Nonviolent Protest, Pro and Con
e:\history\eight\civil\nonviolence.7dp
Main Ideas:
1. Martin Luther King. Until the bright day of justice
Analysis:
emerges, there is something I must say to my people who
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stand on the warm threshold, which leads them to the
palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful
place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us
not satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup
of bitterness and hatred. We must conduct our struggle on
the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not
allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical
violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic
heights of meeting physical force with soul force. Martin
Luther King, "I Have a Dream Speech," March on
Washington, 1963.
To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match
your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure
suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul
force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to
love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down
by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom,
but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your
heart and conscience that we will win you in the process,
and our victory will be a double victory. Martin Luther
King, 1957.
Said Mohandas Gandhi, Suffering is infinitely more
powerful than the law of the jungle for converting the
opponent and opening his ears which are otherwise shut to
the voice of reason. Martin Luther King, 1957.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Have
we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that
we must love our enemies-or else? The chain reaction of
evil-hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars-must
be broken. Martin Luther King, 1957.
The Negro was willing to risk martyrdom in order to
move and stir the social conscience of his community and
the nation. He would force his oppressor to commit his
brutality openly, with the rest of the world looking on.
Nonviolent resistance paralyzed and confused the power
structures against which it was directed. Martin Luther
King, Why We Can’t Wait, 1964.
2. Moral High Ground. On January 30, [1956] After
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putting the baby to bed, Coretta and Mrs. Williams went
to the living room to look at television. About nine-thirty
they heard a noise in front that sounded as though
someone had thrown a brick. In a matter of seconds an
explosion rocked the house. A bomb had gone off on the
porch . . .
As I walked toward the front the porch I realized that
many people were armed. Nonviolent resistance was on
the verge of being transformed into violence. In this
atmosphere I walked out to the porch and asked the crowd
come to order. In less than a moment there was complete
silence. Quietly I told them that I was all right and that
my wife and baby were all right. "Now let's not become
panicky," I continued. "If you have weapons, take them
home; if you do not them, please do not seek to get them.
We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence.
We must meet violence with nonviolence. Remember the
words of Jesus: 'He who lives by the sword will perish by
the sword.'" I then urged them to leave peacefully. "We
must love our white brothers," I said, "no matter they do
to us. We must make them know that we love them.
Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries:
'Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for
them that despitefully use you.' This is what we must live
by. We must meet hate with love. Remember," I ended,
"if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because
God is with the movement. Go home with this glowing
faith and this radiant assurance." Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Stride Toward Freedom, Clayborne Carson, AfricanAmerican Professor of History at Stanford University
David J. Garrow, Professor of Political Science at City
College of New York Gerald Gill, Professor of History at
Tufts University Vincent Harding, African-American
Professor of Religion and Social Transformation at the
Iliff School of Theology and Darlene Clark Hine, AfricanProfessor of American History at Michigan State
University, eds., The Eyes On The Prize Civil Rights
Reader: Documents, Speeches, And Firsthand Accounts
From The Black Freedom Struggle, 1954-1990 (New
York: Penguin Books, 1991), 56-7.
More important than the immediate victories of the
Montgomery boycott was its success in establishing a new
form of racial protest and in elevating to prominence a
new figure in the movement for civil rights. The man
chosen to head the boycott movement after its launching
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Evaluation:
was a local Baptist pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr., the son
of a prominent Atlanta minister, a powerful orator, and a
gifted leader. King's approach to black protest was based
on the doctrine of non-violence-that is, of passive
resistance even in the face of direct attack. He drew from
the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian nationalist
leader; from Henry David Thoreau and his doctrine of
civil disobedience; and from Christian doctrine. And he
produced an approach to racial struggle that captured the
moral high ground for his supporters. He urged African
Americans to engage in peaceful demonstrations; to allow
them to be arrested, even beaten, if necessary; and to
respond to hate with love. Alan Brinkley, American
History: a Survey Volume II: Since 1865 (New York:
McGraw Hill, Inc., 1995), 806-7.
Martin Luther King objected to violence and hatred on
moral grounds: "It thrives on hated rather than love . . .
destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible.
It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and
more complicated ones. Martin Luther King, 1961.
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3. Public Opinion. Advocacy of violence as a tool of
Analysis:
advancement, organized as in warfare, deliberately and
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consciously. To this tendency many Negroes are being
tempted today. There are incalculable perils in this
approach. It is not the danger or sacrifice of physical
being which is primary, though it cannot be contemplated
without a sense of deep concern for human life. The
greatest danger is that it will fail to attract Negroes to a
real collective struggle, and will confuse the large
uncommitted middle group, which as yet has not
supported either side. Further, it will mislead Negroes
into the belief that this is the only path and place them as a
minority in a position where they confront a far larger
adversary than it is possible to defeat in this form of
combat. When the Negro uses force in self-defense he
does not forfeit support—he may even win it, by the
courage and self-respect it reflects. When he seeks to
initiate violence he provokes questions about the necessity
for it, and inevitably is blamed for its consequences. It is
unfortunately true that however the Negro acts, his
struggle will not be free of violence initiated by his
enemies, and he will need ample courage and willingness
to sacrifice to defeat this manifestation of violence. But if
he seeks it and organizes it, he cannot win. Martin Luther
King, Jr., Liberation magazine (October 1959), President
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of the Southern Christian Le Conference, Clayborne
Carson, 113.
There, on Wednesday evening, February 17, 1965 a small
civil rights march was attacked by lawmen and one
participant, Jimmy Lee Jackson, was shot by an Alabama
state trooper. Several days later Jackson died, and Marion
activists, in conjunction with the SCLC staff, decided that
a fitting movement response to his death would be a mass
pilgrimage from Selma to the Alabama state capitol in
Montgomery. The march was scheduled for Sunday,
March 7. The SCLC leaders, King and Ralph Abernathy,
were in Atlanta preaching at their respective churches, and
the six-hundred-person column was led by the SCLC's
Hosea Williams and SNCC chairman John Lewis. After
crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama
River on the eastern edge of downtown Selma, the
marchers' path was blocked by scores of Alabama state
troopers and Clark's local lawmen. The troopers'
commander instructed the marchers turn around and walk
back into Selma; when the column did move, the gasmasked lawmen walked forward, pushing marchers to the
ground and striking others with billy clubs as tear
canisters were fired at the peaceful parade. Within
seconds scene was a bloody rout with mounted possemen
chasing marchers back across the bridge into Selma.
More than fifty participants were treated at local hospitals.
Television footage of the eerie and gruesome attack
produced immediate national outrage. King issued a
public call for civil rights supporters across the nation to
come to Selma to show their support and join a second
attempted march; congressmen of parties called upon
President Lyndon B. Johnson to intervene in Alabama and
to speedily put voting rights legislation before Congress.
Johnson's Justice Department aides already had hard at
work preparing a comprehensive voting rights bill, the
"bloody Sunday" attack and the national reaction to it
spurred the White House to press for a faster completion
of the drafting process. Clayborne Carson, 206.
Last Sunday, more than eight thousand of us started on a
mighty walk from Selma, Alabama . . . Selma, Alabama,
became a shining moment in the conscience of man.
There never was a moment in American history more
honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of
clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into
Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.
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Clayborne Carson, 224-5.
4. Economic Persuasion. One of King's most famous
orations, perhaps second only to his August 28, 1963, "I
Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington, is his
April 3, 1968, "mountaintop" speech delivered at the
Mason Temple in Memphis the night before his death.
We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to
curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't
need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov
cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to
these massive industries in our country, and say, "God
sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his
children' right. And we've come by here ask you that to
make the first item on your agenda—fair treatment where
God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not
prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must
follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic
support from you." Clayborne Carson, 414.
'The Negro people can organize socially to initiate many
forms of struggle which can drive their enemies back
without resort to futile and harmful violence. In the
history of the movement, . . . many creative forms have
been developed—the mass boycott, sitdown protests and
strikes, sit-ins—refusal to pay fines and bail for unjust
arrests—mass marches—mass meetings—prayer pilgrimages, etc. There is more power in socially organized
masses on the march than there is in guns in the hands of a
few desperate men. Our enemies would prefer to deal
with a small armed group rather than with a huge,
unarmed but resolute mass of people. However, it is
necessary that the mass-action method be persistent and
unyielding. Gandhi said the Indian people must "never let
them rest," referring to the British. He urged them to keep
protesting daily and weekly, in a variety of ways. This
method inspired and organized the Indian masses and
disorganized and demobilized the British. It educates its
myriad participants, socially and morally. All history
teaches us that like a turbulent ocean beating great cliffs
into fragments of rock, the determined movement of
people incessantly demanding their rights always
disintegrates the all order. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Liberation magazine (October 1959), President of the
Southern Christian Le Conference, Clayborne Carson,
113-4.
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Our method will be that of persuasion, not coercion. Our
actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our
Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal. Once
again we must hear the words of Jesus echoing across the
centuries: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you,
and pray for them that despitefully use you. In spite of the
mistreatment that we have confronted we must not
become bitter, and end up by hating our white brothers.
As Booker T. Washington said, "Let no man pull you so
low as to make you hate him." Martin Luther King, 1955,
his organizing speech beginning the Montgomery Bus
boycott. Peter B. Levy, ed., Documentary History of the
Modern Civil Rights Movement (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1992), 59.
Letter from Albany Merchant Leonard Gilberg to Albany
Police Chief Laurie Pritchett, July 23, 1962
One of the Albany Movement's tactics was to mount a
boycott against many downtown white businesses in the
hope that pressure on the pocketbook would achieve what
appeals to whites' consciences had not produced. Leonard
Gilberg's letter to Chief Pritchett was written during a
period of mass protests that took place during July and
August 1962.
Dear Chief Pritchett:
In order to inform you as to the situation business-wise for
myself and other merchants with whom I have spoken, I
am sure you will find the following to be true.
At least 90 to 95% of all the negro business I have enjoyed
in past years has been lacking for the last 7 months due to
an obvious boycott on the part of the negroes and threats
and coercion toward other negroes not in sympathy with
the movement to keep them from shopping downtown in
Albany.
Now to top all this off, their constant harassment, sit-ins,
demonstrations, marching, etc. are keeping all people both
white and negro from Albany. Many customers have told
me direct that they would not come to Albany from out of
town due to fear of demonstrations in Albany and local
people have said that they ask their wives and children to
stay out of town for the same reason.
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Our business is at present suffering an approximate 50%
decrease due to lack of customer traffic in Albany and it is
an intolerable situation. This fear of mob violence and
demonstration has made our situation a dire one. Any aid
you can give us in the matter will be greatly appreciated
and our thanks to you for the wonderful manner in which
you have handled these past events.
Very truly yours, Gilberg's Leonard Gilberg. Clayborne
Carson, 146.
5. Gandhi. This is in essence the principle of nonviolent Main Ideas:
cooperation. It follows therefore that it must have its root Analysis:
Evaluation:
in love. Its object should not be to punish the opponent or
to inflict injury upon him. Even while noncooperating
with him, we must make him feel that in us he has a friend
and we should try to reach his heart by rendering him
humanitarian service wherever possible. Mohandas K.
Gandhi, 1940, 158.
Its root is "holding on to the truth,” hence "force of
righteousness." I have also called it love force or soul
force. In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered in
the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not permit
violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he
must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy.
For what appears to truth to the one may appear to be error
to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the
doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by the
infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Defense Against Charge Of
Sedition, 1922.
Nonviolence in its dynamic condition means conscious
suffering. It does not mean meek submission to the will
of the evil-doer, but it means pitting of one's whole soul
against the will of the tyrant. Working under this law of
our being, it is possible for a single individual to defy the
whole might of an unjust empire to save his honor, his
religion, his soul, and lay the foundation for that empire’s
fall or its regeneration. Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1940, 156.
I praise such courage. I need such courage because in this
cause I too am prepared to die, but my friends there is no
cause for which I am prepared to kill. Whatever they do
to us, we will attack no one, kill no one, but we will not
give our fingerprints not one of us. They will imprison us,
they will fine us, and they will seize our possessions, but
they cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it
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to them. I am asking you to fight against their anger not
provoke it. We will not strike a blow, but we will receive
them, and through our pain we will make them see their
injustice. And it will hurt as all fighting hurts, but we
cannot lose. They may torture my body, break my bones,
even kill me. Then they will have my dead body not my
obedience. They then sang, “God Save The King.”
Gandhi quoted by Richard Attenborough, Gandhi
(Burbank, California: Columbia Pictures, 1982).
“When asked whether or not he supported the war effort in
1915, Gandhi said, "If as a citizen I wish to enjoy the
benefits and protection of the British Empire, it would be
wrong of me to not help in its defense. They are preparing
for war. I will not support it but I do not intend to take
advantage of the danger. We’ve come a long way
together with the British, when they leave we want to see
them off as friends.” Richard Attenborough, Gandhi
(Burbank, California: Columbia Pictures, 1982).
Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is
cooperation with good. But in the past, non-cooperation
has been deliberately expressed in violence to the
evildoer. I am endeavoring to show to my countrymen
that violent non-cooperation only multiplies evil and that
as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of
support of evil requires complete abstention from
violence. Nonviolence implies voluntary submission to
the penalty for non-cooperation with evil. Mohandas K.
Gandhi (1922), William Safire, Lend Me Your Ears:
Great Speeches In History (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1992), 326.
5. Robert F. Williams. Robert F. Williams of Monroe,
North Carolina, was one of the few civil rights activists
who openly challenged the idea that blacks should rely on
nonviolent tactics. In 1959 Williams's position had
prompted the national office of the NAACP to suspend
him as head of its Monroe chapter.
In 1954, I was an enlisted man in the United States Marine
Corps . . . Laws serve to deter crime and protect the weak
from the strong in civilized society. Where there is a
breakdown of law, where is the force of deterrent? Only
highly civilized and moral individuals respect the rights of
others. The Southern brute respects only force.
Nonviolence is a very potent weapon when the opponent
is civilized, but nonviolence is no repellent for a sadist . . .
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In 1957 the Klan moved into Monroe and Union County
(N.C.). Their numbers steadily increased to the point
wherein the local press reported 7500 at one rally. They
became so brazen that mile-long motorcades started
invading the Negro community . . .
Each time the Klan came on a raid, they were led by
police cars. We appealed to the President of the United
States to have the Justice Department investigate the
police. We appealed to Governor Luther Hodges. All our
appeals to constituted law were in vain . . .
On May 5, 1959, while president of the Union County
branch of the NAACP, I made a statement to the United
Press International after a trial wherein a white man was
supposed to have been tried for kicking a Negro maid
down a flight of stairs in a white hotel. In spite of the fact
that there was an eyewitness, the defendant failed to show
up for his trial, he was completely exonerated.
Another case in the same court involved a white man who
had come to a pregnant Negro mother's home and
attempted to rape her. In recorder's court the only defense
offered for the defendant was that "he's not guilty. He was
just drunk and having a little fun." A white woman
neighbor testified that the woman had come to her house
excited, her clothes torn, her feet bare and begging her for
assistance; the court was unmoved.
This great miscarriage of justice left me sick inside, and I
said then what I say now. I believe Negroes must be
willing to defend themselves, their women, their children
and their homes. They must be willing to die and to kill in
repelling their assailants. Negroes must protect
themselves, it is obvious that the federal government will
not put an end to lynching; therefore it becomes necessary
for us to stop lynching with violence. Some Negroes
leaders have cautioned me that if Negroes fight back, the
racist will have cause to exterminate the race.
This government is in no position to allow mass violence
to erupt, let alone allow twenty million Negroes to be
exterminated. It is instilled at an early age that men who
violently and swiftly rise to oppose tyranny are virtuous
examples to emulate. I have been taught by my
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government to fight. Nowhere in the annals of history
does the record show a people delivered from bondage by
patience alone. Robert F. Williams, Liberation magazine
(September 1959), Clayborne Carson, 110-2.
Robert Williams from Monroe, North Carolina, was an
ex-marine and war veteran who didn't scare easily. With a
number of other black veterans, he formed a particularly
strong chapter of the NAACP. Williams successfully
integrated the Monroe Public Library and geared up to end
discrimination in housing, employment and public
facilities. After his group began a stand in at an all white
swimming pool, Klansmen started riding in motorcades
through the black community, honking their horns and
firing pistols and shotguns. At one point they stopped a
black woman on a street corner and forced her to dance at
gunpoint. Peter B. Levy, 301.
When William’s protests to local and state officials and
even to President Eisenhower went unheard he applied to
the National Rifle Association and received a charter.
Sixty members of his association begin arming
themselves, and Williams provided the training. In the
summer of 1957, an armed motorcade of Klansmen drove
into William’s neighborhood, and Williams and his men
shot it out with them, until the undisciplined Klansmen
were forced to flee for their lives. Peter B. Levy, 301.
6. Malcolm X. A prefatory note in Malcolm X Speaks,
edited by George Breitman, explains the context for this
speech, delivered shortly before Malcolm X's break with
Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam: "In late 1963,
the Detroit Council for Human Rights announced a
Northern Negro Leadership Conference to be held in
Detroit on November 9 and 10.
The white man does the same thing to you in the street,
when he wants to put knots on your head and takes
advantage of you and does not have to be afraid of your
fighting back. To keep you from fighting back, he gets
these old religious Uncle Toms to teach you and me, just
like novocaine, to suffer peacefully. Don't stop
suffering—just suffer peacefully. As Rev. Cleage pointed
out, they say you should let your blood flow in the streets.
This is a shame. You know he's a Christian preacher. If
it's a shame to him, you know what it is to me.
There is nothing in our book, the Koran that teaches us to
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suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent.
Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone;
but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the
cemetery. That's a good religion. In fact, that's that oldtime religion. That's the one that Ma and Pa used to talk
about: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and a
head for a head, and a life for a life. That's a good
religion. And nobody resents that kind of religion being
taught but a wolf, who intends to make you his meal.
This is the way it is with the white man in America. He's
a wolf—and you're sheep. Any time a shepherd, a pastor,
teaches you and me not to run from the white man and, at
the same time, teaches us not to fight the white man, he's a
traitor to you and me. Don't lay down a life all by itself.
No, preserve your life, it's the best thing you've got. And
if you've got to give it up, let it be even-steven. Clayborne
Carson, 256-7.
You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a
turn the other cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a
nonviolent revolution. Revolution is bloody. Revolution
is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution
overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way.
Malcolm X, 1960.
There are 22,000,000 African-Americans who are ready to
fight for independence right here. When I say fight for
independence right here, I don’t mean any non-violent
fight, or turn the other cheek fight. Those days are gone.
Those days are over. Malcolm X, 1964, Peter B. Levy,
176.
Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not
to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal
attacks. Malcolm X, New York City, 1964.
Only two things bring you freedom- the ballot or the
bullet. Only two things. Well, if you and I don't use the
ballot, we're going to be forced to use the bullet. So let us
try the ballot. And if the ballot doesn't work, we'll try
something else. But let us try the ballot. Malcolm X,
1964.
Strength lies not in defense but in attack. Adolph Hitler,
933.
7. Karl Marx. “The Communists openly declare that
their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow
of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling class
tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians
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have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world
to win. Working men of all countries unite.” Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, (1911) reprinted by Brian Tierney,
Donald Kagan and L. Pearce Williams, Great Issues in
Western Civilization, Volume Two (New York: Random
House, 1967), 283.
The replacement of the bourgeoisies by the proletarian
state is impossible without a violent revolution. Vladimir
I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International
Publishers, 1932), 20.
The so-called "democratic" power lies with the money
elites (the rich folks). Democracy, like every other form
of government, consists of organized, systematic
application of force against human beings. Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, 82.
Political power is merely the organized power of one class
for oppressing another. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
350.
8. Armed Resistance. In 1866 a small group of blacks
protested the arrest of two of their members by six
policemen in Memphis, Tennessee. The police fired into
the crowd wounding one black. The blacks then had the
temerity to fire back, wounding one policeman. The
entire police force gathered in the center of town with a
huge crowd of white citizens. John Creighton, the
Memphis city recorder, yelled to the crowd, "We are not
prepared, but let us prepare to clear every Negro son of a
bitch out of town!" The angry white mob then proceeded
to shoot, beat and threaten every Negro met within that
portion of the city. When it was all over, two whites had
been killed and two wounded. 46 blacks had been killed
and eighty wounded. And scores of black churches,
schools, and homes had been burned, resulting in a loss of
over $53,379. According to the investigation by the army,
all the victims of the riot had been "helpless and
unresisting Negroes." Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross,
The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987), 24.
In Grant Parish, freedmen who feared Democrats would
seize the government cordoned off the county seat of
Colfax and began drilling and digging trenches under the
command of black veterans and militia officers. They
held the tiny town for three weeks; on Easter Sunday,
whites armed with rifles and a small cannon overpowered
the defenders and an indiscriminate slaughter followed,
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including the massacre of some fifty blacks who lay down
their arms under a white flag of surrender. Two whites
also died . . . The result was that on Easter Sunday of
1873, when the sun went down that night, it went down on
the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes."46 Eric
Foner, New Left Professor of American History at
Columbia University, Reconstruction: America's
Unfinished Resolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988),
437.
46. KKK Hearings, Mississippi, 244, South Carolina, 15; 46th
Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Report 693, pt 2:357, 373, 409, 43.
Robert Charles was one of those people to improvise their
lives while pressed against the wall, compelled to define
in time of personal crisis what will be necessary for the
possession of one's soul. Quiet, intense, in his twenties, a
worker at odd jobs, a native of Mississippi, Charles was
an agent of an emigration society, a reader of the materials
of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, the brilliant, caustic
promoter of African emigration in the black communities
of America. Charles apparently did some writing of his
own. He also had collected a small arsenal.
Then on a night in July 1900, he is sitting quietly on a
front stoop, talking with a male friend. It is near midnight
when the almost mythic, tragic encounter begins. Three
white policemen appear. The arrogance of race and power
is in the air, concretized in the drawn, menacing pistols,
the flailing billy clubs, and the unprovoked announcement
of arrest. Charles draws a pistol, shoots one of the
officers, and runs, wounded, from the scene. But he
refuses to keep running. He reaches his cache of arms,
chooses at least one rifle, and moving from one hiding
place to another, kills at least five policemen and wounds
a dozen more from the scores who are on his trail. A mob
of more than a thousand white men offer their welcome
assistance to the police force, periodically, randomly
pouring their fury and their ammunition into the black
community. Finally Charles is burned out, down in a hail
of bullets, and badly mutilated in death. But that was not
the end. Ida Wells-Barnett almost immediately
investigated the incident, and at the end of her report she
said, white people of this country may charge that he was
a desperado, but to the people of his own race Robert
Charles will be regarded as 'the hero of New Orleans.'"
Clayborne Carson, 11.
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9. Fighting Back. The black troops in Houston, Texas,
knew A. Philip Randolph was right when in August 1917, Analysis:
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perhaps with the stench and the screams of East St. Louis
still filling their being, they made their choice. Goaded by
continuous and cruel white civilian attacks and
provocations, finding no support from their military
superiors, they used their democracy-defending weapons
to strike out against those who chose to be their
tormentors rather than their fellow Americans. White
civilians were killed in a nighttime engagement. The
soldiers were imprisoned, secretly tried, and secretly
executed. But when the word broke loose, they were
applauded by their people as heroes of the long and costly
war to make America safe for its black citizens, safe for
democracy and justice, safe for its posterity of every color.
These were the brothers of Robert Charles. Clayborne
Carson, 19.
In 1899, Sam Hose, a plantation laborer who killed his
employer in self-defense, was brutally murdered near
Newman, Georgia, before two thousand onlookers, some
of whom arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta.
The crowd watched as Hose's executioners cut off his
ears, fingers, and genitals and burned him alive, and then
fought over "souvenirs," such as pieces of his bones. Law
enforcement authorities made no effort to prevent the
lynching or to bring the assailants to justice. Like many
victims of lynchings, Hose was retrospectively accused of
raping a white woman, a deed almost universally
considered by white southerners as justification for
extralegal vengeance. Eric Foner, 209.
“Lynching was the most terrible example of the way white
supremacy made a mockery of the rule of law . . . In 1911
a white mob in Livermore, Kentucky dragged a black man
accused of killing a white, to a local theater and hanged
him before an audience of white townspeople who paid
admission. Those paying for orchestra seats were invited
to empty their pistols into the victim's swinging body.”
Donald G. Nieman, Professor of History at Bowling
Green University, Promises to Keep: African-Americans
and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 119.
10. Others. On the weekend of April 15, 1960, student
leaders of the southern sit-in movement met at Shaw
University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The meeting, held
at the initiative of Ella Baker, acting executive director of
14
Main Ideas:
Analysis:
Evaluation:
the SCLC, attracted 126 student delegates from fifty-six
colleges in twelve southern states . . .
Love is the central motif of nonviolence. Love is the force
by which God binds man to himself and man to man.
Such love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and
forgiving even in the midst of hostility. It matches the
capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more
enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in
love. By appealing to conscience and standing on the
moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the
atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become
actual possibilities. Clayborne Carson, 119-20.
Reason can and will prevail, but of course it can only
prevail with publicity-pitiless, blatant publicity. You have
go to make the people of the United States and of the
world know what is going on in the South. You have got
to use every field of publicity to force the truth into their
ears, and before the eyes. You have got to make it
impossible for any human being to live in the South and
not realize the barbarities that prevail here. W.E.B.
Dubois, cofounder of the NAACP, Peter B. Levy, 16.
The student leadership Conference made it crystal clear
that current sit-ins and other demonstrations are concerned
with some thing much bigger than a hamburger or even a
giant sized coke. We want the world to know that we no
longer accept the inferior position of second-class
citizenship. We are wiling to go to jail, be ridiculed, spat
upon and even suffer physical violence to obtain First
Class Citizenship. Ella Baker, a graduate student and
executive director of SCLC, who helped organize Student
Leadership Conference on Nonviolent Resistance at Shaw
University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Peter B. Levy, 70.
Why non-violent? CORE seeks understanding, not
physical victory. It seeks to win the friendship, respect
and even support of those whose racial policies it opposes.
People cannot be bludgeoned into a feeling of equality.
Integration, if it is not to be tense and artificial, must, in
CORE’s view, be more than an armed truce. Real racial
equality can be attained only through co-operation; not the
grudging co-operation one exacts from a beaten opponent,
but the voluntary interaction of two parties working
toward a solution of a mutual problem. The Congress of
Racial Equality, Peter B. Levy, 83.
By the fall of 1961 every southern and border state-over
one hundred communities-had experienced sit ins
15
(protesting segregated lunch counters). Over 70,000
individuals participated. Peter B. Levy, 65.
Main Ideas:
11. Freedom Riders. In good Gandhian fashion, James
Analysis:
Farmer gave advance information of CORE's plans to the
Evaluation:
President, the attorney general, and FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover. Robert Kennedy said later that the information
never got to his desk; the first he knew of the Freedom
Ride was when a mob turned over the integrated bus and
burned it outside Anniston, Alabama, on May 14, 1961.
When a second bus reached Birmingham later that day, it
was met by a mob led by Ku Klux Klansmen carrying
pipes, chains, and baseball bats. Not a single policeman
appeared. One of the Klansmen was a paid FBI informant
who had briefed his "handler" about the Klan's plans,
whereupon the Birmingham FBI office had sent a teletype
to J. Edgar Hoover about the impending ambush. Hoover
therefore knew that police chief Bull Connor had
promised the Klan enough time to attack the Freedom
Riders, whom Connor wanted beaten until "it looked like
a bulldog got a hold of them." Hoover notified no one and
did nothing. A sixty-one-year-old Freedom Rider was left
permanently brain-damaged by the beating he suffered.
Todd Gitlin, associate professor of sociology at the
University of California at Berkeley, The Sixties: Years of
Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987),
137.
Armed state troopers did accompany their next bus to
Montgomery-only to melt away as soon as the bus arrived.
With no local police in sight, the waiting mob ran amok,
bashing Freedom Riders and reporters with fists, sticks,
metal pipes, and baseball bats, setting one person afire.
John Seigenthaler, on the scene, saw two women slapped
around and tried to help them into his car. He was
jumped, beaten unconscious, and left lying on the ground
by the police for twenty-five minutes before they drove
him to a hospital. FBI agents stood around taking notes.
Todd Gitlin, 137.
Rioters took turns smashing one Freedom Rider in the
head while others chanted, "Kill the nigger-loving son of a
bitch"; he lay bleeding, in shock, with a damaged spinal
cord, for more than two hours before he was taken to the
hospital. The police commissioner of Montgomery
declared: "We have no intention of standing guard for a
bunch of troublemakers coming into our city." Todd
Gitlin, 137-8.
16
In Montgomery, the day after the bus station riot, Martin
Luther King and James Farmer were addressing a huge
church rally. Again a white mob gathered. Again
Negroes were beaten. Whites threw stones, bottles, stench
bombs, and firebombs through the church windows.
Inside, the congregation tried to barricade the doors, but
the mob kicked them open. Just then the marshals
materialized, like movie cavalry-this time called out to
protect the Indians. Todd Gitlin, 138.
Under movement pressure, gradually and gingerly, Robert
Kennedy did nudge the FBI into a more aggressive
posture. During his years at the Justice Department, the
number of FBI agents in Mississippi soared from three to
more than one hundred fifty. The Bureau did infiltrate the
Ku Klux Klan. To bitter-end whites, the FBI became the
"Federal Bureau of Integration." In July 1964, after the
murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner,
Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney (the first two
northern whites) near Philadelphia, Mississippi, it even
opened a field office in the state capital. But even then, J.
Edgar Hoover was not going to let his Bureau get pushed
around by uppity blacks demanding that the authorities
deliver on their rights. When Hoover opened his
Mississippi office, he conferred with the governor, the
mayor, the head of the state highway patrol, the local
police chief--the entire local white-supremist political
establishment. Todd Gitlin, 141-2.
Between 1961 and 1964, SNCC repeatedly, doggedly,
sometimes desperately appealed for federal help. Their
appeals were usually unavailing. Until the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, the Justice Department only twice took legal
action on behalf of assaulted civil rights workers. Todd
Gitlin, 142.
For the first time, the words of "We Shall Overcome"
began to acquire reality for opponents of segregation in
the Deep South. The Freedom Rides eventually
desegregated 120 interstate bus terminals. CORE Papers
1963, Peter B. Levy, 82.
17