THE STRUGGLE OF BLACK AMERICANS: FROM NONVIOLENCE TO BLACK POWER
As was noted in the previous chapter, Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a key leader of the civil rights movement during the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. King and other Southern clergymen founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which taught that civil rights could be achieved through nonviolent protest. SCLC leaders taught that violence could never be utilized to achieve their goals, no matter what the circumstance.
Many younger blacks were eager for the fight for civil rights to develop at a quicker pace. In 1960 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed; its leaders were not ministers, and they demanded immediate, not gradual, change. During the first years of its existence, SNCC attracted both black and white members; many of the whites were college students from Northern universities.
An effective technique utilized by the civil rights movement in the early 1960s was the sit-in. Blacks were not allowed to eat at the lunch counters of many Southern stores, even though blacks could buy merchandise at these stores. Black and white civil rights workers would sit down at these lunch counters; when they were denied service, they continued to sit there (preventing other paying customers from taking their spaces). Picketers would oftentimes march outside the store in question. Those participating in sit-ins received tremendous verbal and physical harassment from other whites, yet the tactic of the sit-in helped to integrate dozens of Southern establishments in the first several years of the 1960s.
In May 1961 the Congress for Racial Equality sponsored the Freedom Rides. During the previous year the Supreme Court had ruled that bus stations and waiting rooms in these stations had to be integrated. On the Freedom Rides, both black and white volunteers started in Washington and were determined to ride through the South to see if cities had complied with the Supreme Court legislation. In Anniston, Alabama, a white mob greeted the bus, beating many of the freedom riders and burning the bus. Freedom rides continued throughout the summer; almost all riders experienced some violence or were arrested.
The Freedom Rides introduced an important influence into the civil rights struggle in the South: the public opinion of the rest of the country. Many Americans were horrified at the violence they witnessed; many called their representatives in Congress to urge that the federal government do more to support the freedom riders. By the end of the summer, marshals from the Justice Department were in every city the Freedom Ride buses passed through to ensure a lack of violence.
Under Attorney General Robert Kennedy the federal government became much more involved in enforcing federal civil rights guidelines and court rulings. In September of 1962 President Kennedy nationalized the Alabama National Guard and sent in federal marshals to suppress protesters and allow James Meredith to be the first black to take classes at the University of Mississippi. In Birmingham, Alabama, city officials turned fire hoses and trained dogs on civil rights protesters; the broadcast of these events to the entire nation again created a widespread outrage against those in the South who were opposing court-ordered integration.
President Kennedy went very slowly on civil rights issues, but in the summer of 1963, he presented to Congress a wide-ranging civil rights bill that would have withheld large amounts of federal funding from states that continued to practice segregation. To muster support for this bill, civil rights leaders organized the August 28, 1963 March on Washington. More than 200,000 people showed up to protest for civil rights legislation; it was at this rally that Martin Luther King made his very famous “I have a dream” speech.
In 1964 Lyndon Johnson presented to Congress the most wide-ranging civil rights bill since Reconstruction, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 stated that the same standards had to be used to register white and black voters, that racial discrimination could not be used by employers to hire workers, that discrimination was illegal in all public locations, and that an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would be created. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed measures such as literacy tests, which had been used to prevent blacks from voting. Passage of this bill was aided by the public sentiment that followed the revelation that three civil rights workers had been killed the previous summer while attempting to register voters in Mississippi. Television reports of violence against civil rights workers, such as was seen during Martin Luther King’s march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, convinced many Americans that additional civil rights legislation was necessary.
Many blacks who lived in poverty in Northern cities believed that the civil rights movement was doing little or nothing for them. In August 1965 riots broke out in the Watts section of Los Angeles; Chicago, Newark, and Detroit soon experienced similar riots. The Kerner Commission was authorized to investigate the cause of these riots, and stated that black poverty and the lack of hope in the black urban communities were the major causes of these disturbances. The Kerner Commission reported that two societies existed in America, one white and rich, and the other poor and black.
One group that preached opposition to integration was the Nation of Islam. This organization (also called the Black Muslims) preached that it was to the benefit of white society to keep blacks poor and in ghettoes, and that for blacks to improve their position they would have to do it themselves. Malcolm X would become the most famous representative of this group, preaching black nationalism. Eventually Malcolm X rejected the more extreme concepts of the Nation of Islam, and he was killed in February 1965.
The ideas of black nationalism exerted a great deal of influence on many of the younger members of SNCC. One, Stokely Carmichael, began to urge blacks to take up arms to defend themselves against whites; Carmichael also orchestrated the removal of all whites from SNCC. In addition, Carmichael began to urge SNCC members to support black power: this concept stated that blacks should have pride in their history and their heritage, and that blacks should create their own society apart from the all-controlling white society.
The most visible group supporting black power were the Black Panthers. This San Francisco group, founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, had a militarist image. Several members died after vicious gun battles with police. At the same time, the Black Panthers set up programs that gave food to the poorest members of San Francisco’s black population and established schools to teach black history and culture to the children in the community. However, the image of this organization was greatly damaged by its violent reputation.