The
Struggle for
Civil Rights
• I need a new organisational theme for this
lecture – more grass-roots stuff?
Challenge Montgomery to Selma
narrative?
• Scope of the lecture has widened to
include post-1964 story, black power etc.
• This needs MASSIVE editing. Too many
slides
Signs of Change in the 50s
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Bi-racial alliances
The black vote
Popular Culture
Legal breakthroughs: Brown and Brown II
Civil Rights Act of 1957
Urbanisation, more education for blacks
Economic prosperity, increasing consumer
power of black people
Civil Rights Organisations
NAACP (National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People), founded 1909 in New York City
by Ida Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois and others
Roy Wilkins, Executive
Director of the NAACP in
the 1960s
Civil Rights Organisations
SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership
Conference) founded in 1957 in wake of
Montgomery Bus Boycott. Lead by Martin Luther
King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth and
others
Civil Rights Organisations
CORE (Congress for Racial Equality
founded 1942 at the University of Chicago
by James Farmer, Bayard Rustin and
others, influenced by Thoreau and Gandhi:
non-violent direct action
James Farmer
Civil Rights Organisations
SNCC (Student NonViolent Co-ordinating
Committee), founded
in 1960 in wake of
Greensboro sit-ins,
inspired by Ella
Baker. Leading
figures included,
Julian Bond, Stokely
Carmichael and John
Lewis
1960: Sit-ins
1961: Freedom Rides
1962: The Limits of Protest
Albany, GA: Laurie Pritchett
“Protest becomes an effective tactic to the
extent that it elicits brutality and
oppression from the power structure.”
Bayard Rustin
1962: The Limits of Protest
“Tokenism” and
the difficulty of
forcing federal
intervention: the
ambiguous
success of James
Meredith at “Ole
Miss”
Political Power of Segregationists
• Governors: Ross Barnett and George
Wallace
• Senate: James Eastland, chair of Judicial
Committee
• Hoover hated King and distrusted all Civil
Rights activists, condoned and cooperated with segregationist forces
1963: Birmingham
“The purpose of our direct-action program
is to create a situation so crisis-packed
that it will inevitably open the door to
negotiation.”
Martin Luther King, Letter from
Birmingham Jail, 1963
1963: Birmingham
• Non-violence losing its power as an
energising ideology
• 15,000 demonstrators arrested in 1963
• Revealed the importance of television
news
• “Do I really want to be integrated into a
burning house?” James Baldwin, The Fire
Next Time (1963)
1963 Civil Rights Bill
• Curbed discrimination in public
accommodations
• Did not deal with local or state elections,
or police brutality or racial discrimination
in employment
1963: The Final Assault on Jim
Crow
1963: March on Washington
“What counted
most at the Lincoln
Memorial was not
the speeches,
eloquent as they
were, but the
pledge of a quarter
million Americans,
black and white, to
carry the civil rights
revolution into the
streets. Our task is
now to fulfill this
pledge through
nonviolent
uprisings in
hundreds of cities.”
Bayard Rustin
“There wasn’t a single
logistics aspect
unctrolled… [This
was] the Farce on
Washington…”
Malcolm X
Civil Rights Act, 1964
• Barred discrimination on the basis of race
in public accommodations
• Justice Dept could bring suits against
states that discriminated against women
and racial minorities
• Unlawful for any private company with
more than 25 employees to discriminate
on the basis of “race, national origin,
religion or sex.”
Atlantic City, 1964
Democratic
Convention:
The Mississippi
Freedom
Democratic Party
Unfinished Business
Harlem, 1964
Watts Riot, August 1965
Malcolm X
Nation of Islam: 30,000
members by 1963
How is the black man going to
get "civil rights" before first he
wins his human rights?
Autobiography of Malcolm X
“If it is wrong to be violent
defending black women and
black children and black babies
and black men, then it is wrong
for America to draft us and
make us violent abroad in
defense of her. And if it is right
for America to draft us, and
teach us how to be violent in
defense of her, then it is right
for you and me to do whatever is
necessary to defend our own
people right here in this
country.”
November 9, 1963
America now faces a race war… a war in which children
are mutilated… the worst war that you can conceive…
[the white man] is bringing it down on himself… simply
because twenty million ex-slaves are demanding
freedom, justice and equality… seeking human dignity
… The American white man answers your non-violence
with violence.
Feb 21 1965
Black Power
“Integration is a subterfuge for white
supremacy” Stokely Carmichael, 1966.
“We reject the American dream as defined
by white people, and must work to
construct an American reality as defined
by Afro-Americans.” SNCC, 1966
Tommie Smith and
John Carlos, Mexico
City, 1968
Black Panther Party Poster, 1969
“It was the moment
Dr King realised the
importance of
economics”
Bayard Rustin