The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964
Main article: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
COFO had held a Freedom Vote in Mississippi in 1963 to demonstrate the desire of black Mississippians to vote. More than 90,000 people voted in mock elections which pitted candidates from the "Freedom Party" against the official state Democratic party candidates. In 1964, organizers launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the all-white slate from the state party. When Mississippi voting registrars refused to recognize their candidates, they held their own primary, selecting Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray to run for Congress and a slate of delegates to represent Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
Their presence in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was very inconvenient, however, for the convention organizers, who had planned a triumphal celebration of the Johnson Administration’s achievements in civil rights, rather than a fight over racism within the Democratic Party itself. Johnson also was worried about the inroads that Barry Goldwater’s campaign was making in what previously had been the Democratic stronghold of the "Solid South" and the support that George Wallace had received during the Democratic primaries in the North. Other all-white delegations from other southern states had threatened to walk out if the all-white slate from Mississippi were not seated.
Johnson could not, however, prevent the MFDP from taking its case to the Credentials Committee, where Fannie Lou Hamer testified eloquently about the beatings that she and others were given and the threats they faced for trying to register to vote. Turning to the television cameras, Hamer asked, "Is this America?"
Johnson attempted to preempt coverage of Hamer's testimony by calling a hastily scheduled speech of his own. When that failed to move the MFDP off the evening news, he offered the MFDP a "compromise" under which it would receive two non-voting, at-large seats, while the white delegation sent by the official Democratic Party would retain its seats. The MFDP angrily rejected the compromise. As Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers' successor as President of the NAACP 's Mississippi affiliate, stated:
"Now, Lyndon made the typical white man's mistake: Not only did he say, 'You've got two votes,' which was too little, but he told us to whom the two votes would go. He'd give me one and Ed King one; that would satisfy. But, you see, he didn't realize that sixty-four of us came up from Mississippi on a Greyhound bus, eating cheese and crackers and bologna all the way there; we didn't have no money. Suffering the same way. We got to Atlantic City; we put up in a little hotel, three or four of us in a bed, four or five of us on the floor. You know, we suffered a common kind of experience, the whole thing. But now, what kind of fool am I, or what kind of fool would Ed have been, to accept gratuities for ourselves? You say, Ed and Aaron can get in but the other sixty-two can't. This is typical white man picking black folks' leaders, and that day is just gone."
Hamer put it even more succinctly:
"We didn't come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we’d gotten here. We didn't come all this way for no two seats, 'cause all of us is tired."
The MFDP kept up its agitation within the convention, however, even after it was denied official recognition. When all but three of the "regular" Mississippi delegates left because they refused to pledge allegiance to the party, the MFDP delegates borrowed passes from sympathetic delegates and took the seats vacated by the Mississippi delegates, only to be removed by the national party. When they returned the next day to find that convention organizers had removed the empty seats that had been there the day before, they stayed to sing freedom songs.
The 1964 convention disillusioned many within the MFDP and the Civil Rights Movement, but it did not destroy the MFDP itself. The MFDP became more radical after Atlantic City, inviting Malcolm X to speak at its founding convention and opposing the war in Vietnam.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his above-mentioned work for peace, December 101964.[5]
Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965
Main articles: Selma to Montgomery marches and Voting Rights Act
SNCC had undertaken an ambitious voter registration program in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, but made little headway in the face of opposition from Selma's sheriff, Jim Clark. After local residents asked the SCLC for assistance, King came to Selma to lead a number of marches, at which he was arrested along with 250 other demonstrators. The marchers continued to meet violent resistance from police. A Selma resident, Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed by police at a later march in February.
On March 7, Hosea Williams of the SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC led a march of 600 people who intended to walk the 54 miles from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. Only six blocks into the march, however, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and local law enforcement, some mounted on horseback, attacked the peaceful demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire and bull whips, driving them back into Selma. John Lewis was knocked unconscious and dragged to safety, while at least 16 other marchers were hospitalized. Among those gassed and beaten was Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was at the center of civil rights activity at the time.
The national broadcast of the footage of lawmen attacking unresisting marchers seeking only the right to vote provoked a national response similar to the scenes from Birmingham two years earlier. While the marchers were able to obtain a court order permitting them to make the march without incident two weeks later, local whites murdered another voting rights supporter, Rev. James Reeb after a second march to the site of Bloody Sunday on March 9. He died in a Birmingham hospital March 11. Four Klansmen shot and killed Detroit homemaker Viola Liuzzo March 25 as she drove marchers back to Selma at night after the successful completed march to Montgomery.
Johnson delivered a televised address to Congress eight days after the first march in support of the voting rights bill he had sent to Congress. In it he stated:
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6. The 1965 Act suspended poll taxes, literacy tests and other voter tests and authorized federal supervision of voter registration in states and individual voting districts where such tests were being used. African-Americans who had been barred from registering to vote finally had an alternative to the courts. If voting discrimination occurred, the 1965 Act authorized the Attorney General of the United States to send federal examiners to replace local registrars. Johnson reportedly stated to associates that signing the bill had lost the South for the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future.
The Act, however, had an immediate and positive impact for African-Americans. Within months of its passage on August 6, 1965, one quarter of a million new black voters had been registered, one third by federal examiners. Within four years, voter registration in the South had more than doubled. In 1965, Mississippi had the highest black voter turnout—74%—and led the nation in the number of black public officials elected. In 1969, Tennessee had a 92.1% turnout; Arkansas, 77.9%; and Texas, 73.1%.
Several Whites who opposed the voting rights act paid an immediate price as well. Sheriff Jim Clark of Alabama who was infamous for using fire hoses and cattle prods to counteract civil rights marches was up for reelection in 1966. Taking off the notorious "Never" pin on his uniform to get the Black portion of the vote, he was unsuccessful. At the election poll, he lost as Blacks voted for the sake of just taking him out of office by any means possible.
Blacks winning the right to vote changed the political landscape of the South forever. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, barely 100 African-Americans held elective office in the U.S.; by 1989, there were more than 7,200, including more than 4,800 in the South. Nearly every Black Belt county in Alabama had a black sheriff, and southern blacks held top positions within city, county, and state governments. Atlanta had a black mayor, Andrew Young, as did Jackson, Mississippi—Harvey Johnson—and New Orleans, with Ernest Morial. Black politicians on the national level included Barbara Jordan, who represented Texas in Congress, and former mayor Young, who was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Carter Administration. Julian Bond was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1965, although political reaction to his public opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam prevented him from taking his seat until 1967. John Lewis currently represents Georgia's 5th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives, where he has served since 1987. Lewis sits on the House Ways and Means and Health committees.
The American Jewish community and the Civil Rights movement
Many in the American Jewish community supported the Civil Rights Movement. The Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald funded dozens of primary schools, secondary schools and colleges for black youth. He gave, and led the Jewish community in giving to, some 2,000 schools for black Americans. This list includes Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities. At one time some forty percent of southern blacks were learning at these schools.[citation needed] Fifty percent of the civil rights lawyers who worked in the south were Jewish.[citation needed]
Jewish leaders were arrested with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations. Abraham Joshua Heschel, a writer, rabbi and professor of theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America was outspoken on the subject of civil rights and marched arm-in-arm with Dr. King in the 1965 March on Selma.
Brandeis University, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored college university in the world, created the Transitional Year Program in 1968, in part response to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. The Transitional Year Program (TYP) at Brandeis was founded in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, this event compelled members of the faculty to find a means for renewing the University's commitment to social justice. Recognizing Brandeis as a university with a commitment to academic excellence, these faculty members thought it only right to extend the opportunity to participate in an empowering educational experience to students from communities that offered limited educational options.
It began by only admitting 20 black males to ensue the obvious disenfranchisement of the African American Community in the United States. The progam has developed into The TYP selects students from two broad categories with respect to background that in many cases overlap. The first group is comprised of students whose secondary schooling experiences and/or home communities may have lacked the resources to foster adequate preparation for success at elite colleges like Brandeis. Many times, their high schools do not offer AP or honors courses nor high quality laboratory experiences. Despite the absence of such opportunities, students have excelled in the curricula offered by their schools
The second group of students contains those whose life circumstances have created formidable challenges that required focus, energy, and skills that otherwise would have been devoted to academic pursuits. Some have served as heads of their households, others have worked full-time while attending high school full-time, and others have shown leadership in other ways.
The PBS television show From Swastika to Jim Crow explores Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. Jewish professors, refugees from the Holocaust came to teach at Southern Black Colleges in the 1930s and '40s. There came to be empathy and collaboration between Blacks and Jews. Professor Ernst Borinski organized dinners at which blacks and whites sat next to each other, a simple act that challenged segregation. Black students empathized with the cruelty these scholars had endured in Europe.[6]
The American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League actively promoted civil rights.
Fraying of alliances
King reached the height of popular acclaim during his life in 1964, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His career after that point was filled with frustrating challenges, as the liberal coalition that had made the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to fray.
King was, by this point, becoming more estranged from the Johnson administration, breaking with it in 1965 by calling for peace negotiations and a halt to the bombing of Vietnam. He moved further left in the following years, moving towards socialism and speaking of the need for economic justice and thoroughgoing changes in American society beyond the granting of the civil rights that the movement had sought to that date.
King's attempts to broaden the scope of the Civil Rights Movement were halting and largely unsuccessful, however. King made several efforts in 1965 to take the Movement north to address issues of employment and housing discrimination. His campaign in Chicago failed, as Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley marginalized King's campaign by promising to "study" the city's problems. In 1966, white demonstrators holding "white power" signs in then notoriously racist Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, threw stones at King and other marchers demonstrating against housing segregation, injuring King.
Race riots, 1963-1970
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Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, many acts were signed into legislation guaranteeing equality for black citizens. Enforcement of these acts, especially in Northern cities was another issue altogether. After World War II, more than half of the country's black population lived in Northern and Western cities rather than Southern rural areas. Coming to these cities for better job opportunities and a lack of legal segregation, blacks often did not receive the lifestyle that they had come for.
While blacks were free from segregation and terror at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, other problems often presided. Urban black neighborhoods were in fact amongst the worst and poorest in any major city. These neighborhoods were ghettos rampant with unemployment and crime. Blacks rarely owned any neighborhood stores or businesses, and often worked menial or blue-collar jobs for a fraction of the pay that their white co-workers received. Blacks often made only enough money to live in the most dilapidated housing or public housing. Blacks often also were eligible for welfare, being unable to find a well paying job. The use of illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin was out of control in black neighborhoods before large-scale numbers of whites ever began experimenting with them. Liquor stores were also in abundance, adding to the lack of opportunity for blacks that was in place. Blacks attended schools that were often the worst academically in the city and had very few white students inside of them. Worst of all, black neighborhoods were subject to police problems that white neighborhoods were not at all accustomed to dealing with. The police forces in America were set up with the motto "To Protect and Serve." Rarely did this occur in any black neighborhoods. Rather, many Blacks felt police only existed to "Patrol and Control." The racial makeup of the police departments, usually largely white, was a huge factor here. Up until 1970, no urban police force in America was greater than 10% black, and in most black neighborhoods, blacks accounted for less than 5% of the police on patrol. Arrests merely for being black were common, and as a result of racist police harassment and all the other listed factors causing a poor living standard, rioting eventually broke out.
One of the first major race riots took place in Harlem, New York, in the summer of 1964. A white Irish-American police officer named Thomas Gilligan shot a 15-year-old black named James Powell for allegedly charging at him with a knife. In fact, Powell was unarmed and as a result, an angry mob approached the precinct station house and demanded Gilligan's suspension. When it was refused, many local stores were ransacked. Even though this precinct had promoted the NYPD's first black station commander, the neighborhood people were tired of the inequalities in place, and were so enraged that they looted and burned anything that was not black-owned in the neighborhood. This riot later spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant, the main black neighborhood in Brooklyn, and during that same summer, riots broke out also in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for similar reasons.
The following year, 1965 President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, but conditions for blacks had not improved for several neighborhoods. This time, in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, another riot broke out. Watts, like Harlem, was subject to impoverished living conditions where unemployment and drugs were rampant and the neighborhood was subject to the patrol of a largely white police department. The police, who were arresting a young man for drunk driving, argued with the suspect's mother before onlookers. The result was a massive destruction of property which lasted six days. Thirty-four people were killed and property valued at about $30 million was destroyed, making the Watts riot one of the worst in American history.
With black militancy on the rise, several acts of anger were now directed at the police. Black residents growing tired of police brutality continued to riot and even began to join groups such as the Black Panthers solely to rid their neighborhoods of oppressive white police officers. Now, blacks had not only began rioting but also began murdering white police who were believed to be racist and brutal, while shouting words such as "honky" and "pig" towards the officers.
Rioting continued through 1966 and 1967 in cities such as Atlanta, San Francisco, Oakland, Baltimore, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Newark, Chicago, New York City (specifically in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx)]], and worst of all in Detroit. In Detroit, several blacks had previously received jobs in automobile assembly lines, so a comfortable black middle class was living well. However, all the blacks who had not moved upward were living in even worse conditions subject to the same problems as blacks in Watts and Harlem. When white police officers murdered a black pimp and brutally shut down an illegal bar on a liquor raid, black residents got extremely angered and began a new riot. The Detroit riot was so bad that it was one of the first major cities where whites began to leave in a sense of "white flight" because the riot seemed threatening enough to burn down white neighborhoods as well. Cities such as Detroit, Newark, and Baltimore now have a less than 40% White population as a result of these riots. To this day, these cities contain some of the worst living conditions for blacks anywhere in America.
Fresh rioting broke out in April 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered by alleged white supremacist, James Earl Ray. This time a riot broke out in every major city at once, but the cities that were burned the worst include Chicago, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. As a result of the numerous riots, President Johnson had created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1967. The commission's final report called for major reforms in employment and public assistance sent to black communities everywhere, saying that the United States was moving toward separate white and black societies.
Affirmative Action helped in the hiring process of more black police officers in every major city, and as a result, blacks make up a majority of the police departments in cities such as Baltimore, Washington, New Orleans, Atlanta, Newark, and Detroit. While many are glad at this development, many criticize the hiring of these officers as a method of appeasement and covering up racism at the hands of the police departments. Employment discrimination in modern times is less of a problem but still at times happens. Illegal drugs are still rampant in black neighborhoods, but statistics now show that whites are as likely if not more so to experiment than blacks. Overall, improvements have been made in every city affected by these riots, but work is still to be done so that inequality can one day maybe disappear completely.
Black power, 1966
Main article: Black Power
A statue honoring Carlos and Smith at San José State University
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A statue honoring Carlos and Smith at San José State University
At the same time King was finding himself at odds with factions of the Democratic Party, he was facing challenges from within the Civil Rights Movement to the two key tenets upon which the movement had been based: integration and non-violence. Black activists within SNCC and CORE had chafed for some time at the influence wielded by white advisors to civil rights organizations and the disproportionate attention that was given to the deaths of white civil rights workers while black workers' deaths often went virtually unnoticed. Stokely Carmichael, who became the leader of SNCC in 1966, was one of the earliest and most articulate spokespersons for what became known as the "Black Power" movement after he used that slogan, coined by activist and organizer Willie Ricks, in Greenwood, Mississippi on June 17, 1966.
In 1966 SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael also took Black Power to another level. He urged African American communities to confront the white supremacist group known as the Ku Klux Klan armed and ready for battle because he felt it was the only way to ever rid the communities of the terror caused by the Klan. Listening to this, several Blacks confronted the Ku Klux Klan armed and as a result the Klan stopped terrorizing their communities.
Several people engaging in the Black Power movement started to gain more of a sense in Black pride and identity as well. In gaining more of a sense of a cultural identity, several Blacks demanded that Whites no longer refer to them as "Negroes" but as "Afro-Americans." Up until the mid-1960s, Blacks had dressed similarly to whites and combed their hair straight. As a part of gaining a unique identity, Blacks now started to wear loosely fit Dashikis which were a multi-colored African clothing and had started to grow their hair out as a natural Afro. The Afro sometimes nicknamed the 'fro remained a popular black hairstyle until the late 1970s.
Black Power was made most public however by the Black Panther Party which founded in Oakland, California in 1966. This group followed ideology stated by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam using a "by-any-means necessary" approach to stopping inequality. They sought to rid African American neighborhoods of Police Brutality and had a ten-point plan amongst other things. Their dress code consisted of leather jackets, berets, light blue shirts, and an Afro hairstyle. They are best remembered for setting up free breakfast programs, referring to white police officers as "pigs", displaying shotguns and a black power fist, and often using the statement of "Power to the people."
Black Power was taken to another level inside of prison walls. In 1966, George Jackson formed the Black Guerilla Family in the California prison of San Quentin. The goal of this group was to overthrow the White ran government in America and the prison system in general. This group also preaches the general hatred of Whites and Jews everywhere. In 1970, this group displayed their ruthlessness after a White prison guard was found not guilty for shooting three black prisoners from the prison tower. The guard was found murdered in pieces and a message of how serious the group is was heard throughout the whole prison. This group also masterminded the 1971 Attica riot in New York which led to a takeover of the Attica prison. To this day, the Black Guerilla Family is one of the most feared and infamous advocates of Black Power behind prison walls.
Also in 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, while being awarded the gold and bronze medals, respectively, at the 1968 Summer Olympics, donned human rights badges and each raised a black-gloved Black Power salute during their podium ceremony. Incidentally, it was the suggestion of white silver medalist, Peter Norman of Australia, for Smith and Carlos to each wear one black glove. Smith and Carlos were immediately ejected from the games by the USOC, and later the IOC issued a permanent lifetime ban for the two. However, the Black Power movement had now been given a stage on live, international television.
King was not comfortable with the "Black Power" slogan, which sounded too much like black nationalism to his ears. SNCC activists, in the meantime, began embracing the "right to self-defense" in response to attacks from white authorities, and booed King for continuing to advocate non-violence. When King was murdered in 1968, Stokely Carmichael stated that Whites murdered the one person who would prevent rampant rioting and burning of major cities down and that Blacks would now burn every major city to the ground. In every major city from Boston to San Francisco, racial riots broke out in the Black community following King's death and as a result, "White Flight" occurred from several cities leaving Blacks in a dilapidated and nearly unrepairable city.
Memphis and the Poor People's March, 1968
Main article: Poor People's Campaign
Rev. James Lawson invited King to Memphis, Tennessee, in March, 1968, to support a strike by sanitation workers who had launched a campaign for union representation after two workers accidentally were killed on the job. A day after delivering his famous "Mountaintop" sermon at Lawson's church, King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Riots broke out in over 110 cities across the United States in the days that followed, notably in Chicago, Baltimore, and in Washington, D.C.
Rev. Ralph Abernathy succeeded King as the head of the SCLC and attempted to carry forth King's plan for a Poor People's March, which would have united blacks and whites to campaign for fundamental changes in American society and economic structure. The march went forward under Abernathy's plainspoken leadership, but is widely regarded as a failure.
Gates v. Collier
Gates v. Collier was a case decided in federal court that brought an end to the trustee system and flagrant inmate abuse and racial segregation at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Mississippi.
In 1972 federal judge, William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm violated modern standards of decency. He ordered an immediate end to all unconstitutional conditions and practices. Racial segregation of inmates was abolished. And the trustee system, which allow certain inmates to have power and control over others, was also abolished.[7]
Cold war
The international context of the actions of the US federal government during these years, and in particular its need to appeal to the people in Third World, should not to be ignored.[1] In Cold War Civil Rights:Race and the Image of American Democracy, Mary L. Dudziak shows how, in the ideological battle of the Cold War, Communist critics could easily point out the hypocrisy of the United States's portrayal of itself as the 'leader of the free world' when so many of its citizens were the object of racial discrimination. She argues that this was a major factor in pushing the government towards civil rights legislation.
