Civil Rights and Kennedy’s Response
-NAACP was still committed to overturning the legal bases for segregation in the aftermath of its
victory the Brown v Board of Edu case of 1954
-the Congress of Racial Equality, an interracial group established in 1942 promoted change
through peaceful confrontation.
-SCLC, organization of southern black clergy
-more militant is the SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee started in 1960
recruiting young Americans who had not been involved in the civil rights struggle
-Confrontations on Jan 31, 1960 4 black college students from the Argricultual and Tech College
in Greensboro, NC protested continuing patterns of segregation despite the Supreme Court'
*frustrated that they were permitted to shop but not to eat at a Woolwoth’s, a pop
department store chain specializing in household goods so they sat down at the lunch
counter and refused to leave
-John Lewis, AA activist who participated in a sit in in Nashville, TN said that white men beated
young women and police arrested them not the white boys
-sit ins gave rise to freedom rides, aimed at southern transportations facilities helped by CORE
and aided by SNCC which let blacks and whites sit together and stop.
*Anniston, Alabama, group of white men attacked a bus
*in Birmingham, police made an agreement with the KKK to give Klansmen 15mins alone
to beat the Freedom Riders and the FBI knew about it and didn’t do anything
-Anne Moody is a young girl who experience hardship when she was young, seeing her family
members die but she became the first person in her family to go to Tougaloo college she then
joined the 3 groups and wanted to make a change
*she even went to sit ins where she was thrashed and jailed but she still followed with
the movement
-Mimi Feingold was a white student at Swarthmore College in PA and hekped picket the
Woolworth’s in Chester, Pa and worked to unionize Swarthmore’s black dining hall workers.
*1961 she kpied the freedom rriders by CORE and sometimes was jailed and had
confrontations
-1962 James Meredith, a black air force vetern and student at Jackson State College applied to
an all white U of Mississippi and was rejected but the Supreme Court allowed him to attend
*gov Ross Barnett said that he was not allowed and will be blocked the way so riot was
held and two men were killed and hundreds were hurt
-George Wallace of Alabama stated in his 1963 inaugural address “segregation now! Segregation
tomorrow! Forever!”
*Alabama became a nat’l focus that year as a violent confrontation unfolded in
Birmingham so black leaders encouraged MLK launched another attack on southern
segregation in the city.
*city officials declared the protest marches violated city regulations against parading
without license and over a five week period, they arrested 2,200 blacks and some
schoolchildren
-Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor used high-pressure fire hoses, electric cattle prods,
and trained police dogs to force the protesters back
-Kennedy was sickened but insisted that he could do nothing after winnign black support in 1960
*he need the white southerners votes so he couldn’t do anything about the civil rights
*he failed to promote civil rights legis and ignored a campaign promise to end housing
discrimination by presidential order
*but took action after the midterm election in 1962- an executive order ending
segregation in fed financed housign
-the prez took force on the James Meredith confrontation by sending fed tropps to restorre
contol and to guarantee Meredith’s right to attend the University
*also forced the desergregation of university of Alabama and helped arrange a
compromise that eased discrimination in Brimingham’s municipal facilities and hiring
practices
-When white bombings aimed at eliminating black leaders in Birmingham caused thousands of
blacks to abandon nonviolence and rampage through the streets, Kennedy readied fed troops to
intervene
-Kennedy spoke strongly on television saying that equal rights was a moral issues and spoke that
this is not a country that gives freedom except to the blacks but after the speech.. Assassins
killed Medgar Evans, a black NAACP official, in his own driveway in Jackson, MI
-Kennedy sent Congress a new and stronger civil rights bill, outlawing segregation in public
places, banning discrimination wherever fed money was involved and advancing the process of
school intergration and 63% supported it.
-black activist arranged a massive march on WA in Aug 1963 and more than 200,000 people
gathered from across the country
*celebs like Ralph Bunche, writer James Baldwin, entertainers Sammy Davis, Hary
Belafonte, and Lena Horne, and baseball player Jackie Robinson… artiost like Joan Baex,
Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul, Mary led the crowd in snges like Bowin in the Wind and We
Shall Overcome
*MLK implored his audience to share his faith and said the “ I have a Dream” speech
-even with Dem majorities, strong white southern resistenace to the cause of civil rights
continued and the bill was bottled up in committee
Achievements and Challenges in Civil Rights
-Johnson pushed the bill though Congress, heading off a Senate filibuster by persuading his old
colleague, minority leader Everett Dirksen of IL, to work for cloture—a 2/3 vote to cut off debate
-Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in all public accommodations and
authorized the Justice Depart to act with greater authority in school and voting matters
*an equal-opportunity provision prohibited discriminatory hiring on grounds of race,
gender, religion, or national origin in firms with more than 25 employees
-Even with the voting rights measures of 1957 and 1960, AA in large areas of the South still
found it difficult to vote
*Freedom Summer, sponsored by SNCC and other civil rights groups in 1964, focused
attention on the problem by sending balck and white students to MI to work for black
rights.
*Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman (white men) aand black James Chaney were
murdered, 80 workers were beaten and 1,000 arrested and 37 churches bombed
-1965, Alabama police teargassed in an aborted march from Selma to state capital of
Montgomery so Prez Johnson sent the Nat’l Guard to protect another march to Montgomery
and ten asked Congress for a voting bill that would close the loopholes of the previous acts
-Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important law of the decade, singled out the South for its
restrictive practices and authorized the US attorney general to appoint fed examiners to register
voters where local officials were obstructing the registration of blacks.
*next year, 400,000 blacks registered to vote in the Deep South, by 1968 it was 1m
-one episode that contributed to many blacks’ suspicion of white liberals occurred at the Dem
nat’l convention of 1964 in Atlantic City
-SNCC, active in the Freedom Summer project in MI founded theFreedom Democratic party as a
alternative to the all-white delegation that was to represent the state
-black activist Fannie Lou Hamer reported that she had been beaten, jailed, and denied the right
to vote and Prez didn’t do anything because the upcoming election so SNCC became an all black
cadre that could mobilize poor balcks for militant actions”Liberation” replaced civil rights as a
goal
-Black author James Baldwin wote that unless change came soon, the worse could be expected
-Malcolm X, converted to the Nation of Islam and a disciple of the black leader Elijah
Muhammad preached about that the white man was responsible for the black man’s condition
and that blacks had to help themselves and that blacks had to help themselves
*he said black separatism and black nationalism for most of his public career and argued
for black control of black communities and preached an international perspective
embracing African people in diaspora and appealed to blacks to fight racism by any
means necessary
*he helped shaped the struggle against racism but was assassinated by black antagonist
in 1965
-one man influenced by Malcolm X was Stokely Carmichael became active in SNCC and urged
fieldworkers to carry weapons for self-defense that it was time for blacks to cease depending on
whites and argued to make SNCC into a black organization and this reflected SNCC’s growing
radicalism
-the movement split when in June 1966 when Carmichael’s followers challenged MLK during a
march in MI.
*King wanted a nonviolence and interracial cooperation but Carmichael called for Black
Power
-Black Power was a call to build independent institutions in the AA community and to end the
physical and sexual abuse of black women
*fostered a powerful sense of black pride and featured Maulana Ron Karenga, an
activist scholar and authority on Black Studies and
*Nathan Wright chairman of 1967 and 1968 Natl and internat’l Conference on Black
Power and rev nationalist as Huey Newton, a aggressive liberation measures
-Black Power demands for action
*Black Panthers, radical activist who organized first in Oakland, Ca and other cities that
voed to eradicate not only racial discrimination but capitalism as well.
-H. Rap Brown who succeeded Carmichael as head of SNCC became known for his “Violence is as
American as cherry pie”
*violence accompanied the more militant calls for reform and showed that racial
injustice was not a souther problem but an American one
*riots in NYC and NJ in 1964 and in 1965, Watts neighborhood of LA, lasted 5 days left
34 dead and 1000 injured and stuff burned. Other cities from 1966-1968
A sympathetic Supreme Court
-four new liberal justice appointed by Kenneddy and Johnson, the SC supported and promoted
the liberal agenda
*Justice Earl Warren the court followed the lead it had in Brown v. Board of Ed
outlawing school seg by moving against Jim Crow practices in other public establishment
-Court supported civil liberties by beginning to protect the rights of indvi. With radical political
views
-Court sought to protect accused suspects from police harassment.
-Gideon v. Wainwright 1963, the justices decided that poor defendants in serious case had the
right to free legal counsel
-Escobedo v. Illinois 1964 ruled that a suspect had to be given access to an attorney during
questioning
-Miranda v Arizona 1966 argued that offenders had to be warned that statements extracted by
the police could be used against them and they could remain silent
-others broke the new ground like Baker v Carr 1962 opened the way to reappointment of state
legislative bodies according to the standard, defined a year later in Justice William O. Dougla’s
by saying “one person, one vote” and this helped break the political control of lightly populated
rural districts in many state resemblies and made the US house of Reps much more responsive
to urband and surban issues.
-Court outraged conservatives by ruling that prayer could not be required in the public schools
and that obscenity laws could no longer restrict allegedly pornographic material that might have
some redeeming social value
The Great Society Under Attack
-business spending promoted led to a steady increase in GNP of 7.1% in 1964, 8.1% in 1965, and
9.5% in 1966
*as the economy improved, the budget deficit dropped, unemployment fell, inflation
remained under control
*med programs probided basic security for the old and the poor
*edu flourished as schools were built and teachers’ salaries increased as a result of
influx of fed aid
-factionalism was a problem, the diverse coalition soon clashed
*conservative white southern and blue collar white northerners felt threatened by the
gov’t support of civil rights
-local urban bosses, long the backbone of the Dem paty, objected to grassroots participation of
the urban poor, which threatened their own political control
-others questioned that poor people lacked a broad vision of nation’s needs
-other midclass Americans argued that the gov’t was paying too much attention to the
underprivileged and neglecting the needs of middle class.
-radicals attacked the Great Society for not going far enough
-Tom Hayden said that the welfare state is more machinery that substance, a warmed over
version of the new deal, making no real effort to redistribute income saying that it’s the only way to
transform American life
-Vietnam War dealth the Great Society a fatal blow, Johnson wanting to promote both just
ended up in an inflation
*he refused to rase the taxes and inflation slashed Great society programs