never did and didn’t intend to employ Negroes.” Black women
confronted even greater difficulties gaining defense jobs than black men did.
Employers expressed the belief that black women were peculiarly suited for domes-
tic service but not for industrial jobs. Thus many African-American men and
women believed that it was a waste of time to seek work in all-white defense plants.

Craft unions reinforced discrimination against black workers in defense work.
Skilled black workers—plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, electricians, cement fin-
ishers, and painters—faced exclusion from labor unions either by provisions of
their bylaws or by some form of “ritual,” or gentleman’s agreement that blacks
would not be proposed for membership. In a resolution introduced at the 1941
convention of the AFL, A. Philip Randolph pinpointed labor union discrimination
against black workers in a broad range of jobs in different parts of the country. He
cited the International Association of Machinists (IAM) as the union with the most
conspicuous record of labor union discrimination against African Americans. By
accepting only white members, the IAM reinforced the exclusion of blacks from
the metal trades and the aircraft industry, including the huge Boeing Aircraft
Corporation in Seattle.

Since many defense industry jobs required additional training for large num-
bers of white as well as black workers, the U. S. Office of Education financed such
programs under the Vocational Education National Defense (VEND) Training
Program. In his study of black labor during the period, economist and New Dealer
Robert Weaver documented racial discrimination in the implementation of such

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 159

Blacks continued to struggle against racial discrimination at home, even as African-American sol-
diers fought and died overseas during the Second World War.

programs. According to Weaver, such discrimination had deep roots in earlier
patterns of discrimination in federal educational programs. During the 1930s, the
federal government had established a precedent for discrimination, by awarding
blacks less than $4.75 per capita of federal funds, compared to $8 for whites. When
the government established VEND, it continued the same practices. As Weaver put
it, “This discrimination was in reality a projection of past practices. Most voca-
tional education officials at the national, state, and local levels were not prepared

160 To Make Our World Anew

Cadets in the U.S. Army’s first all-black air unit, the 99th Pursuit Squadron, were trained at
Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. More than 600 black pilots were trained there during the war.

to champion new policies relative to minority groups’ training.” Vocational train-
ing programs reinforced a vicious cycle of black exclusion from defense jobs. When
asked why blacks were not trained and employed in defense industry jobs, training
school supervisors, unions, and employers conveniently blamed each other, thus
passing the buck back and forth and assuring that nothing was done about their
discrimination practices.

African Americans fared little better in the armed services. During the early
1940s, as the government trained white pilots to fly warplanes, the War Depart-
ment barred African Americans from the U. S. Air Corps. Blacks were admitted to
the U. S. Army in large numbers, but were placed in segregated service and labor
units, responsible for building, maintenance, and supplies. In 1940, there were an
estimated five thousand blacks in the Army, but only four black units were up to
full strength and there were fewer than twelve officers in a corps of over twenty-
three hundred thousand enlisted men and officers. At the war’s outset, the Marine
Corps and Air Corps barred blacks completely, while the Department of the Navy
and Coast Guard accepted them only as messmen or laborers.

Despite the existence of racial discrimination in the defense program, African
Americans played a key role in the war effort. The number of blacks selected for mil-
itary service increased from 2,069 in 1940 to about 370,000 in 1942, following the

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 161

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7,1941, and the official entry of the
United States into the Second World War. By the end of the war, nearly one million
black men and women had served in the armed forces, nearly three-quarters in the
U. S. Army, followed in numbers by the Navy (and Coast Guard), Marine Corps, and
the Air Corps, in which only a few blacks served. At the same time, black civilians
supported the war effort by purchasing war bonds and launching vigorous bond
campaigns in their churches, schools, and community organizations. Despite the
poverty of many, they also cooperated with the government’s food conservation
program and staffed United Service Organizations (USO) to boost the morale of
black service men and women. The USO coordinated the social service activities of
a wide range of organizations, including the YWCA, YMCA, and the Salvation
Army, to name a few. In addition, African Americans served as nurses’ aides, drivers
in motor corps, and other voluntary but vital jobs in the Red Cross.

Nearly 500,000 African Americans saw service overseas. Most served in trans-
portation corps, port battalions, and construction units. They moved troops and
supplies, built and repaired roads and fortifications, and cleared battle zones of
debris and dead and wounded soldiers. They also engaged the enemy in combat in
the European, Mediterranean, and Pacific theaters, and gained recognition for
their outstanding services. The 761st Tank Battalion, which served in six European
countries and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, received several commendations
for its bravery on the battlefield. By war’s end, many of these units received the
Presidential Citation for their contributions to winning the war. The Air Corps
awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross to eighty-two African American pilots
and several blacks received the Navy Cross. Messman Doric Miller became per-
haps the most renowned of these seamen. “Without previous experience [he] . . .
manned a machine gun in the face of serious fire during the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, on the Battleship Arizona shooting down four
enemy planes.”

The significant number of Distinguished Flying Crosses was made possible by
the training of black airmen at segregated institutions, like Tuskegee Institute.
Although some black leaders resisted the training of blacks in segregated facilities,
others accepted the arrangement as an opportunity to expand their war-and-
peace-time opportunities. Tuskegee trained some six hundred black pilots who
flew missions in Africa, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Germany. Colonel
Benjamin O. Davis, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, became
the highest ranking black officer. He flew sixty missions and won several medals for
distinguished service. Other African Americans received medals of honor from the
governments of France, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.

African Americans served and achieved against great odds. On and off mili-
tary bases, black service personnel often did not receive courteous treatment
and recognition of their human and civil rights. In Durham, North Carolina, for
example, a local jury acquitted a white bus driver who murdered a black soldier

162 To Make Our World Anew

African-American women service a truck at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. During the war, black women, perhaps
even more so than white women, performed traditionally male jobs.

following an altercation on his route. When German prisoners of war arrived in the
United States, they often received service in white establishments that denied ser-
vice to African Americans.

No less than black men, black women in the military were also subject to bru-
tality in the Jim Crow South. When they failed to move along fast enough, three
black Women in the Women’s Army Corps (WAGS) were brutally assaulted by
civilian police in a Kentucky railroad station. When African Americans resisted
such treatment, racial violence erupted at Fort Bragg, N.C., Fort Dix, N.J., and
other military bases.

Racial discrimination in the military was part of a broader pattern of hostility
toward blacks in American society. Attracted by new jobs created by the war effort,
nearly 1.6 million blacks moved into the nation’s cities. The percentage of blacks
living in urban areas rose from less than fifty percent in 1940 to nearly sixty per-
cent in 1945. Western cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle now joined
established northern and southern cities as major centers of black urban popula-
tion growth. Between 1940 and 1945, the black population of Los Angeles county

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 163

rose from about 75,000 to 150,000. Seattle’s black population leaped from 3,800 to
nearly 10,000. At the same time, established midwestern and northeastern cities
attracted large numbers of new blacks. In the three year period between 1940 and
1943, Detroit’s black population increased by fifty thousand. As the black urban
population increased, race relations deteriorated and violence broke out in several
cities. One example was the so-called “zoot suit” riots in which white sailors and
civilians attacked African Americans and Latino residents. Marked by their dress as
well as their color—broad felt hats, pegged trousers, and pocket knives on gold
chains—African American and Latino youth were assaulted in Los Angeles, San
Diego, Long Beach, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

Racial violence went well beyond the “zoot suit” confrontations. The most seri-
ous conflicts occurred in Harlem and Detroit. In 1943, a policeman shot a black sol-
dier and touched off the Harlem riot, which resulted in at least five deaths, five hun-
dred injuries, hundreds of arrests, and five million dollars in property damage. The
actor Sidney Poitier later recalled his experience of the riot: “In a restaurant down-
town where I was working I heard that there was trouble in Harlem. After work I
took a train uptown, came up out of the subway, and there was chaos everywhere—
cops, guns, debris and broken glass all over the street. Many stores had been set on
fire, and the commercial district on 125th Street looked as if it had been bombed.”

The confrontation in Detroit left behind even more deaths, injuries, and arrests.
On June 20, 1943, more than 100,000 Detroiters crowded the city’s Belle Isle
Amusement Park to escape the sweltering summer heat. Before long, violence
between blacks and whites broke out at the park’s casino, ferry dock, playgrounds,
and bus stops. The violence soon spilled over into the black Paradise Valley area. At
a local club, a patron took the microphone and announced: “There’s a riot at Belle
Isle! The whites have killed a colored lady and her baby. Thrown them over a
bridge. Everybody come on! There’s free transportation outside!” Although the
report of the death of a black woman and her child was false, by early morning
African Americans had smashed windows and looted numerous white-owned
stores on Hastings Avenue. Only the arrival of federal troops put down the
violence, which resulted in 34 deaths, 675 injuries, nearly 1,900 arrests, and an
estimated $2 million in property damage. In both the Harlem and Detroit riots,
most of those killed, injured, or arrested were blacks, while the damaged property
belonged almost exclusively to whites.

Racial violence in Detroit and elsewhere was intertwined with the growing res-
idential segregation of African Americans in the urban environment. As it had
during the depression years, federal housing policy reinforced patterns of residen-
tial segregation. For example, in 1941, the Federal Public Housing Authority
(FPHA) approved the Sojourner Truth Housing Project. Although the project was
designated for black occupancy, it was located in a predominantly white working-
class neighborhood. When local residents protested, federal authorities rescinded
its decision and handed the project over to whites. Only the vigorous protests of

164 To Make Our World Anew

the black community, organized in the Sojourner Truth Citizens Committee and
supported by the United Auto Workers union, regained for African Americans
their right to live in the project.

On the other hand, the federal government soon established an all-white pro-
ject at the Ford Motor Company’s new Willow Run factory. Although blacks and
their CIO allies tried to persuade federal officials to permit blacks and whites to
occupy the units, the FPHA insisted on a policy of racial segregation. Such hous-
ing policies, along with restrictive employment practices and discrimination in the
military, embittered black-white relations in the city of Detroit and fueled the
underlying forces leading to the 1943 race riot.

African Americans did not passively accept racial discrimination in the defense
program. They waged a militant “Double V” campaign against social injustice at
home and abroad. Popularized by the Pittsburgh Courier, the “Double V” campaign
enabled African Americans to declare their loyalty to the war effort without aban-
doning their thrust for equal rights at home. As early as summer 1940, the NAACP
criticized the navy’s policy of recruiting blacks as messmen only. The organization
emphasized the injustice of using black tax dollars to finance opportunities for
whites, while denying such opportunities to blacks.

The fight against discrimination in the military was not limited to male branch-
es of the service. Under the leadership of Mabel K. Staupers, executive director of
the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, African Americans waged a
vigorous fight to integrate the Army and Navy Nurse Corps. The army established
a quota on the number of black women accepted for service, while the navy barred
them altogether. In her campaign to end such discrimination, Staupers tried to
enlist the support of white nurses groups. Only the acute shortage of white nurses
by early 1945 helped to end the army’s quota system and break the barriers on
black women in the navy.

African Americans also attacked racial discrimination in war industries with
government contracts. On its July 1940 cover, the NAACP’s Crisis featured an air-
plane factory marked, “For Whites Only,” with the caption, “Warplanes—Negro
Americans may not build them, repair them, or fly them, but they must help pay
for them.”

The African-American quest for social justice gained its most potent expression
in the emergence of the militant March on Washington Movement (MOWM).
Spearheaded by A. Philip Randolph, the MOWM was launched in 1941 following
a meeting of civil rights groups in Chicago. The critical moment came when a
black woman angrily addressed the chair: “Mr. Chairman . . . we ought to throw
fifty thousand Negroes around the White House, bring them from all over the
country, in jalopies, in trains and any way they can get there, and throw them
around the White House and keep them there until we can get some action from
the White House.” Randolph not only seconded the proposal but offered himself
and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters as leaders: “I agree with the sister. I

From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 165

will be very happy to throw [in] my organization’s resources and offer myself as a
leader of such a movement.”

By early June, the MOWM had established march headquarters in Harlem,
Brooklyn, Washington, D. C., Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Fran-
cisco. The movement spread through the major rail centers and soon joined forces
with local NAACP and Urban League chapters, churches, and fraternal orders.

The MOWM helped to mobilize the masses of black working people as well as
the middle and upper classes. According to Randolph, “It was apparent … that
some unusual, bold and gigantic effort must be made to awaken the American peo-
ple and the President of the Nation to the realization that the Negroes were the vic-
tims of sharp and unbearable oppression, and that the fires of resentment were
flaming higher and higher.” Although the MOWM welcomed liberal white sup-
port, Randolph insisted that African Americans lead the movement. Randolph was
wary of the labor movement, the major political parties, and the growing Com-
munist influence in black organizations like the National Negro Congress (NNC).
When the Communist party gained control of the NNC in early 1940, for exam-
ple, Randolph resigned from the presidency and soon left the organization.

Although Roosevelt resisted the movement as long as he could, the threat of a
march on Washington finally produced results. Roosevelt met with leaders A.
Philip Randolph and Walter White of the NAACP on June 18, 1941. A week later,
on June 24,1941, FDR issued Executive Order 8802, banning racial discrimination
in government employment, defense industries, and training programs. The order
also established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to implement
its provisions. The FEPC was empowered to receive, investigate, and address com-
plaints of racial discrimination in the defense program.

Executive order 8802 proved to be a turning point in African-American history.
It linked the struggle of African Americans even more closely to the Democratic
party and helped to transform the federal government into a significant ally.
African Americans used the FEPC to broaden their participation in the war effort,
but it proved to be a slow process. Although an estimated 118,000 blacks were
trained for industrial, professional, and clerical jobs in 1941, by the end of 1942
only a small percentage had obtained employment in defense industries. Industrial
firms in the North and South dragged their feet on the putting of fair employment
practices into effect. In January 1942, the FEPC cited five Milwaukee firms for racial
discrimination against the city’s black workers, and directed them “to give written
notice” that they would end such practices. Shipyard companies in Houston,
Galveston, Mobile, New Orleans, and Tampa widely advertised for white women
and boys to pursue training as welders, but they resisted the FEPC’s push to place
black welders. Southern colleges also barred blacks from training programs sup-
ported by federal money, forcing African Americans to travel to a limited number
of black training centers. In Mobile, when the FEPC pressured the Alabama
Drydock and Shipbuilders Company to upgrade some black workers to the job of

166 To Make Our World Anew

welder, the company supported the walkout and a riot of some twenty thousand
white workers, who quit in protest against the employment of black workers.

Southeastern railroads offered even stronger evidence of white resistance. In
1940, with the support of the National Mediation Board, the southeastern railroads
and the exclusively white unions signed the notorious “Washington Agreement,”
designed to eliminate black firemen from employment. Black workers soon chal-
lenged the Washington Agreement under the new FEPC guidelines. The FEPC
ordered the companies and unions to adjust their policies “so that all needed work-
ers shall be hired and all company employees shall be promoted without regard to
race, creed, color or national origin.” When the roads and unions defied the order,
African Americans took their case to court, but nothing was determined until 1944
when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Bester William Steelev. The Louisville and Nash-
ville Company Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Engineers, upheld their
claims. Every year, at the annual meetings of the AFL, A. Philip Randolph exhort-
ed white workers to end racial bias.

Despite the persistence of discrimination, as the wartime labor shortages
increased, the FEPC played a key role in helping black workers find jobs in defense
plants. The number of blacks in war production increased from less than three per-
cent in March 1942 to over eight percent in 1944. And unlike what happened dur-
ing the First World War, substantial numbers now moved into semiskilled and
skilled positions. As St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton noted in their study of
Chicago during the period, “The Second World War broke the ceiling at the level
of semiskilled work and integrated thousands of Negroes as skilled laborers in the
electrical and light manufacturing industries, from which they had been barred by
custom, and in the vast new airplane-engine factories… They also began to filter
into minor managerial and clerical positions in increasing numbers.”

While the AFL unions and the railroad brotherhoods did much to hamper this
process, the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations often supported
the FEPC claims of black workers and helped them to break the job ceiling. At its
annual convention in 1941, for example, the CIO denounced racially discrimina-
tory hiring policies as a “direct attack against our nation’s policy to build democ-
racy in our fight against Hitlerism.” A year later, the organization established its
own Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination and urged its affiliates to sup-
port national policy against discrimination. Although black workers faced ongoing
obstacles in their struggle for skilled, managerial, and clerical positions, by the end
of the Second World War they claimed the CIO, the Democratic party, and the
federal government as important allies in their struggle for social change.

The “Double V” campaign for victory at home and abroad, the March on
Washington Movement, and the growing use of the federal government to secure
their aims helped to write a new chapter in the history of African Americans and
set the stage for the modern Civil Rights movement of the postwar years.

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